The Pakistani Spectator

Nineteenth century was a period of great change. The hitherto disconnected and isolated understanding of the physical world since ancient times had suddenly started to interlink and beginning to make sense. Better means of communication and more powerful state systems added fuel to the fire, if not ignited it in the first place. Now thinkers and philosophers rose up, questioning the age-old beliefs and practices of human beings on earth. Everything that was old and ancient was considered crude and undeveloped. The word “old” became synonymous with backwardness.

In arts new ideas and techniques were tried and ugliness was also promoted as works of art. In architecture, all the accumulated knowledge of mankind was considered rubbish and functional buildings were created with straight lines and no ornamentation. Man was thought as a creature that has evolved from other inferior creatures. The savior of mankind was the technology and not the gods. The idea of faith was abandoned in the name of progress. Whatever man had been doing had to be reinvented from zero, in order to be called modern. Old family structures were frowned upon and the idea of living separately was considered cool. Nothing was sacred in this philosophy; this whole world was to be broken down into units of matter.

Materialism was favored against spiritualism that made no sense to modernist thinkers. It was argued that there is no absolute truth, no absolute ideal, no absolute concept of beauty; everything is relative. It was postulated that truth is subjective and is dependent on time and place. Thus all efforts to find the truth or to come close to the ideal were disapproved of and considered waste of time. All this was at its peak in Europe and was accepted readily in the Western world. As the West was in power those days, these theories were thought of as the theories of the powerful. The colonists spread these ideas wherever they went. Many unsuspecting natives, as they were called, fell to this trap and lost their identities as a result.

The Eastern philosophers resisted this idea and tried to prove that “traditions are solutions for which we have forgotten the problems.” That beauty is divine and humans can only reflect it. That art is different from craft. That there is life after death and there is a set of rights and wrongs. That human beings cannot decide what is good for them but they can always pray for guidance. That man is not a thinking machine, a harddisk full of acquired information but he is the image of God on earth. That there is a difference between knowledge and information. That wisdom does not come from statistics alone. That a wise man’s thinking is better than the votes of thousands of people.

But the time was not in favour of the traditionalists and they had to wait for more than a century to see the failure of the modernist dogma. The physical destruction of the world we live in and the spiritual destruction of the new generation are the results of materialistic human-centered modernism.

We in a so-labeled backward country will have to go back to our roots to find out the solutions to our present problems, problems that are there because of our blind-folded following of the modern man. The so called “Enlightened Moderation”, which has led us to this stage that we have forgotten our roots.

So stop saying “Take Care” and go back to our previous “God Bless You” in our own language.