Predictions vs ideas

Earlier this year, in anticipation of 23^rd March, I was asked by a colleague to share some thoughts on the Pakistan I would like to imagine. The prompt was simple: what was missing, what was needed, and how we can get there. I wrote about needing a new social contract, one that was based on human dignity. I talked about the injustices that happen every day, in daily transactions and interactions, and why the way we treat others, especially those who may not be as affluent or privileged, remains a major barrier in creating a more decent, inclusive and promising society. I wrote about how we ought to change and what I think needs to be done. Other colleagues in the series wrote about strategies needed for putting the economy back on track, changes needed in education policies, tackling climate change, labour market reforms, increasing agricultural productivity, restructuring our public health system and many other areas. The ideas presented were diverse, insightful and thought-provoking, even when one did not agree with everything that was presented.

Today, that idea generation exercise and discussion seems almost a lifetime away.

The events of the last couple of months have changed the national discourse, once again. There is no more a discussion of the path forward and a road map. Once again, we have gone from prescriptive discourse to a descriptive one. Once again, the discussion is dominated not by what we should be doing, but by what is likely to happen. The new discourse is dominated by petty attacks and nasty jibes. There are predictions, and predictions on whether the predictions will turn out to be true. The likelihood of each prediction coming true is 50% — but those who get lucky in a particular week are crowned as great visionaries of our time who can see clearly into the future. The ones whose predictions do not come true paint their perspective with a new spin.

This is not the course we should be taking.

I recognise that it is hard to think about what ought to be done, but that is exactly what we must do. In the first quarter of this year, there were efforts by some former ministers and parliamentarians to re-imagine the future. Those efforts were imperfect, and needed to be more inclusive and accessible. But they were an effort in the right direction. I am not sure how many people engaged with the article series I mentioned above, but we need such conversations to happen more. Using media formats that are accessible, whether in Urdu print or on YouTube, we have to bring ideas forward that talk about more than describing the current intrigues and predicting the exact date of the next elections.

Sometimes good or even great ideas take time to be appreciated. Great books are forgotten for a long time before they transform the way people think. For hundreds of years Ibn Khuldun was largely forgotten before he became popular again. Edison’s campaign against Tesla and his alternating current system meant that a better solution to distribute power over long distances was delayed by nearly half a century. The list of theories, books and ideas that took time to be adopted is long. Yet, if no new ideas are generated, there would be no change. As the philosopher Thomas Kuhn argued in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, when a discipline enters a period of crisis such and a “proliferation of compelling articulations, the willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and to debate over fundamentals” — a situation like that can only be resolved by a new idea, a new hypothesis or a new paradigm. In many ways, we are in the moment of crisis — or perhaps a series of interconnected crises. What we need at this stage is new ideas, not descriptions and predictions. But no new idea will come forward if we fail to generate them.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 4^th, 2023.

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