The Pakistani Spectator

To my readers: I wrote and submitted the following originally during the proceedings to oust Mr. Musharraf. The editors of the Pakistani Spectator very sensibly chose to hold my article back until the more urgent Pakistani news played out, as that urgent, timely news deserved immediate comment, and my own article would be no less relevant a week or two after I wrote it. I agree with and applaud the editors for this very sensible choice. However, recent news has been so momentous that I feel I should not run the original article without at least a comment in recognition of these events. First, with regards to the more or less forced resignation of Mr. Musharraf, I want to express my admiring delight and congratulations to Pakistan – it is a rare event in world history (though it is growing somewhat less rare, lately, I am pleased to notice!) that a leader who took power by non-democratic means is removed without bloody rebellion and replaced by democratically elected leadership. I realize that there is yet a long way to go before Pakistan has the stable government and prosperity you deserve, but change in the right direction is still wonderful to see, and nowhere is enormous change achieved overnight.

On the other hand, I share your sorrow and anger at the slightly more recent suicide bombings. It is a true challenge, a job for wise adults, to help guide a nation in a positive direction, to make a real difference for good. Tragically, it takes only stupidity and a warped mind to accomplish major evil – foolish individuals who would otherwise be almost powerless can destroy far, far more easily than they can build. The challenge for the rest of us, I think, is to avoid letting a few evil fools take more of our attention than the minimum necessary for our self defense, and for our mourning of the harm they have done. (I believe that the American media, for one, pays far too much attention to sick, warped fools doing evil, to the point that it actually encourages more evil from more fools, who imagine that media attention, even for evil acts, would give meaning to their worthless lives.) That said, here is the original article, essentially as I wrote it around ten days ago:

There seems to be much discussion in the pages of The Pakistani Spectator about the general powerlessness of common Pakistani citizens and the control exercised by a few powerful men from afar. I want to share some general thoughts on the subject from my own perspective. The card game bridge is a favorite of mine, when I can find time and a foursome, and I understand it is popular in Pakistan, too, so I’ll be drawing some analogies between life, politics, and bridge that I hope clarify the points I want to make, and I will also point out some important ways that life and politics greatly differ from bridge or any other game.

We have very limited control over most of the factors of success. Whether playing bridge, living life, or taking part in politics, most of the outcome is determined by factors wholly outside our control. In bridge, we cannot choose the cards we are dealt. Even where we shuffle or cut the cards, unless we cheat, any sense of control is illusory – without cheating, one sort of shuffle or cut is no more likely to produce a good outcome than another. Once we have our cards, we see (unless we cheat) only part of the picture, having ignorance of the locations of hidden cards. We cannot control the actions of our partner, and the actions of our opponents are not only outside our control, but they will most likely be chosen carefully to frustrate our wishes. These sorts of limits to control are only greater in life and politics, where we cannot hope to know more than a miniscule fraction of reality, and where we find not one partner (or ally) working on our side, but nevertheless outside of our control, but millions of allies all making up their own minds what is best, and, more important, in place of a pair of opponents, we find millions of opponents actively seeking their own goals that are in conflict with our goals, opponents who are perfectly happy to block our goals in order to achieve their own.

Anger only gets in the way of intelligent play. I’ve seen much anger at the bridge table, but I’ve never seen useful anger. I’ve seen anger at the cards – what absurdity! The cards are what they are, sometimes favorable, sometimes not, and the best players simply make the best of whatever is dealt, and play the game with calm dignity, whether dealt the best possible hand, or the worst. Behind anger at the cards, I think, is some sort of mistaken notion that the Universe (or God, or whatever), somehow owes us, personally, better luck! In bridge, this assumption leads us to plan our play to work out well if we get every lucky break, but likely we will not get every break, and then we will lose the contract and the match. The better player plans a strategy that requires as little luck as possible, on average, with no expectation that the cards are just where he or she might like them to be. I’ve seen anger at one’s partner. If you think your partner made a mistake, and your partner wishes to learn, there may be an opportunity (usually later) for a fruitful discussion of how to play better next time, recognizing that the partner might have had good reasons for his or her choices that you failed to understand (so you may be the one doing the learning!). Anger isn’t likely to help the learning process, though, only getting in the way of clear communication! I’ve seen anger at the opponents – the ultimate absurdity – of course they want a different outcome than you desire, and what would be the fun of the game, anyway, if they didn’t do their best to play their side? All these sorts of anger appear in politics and life, as well, anger at random events outside anyone’s control, anger at allies who don’t agree on the best tactics to achieve your common objectives, and anger at opponents who legitimately pursue contrary goals, and the anger in these cases is generally just as pointless and unproductive in life and politics as it is in bridge! I should add, however, that sometimes the opponents are genuinely evil, and their opposition is beyond the bounds of legitimate political action, harming innocents, so anger in such a case is nothing to be ashamed of. Even in this case, however, it is likely that such an evil opponent actually wants our anger, and wants us to react thoughtlessly on that anger, so our best reaction, to the extent that is possible, is a sort of controlled anger, anger that does not prevent the best strategic response. American reaction to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, lead by George Bush, can be held up as the opposite to the well-thought-out, carefully-chosen response I am advocating, here!

