Wole Soyinka - Climate of Fear - The Quest for Dignity in a Dehumanized World

Objections surfaced in the mind — the indelicate, even provocative timing of the French government— indelicate to the extent of almost sounding like a declaration of hostilities! Then the positive role of religious symbols as spiritual and ethical reminders in the consciousness of youthful minds at all times, a corrective mechanism when one might be on the verge of misconduct. In short, the mind was readying itself for the dialogue mode, anticipating even its extension into protest demonstrations on the streets of Paris and the wharfs of Marseilles. Capitulation by the government was a possibility. I foresaw a protracted dialogue, from objective to acerbic — the basic philosophy of education, instruction traditions from different cultures, inductions into age-groups in traditional societies, reconsiderations in view of the vastly changed nature of the world since Socrates preached his “impieties” in the street “schoolrooms” of Athens…

For some, alas, such dialogue was superfluous. A hitherto unknown group — vying to overtake rivals as the terminal censors of our time — warned the French government that it was next in line for a Madrid-style reprisal, and should prepare for a season of “sorrow and remorse” for its perceived assault on the Islamic faith. At first I was numbed, then surprised at my reaction. Of course, in the world we now inhabit, it should be only a matter of time before some public target, preferably even a school, is bombed, and the contested Islamic head scarves are torn off to serve as tourniquets for severed limbs — and even as shrouds.

Here is an even older terminating venture — the ironically named “Right to Life” crusaders in the United States, known plainly as antiabortion militants. One such group — self-styled the “Army of God”—boasts a supportive network for its assassins, one that extends to Europe.Their zeal for the conversion of minds requires that they gun down doctors, police guards, and the occasional patient or passerby. Their effective network provided protection for the one who named himself “Sword of God” while on the run for murder. Another of the same breed of Christian fundamentalists, an ordained priest, was executed in Texas last year, to a chorus of threats by his support group that they would unleash on the American populace reprisals that would make Timothy McVeigh’s crusade of vengeance look like child’s play. Timothy McVeigh, for the uninitiated, was that remarkable individual who was plagued by a unique social conscience that could be stilled only by his blowing up a public building, one that housed both a state security department and an infants’ school. His timing ensured, naturally, that scores of children were blown apart or maimed for life. McVeigh did not profess any religion. Nonetheless, he was a zealot of his own Supreme Purpose, the manifestation of a private irredentism. His chosen grounds of dispute were neither ideological nor theological, but he presents us with a clear psychopathology of the zealot, one who is imbued with a self-righteousness that must be assuaged by a homicidal resolution. It moves all possible discourse away from even the dogmatic monologue of I am right, you are wrong — itself a dead end — to one of I am right; you are dead.

The sacred — including the infant crèche — appears to diminish by the day, drowned perhaps by the saturation of the world in the rhetoric of sacrosanctity. Here is another lesson from school, an autobiographical note to consider in the collapse of logical (?) expectations from an evolving world:

The boarding school that I attended in Ibadan, Nigeria, was not without its share of bullies. My class was cursed with a singularly vicious specimen against whom we, the smallest and thus the most vulnerable, adopted a very simple strategy: we formed what, taking our cue from history books, we called the Tripartite Coalition. We summoned the bully into our presence and formally announced to him that, from then on, an attack on any one of the three of us would be considered an attack on all three. We moved together as much as possible, especially when changing classes or on the playing fields. Our strategy held the bully in check for a while, but he soon discovered that all he had to do was bide his time — since we could not always be together — and then pounce on the isolated wanderer. Unfortunately for me, I had a tendency to wander off on my own. Because of this, taken together with the fact that he had decided in his mind— perhaps because I was the smallest — that I was the architect of this defense agreement, he constantly stalked me and tried to teach me a lesson.

Well, I also had an answer to that. I schooled myself to keep to a certain perimeter whose center was the school chapel. I already had certain agnostic tendencies — which would later develop into outright atheistic convictions— so it was not that I believed in any kind of divine protection.What mattered was that he did.Well, not protection as such, but — interdiction. He could not bring himself to attack me in a house of worship. So I watched him prowl, taunt, dare, and do everything to invite me out to single combat. All he got in return was an equal dose of insults. Then, when the school bell rang for classes, I took off as fast as my short legs could carry me into the safety of the classroom.

Even the class bully, a creature of quite indeterminate religious conviction, to the best of my recollection, respected the mandates of sanctuary. Today, there are no more sanctuaries left in the world, not even the holy city of Mecca, whose time-honored serenity was shattered some years ago by a bunch of fanatics. Acting from a most ruthless determination, they destroyed all notion of a peaceful affirmation of faith that eliminated, for a few days of spiritual rapture, all distinctions of race, color, class, wealth, and so on, in what sometimes appeared to be a single concourse of one humanity. Nothing that the world knows today equals the annual hajj to Mecca, neither the combined pilgrimages of other religions, nor those of rival deities, such as the football World Cup. And thus, appropriately for our times, this proved the setting for the most heinous act of religious desecration that the modern world has known. The recent massacre in Iraq that accounted for nearly two hundred worshippers, a massacre that was timed for the holy festival of the Shiite sect of the Islamic faith, naturally shocks and dispirits, but it counts almost as a footnote to the memory of the outrage that was inflicted on the harmonizing potential of that concourse of humanity, one that does have its lessons even for non-Muslims or, indeed, nonbelievers in any deity.

We have to speak to religion! True, the issue is fanaticism, but this does not exonerate the mother — secular ideology or religious indoctrination — from the lapses of the child. We are obliged to recognize, indeed, to emphasize, the place of injustice, localized or global, as ready manure for the deadly shoots of fanaticism. However, the engines of global violence today are oiled from the deep wells of fanaticism, even though they may be cranked by the calculating hands of politicians or the power-hungry. These sometimes end up being run over by the juggernaut they have set in motion, but the lesson appears to be constantly lost on the next contenders for political domination. They believe that they have uncovered a secret that the erstwhile contender for power failed to grasp, and proceed to unleash a monster on an unprepared polity. It is time for all to recognize that there is no regulating mechanism for the fanatic mind. The sooner this is accepted, the earlier we can move to addressing the phenomenon of fanaticism in its own right. Not for nothing do the Yoruba warn that Sooner than have a monster child meet a shameful death in the marketplace, it is best that the mother strangle it in the secret recesses of the home. What this means, quite simply, is that the primary burden of exorcising the demon that escaped from the womb rests on the same womb that gave it life. Today, there is urgent need for Mother Religion, of whatever inclination, to come to the rescue of humanity with the benevolent act of infanticide.