Theos-Talk Archives (March 2003 Message tt00065)

Hi all of you,

Here is part 5 of the article "The Sufi Tradition" by Elizabeth Hall on Idries Shah.

Article originally published in Psychology Today, July 1975
Copyright Elizabeth Hall


Part 5 - with about 2 pages:

Hall: People in the United States seem to be looking for leaders, 
whether spiritual or political, and they keep complaining because 
there are no leaders to follow.

Shah: People are always looking for leaders; that does not mean that 
this is the time for a leader. The problems that a leader would be 
able to resolve have not been identified. Nor does the clamor mean 
that those who cry out are suitable followers. Most of the people who 
demand a leader seem to have some baby's idea of what a leader
should do. The idea that a leader will walk in and we will all 
recognize him and follow him and everybody will be happy strikes me 
as a strangely immature atavism. Most of these people, I believe, 
want not a leader but excitement. I doubt that those who cry the 
loudest would obey a leader if there was one. Talk is cheap, and a 
lot of the talk comes from millions of old washerwomen.

Hall: If so, the washerwomen are spread throughout the culture.

Shah: They're not called washerwomen, but if we test them, they
react like washerwomen. For example, if you are selling books and you 
send a professor of philosophy something written in philosophical 
language, he will throw it away. But if you send him a spiel written 
for a washerwoman, he will buy the book. At heart he is a 
washerwomen. Intellectuals don't understand this, but business
people do because their profits depend upon it. You can learn much 
more about human nature on Madison Avenue than you will from experts 
on human nature, because on Madison Avenue on stands or falls by the 
sales. Professors in their ivory towers can say anything because 
there's no penalty attached. Go to where there is a penalty
attached and there you will find wisdom.

Hall: That's a tough statement. You sound as if you are down on
all academics.

Shah: Well, in the past few years I have given quite a few seminars 
and lectures at universities, and I have become terrified by the low 
level of ability. It is as if people just aren't trying. They
don't read the books in their fields, don't know the workings
of them,use inadequate approaches to a subject, ask ridiculous 
questions that a moment's thought would have enabled them to
answer. 
If these are the cream, what is the milk like?

Hall: Are you talking about undergraduates, graduate students, or 
professors?

Shah: The whole lot. Recently I've been appalled at the low
levels of articles in learned journals and literary weeklies. The 
punctuation gone to hell, full of non-sequiturs, an obvious lack of 
background knowledge, and so on. I went to a newspaper and looked up 
the equivalent articles from the 1930's. A great change has taken
place. Forty years ago there were two kinds of articles: very, very 
good and terribly bad. There seemed nothing in-between. Now 
everything is slapdash and mediocre. Why are so many famous persons 
in hallowed institutions now so mediocre?

Hall: Critics like Dwight Macdonald have said for years that as 
education becomes widespread and people become semiliterate, the 
culture at the top is inevitably pulled down.
But you're not really hostile to all academics, are you?

Shah: No, some of my best friends are academics.

Hall: That is no way to get out of it.

Shah: Of course, I'm not hostile to all academics. There are some 
great thinkers. But I do not believe that it is necessary for us to 
have 80% blithering idiots in order to get 20% marvelous academics. 
This ratio depresses me. I think that the good people are 
unbelievably noble in denying that the rest of them are such hopeless 
idiots. Privately they agree with you, but they won't rock the
boat. 
For the sake of humanity, somebody has got to rock the boat.

Hall: For the sake of humanity, what would you like to see happen?

Shah: What I really want, in case anybody is listening, is for the 
products of the last 50 years of psychological research to be studied 
by the public, by everybody, so that the findings become part of 
their way of thinking. At the moment, people have adopted only a few. 
They talk glibly about making Freudian slips and they have accepted 
the idea of inferiority complexes. But they have this great body of 
psychological information and refuse to use it.
There is a Sufi story about a man who went into a shop and asked the 
shopkeeper, "Do you have leather?" 
"Yes," said the shopkeeper.
"Nails?"
"Yes." 
"Thread?"
"Yes." 
"Needle?" 
"Yes" 
"Then why don't you make yourself a pair of boots?" 

That story is intended to pinpoint this failure to use available 
knowledge. People in this civilization are starving in the middle of 
plenty. This is a civilization that is going down, not because it 
hasn't got the knowledge that would save it, but because nobody
will use the knowledge.

Article originally published in Psychology Today, July 1975
Copyright Elizabeth Hall







Part 6 of 6 follows shortly. 

from
Sufilight with peace and love...



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]