The essence of realism is the preference to see things as they were, are, and can be instead of how human caprice wishes they were. This is the fundamental building block of any meaningful effort at personal and social reform. Adherence to realism is the basis of reasonable hope that actions taken under its guidance will cause less misery than whimsical social engineering. However, there is no guarantee that realism will always lead to desirable outcomes.

Realism’s dialectical combination of free will and determinism makes it a good tool for policymakers. It holds that people, endowed with free will, are capable of both right and wrong. It recognises that this human choice is constrained by circumstances that precede and surround the act of choosing.

In order for choices to be meaningful, realism prescribes that they should be made with a deep understanding of available alternatives. Unfortunately, the triple challenge of limited time, voluminous information, and lazy thinking makes the exercise look like an onerous job. When people, including policymakers, cannot decide rationally between alternatives, they invariably seek broad-based consultation in the hope that numbers will supply the cognitive resources required to address policy bottlenecks - conveniently forgetting that quantity does not always throw up quality. Faced with complex information in challenging situations, their default response is to dumb the task down by dismissing any serious intellectual effort to ponder over it as a theoretical exercise. There is, indeed, no safety in numbers if they only add mediocrity.

This is not very different from what happens to us when we begin watching a movie from the middle. We have only a vague idea of what the plot is about, being in the dark about how it began, and can only speculate about how it shall end since we have missed some of the twists and turns that add critical nuance to the story. Most postcolonial states exhibit this condition in their policymaking.

In domestic terms, such misreading occurs typically when it is the question of setting development priorities or combating corruption. Famous Stanford psychologist, Philip Zimbardo’s use of the lens of analogy to explain the relationship between agent and social structure is useful in such contexts. His analysis is that a few actual or alleged bad apples are binned with zeal and zing but the possibility that perhaps the apple barrel itself is rotten is facilely ignored. The consequence is that the apple barrel continues to putrefy in plain sight.

For most postcolonial states, the potential rather than the actual capacity for exercising influence in inter-state relations becomes the focus of diplomacy. Hence, building narratives and managing perceptions becomes more important than building robust theories that explain facts more convincingly. In the absence of strong indigenous explanatory models aiding clear foreign policy goals, diplomacy is deprived of substance. This hinders the advancement of national interest, and foreign policy is reduced to volubility and empty elegance.

The usual fate of such polities is mass cultural hypochondria: failing to treat its real ills, the society begins treating itself for ills from which it is not even suffering. As a result, imagined ills finally become a real malady. This condition is painfully evident in many contemporary Muslim societies in which the separation of state and religion is considered one of the core conditions for development.

No effort is made to consider that this separation was not originally a problem of Muslim societies but that of Western Christianity. There simply was no institution analogous to the medieval European church in Muslim societies against which the state needed to struggle for autonomy and sovereignty. The induction of the belief in a need for separation between politics and religion in Muslim societies as a prerequisite for stepping into modernity first took place during European colonial rule which thrived on a careful cultivation of divisions and rifts in colonised societies.

We rarely realise that the question of separation of powers was first posed in the context of the struggle between ecclesiastical authority and state authority in early modern Europe. The separation was not supposed to pit state institutions against one another in postcolonial developing polities.

We also do not pay attention to the fact that the European lore of separation of powers was meant to enable, not disable, cooperation. Given these reflective lapses, it is not surprising that in many Muslim societies, the inter-institutional dynamics cease to be functional. Eventually, this leads to political deadlock, social decline, and cultural ossification.

We would do well to remember that the gap between policy and development as well as the gulf between diplomacy and national interest can only be bridged through widespread societal restoration of realism.