The integration of violence into society

 

A few years ago, there was an upsurge of learners physically attacking teachers in South African schools. The teachers could not retaliate because the law forbade it. There seemed to be an asymmetry (beyond the minor-adult axis) regarding the meting out of justice in these situations; a teacher would be in more trouble if he retaliated then the learner would be for assaulting the teacher in the first place. This asymmetry left teachers at the mercy of learners and learners took advantage of this. It became a rather contentious topic on 702 and I recall quite a considerable number of its listenership advocating for the reinstitution of corporal punishment. At the time I thought it was the worst idea; living in one of the most violent countries, the last thing we needed was another tributary through which more violence could flow. I felt that in order for violence to be curbed; it should be eradicated from society entirely. For me it seemed disingenuous and lazy for us to discuss ‘gender based’ violence without discussing the number of men who kill other men in South Africa, or the number of women who inflict violence on men knowing that society would not even bat an eyelid because of an unfortunate masculinity construct. There is a toxicity in femininity that relies on this and will goad, taunt and provoke men to no end knowing that he cannot in any way respond physically because the law will come down, ton of bricks, hard on him. Because, as is often the case in society, men are not really seen beyond their utility; parts of their humanity is thwarted or ignored altogether. Men are complicit in this as well. Men are not meant to have feelings, they are not meant to react in any way to provocation and when an armed burglar breaks into a man’s home at 3am, he (as a man) is meant to leave his wife in bed and confront the burglar by himself and risk his life. His life seems by virtue of being a man disposable i.e. how in The Titanic, women and children were first on the lifeboats. There are men who will read the few sentences above and see zero conflicts regarding what I’ve articulated. They internally and impulsively assent to ideas that men are supposed to protect their families, cannot show emotional displays (interpreted as weakness), and irrespective of what women do, the men can never lay hands on women. If this blog had appeared on any mainstream media, this is the part of the blog where folks stop reading, put on their virtue signalling T-shirts and cancel me. But before roll your eyes and label me as anti-women or pro-GBV, bear with me for a second. I am not in any way arguing for GBV, as a woman myself it should be obvious why this cannot be the case. What I have been arguing for is a violence-free society (think Scandinavian). As a caveat, I’d like to draw attention to the observation that South Africa’s violence is a symptom of inequality and there is no way that the violence conversation can take place before the inequality one has. Inequality aside, I saw a society where men wouldn’t raise their hands to women; women wouldn’t raise their hands to men; men wouldn’t raise their hands to women; learners wouldn’t raise their hands to teachers, vice versa and so forth. Importantly and indispensably, it is a society of mutual respect and understanding that our ability to inflict violence on one another is ever present; that we should treat each other in a way that doesn’t wittingly poke and trigger those parts. It would not be a society where violence becomes impossible but where violence becomes unnecessary. It would be a society where a man does not have to bear the yoke of protecting his family, existentially and financially, because there would be nothing potentially-violent he would need to protect his family from. While I’m lost in fantasies of this utopic non-violent society, Tyson Yunkaporta comes and drops his book Sand Talk on to my society. Like a house of cards, my society flattens at the impact. I had to begin ideating afresh on violence. The great thing is that I already had a cornerstone to begin with: the acknowledgment that the ability to respond violently is very much a part of the makeup of being human. I guess I have been Ariscratle from Ice Age 4 imploring Scrat and the rest of society, ‘No! Stop! Brother [and sister], rise above this base desire to be more than a [primate- of the chimpanzee variety].’ With this capstone and Sand Talk, I started rebuilding.

In Season 5 of The Real Housewives of Potomac, Monique Samuels assaulted another cast member, Candiace Dillard and most of the other cast members reproached Samuels and she was ostracised and Dillard herself was spared rebuke even though her actions were instigative. Consequently, Samuels is no longer a part of the show. Samuels heightened already high tensions by tweeting ‘ask and you shall receive’ post altercation. Her co-stars condemned her behaviour as morally reprehensible as the tweet showed that she lacked remorse for her actions. She subsequently kowtowed to the pressures that be. I thought her behaviour was a natural consequence of the provocation. You push people hard enough and they will push back. You go around daring people, one day someone will call your bluff. In Seriously Funny, Kevin Hart has a bid about precisely this. And of course, the hackneyed ‘a lady doesn’t behave like that’ reprimand from all other cast members. This brings me to the domestication of people.

 

 Yunkaporta has a rather interesting hypothesis regarding the mass scale domestication of people. He posits that the Prussians invented adolescence to extend the developmental period of children into adulthood. This adolescence allowed the Prussians to retard the populations’ social, emotional and intellectual maturation so that they would be easier to control; creating a permanent state of child-like compliance in adults. This domestication was exported to Nazi Germany and then to America. His hypothesis does coincide with menarche but it conflicts with the neurobiological finding that the human brain only fully develops at the age of 25 unless this finding is correlated to the retardation. I think his hypothesis is compelling and if that was the only thing I had found insightful in Sand Talk, it would have been completely worth the read. It is still something I need to mull over; the jury is still out on whether his hypothesis is poppycock or pure genius. I do however want to spend time a bit of energy on the domestication of human beings because our current human conditioning would have made us easy prey to the sabre-tooth if we were placed in those settings, that’s if we didn’t die of starvation because persistence hunting is no joke. Yunkaporta points his finger to public education but I would like to point to more nuanced techniques that I myself have fallen for, repeatedly. This particular technique is courtesy to the English and the residual culture they left in their wake when South Africa became a Republic in 1961. When I was in primary school we were often referred to as young ladies. Obviously this was the Pygmalion Effect in full force and my nine-year old self had zero fighting chance against such psychological weaponry. Whenever a teacher referred to us as ‘young ladies’, we would beam with all the pride we could muster without putting our ladyship in question with vainglory. That referral, however, was not just an acknowledgment of the self but an invitation to step further and firmer into our ladyship. The principal of the school at the time was the epitome of a lady: never raised her voice even in anger, always composed, poised, immaculate, articulate, unhurried and the entire student body adored her. To emulate her was an ambition harboured by many female learners. So there we were: tempering our loud natures, walking across the quad instead of running, having our hair tied back at all times and blunting our sharp tongues. Later, it dawned on me that this whole turn ‘girls into ladies’ thing was a restraining, a domestication. I had inadvertently zipped up my own lips; placed fetters and handcuffs on my own feet and hands. I am wild now, untamed, let loosed; resembling an older Sandy Crood, or at least attempting to.

Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, in conversation with Tom Bilyeu says that the number one preoccupation people have is ‘looking good’ and showing the world that you ‘have it all together’. Woe to him who gets flustered in public. Being taught to be a lady was being trained to look good in thought, word and deed. The same thing has been done to men; a gentleman shows the outmost restraint, suffers silently under heavy constraints and is chivalrous. In societies where violence is equated with savagery; unsophistication and the efforts of desperate people who have not cultivated any other alternatives as a response to life’s provocations. This perception has also led to the damsel in distress trope. In the face of danger, a lady doesn’t raise her hands but must rely on a man facing the danger on her behalf, putting his own life in harms away. A woman must act like a lady by sitting and waiting on a man to act like a gentleman. This is some co-dependent toxic shit. Just imagine with me if you will, a lady dropping her ladyship, picking up a weapon of self-defence and pulling a Jenko & Schmidt from 22 Jump Street or a Mike and Marcus from Bad Boys, standing back to back facing the threat from all sides with the camera panning in slow motion. Impossible? No. Implausible? No! Improbable? Most definitely. Not because women can’t learn to fight but because have been weakened more and more through domestication. Women don’t fight. Most women have no agency in the face of danger. They freeze. While men have been given options in the face of danger: fight, flight or appease. Just as a lion at the lion park approaches the fence of an enclosure when it spots a human child (easy prey) on the other side of the fence. There are men who see women in the same light. They see easy prey. They are predatory because they know they’ll mostly get away with anything they do to women. In Vagabond by Lerato Mogoatlhe she shares an account of a man attempting to force himself on her and she fights back. I remember picking up her book, reading the blurb and being both excited and afraid at the same time. Here was a woman, very much like myself demographically, who travelled the continent on very little money and alone. My domestication reflex kicked in right on cue: What? No male chaperone? And my neo-cortex shows up on the scene (late as always) and I have to remind myself that she’s an adult. She should be able to go wherever she wants and do whatever she wants to do without being afraid. The domestication of women has not only been accomplished through their physical weakening but like the domestication of dogs, there has been an invisible leash placed around them that keeps them in their very well air-conditioned and artificially lit kennels. Not a lot of women would do what Mogoatlhe did. A lot of women die having not heeded the inner call to adventure or not trying new things they really want to because of safety or looking good or the other tamings of society. Lebo Mashile writes in her poem There is a me that I could be:

