If you’ve lived in Pakistan long enough, you may have witnessed one of the endless number of cases where someone died, say, to the negligence of a doctor, and seen that what invariably ensues are indignant protests to the effect that ‘our beloved so-and-so would have been alive, if only this treacherous individual had not acted in such-and-such way.’
To anyone with mature religious sensibilities, this - to retrospect on what could have been done as to save an individual’s life - transcends the ignorant and is closer to the repugnant. Go ahead, prosecute another for incompetence/negligence/intention to kill etc, because the fact that the time of the victim was up is, for sure, completely independent of the course. So do address the inhumane behavior of the perpetrator wholeheartedly - but for nothing else than its own sake.
But no. We will conduct one protest after another because the life could have been saved, we believe.
The result is a society that is ever-more neglectful of the precautions that *can* be taken: once someone’s time is up, at least we can find ourselves in a position where we haven’t furthered the cause of death, and so spare lasting psychological distress to the loved ones of the victim.
Everywhere you look, the very same people - the glorified protestors - are wholeheartedly exhibiting the same barbaric apathy which they target later.
I gave today’s column the title I did because, quite simply, I wanted to distance myself from the above lunacy. No, no one has died yet - which makes *this* the time to act, because it is fast becoming inevitable that we hear one day someone ran over a bunch of school-going children.
I’ve written on multi-tasking before (in my article The Multi-tasking Epidemic for The Express Tribune) so I’ll refrain from a full technical analysis. Cut a long story short, this is what multi-tasking is: a “mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously.” (Psychiatrist Dr. Edward Hallowell, CrazyBusy)
What we observe when people attempt to transcend man’s mortal limitations of singular attention is more correctly referred as ‘task-switching.’ Task-switching entails a rapid toggling of two or more tasks in the brain, putting tremendous strain on the individual and releasing substantial amounts of stress hormones. Watch a person talking on the phone while navigating through traffic - in many cases you’ll note that, their massively exaggerated, often incongruous body language is barely distinguishable from that of someone arguing with a police-officer for a traffic violation.
But that’s just the half of it.
In the 1960s, Stanford psychologist Stanley Milgram, in his world-famous experiment Obedience to Authority, published results that disturbed people like very little had in the history of social science. He showed that, if you could get individuals to agree to take part in an experiment that involved giving progressively more severe electric shocks to volunteers for giving incorrect answers to questions, then, as long as an authoritative figure in a white coat was stubbornly reminding them of ‘the greater cause of scientific research’, almost all the individuals would invariably continue participating till the stage that the shocks they were giving got so bad that the volunteers begged to be let go and passed out (they were acting.)
Milgram was inspired to carry this study from the story of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi officer who was one of the main organizers of the Holocaust. German political theorist Hannah Arendt in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem argued that, rather than the commonly held view that Eichmann was a psychopath, he was a normal human being like any other, only carrying out atrocities in the name of some higher goal. Milgram’s experiment thus confirmed what Arendt argued - while most humans are not inherently cruel, they can easily be made to be so when presented with some higher purpose. It is only a small segment of people - represented in Milgram’s study as the few participants who refused to go along - who will swim against the current.
“They assert their individual beliefs despite the situation, whereas most of us bend to the situation. That is the difference between a hero who is willing to risk their own life to save others, and an Eichmann.”
(Tom Butler-Bowdon, Chapter 35, Stanley Milgram, 50 Psychology Classics)
Now, if you’re behind the wheel and you attend your phone, no matter what the excuse – your grandmother has had a motorcycle accident - you have shown that you have the seed of an Eichmann in you. You, talkshawker, should thank God you’ve thus far been spared the blood of hundreds of thousands of Jews on your hand, nevermind that of a few relatively insignificant school-goers, because you are no different from the men who weren’t (spared.) You are the person who, given a sufficiently glorifiable justification - ‘koi zaroori baat bhee ho sakti hay’ / ‘the Jews are polluting the world’ - will bend to the situation and be content (or, if you inspect closely enough, sometimes even proud) to (attempt to) exceed what God ordained as the mortal man’s limited faculties.
Again, if you’re behind the wheel and you attend that phone call while your car is moving, consider yourself very fortunate, because, provided with powerful enough excuses, the research on what you can follow with is absolutely unequivocal: you would proceed to obey orders to shock other human beings into unconsciousness or order for women and children to be terminated in gas chambers.
I’ve mentioned psychologists Hannah Arendt and Stanley Milgram, now, let me mention one of our own. In the words of Dr. Syed Azhar Ali Rizvi, founder of the Society of Muslim Psychology, “Psychological diseases are analogous to the distance one maintains from the Creator.”
So, the next time you see someone trying to play God and expressing indignant rage over what could have been done to save a life, just note what they do when they receive a phone call while driving.
You guessed it. The two go together.
Ladies and gentlemen, in a society afflicted with the ‘multi-tasking epidemic’, I ask you to join me. To direct our lives not on opinions and ‘situations’, but on research and principles. Unlike the heroes of the Holocaust, I can’t promise you any films such as ‘Schindler’s list’ that would be made to honour your memory. But, at least, when it’s all said and done, you and I - the ones who refuse to justify the risk of killing others against our never-ending ‘emergencies’ - will be able to fondly recall to each other: we too were heroes.
The author runs Scholars by Profession, a local research-initiative. Facebook: facebook.com/scholarsbyprofession
harishseyal@gmail.com
@HarisSeyal