THERE'S always something hard to believe, or accept, about the death of a public figure who seems to us to represent some deep truth about our own generation.
In 1963, the people who fought through the Second World War, and staked their futures on the ideal of building a better post-war world, were shattered by the death of John F Kennedy, the bright young American president who seemed to embody so many of
those high hopes. In 1980, a whole generation of post-war cod-liver-oil-and-orange-juice kids reeled at the loss of John Lennon, the essential voice of that Sixties decade of exploding grassroots creativity and antiauthoritarian rebellion.
And now, in 2007, I find myself shaken again by news of the death of Benazir Bhutto, one of the most predictable events of an ugly year in world politics, yet one that remains strangely difficult to absorb. Of course, Benazir – born in Karachi in 1953, the privileged eldest child of a future Pakistani prime minister – is likely to remain as controversial a figure in death as she was in life, tainted both by her undoubted political failures as prime minister of her country in the 1980s and 1990s, and by a series of corruption scandals.
Yet in the broad spectrum of Pakistani politics, there can be no doubt that Benazir spoke, in general, for the best of liberal and humanist political ideals: for a programme of human rights, democracy, education and welfare that places human development above any fundamentalist dogma, whether religious or economic. In that sense, she was a classic secular humanist of her and my generation; not a militant anti-religious atheist like the old humanists of the 1930s, but one determined to honour both the faith in which she had been raised, and the underlying universal values of compassion and human equality which she believed it reflected.
As a student at Harvard and Oxford in the early 1970s, she famously knew how to party; she embodied the internationalist and multi-cultural mood of the time, rebelled with the best of them, and embraced the feminism that was the essential creed of every thinking woman in those years.
Yet later, she saw no conflict between those beliefs and her growing accommodation with enlightened Islam; last year, in the preface to her autobiography, she wrote that she felt a special personal obligation to contrast the true Islam – which she saw as a religion of tolerance and pluralism – with the cruel caricature of her faith promoted by terrorists. And now, in a flash of gunfire and explosive, Benazir Bhutto is gone; along with all her sharp intelligence and wit, and her enduring vision of the kind of modern Islamic democracy she sought.
And what's most frightening of all, about the world she leaves behind, is the extent to which Benazir's creed itself increasingly seems like a thing of the past. Here in Scotland, for example, the veteran Glasgow ex-councillor Bashir Maan mourns her loss. But Osama Saeed, from the perspective of younger British Muslims, dismisses her with something close to contempt; as if her use of concepts that smack of western liberalism, and the fact that she had recently once again become the West's flavour of the month among Pakistani politicians, in themselves branded her as little more than a western stooge.
In the decade when Benazir Bhutto and I were born, in other words – the decade following the drafting and signature of the UN Declaration of Human Rights – belief in the common values of humanity stood at a historic high-water mark: belief in our power to resist and defeat evil, and to use science, technology and politics to give everyone on earth the opportunities that should be every child's birthright.
Now, by contrast, we increasingly revile our own species as so much useless biomass destroying the planet; fail to defend the liberal democratic culture in which we live, regularly whine that no-one should enjoy any human rights unless they have "earned" them, and increasingly retreat into our own tribal groups, effectively closing our physical and emotional borders. Nor are the main reasons for this collapse of confidence in secular humanism difficult to identify.
We do face an unprecedented environmental crisis, brought about by our own reckless embrace of fossil-fuelled economic development. We have been powerless to prevent the eruption of new ethnic and sectarian conflicts in an age when we hoped such things were past. And we have seen the language of liberal democracy abused by a bunch of hard-faced neoconservatives whose policies have come close to discrediting the idea of democracy with an entire generation, both in the west and elsewhere.
Yet as anyone with any serious knowledge of human history knows, in the end we struggle to find any creed that can serve us better than some form of compassionate humanism, whether backed by enlightened religious faith or not; and insofar as we turn away from those humanistic views, we always turn against ourselves, into a nightmare of conflict, cruelty and alienation. "Mankind was my business!" roars Jacob Marley's guilt-stricken ghost in Charles Dickens's great humanitarian story A Christmas Carol, repenting a life spent only in the business of money-making; and the same truth endures, 160 years on.
For all her undoubted flaws, Benazir Bhutto was a politician who knew that humankind and its welfare was her political business, first and last. And now, we can only pray for the coming of new generation of global politicians who will share those priorities; and who will know how to pursue them with courage, charisma and gaiety, as Benazir Bhutto did, to the end.
The full article contains 959 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
