We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death. —T. S. Eliot, “The Journey of the Magi”
The world as it is known today has come a long way. Most of human history is irreparably lost to us. Our species, Homo sapiens, has existed for at least 200,000 years, but for most of that time we have next to no idea what was happening. In fact, no country of today existed around10,000 years ago, the same way we cannot be too sure if any country of today will exist 10-20,000 years from now.
To understand the world of today, different fields of human intellectual inquiry that diverged between the humanities and the sciences have championed different views of how our world came to be. While physics has succeeded brilliantly in providing explanations from the domain of the physical world of matter, space, and time, the humanities have largely championed the discussion from the arena of palpable material societies.
Science has different theories about how our world morphed into existence, and the most notable and prominent among these theories is the big-bang theory. In the corridor of the humanities, theories were propounded that explain how states or societies (used interchangeably in this piece) came to be. These theories include, but are not limited to, the Force theory, Divine Theory, Social-contract theory, evolutionary theory, etc. These theories were pushed forward by various scholars from John Locke to Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, etc.
While many aspects of human society are interesting for observation, as well as colorful enough for further inquiry, this piece extends its tentacles to civilization only. The history of human civilization is quite broad and long, but it is of little essence to many people. What holds their water of interest is the events and happenings of today in relativity to their place on the societal ladder of survival. They don’t have much reason to swim in the long pool of human civilization history. Insofar as the question comes up at all, it’s usually when reflecting on why the world seems to be in such a mess and why human beings so often treat each other badly – the reasons for war, greed, exploitation, and systematic indifference to
others’ suffering.
Were we always like that, or did something, at some point, go terribly wrong? It is basically a theological debate. Essentially the question is: are humans innately good or innately evil? But if you think about it, the question, framed in these terms, makes very little sense. ‘Good’ and ‘evil’ are purely human concepts. Nietzsche had argued this many years ago. It would never occur to anyone to argue about whether a fish or a tree were good or evil, because ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are concepts humans made up in order to compare ourselves with one another. Something cannot be good or bad unless you compare it to something else.
This is not only about good and bad; many other concepts or constructs only make sense in comparative terms. For instance, quality. Nothing is either of good quality or poor quality unless you compare it to something else. Therefore, good or bad derive their sense of meaning only in comparison. It follows that arguing about whether humans are fundamentally good or evil makes about as much sense as arguing about whether humans are fundamentally fat or thin. This time-honored intellectual territory is likely to raise eyebrows, but again, this is not the centrifugal concern of this piece. Rather, my focus is the unobserved angle to civilization, which is civilization as feedback.
To the ordinary man on the street, what is civilization? In the Yoruba cosmology, civilization is called OLAJU, which literally translates to mean ‘open-eyes,’ further meaning more exposure. The question then is: more exposed to what? The answer to that question is exposure to the Western world, the world of the white man. Yet, a little bit of scholarly direction is needed here. However, the shelves of libraries contain numerous ponderous tomes treating the history of civilization.
Yet again, authorities often fail to successfully get around to telling us what civilization really means. In The Story of Civilization, Will Durant opines that civilization is a social order promoting cultural creation. Dr. Durant’s definition may not do justice to civilization; however, it succeeded in introducing the concept of culture into the conversation of civilization. The foregoing implies that culture is an embedded construct of civilization; that is, culture is the agglomeration of all forms of human behavior except those which apes and mankind share in common. Simply put, culture is the total way of life of a people, and the total way of life of people forms the basement and the belfry of their civilization.
Over many years of human cadence and existence, people have given pride to their civilization and culture. People say, “This is how we do our things. This is our culture. These are the various things we pride ourselves about and around.” While this has been presented as the real and classic discussion around civilization, the real civilization is the feedback; that is, the unspoken response to certain behavior in society, even if they say something totally different.
For example, food is a central part of culture. The Yoruba people of south-west Nigeria will tell you today that pounded yam and melon soup, or Amala (yam flour) and Ewedu (green leaf) soup is their cultural food, and it is the god of their culinary life. To buttress that point, a particular melodic verse is often accorded to pounded yam. It goes thus: “iyan funfun lele” (the pounded yam is so white), “oba ninu ounje” (a king among foods), “ijoye atata lawujo okele” (a respected chief among morsels), and so forth.
In this culture, what is said about pounded yam’s electrifying respect is, however, largely different from what is observed in respect to the feedback that people get when they want to live up to this celebrated cultural height. The observed reality of the day among the Yoruba people of south-west Nigeria is that people who order pounded yam over fried rice and chicken at a party are more often than not viewed as traditional, archaic people. Meanwhile, people who order Chinese rice, pizza, shawarma, etc., at restaurants over Amala and Ewedu are seen to be the civilized ones. In conversational words, pounded yam is celebrated, but in feedback, disrespect is what pounded yam gets.
