Yesterday I attended TEDX Margalla, the Islamabad incarnation of the TED talks franchise. It was fucking terrible. A Cambridge University education researcher unveiled (with great fanfare) pedagogical insights that are at least 20 years old (leaning must be immersive? HOLY SHIT!). A parliamentarian, apparently unable to perform a Google Scholar search, asked the crowd why the intelligentsia has failed to investigate corruption and terrorism in Pakistan. A former architect outlined her plan for a transformative orphanage which, she claims, could be self-sustaining through the sale of vegetables from its garden.
Besides debasing the TED brand, these performances made me feel more acutely what some have described as “the postmodern condition”, the overload of information that reduces me to inaction and silence (but painfully, not apathy). Gandhi said that we must be the change we wish to see in the world. But today we need a new formulation, one that addresses the malady of the present age: The ability of the thoughtless to see whatever they want in the world, and the inability of thoughtful people to see anything with confidence.
One of the speakers, by way of saying that we should be able to solve the problems that face us, said, “This is the age of reason, isn’t it?”
That was the most dated of all the dated ideas advanced at TEDX Margalla. The Age of Reason is long over, riddled by machine guns, irradiated by fallout, spun into quantum superposition, chopped up into tranches and bundled into derivatives for sale to the predictably irrational. Reason still has power in the world, but it is the power of dinosaurs and trees long dead, plumbed and processed and pumped into the tanks that fuel our joyrides, and our wars.
