Knowledge without character is dangerous

Knowledge without Character is Dangerous We acquire knowledge on the terms of materialism so that we can get a better job, make more money and lead a comfortable life. A money-spinning career has become a hundred times more important to us than a refined character. Our schools, our colleges and our mentors pay attention on our career building; they fail to understand that character building is much more essential. There are several incidences where we see a child who has an excellent academic record and is meritorious throughout his career however, when he steps in the outer world he fails to build relationships with people because throughout his life span, nobody ever asked him to focus on the vital aspects of life. This is the reason why people today cannot hold a family together. The divorce rates are ever increasing and so are the suicide rates. The people who are not able to understand themselves, how will they understand the philosophy of life? All those years of study and excellent grades do not really bring contentment.

Henceforth a wealthy and knowledgeable is not necessarily happy. An education that ignores character- building is an incomplete education. Albert Einstein very aptly said – ‘education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learnt in school.’

Gandhi formulated a series of diagnoses of the modern world’s seemingly perpetual state of crisis, which he called “the seven social sins.” I prefer to think of them as seven social ailments, since the problems they address are not crimes calling for punishment but crippling diseases that are punishment enough in themselves. The first one out of those seven is knowledge without character. It means we can decipher the difference between good and bad, but can we really act on that knowledge? Here comes the role of character.

To me, the central paradox of our generation is that regardless of our powerful intellectual skills and our ingenious engineering and medical achievements, we still lack the ability to act prudently. We send complicated satellites into outer space that throw light on the astonishing information about the destruction of our environment, but what do we do to stop or control that destruction.

As Martin Luther King, Jr. said it the best, when he said –“we live in a world of guided missiles and misguided men,” where we might solve the most complicated technical problems with utmost ease but fail to cope up with the basic challenges of life. In our coherent moments we can analyze that we are doing a huge damage to ourselves and our planet, but somehow, for all our intellectual understanding, we cannot seem to change the way we think and live.

The crux isn’t that we are bad people but the problem lies with our incomplete education. We have studied all subjects from history to astronomy, but could not inculcate the core values of life. When Gandhi speaks of knowledge without character, he is not implying that we know too much for our own good. He is saying that because we do not understand what our real needs are, we are unable to use our tremendous technical expertise in a way that might make our lives more secure and satisfying.

Every day, for example, dozens of new products appear, promising to satisfy our deepest desires. We are barraged with messages—subliminal and otherwise— on billboards and in magazines, on television and in the movies, telling us that everything we are looking for in life can be found in a car or a bowl of ice cream or a cigarette.

The ads are just playing around the basic fact that when you own something, when you eat or when you smoke, you bestow yourself with self respect. But you need to understand that it you who gives dignity to your car by driving it and not the car. If it were not for you, that car would be only a hunk of metal.

These things are not some hidden secrets. We all know them and have heard them several times before, but we find it hard to do anything about them. Car has become a necessity for us, more than a status symbol. The expansions of the cities have made the situation worse.

Today the roots of our dependence on the automobiles go deeper than the desire for a convenient mode of transportation. There is a much more powerful force at work here—a force that characterizes almost every activity in industrial society: profit. Under the relentless domination of the profit motive, we have remade our

country in the image of the automobile. As the political historian Richard Barnet writes, describing America in the middle decades of this century, “Buying highways meant buying motels, quick food eateries,…and the culture of suburbia….The highway system was the nation’s only physical plan, and more than anything else it determined the appearance of cities and the stretches in between. In choosing the automobile as the engine of growth, the highway and automotive planners scrapped mass transit.”

In just one hundred years, urged on by the profit motive and the media conditioning that driving is entertainment and our car is an extension of our personality, we have used up nearly three-fourth of the world’s known petroleum reserves, fouled our air, and put our oceans and beaches at continual risk from oil spills.

I don’t mean to say that it is wrong for the businessmen who are yielding profits to give their family the desired comforts —everyone should have this opportunity. But we have exaggerated the significance of profit out of all proportion to its natural place in business. We have become addicted to it, and that is a very dangerous situation.

Most addictions begin innocently enough - Just one more helping, one more bowl of ice cream, one more cigarette, one more drink for the road. That is how it starts—just one more: “Let’s buy just one more new car, make one more dollar, and pump one more gallon of gas.”

When we give in to that desire repeatedly, with a second helping, a second smoke, a second drink, or a second sniff, it becomes a habit—not just one more but one every day: “The stockholders want to see this quarter’s profits rising above last quarter’s. Get the general manager on the phone and tell him to increase production, bolster demand, and heat up consumption. And do it yesterday.”

When such habits continue long enough we forget to choose. We feel insecure without these materialistic possessions. We do not mind in sacrificing our children’s precious seas, air, and earth. This is what Gandhi meant by knowledge without character—a lack of connection between what we know to be in

everyone’s long-range best interest and our ability to act on that knowledge. It has become the cornerstone of much of our business and our lives.