‘There is a me that I could be/ If I could just let her breathe outside/ A thundering song that I could sing/ If I just let her breathe outside/ There is a me who lives unseen/ She paces the corridors inside.’

Yunkaporta sums up the domestication of women in this way. ‘Everywhere civilisation goes, most women are excluded from active participation in violence and then domesticated into a twisted, soft, flouncing version of femininity… In Asia, the Middle East and Europe, in every civilization, women are forced to adopt a passive role, their bodies confined and weakened until they are at the mercy of the men around them… the subjugation of women is perpetuated by multiple means. The myth of romance is political. It is a myth about male-dominated hetero couples, where an incomplete woman is completed by her relationship with her partner. Patriarchy naturalises this sexual identity, masking the cultural construction of the feminine, thereby continually reproducing women in a subordinate position… when it was found that Neanderthal women carried much the same suite of bone injuries as men, there was a brief silence before ‘men were hunters and women gatherers’ narrative continued unchallenged… When I think of the worst public beating I ever received from a woman, resulting in three busted ribs, a knife through my hand and half my hair pulled out, I recall that the non- Aboriginal observers of that fight ignored the power of that magnificent woman and focused on my weakness as an individual who had somehow let my sex down. The onlookers, both male and female were so disgusted with my poor performance that they didn’t even bother calling an ambulance, leaving me to crawl my bloody way home.’ So again I ask: Improbable? Yes, but it doesn’t have to be.

 

Palahniuk says that his work scratches away at the gossamer of looking good; allowing people to confront their shadow selves (including people’s propensity for violence), to integrate it into themselves, and lastly celebrate it because it is a part of being human. Yunkaporta, ‘Creation started with a big bang, not a big hug: violence is part of the pattern. The damage of violence is minimised when it is distributed throughout a system rather than centralised into the hands of a few powerful people and their minions [or one gender of the population]. If you live a life without violence, you are living an illusion, outsourcing your conflict to unseen powers and detonating it in areas beyond your living space. Most of the Southern hemisphere is receiving that outsourced violence to supply what you need for the clean, technological, peaceful spaces of your existence. The poor zoned into the ghettoes of your city are taking those blows for you, as are the economically marginalised who fill your prisons. The invisible privilege of your technocratic, one-sided peacefulness is an act of violence. Your peace- medallion bling is sparkling with blood diamonds. You carry pillaged metals in your phone from devastated African lands communities. Your notions of peaceful settlement and development are delusions peppered with bullet holes and spears. Violence exists and it must be carefully structured within rituals governed by the patterns of creation and the laws of sustainable cultures derived from those patterns. Violence employed in these highly interdependent and controlled frameworks serves to bring spirit into balance and hold in check I-am-greater-than deception… Every organism in existence does violence, and benefits from it in reciprocal relationships. Domesticated beings are stripped of this reality, and become passive recipients of violence- either its benefits or its cruel impacts. They devolve as a result.’ This shares the same sentiment with what Jordan B. Peterson once said in his Maps of Meaning series. He said that the reason why we don’t resort to our primal reptilian brain is because everything is working as it should be. If there were serious food shortages for example, we would shrug off our civility to survive. It would be Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. We saw a hint of this in our avaricious hording behaviour with the impact of the Corona virus. All of a sudden, shops had to interfere and restrict the amount of non-perishable food people were buying because at that point, it didn’t matter if other people got food or not.

And also, with the Scandinavian example; as ‘peaceful’ as it is, now and then violence bubbles to the surface. A few days ago, a man went on a shooting (bow and arrow) spree killing five people. We can repress violence but we run the risk of having no say in how it will erupt and how extensive the damage will be; uncontrolled violence is also gratuitous. Yunkaporta writes, ‘There is controlled violence versus uncontrolled violence, hidden violence and public violence, violence born from colonisation and dispossession. There is also an argument to be made for white systems perpetrating non-traditional violence so that members of marginalised groups remain cornered about these things and not with the decisions that are being ‘made for us’ in a wider socio-political sense.’ Violence is not just physical; violence is poverty, carnism, erasure of cultures, arbitrary hierarchies, incarceration without rehabilitation, the commodification of people and the environment etc. Erick Godsey in conversation with Michael Phillip of the Third Eye Drop podcast, says that we should take our cues from nature. Yunkaporta supports this view as well, ‘Violence is part of creation and it is distributed evenly among all agents in sustainable systems to minimise the damage it can do. We follow creation, so we must all have high levels of competence when it comes to conflict.’ Godsey takes it further and says one of the problems with modern day society is that ‘we are heads cut off from our bodies’ which is why Ian Tattersall says that ‘The only ironclad rule of human experience has been the Law of Unintended Consequences.’ While we lived in smaller tribes, unintended consequences could be rectified and equilibrium in the system re-established. Unfortunately global village consequences are exponentially catastrophic which is how we have found ourselves in the climate change predicament, amongst other things. And because we are disembodied; we have lost the ability to recalibrate to nature’s patterns. We have lost the patience to wait and see how the changes we make on the earth affect the rest of the system before changing something else. Before we ourselves have assimilated a change into ourselves, a new one is thrust upon us by occupying powers and on each other. We have literally lost touch of reality. We have all this information and technology and our heads are spinning at the speed of 260 Mbps but our bodies are still at the beginning of the race; asking like that infamous South African ghost: ‘Waar is my kop?’ The Law of Unintended Consequences remains and the consequences will naturally follow; whether we like it or not. Jonathan Pageau of The Symbolic World had his house flooded in 2019 because a dyke had broken. Despite the stress of having most of his and his family’s possessions destroyed, he asked a sensible question: Where is the water supposed to go? In Nadia Owusu’s Aftershocks, she describes how all the people who die as a result of an earthquake are killed by the manmade structures around them. The earth is have said to have gone through 5 mass extinctions and I’m pretty sure they were violent affairs. Nature, will always auto-correct. With our big brains, we could have let nature set the rhythm so we could exist in tandem with it; moving along the grain; advancing with its patterns; able to anticipate and dance with it. But we’ve chosen to strong arm it as we have done with one another  and the violence of nature’s autocorrect (homeostasis) of our unintended consequences may lead to our demise which will likely be a protracted painful death; as the planet becomes even more inhospitable for and hostile to us. Yunkaporta says that violence has to be distributed among all agents to mitigate the damage, similarly Jamie Wheal’s recapturing of the rapture has to be distributed among all agents. Elon Musk is not going to save us.

