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| Media,
Education and Public Consciousness In a sense the media and the educational apparatus have similar roles. In the oldest societies about which there is evidence, this role was to socialize the young to accept the dominant worldview and, along with it, the power structure. Education was in the hands of the family but in societies, which had an agrarian base there was enough surplus wealth to support a paid priesthood, which imparted education. In our part of the world, after the family, the child was taught – if at all – by the village priest (the maulvi or Mian Ji). The equivalent of the media was the nai, the village barber, whose official functions included announcing marriages, exchanging information through gossips etc. Along with it a mirasi or bhand served similar functions. There were other similar functionaries too who spread news by beating drums. Even at this unsophisticated level both the educational and the media establishment were differentiated in various ways. The educational establishment generally concerned itself with the past, with the ‘Word’, and its meaning. The contemporary situation was reckoned with but in the light of canonical texts or oral discourses. The media concerned itself with the here and now: marriages, deaths, elopement, theft, jokes, gossip etc. Both had pro-and anti-establishment practitioners. In the educational establishment the anti-establishment ulema and sufia stayed away from the patronage of the court and the nobles. The pro-establishment ones got the huge tracts of land for the madrassas and khanqahs, which they established. Mostly, however, the madrassa was established by an endowment (waqf) given by a rich patron who did not, or could not, interfere with the teaching, which remained firmly in the control of the ulema. If the ulema were not too radical, especially if they left the king himself in peace, they could carry out their teaching without fear. So, the educational establishment could generally carry on its work unhindered by the state. Not all of the educational establishment was in the hands of priests or mystics. Some of it was in the hands of practicing poets too. They corrected the poetic compositions of their pupils without fees. Sometimes, however, they were compensated by rich pupils. Ghalib, for instance, was given a monthly stipend by both Bahadur Shah, the king of Delhi, and the Nawab of Rampur for correcting their verses. While the ecclesiastical teachers emphasized their ideology (maslak), which was predominantly theological, the poets too did the same though their ideology was aesthetic. In both cases a discourse of what was right or appropriate or beautiful was generated. If one was to succeed one had to adhere to it. Dissent was possible but it too followed established patterns – mystical, heretical, psychological etc. As a mystic one could be different from the orthodox ulema but, in general, one had to follow a school of mysticism. One could, of course, be a heretic but this was dangerous though the state did not reach everywhere nor was the religious establishment very efficient so one could survive unless one annoyed someone very powerful in a personal way. One could, of course, pose to be insane or prone to falling into a trance. This gave one a certain license and the restrictions of a highly traditional society were relaxed for such people. In South Asia, those possessed by supernatural beings were not hurt on the stake (as they were in Europe) though they could be beaten with shoes. As for the media, it too was either pro-or anti-establishment. The pro-establishment nai, mirasi, bhat or dom (domni) merely sang the praises of the paymaster. The anti-establishment one made fun of the great. The jokes and songs were irreverent but the solemnity and majesty of the powerful could hardly afford to punish them because that would be considered in bad taste. This is exactly what the ‘fools’ or court jesters did in Europe. They often pointed out to their powerful patrons that they were wrong and were, after all, mere human beings with no special claims to be the representatives of divine power. Thus the fool’s cap sometimes hid some of the wisest heads in Europe. It gave the fool the license to speak the truth before a tyrant who would cut off the head of anyone else who said the same thing. This is clearly portrayed in Shakespeare’s play ‘King Lear’:
The Fool is so highly critical of Lear, indeed so disrespectful, that if anyone else had been like that he would have been in danger of life. But the Fool goes unpunished. This kind of license is part of aristocratic patronage. It comes from the consciousness of the patron that he is so powerful that the words from a ‘fool’ cannot harm him. Moreover, the source is itself inauthentic – after all, he is a ‘fool’! Thus the words do not have force unless one wants to invest them with it. Both literature and comedy inherit this ambiguous power. If you want to decode the symbols and unpack the irony the discourse is critical. If you do not, you can dismiss it as an artifact. However, in the movement against the power of the establishment, especially the state as such, both critical academia and the media established a straightforward critical edge and the prerogative of freedom. These are established only in self-assured Western societies but not in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America where the state is less self-assured. The modern media creates myths and confers visibility. If the media does not show the pain of an individual or group of people it is not known. This, incidentally, is true in the world of fairy tales where we feel the sorrow of the princess, however trivial its cause, but not the sorrow of the soldiers’ families when the soldiers die in battle for the princess. The CNN and Fox News, during the U.S bombing on Afghanistan at the end of 2001 showed us the pain of the Americans who died in New York. They showed us the families of the Americans who had died. But they blanked out, for the most part, the families of the Afghans. It was not a complete blank-out though as some reporters like Robert Fisk showed us the other side of the picture i.e. Afghan sufferings. However, on the whole, the world saw Americans as suffering humans rather than Afghans. This, then, is what the media does. It makes us fully human by making us part of the consciousness of other human beings. If we are not part of any consciousness we do not exist. The media, then, gives us life. The media also gives us a profile. It tells people how to perceive us. It gives information, which is itself filtered and, obviously, less than