Leviathan that we need ….. Dr Muhammad Ali Ehsan

It is very disheartening to see the disruption of civil society in Pakistan. A great number of people including students and lawyers are out on streets protesting. In fact, protests on roads and streets have become a new societal norm and we as a society need to find a more dignified and stately way to address our issues. Focused on the appalling conditions and circumstances and desperately trying to overcome them and survive, our society is losing its exuberance, excitement, liveliness, all leading to loss of much important and critical enthusiasm at the national level. Can we continue to afford this state of affairs? What can be done to create the essential social awareness which, in the absence of positive feelings of energetic interests, the society will not be able to balance against and shackle the state? The best way to shackle a state is by practising and proliferating societal norms; and street protests and demonstrations, especially when they turn violent, are the worst of the norms. If state is like a hospital and its citizens like its patients then the hospital needs to make sure that the patients are not turned away and exposed to live under a Hobbesian environment in which life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

Thomas Hobbes taught this great lesson to the world that without great powers vested in a central authority all attempts to create any kind of order in the society would go in vain. Since then, we had many Leviathans. At the global level the Hitler, Stalin and Mao’s leviathans are most popular in their similarity with Hobbes Sea Monster and what they ended up creating and achieving – despotism and despotic states. All the states of the developed world also have their respective leviathans but they have been shackled by their societies and the institutions within them. The leviathans also exist in these states, but despite being very powerful they are not the ultimate masters. The master in these states is the rule of law which all leviathans bow before and respect. West has created mighty states with considerable authority but the societies are overall governed by justice, fair play and rule of law. Their leviathans are shackled by ropes emanating from the system of justice. In short, in their societies patients get treated in the hospital and the lives of the patients are not solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

Controlled and ruled oligarchically and not democratically, the leviathans in the countries like ours strengthen the hands of elite only. If liberty is defined as absence of dominance then the civil society in our country is least liberal as the leviathan dominates and controls them and allows them the least liberty. European countries progressed and advanced by promoting the Red Queen Effect which entails allowing both the society and the state to progress together. The term Red Queen Effect is derived from Lewis Carroll’s novel, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. The novel was published in 1872 and in which Alice climbs through the mirror into a world that she can see beyond it. There she finds that everything is reversed. When she runs along the red queen, she realises that no matter how much she runs she remains stationary; and she asks the queen from where she comes because ‘if you run you change places’; and the queen replies, ‘here you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.’ We will never progress as a state if we don’t allow the society to run with it.

Our state must act as a leviathan but it must provide the political space and the much-needed independence and liberty to the civil society to shackle it with norms that are embedded in the universal values and are the hallmark of civilised societies. Famous sociologist Max Weber explains that it is rationalisation that distinguishes the primitive and the past world from the modern world. Keeping in mind logical thought and intellectual honesty as great driving forces of the process of rationalisation, one only hopes that leviathan in our country can use it to justify its behaviour, decisions and beliefs. The Brazilian leviathan is well explained in the statement of the Getulio Dornelles Vargas who served as Brazilian President from 1930 to 1945 and who said “for my friends everything and for my enemy’s laws.” When the laws are made or broken to facilitate only the leviathan the civil society always suffers. No bomb will ever explode if science violates the laws of physics but a society will shatter and lose sense of its national enthusiasm if the laws that serve to regulate its behaviour, maintain its order and protect its rights are tempered with.

Leviathan always privileges order over truth to gain power. Whereas the civil society struggles to discover uncompromising truth. If the leviathan and the civil society have to run together, we need to find a fine balance between them. We cannot afford a state of statelessness but we can neither afford a leviathan that usurps civil rights and eats into whatever liberty for the society to stay sovereign and independent.

Leviathan must also figure out how to ensure that national enthusiasm as a critical factor for the societal progress never dies. Patriotism is not all about playing patriotic songs or paying respect to your national anthem and national flag. It is much more than that and means the leviathan creates that political atmosphere where people from all spheres of lives are willing to pay their taxes. They will only do that willfully if they know that the taxes they pay will be utilised by the leviathan to invest in social services and making their lives better. When Red Queen and Alice are allowed to run together, Alice will also find that her position also changes, her fortunes also change and her life will no longer remain solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. And the patients are not turned away from the hospitals but will get the deserved treatment.

Courtesy Express Tribune