Correct me if I’m wrong

What is there to be worried about? Why now? For one, public opinion has turned against people unwilling to question certainties. The fear this might engender is understandable: after all, most in idea-generating jobs — at universities, in research centres, in government, in the media — are surrounded by like-minded people. How to separate questionable assumptions from those that aren’t, when all assumptions are shared, and are held to be self-evidently true? Thus, absurdities: banks selling insurance against their own collapse; credit-rating agencies running evaluation programmes rating entire blocks in distressed neighbourhoods essentially as investment-grade assets.

But there have been crashes before. Why should reactions be different? One reason is that anger against echo chambers already existed. That, above all, was the reason for Barack Obama’s victory over Hillary Clinton. Voters felt that those whose job it was to be right were wrong about Iraq, wrong about the aftermath, wrong about the reasons to go in. Clinton was one of them; Obama was not. Those unwilling to break the consensus were electorally unacceptable. And those in the American commentariat, both liberal and conservative, who had suspended disbelief in the run-up to the war, were forced to revisit their statements then — to apologise or gloss over or nuance their words. That hasn’t dissipated public anger completely, and those who suspended disbelief about the state of world finance are justifiably concerned that that anger will now turn on them.

So, if echo chambers are unacceptable, should we instead reward those willing to upend the conventional wisdom? That won’t help: contrarians have been thriving as well. From Jonah Goldberg to Arundhati Roy to Christopher Hitchens, conflict-driven news and analysis have used those who’re happy to disagree to create dramatic opposites in how events can be perceived. Academics privilege “surprising” results as well, which means that what gets published and discussed is frequently interesting — but not representative. Why isn’t this sustainable? Because academia is not focused on representative, big questions that will feed into a system where there are all sorts of little answers available — one study in Scotland saying smoking might not kill you, another in Hawaii about the power of prayer — that the less scrupulous pick and choose between them to create clashing narratives. Because big questions should sometimes not be about “right”, “wrong” or where an academic stands.

And people are turning against narratives continually clashing, like cymbals in a shaadi band — because of the noise and shrillness they produce in our politics and over our airwaves. Obama’s “inclusiveness” received an overwhelming response from those in America who thought that partisanship was poisoning their politics. Closer home, the growing distance between the BJP and the Congress is beginning to cause concern; and the tone and tenor of television news is being questioned, not least from within that industry.

So where do we look for answers? One illustrious career might help. Samuel Huntington, the Harvard political scientist, died last week. Since the late ’60s, he had been one of the most influential of public intellectuals. Surely, one might think, he represents all that our idea-generating professionals need to recover. And his career is indeed something we can learn from, just not so simply.

The truth is that Huntington, a tremendously erudite man and endlessly fascinating talker, was throughout something of a harbinger of such trouble. Consider the “clash of civilisations” thesis, for which he is best known: that the world is divided by civilisational boundaries, and those — between the “Christian”, “Muslim” and “Hindu” worlds, for example — alone matter. This is something that has been endlessly challenged in the academy, and has been as close to being debunked as it is possible to, given that it is so far from specific; and yet it lives on in political discussion, trotted out to support arguments otherwise untenable and incoherent. Consider also his breakout work in the ’60s, Political Order in Changing Societies: it argued that in developing countries, the search for “order” was more desirable than the search for democratisation — something that fit in nicely with the need then universally felt in the free world to find a moral justification for its support of dictatorships elsewhere. Both when disagreeing and when agreeing, Huntington’s work isn’t the solution.

But it indicates where those who are worried about the idea-generating industry need to look for one. In his first book, for example, Huntington confidently predicted the impending break-up of India, a state “unable” to handle modernity. His career, and many others’, is littered with confident predictions that went terribly, terribly awry. What we need to do as consumers of ideas is to introduce a bit of discipline to the market. If you think that someone shouldn’t have said in 1970 that India was about to split apart, or that the USSR was a worker’s paradise, judge his subsequent work more harshly. If you believe that columnists knew enough to have doubts about the Iraq war, consider carefully your trust in those that didn’t express them. What other method have we?

So, as you read people punctuating continuous time with discontinuous analyses, don’t forget who said what. As we search for big ideas to dig us out of this hole we’re in, the first thing we’ll demand is some accountability for those who provide them. Call it a prediction. A brave, dauntless, prediction.

mihir.sharma@expressindia.com