Is Democratic Imperialism The Answer (3)?

The glaring failure of democratic imperialism is there for all to see, except for one thing, the demagogic blindness of those red-hot unpatriotic partisan varieties who simply refuse to take stock of, let alone acknowledge, the litany of apocalyptic deficiencies publicly identified with their preferred political affiliations or ideological choices. Of course there are rational grounds for this kind of partisan inflexibility displayed by a majority of The People. It does however seem that, neither democratic imperialism nor constitutional dictatorship allows for deeper penetration of analytic liquidity in the exercise of rationalization within the broad spectrum of cognitive possibilities, given the notable proliferation of political epicaricacy across The Country’s political divide.

This stiff tendentious behavior may appear contrary to the dictates of progressive intellection, more so because the architectonic operationality of the human brain is such that neurological plasticity provides a range of freedoms and choices which man needs to enable him negotiate the terrain of nature’s unpredictability. This is like saying nature has benevolently handed over to man a secret code to help him gain ready access to nature’s heart of secrets. The secret code itself may be a Pandora’s box, a knotty existential state of affairs requiring stabs of innovative intellectual exertion to unravel. Yet, whenever there is an action, there certainly appears to be a corresponding reaction. This contention may not be needfully complementary when one considers the fact that internecine conflation of “action” and “reaction,” in the case of inexpert persons, has the potential to upset an individual’s psychological equanimity and emotional balance, supposedly.

Further, evidence of ideational bankruptcy on the part of The Country’s political elites to restrain the epidemiological swelling of national ailments may itself originate from a clear symptomatology of internal inconsistencies, a theory predicated on blatant absence of creative political choices for policy makers. The fact of the matter is that these creative choices are there, quite conspicuously so, except that, possibly, the rigid particularities of partisan encumbrances, purity of ideological exclusivity, and prideful hesitance of The Country’s leadership to snatch the elastic possibilities of the human faculty stand in the way of the collective politics of national prioritization. This polemic ostensibly advertizes airs of collective indictment of the national conscience, although it is also a question that does not gloss the crucial element of individual culpability in the collective failure of national policies to reverse the crippling curse of poverty owing to active nationalization of political incompetence, to individual responsibility for the devastating shortcomings of the national enterprise.

What is the basis of our claim? After all, government as abstract instrumentality does not preclude the important element of society’s moral responsibility answering to questions of reified connotations directly bordering on the existential actualities of man, as exercised through the combined effort of human agency. For instance, a pride of lions connotes a collectivity of animals acting in concert to protect their territorial interests and collective survival among other pressing needs, so does human anatomy imply an optimal portmanteau of individual body parts physiologically acting in concert to drive the regulatory homeostasis of the human organism. Thus, the loss of a lion or of a body part, say, may constitute a functional instance of death or life in terms of the concept of instinctual integrity surrounding the internal strategic dynamics of socialization among a pride of lions, its relationship to the external world of biological uncertainty, as well as of the mortal danger of homeostatic imbalance to the survival of the human organism, respectively. Stated otherwise, a seriously diseased body part may momentarily or permanently actuate the shutting down of an entire system of human anatomy.

Therefore, renal or kidney failure, for instance, does not necessitate diagnostic examination of a patient’s nose size or nasal index. Against this backdrop, it does make sense to closely examine the constituent elements of government as points of reference for institutional defects when the aggressive blaze of national crises rises to the intimidating heights of the heavens. Here, an underlying point of reference is to take the legislature, the judiciary, and the executive arms of government apart in their atomistic nakedness in search of the etiological locationality of national disaster. Yet the concept of government is a direct innovative artifact of human imagination. In a sense the human mind, therefore, constitutes the originating or primordial link to his environment, which is itself an outcome of his intellection, when it also appears the central idea of “environment” is of immanent fashioning rather than of being extrinsic to the ontological actualities of human consciousness.

