Fractured conservatism

Pakistan has become increasingly conservative in recent decades. Conservatives dominate Pakistani politics, and have forced liberal parties to become centrist. However, when political coalitions become too dominating, they often become fractured. Pakistani conservatism faces similar challenges.

Conservatism means resisting change. Socially, conservatives resist new values, often following harmful traditions. Economically and politically, they resist changing existing political-economic orders which favour the rich and powerful. Three domains give rise to three types of conservatives: social/religious, economic and political. However, all three are seen as preferring to resolve disputes through power rather than principles.

Evolutionary research indicates that conservatives possess lower analytical ability to handle uncertainty, as they see things in binaries e.g. good-bad, rather than shades of gray. Many prefer conformity and settling disputes through power rather than debate.

Psychology explains that many currently non-functional human traits are actually legacies from early human history where they served important survival functions. The instinctive recoiling on seeing even harmless snakes that people exhibit today saved numerous lives when humans inhabited jungles. The same is true for conservatism. For early humans experiencing numerous threats but possessing basic technology, conformist conservatism helped ensure survival.

Today, when science, ethics and political philosophy have made huge contributions towards enhancing human survival (thanks mainly to liberal thinkers), conservatism is merely regarded as an evolutionary inheritance contributing little to human survival. Intellectually retrogressive, conservatism blocks the attainment of what Maslow,

the celebrated humanistic psychologist, referred to as the higher reaches of human nature, ie, intellectualism, altruism and self-actualisation.

While it may still prove useful in specific situations, conservatism is counterproductive as a guiding philosophy in this day and age.

While conservatism may eventually disappear along the long human evolutionary path in future epochs, political, economic and social conservatives wield enormous power today. They usually band together given intellectual affinity and political compulsions. However, internal fissures sometimes occur among them since their main goals — money, power and cultural hegemony for economic, political and social conservatives respectively — differ.

Pakistan’s own history reveals such fissures. While political and economic conservatives banded together from day one, especially under Ayub Khan, religious conservatives remained outcasts for long.

Yahya Khan eventually invited them on-board, recognising the utility of religious militants in former East Pakistan. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto tried mollifying religious conservatives but eventually failed and succumbed.

It was only under Ziaul Haq that the three groups really gelled together, with the generals, the House of Sharifs and religious parties/militants representing political, economic and social conservatism. The three teamed together to change the country’s destiny and vanquish liberal voices — a feat that Bhutto, a self-proclaimed liberal, had accomplished partially.

Thus, among the five possible contenders (Jinnah, Ayub, Bhutto, Zia and Musharraf) for this title, it is Zia who must be crowned as Pakistan’s most influential leader to date. Pakistan today is what he made it to be — intolerant, retrogressive and reactionary. Forget the other three, even Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s influence in shaping Pakistan’s current character lags far behind Zia’s.

However, this coalition gradually fractured into three adversarial camps after their godfather’s death. Economic conservatives found the generals’ political and security obsessions obstructing their ability to mint money through peace and free trade with India.

Militant religious conservatives, ostensibly unhappy with slow-motion Sharia adoption, started pursuing it through force. So weak are liberals today that the most intense battles in Pakistan today are happening not between conservatives and liberals but among social, economic and political conservatives. Liberals are often mere bystanders and idle observers.

Whichever conservative group wins, commoners will not benefit, though many see economic conservatives as the least of the three evils. Unfortunately, this conservative in-fighting does not help the liberals. Going forward, the chances that genuinely or even nominally liberal parties will win elections are lower than those of one of the three conservative groups attaining power through elections, military revolt or militant revolt.

Thus, there seems to be no viable way for genuine liberals to attain power anytime soon. Fortunately, liberals take idealistic slogans like ‘I will either find a way or create one’ seriously. Thus, one hopes that grass-roots liberal groups will either find a way or create one to liberate Pakistan from the monotonous and suffocating conservative stranglehold.

The writer is a development and political economist and affiliated as a Senior Fellow with UC Berkeley. murtazaniaz@yahoo.com