You gain precisely nothing by trading words with dimwits

If, like me, you have thrown mental stones publicly for 50 years, you may become thick-skinned about being criticised publicly.

Like Willy Mutunga, I am a major target of extremely bad-tempered words — some even ad hominem through the “social media”.

Yet I was deeply distressed to read in the Press the other day that the Chief Justice spends a lot of his time bandying words with unlikely detractors through Twitter.

For, in my opinion, you gain exactly nothing by replying to the Niagara of intellectually vacuous and morally decrepit words that pour out of the mouths of, say, our national and county legislators, not infrequently through the Press.

Exactly what ethical and intellectual capital can anybody bag by sharing a platform with Jonathan Swift’s Lilliputians?

For, in our country, every Tom, Dick and Harry rushes to the media — especially the allegedly “social” ones with an “opinion” arrived at directly from the blue sky.

Nobody ever studies leave alone conducting any experiment — to arrive at real knowledge.

Moreover, to reply to such an “opinion” is to open a floodgate for additional downpours of intellectual vacuity and moral filth.

That is why I do not participate in your Noachian Deluge of words.

Why do you think that your words will impress me, convince me, convert me, etc, only if the words are excited and aggressive, sexist and bigoted, squalid and risqué?

Don’t you think that, to enter a long-lasting dialogue with me, you need to couch your words in terms that, though powerful, are also factual and persuasive?

Even when your conviction is strongly against mine, in his book, How Does a Poem Mean?, John Ciardi, the celebrated American poetry teacher, advises you to express your difference in a manner that can lead me into at least a “sympathetic contract” with you.

Yet, in our social media, how you say something is already too disgusting to lead the reader into what you are actually saying.

But without the “sympathetic contract” without paying any attention to the “how” of your work or utterance you cannot convince too many people to decamp from one party of ideas to yours.

Political scientists affirm that, at the tactical level, politics is “the art of the possible” the skill in gently attracting as many people as possible to your side.

But you wouldn’t know it from the croaking of many a ruling-party Kindiki and Duale.

Any communicator well educated on human nature knows that the choice of words, the way you arrange and deliver them — the art, the mere container — is what can “lure” the listener or reader (namely, the consumer of your art) into the inner goodies — the socio-moral content or “message” of your work.

No matter how powerful the message of your art your column, editorial, essay, lecture, music, novel, painting, poem, parliamentary speech, sculpture, sermon, rally address or theatre piece — it will not cut any ice unless it is rendered caressingly.

In all human activities, especially in the production of a society’s wherewithal — which, in turn, is what is reflected in and expressed as art — the how (the container) is always as important as the what (the content).

As a content, nyuka (porridge) is not conceivable to a traditional Luo except in a container called agwata – an attractive one to boot.

Yet Kenya’s social media are choke-full of bad manners, bigotry, tribe, sectarianism and sexism.

Every time I take a glance at them, I am hit right smack in the face with childishness, immorality, ignorance, bitterness, philistinism, utter absence of reason.

That is why it appalled me to learn that a person as well educated, as intelligent and as highly placed as Dr Mutunga should waste so much public time in a ping-pong of words with intellectual Lilliputians, individuals whose social awareness raises an equally tumultuous flood of questions.

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