The recent kidnapping, rape and murder of eight-year-old schoolgirl Zainab, in Kasur, has shocked Pakistan. And as always happens, the glaring revelation and exposition of this heinous crime has triggered the existence of a number of similar ugly tragedies befalling children across the country. Young boys and girls slaughtered after being molested by strangers and even by close relatives; or beaten to death by infuriated teachers and preachers.

One way to determine the direction of a society’s moral compass is to gauge how this society treats its most vulnerable sections i.e. children, minority groups and, in case of countries such as Pakistan, its women. But how can a few bad apples determine the overall moral disposition of a whole society?

In his 2009 book Nixonland, American historian Rick Perlstein analysed in great detail the social, economic and political reasons behind one of the most turbulent periods in the history of US. This period lasted between the late 1960s and late 1970s. It was marked by intense political turbulence, and increasing economic downturns from the early 1970s onward. It also saw a drastic rise in the country’s crime rate.

Does a heinous crime become okay as long as there is a justification for it?

This was also the era when multiple serial killers emerged in many US cities. Apparently ‘normal’ looking American men went on discreet killing sprees, raping, murdering and mutilating people. Most of their victims were women and children.

At least six known serial killers stalked the streets of urban America during this period and one of them, dubbed the “Zodiac Killer”, was never apprehended. The situation became so drastic that while the American Supreme Court imposed a moratorium on the death penalty in 1972, it reversed its decision in 1976. In his concluding remarks, the then US Chief Justice, Warren E. Burger, remarked, “the death penalty is an expression of society’s moral outrage at particular crimes.”

According to Perlstein, the severe political polarisation generated by America’s involvement in Vietnam, rising racial tensions at the onset of the Civil Rights Movement (1950s and 1960s) and the capitulation of the economy (especially after the 1973 international oil crisis) created damaging fissures in American society. Heroin and cocaine proliferated on the streets, the crime rate shot up and, as a consequence, some major American cities witnessed a brain-drain when established professionals moved out into the suburbs, leaving behind cities devastated by unemployment and decay.

Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard University, made a rather interesting observation in his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature. He wrote that one of the reasons why the late 1960s/1970s became so tainted and violent in the US was an ‘intergenerational decivilising process.’ In the 1960/70s America witnessed an unprecedented bulge in the population of its youth. This generation reacted badly to America’s old social, political, economic and moral order. As a response, the youth offered various radical political and social alternatives. However, Pinkers suggests that by the early 1970s, this collective rebellion had lost its ethical bearings and the “decivilising process” which was to introduce newer civilising modes of behaviour, tumbled into a haze of moral ambiguity. If the old good was now bad, no one was quite sure what the new good really was. In fact, at times, the bad began to be rationalised as good.

CNN’s documentary series The Seventies in episode four ‘Crimes and Cults,’ more than alludes to Pinkers’ theory. In the documentary, acclaimed author Lawrence Wright and media critic James Wolcott explain the aforementioned moral ambiguity of the period by saying that due to the growing power of the electronic media, heinous criminals were “sexed up” and some even became “stars.” For example, when in 1969 Charles Manson, a psychopathic drifter, ordered the brutal murder of actress Sharon Tate (pregnant at the time), some young Americans were shown praising the act as an attack on the American establishment. On the other end, arrested and jailed serial killers and terrorists were regularly interviewed by TV channels and a lot of these criminals actually began to receive “fan mail!”

Condemnation and horror of people murdering women and children was paralleled by voices who actually saw some social/political justification in these atrocious acts.

Bad apples do not emerge from isolated vacuums. They are extreme reflections of turbulent, even damaged, societies. This phenomenon was captured well by a 1956 classic science-fiction film The Forbidden Planet. Loosely based on William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, it shows a spaceship from Earth getting marooned on a faraway planet. The planet has a human scientist and his daughter on it, as the rest of the population has been killed by a mysterious force. After facing attacks from the same entity, the crew of the spaceship finally figures out that the entity is actually the subconscious manifestation of the scientist himself, triggered by a machine invented by him.

The elusive entity which is slaughtering the planet’s inhabitants is the expression of the scientist’s subconscious mind or the manifestation of his inner-most emotions repressed by his more normal outer self. So here’s a question: What kind of an impact do the sights and sounds of someone very ‘normal’ explaining on TV the political motive behind a suicide bomber have on a not-very-balanced person? Would not the message from society to him be that it is okay to quench your thirst of slaughtering men, women and children as long as you can rationalise it as being a political act or even one of religious duty? Before the tragic APS attack in Peshawar in December 2014, were we not fed such nonsense from one ‘expert’ after the other on news channels?

The “decivilising process” which Pakistani society began to go through from the 1980s onward has begun to fully take its toll. This process, which has completely mutated our perceptions of right and wrong emerged sometimes in the name of faith, sometimes in the name of change, sometimes in the name of imposing a new, more robust idea of morality.

Now let’s talk about Zainab (and so many other children) who suffered at the hands of heartless monsters. How do you think these brutes reacted when a large section of this very society mocked a 14-year-old schoolgirl who was shot in the face by extremists in Swat? I am sure the brutes were amused. The message they got was, it is okay to murder innocent young girls, because the society won’t care. All they need is a justification. And in case of Zainab’s tragedy, one did come when a member of the KP assembly blamed Zainab’s murder on ‘the influence of Westernisation in society.’ As if the cold-hearted murderer too was a victim. Pathetic.

Published in Dawn, EOS, January 28th, 2018