Practising magic!

Mixing up our wishes and is-es - an illogical attitude merchandised by us in newspapers and on TV.

WikiLeaks disclosures about Pakistan’s power configuration and its diplomacy have got everyone out there saying, “Hey! Didn’t we know this?” Right, if everyone did, what’s the fuss about? On the other hand, the same people, or most of them, also lament about how Pakistan is configured which, if they already knew what has now come out in the documents, would seem to me to be a rather futile exercise.

Woe betide anyone, however, to think that we would bother to take a pause and realise the contradictions in our arguments, this being no exception. But there is another interesting aspect of this debate which I must touch upon.

In a recent programme on Dawn News TV, the anchor referred to transition and transformation and asked, rhetorically, how long we would wait for this never-ending transition and should we not be aiming at transformation? Now, clearly, the gentleman should be forgiven his ignorance of theory based on multiple case studies since transition and transformation are not to be placed in a dichotomous relationship. Transformation is the aim through multiple transitions, steps leading a people from point A to B and onwards.

This debate was begun by me in Daily Times during the second phase of the lawyers’ movement with an article captioned “Transitionists vs transformationists”. It surprised me even then that, given what was happening around us, we were developing a dichotomy between the two categories. My point related to structural impediments, the discrepancy between what should be and what was.

Nothing seems to have changed. We continue to waver between what-is and what-ought-to-be, but isn’t. I was, of course, using the theoretical framework developed by transitions theorists and applying that to events unfolding in Pakistan. For those pains I got much abuse, an occupational hazard that one must accept if one has to survive and plod on in this line of work.

Then, some days ago, pre-WikiLeaks, I was making this argument with a brilliant lawyer friend and, smilingly, he pulled out Lloyd’s Introduction to Jurisprudence and asked me to go through J Frank’s contribution to “Courts on Trial”. This is what I found fascinating, jibe as it did with what I was arguing.

“One major defect of the traditional legal assumptions is that those who use them mix up two attitudes: (a) ‘This is true.’ (b) ‘This should be true”. The users, without knowing it, slide back and forth between saying, “This is what now happens in courts,” and “This is what I would like to happen in courts,” between a description of the existent and a programme for the future....

“I would call such assumptions ‘wish-assumptions’ or ‘wish postulates’ or ‘programmatic postulates.’ If you openly formulate your ‘wish assumptions,’ you can then be rigorously logical in working out their implications. You can painstakingly seek to learn what changes in the existing affairs are necessary conditions of the fulfilment of your wishes, your programme for the future. But if you mix up your wishes and your is-es, your description and your programme, you will probably be sloppy, inconsistent, timid and wavering. Why? Because you will have a half-conscious fear that what’s implied in your assumptions will show up as a false description of presently existing occurrences. Indeed, one cause of your mixing up, ‘I wish this were so’ and ‘It is now so,’ is precisely that you fear to face up to the fact that what you want does not now exist — and that it may be impossible to achieve. The fear of that disclosure will make you dogmatic. You will insist that your ‘wish assumptions’ are ‘is assumptions,’ that they are self-evidently true in present fact. In short, you will practice magic.”

There, then, need I say more about our present attitude to the structural problems besetting the state and its craft and how we take the easy but illogical course of mixing up our wishes and is-es?

Not only does this attitude betray a poor understanding of the situation and even poorer ability to argue, these wares are merchandised by us in newspapers and on TV programmes as a panacea for all our ills. Verily, J Frank was right, write as he did in 1949, that we practice magic!

Published in The Express Tribune, December 6^th, 2010.