complete. And then it lays down rules of interpretation and, even more subtly, cues to emotional registration. I can portray people from Pakistan’s villages as hospitable and gregarious; warm and caring (for the family) or, alternatively, vicious and aggressive; servile and bullying – all profiles supported empirically. In short, we are not only created by the media; we are also moulded by it. We are not created as a blank slate because we are all socially slotted in society but the media writes our stories on the slate. It can distort the stories and hide the slate if it likes. After this comes the educational establishment, which can perpetuate us as, it wishes for posterity. The educational establishment, like the media, does its own sorting out and it may change the profile. It may even kill the memory that we ever existed. But, for very complex and widely differing reasons, if we are preserved then our images may be quite different from both the reality and even the reality conjured up by the media. Education, like the media, also moulds consciousness. Because of this power of controlling visibility, emotional bias and consciousness all wielders of power have tried to control education and the media. Plato is not the only one to have tried to banish poets – the media – but almost everyone tries it one way or the other. The most interesting experiment is the one now in progress in Western democracies. This is, essentially, the ‘Circus Method’ – at par with the gladiatorial shows organized by the Roman emperors when the people were near starvation. Everybody is given a TV screen to watch inane soap operas or sports. The more enterprising can play video games and the really perverse can watch pornography and video nasties. These packed and ready products have an underlying message: ‘the world is a finished product to take at its face value. It is there to entertain you – for a price, of course. It is not to be changed’. Since it is not to be changed one needs to buy as much entertainment as possible. This, of course, means leaving the screen for forays to the place of work. But, essentially, life means lying back and being deluded with pleasure-inducing sensations. This is the perfect worldview for a consumer-oriented, post-industrialist proletariat which, ironically, does not see itself as a proletariat at all. In this worldview economics takes a front seat and politics is left out. The reductive, often unspoken, assumption is that if you work hard you will ‘make it’. One is not encouraged to question whether this is possible everywhere in the world? For all classes? All genders? All ages? No! These are uncomfortable questions which puncture the myths of equality, liberty and the fairness of the market forces. Because criticism is blunted, one condones layoffs, malnutrition in parts of the world, the increase in poverty in countries where IMF policies are followed, the terrible increase in crime where the market forces have recently come to operate – all these things are impatiently shrugged away by the ordinary person whom the media mesmerizes to believe that history has actually ended, a la Fukuyama, and that the blessed state of the world is one of free market. The question for us in Pakistan, however, is as to how the media and the education system affect us. Our governments are not free from colonial compulsions yet so we are not given the circus treatment. We follow the platonic model of banishing the poets though, of course, we pretend to follow the Western model of making them peripheral and, as it were, fangless. Thus the electronic media is completely controlled and the print media is controlled through self-censorship (for the most part). Our educational system supports the project of nationalism in history, social studies and language textbooks. This ‘nationalism’ means hating India, denying multi-culturalism and sacralizing both the state and the military by using the emotional power of Islam. Thus our media does not question the military and its policies while our educational system glorifies its wars and shows it as a saviour. While the state is still the major power controlling our educational system and the media, private entrepreneurs have emerged too. Like their Western counterparts, they are in the business of making money. But, unlike them, our businesses target the elite ignoring the masses. Thus, while ordinary people eat fast food and wear jeans in the West, in Pakistan only the elite does so. So, unlike the West, the idea is not to increase the purchasing power of the masses to make them all consumers. The idea is to impoverish the middle classes while ignoring the masses. The political consequences of such private interventions may be disastrous. The government media and education create a nationalistic, Urdu-using, religious-idiom-using Pakistani. This Pakistani is under-privileged and poor. He is also angry because he is aware that there is another world cheek by jowl with his own world of misery. This other world, created by the new media entrepreneurs, foreign media and English-medium education is alienated from our society, English-using, secular-idiom-using and full of contempt for ordinary Pakistanis. These two worlds are on a collision course because traditional brakes are becoming loose. Whereas people earlier believed in fate and did not ever see beautiful houses and voluptuous maidens in tight-fitting jeans having a party, young people from the have-nots do see them every day on the TV screen. Thus the brakes are becoming loose and one day they might fail. I can recommend what can be done but who will do it? I know that the media and the education will always create myths and always with some distortion. And, equally, whenever they create they also leave out much which remains unborn, uncreated because the myth-makers have not noticed it. The process is, and will remain, intrinsically violent. What is, however, possible is that the colonial and medieval forms of control are given up. The platonic way is far too violent to be countenanced. The circus method will hold sway but it can be modified firstly by making both education and the media subject to the control of those who work in them. I mean this quite literally – that teachers and journalists should actually have shares in educational institutions and media offices. This will reduce the power of the state and the plutocratic owners. This, coupled with critical pedagogy and insights into dissent, may go some way towards making the media and the educational processes more supportive of the rights and concerns of the common people. About
Dr. Tariq Rahman |
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