Is our country civilised? Please ask me another

As far as many social commentators are concerned all over the world, to be civilised is not the same thing as to be humanised, namely, to be fully informed and fully refined in the mind.

Much less is it the same thing as to be manually skilled and technically efficient.

If it were, how would you explain the crudity and happy-go-lucky mindlessness with which human beings continue to slaughter one another even in the world’s most civilised country?

The importance of that question may be smothered by humanity’s own general misunderstanding of the idea of civilisation.

HUMAN SLAUGHTER

That is the burning question concerning especially the slaughter of human beings that somebody has just perpetrated somewhere in the United States of America.

That dastardly crime has been perpetrated, namely, in the most civilised society that human beings have ever created?

Civilised? Is the United States the world’s most civilised society? If it is, then the question is immediate.

Why, in such a society, has human slaughter degenerated into a children’s game?

ROB

From a society where the national econo-political elite mercilessly robs not only the broad mass but also humanity in its whole planetary configuration, “to have extreme” – as William Shakespeare called it in a sonnet – has become the only motivating factor in human conduct, including in international relations.

This unconscionable and undignified individual rush for economic filth all over the place is the question.

However, to answer it adequately, one must first distinguish clearly between a people’s industrial development and its general civilisation.

In terms of industry, you can soar like the United States towards heaven and yet, in terms of human relations, remain at the very bottom of the human mind’s development ladder.

To be quite sure, in terms of industrial production and vertical accumulation of economic and cultural wealth, the United States of America is what the inimitable English Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon would have called “the nonpareil”, the one who – like “Jaffer the Barmicide” (also of English poetry) – has no peer.

DEVELOPED

Yet, in vertical terms, the US is the most developed society that human beings have ever created.

But, precisely because, so far, such accumulation of wealth is always vertical, it leaves most members of practically all the human society in horizontal filth and teeth-gnashing.

Quite clearly, then, “development” depends. You can tower like New York City’s monoliths and yet remain as backward mentally as the managers of those latter-day Babels.

The question that stares at you is: In terms of the ideal called civilisation, what is the use of creating a Tower of Babel of wealth if that wealth will not filter down from the pinnacle of the tower to its bottom to benefit what Kenya’s constitution-making debaters used to call “Wanjiku”?

MASS OF HUMANITY

The question gapes as scarily as Medusa’s face. In exactly what does your civilisation consist when it leaves the mass of humanity gnashing their teeth all over the country without in any way jarring the conscience of your so-called leaders?

Yet, as far as I am concerned, that question can be answered adequately only if you can satisfactorily define “civilisation”.

As far as I know (from my books on world history), to civilise is to bring a critical mass of human beings up to a certain height of economic production, cultural enjoyment and mental strength.

To civilise is to bring the general members of a human community up to a certain level of mental knowledge of their society and its history.

A people become civilised by raising themselves, through their own indigenous bootstraps, up to a comity of political governance over that property and up to a certain level of refinement of the common mind to full reflection over that whole question.