Our paradoxical world

The world is poised for more conflict. There are internal wars; there’s an ongoing war in Ukraine and the peer competition between the United States, its allies and China has increasingly become adversarial.

Globalisation has brought people together but conflicts are also pulling them apart. While technology makes real-time communication possible, travel becomes more difficult. Greater economic integration, the buzzword since the 90s, is now threatened by interstate dynamics. Example: sanctions and counter-sanctions between the United States and China, the two largest economies in the world and the recent sanctions against Russia.

The Ukraine conflict and sanctions against Russia have forced the latter — as also other states which have faced sanctions — to find ways to deweaponise the dollar and challenge the US’ financial supremacy of the world. That process has been underway since before the Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine. It’s an evolving scenario; conflicts threaten to fragment the world, reshape markets, production and supply chains and force states to group and regroup in adversarial camps.

Meanwhile, the rhetoric about democracies versus the rest aside, states, even the democratic ones, are becoming more authoritarian. Even as programmers and software engineers create new applications, the states are either forced, for security reasons, to ban them or, like the US government, legislate for backdoor access to any and everything.

As Yuval Noah Harari noted in a 2018 article for The Atlantic, there’s “nothing inevitable about democracy”. He argued that “The technology that favoured democracy is changing, and as artificial intelligence develops, it might change further.” Warning that liberalism is losing credibility, he wrote: “politics have grown more tribal; and in more and more countries, leaders are showing a penchant for demagoguery and autocracy. The causes of this political shift are complex, but they appear to be intertwined with current technological developments.”

He is not the only one writing in this vein. A number of heavyweight economists — Mariana Mazzucato, Thomas Piketty, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo et al — are challenging many long-held beliefs about markets, modes of production and wealth distribution.

But while some great minds are working towards making sense of failures of the past, questioning traditional notions and theories, something else is happening too. And that’s where conflicts come in.

Whether internal or interstate, conflicts leave a trail of blood. That’s bad enough. What’s worse is that by the very nature of us versus them, they spell the death of any meaningful debate to understand the nature of the conflict and to work towards ending it. The reason is simple: a conflict, when it begins, gathers its own momentum and results in entrenched positions that are grounded in deeply partisan worldviews.

That poses a fundamental problem. Human situations generally defy linearity. Dealing with the complex ones is even more problematic. It is a fact of history that while a particular incident might provide the trigger for starting a conflict — take, for instance, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo in June 1914 — it is never the sole cause. If one cares to look closely, as historians do, one can find multiple causes, gestating over a long time, waiting for that one moment that will unleash the dogs of war.

And when the conflict begins, partisan positions and narratives take over, each, or in the case of multiple belligerents, every side developing its own truth, filtering out information that conflicts with one’s narrative and retaining only that which supports it. Subtleties are lost; the life of the mind is suppressed in favour of emotions, loyalties, and, very often, the pressure of the circumstances.

From World War I in the above example to the ongoing war in Ukraine and several small and big wars in between, two factors, multiplicity of causes and partisan narratives, are common strands that never change.

To this we might add another fact. The bulk of human beings are not leaders; they look for one. And in conflict (also, difficult) situations, they want the charismatic ones, a Churchill more than an Attlee, in a manner of speaking. Leaders develop narratives; the led lap them up: you get an echo chamber effect.

Nor is this strange. Humans like to create and dwell in their comfort zones. In a conflict situation, when life may be nasty, brutish and short — as it is in Ukraine or Afghanistan or Syria, Iraq and Libya — one will always seek the comfort of his own. Walking alone, a metaphor for unpacking complexity, does not remain an option any more. Conflicts are tribal and they require sticking together; divided you fall. Group loyalty is not about right and wrong. It is about survival.

As I once wrote, “Jean-Paul Sartre noted in the preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, to his own question, ‘Will we recover?’, ‘Yes. For violence, like Achilles’ lance, can heal the wounds that it has inflicted.’

“Camus did not believe in that. He lived with, to quote Sartre, the ‘tension which makes the life of the mind’, much like Sisyphus that rolled the rock up only to see it roll down, but never losing the integrity in the measured steps that Sisyphus takes as he walks down the hill. Camus was his own Absurd hero.”

Then there is Rose in Harold Pinter’s The Room. While the room is warm and cosy, the basement is damp and dark, just like the world outside. The dialogue is irrational, with Rose and Mr Kidd, the landlord, speaking of different things, never listening to what the other is saying. News from outside the room is mysterious and brings trouble. Riley, the black man waiting in the basement, must never come to the room and when he does, trouble reaches its crescendo. The metaphor of the room (womb) is powerful and works for all of us in varying degrees.

In 2007, as I waited in the front lawns of the Lahore High Court, along with hundreds of others, for the ‘deposed’ Chief Justice of Pakistan to make his appearance, speaker after speaker thundered and charged the already charged-up crowd. Then, at some point, another speaker came. He was soft-spoken. He spoke of nuances, the paradoxes, the requirement of fighting for institutional integrity while remaining within the bounds of law and the Constitution because what was the struggle all about if not to uphold the law?

He was suited for a calm class on law and institutions. But on that day, the crowd was not interested in him. His voice drowned, despite the microphone, in the din of the slogans raised by the protestors. He stepped down in favour of another, who pulled the crowd back in by casting the nuances aside and voicing his intention to break the law, if need be, to restore it, his version of Kipling’s “savage wars of peace”, though it is hard to fathom, given his apparent qualities of head, if he had any acquaintance with Kipling or could figure out the subtlety of his own paradox.

It’s a troubled and troubling world. But the biggest problem is that just when we need more intellectual rigour from greater numbers, the conflicts threaten to reduce the numbers of those who can, and should, take that route, looking at the world with sophistication and appreciating its multiple paradoxes.

The writer is a journalist with interest in foreign and security policies