KARACHI, Nov 1: Labelling consumerism a drug akin to heroin, Aslam Azhar, a pioneer of television in Pakistan and former chairman of PTV, claimed that multinational corporations — the producers of commodities and services — were setting the world’s agenda while the global multimedia played the role of a handmaiden, faithfully turning people into consumers to satiate the corporations’ ever-growing thirst.

This was one of the many interesting points Mr Azhar raised in a lecture titled ‘Cultural sensibilities in contemporary societies,’ delivered on Thursday at the Aga Khan University’s auditorium as part of the institution’s special lecture series.

Delivered in his trademark resonant voice, the lecture was an abstract tapestry woven with the threads of metaphysics, mathematical facts, anecdotes and history, coming together as a whole to present a world-view that was, quite frankly, refreshing.

“What is truth and where do we look for it?” Mr Azhar rhetorically asked the audience. “All truths must be examined in the court of the human intellect if we are to think critically and correctly,” he added, moving on to a parable of the famed Mullah Nasruddin, in which the maulana is found groping around on his hands and knees inside his house, searching for a key. When a friend asks him where he lost it, the maulana tells him it was lost in the garden.

“Then why are you looking for it inside the house?” asked the perplexed friend.

“Because there is more light in here,” replied Mullah Nasruddin.

“Similarly, we are looking for a key that was lost in the dark long ago,” Aslam Azhar observed.

Cat’s meow

“Consumerism works on degrading human values,” he said, adding that the multimedia was the cat’s paw of the corporations, drawing out the chestnuts roasting on a fire for the corporations, referring to French poet Jean de La Fontaine’s fable The Monkey and the Cat.

He said that even in shanty towns, glamorous programmes and their accompanying commercials were watched with great avidness, even though the inhabitants could hardly afford one square meal a day let alone the products being advertised. Thus these “vicarious desires” created tension, especially amongst the youth, he pointed out. “The media moguls are the moulders of men, women, children and their cultures,” said Aslam Azhar.

The transformation from humans to consumers, he said, had resulted in a loss of innocence. Attempts were being made to extract profit from nature itself while the ability to distinguish between beauty and ugliness suffered as a consequence, he claimed.

“Free will is lost and replaced by programmed desires. There is a deterioration of the public aesthetic in both the East and the West. As humans we were autonomous; now we are automatons,” he observed.

However, he added that there was a ray of hope locally as some writers and directors among the private channels were rebelling against the status quo and trying to create programming that was not materialistic and promoted human values and knowledge that engenders wisdom.

After the fall

“What has bought us to this stage? What caused the fall from aesthetic grace?” he asked. “Human memory is short. Cultural and historical amnesia is prevalent. It is the innate weakness of spoken and written communication. This becomes especially apparent while discussing concepts. That is why the truth about truth has always been kept secret – spoken in parables,” he said, citing the examples of the Gnostics during Christianity’s early era and the Sufi masters.

“Our modern, arrogant age sees the ancients as barbaric, inferior and archaic but today we are learning more and more about less and less, as knowledge of the parts is seen as knowledge of the whole,” he said. This way of thinking gained currency about 500 years ago, at the dawn of rationalism.

Historical amnesia was present among the ancients but cultural amnesia was not, hence neither was arrogance, said Mr Azhar. “The ancients venerated their past and formed an organic whole, or continuum, with their present,” he added.

“Perhaps this is all romanticism. But that is what has gifted the greatest of humans their humanity. Nothing is new. It’s just a matter of synthesising what we know or what we should know,” he claimed.He cited Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Cheops as examples of the ancients’ advanced knowledge, quoting a Scottish historian as saying that “the ancient mind was that of a master mathematician.”“Conventional wisdom would have us believe that today was better than yesterday. We are sweeping under the carpet our collective human conscience to do away with all the inhibitions that stand in the way of our vicious materialistic appetite,” Aslam Azhar said.

The solution?

Although he said that there were no easy answers, one of his replies during the question and answer session that followed his lecture seemed to make the most sense: “Education has corrupted us; only education can reform us.”