A World on the Edge: An Ode to Books, the JLF

“If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: “Hold On”.

                                            Rudyard Kipling, “IF”

 Kipling’s poem is an ode to the human spirit.

 The Palestine question, climate change, and artificial intelligence were some big themes in the JLF (Jaipur Literature Festival) this year.

 The night after I returned from JLF, I felt strangely cold under my quilt in my warm bedroom in Gurgaon. Half-awake, I thought of families in Gaza. Struggling for survival through cold winter nights without blankets and no roofs over them. I had listened to several discussions at the JLF about the breakdown of humanity in the open-air prison of Gaza where a million women, children, aged people and men are forcibly entrapped by the Israeli army. I also wondered how millions of Jews had survived the brutal Nazi concentration camps in Germany in the Second World War.  

 How does the human spirit keep up its will to live even when the body is saying no more?

THE WISDOM OF BOOKS

  The God of War must be a special dunce

To be fighting on both sides at once

                Siegfried Sassoon, “The General”

Books are composed from written words and carry wisdom through the ages.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”, is the beginning of the Bible.

The three Abrahamic “religions of the book”—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—were borne in the Arabian Peninsula, all claiming their ancestry from Abraham. In the Old Testament Bible, the book of the Jews, God speaks to the people. His commandments are words inscribed on a stone given by God to Moses for God’s own people, the Jews. In the New Testament, the book of the Christians, who rebelled against the oppression of Jewish priests, God speaks to humanity through his Son, Jesus. In the Holy Koran, God speaks through his messenger, Muhammad, who is a carrier of God’s message to the people and disclaims any family connection with God.

Both Jews and Palestinians want to live on the same land and drink the same water. One side claims the land because their book says it is theirs. The other claims it because they were born on it, and their mothers, fathers, grandmothers, and grandfathers too. Their ancestors have tended the land for millennia while the Jews left to go to other lands. Palestinians are not squatters on another’s legal property. It is their land, they say.

SCIENCE AND NATURE

Nature’s spirit enables it to live on even when some of its parts decay. Nature is the mother of all life. The spirit within nature and humans is indivisible.  

At the dawn of the European Enlightenment in the 17th century, Francis Bacon arrogantly declared that science had given humans the power to control unruly nature. Technologically advanced nations are envied for the material well-being of their citizens. Modern science has provided them powerful tools for exploiting the earth to improve their citizens’ material well-being. However, over-exploitation has harmed Nature on which all life depends for sustenance.

All technologies are double use: they can be used for good or evil. From the 1990s, technology became synonymous with digital technology. Digital communication of words and pictures across the world without boundaries was expected to make humanity feel like one family. It has not turned out that way. Social media has divided the world into gated communities who hate each other; and digital technologies have spawned new weapons. Most sinister are rapid advances in artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons. They can choose their own targets and turn rogue against their human creators too.

In JLF’s over-flowing Durbar Hall, a thousand people heard an expose of the Palestine Laboratory. Antony Loewenstein, the author of the book with the same title, and Kai Bird, Charles Glass, and Navtej Sarna pooled their insights. Lowenstein explained that Israel is using Palestine (Gaza and the West Bank) to test new AI technologies for surveillance and violence to control people and remove them from their own lands. It is exporting these technologies to other governments to control their own restive populations.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Ah, when to the heart of man

Was it ever less than a treason

To go with the drift of things

To yield with a grace to reason

                           Robert Frost, “Reluctance”

Artificial intelligence (AI) was a big theme at the JLF this year, as expected. AI is a tsunami storming through science, the economy, and the creative arts. It is pushing the boundaries of human capabilities.

Questions about the potential harms of AI are brushed aside by techno-enthusiasts. They say new technologies always benefit mankind. They have amnesia. Kai Bird, the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy, (with Martin J. Sherwin), on which the block-buster movie Oppenheimer is based, was a celebrity at JLF this year.

The purpose for which any powerful technology is used must be an ethical decision. Sadly, ethics finds no place in STEM—Science, Technology, Economics, and Management, which have become the most sought-after subjects in education. Moreover, modern scientific education has been broken into specialisations. Experts in their separate sciences now know more and more, but about less and less. The ancient wisdom of whole systems has been lost. Modern medical science can fix only the biology of the human heart and brain. It cannot heal the spirit within a human heart and mind.

Man does not live by bread alone. But without bread he cannot live. Humans need the Earth to nurture their lives and produce bread for them. Humans cannot live as human beings in a virtual, digital reality.  An artificial intelligence outside the human body cannot be human intelligence. 

Poets express the yearning and pain of the human heart. JLF was rich in poetry. Poets and other authors of books spoke from their hearts. The raison d’ etre and the joy of JLF, to which thousands thronged again this year, is to listen to authors speak from their hearts: about why they wrote their books, and the deep messages in them.

Chat GPT can now write books. We should expect many books by AI soon. Some will sell well too.

Will there be discussions of these books at JLF next year? Will their “authors” come on stage? Will they be able to communicate what they have in their artificial hearts and minds to the hearts and minds of we, real, human beings?

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(My book, Shaping the Future: How to Be, Think, and Act in the New World, was also discussed at JLF this year. I was especially pleased by the response of young readers, some of whom had already read the book. Many met me afterwards and had conversations with me about how they could apply the ideas in the book in their own lives).