An energetic young Kenyan, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, sent me an email three days after we had met, saying he had resolved to educate himself going forward.
“I have downloaded The Leviathan by Hobbes. It is time I educate myself better by interacting with more meaty and dense material so that I'm able to see thing better: to identify and avoid the folly of this world,” he said in the email.
I had asked him whether he had read The Leviathan after he remarked that government is a necessary evil. He replied that he had not. He however, gave a curious reason why he could not read the book. Most educated peers are hostile to great ideas. He therefore saw no reason why he should read ideas that he could not debate or discuss with his friends and acquaintances.
Society cannot make massive investments to educate its citizens just for them to engage in conversation or speech. Education is meant to instill knowledge, wisdom, skills, values and intellectual or mental discipline that makes society work.
The talking is, however, important to the extent that it helps individuals to search for truth, to share vision, purposes and values that animate society and its institutions.
Modern society is inherently a literate civilisation. In its books lie ideas, knowledge and perspectives to the challenges that mankind face and has faced over the centuries.
A bowing acquaintance with the ideas that have shaped civilisations, in the words of former Harvard University president Richard C Levin, helps us “to adapt to constantly changing circumstances, confront new facts, and find creative ways to solve problems.”
Higher education exposes students to different ways of thinking, wondering, questioning, understanding and, ultimately, wisdom about things—inanimate and animate, natural and human.
It does so not with the aim of helping educated people to engage in verbal gymnastics, but to provide the necessary ballast or scaffolding for people to think, and solve individual, institutional or group problems and make life worth living.
Nations place their faith, and hopes, upon the education, intelligence and understanding of their people. There is no better way of keeping the intelligence and the understanding of the people intact or energetic other than through continuous or lifelong education or reading of books that challenge or stretch the intellect and expand the horizons and empathy.
The fact that our friends and acquaintances don’t read does not absolve those who have had quality education from reading. Who knows? Those who don’t have time to read books at their level of education left formal schooling when they had not mastered the ability to read. Nor do they think or disturb themselves about the nature of things. All they want from life is an income, take care of their families, and enjoy life. They don’t care what happens to other people.
On the other hand, readers reasonably prepared for good books find them captivating, entertaining and enlightening. And these great books are, for the most part, the most interesting and well written of all books. They were not written for experts. They were written by men and women who thought about things and sought to give their own version or vision. Authors who hoped to persuade the policymakers and influential people of their times to embrace their own version or vision.
American statesman Adlai E Stevenson observed during a commencement address at Princeton University, March 22, 1954, “…educated, privileged people have a broad responsibility to protect and improve what you have inherited and what you would die to preserve—the concept of government by consent of the governed as the only tolerable way of life.”
It falls on the educated people of any country, whether democratic or otherwise, to protect the values, usages and practices of democratic governance.
They cannot do so unless the education they have gave them the intellectual culture and discipline to cope with and manage changes in the environment. They can have the adaptability and presence of mind to do this, to invigorate society and its institutions by constantly conversing or consorting with the great ideas that great thinkers immortalised in their works.
That is the only way we can “see thing better and identify and avoid the folly of this world.”
I am glad that my young confidant is not just reading Hobbes, but will go on to read the works of other great spirits and hopefully influence his peers to engage in the hobby. Society cannot develop without ideas.