In the time of war, may God give us the sense to stay ignorant

India Today

10-05-2025

Some wars are just. All of them are terrible. They are also part of humanity, have always been and will always be. Yet, there is one thing they don't need to be -- insufferable.To sharpen an old adage: if information is power, then ignorance must be considered peace. Once, and who among us has not harboured such foolish thoughts when young, I used to consider ignorance a glitch. But over the years, and more so in the explosion of information in the last two decades, I have come around to realise that ignorance is not a glitch. It is a feature, a gift that evolution gave to the human brain.advertisementAt a time when India and Pakistan are involved in a conflict, which looks likely to be heading towards a full-fledged war, I hope most of us - and by most of us I mean we who are living in our comfortable cities hundreds of miles away from the border - would choose to stay ignorant for as long as we can, for as long as the war doesn't drag us into it. This, I feel, will make life easier for everyone, including people who would be fighting to keep us safe.
Wars, even the just wars, which this one would be for us if we end up fighting it, are terrible. They are terrible for everyone involved. But they are also a reality, something that Will Durant noted in his sweeping lessons from the history of mankind. 'War is one constant of history, and has not diminished with civilisation or democracy,' he once wrote. George Orwell, who fought in Spain in 1937 because he 'had promised himself to kill one Fascist', explained wars like a writer would. 'The truth is very simple,' he wrote in reminiscence, years after he had picked up the gun in Spain. 'To survive, you often have to fight, and to fight, you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil.'advertisementIn other words, humans have always fought. Often unjustly, but also on occasions with a just cause. Every time we have fought, it has been terrible, sometimes necessary, but still terrible. Only in recent decades has war started becoming insufferable.There has always been the fog of war, but, in a manner of speaking, it is only in recent years that this fog has started to cloud our collective minds in a way that many would call neurosis. This neurosis, too, is the result of social media. A full war between India and Pakistan, if at all it starts this time, is still a few days away. But look around on X, aka Twitter, and the rest of the social media, and you will think that the world is ending. There is doom and gloom, there is misinformation and propaganda of all kinds. There is a collective frenzy, on both sides of the border, that would give the sanest and calmest people sleepless nights and anxiety-ridden days.In times of conflict, it is quite natural that there would be a sense of unquietness, all around us as well as within our minds. Yet, it is this sense of unquietness that social media has aggravated in the last few days. In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell didn't hate the actual war as much as he hated the chatter. 'One of the most horrible features of war is that all the propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting,' he wrote.advertisementThe propaganda and screaming, the emotions that smoulder thoughts, none of that is new. Conflicts also heighten certain emotions and behaviours, which then add to collective neurosis. Virginia Woolf, writing in her diary while Germans bombed London in the Blitz, hated these feelings. 'I don't like any of the feelings war breeds: Communal, all sentimental and emotional parodies of our real feelings,' she wrote one day after going out and seeing people in the bombed and broken city.The difference, nowadays, is that earlier the pace at which information would travel was measured in days. Sometimes, even in months. Now it happens within minutes, and our brain can't keep up.So, as the war looms ahead of us, I hope God, metaphorically because I don't believe in one, will give us good sense to stay ignorant. In the modern world, there is just way too much information. Research has started to show how this information overdose is forcing us to feel worse, it is making us look at the world and life in detail, which we are supposed to ignore and gloss over. At no other time in human history have we been forced to know so much. Nowadays, whether we want it or not, we end up making everybody's business our own business.advertisementThis is doubly troublesome during a conflict. Rumours used to exist earlier as well, but now their scale and sophistication are at a different level. Same with propaganda. Or with warmongering. Or with the talk from doomsayers. Or the assault on senses from emotionally charged exhortations. Now, every flashing red light in the sky, even if it is hundreds of miles away, has the potential to spark panic and anxiety attacks. Now, every clip of a tank rolling, or a burst of fire from some machine gun somewhere, can increase our heart rate and paralyse us with dread.So yes, as we gaze at war clouds gathering fast, I hope we will have the good sense to keep ourselves ignorant. In fact, short of going to the border and taking up an active fighting role, the best we could do in the time of war would be to go about our lives in as normal a way as possible. It will help everyone, including those who are actually fighting. But this will happen only if we wilfully, and deliberately, keep ourselves a little ignorant. Get off social media if that is what it takes. Switch off TVs if the news is making you paralysed. We don't need to know everything. Not even in the time of conflict and war.(Javed Anwer is Technology Editor, India Today Group Digital. Latent Space is a weekly column on tech, world, and everything in between. The name comes from the science of AI and to reflect it, Latent Space functions in the same way: by simplifying the world of tech and giving it a context)(Views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author)Trending Reel