Feature Article of Sunday, 7 September 2014

Columnist: Kwarteng, Francis

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 Countrys 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 natures unpredictability. This is like saying nature has benevolently handed over to man a secret code to help him gain ready access to natures heart of secrets. The secret code itself may be a Pandoras 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 individuals psychological equanimity and emotional balance, supposedly.

Further, evidence of ideational bankruptcy on the part of The Countrys 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 Countrys 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 societys 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 patients 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, Assatas 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 individuals 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 Assatas 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, societys level of industrialization, sex, and degree of individual and group psychological health. Then the additional layer of cultural particularity factors in.

Continued here:
Is Democratic Imperialism The Answer (3)?