Objectivity can help clear ethnic debris choking our minds

Sydney's morning papers sit on display at a news kiosk on May 17, 2017. HOTO / WILLIAM WEST | AFP

What you need to know:

  • True, free worship allows you to entertain as “miraculous” any event you cannot yet explain.
  • Never use free worship to commit your whole newspaper to your own personal subjectivism.

From my decades of editorial newspaper service, I know how dedicated our reporters are to making statements with absolutely no information value about something else that one has already stated in the same breath.

Who needs to be told why any keeper must feed his animals?

If information is your profession, what can you mean by the headline “EU donates Sh17m animal feed to keep livestock alive”.

I culled that wisdom from a Kenyan newspaper recently. Anybody can see the words “… to keep livestock alive …” are completely unnecessary.

ACHIEVE SAGACITY

The statement makes full sense without them. Hence the question: Can even the Devil achieve the sagacity that The Star recently claimed for a European Union donation?

Except under the editor-in-chief’s third-degree lamplight, never assert the obvious as news.

Never insist on any absurdity as an objective event. True, free worship allows you to entertain as “miraculous” any event you cannot yet explain.

But never use it to commit your whole newspaper to your own personal subjectivism.

That was why, during a job interview, nobody could legitimately ask you to state your religion.

FREE WORSHIP

In a country which stresses free worship, the Constitution silently asserts salvation is a matter between you and your personal saviour.

That is why you must leave angels, ghosts, miracles and Satan out of the pages of what purports to be activities only of human beings.

For your object is only to sell such activities as can be fully attributed to human beings of all races, religions, genders, nations, tribes and age groups.

Where a narrowly subjective activity, thought or natural gift is attributed to anything as subjective as religion, sect, sex and tribe, it is sure to cause friction within a society or between societies.

Where you allow the extremely demented thoughts of an Adolf Hitler to be the inspiration of a whole highly educated nation, like Germany recently, there, you are sailing towards a world catastrophe of the kind into which Nazi Europe recently plunged humankind.

EXTREME STUPIDITIES

If a people as highly educated as the Germans had not allowed itself to succumb to the extreme stupidities of a certain Fuehrer as its chief source of national inspiration, there might have been no Second World War into whose debris millions of good human beings lie buried.

Yet every human disaster has its rewards.

From the tragedies into which Europe’s ethno-racial chauvinism has recently plunged mankind, the species has had a chance to learn the lesson that complete objectivity in reporting one another’s activities throughout mankind’s world is what can bring all peoples to see that they have only one destiny.

That is why mankind should by now have rejected Europe’s habit of reporting the world only in terms of upper class Europe’s needs.

RECOGNITION

The crying need is for all sections of mankind to report one another only with concern and care, only truthfully, objectively and with full recognition of and respect for the humanity of all of the earth’s national, racial, religious, gender and age groups.

Hence the need to report all human work and thought, including those you may not agree with, completely objectively.

Because I accept the principle of free worship, I expect our newspapers to report all human activities, including religious ones, as long as these do not preach socially injurious personal, ethnic, national, political, racial and sectarian subjectivisms.

For who in this world does not know that “… to keep [your] livestock alive …” is the reason you need to feed them adequately? Nay, it is to keep your own self alive that, after long hours of swilling, you will need some food before you go to bed tonight.

As a Kenyan, what exactly would you lose by clearing your whole mind of all the ethnic debris that you have allowed to accumulate there as a result of years of bad ethnic upbringing?