Hegemonic political culture — not what Pakistan needs

It is season of politics, any opinion writer would find it difficult to write on politics, elections, or democracy.

The views of Hassan Sardar and Shahbaz Ahmed (popularly known as Maradona of Hockey) on military warfare would have made no difference in how General Zia planned to conduct the war in Afghanistan as much as General Zia’s views on hockey would have impacted how these magicians of hockey from the yester years would have dribbled the ball, made those deep runs and scored those beautiful goals. This to me is the problem with our country Pakistan: our inability to avoid meddling in each other’s affairs. The result — we lost our bearing. The country started heading in the wrong direction and we became a nation in decline. Our hockey, our squash and our cricket of which we were once the world champions, we no more cared about and thus sleep-walked them to disaster. Do we want to do the same to our country?

It is the season of politics and any opinion writer would find it very difficult to write anything but on politics, elections, political system or democracy. As we come close to the election day, the politicians and their politics are becoming more crowd pleasing but the demeanor of the politicians seems gaudy and flashy and bent upon manufacturing and constructing public consent that suits only their type of politics. Today, all these elites of our politics present themselves as answerable to what they promise to the people and tomorrow yet another bad decision and miscalculation by one of these unanswerable elites would push the lives of the majority of the people back to life of more miseries and further poverty.

The problem in our country is not poverty or lives of the poor people, the uneducated and the working class. They don’t have the legs of Shahbaz Ahmed to make those deep runs or the dribbling skill of Hassan Sardar to win us the world cups. The problem is with the elite class — that small number of interconnected people that play the game — that manages all our affairs including politics. So, is it bad to point out to them the slack and reveal to them how things could be well managed and put tight? Not to moralise them but to show them how they were and why they were and what they can be and how they can be. Is there any harm in pointing out the intellectual and moral self-discipline that these small number of elites may practise?

The modern world, the world in which countries have moved forward, prospered and settled after conducting reformist politics, is the world that we seek. A world in which free and fair elections are conducted and in which the election results are respected. But we are already way off from the path which will lead us into such a world. Yet if we see, the creation of the modern world is a very recent phenomenon. Demographically, the world’s population had risen from one to seven billion in just a single century — the 20^th Century — and industrially we have produced more since 1945 than in the whole of previous human history. There is so much life left to live in this world and we still have so much time to improve.

So, if we still have time to learn from the modern world, why must not we learn? The modern and prosperous world became such a world when it ensured that the gap between its civilised elite and (uncivilised) public was bridged. Simply put, they enlarged their middle class. We need to allow people to be free and not try and turn them into conformists that can only practise behaviour that is acceptable to the ruling elite. This was the way of the old world which they gave up because they read and implemented the works of influential thinkers, historians and liberal scholars likes of John Stuart Mill who termed the conformist public opinion as nothing but dead weight. The prospering world concerned itself with the overall anxieties of the society and the anxieties of the people within the society and the answer to address these anxieties for this world was to hear the woes of the people — hear them out. That is how they projected the creation of a platform from which the people could revolt against democratic mediocrity and fight for achievement of democratic excellence.

The thinking of the people and people’s views are their views and they cannot be expressed as opinions on the airwaves, electronic and social media by loud noises created by flock of managed parrots, parroting public opinion which it is not. This is not the way of the prosperous modern world and I have no clue why we are taking this path — are we following the path of Tocqueville’s ‘quiet despotism’?

Tocqueville termed quiet despotism as a situation in which individuals would turn inward and move away from public sphere, thus creating space for the society to be administered by an unpopular and unanswerable government. He called it the government of the shepherd over the sheep. To quote his exact words, quiet despotism leads to ‘a nation being reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.’ But then again, Tocqueville’s ‘Democracy in America’ is considered as the 19^th Century’s most influential work from which the modern world learnt and became prosperous. Are we even thinking of doing this in the third decade of the 21^st Century?

History has its own way of acting as a judge. Hegel reflects on this by saying that individuals make their own history but not in circumstances of their choosing. Its apt to recall how he defines history in three stages: the original history is the history we are all living; the second stage is the reflective history which will present alternative explanations and narratives at a time when most of us will not be there; and the third is the ever-present philosophical history — the history of reason, the very history of Tocqueville, Stuart and Hegel himself that prioritises thought and from which the modern world learnt and prospered. We desperately need to have our Shahbaz Ahmeds and Hassan Sardars back. For that we need to create an open society where merit and not quiet despotism prevails, where reason triumphs over stupidity and mediocrity and where people are free to make their choices and be what they can be.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 28^th, 2024.

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