The show stoppers
The writer is HOD of IR Department at Garrison University Lahore Cantt and can be reached at drmuhammadali@lgu.edu.pk
If norms are socially constructed, why are our norms going from bad to worse? Whether it is the respect for the elders or standing in a queue or not jumping a traffic signal or showing some restraint and tolerance in hearing somebody out — why is our sociability becoming so unsociable? The last time I wrote on the subject I focused on the failure of the state but what about our households, our elders and their grooming and our inability to carry forward our time-tested customs, traditions and norms. Materialism, greed and selfishness are today’s blossoming ‘social facts’ in a society where the strong remains above the law and the weak suffers. Why is politics failing to evolve and give hope to those who look up to it? If it is the demand of recognition around which politics revolves, has something gone wrong with us, with the society and with our very process of ‘recognition’?
If recognition is a state of mind of an individual, group, community as well as a nation then politics in this country has corrupted the software of that state of mind of an entire society. Politics has blurred the dividing line, those boundaries that separated good from evil and vice from virtue. Why can we as a society not distinguish between the correctness and incorrectness of a given political idea?
Our young generation is rethinking about our political and cultural relativism. They are finding answers to the questions as to why certain norms and a type of politics is no more suitable for us while we are evolving and developing. We showcase such mediocre politics and political norms that accompany such politics that the younger generation is being driven away and towards the cultures abroad. Our own culture is despised, detested and disliked by a young lot that is increasingly looking abroad to adopt social norms from cultures outside. In the absence of any ‘universal prospectus on cultural rules and norms’ is it all right for our children to pick, choose and practice social norms of ‘multicultural globalised world’? Is it good for the young generation to believe in diversity and the relativity of the values? Sociologists believe that diversity should be allowed to evolve and not only should it be tolerated but like in West enjoyed and celebrated. Will this be possible if the state continues to take measures such as banning TikTok? Can you ever have any beach without a water body? Both the spread of diversity and ‘state’s intolerance’ have wide ranging implications for our society. Any state that stops the spread of diversity relegates the society to waterless beaches. In the 21st Century and in the kind of world that we are living such societies never go to the water and learn to swim — they drown on their beaches in the sand.
Can we afford to keep the millenniums away from the use of technology? Convert them into lesser accomplished artists and intellectuals? Millenniums are not only the products of upbringing, norms, traditions and culture taught to them by their elders but also products of ‘access to technology’ from where they draw, hold and consume their ‘social satisfactions’. Living between the grandparents and parents they still live in a different world — and we think we can stop them by denying them the access to TikTok? The baby boomers may still prefer not to talk to them about sex, gender roles and family functions but do they think that they already don’t know about their own as well as western cultural practices? In the information age that we live in the boomers should adapt more than the millenniums and instead of shying away from their responsibilities and boasting about how well were their time and their values, they need to ‘develop conversations’ on what should be credited and what should be discredited to channelise millenniums behavioral improvement. The state that bans TikTok is just like the parents that ban internet for children at home. Both avoid taking responsibility and both deprive 21st Century living opportunities to their children and subjects. If our behavior is socially constructed what kind of behavior do I expect from the children who live in a globalised world? Our boomers and our ‘cultural system’ both need to wake up and align with the growing possibilities that the information age offers. Without fitting in the frame of a globalised world our ‘societal portrait’ will continue to look like Mona Lisa that doesn’t smile.
Diversity is a great medicine that treats not just the symptoms but many diseases and influences so many other social phenomena like brotherhood, parenthood, and all the casual and formal connections including friendship, teacher-student and boss-subordinate relationships. Nothing grows under the shadow of the tree. Light, wind, earth, water and so much more exposures make the buds sprout and bloom. A child masters the fluency of the language he speaks because of multiple conversations that he is exposed to with multiple people in his growing years. Can we prevent our children from an integrating and interconnected multicultural world? Is this the right strategy?
The one big question that worries me is why our ‘state of nature’ has prolonged? Man in the state of nature (war of all against all) was a social phenomenon prior to man’s entry into a civilised world. Western civilisation could only change ‘their man’s state of nature’ when Martin Luther King nailed his 95 Theses to the door of Wittenberg Castle Church in Germany in 1517. Could West have reformed and become civilised if Martin Luther King had not challenged the authority of the Catholic Church? Our mainstream political parties still stand with their hands tied behind their backs and their heads bowed in front of a person that represents religious authority which violates the social norms and brings out religious students to execute political musketry. The ‘state of nature’ was thrown out of the ‘window of the House of West’ by a western society that sought reforms. Who will be the Martin Luther King of this country to give it its reforms? Will these politicians who today stand in the company of religious authority allow our society to open up and pull up and pull towards itself those that are marginalised and have their backs to the wall. In the shrinking world and the information age we live in, year 2050 and beyond will accommodate us as part of developed world if we restrict religion to our private lives, depoliticise it and allow humanism and individualism to lead the change in our social behaviour. It is ‘here now’ in which we have to do well and if we do well in ‘here now’ why wouldn’t we be able to stand the test of ‘hereafter’ in front of God?
My country still rots with the dictates of minds that are closed, whom greatness never touched and who suffer from their exposures to second rate intellect and company of mediocrity. They are the ‘norm destroyers’ and the ‘killers of liberty, equality and opportunity’. Such uncivilised people in positions of authority are parasites that eat the social capital and are the preventers of us not becoming by 2050 part of the developed world.
Can our society evolve with a leadership that undertakes every enterprise with a view to achieving its own personal and individual ends? These failed Martin Luther Kings and Queens of our society don’t have the moral virtues to stand up and speak for the rights of the people — most bother just about themselves. They have hardly ever thought of 2050 and what we can achieve by then.
Published in The Express Tribune, October 18th, 2020.
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