Toothpaste Ideologies

Living in Pakistan, one often encounters statements that contain no real substance other than an effort to ram a particular point of view down someone else’s throat, no matter how oblique or convoluted their perspective. Any recourse to nuance, balance or alternative arguments is largely absent, with only a dogged determination to emphasize a single worldview. Such statements are symptomatic of the fact that most often, Pakistanis tend to talk at each other rather than to each other; we tend to be so convinced of our own opinion that the views of others can only be counted as nonsense and thus, dismissed.

The statements that can be heard as a result of this mindset - in our media, in the speeches of our politicians, in our educational institutions and workplaces, and in our social circles – stem from what I like to refer to as ‘ideological toothpaste’. Any particular brand of ‘ideological toothpaste’ may have several ingredients, just like a brand of regular toothpaste has various ingredients such as calcium, fluoride and chloride. However in my concept of ‘ideological toothpaste’, the ingredients could be described as historical narrative, world-view, goals, ambitions, factual information, rebuttals. All these ideological ingredients are then perfectly compressed into the shining brightness of the ‘truth’.

Now, it is a common belief that two contrary ‘truths’ cannot exist, so if you are used to brushing with one ‘ideological toothpaste’ you tend to find yourself in a conflict with someone who uses a different brand of ‘ideological toothpaste’. But in all these conflicts and ideological clashes over the right brand of the ‘truth’, we forget that we are reducing what should be a rich, diverse and engaging dialogue into something like a childish and stubborn fight between children about whether Colgate is a better toothpaste than Pepsodent or not.

 

Over the course of the last few decades and in the contemporary context as well, whenever leaders or public representatives in our country attempt to build a mutual consensus through public opinion and dialogue, they tend to directly import ‘ideological toothpastes’ which have evolved and developed in other parts of the world, with diverse historical backgrounds, and in completely different contexts. By this I mean that, instead of evolving and developing a mutual consensus on issues concerning Pakistan and instead of initiating and supporting a naturally evolved public dialogue, we are given imported ideas, concepts and remedies that have been implemented elsewhere, without any attempt to make them locally relevant to Pakistani history, culture and society.

Our inability to understand that there is no universal solution, and to realize that we cannot generalize and implement the exact same model across different contexts, sometimes makes us waste our resources on the wrong ‘brands’. Our apathetic attitudes and unwillingness to work hard on initiating and developing novel, local solutions to our needs, along with our tendency to adopt such ready-made ideological brands with little self-reflection, often results in our failure to see the underlying essence or context of those imported ideological brands. We start advocating and advertising them so fervently that it seems as if we have no other options before us. In the heat of the moment, we forget that this is just another set of farfetched ideologies which we have adopted without serious thought of dialogue for the sake of our own convenience. In turn, this unnecessarily rigid stance leads to us developing inflexible attitudes and behaviors. I truly believe that the root cause of the lack of any ideational consensus amongst us is due to our habit of turning towards foreign toothpaste, without any reflection or dialogue over how that ‘ideological toothpaste’ could be adapted for the Pakistani context.

Some of us emphasize paranoid ‘toothpaste’ slogans such as “War against the West” and “Western hypocrisy and prejudice” or propagate other brands such as “Arab Imperialism,” as a friend of mine recently thought it would be cool to rant about. To reduce complex historical and social developments to such token phrases is short-sighted and dangerous. One of the major hazards of using a particular brand of ‘ideological toothpaste’ is that people tend to ignore their critical and analytical capabilities and keep using ready-made token slogans just to reaffirm that we are good Muslims, Pakistanis or whatever simple label one may like to attach to oneself.

In my opinion, the greatest tragedy to have befallen us is that we really do not know how to deal with a diversity of thoughts and how to appreciate the multiplicity of human conditions and thoughts, as opposed to enforcing a narrow one-dimensional perspective. This simplistic and indeed, tokenistic way of thinking is a serious malaise for our country and shows both our apathy and our appetite for myopic ideologies.

My toothpaste analogy might seem sarcastic or childish but perhaps we can extend it further for the sake of variety and replace our ‘toothpaste’ with ‘chewing gum’. As Ayn Rand said in her wonderful novel, The Fountainhead, “Sentences have been used like chewing gum, chewed and re-chewed, spat out and picked up again, passing from mouth to mouth to pavement to shoe sole to mouth to brain…” Chewing gum then can serve as an excellent model for the dissemination of narrow ideologies, which move throughout society and are recycled repeatedly. Chewing gum also comes with an extra metaphorical quality that is, the more you chew it, the harder it gets, which is also the case with narrow ideologies. Of course, before anyone raises a question about the ‘foreign’ nature of chewing gum, we can see the same munching and chewing tendency in Paan-Supaari which not only lingers in our mouth but also leaves red stains behind. 

[First published in Laaltain]