A broken contract

When a nun talks of purchasing guns to guard the school, it is a fair indication there is something wrong

When a nun talks of how many more guns she is going to have to purchase in order to arm the security men who guard the school she is principal of, it is a fair indication that there is something wrong. And not just wrong in any ordinary sense, but something deeply, systemically wrong.

We were discussing the near-panic that had seized much of the private education sector with the decision to close schools ‘because of the weather’. The school had already raised its walls, installed electronic gates and added barbed wire atop the perimeter. Not enough, said visiting officials. Do more. Install razor wire and not barbed wire. Employ more guards. Get more cameras. Buy more guns. Mercifully, it had been decided not to arm the teachers. The school in question is one of the largest and most popular in Bahawalpur, but far from the richest. And there was something wrong.

What was wrong was something in the nature of the relationship between the state and the individual. In evolved societies that have governments, that relationship is known as ‘the Social Contract’ which posits that individuals have either explicitly or tacitly surrendered some of their freedoms and submitted to the authority of the state. In exchange, the ruling authority agrees to protect them and those of their rights that remain.

The Social Contract is whence the state derives the authority to rule with the consent of the people, and has its origins in the Age of Enlightenment, specifically in two books The Social Contract written in 1762 by Rousseau, and Leviathan published in 1651. Other theorists of the time also developed models of social and political order — Grotius, Hobbes (he of the aphorism “…solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”), Kant and Putendorf among them.

Each developed a slightly differing model that sought to understand and explain why it was that a rational individual would actually choose to give up what were termed their ‘natural’ freedoms in order to gain the benefits of political order. For Rousseau it was democracy that was the best way of maintaining the welfare of the people whilst maintaining their freedoms, and the Lockean concept of the social contract even found its way into the United States Declaration of Independence. It remains one of the fundamental building blocks of governance everywhere, and particularly in those states that profess to be democracies, Pakistan being one of them.

But back to nuns and guns. What was in evidence and not only in Bahawalpur was an abdication of a core element of the social contract by the government. The requests — nay demands — for more guns and wire and guards was an abrogation of the social contract, and along with that the responsibility of the government to protect both the individual and their rights. With that abrogation goes a portion of the legitimacy by which the government rules. In the context of the social contract, the government has failed, breached the firewall and handed to the people the responsibility for their own protection and by extension handed over as well the right to deliver lethal force in the protection of both self and others. The others being schoolchildren in this instance.

The Social Contract theorists were to a degree overtaken by Hegelianism and Marxism in the 19^th century but enjoyed a revival in the 20^th with the work of the American political philosopher John Rawls; who argued that “the most reasonable principles of justice are those that everyone would accept and agree to from a fair position”. A principle that I am sure will have occurred to the government when it considered what action to take against the striking PIA workers, for instance. Or not.

Fear not Dear Reader the streets are not about to be taken over by gun-toting nuns, but without anybody — or at least anybody in the business of governance — noticing, entire chunks of the social contract are being given away willy-nilly. Politics is abdicating, moving aside on the throne, and giving way to an individualised populace with an eroding rule of law. In so doing the Hobbesean nightmare comes into focus, and life does indeed become solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 4^th,  2016.

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