Education... a new world pole
Mohamed Sid-Ahmed was invited last Thursday to deliver the commencement address for master's degree candidates at the American University in Cairo. The text of the address is reproduced below
I first want to thank the American University in Cairo for inviting me to speak on this prestigious occasion and to share with you, in all honesty, some of my thoughts at this time of heated debates, great uncertainties, sharp polarisation and a general tendency towards extremism.
It is a time when soberness and candor are more necessary than ever before.
Today, America is the only remaining superpower. What to do in a world where superpowerdom is the prerogative of one nation only?
How to make superpowerdom beneficial not only for the superpower itself, but also for the world at large? Not for the superpower at the expense of other nations.
How to come up with a counterpole to balance world order? I am not talking of a negative bipolarity based on brinkmanship. Not a bipolarity between haves and have-nots, capitalism and communism or North and South. Not a confrontational balance between geographical, economic or ideological protagonists, but a peaceful balance between complementary poles. In other words, by making education the other world pole.
So far, unfortunately, the phenomenon of polarisation has gone hand in hand with militarisation. Bipolarity worldwide has been established and driven by the arms race.
Education empowers the citizen, while militarisation empowers the State. More often than not, at the expense of the citizen. And of human rights.
Military power builds up vertically. It increases hierarchism. Educational power spreads horizontally. It encourages debate. It enhances democracy.
Military power encourages the logic that might is right. The time has come to make right the source of might, not the opposite.
A burning issue of our time, with the emergence of a wide range of fundamentalisms, religious and otherwise, is the issue of faith, the deep inner conviction of being the holder of absolute truth. But, then, how does this fit in with Karl Popper's now generally accepted principle that what is scientific is what can be proved wrong? The falsifiability principle, as it is known, has taken us far away from Laplace's assumption, in the late 18th century, that if, at a given moment, the position and momentum of every particle in the Universe were known, the entire history of the Universe, past and future, could be determined from that moment, forwards and backwards.
Science today proves that not everything is knowable with certainty. That is a scientific truth established by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics and Godel's undecidability principle in pure mathematics. But if such fuzziness is all-important for fundamental science, it is of little relevance for measurements concerned with everyday life. Experimentation, whenever possible, establishes the validity of such uncertainties, even if logic and common sense fail to understand why.
To make education a pole on equal footing with superpowerdom, one should not only eradicate illiteracy, but also computer illiteracy. This entails establishing a new type of symbiotic relationship between Man and Machine. New horizons for intelligence. For collective intelligence. Perhaps also for artificial intelligence. Machine becoming an extension and promotion of the five senses. Man suppressing distance in time and space. Man expanding the span of life and forcing Death to retreat. Man becoming capable of exploring an ever expanding part of the cosmos. Of penetrating the realms of the infinitely small and the infinitely large. Of the infinitely complex. Homo economicus becoming homo informaticus. In other words, a complete remodelling of the human condition. Of the power of the human species. Superpowerdom acquiring new dimensions. Freedom harbouring new possibilities, opening new vistas. All this should be food for great optimism.
But not all is positive in our present-day world. The unfolding of events has often taken very unexpected and unpredictable forms. To begin with, the sudden implosion of the Soviet superpower. Liberated from the military counter-balancing effect of the latter, American military power has reached unprecedented heights. Then came 9/11. A challenge that our planet's unique superpower could not tolerate, but not easily defeat either. Both Afghanistan and Iraq are still unfinished business.
With the assets of our present world system, there should be no justification for terrorism to be the world's central concern. This can only signal that, to paraphrase Hamlet, something is rotten in the New World Order. That frustration and despair, rather than enthusiasm and hope, have the upper hand. That something has gone wrong with development, with how to cross the critical threshold from backwardness to progress and towards greater liberty. Something has gone wrong with the interactions and interconnections between nations, societies, social classes, cultures, religions and civilisations.
Education is the necessary, if not sufficient, condition to get us out of the quagmire. To avoid having chaos and new forms of disorder and entropy get out of hand. Only education on the largest possible scale, education in all its diversity, with its ability to correct mistakes, to dissipate misunderstandings, to defeat demagogy, to diffuse awareness, consciousness and knowledge, can develop and antidote for bigotry, disillusion, resentment, hatred and ultimately, negation of the Other.
It is not enough to uproot terrorism; the reasons that make desperate people resort to terrorism in the first place need to be addressed and this is bound to require painful changes in the world system itself. Education in a democratic environment is the best instrument by which the required changes can be properly identified and successfully introduced. This, I believe, is a major responsibility that new generations of graduates and post-graduates of this university and elsewhere around the world will have to assume as they enter public life.
In conclusion, I would like to offer my heartfelt congratulations to all of you who are graduating today, and to wish you every success in future.
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 19 - 25 June 2003 (Issue No. 643)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/643/op3.htm