TURGENEV REMINDED ME OF THE SKIRMISHES between my father and I, how much I was Arkady to his Nikolai Petrovich. Bazarof though I was not. Didn't have the intellectual wherewithal for reasoned debates, the confidence to pull off a flawed argument and the arrogance to believe I cannot be wrong. And so a skirmish it was, every time, no battles, no wars and innumerable retreats. Maybe what we had going was guerrilla warfare of the urban kind.
I had stumbled across Ivan Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons" while rummaging through one of Carrefour's bargain baskets awhile back. For RM9.95 this classic was dirt cheap for the hours of pleasure it gave me. Better than television any time. Value for money it was indeed. I took it up and stopped only to sleep and completed it, cover to cover, in a day and a half. It was more compelling than any action novel I have ever read. It reminded me so much of my days as my father's daughter. And here was a 19th century tale in pre-revolutionary Russia hitting very close to home.
The generation gap, it would seem, is a necessary mechanism of social evolution and, maybe, even revolution as the Russian "nihilists" proved. In Turgenev's Bazarof we see the first example of a Bolshevik, dreamers who think that goodness can be built from ground zero up and structures are all that is needed to eliminate everything undesirable in human existence. Soviet Russia's collapse proved beyond a doubt that the human factor is not so easily fitted into moulds. Again it was the young and the youngish that turned the communist experience into an utter failure. Russia's late 20th century youth were so enamoured of western consumerism and its illusion of untethered freedom that no amount of repression could stop things from changing.
The Russian example then, tells us that the views of the young ought to be taken seriously and not dismissed as inconsequential for the consequences could be grave.
In Malaysia, however, there is comfort in knowing that there are no Bazarovs amongst us. The Islamists are the nearest thing to possible chaos that the country has. Still, we are living in ever present danger of a zealousness that has no alternative social constructs once the present one is overturned. The Islamists are Malaysia's Bolsheviks. They have a vague idea of a glorious future without any notion of what make things tick; what political systems would best deliver the social and economic goods to the people; and, most of all, they persist in a mistaken assumption that because they believe what they want is generally good, others therefore, are stupid to resist. It is this arrogance that always leads humanity up blind alleys.
And this is the error of youth: half-baked belief systems, excessive unchannelled energy easily manipulated by jaded has-beens, and an impatience waiting to be ignited as soon as the critical mass is achieved. The imperative is then, to expose our youth to politics and political philosophy while at school, as an academic discipline so that they are well aware that systems are human machinations not set in stone and that ordering society in all its disparateness has no magic formula.
But what about youthful exuberance that borders on the hedonistic? Here, the lure is of consumerism and lifestyles and no less a menace. Again, it is one of urges and base instincts. Again it is a problem of under exposure to such disciplines as ethics and morality. In short, philosophy is one subject that ought to be introduced to school children and modulated to suit young minds. For, it trains people to think critically and constructively. But, beware, too, of the of it becoming a tool of propaganda. In Soviet Russia Marxism became an uptight dogma fed religiously by the system to manipulate the population. Here, in today's Malaysia, religion is being dogmatically taught to petrify minds and paralyse society into exclusive mental ghettos.
Philosophy is not the preserve of ivory towers. It is the means to intellectual dexterity. Given that it encompasses the whole spectrum of ideas spreading from left to right it teaches the student the importance of informed choices. Understanding the causal relations of social phenomena is the key to a stable society. It creates empathy. Philosophy is the bridge that can close the generation gap, if not today then definitely a generation down the line. But as "Fathers and Sons" shows the reader there has to be a meeting of the minds across the generations before there can be any positive outcome. If the young tells the old that there is something badly amiss it should not be dismissed. The parent generation must investigate the grouse and fix it. When the young stumbles on something positive don't be ashamed to accommodate it. Hopefully, when philosophy becomes an academic staple in schools, the young can be accommodative too.
