By
Nadeem F. Paracha
13 Dec 202
A single
theme runs across the films of the British documentary filmmaker, Adam Curtis.
He has scripted and directed over a dozen documentaries for the BBC. They are
mostly sardonic laments on how, ever since the late 1970s, the state and
governments have allowed their roles to recede in addressing various issues.
Illustration by Abro
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Curtis
often tries to demonstrate that, in the wake of increasing economic, social and
political complexities, states and governments that were once at the forefront
of providing leadership and solutions, began to shrink from this
responsibility. This happened particularly once the paradigm that they had
established in this context began to shift, especially after the 1973
international oil crisis.
According
to Curtis, governments began to outsource their responsibilities to large
private operators such as banks and big businesses, which had furnished loans
and services to them when they had been badly impacted by a series of economic
downturns triggered by the crisis. The role of the state and government
continued to shrink. To Curtis, politicians and civil servants who were once
expected to lead and plan their countries’ progress and wellbeing, simply
became nothing more than props.
However,
from the mid-2000s, all eyes and expectations fell upon the state and
government again when major financial scandals and economic recessions exposed
the dangers of overtly banking on the private sector to provide services which
were once the domain and purpose of state and government institutions. In the
July 24, 2012 issue of The Guardian, the British philosopher Julian Baggini
writes that governments struggled to come to terms with the economic and social
fallout of the new recessions. What’s more, by then, the public had also lost
their trust in the private sector.
According
to Baggini, unable or feeling helpless to address and resolve the problems,
politicians began to look to present themselves as guardians of other things.
If they were unable to prevent economic declines, they posed that they were now
there to halt moral declines.
Baggini
writes that the most fundamental problem with morality is that society still
lacks a sense of where it comes from and who is qualified to make claims for
it. There is great irony in politicians, a naturally amoral lot, speaking of
morality. Baggini is right to observe that most people are highly sceptical of
politicians in this regard. And it is also a fact that those whose domain it
was to define and judge morality — i.e. priests, clerics, etc. — lost their
credibility after the rapid emergence of modernity.
Therefore,
according to Baggini, “the danger is that we will either fall back on the old
authorities or allow new moral leaders to emerge who may well base their
pronouncements on little more than populist sentiment.”
This is
exactly what has been happening in various countries since Baggini wrote his
essay eight years ago. Unable to control economic declines, various heads of
governments in Europe, South and North America, and in South and East Asia,
have increased their talk about morality, in an attempt to distract the
attention of the polity from larger and less abstract issues.
India’s
Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised economic miracles but, after being in
power for almost six years, there has been more talk about Mandirs (temples),
mosques, cows and the Hindutva identity than about the country’s faltering
economy. Trump, before his defeat in this year’s presidential election in the
US, continued to surround himself with animated Christian evangelists, while
completely failing to control the spread of Covid-19 in the US and the
devastating impact it has had on the country’s economy.
Governments
in Brazil, Philippines, Turkey, Pakistan, Hungary and Poland are adopting
similar tactics. For example, in the face of the rising criticism on his
regime’s chaotic style of governance and its mishandling of the economy,
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan constantly reminds everyone how he
overcame the dangers of Westernisation and colonialism to become a man of
impeccable morals. He says this after milking everything there was to about
such ‘immoral’ Westernisation when he was a popular lifestyle liberal, before
he turned 40 and ‘rediscovered his faith.’
As
Pakistan’s economy continues to nosedive and opposition parties prepare to oust
him after accusing him of incompetence, Khan can often be seen lecturing young
people on what Islam is, what the poet-philosopher Iqbal meant, and how to
understand Sufism though Turkish soap operas!
To most
sociologists, the idea of morality largely derives from and attracts the urban
middle-classes. It is this class that is most receptive to Imran Khan’s moral
posturing. In a 1993 essay for the Wilson Quarterly, the American political
scientist and sociologist Allan Wolfe writes that the “old middle class” that
experienced some form of economic prosperity in the 1960s because of the
developmental economics that was all the rage at the time, was less concerned
with morality as an issue. After the 1973 oil crisis, when global economies
began to cave in, a new middle class emerged. But this one had to struggle more
than the previous one.
According
to Wolfe, there are, therefore, two competing ideas of middle-class morality.
Coming of age in uncertain times, the middle class that appeared from the
turmoil of the 1970s tries to save moral capital rather than economic capital.
Wolfe writes that it is a lot more conservative than the older middle class and
wants morality to take centre stage in political and social discourses. But he
also writes that this may include those who would rather exhibit morality in
public while largely ignoring it in private, creating cognitive dissonance.
A report
published in the April 2, 1977 issue of the now defunct Pakistani ‘eveninger’
Leader, quotes a young shopkeeper in Karachi who was taking part in the
movement against the Z.A. Bhutto regime. He tells the reporter that “Bhutto
[with his socialist policies] had usurped the dignity of the country’s middle
classes.” He also adds that the regime was doing this by spreading immorality
and obscenity, even though he was interviewed while coming out from a cinema
after enjoying a Hollywood film. Post-1970s generations of the urban middle
classes in Pakistan too are examples of cognitive dissonance in this context.
But this is
how they address it. PM Khan tries to rationalise this dissonance by suggesting
that it is actually a mandate of the country’s majority faith that morality be
highlighted in public and episodes of immorality be kept private and not spoken
about.
This idea
of middle-class morality thus absolves him of hypocrisy, comforting him to go
on lecturing without having to bother about the irony attached to it, and
without addressing more tangible issues, such as a depressed economy and
political polarisation.
Original
Headline: MORAL
POLICEMEN
Source: The Dawn, Pakistan
New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism