Cynicism and the Theory of Lesser Evil — iv

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The The­o­ry of Less­er Evil (TLE) is a man­i­fes­ta­tion of cyn­i­cism. As cyn­i­cism finds its mean­ing main­ly in neg­a­tiv­i­ty and fault­find­ing, TLE too believes that every­thing is Evil; there is no Good. If every­thing is Evil, and there exists no Good, then what we are free to do is make a choice between all the Evil things. Nonethe­less, TLE makes room for things which are more Evil and which are less Evil. This seems to be a ploy to carve out a niche for human choice; oth­er­wise, if every­thing is Evil, then there is no ques­tion of mak­ing any choice. In that case, we are all con­demned and doomed to live with Evil. But the choice between the things more Evil and the things less Evil allows for us to live with things which are less Evil. Here­in lie the roots of the The­o­ry of Less­er Evil.

So the first thing which requires to be explained is: the TLE as a man­i­fes­ta­tion of cyn­i­cism holds no water. Cyn­i­cism itself, which believes in all-per­va­sive neg­a­tiv­i­ty, is incon­sis­tent. Even if it is not reject­ed on its own view that “every­thing is neg­a­tive” as neg­a­tive, it may be chal­lenged by its self-defeat­ing argu­ment: it views every­thing as neg­a­tive. It is this view about things which helped man improve upon and evolve the things. In anoth­er sense, by declar­ing neg­a­tiv­i­ty as over-rid­ing, it may have exhort­ed and appealed peo­ple to think and act about chang­ing them. That means at least in one of its out­comes, cyn­i­cism appeared not as neg­a­tive, and thus helped man move for­ward. In addi­tion, it may be not­ed that in its total or not-so-total rejec­tion of every­thing as neg­a­tive and faulty, cyn­i­cism by impli­ca­tion seeks to align with an all pure per­fec­tion­ism.

Also, cyn­i­cism is a view about things and not a state­ment of fact about things which it tries to feign. In that sense, as one view among so many oth­ers, it mir­rors mere­ly one aspect of real­i­ty. Since as a philo­soph­i­cal view, cyn­i­cism may not be con­fined to per­son­al con­sid­er­a­tions of men in case of whom it is based on neg­a­tive expe­ri­ences, and since all of their expe­ri­ences could not have been neg­a­tive, and it is cer­tain oth­er fac­tors such as bent of mind, psy­chic per­spec­tives, etc, which may have caused them to be cyn­i­cal in their atti­tudes, their cyn­i­cism turns out to be a mat­ter of atti­tude and not of their philo­soph­i­cal view. That clar­i­fies the cyn­i­cal posi­tion of Paki cyn­ics as ground­ed in their per­son­al atti­tudes, and not as a con­sis­tent view about the things pre­vail­ing in the coun­try. That is most obvi­ous in the realm of pol­i­tics, where due to their cyn­i­cal atti­tudes, intel­lec­tu­als and com­men­ta­tors have mis­er­ably failed to under­stand and ana­lyze the nature of the poli­ty of Pak­istan; and thus their cyn­i­cism tries to jus­ti­fy the same poli­ty which they declare as absolute­ly neg­a­tive.

Let it be admit­ted that it’s not clear whether it was grad­u­al­ly increas­ing vot­er turnout in elec­tions that forced cyn­ics to pro­pound the The­o­ry of Less­er Evil so that the par­tic­i­pa­tion of com­par­a­tive­ly over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of the cit­i­zens in elec­tions could be jus­ti­fied or it was the oth­er way round, and though I find myself on the side of the for­mer view, I think it requires detailed research to estab­lish the tem­po­ral prece­dence of the fact of vot­er turnout over the TLE’s for­mu­la­tion and also to sort out when and how the TLE came to be for­mu­lat­ed. How­ev­er, be that as it may, there is this The­o­ry of Less­er Evil which till now pre­vails as the dom­i­nant view about the things polit­i­cal in Pak­istan.

It may also be not­ed here that although the The­o­ry of Less­er Evil is a man­i­fes­ta­tion of cyn­i­cism, at the same time it needs to be real­ized that the TLE is incon­sis­tent with an over-rid­ing cyn­i­cism; that is, how it unrav­els the essence of cyn­i­cism and breaks out of the cyn­ic shell to con­nect with the real­i­ty strikes at its own root. In that it cre­ates space for two things. First, that not every­thing is neg­a­tive and we may not suc­ceed to find fault with every­thing. Sec­ond, that despite the fact that every­thing is neg­a­tive and faulty, there are cer­tain­ly such things which are not that neg­a­tive and not that faulty as oth­ers are which may be said total­ly neg­a­tive and total­ly faulty. That is, it is such things which are less neg­a­tive and less faulty with which we can con­nect. That’s some­thing ver­i­ly pos­i­tive; it accepts the neg­a­tive real­i­ty and sees some parts of the real­i­ty or polit­i­cal real­i­ty as accept­able since they are less neg­a­tive and less faulty.

In view of the above, it may be con­clud­ed that per­fec­tion­ism as a cher­ished ide­al aside, in real­i­ty things may both be evil and good; it means noth­ing is per­fect­ly good or per­fect­ly evil with an either-or choice. That amounts to say­ing that, for instance, in a sit­u­a­tion all the things may appear evil, but in fact they are not; this or that or something/s may be good, and it is with such a thing that we need to con­nect not only to strength­en it but to increase the mag­ni­tude of good also. In the realm of pol­i­tics, it trans­lates to mean that not every polit­i­cal par­ty is per­fect­ly evil or per­fect­ly good; not every idea and act of a polit­i­cal par­ty is evil or per­fect­ly good; it may be both, but this or that polit­i­cal par­ty or this or that idea and act of it may in fact be good, and it is with this or that polit­i­cal par­ty or this or that idea and act of it that we need to con­nect not only to strength­en it but to encour­age and fight the evil also. That is absolute­ly essen­tial to dis­cour­age, weak­en and debunk cyn­i­cism in Pak­istan in the field of pol­i­tics and in gen­er­al as well if we want to come out of the false spell of the The­o­ry of Less­er Evil.

One last point: a cyn­ic or not-a-cyn­ic may raise the ques­tion: how to judge which polit­i­cal par­ty or which of its idea and act is good or which evil. Sim­ply, it’s the con­sti­tu­tion which pro­vides us with that yard­stick that helps see and iden­ti­fy good and evil in the realm of pol­i­tics espe­cial­ly. Anoth­er les­son: not only the “ends” of a par­ty but its “means” also which it adopts to seek them need to be judged on the touch­stone of the con­sti­tu­tion. Final­ly, as the con­sti­tu­tion is basi­cal­ly a moral doc­u­ment, we are bound to judge how far every polit­i­cal par­ty and every idea and act of it is in accor­dance with the val­ues of the con­sti­tu­tion of the coun­try, and also how far it accords with the moral val­ues of human­i­ty.