An inconvenient truth

What does not make sense in a sane society has turned out to be a usual affair in the political and social milieu of our homeland. We have been blessed with condoning and forgetting serious and sensible matters because they require angst, agony and burden on a facile mind.

Then why bother being sensible, and why let go of the providential facility of shunning hardship and absolving ourselves of any responsibility of the unabated plight that Pakistan has faced for decades now. Thinking minds are overwhelmed by mediocrity, which works best for mundane affairs and ensures gainful survival with the proverbial truth ‘we do not need thinkers we need doers’ at work.

Even our doers have been bereft of any work ethics if we look back at our politically chequered history where we have been unable to navigate through the challenges to democracy in the name of national security concerns – the most counterproductive policy choice for national integration.

It is fair enough to be oblivious of serious issues as a choice because thinking beyond a given social order is not everybody’s business. It requires dislodging the orders and patterns that invite the wrath and anger of the demagogues of the status quo. Now 70 years old, our pragmatism of adapting to a given social and political order has inculcated in us collective amnesia (though we have lost half of this fortress of Islam in our bid to letting things go).

This amnesia keeps motivating our collective sense of absolving ourselves of the sort of responsibility that only augurs well for thinking nations and those who are born to lead. Look at China, our friend two years younger to us, led by Mao Tze Tung and his political progeny who dislodged the patterns of the enslavement of body and soul. Alas, they did not enjoy the facility of outsourcing every hardship to Providence as we are used to doing.

It does not stop here, the irony is that we assert to be one of the wisest nations on earth and say that we can outmanoeuvre the best of minds. It does not take research, knowledge, philosophical endurance and political acumen, all it takes is an audience that loves sensationalism whether it a cricket match or a national day celebration. Our memories are short-lived, our aspirations are momentary, our discussions are inconclusive and our national character is punctuated by unrealistic realism.

There are notions of freedom elucidated by leading philosophers of the world right from the days of Socrates who drank hemlock to protect the right of expression. We had Galileo who chose to go to the gallows to protect what he thought was scientifically right rather than submitting to the clergy. Hegel, Marx and Sartre spoke for human freedom, the liberation of mind and body and stood for what they thought was right.

We had thinkers in the Muslim world like Averroes (Ibn-e Rushd) and Abu Nawaz who stood for what was right with unflinching commitment to speaking truth to power at the cost of the wrath of gods. The spirit of those champions of freedom would be perturbed by our sense of freedom today which allows intrusions into the freedom of the weaker, voyeurism unbound and misogyny that unfortunately finds popular support. Moral and ethical decadence has ensnared our national character and yet we blame others for our miseries.

We hear about a plethora of issues, analyses and policy discussions related to the political and economic plight of Pakistan. Most of these policy discourses and analyses are either too complex to comprehend or remain inconclusive at best. The open-ended discussions and inconclusive analyses complicate the public debate because these debates are shrouded in the short-term logic of political expediency both by civilian and non-civilian authorities to rule the roost.

Our social and mainstream media thrive on sensational discussions that encourage a non-serious social attitude and breed subjectivity and stereotypical thinking. In a socially and politically polarised Pakistan, discussions and public debates are skewed towards multiple extremes, hence creating further thought cleavages and breeding intolerance and prejudicial ideas. Just switch through your TV channels and you will find unending fray by self-proclaimed experts that are a dime a dozen in this country.

In a country with one of the lowest literacy rates in the world and whose universities do not even make to the 500 top universities of the world in terms of academic quality and research, where do these self-authenticating experts come from? If taken at face value these analysts tend to make claims and assertions that would belie all political thinking since Aristotle and all intellectual credentials right from the days of Socrates.

It is not only the media-savvy political ‘thinkers’ and those jacks of all trades whose apocalyptic narrations will amaze you. Even discussions overheard on public transport, on social media or on the street give one the impression that this country is blessed with experts whose reading of the national plight is outstanding.

While bragging about our sense of cynicism and our street smart comments on political and social ills, we will not hesitate to dupe those who dare to speak sense. In a rising Asia, we have become one of the dark spots of bigotry, backwardness and political and economic degeneration and can aptly qualify for the historic title of the ‘sick man of Asia’.

Our moral and ethical decay percolates from the top – the fish starts rotting from its head – and in practice we aspire to imitate our inept, corrupt, dishonest and self-centred (there are the kind of adjectives we use to describe them) rulers. Hypocrisy is the right word to describe our state of being and we do not have the integrity and moral courage to step forward and dislodge the patterns we are enslaved to.

We have become xenophobic and suffer from schizophrenia at the social level. As individuals our narcissism and self-righteousness keep us away from introspection and self-assessment. We have found exotic forces to blame for our issues from Gwadar to Gilgit but we hardly question the Frankenstein’s monster we have created that haunts us today.

Our strategic asset has returned home to roost and our blue-eyed boys have turned against us. We do not still accept how shallow our philosophy of strategic depth was and what price we had to pay as a people by letting our democratic rights be trampled for an ignoble cause.

National fervour and frenzy was at its peak this year again on Independence Day. It is absolutely okay for nations to celebrate but this should have been a day of introspection, critical reflection and commitment to dislodge the structures of oppression, exclusion and bigotry. Let us demonstrate that we are a nation of free people and we will not go with the flow like dead wood.

The writer is a freelance columnist based in Islamabad.

Email: ahnihal@yahoo.com