 

One of the most violent occurrences that take place daily and should then reinforce the indispensability of nature’s timing in the activities of human beings; and that is childbirth. Childbirth is violent for the mother and the child. Maybe it’s modern day medical advancements (epidurals, caesareans, inductions, germ theory etc.) have made it less harrowing. Even with the hormones that flood the system of the mother to dilute the violence so that she heals well and that allows her to remember childbirth in sepia tones so that she would still want to procreate in the future; the violence still exists. There was a time in our not so distant past when childbirth was truly touch-and-go. Maternal and/or neonatal death was common and likely. Creation started with a big scream, and the hug came only after. Human beings have fully wrapped their heads and bodies around the gestation period of a human foetus. They know that they run all sorts of risks by either shortening or lengthening that period. A cautionary tale, perhaps, on not dilly-dallying with regards to climate change and all the other percolating elements that came as a result of our heads floating around without bodies. Another lesson childbirth extends to us is that violence doesn’t have to lead to trauma. I think trauma is one of the biggest threats to the survival of human beings. Systemic violence has produced trauma that has lasted generationally and psychologically crippled large populations which is really counterproductive to our existence. In summary, a good childbirth is not one without violence; it is one where violence is integrated, is shared, timely, where both mother and infant survive without trauma. Therefore, a good society is not one without violence, it is one where violence is integrated, is shared, timely, where human beings and the earth survive without trauma.

The Courage to be Ordinary

 

‘It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasm, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.’

Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly, is titled after the last two words of Theodore Roosevelt’s The Man in the Arena speech. She begins the book with the quote and returns to it as she wraps the book up. Perhaps at this point your pupils are darting from one side to the other or your brow is furrowed in an attempt to reconcile daring greatly with being ordinary; intuition would put these very far apart on the continuum of being. But I see them essentially communicating the same message: That of showing up in your life in the way only you can. And that requires a lot of courage because we are inundated with a lot of things that would make showing up difficult and sometimes debilitating.

 

The title of this blog is inspired by Paul Tillich’s seminal work The Courage to Be. Tillich writes extensively of how we are in the grips of an anxiety crisis and how this anxiety threatens our ability to BE in this world. He differentiates it from fear because fear can be faced, analysed, overcome and even endured. Fear always appears as a definite object and therefore in a way makes room for you to participate in it; you have agency and while it may not be easy facing the objects of your fears; it is entirely possible through courage. Whereas, anxiety is a pernicious thing in that it permeates everything, the very air you breathe and therefore it cannot be faced as you would fear. As a result it threatens your very agency; because how do you begin to fight that which you can’t even point out or localize? Tillich writes ‘Anxiety is finitude, experiences as one’s own finitude… it is the anxiety of nonbeing, the awareness of one’s finitude as finitude… it expresses itself in loss of direction; inadequate reactions, lack of intentionality… the reason for this sometimes striking behaviour is the lack of an object on which the subject (in the state of anxiety) can concentrate. The only object is the threat itself, but not the source of the threat itself, the source of the threat itself is ‘nothingness’.’ This ‘nothingness’ is where courage is really needed. It is quite easy to be courageous in the face of things that affirm your being, perhaps courage is not even needed there but courage is necessary in the face of things that threaten your being; the nonbeing. Which is why Tillich’s writes ‘courage is the affirmation of one’s essential nature, one’s inner aim or entelechy, but it is an affirmation which has in itself the character of ‘in spite of’.’ This ‘in spite of’ comes in many different forms and Tillich elucidates on these forms which basically mark the human condition today; what the modern man is facing. ‘There are three types of anxiety according to the three directions in which nonbeing threatens being. Nonbeing threatens man’s ontic self-affirmation relatively in terms of fate, absolutely in terms of death. It threatens man’s moral self-affirmation, relatively in terms of shame, absolutely in terms of condemnation. It threatens man’s spiritual self-affirmation, relatively in terms of emptiness, absolutely in terms of meaninglessness.’ In the words of the Apostle Paul, ‘we are hard pressed on every side’ and with depression being the leading cause of ill health and disability in the world; some of us are crushed.

 

In W. H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety, he writes: ‘We would rather be ruined than changed/ we would rather die in our dread/ Than climb the cross of the moment/ And let our illusions die.’ One of the reasons that some of us are crushed is because we have clung to the illusions that do not work for us anymore or we refuse to face the crisis that we are in. John Vervaeke in his Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series defines courage in a very specific Tillich- inspired way. He says courage is not just bravery (the facing of danger) nor is it just fortitude (the enduring of difficulty); courage is facing the meaning crisis head-on and rejecting anything that responds to the crisis in any way that is not good. Courage is a virtue; it involves the wisdom to see through the illusions and the distortions of fear or distress to what is truly good and to act accordingly.

 

One of the uncourageous ways that history has responded to the meaning crisis is through the adoption or implementation of pseudo-religious ideologies such as Nazism, Fascism, Marxism, Fundamentalism etc. which tried to resuscitate religion apropos Nietzsche’s death of God. Tillich writes ‘The anxiety of emptiness is aroused by the threat of nonbeing to the special contents of the spiritual life. A belief breaks down through external events or inner processes: one is cut from creative participation in a sphere of culture, one feels frustrated about something which one had passionately affirmed, one is driven from devotion to another to another because the meaning of each of them vanishes. The contents of the tradition, however excellent, however praised, however loved once lose their power to give content today. And present culture is even less able to provide the content. Anxiously one turns away from all concrete contents and looks for an ultimate meaning, only to discover that it was precisely the loss of a spiritual centre which took away the meaning from the special contents of the spiritual life. But a spiritual centre cannot be produced intentionally; and the attempt to produce it only produces deeper anxiety’ or as Vervaeke puts it ‘has drenched our world in blood’. Akwaeke Emezi in Dear Senthuran: A black spirit memoir, writes ‘Illusions are the best things to burn, I think, but some people consider such fires to be threats, and those who start them even worse’. Tillich himself courageously incinerated illusions against the Third Reich through more than 100 radio addresses that implored Germany, to recognize and reject the horrors of Hitler. Courage is always on the side of the good, and acts out against any illusions that detract from the good. The courageous dare greatly. Maya Angelou addressing Cornell University in 2008 said ‘Courage is the most important of the virtues, because without it no other can be practiced consistently, you can be kind and true and fair and generous and just, and even merciful, occasionally but to be that thing time after time, you have to really have courage.’ Angelou, Tillich, Vervaeke all have illustrated how courage is a virtue that points to other virtues, pointing to the true and the good i.e. the transcendentals. Tillich writes that courage does not eliminate anxiety, the existential nature of anxiety not allowing its removal, but courage can subsume the anxiety of nonbeing into itself. In order for this courage to be to not be threatened by nonbeing then the courage has to be powered by something that transcends both being and nonbeing. Vervaeke suggests that one of the ways you can face the meaning crisis is by moving from a horizontal teleological narrative (where you are caught in your personal history and future) into a vertical ontology where you ascend in terms of virtue; where you become more and more of yourself i.e. Platonic atonement or Aristotelean self-actualization. All these point to transcendence.

 

One of the ways the meaning crisis has reared its ugly head is in our culture’s obsession with purpose. People have been rendered catatonic by the need to live meaningfully or by the weight of feeling they are living purposeless lives. We are bombarded by cataracts of social media images and celebrities who seem to be killing this life thing and making a killing while at it; who seem to know what they are here for and meet every day with a vitality we crave and that exsanguinates the life out of us in comparison; that embroils us in the drama of the narcissism of small differences. Always trying to find the thing that makes us unique in comparison to others; that makes us believe we should be simply adored for who we are. Brown writes, ‘when I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see shame-based [shame lying between relative guilt and absolute condemnation] fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong or to cultivate a sense of purpose… I see through the cultural messaging everywhere that says that an ordinary life is a meaningless life… I know the yearning to believe that what I’m doing matters and how easy it is to confuse that with the drive to be extraordinary. I know how seductive it is to use the celebrity culture yardstick to measure the smallness of our lives. And I also understand how grandiosity, entitlement, and admiration-seeking feel like just the right balm to soothe the ache of being too ordinary and inadequate.’

