Pakistan’s arrested development

Societies, like organisms, which fail to confer adaptive advantage end up imploding or jump to next evolutionary stage

A certain list ranks Pakistan amongst the top 10 global countries. Allow me to add, before a passionate few break into slow applause, that this list has nothing to do with a country’s entrepreneurial savviness, or gender equality, or some feel-good happiness index. It is simply a list of the world’s most dangerous countries — the Global Peace Index of 2014. And if this isn’t depressing enough, the fact that we are ahead of North Korea is enough to cause a few neuronal sparks in even the most placid mind. Just consider, for a moment, North Korea — the place which long fell through the cracks in some dark nether area between civilisation and its reverse; a timeless hostage crisis, or to borrow from Christopher Hitchens: a “thanatocracy”.

But ours is a tragedy well understood, especially in the post 9/11 context. We are widely recognised as a country pregnant with terrorism. And our terrorism problem presents few mysteries, linked as it is to the Afghan jihad and our Saudi alliance much through the 1980s and 1990s; a cataclysm which accelerated our advance to permanent pariah-hood. To condense things still further, one need only mention Ziaul Haq, the Darth Vader in Pakistan’s horror story. Somewhere along those messianic times when most of the world was growing wings, Pakistan morphed in reverse, growing tentacles based on a warped ideology, and reviving latent enthusiasms of antiquity. Murderous intolerance soon replaced textile as our chief export. Sports, like hockey, cricket and squash, which had seen the rise of some our fittest athletes, became preaching platforms for fatalistic messiah types for whom divine will rather than pathetic performance on the field was often the source of our many ignominies in various games. And it was somewhere along this backsliding mutation, an ‘unnatural selection’ if you will, that some of our famous pop icons grew long beards and embarked on long and eerie retreats from reality.

What went wrong is a question asked often, though not often enough. It will no longer do to circumscribe all analysis to symptoms, platitudes and tautologies. Yes, we know the system is diseased, vermin-infested as it is with our moral rot — but why?



Perhaps, looking at other nations may help. When one examines the civilisational advances of the rest of the world, especially the West, two distinct periods emerge. First is the Enlightenment period circa 18^th century and the second is the post Second World War period circa mid-20^th century. Both these periods are characterised by one dominant theme: the humanitarian thrust. Consider the European Enlightenment before which Europeans were busy hunting witches and nailing heathens to the cross. It took a shift to humanistic principles enshrined in the philosophies of great thinkers like Voltaire, Locke and Spinoza, for progressive ideals to prevail over the malignant bigotries espoused by the rigid orthodoxies of the time. The Enlightenment, however, didn’t just emerge in a vacuum, but was rather an organic offshoot of a fecund intellectual ecology, owing much to the rise of commerce, literacy and cosmopolitanism in most of Europe. This shift from zero-sum arrangements to non-zero ones — from conquest to commerce, and from agrarian economics to mercantilism — disincentivised wars and violence. And while wars still remained a reality, they greatly reduced in number. The printing press, too, proved a great force multiplier, with literature generating a market place of ideas and novels playing a significant role in the expansion of empathy.

The wreckage of the Second World War motivated another thrust into the humanist direction as embodied in the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva conventions. The creation of secular democratic nation-states with liberal economies in a globalised world undermined the profit motive from war and genocide — again, not wholly, but relatively.

The progress in the West fits in place with Kantian philosophy according to which democracy, open economies, and trade/engagement with international communities led to general welfare and less violence. Morality, then, is a product of non-zero sum incentive structures rather than ancient dogmas blasted down from pulpits.

Interestingly, a striking parallel with pre-Enlightenment Europe exists in much of the Muslim world today where wars over religion, and medieval practices like stoning to death of alleged blasphemers/apostates (at times in public squares) and mob violence, are not mere archival accounts in history books but are, in fact, deadly quotidian realities. In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Harvard Professor Steven Pinker argues that violence is generally a confection of following elements: 1) the Hobbesian dynamic of fear, greed and vengeance; 2) the essentialising/categorising of the perceived enemy and moralisation of emotions, like disgust, against him; and 3) the appeal to utopian ideologies to cleanse the enemy — often by way of gratuitous means including genocide. Pinker goes on to argue that while autocracies are worse than democracies, especially in their vulnerability to violence, a cross between the two — anochracy — is even worse because anochracies, unlike autocracies, can neither intimidate populations into quiescence nor do they have the formidable law-enforcement mechanisms of a democracy. One can see how all this applies to Pakistan.

So, to surmise: societies flourish via effective incentive structures aimed at benefiting the maximum number of people. One look at Pakistan, then, reveals just how brutally we have violated this principle, not just in the unfair distribution of resources (feudalism), or money (elitism), but even in ethics and morality (the perverse incentives leading to a culture where shame rather than guilt guides most moral considerations — ‘honour culture’).

Today, most social scientists agree that the principles of Darwinian adaptation apply not just to biological systems but equally so to social systems and cultures. Societies, like organisms, which fail to confer adaptive advantage on the collective end up either imploding or are forced to jump to the next stage of their evolution through exogenous factors. The convulsions in our society today — the action in Sindh/Karachi, an active judiciary, the intellectual tear that has appeared in matters of identity and beliefs — could well be the onset of such transformation. And just maybe, or so one hopes, in a few years, we may lose our top 10 spot on the list of world’s most dangerous countries.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 7^th,  2015.

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