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.’

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.

Transformation this time, not revolution

 

A friend of mine works in the transformation office at the University of Stellenbosch. If there is an institution that is in radical need of transformation, it is Stellenbosch University. She has found the work rather challenging primarily because the very people who are quite comfortable keeping Stellenbosch as is; entrenched in Afrikaans culture, exclusive and alienating to the other races; have been tasked to carry this transformation on their shoulders. You can just imagine the dragging of feet; Resistance with a capital R. One of the things that kept coming up during workshops is the sympathetic response from white staff members. The appropriate response is one when everyone realises we (South Africans) are in this together and we have to help each other navigate the new South African terrain together, with our rather complicated history. As I echo Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki’s words: ‘[South] Africa belongs to all who live in it’ and that attests to its resources as well. The problem with the response of sympathy is that sympathy places the sympathizer at arm’s length from the victim. The action then that follows this type of response is charity as opposed to sharing. Since the word charity has fallen into disrepute (it leaves an unsavoury taste in one’s mouth), it has become replaced with the word philanthropy but both these words have been misconstrued and we have moved away from their original meanings. Dambisa Moyo has a lot to say regarding the disenchantment of philanthropy in her book Dead Aid. I’m disenchanted as well with philanthropy as we know it and advocate for the return to its original meaning.

 

The word charity etymologically referred to the love between Christians. The word philanthropy has Greek origins meaning love of man. Both these words have love as the primary response. To be charitable is to love and to be philanthropic means to love. No sign of sympathetic responses here. The ‘ag shame’ sentiment pervasive in South Africa is insufficient and is altogether rather infuriating. Not only can a sympathetic response only take place where there is distance between the parties involved but it’s also a hierarchical response. The sympathizer places themselves above the marginalised and sends sympathy down to the marginalised. They feel sorry for them but in no way identify themselves with them. They are in effect saying ‘We see you down there in the trenches and we are in no way joining you. Sucks to be you.’ The Christian charity is the Jesus type of love, the sharing of bread and fish amongst all who are present type of love. It is not decadent gala fundraisers and golf tournaments where a Davos type of setup takes place with a handful of people making decisions on behalf of those on the other side of the world. The space between is the very reason love cannot take place. No intimacy, no love. No brushing up against each other in the trenches, no love. Jay Z has a line in Sade’s remix to The Moon and The Sky where he says ‘I guess it’s in the stars for me to love you from a distance’ Great line. Sounds fantastic but in reality it doesn’t hold. Love is a product of proximity which brings us back to Stellenbosch.

 

My disheartened friend felt as though her skills could be better utilised elsewhere and could have a bigger impact than they currently have at Stellenbosch. She was saying that it seemed that the only way Stellenbosch would change is through a complete board overhaul; all twelve of those white men with vested interest keeping Stellies as is should be replaced by people who actually want transformation to take place. She is calling for a revolution; a change from the outside in. Completely understandable but revolutions are a high stakes game; because even those who win lose. They miss out on a collaboration with those who have been overthrown. So I would like to echo Jamie Wheal’s word in his book Recapture the Rapture: ‘This time the aim isn’t revolution; its transformation’. South Africa’s not so distant past is testimony that collaboration is in the best interest of everyone. Our transition to a democratic country has been far from seamless and there are still resentments and injustices that many people are still contending with regarding the transition. To say the apartheid government was reluctant to transition is an understatement. That reluctance can still be felt to this day. The main reason why F.W. de Klerk’s government capitulated is because of the external pressure that the apartheid government was receiving through sanctions. We were being watched and so we needed to act accordingly in the eyes of the world. And so the apartheid government reneged and the ANC came into power. C. S. Lewis’ quote comes to mind: ‘There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up. That will not be the time for choosing; it will be the time to discover which side we really have chosen… now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side.’ The apartheid government did not choose to do the right thing; they did so begrudgingly and so it beggars the imagination why their leader would be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for acting with the world twisting his hand behind his back. Transformation is the right side, it is the right thing to do. History has shown us how it goes down otherwise. It would behoove Stellenbosch to cotton on to this historical lesson and climb on board before the revolution.

 

Recent global events show us that we are at the mercy of the vagaries that threaten to annihilate us as the human race; those we have brought on to ourselves and those completely out of our control. There are bigger threats looming over our heads and we have to triage those threats over anything else. And we have to be united in order to do so. One could ask what the global crises have to do with a small town in the Western Cape of South Africa? Everything. ‘We need to foster more localized solutions to global challenges’ says Jamie Wheal and then we scale up. The privileged and disenfranchised have to work together to make their small place peaceful, free and liveable for everyone before any effort can be channelled towards global challenges. This working together is the very process of transformation where there will be a sharing of space, resources and knowledge and where peace is achieved through justice. And no one knows better than those who live in those spaces daily what will be required to foster transformation there. Not the philanthrocapitalists (what an oxymoron). Us. We have the gnosis. And besides we have learnt from the infamous story of the well, the taps and the angry women; and we have learnt from Bill Gates’ mosquito nets faux pas that the solution cannot come from the outside in. It must come from within. Transformation this time, not revolution. None of the figureheads business either, it fools no one.