 

Meister Eckhart writes, ‘People should not worry so much about what they do but rather about what they are. If they and their ways are good, then their deeds are radiant. If you are righteous, then what you do will also be righteous. We should not think that holiness is based on what we do but rather on what we are; for it is not our works which sanctify us but we who sanctify our works.’ Let us not get caught up in the world’s insistence that our works should produce insta-money or insta-fame. Emezi calls this necessary work, The Spell. ‘The spell is clear: face your work. I inhale it like a meditation sometimes, to counter the panic of a life mutating too fast, when I wake up every day as a different person inside a different world. Everything else can shift however it wants, but the work will always be the work. No matter what changes, that instruction is still the same.’ We should also not buy into over-consumptive culture’s ideas about having something to show for our lives beyond actually showing up for our lives. As Phil Ford writes in his essay What was blogging?, ‘Hoping You’ll have something to show for your life is a mug’s game. What we want is something to show we’re living.’

In his book, Tillich evokes the image of a knight in full armour riding his steed through the valley with death and the devil on either side of him. ‘Fearlessly, concentrated, confident. He looks ahead. He is alone but he is not lonely. In his solitude he participates in the power which gives him the courage to affirm himself in spite of the presence of the negativities of existence.’ Brown makes use of the man in the arena who stumbles, with a face marred with blood and sweat and dust. Both of these examples illustrating people showing up to the task or work at hand, in spite of. Emezi writes, ‘Even when seized by a thousand fears we can make strange and wonderful things simply for the sake of the strange and the wonderful, we can create without permission, we can [work] into the unknown.’

 

In light of being stared down by what Tomas Bjorkman calls the meta-crisis: the interlacing of ecological, spiritual, existential, socio-economic, mental health crises of our time tied with the cultural pressures mentioned above; to be ordinary is itself a courageous act. To show up in spite of is to dare greatly. To decide for yourself what the meaning of your life will be (Viktor Frankl vibes) or to decide that life is meaningless (as Tillich says that the act of accepting meaninglessness is in itself a meaningful act). You can still show up in your life and in the lives of others, regardless what you choose to do with your life. Emezi writes, ‘The manual stays the same: to try until you can, to be bold and patient.’ To be excellent, to be good, to be courageous. To dare greatly with our eyes cast upwards. To say yes to life in spite of everything as Frankl’s recently released collection of essays is titled. Or as he puts it originally: Trotzdem ja zum leben sagen.  

You can miss me with all that hopeless romantic bullshit’- Iman, Run the World

 

In a previous post titled R. Kelly: The Man, the Artist, the Art, I begin the post with a Jamie Wheal quote, ‘My default setting is hopeless romantic’. I used this quote because that has been my default setting as well… or so I thought.

 

In Episode 23 of John Vervaeke’s Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, he breaks down Romanticism and shows how our culture still bears the vestiges of Romanticism, much to his dismay. He says ‘You are paying a very devastating price for Romanticism. And if you think that Romanticism doesn’t exist in our culture, you are not paying attention to the fact that we use the grammar of Romanticism to talk about love and we even buy into a romantic model of how love operates. Romantic comedies are these weird metaphysical perversions in which we throw away the scientific model of things and believe that somehow love is this irrational force that brings us in contact with the course of history (at least our personal history and destiny) and that of another person. And it’s all such bullshit and it’s devastatingly bad bullshit. You are trying to make this machinery of the imagination carry all the neo-platonic weight that religion, tradition, philosophy, history carry. You try to make your romantic partner carry the role of all of that. No person can bear that. No human relationship can bear that burden. So we go into our romantic relationships with unreachable expectations of how the person is going to address everything that we’ve lost in our history and of course they can’t which of course is why many people simultaneously say that romantic relationships are the place where they look for the most meaning in their life and their romantic relationships are those things that precisely cause them the most trauma and suffering in their life.’

Following this clear, succinct and valid breakdown, I was left with the question of what did I actually mean when I professed to be a hopeless romantic? Surely, what is written above is not what I mean. Even I have a low saturation point when it comes to romantic comedies because they require me to engage in a lot of the Coleridge concept of belief suspension. So what then did I mean? I guess I meant I am optimistic, that I believe in human beings overcoming adversity and that would tie in rather neatly with romantic comedies. There are always adversities to be overcome, however unrealistic the storyline. I guess I also meant that I believe in the transformative power of love which can be seen in spades in romantic comedies. The protagonist transforms for the better. This of course is not limited to the romantic comedy genre but the hyper-focus on love (however misguided and most often times convoluted) is. I do believe in the conquering spirit of love but not in romantic love. We need only take a step outside the cinema, look around us and see the carnage that romantic love has wreaked on the people around us, ourselves included. Romantic love is just not the answer; it fails time and time again. There is an alternative however which is agape. Agape is not just an alternative but is in the most profound sense the most fitting description of transformative love. It is the 1^st Corinthians 13 type of love. The love that never fails juxtaposed with a romantic love that fails consistently. This is where I then disencumber myself for good with romanticism, all its limitations and its ‘devastation’. Besides, romantic films and days and the whole idea of romance are ways to meet ‘having needs’ as opposed to agape which is a way of meeting ‘being needs’. Agape is giving while romantic love is about taking. Even when people give in romantic love, it’s so they can take eventually. Romantic love is consumptive and agape is transformative. While romantic love increases the distance between people and reality, agape brings us ever so closer. This has been a lesson to me to be mindful of the words I use and what they mean and what message I intend to communicate by using them. But also, romance is puerile; it’s cute when little children are dressed in red and white on Valentine’s Day but it’s not so cute when adults fork out large sums of money to buy clichéd gifts and sit in over-packed restaurants. As Paul wrote in Corinthians ‘When I was a child, I talked like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a [wo]man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.’

 

As I have a rather tenuous, of a spider-web quality, tie with social media, I rely on social media savvy interlocutors to bring to my attention relevant hashtags so we can then proceed to hash it out (as it were). Recently one such interlocutor brought the #takemeasiam to my attention. When the words first land on the eardrums, they ring of warm, fuzzy, unconditional acceptance but upon a closer listening, you realise that just as with romantic love, there are big problems here. It’s an Outkast ‘roses really smell like poo-poo-ooh’ realization. Author of Sand Talk, Tyson Yunkaporta, in conversation with Michael Garfield of the Future Fossil podcast in a podcast titled Tyson Yunkaporta on Indigenous Systems Thinking, Fractal Governance, Ontopunk, and Queering W.E.I.R.D Modernity. Yunkaporta emphasises that individual autonomy must be balanced with relationship obligations. He says: ‘You can do whatever you want; nobody can tell you what to do but you are constrained by your web of relationships. So you can’t survive as an individual without being in relation to a unique web of human and non-human entities in your community and landscape… If you don’t tend to those relationships to make show you’re in good relationship then that web falls apart and you are lost, you become nothing, you become anathema… you excommunicate yourself.’ #takemeasiam is exemplary in illustrating how people (women mostly) want to be able to exercise their autonomy whilst abdicating any obligations they have to their community or in this particular case, to the romantic relationships they are currently in. Not only will this cause the couple a lot of trauma and suffering as Vervaeke mentions but it will result with the women in question effectively excommunicating themselves. Men will just not want to be with them; they will find them too burdensome. The women who are taking part in #takemeasiam are women who do not want to be single or else they would not be hash tagging about this. These are not women who want to be let be, with whatever existential turmoil they carry. No. These women want to shoulder their existential turmoil with the help of a man; better yet who will gladly heap all of it on that man’s shoulders. At some point, these men will pull an Ayn Rand’s Atlas and shrug it all off. If you want to tip the scales so that you exercise full unadulterated autonomy then you forfeit the community or the romantic relationship. That’s just what it is. Also, Yunkaporta says ‘You can do whatever you want, no one can tell you what to do but you can at least be held accountable to your own internal logic.’ If you are a woman who desires to be in a long-term committed relationship, how is #takemeasiam going to bring you closer to this desired relationship? Internally, these two things are diametrically opposed because if anything it will take you further from one. Lastly, Yunkaporta says ‘A breakdown in relationship is when you start bossing other people around’ which is precisely what this hashtag is doing. You are demanding that people take you as you are. On what grounds? As if the world owes you something. You are imposing yourself on other people’s autonomy. Would it not be better to take yourself as you are and stay single?

