It’s turtles all the way down

There is an anecdote oft repeated in university environments and I am copying it from Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky’s book “Determined.” It goes like this: A professor was giving a lecture about the nature of life and the universe.

Afterward, an old woman came up and said, “Professor, you have it all wrong.”

To which professor asked, “How so, madam?”

“Things aren’t at all like you said,” she replied. “The world is on the back of a gigantic turtle.”

“Hmm.” said professor, bemused. “That may be so, but where does that turtle stand?”

“On the back of another turtle,” she answered.

“But madam,” said professor indulgently, “where does that turtle stand?”

To which the old woman responded triumphantly: “It’s no use, Professor. It’s turtles all the way down!”

This story manifests the absurdity of clinging to illogical themes and illogical premises. Do we also have turtles all the way down in our national response to various challenges that we have faced in the life of this country.

What we are facing today in the form of rampant corruption, elite capture, shoddy policies, clinging to SOEs that bleed our economy dry and no thought of putting things right for the future, this all seems part of that illogical construct that has beholden our national discourse, if there is any.

Without making this discussion burdensome let me borrow something more from the same author as he makes a case in his book that all what we do today is the sum-total of various stimuli and the environment of our childhood, small details like whether our family believed in good education and what type of school we attended, was some elder talking about values, how much love or hatred we have faced and how we were nurtured while as a baby and an adolescent.

Same is the case with a nation, where we stand today, it does not come about in a day or so. It is the sum-total of all the choices we and our previous generations have made in the last seven plus decades.

Though it might seem that I am trying to absolve ourselves from any responsibility, whereas the point I am making here is that we must understand the basis of nation building, which needs a long term view of the future. It needs sincere efforts now if we want our next generations to be happy, safe and successful.

We need to think about the future of children and young people, do we want them to inherit a weak Pakistan that cannot sustain itself through economic activity? Do we want them to be at the mercy of our neighbours who are not very fond of us? do we want them to be begging for aid or fighting among themselves in a civil war? If we want them to avoid all these difficult scenarios, we need to educate them to become productive.

Our national productivity in industrial labour or agriculture output is amongst the lowest in the world. Our population is increasing with such a speed that any increment in the GDP would be devoured by the teeming millions.

We need to upskill our young generation in the skills that would be relevant in the next few decades. World Economic Forum’s meeting in Davos this year had one of the themes about what would be the future of work. In a study they pointed out that about a quarter of jobs today would not be there very soon due to the advances in technology, especially Artificial Intelligence.

The smog levels in our cities are topping global ranking, yet we have erased the green spaces from our neighbourhoods and constructed apartments or shopping complexes over them. It is illogical that we want our children to be healthy but feel no burden in degrading the atmosphere we breathe in, burning of trash is part of urban lifestyle and burning the crop stubs a necessity for the farmers. If that is so then we have pre-determined the health of our next generations by our actions today.

We need water for our population, are we educating our children on water conservation, and do we have our universities engaged in meaningful research to upgrade our ways of water usage? If we are not doing this then who will provide water to these hundreds of millions of our children. Have we started investing in water recycling plants or doing something to improve the subsurface water reservoirs and their quality?

When we were young, we thought that we have such abundance of natural gas that we will never run out of it. We got “Sui Gas” so cheap that many housewives never liked to extinguish the stove, let it burn at low flame instead of lighting a match to start a fire when needed. When we were providing gas to every corner of the country at a price far below the real cost , as the real cost was the replacement value assessed by looking at the international prices of similar fuel, the future was already pre-determined, it was a future full of misery where households will wait for the gas to be available only for an hour or so to cook a meal.

Many have resorted to cylinders instead of the piped natural gas and many more have turned towards wood. We could have used this gas in producing high value Petro-chemicals had we put our minds to it and added industry and jobs for many generations by effectively use this gas. If that would have happened I believe our trajectory would have been different as a nation.

Talking of wood, don’t we need forest and clean air for our future generations? If our children would need that then why we are slow in reforestation, why we are keeping a blind eye on the timber mafia, why we have not nurtured the concept of sustainable wood.

A concept, where we farm trees that have wood suitable enough to be used in furniture or buildings, the trees mature in reasonable time of three, four years and companies harvest equal amount of wood every year from a farm as much they replenish with new plants. The concept is not novel, and details could be found on the net, the point is that are we doing something like this or condemning our children to a bleak future where the country is deforested?

I wrote in another article about “searching for reasonable thinking” as we need to use common sense in our policy making but the decay is far greater than lack of common sense at all mighty levels of upper echelons of our society. We are bewildered and searching for any logic in our policies at the national level today because we have done so much illogical in the past, it’s turtles all the way down.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024