Thus the seat of human consciousness, the mind, is a battlefield for the contesting claims of ideas, be it God, gods, ancestors, Satan, ghosts, witchery, sexual drive, murderous intents, survival, philanthropy, gustation, and so on. Besides, the fact of the environment being a product of human imagination does not, however, exclude the notional ontology of mutual interactivity between the two neighborly worlds, the mind and the environment. Another good example relates to the experimental activity of chemical equilibrium where reactants and products concurrently socialize with each other through an entropy relationship subject to conditionalities of externality, human interventions included, and of internality. This instance of experimental conditioning can also be likened to the internal dynamics of a balance sheet where correct debit and credit entries undergo transformational episodes of mutual impaction, a process, which, in turn, imputes numeric equilibration to an otherwise abstract economic or industrial activity.

The unspoken assumption here points to another crucial fact of human existence, that every human process feeds on a set of conditionalities and constraints, however abstract or empirical the nature of this process. This requires courage and a combination of other virtues to sail through the glacier of life challenges. Assata Shakur is right to note: “But we were to find out quickly that courage and dedication were not enough. To win any struggle for liberation, an overall ideology and strategy that stem from a scientific analysis of history and present conditions.” In fact, Assata’s rhetorical eloquence correctly establishes science, not emotionalism or affectationism, as a secular version of liberating theology based on the instrument of radical rationalization, linking the existential actualities of the past to the prevailing circumstances of modernity. Of course, emotion has its place in human and animal biology as part of the general question of instinctual survivability, but the rationality of the scientific method, it seems, possesses the power, a writ of habeas corpus sort of, to call the subjectivity of emotionalization into question.

On the other hand, mediation between scientific rationalization and emotionalization is required to establish an element of innate harmony within an individual’s intellectual personality and across the analytic landscape of policy decision making. It matters a lot if the scientific approach in question meets the rigors of contemporary analytics. It is that Assata’s postulate on the question of rigorous scientificity certainly puts the modern science of fingerprinting ahead of the archaic archeology of the Bertillon system. It also remotely implies man has some degree of elastic control over the innate dynamics of the mind, once again, subject to conditionalities of neural socialization, to constraints of neurologic inelasticity and fluctuating levels of neurotransmitters in the brain. Other indispensable factors affecting the final artifactual outcomes of the thinking process, includes, but not limited to, education, mores, social order, religion, personal convictions, religion, age, society’s level of industrialization, sex, and degree of individual and group psychological health. Then the additional layer of cultural particularity factors in.

We should add that human individuality and nationhood are compositions of material and nonmaterial essences. The factorial admixture of these existential artifacts regarding the fluid identity of human psychologization plays out in the crystallizing of an individual’s or a society’s intellectual and spiritual make-up. In the meantime, these factorial elements and others not directly mentioned here as well as in the preceding paragraphs, serve as hidden locations for the endless inventory of human foibles and strengths, a contentious notionality which emphatically impacts moral credence to another proverbial wisdom, that, man’s failures and successes, are, by and large, immanent. Here we think the concept of moral revolution is of imminent value to the correction of human failings. This is bigger for the church or mosque to handle. Thus, we make a bold assertion that moral revolutions are not the preserve of religion, and that they need not necessarily be borne on the scoliotic back of anarchy, firing squad, or bloodshed. Interestingly moral revolutions begin and end in the human mind!

It is also of great consequence to men and women of conscience that the barbarism of the French Revolution, the moral execration of Talibanism, and the moral cowardice of Al-Shabab, Boko Haram, Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Lord’s Resistance Army, to name but a few, are mitigating exemplars of the universal! Predictably, moral revolutions do not pretend to hold all the answers in the specified domain of moral certainty where situational categories of economic, cultural, social, and political transformations constitute popular intellectual frames of public agitation for social justice. Adding to that, we posit the promise of immediate success from moral revolutions is predicated on public consensus and that success requires a continuous injection of moral regeneration into the social thick-skin of popular consciousness. That makes “revolution” technically a constant process, an evolutionary response to the fickleness and pessimism of the human condition.

Many at times moral revolutions are effectuated through the cracking whip of the gun, other times through a combination of methods: Social pressure, boycotts, civil disobedience, well-coordinated public demonstrations, liberation theology, intentional violation of constitutional authority and structures, etc. Malcolm X, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Jesus Christ belong in the second category; Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro, Amilcar Cabral, and Che Guevara belong in the first category. But there exists a major difference between the two classes with regard to methodology: Unlike those in the second category, members of the first category combine the two approaches in a manner of effective execution.

