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.’

R. Kelly: The man, the artist and the art

 

In an interview with Aubrey Marcus, Jamie Wheal says ‘My default setting is hopeless romantic’. I could completely sympathize as that is my default setting as well. I have a tough exterior but my insides are goo therefore it should then come as no surprise that I have a favourite love song (The Scientist by Coldplay), book (Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez), favourite love film (Wicker Park) and favourite celebrity couple (Caiphus Semenya and Letta Mbulu). Although Coldplay holds the number 1 spot, there is an entire top ten of love songs one of which being ‘I’ll never leave’ by R. Kelly. The year was 2013 when The Chocolate Factory graced our hearts and our speakers. If you know anything about me, I play my music forte much to the chagrin of my neighbours who probably think I’ll outgrow it but what they don’t grasp is that this listening-to-music-loudly thing is genetic and all I can say by way of explanation is that I am my mother’s daughter.

So one Sunday morning I stream it through my car speakers and recall a conversation I had with a friend earlier this year in Sunninghill. The topic of conversation was Ravi Zacharias, MLK and R. Kelly and he emphatically expressed how he would never buy R. Kelly’s music again because he and I quote ‘won’t support a child abuser’. This knee-jerk reaction is very popular in today’s cancel culture. When someone transgresses worse than we have done then we take a self-appointed seat on our high moral pedestals and cast judgment. This judgment is like that unforgiving monopoly card that says ‘go straight to jail, do not pass begin’ which plays out in modern day culture as being ‘cancelled’. At least in Monopoly you are able to re-participate in the game as opposed to our cancel culture that wants to pretend you never existed to begin with. No atonement. No ‘go back to start’. Nothing. You are torn out of all the history pages and there is a black ink blot wherever your name use to be. I hope this essay, more than anything, allows us to pause and reflect before detonating people and their life’s work with our thumbs.

In Rene Girard’s Mimetic Theory, he establishes how social interactions amongst human beings culminate in sacrifice, time and time again; which is why sacrifice is an element of many different tribes around the world. Girard is often referred to as the accidental Christian because what his theory leads to ultimately is Jesus Christ who paid the ultimate sacrifice. Many gods have walked the corridors of Hades to bring someone back to life: Isis brought Osiris back to life, Semele brought Dionysus back to life and other gods who were brought back to life include Inanna, Adonis, Romulus, Asclepius, Ba’al and Melqart. Even Jesus brought Lazarus and Jairus’ daughter back to life. The distinguishing factor between Jesus and the other gods is that Jesus Christ went to the worst place (Hades) and gave his life but in doing so, just as Samson brought down the pillars in the temple of Dagon, Jesus brought down the pillars of Hades thereby conquering death. So what does that have to do with R. Kelly? That basic pattern appears with events circumscribing R. Kelly’s downfall. R. Kelly became our scapegoat which Jesus was and which is the step that precedes sacrifice in Girard’s work. R. Kelly was ultimately sacrificed by being ostracized. R. Kelly’s presence in our society and the very acts he committed are those that happened in the societies that we live in, his transgressions are an indictment on the societies we have built. He mirrored our complicity to us in the ‘monsters’ we produce in society. And because a whole bunch of us are in denial of our shadow sides; whenever someone shows us this part of ourselves, we react with rancour and make attempts to repress these sides of ourselves by removing those who mirror them to us from our sight. We numb our guilt by engaging in a sort of collective amnesia and choose to form our identities through scapegoating.  

Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear) writes ‘One thing that does predict violent criminality is violence in one’s childhood. For example, Ressler’s research confirmed an astonishingly consistent statistic about serial killers: 100 percent had been abused as children either with violence, neglect or humiliation (with the exception of people suffering from no-fault diseases).’ R. Kelly himself suffered at the hands of abusers when he was a child and this is precisely what we have chosen to forget in order for us to delineate between the bad man that R. Kelly is and the good society that we raise our children in. We choose to forget all about schismogenesis and that R. Kelly is a victim of said processes. He was a victim and he became a victimizer. Our reaction to his abuse has been to harden our hearts and become ever so indignant towards him. Whereas, we could have stood in a place of understanding and introspection into how we have allowed the society that he grew up to have existed in the first place. ‘Difficult childhoods excuse nothing but explain many things- just as your childhood does’ (Gavin de Becker). The healing he afforded the world through his art was sadly not afforded to him.