Even with very limited control, we can still achieve useful objectives. With such limited control, is entering a major bridge tournament like buying a lottery ticket? Hardly! Invariably, major bridge tournaments are won by one of the consistent top teams entering the tournament – they do best in some hands, worst in others, somewhere in between in most, but on average, the best teams calmly “play the odds” to do better in the end, and on average, they do much better than less-expert players, their good and bad luck averaging out, leaving skill as the factor that brings them a consistent result among the top scores. Bridge, like most games, is carefully designed to be fair. Luck surely factors into the outcomes, especially in the short term, but in the long run everyone should get a fair share of luck, regardless of where they were born, who their parents were, etc. Life and politics is unfortunately not so fair; a few matters of luck (such as who one’s parents are) are likely to have overwhelming importance, so that some people do end up with consistently better chances to win, or consistently worse chances to win, over their whole lifetimes. If we could choose a more fair “game of life,” it would be very reasonable (assuming we were born into a position that limited our chances to win) to choose a fairer game, where for example the accident of our birth need never present us with unfair obstacles. Sadly, this choice is not available – we may choose to play poker, or cricket, or football, or chess, instead of bridge, but we cannot choose another game of life. Given this, I think, it is still true that almost everyone can achieve far more by making the most of the very limited control we are each afforded than by simply giving up and refusing to make the best effort. The key, I think, is just to understand that while we play the game of life and politics, we will not in general singlehandedly achieve all we want overnight, but that if we play the best possible game, and trust our allies to do the same, we will surely, gradually, achieve a much better result than if we simply failed to try our best, forfeiting the game to our opponents without opposition. Even where victory appears hopeless, I believe there is an admirable dignity in playing our best, fulfilling the objective of dignified play, at least, just as professional sports teams do not just lie down and nap during the ends of games, even where the game is unavoidably lost, and the fans would surely and rightly lose respect for them if they did.

Our own lack of control is shared by all the other players. This is obvious in bridge, but much less obvious in life and politics. In American Control, I already addressed the matter of American leaders having far less control than most people imagine, so I won’t go into great lengths to repeat myself, here, but even the most powerful or the richest individual in the world is still just an individual, with a weak body, a tiny fraction of the world’s wealth, in a world of over 6-billion other individuals who all have their own separate desires and plans. It is surely possible to use wealth and positions of power (such as the US Presidency) to exercise many thousands of times more power than the average person enjoys, perhaps even in rare cases millions of times more power than the average, but even this much power is small compared to what would be required for true control. Take George W. Bush, who has arguably had more power than anyone for the past 7.5 years, as an example: Will he end up being exceptionally wealthy? Although he is not poor, and will likely be richer still after leaving the White House, there will continue to be thousands of people richer than he will ever be. Will he end up being exceptionally well respected? Quite the opposite – even among his fellow Republicans and conservatives he is seen largely as a failure, and for most of the rest of us the debate is whether he is the worst US president in history or just one of the bottom five. Has his cause of conservatism been advanced by his exercise of power? Hardly! As a reaction to his failure, we have two presidential candidates, Obama and McCain, from the two major parties, who are both very low on the list of the conservative’s favorites! Is America more powerful, or better respected as a result of Bush’s exercise of power? Certainly not! I cannot think of a single objective where George Bush’s exercise of power can be said to have succeeded in yielding him a result we could point to as evidence that he or his allies had truly meaningful control over world outcomes during his presidency. Surely he and his allies made big things happen, but these things were not in the end useful to him or to his allies because their control was so limited. There is a tendency, I think, to forfeit our part in the game of politics simply because we have much less power than the most powerful. If we recognize, however, that even the most powerful are hugely frustrated in their attempts to control world outcomes, and that masses of common folk have more power, as a group, than even the most powerful individual, then I think we can take a more sensible approach of using what limited power we each have to play our part for our team, to achieve at least very gradual progress. A mouse will find less food in a lifetime than an elephant will find in a day, but that is no reason for the mouse to choose self-starvation!

