“If the young commit a fault it is always on the side of excess and exaggeration” — Aristotle.
Aristotle once said that youth is the age of extremes. He meant that the lack of knowledge and experience of the young predisposes them to blind faith and utter dedication to one opinion at the expense of rational discussion of all others. This is simultaneously their greatest virtue and greatest failing.
It is their greatest virtue because they are always true believers in their cause, and hence ready for the utmost sacrifice and struggle. They are the most energetic, the most vibrant, the most committed and the most dynamic precisely because of their utmost conviction in their unformed simplistic views.
It is their greatest failing because, in this simplistic view, things are often entirely black and white. Their cause possesses no faults, and their opponents possess no virtues. If, by chance, they discover that they have made a mistake of judgment they are prone to ‘overcorrection’. Those who have blindly followed one extreme do not consider the mean as a virtue. On the contrary, when they change their opinion, it is the opposite extreme that becomes for them the new virtue.
Aristotle tells us that sometimes this is just as it ought to be: “We should aim at the other, and so we may reach the middle position…as men do in straightening bent timber.” However, most times, this results in an ethical or political framework that is constantly lurching from one extreme to the other. In other words, those who are prone to extremes always look upon the mean as the greatest vice. Aristotle says, “They expel towards each other the man in the middle position; the brave man is called rash by the cowardly, and cowardly by the rash, and in other cases accordingly.”
Perhaps, most importantly, such lurching from one extreme to another is very characteristic the world over of the class that is known as the petty bourgeoisie. It is well known in progressive literature that the extremities of capitalism and the middle order of this class between the great mass of the exploited people and the great mass of wealth of the exploiting classes produce a constant lurching from extremist and adventurist opposition to capitalism, to complete ideological submission to the ruling elite. Given that the student youth is largely from the petty bourgeoisie, one can expect that this movement of ‘overcorrection’ is amplified by the conjunction of the lack of knowledge/experience and this petty-bourgeois characteristic.
The greatest difficulty for the youth then is to grow out of this age of extremes and to assess things for what they are rather than for what they want and believe them to be. In other words, to come out of the world of black and white and into the world of colour.
We can see how this attitude manifests itself in the youth of Pakistan and their political opinions. Take, for example, adherents of the PTI. To them, Imran Khan must always be right. Hence, when he makes an obvious mistake, the true believers — the young — simply find it impossible to accept. They feel obligated to defend his every action and every move. And when arguments fail them, as they often do, they resort to abuse.
At the opposite pole, all those opposed to their cause must be seen as possessing no virtue whatsoever. They are to be roundly condemned whatever their achievements, whatever their opinions, whatever their sacrifices or struggles. Those who urge moderation, a balanced view, or bring to the fore nuances, invariably fail the test of the true believer.
It is precisely this tendency for overcorrection that makes former allies the bitterest opponents. Former supporters can see no virtue of any kind associated with their former friends. Such, for instance, has been the fate of one of Pakistan’s most popular political figures and an icon of the youth in the 1980s: Benazir Bhutto.
To imagine that this culture of extremes is mitigated or somehow absent in the progressive circles of Pakistan is to close one’s eyes to how the Pakistani left is very much part and parcel of the cultural milieu of Pakistan. Despite all claims of rationality, scientific objectivity and self-reflexivity, young people who are part of the Pakistani left lurch from one political formation to its polar opposite, much like bees searching for honey. And when they do so, they find in their new friends no fault or defect whatsoever and in their former comrades not even a trace of virtue. The smattering of scientific conclusions to which they have latched on without vigorously understanding its logical foundation only serves, in such circumstances, as a copious vocabulary under the guise of which they are able to mask the true movement of their frameworks from one polar extreme to another.
There is no magic bullet that can solve these rollercoaster rides from one extreme to the other. These problems can only be slowly overcome by learning and experience. Universities are supposed to be, at least in theory, conducive environments precisely for learning. At the very least one would hope that university life would expose students to a wider view of politics and history and that a higher education would provide students with the ability to identify various political and social trends, not as the desires or conspiracies of individual leaders, but as the products of social contradictions. Last but not least, it would impart to the young the tools of collective organisation and politics based on mass consensus building. Recent experiences with the Islami Jamiat-e-Tulaba demonstrate that Pakistani universities fail on all these accounts.
How can the youth of Pakistan move in this direction without vital academic, intellectual and organisational rights, for instance, the right to engage in progressive student politics and the right to form student associations, including student unions? Moreover, how can young people move in the direction of progressive thought when the entire educational system is divided along class lines, dominated by irrationalism and obscurantism, and when millions of young people are deprived of any education whatsoever?
Sadly, the youth of Pakistan seems to be caught in a vicious cycle, a cycle that keeps them moving from one extreme to another in their desperate attempt to arrive at a destination that will change things for the better but in fact reinforcing the very ideological and political structures that chain them to irrationalism and obscurantism.
The writer is an Assistant Professor Political Science at LUMS and spokesperson for the band Laal