Excerpts of graduation address delivered at the 113th Convocation of Asian Institute of Technology on May 26 in Thailand:

From groves of academe to world of reality

Prof J.B. Dissanayaka Ambassador of Sri Lanka to Thailand, Cambodia and Lao PDR

We need knowledge for survival. With the dawn of the new millennium, we have entered the so-called ‘knowledge society’ where knowledge, rather than money, is the most essential capital. Lack of knowledge or ignorance will not take us anywhere. Ignorance will only make you grope blindly in the dark.

Knowledge is one of the things that you too acquired here. You entered the portals of this campus with a considerable body of knowledge and today you are leaving it more knowledgeable than when you entered it a few years ago. Knowledge is the foundation on which everything else is built.

Knowledge expands

Universities and academic institutes not only impart knowledge that is already there but create new knowledge, thereby extending the horizons of knowledge. With your teachers and peers you worked hard to add new knowledge to the corpus of knowledge that already existed.

To create new knowledge, you need intelligence. You used your intelligence to question, argue, compare, contrast, speculate and to conclude.

Thus you arrived at logical conclusions, transforming your hypotheses into new theories, thus extending the horizons of knowledge.

Knowledge has its own limits

Having observed the old man for a period of two weeks the specialists had to confess “We still do not know how he survives”. That clearly shows that what we know is limited.

There is so much more to be discovered, particularly in the area that deals with the workings of the mind.

Knowledge can also be abused

The acquisition of knowledge is one thing. The use of knowledge is another thing.

The abuse of knowledge is quite a different thing. The knowledge that you have acquired in Management, Environment or IT can not only be used but also be abused.

He who uses his knowledge of IT, for instance, to create ‘viruses’, to distort facts and figures, to destroy what we have built over generations is, in reality, abusing his knowledge for the sake of private gain over public interest. IT experts are now engaged in seeking new laws to crush these abuses.

Knowledge is thus a tool that must be handled with care, for it can either be used to make our life easier, more comfortable and more efficient or can be abused to make life difficult, more uncomfortable and disastrous. The choice of using or abusing knowledge is entirely ours.

Then we need something more powerful than knowledge to monitor its workings. Is there anything above knowledge? I think there is.

There is ‘wisdom’, the quality of being wise. It is true that academic courses in universities and institutes give you knowledge; make you more and more knowledgeable, but do they make you any wiser?

What exactly is ‘wisdom’? Wisdom is something that has to do with what is right and what is wrong; what is moral and what is immoral; what is ethical and what is unethical.

The binary distinction between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ does not always justify the binary distinction between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’. What is ‘legal’ may not always be ‘right’.

Disaster and knowledge

Most of the disasters you will face today are due either to the lack of knowledge or the abuse of knowledge.

There are some disasters that may be called ‘natural’. Storms, tsunamis, cyclones, typhoons, earthquakes and the like are natural disasters that are beyond human control. However, thanks to advances in knowledge, we are today more prepared than ever before to face such natural disasters. Teams of researchers at the Asian Disaster Preparedness Centre in Bangkok, for example, are conducting research into new ways and means of getting information in advance about impending natural disasters. New machines have been created, new programs have been designed to record this information.

All the other disasters are man-made. Drought appears to be a natural disaster but isn’t it triggered off by human desires? Isn’t it the logical culmination of acts of deforestation engineered by human beings who seek personal monetary gains at the expense of the public good? Is global warming a purely natural disaster?

The worst of the disasters are purely man-made. Terrorism, communalism, religious fanaticism, civil war, pollution, poverty, inflation, bankruptcy, epidemics, diseases such as AIDS-HIV, drug addiction, child abuse, human trafficking and so on are caused by human beings either due to their lack of knowledge or their abuse of knowledge.

Whenever there is a lack of knowledge, use the knowledge you have gained to educate the people. Whenever there is an abuse of knowledge, use your wisdom to tell them that there are many things more valuable than money, power, fame and glory. Tell them that there are values called ‘moral values’ or ‘ethical values’.

Moral or ethical values are neither Buddhist nor Christian; neither Hindu nor Islamic. They are neither Eastern nor Western.; They are not the sole property of any religion, of any culture, of any community or of any nation . They are human values of universal validity. Men of wisdom brought them down from generation to generation to make life on this planet peaceful and comfortable.

These values make the human animal different from other beasts; make human beings share the resources of the world in a just and fair manner; make human beings realize that there are things more important than money and profit; make human beings realize that even animals need our love; make human beings understand that our natural environment needs our care.

In this way, use your knowledge and wisdom to make this world a better place to live, a place where all beings, whether human or animal, can coexist in peace, harmony and dignity.