Condemned democracy

“O gods! Who is’t can say ‘I am at the worst’?/ I am worse than e’er I was. / And worse I may be yet: the worst is not/ So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’ ” Thus asides Edgar in Shakespeare’s King Lear.

I write this on January 1, 2011. It’s murky outside and gas heaters aren’t working because the pressure is too low. What nonsense. It’s the New Year and any number of people were Happy New-Yearing me last night (there, like ‘aside’ I just verbed it and a friend, a sophisticated boor who thinks a language should die, rather than allowing nouns to be verbed, can go take a hike!). Wasn’t today supposed to be different from yesterday, yesterday being the darned last year that we just stomped over?

Apparently, today is no different and the year, overall, by the looks of it, is likely to be shittier than the one gone by. So here goes.

Unless we were to suddenly change into humans from being yahoos, a transformation that has nothing to do with serial time; this year will bring no more happiness than the one gone by and more misery than the one that just died. One specimen of that we saw on the last day of last year.

Businesses shut down across Pakistan because yahoos decided, in the name of the Holy Prophet (pbuh), that they won’t let the government do the right thing — i.e., amend the blasphemy law. Let people live in misery; let them die miserably; let this society continue to wallow in its own diabolical idiocy. But let us not do the right thing, thank you.

Welcome to democracy! I have no intention of penning a dirge or sermonising. In fact, if this is what we are, some good people notwithstanding, then this is what we are. Add to the what-we-are our domestic, political compulsions, because that’s what democracy is all about, working in and through political compulsions, and we will see much good-getting wasted because there are no buyers for it.

Perish the thought, however, that a dictatorship will work any better. War has a term, window of savagery. Pacifists aside, history is evidence that some occasions necessitate it. Ditto for social engineering. There was a time when a man or a group of people could yank societies out of one state into another. Often at much cost, and often abominable it was. But it also worked, at least for those that survived.

No more so. There’s not much stomach left in people for engineering solutions. But the deep irony is that those who would like to retain anachronisms rely on the same modern tools that demand that society move forward and prevent it from doing so in any way other than through democratic consensus. As paradoxes go, I love this one.

So, if the ‘modern’ consensus in society is to retain its medievalism, the turn of the year is not going to do much about it. If anything, we are likely to echo Edgar.

But what we have offers more problems than even the blasphemy law. The worst part of this medievalism will continue to unfold through the internal security threat we are facing. Irregular war, where zones of war and peace overlap, requires for its relatively successful conduct, a strategy of dislocation: Dislocate the enemy from the context which strengthens him. How does one do it when the context that has given birth to the current enemy stays unchanged and the society doesn’t think it needs to change?

Walling out the enemy is not just a literal, physical measure. It also relates to not sustaining him. How can a society that believes in what it does, and of which we saw a manifestation on December 31, 2010, wall out a disease that lies at its heart?

In which case, let me Happy New-Year you. Welcome to the expression of medievalism through democracy and the paradox that we shall give nary a thought to the fact that when a society grounds laws in creedal certainty, it shuts the door on any debate. This is our democracy without legal realism and we are condemned to it. “Injai!”

Published in The  Express Tribune, January 4^th, 2011.