The implication of the foregoing is that the civilization of these people is not shaped by what they say they stand for; it is shaped by the feedback they give. Little wonder a whole generation came to be named the Indomie (noodles) generation. No Yoruba man will tell you noodles is their cultural food, but today the feedback given to noodles is positive, and that of pounded yam is largely unfavorable, especially among the younger generation. Even though this is a fruition of cultural hybridity, tastebuds don’t change overnight; the children are evidence of what the parents have fed them from childhood.
This pattern of cultural feedback shaping civilization didn’t start last night; it has been observed by many African writers. Kobina Sekyi documents this in his literary work The Blinkards, which had its setting during the colonial period. The plot brings out the crazy rush for everything European and negative feedback for anything African, and so many people, including but not limited to Mrs. Brofusem, Mr. Tsiba, etc., want to live like English people, hating all African culture. At the beginning of the play, Mrs. Brofusem scolds her servant because he always sweeps cigar-ashes away from the sitting room. She questions him: “Do you know that in England, cigar-ashes are used to kill the moths in the carpet?” (P.18).
Mrs. Brofusem does not allow the Fanti language in the house, only English, and compels her husband to wear pajamas and slippers. Mrs. Brofusem’s lifestyle piques the interest of Mr. Tsiba, a stark illiterate and cocoa magnate who employs the services of Mrs. Brofusem to Europeanize his daughter. This is not just a case of acculturation or cultural imperialism; it is evidence of positive feedback given to behaviour different from what they claim to love. That is, claiming to be African from one side of your mouth while loving Africans who are westernized down to the bed of sleep.
Another case is evident in Achebe’s No Longer at Ease. Obi Okonkwo made two mistakes among his clansmen, which include: when everybody was properly dressed in agbada or European suit, only Obi Okonkwo appeared in his shirtsleeves because of the heat. That was Obi’s mistake Number One. Everybody expected a young man from England to be impressively turned out. Obi’s English was most unimpressive. He spoke “is” and “was.” He told them about the value of education. “Education for service, not for white-collar jobs and comfortable salaries. With our great country on the threshold of independence, we need men who are prepared to serve her well and truly.” When he sat down, the audience clapped from politeness. Mistake Number Two. The foregoing is an indication of the feedback that people who try to remain loyal to what is said of their culture get—largely unimpressive—ushering in a new mindset where people do not listen to what people say about their culture but rather respond to their feedback, and this in turn shapes their society and their civilization.
More so, in today’s world, feedback is often favorable to bad behaviors that people openly criticize. People say, “Oh! Integrity is the best,” yet their feedbacks are always in support of fraudsters and politicians whose lifestyles and behaviors are miles and miles away from integrity. The foregoing often brings to mind the question: why are people so two-faced? What they say is often different from what they really react to. In a country like Nigeria, the fastest way to become a poor man is to uphold all grounds of good morals. A school teacher can hardly feed himself, but an OnlyFans porn star just bought another mansion. In all of these, one truth remains sacrosanct, and it is that civilization has been mistaken to be only about the sub-total of our behaviours, neglecting the other dimension of the things we applaud silently but deny openly.
The reason why many people are not courageous enough to openly involve themselves in the things they silently celebrate is the mechanism of state control. This view of things has been around for a very long time as well. There’s a reason why, in English, the words ‘politics,’ ‘polite,’ and ‘police’ all sound the same – they’re all derived from the Greek word polis, or city, the Latin equivalent of which is civitas, which also gives us ‘civility,’ ‘civic,’ and a certain modern understanding of ‘civilization.’ There was always, in this version, some ‘alpha-male’ leader. Hierarchy and domination, and cynical self-interest, have always been the basis of human society. It’s just that, collectively, we have learned it’s to our advantage to prioritize our long-term interests over our short-term instincts; or, better, to create laws that force us to confine our worst impulses to socially useful areas like the economy, while forbidding them everywhere else. Yet again, our feedback speaks louder than our voice.
People go as far as saying, “We are all thieves; only the man who is caught is the criminal.” But in our culture, we say we love integrity, but the people who thrive most in society are those with zero pinch of integrity. That is why our civilization is characterized by behaviors that ordinarily no culture is proud to accept as their core values. Our civilization, therefore, became a ripple effect of all our feedbacks and not about what we say. The positive feedbacks becomes a reinforcement. A reinforcement of the things we are scared to admit in the open.