The quality of the political discourse in Pakistan has reached such an abysmally low level that even simple concepts like Revolution or Civil Disobedience have lost all content and historical context
Why are commentators so critical of Imran Khan’s call for Civil Disobedience? After all, he was caught in an impossible situation – between the devil and the human sea, as it were – and had to do something. A twelve hour cogitation brought him this inspiration. And, certainly, it had a more positive ring to it than the extraordinary economic theories and unique arithmetic outlined a little further up the road by the bizarre cleric with the unusual taste in hats.
Both these Pied Pipers had led their followers here...only to find that the mountains were not opening to let them in to any wonderland of fruits and flowers. A triumph for our wooden-faced Prime Minister, with his notorious two-minute attention span and his surrounding coterie of stolid, rich, old men? I do not believe anyone has been a gainer from Pakistan’s most recent Theatre of the Absurd event.
For a finicky old fogey like me what is especially distressing is the appallingly low quality of today’s political discourse. Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we had debaters and orators with the class and skills of Maulvi Farid Ahmed, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Mujibur Rahman, Maulana Maududi, Ghaus Bux Bizenjo, Ahmed Saeed Kirmani, SM Zafar, Hamid Bhashani, Mahmood Ali Kasuri, Hafeez Pirzada, to name only a few. That is certainly not the case in the Age of Shaikh Rashid.
I recall a science fiction story I once read, called “The Marching Morons”. The author was Cyril Kornbluth and the story is set a couple of hundred years in the future. A man from the twentieth century has been put into suspended animation by a freak accident. He is revived in the future world, where he now expects to observe extraordinary wonders of science, culture and the intellect. However, instead, he is bewildered by the gaudy, trashy reality he finds. A scientist of this future world in due course explains to him that, owing to the fact that the more intelligent people had fewer children and, on the other hand, there was excessive breeding by less intelligent people, average IQs everywhere have plummeted. This future world, in short, has dumbed itself down and is now full of morons, with the exception of an elite few who work slavishly to ensure some kind of order survives.
[quote]The countries with the highest average IQs include South Korea (106), Japan (105) and Taiwan (104)[/quote]
Consider the rapid growth of population in Pakistan today, the highest of any country in the world, and one begins to glimpse the relevance this story to us. Now, Kornbluth’s assumption that lesser intelligence parents will produce lesser intelligence offspring is not borne out by genetics. Gifted children can be born to dullard parents while brilliant parents may well produce stupid offspring. However, the simple fact is that the capabilities of a child’s brain are directly linked to the quantum and quality of the pre-natal and infant nourishment the child receives. Thus, a home that provides inadequate nourishment to a foetus or baby, either owing to poverty or simple ignorance, will fail to produce children of higher intelligence.
The Finnish researcher Tatu Vanhanen clearly established a correlation between the wealth of nations and the average IQ of their inhabitants – each of these factors being both the cause and the effect of the other. Thus, according to world-wide sample surveys, the countries with the lowest average IQ among those surveyed – Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, DR Congo and Sierra Leone – are also the amongst the most backward, whose populations face starvation-level conditions frequently. The countries with the highest average IQs include South Korea (average IQ 106), Japan (105) and Taiwan (104). Germany is 102, while the USA is 98.
What is regarded as an average IQ, for an individual, is one between 95 and 100. Pakistan clocks in at an average IQ of 84, which, if exhibited by an individual, would classify him as ‘Borderline’. An individual scoring below this level would be certified as a ‘Moron’. Clearly, to have this kind of average, much of the sample must have fallen into that category.
Now, before I hear cries of outraged national pride, let me point out that these measures are not infallible, nor is IQ the only factor involved in intelligence or achievement. However, these kinds of scores are certainly indicative of a country’s relative situation.
[quote]I recall interviewing a young man with a First Division in Economics, who thought Karl Marx was President of Russia[/quote]
There are several factors at work in Pakistan. The first and deadliest of these is the hard fact of too-rapid population growth. Too frequent pregnancies place severe strains on a mother’s bodily health and ability to provide pre-natal nourishment to her unborn child. Too many children strain a family’s resources and compromise a breadwinner’s ability to provide adequate nourishment to the children. Now, take this one step further. We know that, in Pakistan, while per capita GDP is rising, nevertheless more and more families are dropping below the poverty line, with a consequent decline both in the per capita food consumption and in the variety of nutrients in the diet. Growing poverty means the development of starvation-level situations in parts of the country and among disadvantaged economic groups that, as I said in an earlier piece, make the posturings of a government obsessed with the glitter of bullet trains seem terribly out of place. It also means reduced proportions of protein, fruit and vegetables in the average diet, because of rising costs, and consequent deficiency disorders and poor brain development among children.
Supporters of Imran Khan listen to his speech while sitting on a tree
More distressing still is the declining quality of education. My wife, who is a Teacher, tells me of students going up for Board-level examinations who did not know who Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry was, or where Osama bin Laden had been found. I recall interviewing, for a company I then worked with, a young man who held a First Division in Economics, with a second position in his university, but who had not heard of Milton Friedman and thought that Karl Marx was President of Russia!!!
More horrific still is the situation at school level, where whole generations have been forever ruined and rendered unemployable by the toxic textbooks introduced during the evil regime of Ziaul Haq (and still largely extant in our schools)and the mushroom proliferation of so-called Madrassas in the country.
Now add the clincher: Our best and brightest and most enterprising individuals are streaming out of the country in search of opportunity, reward and peace of mind elsewhere. Their desperation is well captured in Meenu Gaur and Farjad Nabi’s brilliant Punjabi film Zinda Bhaag.
No wonder the country is getting intellectually poorer all the time. No wonder the quality of the political discourse has reached such an abysmally low level that even simple concepts like Revolution or Civil Disobedience have lost all content and historical context.
