THE recent US election has confirmed an unconventional president and the realisation that we live in a post-truth culture. Reliant on emotional appeal, the seductive quality of post-truth politics is that anyone can launch baseless allegations against the state, judiciary and each other with no proof required. Accusations of rigged polls, corruption, nepotism, moral bankruptcy and personal attacks need no substantiation — just a sense of outrage and a messianic need to achieve power. Emotional calls by political leaders ignite an adrenalin rush, triggering a battle of media-amplified abuse, catharsis or cutting, clever sound-bites.
Post-truth practice is not the exclusive preserve of racist, sexist, insular Anglo-American bigots. Globally, the progressives have also mastered the art of learned deception disguised as intellectual analysis. The rear- and vanguard depend on new media landscaping as the main driver of post-truth politics.
Any researcher with a Facebook and Twitter account is an analyst. Any unpublished author with a blog is a self-made analyst. Post WikiLeaks, any journalist who claims to be a whistleblower and conceals evidence as respect for his sources qualifies as an unaccountable victim-analyst. The post-Chomsky media does not have to manufacture consent or be accurate — it just has to perform as hormone replacement treatment.
Academia’s absence gives rise to post-truth discourse.
The absence of academia as a site of relevance in Pakistan and the poverty of research in limited cultural festivals and NGO reports have given rise to post-truth public intellectuals reliant on descriptive narratives sold as analysis. For nearly 60 years, political analysis was heavily statist under the influential Hamza Alavi thesis. The ubiquitous civil-military ties dominated as definer of the overdeveloped state. Recently, some social scientists challenged this reliance on the Alavian model around three main findings: the changing nature of economics, Islam and gender.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the tryst between women’s rights, the political economy of Ayub Khan’s One Unit and Ziaul Haq’s Islamic state was the core feature in any analysis of the Pakistani state. This yielded fantastic foundational, empirical and theoretical findings. By Musharraf’s era, post-truth politics reigned supreme — with political co-optation, fudged economics, a ‘short-cut’ prime minister and a truckload of apparently dubious experts on jihad, security and Islamic politics. This trend has had a lasting effect. Since the lawyers’ movement, a new generation of travelogue analysts have seamlessly snuck into the post-truth fabric, sewn almost entirely by social media in the new millennium.
Contemporary freelance analysts may be divided into two competing lots. One group fixates on the neoliberal state dominated by the military establishment of the 1980s’ Cold War, subservient to America’s satanic capitalism. These refuseniks insist Pakistani liberals are US-funded, collaborative compradors and that ‘NGO Islamophobes’ persecute our poor, passive Muslim men mislabelled as militants. India and China do not exist for such analysts; there is no genuine resistance amongst the people, and if there is, then the wardi is behind it. Through this myopic fog they see no structural change and rave about politics in cyberspace. Occasionally, they dip into ‘relevant’ liberal causes, such as protesting drone warfare or capital punishment.
The other group reifies democratic forces as the panacea to state interests. It values parliamentary governance and the restructuring of political landscapes through devolution, the NFC and progressive laws on women and social reform over the last decade. For them, consolidation of the state’s writ via violence or coercion indicates progress towards finally materialising into a (stable?) nation state. These analysts minimise the role of elite-capture, rent-seeking and patronage politics or, the role of the private sector, capital and media as brokers and drivers of non-change.
Both sets of analyses are independently and simultaneously partial or contradictory. The former relies exclusively on a post-human economic framework while the latter is practically post-economics. The former is outraged at everything and the kitchen sink, while the latter is laissez-faire at its non-confrontational best. The abstract focus on flawed neoliberalism and something called the ‘state’s writ’ erases any class analysis. Inconveniently, though, neoliberalism and globalisation have supporters amongst working classes, and the changing nature of our state has limited beneficiaries.
The post-Alavian Pakistani state holds promise for women, the transgender community, media moguls and Riaz Malik capitalists alike. The rest of the subalterns, religious and ethnic minorities will continue to rely on the tethered forces of an economy steered by a status quo bureaucracy, judiciary and privatised interests of the military establishment.
A post-human state described in scintillating terms such as ‘metaphoric DNA’ and analysed through feel-factor observations does not put people’s economic worth and dignity at the centre. This ends up as misleading because, very simply, a reasonably good state just needs pragmatic, truthful, people-centric economic practice.
The writer is a sociologist based in Karachi.
Published in Dawn, November 25th, 2016
