Speaking power to truth

Geography is arbitrary, make-believe and subjective. Not convinced? Take an imaginary sphere and suspend it in the vastness of space. Now tell me which side is up and which side is down. See. As you change the context, geography changes. Now, two concrete examples. In a recent interview, Bibi Netanyahu referred to his country, Israel, as a Western democracy. I am not contending otherwise right now. Whatever this bird called Western democracy is, Israel is considered a part of its flock. But here is the interesting thing. The neighbourhood where Israel exists is literally called the Middle East. The middle of somewhere called EAST! Now another country. Japan. It, too, is now accepted as a part of the West. Ergo, crucial Western alliances. But this region is often referred to as the Far East.

This takes me to a crucial faculty of mankind — conceptualisation. But don’t take my word for it. Consider what Iqbal says here. In his The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, after quoting the Quranic verses about the creation of Adam, where God first asks angels to name things in which they do not succeed, He asks Adam to do that, and he immediately does so (2:30-33), Iqbal writes: “The point of these verses is that man is endowed with the faculty of naming things, that is to say, forming concepts of them, and forming concepts of them is capturing them. Thus the character of man’s knowledge is conceptual, and it is with the weapon of this conceptual knowledge that man approaches the observable aspect of Reality. The one noteworthy feature of the Quran is the emphasis that it lays on this observable aspect of Reality.”

With me so far? Now, we see how this remarkable ability of mankind to associate ideas to inanimate objects has been an engine of creation and growth. First, you conceptualise, and then you materialise. A table, a chair and a glass or goblet all do not have inherent utilities defined by the forces of nature. At first, mankind felt a need for them, then it conceptualised objects that could fulfil those needs, and finally, it mastered the art of manufacturing them. This singular trait has served humanity well throughout history. It did not hurt that humans were the only animals or force on the planet to do so. But that might not be the case any longer. For the first time in its history, humankind has created two baffling things. Internet — a repository of all human knowledge which is accessible to nearly everyone, everywhere, almost at once. And artificial intelligence, which already can, at least under certain conditions, fulfil these crucial human functions of creativity and conceptualisation. You can add to this the third thing which has staggering importance — social media. But wait a minute. Social media is a manifestation of something, an outcome, an effect, not the cause unto itself, of something bigger. This bigger thing can be described as the ease of creating and producing things. From microblogging, weblogging, vlogging, podcasts and live streams to the content revolution in the shape of Netflix, Prime, Disney+ and so on, the internet and adjacent technologies have made an unprecedented amount of content creation and distribution possible and with remarkable ease. This explosion should have made us wiser beings. But it has not. A lot of this is white noise. But abundance can create a sense of wariness, resignation and paranoia. We are battling these diseases right now.

Before we examine the biggest victim of this all, let me describe how the resulting boredom is shaping your lives. This probably isn’t a great thing to say in the age of hyperinflation and the gig economy, where many have to work endlessly to make both ends meet, but we do so, hoping that the reader will be able to draw a distinction between scarcity and exorbitant costs of essential commodities and the abundance of free or cheap content that is supposed to act as an opiate of your minds. So, if a material example is given, grasp its essence, not its implausibility. The scarcity of our favourite foods plays a crucial role in making them our favourite. Bring or make them in abundance, eat them day and night for a prolonged period, and you may reach a situation where even their sight might prove unbearable. That is if you continue to masticate but can’t tell the difference between your favourite food for ordinary chow.

Now the biggest victims of the above phenomenon — the pundits. Every field needs (or at least once needed) experts. But their monopoly on their subject matter is broken, partly because of the factors mentioned above and partly due to their refusal to change. Demanding to be treated as nobility is one thing; abusing your privilege is another. Remember what Chris Christie said about Marco Rubio in the last Republican presidential debate in 2016? “You see everybody. I want the people at home to think about this. That’s what Washington, DC does. The drive-by shot at the beginning with incorrect and incomplete information and then the memorised 25-second speech.” Christie called it truancy. Rubio then proceeded to prove him right by parroting the same memorised sentence in the next breath. Dr Ken Booth once described this abuse of their privilege by the pundits as “speaking power to truth”. We examine examples of that now.

What triggered this chain of thought is a book I have just begun reading. Calder Walton’s Spies is a gripping and thrilling history of the hundred years of espionage. So far, so good. But it was an Economist book review that compelled me to read it. The anonymous writer of the review sounds convinced of himself/herself in drawing the conclusion from the book and also personally believing it also that a new cold war between China and the US has already begun. As far as the book goes, I cannot be that certain because I have not finished the book and promised to share my thoughts with you once it is done. But using old terms to instigate new conflicts is an old trick and a boring one. The same intellectual dishonesty led you to believe that the war on terror was the new cold war and that Iraq had nuclear weapons. The same school of thought brought you the ‘unpresidented’ presidency of Donald Trump.

The fact is that we are in uncharted waters, and all these useful idiots want to pull the wool over your eyes. The cold war started because it was a clash of two systems, two ideologies. The USSR was trying to export revolution. China does no such thing. The cold war created an iron curtain which divided the world into two spheres. Russia’s own population is not huge. Now these attempts to permanently isolate and alienate 1.4 billion people are just another agenda without merit of the punditry that speaks power to truth. You cannot leave China out, or India, or Muslims. This is sheer madness. And the one that is about to make punditry redundant.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 22^nd, 2023.

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