Prema Jayakumar

Recently, in a speech, the well-known musician Sri T.M.Krishna spoke about the experience of singing on the beach, before an audience of fishermen who did not know anything about classical Carnatic music. He was saying how uncomfortable he found it, though he had opted to do it as an experiment. Obviously, classical music is not for an untrained ear. A large proportion of his audience did not like his music and asked quite loudly what the guy was screaming for. He had to find new ways of keeping their interest without going outside the genre. According to him the usual concert is as comfortable as a familiar club, where the habitués all know each other and can predict reactions and plan how to proceed accordingly. A sort of echo chamber where everything is known and comfortable.

The ear as an echo chamber was a concept that was dear to the Elizabethan playwrights. The whole experience of theatre was a magnification of that. You went into the theatre expecting to spend time in listening to echoes of other lives. Any theatre, be it Elizabethan or the Kathakali stage, is the product of a conspiracy between the performers and the audience, with the latter accepting the unreal as the real. As long as this is in the theatre there is no harm in it. There might even be good because you are immersing yourself in other lives and other ideas. The mischief starts when this conspiracy of agreement overflows into real life and large numbers join in, when an opinion or supposed fact is accepted only because a particular person said it. The ancient philosophers called it a logical fallacy and named it argumentum ad hominem. You agree or disagree with something only because so and so said it.

All of us now seem to live in such echo chambers. The social media, somehow, perhaps because it is accessible only if you try to get into it, not in the really public domain, exacerbates this problem. We don’t move out of the space of comfort, confront opinions that irritate us. There seems to be no place where I can convince you of anything or you can convince me of anything, however well-argued our theses are. Facts are treated as speculations and speculations as facts. The best we can hope for, at present, seems to be to agree to disagree, and try not to lose personal relationships to religion or politics or any fast-held beliefs.

We live in an information cocoon, reading and seeing only what reinforces our views, sure that anything else is false news, planted by interested parties. We get together with like-minded people, speak and listen to each other, nodding wisely to say ‘how true!’ without even wondering if there is another point of view, another truth. There is even supposed to be a move to alter old news, to slant it so that it fits in with our world-view. It sounds frightening to me, very 1984-ish. Nineteen Eighty Four came and went, and we heaved a sigh of relief, told each other how pessimistic Orwell had been, see how the world remains quite sensible. But it looks now as though Orwell was pessimistic only in the sense he expected disaster earlier than it occurred.

What is more frightening is that this is not an attitude imposed by the Big Brother, but something that people seem to take on themselves. To meet only like minded attitudes so that you don’t have to think. To hear only the litanies that you have subscribed to so that you are not irritated by anything that grates. The danger with this is not that you become narrow minded and less open, but also that such agreements breed extremism in opinions and attitudes. When your opinion is reinforced by a number of people you tend to take opinions as facts, as the only truth.

When like-minded people get together, speak only to each other, listen only to each other, they end up holding views that are more extreme than the ones they started out with. If you hear the phrase ‘everyone thinks so,’ be warned: this is one of the give-aways. Because for them ‘everyone’ is people who think like they do, others irrelevant, badly informed at best, purposely lying to further their own agendas at worst.