There is an interesting overlap between the two methodologies: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s civil disobedience led to deaths, so too was Fidel Castro’s armed revolution. In other words, sometimes collateral damage is inevitable, a normal existential happening when The People choose to exercise their rights against the concrete walls of secular autocracy and religious fundamentalism. Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” and Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up” and Peter Tosh’s “Equal Rights” and Dennis Brown’s “Revolution” speak to this. Dennis Brown’s roots reggae track “Revolution” has the following lines: Do you know what it takes to have a revolution? And what it takes to make a solution? Are you ready to stand up and fight the right revolution? Are you ready to stand up and fight it just like soldiers?

Likewise, Public Enemy’s Chuck D pours out the following rap lyrics on the track “Fight the Power”: “Got to give us what we want; gotta give us what we need; our freedom of speech is freedom or death; we got to fight the powers that be…” Tupac’s rap track “Words of Wisdom” has a similar revolutionary message for the powers that be. Those are some of the major questions moral revolutions have attempted to address throughout history. Do we even recall the kind of moral revolution which Leymah Gbowee’s Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace waged to bring the Liberian Civil War to closure? What are all these saying? The moral of the narrative is that social gullibility and political inaction in the face of the widening gap between rich and poor, squandermania, political corruption, institutional failure, social fermentation, mounting national debt, and political ineptitude is unacceptable. That is when moral revolution comes in!

Again, moral revolutions are predictably won in the human mind, not on man-made battlefields! In that regard the human mind is where public agitation against corruption, anomie, social deviance, and other human defects has to be waged. Then, going back to our earlier assertions, we propose a new radical theory of national soul-searching in which The People take a sincere look at themselves, severally and collectively, in the mirror of spiritual, intellectual, and moral rebirth. The moral and spiritual renewal of the human mind is long overdue. However, the only hindrance to possible realization of this project of national renewal may relate to constant change of the colors of spirituality and morality along the modernizing paths of cultural time. But change is not an excuse for collective inaction. Neither is it an excuse to laze the collective intellect away. The spiritual actionability of the individual self as well as of the collective self is nature’s key to rebirths of moral civilizations, what we talked about earlier. A moral civilization may be personal or communal, or both. And civilization is fundamentally human, another product of human imagination.

What do we mean by “spirituality”? We actually do not mean the simplistic claims of righteous hypocrisy or of moral superiority made on behalf of organized religion, religion for short, by self-appointed spokespersons of transcendence. What is the point? We are directly referring to a certain degree of internal moral compunction, Ubuntu, driving one human being to do right by his or her neighbors. Self-love, respect for social order, propensity for philanthropy, patriotism, aversion to political corruption, open-mindedness, outright rejection of religious and political dogmatism, humility, righteous indignation, hard work, virtuous living, social justice, and healthy respect for nature are model manifestations of that internal moral compunction. As it is there is always a heavy social cost to society when the latter comes under secular or public attack against a backdrop of ethnic nationalism. Accordingly, a nation-state is as strong as the covalent bond of multiethnic homogenization and as weak as the London dispersion bond of ethnic Balkanization.

Alas, like public clamor for rigid institutional separation between state and religion, we believe it is high time partisan politics and ethnic nationalism got partitioned, an ontological experience not dissimilar to a parting of the physical body from the etheric body at the point of legal death. Meanwhile, civilization does end at the level of legal birth where an individual constitutes the primary focus of transmigration. Yet civilization is sustained and nurtured by human communities. Civilization also comes in varied echelons of industrial development and cultural manifestations. Apartheid, Jim Crowism, Nazism, social Darwinism, neocolonialism, ethnocentrism, racism, child slavery, terrorism, and political corruption are negative civilizations. De-colonialism and Ubuntu and philanthropy are positive civilizations. The irony is that a hybrid of negative civilizations and positive civilizations do coexist in communities of human derivation.

This theory underscores the notion that civilization is culturally malleable under the manipulating agency of the human intellect.

We shall return…