A Note on the Farzad Hassani Affair and the Zereshk Affair

Hassani: Whose photo is this? Contestant: A photo of a lady… Mary Bart. Hassani: You realized it's a woman, right? It's not those other three? Contestant: No Hassani: Very clever. You realized we put a woman in the middle of it… you said it, I said it, right? I mean, do we look that stupid to you, that we'd write the names of three men next to a woman! And then you'd just casually come here and take the prize. No, really, what did you think of us? I mean, you looked at my appearance and Mostafa Sharifi's. Did you see foolishness in us? Huh? Contestant: No

The above phrases are part of the scenes of verbal humiliation of a citizen on the television program Elixir from IRIB TV3, which has sparked much discussion and criticism in recent days. Although shortly after, the release of another video file—which was unclear whether it was recorded before or after the program—attempted to clear the accusation of this unprofessional behavior, the core of the story remains. We make no judgment about whether this dialogue was staged or not, and we even proceed on the assumption that the whole story is exactly as the program's producers have stated. It seems that public opinion remains unconvinced, even after the producers' insistence that the dialogues were staged. The issue is that the staged nature of such a dialogue does not justify it. In any case, whether staged or real, this program promotes wrong behavior and must be seriously analyzed and criticized. From a general perspective, there are two scenarios, each worse than the other. The first scenario is that the entire scenario above was completely real, in which case the matter is clear. The second scenario is that everything that happened was a staged, pre-determined scenario, which is, in a sense, an excuse worse than the sin. Not to mention that the fabrication of selecting an actor from among the audience is, in a way, an insult to the viewer's intelligence. The use of offensive language in a public program is in no way justifiable. I do not think that addressing an elder with white hair as "you" [informal 'to'] is normal in Iranian culture. The common cultural norm is to address an elder with the formal 'you' [shoma] and use plural verbs, and using the informal 'to' is not a sign of intimacy but rather of humiliation. But our main question here is: Who has the authority to accuse others of illiteracy or ignorance? Saadi, the renowned Persian poet, says in his book Golestan, Chapter Eight, on the Rules of Conduct:

Should reason vanish from the expanse of the earth

No one would ever imagine themselves ignorant

Few people can be found who consider themselves illogical, illiterate, or poorly educated. As it happens, even in the most illogical conversations, everyone calls upon the other party to adhere to logic. Admitting to being poorly educated or illiterate is considered a loss of face for most people, and no one wants to appear illiterate or poorly educated. General knowledge can be classified into several levels. Each of us, by watching television, reading newspapers, or chatting in friendly gatherings, is entirely unintentionally exposed to everyday news and information. All of us, simply by virtue of being human and living in a social environment, willy-nilly receive this information and are not indifferent to global developments. Of course, it goes without saying that the degree of importance of this information and its classification depends on us. In other words, it depends on our level of environmental attention, or our inquisitive and critical spirit, or even our social role, job, or civic responsibility. Now we can ask: which category of information that we receive through the media, reading books, talking with friends, or in school and university is valuable, and the lack of which indicates ignorance and illiteracy? The lack of which category of general knowledge can justify humiliation, ridicule, and receiving a box of barberries? Does the program host (regardless of whether this program was merely a show or real) truly imagine that if faced with questions from physics, medicine, chemistry, history, biology, geography, astronomy, geology, law, or mathematics, he would be able to answer what percentage of the questions correctly? Does the program host know, for example, that Mongolia's wheat production in 2011 was four hundred and thirty thousand tons, or that Mount Ruapehu, with an elevation of 2,797 meters, is the highest point on New Zealand's North Island and the source of the Waikato River, which is 425 kilometers long? Does Mr. Farzad Hassani know that Emperor Meiji, the 122nd emperor of Japan, died on July 30, 1912, in Tokyo, or that Australia harvested 2,107 kilograms of cotton per hectare of cotton-cultivated land in the 2013-14 farming season? It is obvious that we are all illiterate regarding fields outside our area of competence. A professional physicist cannot be accused of illiteracy or ignorance for not knowing that "the House of Romanov ruled Russia from 1613 to 1917 AD, and Nicholas II abdicated in favor of his brother, Michael Alexandrovich." A highly expert historian cannot be considered illiterate for not knowing that "the Klein-Gordon equation is the relativistic form of the Schrödinger equation for particles with zero spin." It is almost impossible for a highly literate and skilled specialist surgeon to have any knowledge of Euler's method for solving first-order differential equations. Or for a highly expert engineer to understand anything about brain surgery methods for treating Parkinson's. It is hard to imagine that an electronics engineer would know that Mercury's closest distance to the Sun is 46 million kilometers, or that a professional biologist would know that the equations related to the Coriolis force were published in 1835 by a French engineer named Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis. Of course, we do not use this information to determine the level of general literacy, and we neither blame nor humiliate anyone for lacking this information. Now, it remains to be said that not all general knowledge is this complex and specialized, and parts of common understanding are directed toward questions that every human being is expected to be informed about by virtue of social life. In Persian, a famous saying is quoted from Bozorgmehr: "Not everyone knows everything, and not everyone has yet been born of a mother!" In reality, we are not supposed to be polymaths of the age, possessing mastery over all known and transmitted sciences. Such a thing, given the expansion and exponential growth of knowledge in recent centuries, is certainly and definitively impossible. In the 2005 Eurobarometer report, a number of countries worldwide were surveyed on public understanding of science. One of the questions was: Dinosaurs lived at the same time as humans. This false statement yielded the following results among the individuals studied: 13 percent of Swedes, 20 percent of Germans, 21 percent of Danes, and 50 percent of Greeks actually believed that dinosaurs lived at the same time as humans. The U.S. National Science Foundation report showed that 25 percent of survey respondents believed that the Sun revolves around the Earth.

In classical definitions, we have two models for measuring the level of public understanding of science in societies, each of which, of course, has its own advantages and disadvantages: 1. The Deficit model 2. The Dialogue model or Engagement model In the first model, the emphasis is often on the deficit in public knowledge—that is, a deficit that must be remedied by science communicators and experts. The second model, however, actually addresses the necessity of two-way communication between the scientific community and citizens. In various programs, I have cited as an example the results of a study at Harvard University showing that fewer than ten percent of graduate students could explain why the air is warmer in summer than in winter. Or in another study conducted at George Mason University, more than fifty percent of graduate students could not correctly determine the difference between an atom and a molecule. Or in another instance, Robert M. Hazen conducted an interesting study on scientific literacy, during which he asked twenty-four physicists and geologists holding PhDs to explain the difference between DNA and RNA. The result, however, was not very satisfactory, and only three individuals managed to answer this question. Now the question is: who, and on the basis of what qualification, has the right to accuse another of illiteracy on a widely watched television program and use humiliating language? Even if this program was staged and pre-arranged, it does nothing to diminish the ugliness of this behavior and, in a way, promotes uncivil and unethical conduct. Moreover, would the esteemed host of the program, who permits himself to mock another for their lack of knowledge, himself be willing to participate in a program with 100 general knowledge questions—which I can prepare at the earliest opportunity—to determine what general knowledge and scientific literacy truly mean? If the host cannot even answer one of our one hundred general knowledge questions correctly, what would he expect from us? Would we then be permitted to present a box of barberries as a gift and sarcastically call him intelligent?

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Video of Farzad Hassani's insulting behavior toward a guest on the Elixir program

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IRIB report after the release of the video of Farzad Hassani's insulting behavior

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Elixir and Scientific Zereshk

A Note on the Farzad Hassani Affair and the Zereshk Affair

Erfan Kasraei | Elmna News Agency | 20 Ordibehesht 1395

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