Pakistan’s ‘intellectual’ crisis

An interesting discussion over Pakistan’s intellectual crisis has recently surfaced in local print. The protagonists in this discussion lament that the country lacks a variety of books; that talks shows on electronic media focus mostly on spicy he-said-she-said politics instead of featuring a scholarly debate; that local policy thought is made irrelevant by the influence of donor community; that universities and think tanks are not playing their role as the breeding ground of ideas; and that as such Pakistani businesses and the society at large do not have a demand for thought.

Those laments lie on justifiable grounds, most of them at least. At the risk of sounding pedantic, however, the protagonists seem to have conflated subject-matter specialists or technical experts as intellectuals. Intellectuals are not manufactured by way of right government policy or by freedom from donor influence; academics and subject-matter specialists are. Nor do intellectuals spring up by market funding, though they do often attract individual benefactors as sponsors in their early ages, whereas some are able to get sponsorships from the state or a select firm or two later in their lives.

But such is the reality in this country; subject-matter specialists and technical experts – some of whom spent their lives running regression analysis and other quants on trade and taxation for example — present themselves as intellectuals. So pervasive is the habit of conflating academics and subject-matter experts as intellectuals is that even PhD students and their faculty start labeling them as ‘PhD scholars’ as soon as they are enrolled in the programme.

From among the so-called intellectuals, some are sitting in the lap of establishment waiting not for a moment to flag the weakness of democratic institutions while subtly praising the military regimes. Others are happy living off as consultants for the state, donor projects or the market, where they peddle the decades-old globally accepted thinking as profoundly unique solutions for Pakistan’s problems. When in fact that very decades-old globally accepted thinking is being questioned, and considered for the dustbin of history by present day global intellectuals.

If Pakistan’s so-called intellectuals don’t challenge accepted thinking, then who will? Will the real intellectual please stand up? If they are not willing to make sacrifices and speak their mind - as have intellectuals in the past at home and abroad – then they will hardly ever find the voice that resonates enough to incite action. If they only keep on writing soft cushioned critique in English newspapers that two and half people read, then their impact will hardly ever be visible.

The agenda for Pakistani intellectuals should not be, for example, finding the right financing mix for CPEC or how to boost universities performance or how to ease the doing of business. That’s managerial stuff. Intellectuals should instead focus on bigger questions such as how to raise the society from slumber, or how to reconcile the dominant Islamic interpretation with the demands of a rational modernist society without tearing the social fabric part; and especially how to learn from the mistakes from ‘developed’ west and take a giant leap forward without abusing the planet and avoiding other ramifications of growth-obsessed ‘development’. These are the kind of questions that better suits an intellectual rather than finding the right policy tool for say textile exports. And these are the kind of discussions that are not taking place in this country; not by intellectuals, nor surely by those to pretend to be one.

Mere libraries and culture of reading does not produce an intellectual; nor do universities always produce one; especially not those hijacked by the market; they would only produce academicians and subject-matter specialists who are happy to take money from the market and produce the research the market wants them to produce.

Pakistan’s intellectual crisis will not be solved by arguing over twitter, nor by writing columns in a newspaper, or appearing on television; if it were the case the relatively simpler problems of tax and energy would have been solved by now.

The solution to intellectual crises warrants radical thinking, and radical action; both are found in short supply in Pakistan current lot of self-proclaimed intellectuals.