Speaking of healing, the word ‘pharmaceutical’ would conventionally invoke the spirit of the Hippocratic oath and has now become synonymous with the nefarious, iatrogenic, profiteering Big Pharma. The word ‘pharmaceutical’ is derived from the word ‘pharmakon’ which is Greek for drug (both poison and cure). In Plato’s Phaedrus, there are other similar words that are mentioned and I think these tie together in the deconstruction of R. Kelly’s fall. One such word is ‘pharmakos’ (sacrifice) and ‘pharmakeus’ (poisoner, sorcerer or magician). R. Kelly embodies all three of these ideas: healer (drug), sacrifice and sorcerer. I’ve elucidated on the sacrificial aspect of his persona in preceding paragraphs and will spend a bit of time on the other two.

‘I am a giant; I am an eagle, oh,

I am a lion down in the jungle

I am the people, oh, I am a helping hand

I am a hero…

I’m that star up in the sky

I’m that mountain peak up high

Hey, I made it, hmm

I’m the world’s greatest’

These are lyrics to an R. Kelly song I belted when I was a child and it was one of those songs that used to fill me to the brim with possibility. His music has been so empowering and healing. Through that song, we all tune into our inner hero and we enter the ring of life with the greats. We don our white Hero T’s and join R. Kelly in the boxing ring like in the music video. We learn to fight back despite the challenges we face. It is because of songs like his that we do not succumb but overcome. He also speaks a message of unity through that song. I am that little kid in the beginning of the music video who says to R. Kelly ‘Thanks Champ’ for allowing himself to be a conduit of such uplifting and inspiring music.

The third word mentioned is ‘pharmakeus’ which is the sorcerer which he unfortunately becomes. In Phaedrus, Socrates and Phaedrus discuss the Egyptian god of Technology (Theuth) who is also the god of art. They discuss the positive and negative elements of technology and R Kelly himself is an illustration of both the positive and negative of technology i.e. art. R. Kelly aka The Pied Piper of RnB who in his words ‘put the R in RnB’ is a descendent of Theuth. R. Kelly becomes a sorcerer however, because he uses knowledge (gift) that he received, not to obtain more knowledge but to obtain power and yield this power inappropriately which has led to his global widespread condemnation.

W.B. Yeats describes Shakespeare as possessing a characteristic he calls ‘negative capability’, which is the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs without suffering distress (cognitive dissonance) as a result. This is precisely the lens we should view art and artists through; we should be able to separate the art from the man the art came through. We cannot throw away the art because of the fallibility of the artist. They are not one and it takes someone with an opposable mind (Roger Martin) to wrench the two apart and keep them differentiated: To be able to buy R. Kelly’s music without it being enmeshed with ‘supporting a child abuser’ rhetoric. JF Martel and Phil Ford of The Weird Studies Podcast say in a podcast addressing this very issue, that if we are going to value or engage with art depending on the moral character of the artist then we’ll have no art left. And a life without art, I may add, would be akin to being thrusted into the wilderness-terra incognito- with no way of navigating the terrain, without cynosure to point the way and no way to make sense of reality spelling ultimate death.  