 

In Tarriona ‘Tank’ Ball’s Vulnerable AF, she writes about a guy whose ethos is a #takemeasiam one. Of course very few males in a society where men are valued for their productivity would actually say this out loud, but many sure do live it, and unfortunately these unfortunates will prey on a woman who has just enough insecurity to allow that to happen. The opposite is true as well. The reason why women can, without a scintilla of humility, say takemeasiam is because, like the men in the manosphere like quibbing ‘every day a sucker is born’. There are men who will roll with the #takemeasiam woman until the wheels fall off that relationship as they inevitably do. Because it’s just too much, to demand of anyone. I wrote a poem inspired by TANK addressing this very thing.

 

Sometimes

A new person steps in and

Puts up with all the things you couldn’t

That you shouldn’t have had to

And your love was put into question

As though you wanting them to be their best self

Meant you were denying their personhood

But you couldn’t stand by and watch them

Constantly undermine themselves and

Stand in their own way 

Sabotaging themselves with destructive behaviour

And putting you in collateral harm’s way

 

In this way there is a lot of destruction, toxicity and hurt. Why do we have to continue in this way when there is an alternative offered to us? Gabor Maté says children need two things: acceptance and authenticity. ‘When I was a child…’ Jordan B. Peterson that the two characteristics that yield success in the world are competence and generosity. The contrast is clear, authenticity and acceptance are things coming in from the outside which makes sense because human offspring are altricial. However, there is a shift in adulthood towards generosity and competence which are inside things moving outwards to the community. They strike the beautiful Yunkaporta balance between autonomy and relation and they also make room for agape because generosity is at its heart. In romantic love and #takemeasiam situations, people remain trapped in existential turmoil but agape inspires transformation.

Paying Attention

 

In a podcast between Jonathan Pageau and Jordan B. Peterson (The Perfect Mode of Being), Peterson asks Pageau what the first response would be if one were to believe in God. Pageau replies with an emphatic, immediate, and unequivocal: ‘Attention’. Our first response would be to give God our full attention with our entire selves. For most people, the first response would be some sort of action fuelled by guilt or shame within the purview of how they have lived their lives and how, morally, their paths have been filled with substantial immoral meanderings. People’s morality, or lack thereof, would drive their first response and most of us would bow our heads in shame riddled with guilt.

I am of the opinion that this response finds its source in the grammar we use when we speak about God. People constantly refer to ‘The Fear of God’ which doesn’t really make sense but it does explain that if we think of God as invoking of fear, we would be scared as a result of our moral failings and that would be the primary response to him; scared of the repercussions of our sin. But ‘God is love’ and ‘love casts out all fear’ therefore a fear response to love doesn’t make sense to me. Fear is an inappropriate and antithetical response. There is another response, however, and that is wonder which then becomes awe. When we sing ‘Our God is an Awesome God’ then we really are on to something.

 

John Vervaeke describes Awe as a confrontation we have with something so vast, so big, so larger than ourselves that demands us to change who we are. In order for us to accommodate or begin to wrap ourselves around the object of our attention; our rather limited finite selves need to change. We cannot remain as we are. A metanoic experience awaits us.

In his essay, A Secular Wonder, Paola Costa writes ‘In wondering the subject is absorbed by reality; without being its hostage or puppet. In this sense, the wonder-response always embodies a form of assent , ‘yea-saying’ and having no utility whatsoever, it fosters in the subject a vague of sense of joy in the very fact of being alive and of objectless gratitude that turns outward. Wonder, is an expansive response to the world’s allure that encourages respect, compassion, gentleness, humility, unpossessiveness.’ I think wonder puts us in deep contact with reality. And since God is love; then with love itself.

 

‘As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”

“Martha, Martha” the Lord answered, ‘you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed- or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better and it will not be taken away from her.’ Luke 10:38-42.

Mary knew the first act of worship is attention.  

 

Joe Dispenza is famously known for saying ‘Life is about the management of energy, where you place your attention, is where you place your energy.’ But it doesn’t end there, attention is at the heart of every transformative experience, but it is also at the heart of ways transformative experiences are impeded through distraction. In his YouTube video TikTok: The Worst of the Worst Thinking Ape describes how he thinks the way TikTok is setup; with short video automatically cascading into short video ad infinitum programmes us to develop short attention spans and he thinks this is particularly deleterious because in order for human beings to progress or to create something that will move the needle with regards to advancement requires long attention spans of dedicated focus; the equivalent of what Michio Kaku calls ‘Butt Power’. Cal Newport in Deep Work writes about dedicating 4 hours of your day to deep work; Robert Greene also writes about spending 4-5 hours a day on ‘your life’s task’ if you are going to achieve mastery. But I think it’s not just limited to TikTok; it’s simply how social media makes its money. More than anything our attention is currency, so fundamentally it doesn’t make a difference to FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) whether we are using their platforms constructively or not as long as we remain on them. Which is why I think attention can be used to literally block any sort of transformative experience. All of the psychotechnologies that John Vervaeke mentions in his series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, for example, are depended on where and how we focus our attention. From meditation to contemplation to Tai’chi or flow states or even internalising the inner sage. Our attention is the Noble Rock; the place from which all creation begins. We come to realise that our biggest resource is not time in its generality but attention in its specificity.

 

 ‘Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called “the pledge’. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course…it isn’t. The second act is called ‘The Turn’. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret… but you won’t find it, because of course you are not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn’t clap yet. Because making something disappear isin’t enough; you have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call “The Prestige”.’ Christopher Priest in The Prestige. 

The Latin Omne trium perfectum comes to mind which is partly why those are the most memorable lines of the book and film. The pledge. The turn. The prestige. I think the machinery of transformation through wonder can also be summarised with these three parts. Surprise (The Pledge) when we are shown an ordinary physiological response. Wonder (The Turn) when ordinary surprise becomes extraordinary wonder. Awe (The Prestige). The great reveal. The Vervaekean confrontation. There is a 4^th part I would like to discuss. A part that is mentioned by Priest in passing; but I would like to linger on it. The reason it’s not given priority in the quote is because it is not directly a part of the magic trick, but rather is directly inspired by it; which is the audience clapping their hands. The audience participating and witnessing a good magic trick cannot help but clap their hands in response to one. Let’s call this 4^th part, The Impel. The audience is impelled to clap. Once we have experienced the full progression of surprise to wonder to awe then we are also impelled to transform; because Christ’s love compels or in this case impels us. And I believe that this comparison holds true because a transforming person is but a magical thing to behold.

