The tragedy, not the luxury of being an observer of evil is the constant need to find meaning in it. I find myself incessantly in search of the ‘why’, the why which is a motivation for a human being to drill in the head and gorge out eyes of another human being, truss it up in a gunny bag and throw it on the street, then go back and do it all over again, and again, and again. Relentlessly.
Dave Grossman in his book: On Killing explains what makes war possible; the motivations and reasons behind a killing, the ease with which a man kills and the capability or rather the potential of a man killing another man. His explanation of just why a man can kill oddly makes sense: finding motivation in killing through emotional distance, fear of authority, camaraderie, the us-against-them phenomenon; you really have to read the book to fully appreciate just how far he comes in understanding the anatomy of killing. However, his theory mostly concerns itself with war and how killing situates itself during one making me wonder: To provide any form of justification to the killings in Pakistan, is it in the state of war? If yes, is there an “us” or “them” in this equation? Is there one war or many wars all fought simultaneously in Pakistan’s battlefield; its cities, towns, roads, streets, now rivers gobbling up the quiet, the innocent, the observers and turning them into collateral damage for the big cause(s) and what, one may ask are these ‘causes’?
The death toll in Karachi today, the eighth day of the alleged ‘ethnic’ violence rose to 111. As I understand it, this killing spree is neither a violence whose foundation lies in ethnicity nor is it of hatred or rage for other human beings. It is a simple, systematically engineered mission to achieve a set of goals, primarily in connection with money and power. Understood, there is the big cause, the motivation: money and power. That answers my question of the ‘why’. Should I still be questioning the existential nature of being? Surely there have been killings before, murder before, wars before and genocides before, all with perfect explanation of just why they happened. Why still are questions being hurled on the philosophy of violence and its existence in human beings?
Being human was once about the good things. The innate nature of humanity once explained the good, the love, the kindness, the morality while killing was considered inhumane but have we not bred ourselves into such a way that we are now accepting and tolerating of it all. We cringe at the sight of blood and dead bodies, yet we live by them each day, quietly going about our lives, so resilient in the eyes of terror, torture and pain.
We are at ease, is that the problem? The ease with which we take the news and put it in the deep recesses of our minds, the way we manage to find humor in it; is that a defense mechanism? Let me demonstrate here a quick example. My brother got these texts over the past days saying:
¹Aur dost khariat hai na. Ghar pey ho, Ya bori mein
Another said:
²Aaj kal kay halaat kuch aisay hain, faraz. Jo apnay ghar pohanch
gaya woh sikandar, aur jo na pohancha woh bori kay andar
What propels one to write such a thing and what makes us laugh; I know I did when I read it first, then I clenched my fists in disgust.
As each ‘war’ subsides in Pakistan, we postpone our mission to come out on the streets for justice and revolution and just sit back for a second, heave a sigh of relief and think: ‘Now it is better. Let us see. Wait a while’. As far as theories go, many a philosophies have been derived on violence and its perpetuation, pages have been filled by Kant and Rousseau on the ‘real’ nature of human beings but the metaphysical nature of it has failed to answer for sure whether we are getting ‘de’humanized or is violence just a quality, a characteristic inherent to our natures and very much human.
I find myself revisiting the Theory of Evolution of Darwin. He hypothesized that man would be bred on the basis of his breeding success; those selected traits would go forward which fought better over other traits and newer generations would be born.
If one were to insist that it is less human to kill, are we not then becoming evolved towards our more primal selves, even though we are more socialized and more aware, aren’t we moving towards and not away from the ‘freaks of nature’ that we once were. Darwin may have identified how only the fittest would survive but could he have guessed that his evolution theory perhaps lies in a circle; that eventually we will all evolve to our more basic forms, the freak, the animal.
I admire the people who still express their desire to come out on the roads and scream for a revolution, who still find hope in the revolutionary episodes of Libya and Egypt and who still get suitably shocked at the ugliness of violence in Pakistan.
How few of these are left and how most of us here are only standing under the sun waiting…waiting for something, reminiscent of waiting for Godot; waiting like fools
… and noone dares to ask, just why are we still waiting?
[1]Literal translation: Hello friend. Is everything fine? You at home or in a sack
[2] The situation these days is such that, whoever reaches home is hero and whoever doesn’t is trussed in a sack
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