 

Even though my friend’s passion for working at Stellenbosch is waning, this is perhaps the time where she and her team knuckle down. They hold the liminal space. They are doing the Samsonian work of pulling the privileged and disenfranchised together. They are dissolving the distance. They are engineering the intimacy required for love of man to take place. They are the ‘men in the arena… daring greatly’. They are the hope and they are compelled to make being a hope a contagion. In Cornel West’s words: ‘The question’s not having hope, the question is being a hope. Having hope is still too detached, too spectatorial. You have got to be a participant. You gotta be an agent.’ And while they set the example, we have the even greater responsibility of being open and vulnerable enough to viscerally feel each other’s pain and to ‘metabolize that pain’ (Jamie Wheal) as fuel for love. To unite. To simply refuse to let other South Africans live in a way we (the privileged) wouldn’t.  We can no longer remain as we are. There are three essential nutrients for humans to flourish as articulated by Jamie Wheal: Beyond, Becoming and Belonging. We then need to move beyond our comforts and avarice, to becoming a people transformed and united, belonging to all of South Africa. ‘They are how we wake up, grow up and show up. Again, and again, for as long as it takes’ (Jamie Wheal).  It really is time for us to wake up, grow up and show up.

A case for Generosity

 

Dedicated to: Sannie Ncube   

Whose generosity has split over in to many different lives.

 

There is a theme that has been recurring in books I’ve been reading, from fiction to non-fiction and even in music. I think it may just be a universal law; not as in a universally known physics law but rather a law on how the universe works. I think it boils down to the fundamental concept of generosity. The law is that when you save or help others, you inadvertently or perhaps even ultimately help yourself. In Susan Newham- Blake’s As If Born to You, Ana, who is a psychologist describes how she went into the field because she was in a way attempting to help herself. Garth Japhet (Like Water is for Fish) suffers from dysthymia throughout his childhood where he had to change schools often and spent a great deal of his childhood in tears when on the surface, nothing seemed to be wrong with his life. He decides to become a doctor when all the academic signs are pointing towards his studying law. He writes that in deciding to become a doctor, he wanted to help others but in effect he was trying to help himself, especially since he was not then aware of what was wrong with him.

Lupe Fiasco runs a similar thread in his album Drogas Wave. In his song Alan Forever, he rewrites the story of Alan’s life centred on this motif. Alan Kurdi drowned during the European immigration crisis when his family was trying to leave Syria. He was three years old and a picture of his washed up body was taken by a Turkish photographer and went viral. In Lupe’s song, Alan becomes an Olympic swimmer, Michael Phelps, with the ambitions of becoming a Jacques Cousteau of sorts, someone who is very comfortable in large bodies of water. A young child falls into the water and Alan saves the child and there are happy endings as opposed to Alan’s real-life endings. In his song Lupe raps: “

‘You should really feel good that you gave your help
Might get you into heaven, might raise your health
Might get a lot of blessings, might raise your wealth
Bet you ain't even know that you saved yourself’

It is in the last line where the motif is echoed. Later in the album, another song titled Jonylah Forever, which carries the theme as well. Jonylah Watkins was a 6 month year old baby who was shot in Chicago. She was with her father in a car and she was killed when a retaliatory attack took place against her father. In Lupe’s song, Hadiya Pendleton who died when she was shot in the back while standing with friends, lives instead and grows up to be a doctor. She decides to go back to the South Side to help the communities there when she could have had her pickings with regards to a job in the medical profession. In returning to Chicago working at the free clinic, Lupe writes:

‘And that's where you (Hadiya) heard the shots and quickly ran outside
And saw a man and a van and a bleeding baby (Jonylah) in his hands
Fading fast, but you knew she could survive
Did everything you could to keep this girl alive
Stabilized until the ambulance arrived
And in that moment, where you gave your help
I bet you didn't know that you saved yourself’

 

In a way, Lupe seems to be articulating that it is only in helping others, that we truly become immortal and we live forever. Richard Powers in his book, Generosity, writes that it is not a coincidence that the word gene appears in the word generosity. To be fully human, is to be generous. I, for one, support this whole idea with élan. As much as I get Richard Dawkins’ selfish gene, I am behind the generous gene. I have seen how life is all the more better for those neurons having fired together. N.E.R.D. was on to something with their band title. No one Ever Really Dies; perhaps the ones who give of their lives are the ones who never die.

Or In Lupe’s words:

You live… FOREVER!!!

 

 

LL Moeketsi