 

The Lacunae of the 'Success' manuscript

 

A lustrum ago, I was introduced to a guy who bears a striking resemblance to a young pugilist who went by the name Nelson Mandela and of course I was curious if perhaps he had some of that Madiba Magic in him. Disappointingly, he didn’t. Pretty sweet looking like the most loved African man in the world. That aside, we take to each other and parley on a variety of topics, Brownian motion style. It was during that afternoon that I was formerly introduced to the work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb who is his favourite mathematician. I had vaguely heard of The Black Swan as there was much hubbub about it but I had only given it a flit and moved on with life and I didn’t know at the time that Taleb was its author. My companion proceeded to sell me on what turns out to be a remarkable Armenian of a man. Hook. Line. Sinker. Admittedly, I’ve still not read The Black Swan but I have read everything else in the Incerto series. It takes a rather special man to write a delightful book such as The Bed of Procrustes. I greeted every page with residual laughter from the page before. Now that I had encountered Nassim, I could not un-encounter him. That conversation got me thinking on who my favourite mathematician is. As soon as I had asked the question, a name came immediately to mind, well two names actually. Henri Poincaré followed very closely by Benoit Mandelbrot. I hadn’t heard anything about Gaston Julia at the time but he deserves a mention as his work preceded and highly influenced the work of Mandelbrot. I was introduced to Poincaré and Mandelbrot in A brief History of Mathematics presented by Marcus du Sautoy and in Robert Sapolsky’s Stanford lectures on chaos, reductionism, emergence and complexity. Sapolsky was explaining how biological systems cannot be broken down into their parts to understand how the whole works; as can be done in a mechanical system like a car. Biological systems are emergent. This for me has since held a deep fascination, and it found deep resonance within me. Things that couldn’t be measured or predicted have been the things that have intrigued me the most. Marcus du Sautoy in his lecture titled The Music of the Primes describes how prime numbers are emergent and there is no way to predict them which is why they are used in online payment encryption. Mandelbrot provides us with The Coastline Paradox of how the length of a coastline cannot be measured due to its fractal nature. These have been the mysteries I have returned to time and time again in wonder. As a biological system myself, not only is the human body itself emergent (cells→ tissue→ organs etc.) but I’ve felt that my place in this world, as an agent, is also emergent. Not mine alone but all of our lives should be. This has not been my experience however. So much of life is prescriptive, homogenizing, normalizing and most important of all so reductive. We get born, go through twelve years of school where we are assaulted with standardized tests, go to university, get degrees (of which we know beforehand which will yield the greatest material success), get married and have 2.5 kids (or whatever the latest average is), buy a house and two cars, work until we retire and die. The End. Roll credits playing Bittersweet Symphony by the Verve in the background. In William Shakespeare’s words ‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ Meaningless existences. Not only are we estranged from ourselves by not doing what Robert Greene refers to as Your Life’s Task in Mastery or what in Happy Feet is referred to as your Heart song; but also the domain described above is very crowded and limited. This is the domain where causes are treated interchangeably with the sequential as though all our lives were a mere conveyor belt of material milestones. Static lives coated with a veneer of the dynamic. All that multiplicity, specificity, complexity, variability and colour thrown into a melting pot and vulgarized into a grey economic pulp. Sapolsky says that ‘Reductionism works when we are not too picky’. But we are picky or at least we should be, picky of ourselves. Our complexity cannot be shirked, denied or rendered an excess. Our biology insists on this and so does our consciousness. Our variability is not noise. In evolutionary biology, systems with the most variability generally survive the longest. In the way we are proceeding, Ben Okri was right when he wrote ‘we are long due an apocalypse’. An apocalypse in terms of impending disaster (meaning crisis) but also in a revelatory sense; that this is no way to go about living fulfilled dynamic lives.

 

In his essay Reality is Analog, JF Martel describes a pernicious Intellectualism (a term coined by William James), where all experience is reduced to information. I’d even venture to say that we’ve gone a step further and used that same information as data to inform how life should be lived, both descriptively and prescriptively; what in effect becomes a simulation of reality. ‘When an experience is conceived as information, the universe appears to us as it would to any computer, namely a series of fixed states without interval, motion or becoming- a zombie cosmos’. It is not a coincidence that John Vervaeke who lectures in a series called Awakening from the Meaning Crises’ is also the leading author of the book Zombies in Western Culture. Our lives have lost their dynamism, their biology and their enchantment. We are binary 0s and 1s now and our lives’ intolerable interval has become superfluous. Alicia Juarrero (Dynamics in Action) writes: ‘The study of living systems (and especially for ecosystems) has taught us that nature and evolution do not favour stability and equilibrium; instead, natural processes select for resilience and adaptability for characteristics that foster evolvability. Living things learn from the past and anticipate the future- and then modify themselves to handle ambiguity, uncertainty; and unwelcome perturbations. Handle and manage, not avoid and eliminate ambiguity and uncertainty.’ Living things learn from the past and anticipate the future; they don’t try to reproduce the future through Intellectualism. Life is ambiguous, uncertain and unstable. These are not negative things as they foster evolution and should therefore not be done away with.  C.S. Lewis has a quote ‘God doesn’t care for temples built but for temple-building.’ The idea is that as we go through life, we develop and grow (which Vervaeke identifies as one of the principal driving forces in us). Developing and growing are dynamic terms; there is a continual movement of becoming, a continual building of temples. Even countries who were previously referred to as developed countries are in a continuous state of development. Most of life is marked by this in-between-ness; by the journey, the becoming. ‘What really exists is not things made but things in the making. Once made, they are dead and an infinite number of alternative conceptual decompositions can be used in defining them. But put yourself in the making by a stroke of intuitive sympathy with the thing and, the whole range of possible decompositions coming at once into your possession, you are no longer troubled with the question which of them is the more absolutely true. Reality falls into passing into conceptual analysis; it mounts in living its own undivided life- it buds and burgeons, changes and creates’ (James as cited by Martel). Reality is analog, Martel asserts. Consequently, Reality is Emergent.

 

‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’. John 1:1

While reality is emergent; there is another phenomenon at play here. This is regarding that which Emanates. While Emergence is understood from bottom-up, ‘Emanance’ is understood from top-down. ‘Emanance’ is defined as something flowing forth from the source. The neologism coined by complex dynamical students is heterarchy which allows inter-level causal relations to flow bi-directionally (Juarrero). The John 1^st verse above is an illustration of ‘Emanance’. This is the logos which Vervaeke describes as the word that helps create history. It is not comprised of just words but has an intelligibility behind it. It is an underlying structure. It is what Aristotle would refer to as potential. The other side of the potential coin being actuality. It is only through actuating by exercising our agency that we can live up to our potential. And since we are well ensconced in the metaphor of the coin bearing two faces, the other two coins whose faces I’d like to discuss is the agent-arena one and the cause-constraints one as well. While reality is emergent, its emergence is contingent on that which emanates; similarly, an agent can only act in an appropriate environment or risk being subjected to absurdity (Vervaeke). You can only live up to your potential if your potential was there to be lived up to in the first place. Your ability to live up to your potential, to act in the world, embark on some causal pattern in the world is dependent on the constraints of your arena. Causes are events that make things happen and constraints are conditions that make things possible (Vervaeke). Juarrero distinguishes between two types of constraints: enabling constraints (the possibility of an event is increased) and selective constraints (the possibility of an event is reduced). We have constructed our societal arena’s in such a way that we have limited the ways in which we can participate within those arenas. We have also codified success misleadingly; the belief being it can be achieved through following a series of steps. Therefore the failure of non-attainment falls squarely on those who have failed without even taking into consideration how the actual arena has contributed to this. Although I am of the opinion that people crave fulfilment, I’ll proceed with the term ‘success’ because it is an easily understood, modern lexical term. Taleb in Fooled by Randomness writes on how big a role chance plays in life. ‘No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word’ and Martel in the same sentiment: ‘Beneath the conceptual overlay, reality remains what it is: not an orderly network of humanly comestible ideas but a turbid, ever-changing, symphonic, indefinable process of becoming that is accountable to neither the predilections of reason, nor the strictures of logical grammar.’ We have not only stacked the deck against ourselves through our reductionism but we have sold the underprivileged lies wholesale; that they need only work hard to attain success. It’s a double jeopardy in essence: on the one hand, the arena’s themselves are not accommodating of all who wish to act in them and on the other hand, the attempted codification of success, itself rests on ‘turbid, ever-changing, symphonic’ ground. Katlego Letlonkane in her essay (Theories of Diversity, Difference and Otherness) expounds on this double jeopardy in the South African context. Now and again a black person manages to escape the chokehold of poverty through the completion of a university degree. When this person is interviewed, he will say something to the effect of ‘everyone can do it with hard work and determination’. Letlonkane disagrees with this one-size-fits-all statement and I agree with her.  There is also the rising unemployment rates of graduates in South Africa which shows that education itself is not the security blanket it is purported to be, but I digress. ‘Structural poverty is ignored as having any constraining consequence on a black individual but rather, as a conquerable glitch’. Letlonkane writes, ‘What we must also remain mindful of is the often white opportunistic use of ‘triumph over poverty’ narrative against other black people to make them accountable for their own poverty as if decades of structural and institutional oppression are nothing to talk about. We must understand that black people were never supposed to make it out of the conditions that were pronounced upon them. The organization of townships and systems of being for black people were designed to confine black people to lives of poverty, decay and marginalization. The reality is as was intended in the first place. Many black people just did not make it out of poverty. Could not make it out of poverty. The hold of structural oppression was just too strong and tight. Even those of us black people with degrees and post-graduate qualifications and revered professions can’t say that we have made it out of poverty when so much about us is still poor. I worry about being used as the shining example of hard work to people who inherit so much unbearable difficulty and trauma inducing poverty as if my path was a real possibility to every young person in the township. The truth is, things were different for some who may have been blessed with rare opportunities which shaped the possibilities that had. This is not the case for everyone, so to make things fall down to personal drive and hard work erases the wounding effect of oppression while also drawing a line between black people and making it possible for black people to be called lazy and wanting to live off welfare, when their fellow black individuals are working hard and bettering themselves. This is a cruel and insensitive criticism against black people after being put through what they were’. Ill-fitting agent-arena relationships; a hyper-focus on the causal coupled with a hypo-focus on the constraints; a pretension that possibilities are endless when they are rather limited is not only absurd but cruel to those who are none the wiser and have internalized their Sisyphean efforts as personal failures. Juarrero writes, ‘cultural constraints must provide enough flexibility for the system to be resilient.’ Our constraints are closing in on us and at some point they’ll give, with many a body buried beneath the debris.

 

‘In his novel The Kites, set in Europe amid the Nazi barbarities of World War 2, the Romanian French novelist Roman Gary neatly encapsulated the human predicament. ‘part of being human’ he wrote, ‘is the inhumanity of it’ and for good measure, he added that ‘as long as we refuse to admit that inhumanity is completely human; we’ll just be telling ourselves pious lies’. To anyone who might-against all odds-believe in the perfectibility of humankind, Gary’s view of Homo sapiens might appear a little uncharitable. But a dispassionate view of history will leave most of us in little doubt about the enduring accuracy of his observation. True, during its tenure, Homo sapiens has been responsible for a practically inexhaustible list of wholly admirable achievements. But it is nonetheless undeniable that the list of the miseries our species has inflicted on itself, and on the world in general is impressive enough to suggest that Gary was spot on: that ‘inhumanity’ is or, perhaps more accurately, that any adequate characterization of our species requires using both descriptors.’ This is how the prologue of The Accidental Homo Sapien by Ian Tattersall and Rob DeSalle commences. While I agree that the legacy story of human beings has been one where the inhumane and humane aspects have walked the historical pages holding hands in concert (one need only cast a furtive glance in the general direction of the 19^th century and shudder); I don’t believe that the two cannot be separated going forward. To carry on in this fashion is to personify Dukkha as described by Vervaeke. It is to keep turning a wheel that is off-axis which damages the wheel with each revolution. Our stories do not have to be characterised by Dukkha. The path to becoming a fully humane human being is that of the transformation where we can truly exercise agency in conducive dynamic arenas to gain wisdom, which will shape our discernment (in thought, in perspective, in participation, in identity); create coherence between that which is within us and what is without; live up to our potential and to live meaningful lives.

 

‘I find [a fully functioning] person to be a human being in flow, in process, rather than having achieved some state. Fluid change is central in the picture. I find such a person to be sensitively open to all of his experience-sensitive to what is going on in his environment, sensitive to other individuals with whom he is in relationship and sensitive perhaps most of all to the feelings, reactions, and emergence meanings which he discovers in himself. The fear of some aspects of his own experience continues to diminish, so that more and more of his life is available to him… such a person is a creative person.’ This is a quote by Carl Rogers that appears in Scott Kaufman’s Transcend. Not only is this a creative person, but this is also a successful person- in all meaningful manner of speaking.

A Return to The Ethos of Oral Societies

 

There is an age old joke that the Africans and Europeans made an exchange where the Africans gave up their land in exchange for the Bible. Beyond the tongue and cheek, there is a deeper part to this joke that doesn’t involve the Bible in its specificity but the written word in its generality. In a previous blog, titled African women should breastfeed whenever the need to arises, I touch on the differences between oral and literary societies. This blog is a dehiscence from that one and I focus on the darker minatory aspects of the writing medium.

 

The Gutenberg Press was a complete game changer as was the steam engine and the transistor. These technological advancements were just incredible. And I for one having spent a quarter of my waking life reading, the Gutenberg Press has brought me an indispensable pleasure and resource. C.S. Lewis in A Writing Life writes ‘Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege of individuality… In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself.’ Marshal McLuhan writes in his book Understanding Media, ‘For the content of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind’. While the content of the written word has changed my life. It is the medium itself that needs to be paid particular attention to. ‘The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.’ We cannot ignore the darker sides of a medium irrespective of the positive that its content has brought to our lives.

 

Ayi Kwei Armah begins Two Thousand Seasons with the line ‘We are not a people of yesterday’. The ‘We’ he is referring to is the African people. One of the most historical gas lighting events that has taken place against African people, was to make us believe that because we did not have a recorded/ written down history then we didn’t have a history at all; that we were a tabula rasa before European intervention. Of course we did; the major difference being that the history of African people flowed from one generation to the next without needing the permanence of the written word to uphold the culture and history. Everything that was pertinent was passed down orally.

 

In Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu’s The Theory of Man, the protagonist Emil Coetzee (of European descent) thinks ‘He realised that the problem with the African was that there was a lack of permanence in his way of doing things. The African did not build permanent structures: pole and dagha constructions could never withstand the demands of time. The African did not have a writing tradition; all he had was the orality he could carry with him but never leave behind a record. All that the African possessed were his memories, which were destined to forever fade with time.’ Coetzee views this impermanence as a problem but the African people didn’t build permanent structures because they were not a permanent people. They realised that birth and death are two sides of the same coin; they celebrated birth and knew that with their birth, there was already a procession in living making its way to the grave. They knew that in their death, they were simply making way for others to be born. They also understood Mitch Albom’s words when he writes ‘Death ends lives not relationships’ and that they would assume a different role as ancestor beyond the veil. It was based on this impermanence premise that the Western world carried out their various machinations against the African people. The sophisticated logistical systems that became known as the Triangular Trade Route could not have been carried out as effectively as they were without writing as a medium. In Lupe Fiasco’s Unforgivable Youth he raps:

‘Ways and means from the trade of human beings/ A slave labour force provides wealth to the machine/ And helps the new regime establish and expand/ Using manifest destiny to siphon off the land/ From native caretakers who can barely understand/ How can land be owned by another man?/ Warns, “One cannot steal what was given as a gift”/ Is the sky owned by birds and the rivers owned by fish?/ But the lesson went unheeded, for the sake of what’s not needed.’

