Fear of the future

The world is transforming fast, we have not been able to benefit from it because we lack the capacity and education.

Before the times of change, still is it so: By a divine instinct men’s minds distrust/ Ensuing dangers; as, by proof, we see/
The waters swell before a boisterous storm.

— William Shakespeare, King Richard III

 

These iffy times make one feel that a mad malady has gripped this nation. And this disease has a name too — ‘fear of the future’. There is nothing new about it. We mortals abjure change unless it directly and quite unashamedly gratifies us. So has been the way of the world for eons. Some recent examples are instructive. When the Taliban took over Kabul in the mid-1990s, the only use they had for the city’s dish antennas was to use them for decoration. The fact that those devices could bring the entire world’s knowledge to them was simply lost in this fear of losing the known world to the currents of change. And auxiliary to this fear are the fears of women gaining freedom, new knowledge, civil liberties and even open talk of things like sexuality.

And evidence supports the conclusion that this disease is spreading and growing in strength. It starts with the intellectual exercise of defining and discouraging obscenity and heresy and ends with burning women at stake. Already an underage Christian girl with Down’s syndrome is behind bars for allegedly burning a Noorani Qaeda and by so doing blaspheming the good name of Islam. And a governor is dead, killed by his own guard, for speaking in defence of a woman against whom a blasphemy case is so weak that it cannot stand the test of trial in an objective court of law. And so frightened our interior minister is by the example of the slain governor that instead of siding with the girl mentioned above, his ministry is advised repeatedly to oppose the release of the poor soul. Meanwhile, our homegrown Taliban keep burning books and CDs in Fata and adjacent areas of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.

But even if you ban all objects of change, the eddies of marauding time have seldom been stopped by such cheap ploys. The world around us is transforming fast and beyond recognition and yet, we have not been able to benefit from it partly because of our parochialism and partly because we lack the necessary capacity and education. In order to understand how much the world has changed in the last century and will change further in another, you just have to read two books by Dr Michio Kaku — Physics of the Impossible and Physics of the Future (Knopf Doubleday, 2008). Only 10 years ago, it was difficult for me to buy and store Will and Ariel Durant’s 11-volume Story of Civilisation. Now I carry all volumes in my cell phone and its audio version in a tiny iPod. Things will change and we cannot stop changing. However, we can stop fearing that what is inevitable.

If only our intellectual class was ready to help in ending this fear. But no sir, it has become so complacent that everyone now dreads the fate that met the aforementioned governor before opening their mouth. Otherwise, it doesn’t take an Alvin Toffler to figure out that these changes cannot rob us of our faith, for that is an emotional matter, nor harm our country in any respect. Only remaining oblivious to the march of the future can. All we need is to take it easy and prepare ourselves. But alas, no one is ready to do even that much.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 7^th, 2012.