Will the real Lebogang Moeketsi please stand up... and step outside

It has been a hard day 

I slam the door 

And the books in me fall off their shelves

Blocking the door

Sealing the world out

As I do the comforting but courageous work 

Of putting the books in me back on their shelves

Clearing the doorway with a sweaty-palm reticence

You call my name as though from the other room

In the way only you can

It still has the underwater ring to it

Like how used to call me when I was safely

Ensconced in your belly floartinng in amniotic fluid

You called my name and I was born and 

Faced the glare of the world

You call my name

And even though it has no physicality 

Since you left me on this side of the veil

It is not silent

The particles of the other room vibrate

Except I know there is no other room

There is the world I need to meet

Lebogang 

Give thanks to she who faces the glare of the world

Born... yet again

With Jesus reminding me that 

He has overcome the world I'm about to step into

Take heart darling daughter

The world awaits your contribution 

African women should breastfeed wherever the need to arises

 

No, this is not the opening title of a feminist manifesto, but rather a critique on the one blanket approach we’ve taken with regards to nudity as opposed to a culture-specific perspective. A comparison between oral and literary societies reveal how cultures inform the different lenses through which things like nudity are to be viewed. Marshall McLuhan in his book, Understanding Media, writes immensely on the differences between oral and literary societies; mainly that literary societies are limited in their perception and there is an over reliance on sight as a sensory input. Whereas with an oral society, hearing does not just involve the ears. McLuhan writes ‘The act of hearing is a group effort for the human body’s organs, involving the ears, the eyes and the skin.’ McLuhan expounds on the McGurk effect which describes how hearing involves the eyes as well. There has to be regularity between the auditory and the visual. For example, if someone mouths ‘ga’ but the auditory input is ‘ba’ then they will report to hearing ‘da’. This is one of the primary reasons I can’t watch anything that has been dubbed; my mind cannot reconcile the movements of the actors’ lips with the words emanating from the screen. Part of the fascination with Chinese films when we were younger lies in the fact that we found the auditory and visual inconsistencies hilarious; not to be taken seriously. Milli Vanilli learnt the hard way that if you are going to lip sync, then remember the operative word ‘synchronization’.

McLuhan also mentions a phenomenon that illustrates how hearing involves the skin. There are certain letters such as ‘p’,‘t’, and ‘k’ which in saying them release a puff of air which is picked up by the skin. This puff of air differentiates those particular letters from ‘b’,‘d’ and ‘g’ respectively. ‘We listen with the entire epidermis’ writes McLuhan. The advent of literacy in modern societies has reduced the sensorium to just sight; and it is through that rather limited lens modern societies have perceived and understood things.

African people have for the most part been oral people; we are the griot people, the people of the ears, the eyes and the skin. It is this particular frame through which we view nudity; in its entirety as a natural part of the environment. When people from literary societies encounter nudity; they do so having been betrayed by their eyes. Their eyes make benign all other sensory input, heightening themselves and creating as a result a sort of fetishistic quality to that which is beholden. The unsurprising reaction to nudity (a bare breast) then would be a gasp from the modern man and he would then be compelled to look away in embarrassment. When an African man encounters a bare breast, he is able to absorb this information in its appropriate context. It is subsumed as a part of the environment because he makes sense of this information holistically; which is why nudity outside of a sexual context is not sexualized. ‘To a person using the whole sensorium, nudity is the richest possible expression of structural form. But to the highly visual and lopsided sensibility of industrial societies, the sudden confrontation with tactile flesh is heady music indeed’ writes McLuhan.

While modern societies have ridiculed African societies to no end on being scantily clad; because the assumption has been that the civilized wear clothes and the barbaric choose to go without them; things like climate or diet not even factoring into these assumptions. While the move to literary media has a lot of positive implications for the cultures in which this media is imbedded, it also has its drawbacks. We then to need to be careful of hiding the drawbacks of certain media under the auspices of the word ‘civilization’. In the words of Mark Manson ‘Everything has trade-offs’. Africans, therefore, have no need to be ashamed when it comes to their sartorial preferences (e.g. ibheshu of the Zulu or the loincloth of the San people) and they also need not be ashamed of that which is natural and intuitive to them like the breastfeeding of infants at any time or place when an infant expresses hunger. The moderns eat in full view of other people in restaurants and yet a hungry infant must take his meals in private because there are people who find his mother’s bare breast indecent. In fact, it is the sexualisation of a child receiving nourishment that is deviant and indecent. An African mother on African soil should never have to cower beneath the contempt of people who themselves haven’t interrogated where this contempt stems from and if they indeed even have a right to be contemptuous in the first place.