 

African people have had a clear understanding of their place in nature; as part of the whole and knowing that we are stewards or the word Lupe uses ‘caretakers’ of all that we come in contact with. African people knew that land was not up for grabs as the ‘scramble for Africa’ would like to deceive the world into believing. If land could not be owned then succession was even more of a strange concept than ownership. And one would consequently ask, if we are all doing our best to own and horde land coupled with the fact that the earth is finite; and it is already packed to the rafters with people, where on earth are the people still yet to be born going to live? Which part of the landscape will have escaped the ‘private property and its attached threat’ mark?

 

Mortality Salience is a psychological phenomenon where human beings are aware that they are going to die and it causes anxiety and fear within them. I think it is one of the conditions that came to be as a consequence of the establishment of literary societies. Once man was able to write his individual personal story, it created space between him and his neighbour psychologically (moving from collective societies to individual societies) and he then became obsessed with that personal story like Narcissa, perpetually acting as a servo-mechanism (Marshall McLuhan) for this story and also having to contend with knowing that at some unknown place, time , manner; the story will abruptly end. The stylus will slip off the turnstile and there will be no music playing. The existential insanity of this obsession with the self, the story of the self and not dying is not experienced by just one person (usually a sovereign who searches for the elixir of immortality); this is societal. And as a result the word that governs the doings of the day and of the life is not success but legacy followed by success because it is assumed that the easiest way to leave a legacy is to be materially successful. Legacy is the prime mover. In our pursuit for the attainment of material success, non-bottom line entities like ethics and the environment take a backseat. The shift from collective societies to literary societies have not only alienated people from their neighbours; breeding competition and conflict fuelled by greed but this has placed a very heavy burden on existence. The unrelenting need for everything we do to be measurable; which means it can therefore be attached to a price. We hope we are cutting it according to the success standards of the day; that we are passing the existential Turing test of leaving a legacy when the grim reaper makes an appearance.

 

In his Youtube video, The Mark of Cain, Jonathan Pageau says ‘It is the capacity to see the other human as so completely outside of yourself as to be able to take his life… There is an irreconcilability between the internal and the external man, such that he perceives the external as dangerous and he sees his lack (vulnerability) as needing to be added unto’. Jonathan was describing Cain’s fratricide and Adam and Eve’s condition post-The Fall. I think the consequences of The Fall are in and of themselves allegorical and can then find their applications in a myriad of real-life situations; including the literary man’s current condition. The adoption of the ways of literary societies have produced a separation akin to The Fall. This separation has played out as a separation from everything else (the natural world) and also from other people (they become a danger because we are competing for resources) and also a separation from the self where our vulnerability (mortality) casts a long shadow over our entire lives. It is to live in square houses with high walls flitting from one thing to the next.

 

The Flynn Effect is the tendency of IQ scores to change over time, and specifically the apparent increase in intelligence in the general population evidenced by a steady increase in IQ scores. James Flynn, in his Ted Talk describes the exponential increase in IQ recently and attributed this increase to the ability to think abstractly and this is no doubt due to literacy. Abstract thinking has been heralded as good conclusively. Walter J. Ong writes ‘without writing, the literate mind would not and could not only think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it comes to composing its thoughts in oral form. More than any other single invention writing has transformed human consciousness.’

 

Frederica Mathewes-Green in conversation with Jonathan Pageau in his YouTube video ‘How we exist together: Re-enchantment and orthodox’ in discussing A.R. Luria’s Cognitive Development: It’s cultural and social foundations says ‘They (people who live in oral societies) recognised them (the things & people around them) as friends in a sense, as things they already knew, as things that were part of the story of the lives. That they are participating in the story amongst other people and they are enmeshed in all these touchable, tangible things that are around them.’ In his studies Luria would ask the people to select the item that does not fit in with the rest (typical pattern recognition IQ question style) e.g. a saw, hatchet, hammer and a log. Literate people would say the log and the people from oral societies would reply that everything fits together because without the log then what would the point of the existence of the others be. ‘They resisted reducing things to abstraction and I think that’s the sickness that we have.’ Jonathan Pageau adds ‘We understand health through disease; we understand things through their exception. We look at things that don’t work to understand things that do work.’ In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates says writing is bad because it means people will no longer be able to remember things and they will be wholly depended on writing. Writing as any other supplement has given and it has taken away. It’s not that illiterate people didn’t believe in their personal story but saw their story imbedded within that of the collective, intertwined and interwoven to form a bigger story (The logos of the stoics and the Way of the Tao). As a result of competing internecine stories, there is no union, no coming together. I’d compare oral societies to a Christmas tree with a single apex point (the multiplicity at the bottom coming together to form an apex) and literary societies to a thornbush with many points pointing in many different directions (Richard Rohlin). It is because of this separation that we are weak like a single strand of hair and we have to be adding on perpetually by running ourselves ragged on the hedonic treadmill, always adding yet remaining ill at ease because we are on psychological death row. When people in oral societies were asked that typical interview question ‘Who are you?’ or ‘Tell me about yourself’. The people replied with ‘only the people around me who live with me can you tell you who I am’. In literal societies, we are very quick to assert our ‘I’s. The people in oral societies understood the concept of ‘communitas’ and their role in the community. We cannot even accuse them of a lack of self-awareness because according to the book Insight by Tasha Eurich, we are not as self-aware as we think. Who we think we are and how other people see us are usually at odds. Literate people rely on their sight so much that it doesn’t just distract us but misleads us. We are not able to see clearly, our sight provides us a dysmorphic representation of our reality. In A. R. Luria’s The Mind of a Mnemonist, he writes a portentous line ‘perhaps this account of a man who ‘saw’ everything will play some part in the difficult course that lies ahead’. A reminder of Alfred Korzybski’s words, ‘the map is not the territory’.

 

There is a hope however, and it is provided by both Socrates and Phaedrus in Phaedrus. Socrates offers a prayer to Pan, ‘Give me beauty in the inward soul and may the outward and inward soul be at one’ and Phaedrus, ‘Ask the same for me, for friends should have all things in common.’ This is the ethos of oral societies. There is oneness in the interior and exterior man; subsequently with the man and his neighbour and eventually with man and his community, world and universe. Of course there is no going back and besides, I think I speak for many when I write ‘I love books, books, books, books; books I do adore.’ It is time to lay down our arms and dissolve the individual frontier wars and carry out the domino effect of this dissolution to everything else; to transcend according to Scott Kaufman which ‘allows for higher levels of unity and harmony within oneself and with the world’. It is time to take hold of each other’s hands, work together and face this existential eschatological Garmonbozia (David Lynch) together.

 

Marshal McLuhan writes that whenever a new medium replaces an existing one, the existing one becomes art. I think it’s time we enter the museums and remove the implications of oral societies from the walls and reintroduce them into societies; that we may be able to live better, freer, harmonious and sustainable lives. Robert Greene in Mastery quotes Marcus Aurelius ‘keep reminding yourself of the way things are connected, of their relatedness’. David Whyte (The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship) brings us into a more interactive stance. ‘We want to give this meeting of the inner and outer voice in the world. We bring what is inside us into conversation with what seems outside of us. We do this because it is only in this form of created joy and satisfaction that human beings lose their fear of death and disappearances.’