It is possible to carry the analogy between politics and a game such as bridge too far. There are important differences, too:

The rules of life and politics are extremely open-ended. Bridge rules constrain communication between the players, bidding, and play of the cards, and the rules define what makes a victory. In life, though, we largely choose our own rules. Even where there are national laws involved, we may judiciously choose sometimes to disobey those laws for good cause, exercising Civil Disobedience, for example, in non-violent protest against serious government failings. No one decides what makes up a “win” for our side, either – we decide that for ourselves. In bridge, as in most games, the sides are predefined, and neither can win without the other losing. To switch sides and help your opponents win is considered dishonorable in most games, but in life and politics we are free to change sides, and it is noble and correct to do so if evidence emerges that a new side is a better choice. (Winston Churchill, arguably the most effective leader of the twentieth century, switched parties twice!) The best strategy to win is frequently to recognize a better choice than the one you made before, or to work out how to persuade your opponents (or most of them, anyway) to come over to your side, working out some way that you can achieve a result (perhaps a compromise) that they also will see as favorable. If you can offer a possible result that almost everyone can agree is favorable, resistance will be far less. I firmly believe that almost all conflict in politics is simply a result of a lack of understanding and imagination – I believe that almost everyone could be satisfied if they properly understood the problems at hand and they were offered reasonable compromises, so to me the number one opportunity in political progress is simply for good ideas to spread so that these reasonable compromises will easily win the day. I don’t expect this to happen at all quickly, but over the centuries I see progress, and I expect the progress to continue.

The “game” of politics and life never ends. Toward the well-defined end of a bridge match, or a football game, or almost any other game, there generally comes a point when one side either knows it will lose once and for all, or when the losing side has only a small chance of winning, usually a chance that requires some sort of “go-for-broke” strategy (like bidding a slam with fairly weak cards) involving play that would make no sense except in this sort of desperate end-of-game situation. Life and politics are very different, to the enlightened – the “game” never ends, and it never makes sense to do something crazy that would reflect badly on one’s cause over the long run. If you don’t win this election, you can lose with dignity to improve your chances to win the next election, or to win an election forty or a hundred years from now, if that is what it takes. Even the end of your life is not the end of the game – you will surely leave behind people with similar points of view, people you love, who can benefit from any progress toward a better outcome that you can make during your lifetime.

You can walk away from playing bridge, or any other game, but you can’t walk away from life and politics. If you are sick of your poor chances to influence the world or even the small part of the world surrounding you, you can become very apathetic about life, and have even less control than the small measure of control that you were born with, but you cannot abandon the game of politics and life altogether! If you play that apathetic role, you do not leave the game, you simply become a very tiny pawn to be used more freely by others. Even if you chose death, this would not truly take you out of the game – it would be an act with consequences that would live on after your death, consequences that would be a foolish choice, compared to the alternatives, in almost all cases. Life and politics are games, of a sort, that we are born into, with no choice except to play our parts, well or badly.

The “playing field” in life and politics is huge, and we can choose what part to focus on. In bridge, we either play the whole game or not at all, and there is no point in playing some parts of the game less intensively than other parts. Politics and life are different from a conventional game in this way, though. Some people have a passion for the environment, some for helping the poor, some for making better laws, some for protecting health – we may choose our battlegrounds in the war of ideas, according to our passions and beliefs – we need not try to take part in every battle equally. I’ve made an unconventional choice as an American, so far, to take a bigger role (though still a very small role, certainly) in the battleground of ideas in Pakistani politics than in American politics. Perhaps this choice is wrong, but I have some reason behind it: I hope that my American voice, simply because it comes from a different point of view (not because my point of view is American, specifically, just because it is different), might be of some modest interest in Pakistan, while it is just one voice among 300-million in the US, unlikely to attract even small notice in America. I believe that the world in general would benefit from much more exchange of ideas, in all directions, between all different nations. I think, also, that Pakistan has a very important role in the world’s future, a role that could come out either very well or very badly, so I think that the battle of ideas within Pakistan has unusually high importance, making even a small and (I hope) positive contribution to that battle well worth the effort.