To err is human but we must strive to correct the errors

If, as a method of coming by the national leader, elections are not “the be-all and the end-all here” (in Shakespeare’s celebrated phrase), it raises a basic question: How do Kenyans understand the court’s declaration that Uhuru Kenyatta did not really win the last presidential election? 

Because under another form of political evangelism called liberalism  –  that Western Europe has recently downloaded onto humankind – the Much Ado About Nothing  that begins with registration,  passes through polling, counting and announcements and culminates in an inauguration,  many of the individuals in charge of the mechanism are always likely to corrupt the whole thing somehow.

It is either deliberate (in such backward human causes as racism in North America), tribalism (in the Third World) and “genderism” (throughout the world) because, as we know from what passes as “wisdom”, to err is human.

Yet to err can be human only if it leads to positive learning, to error correction, to productive action.

WISDOM

But, as far as I know, the teaching that it is human to err can amount to useful wisdom only if we – all human beings as individuals, ethnicities, genders, nation-states and races – can learn positive lessons from our errors, some of which – like those of Adolf Hitler and his followers in a world which calls itself educated, civilised and humane  – have led humanity to  monumental tragedies.

It is for that very reason that I cast aspersions on the teaching merely that to err is human.

Yes, humanity is prone to error. But that is not what defines our human-ness.

What makes us human is not that we err but that we can act to correct our errors.

The ability to learn useful lessons from our errors and to be able, through such learning, to take positive steps to prevent all future errors – that is what defines our humanity.

SURRENDER TO FATE

Thus to assert it without any resolution on how to move out of such a situation is to surrender to fate, to give in to a social world that human beings themselves  are what have made increasingly inclement, indecent and tragic to human beings.

That, even as we race towards the centre of another century, such usually negatively alienating thoughts as tribe, nation, race and religion continue to dominate humanity’s thinking  and action.

All governments – especially those of the so-called First World – spend most of their political energies scheming how to rob the world and thus how to starve the world’s children and mothers into heart-rending mass deaths.

For, the teaching that to err is human is completely negative unless it is immediately followed by an effective corrective measure.

MENTAL SUPERIORITY

Without such a measure, such a teaching must culminate in “surrenderism” of the kind that once forced the intelligentsia of the black race all over the world to surrender to the alleged mental superiority of the Caucasian race. If that process is inevitable, then any attempt to avert it must seem futile. 

But it looks self-evident that learning – including from our own mistakes – is a uniquely human gift much more positive than most human beings ever seem capable of seeing.

It is a failing which must be attributed, not to our specific nature, but only to our upbringing.

COLONISED

The fact has long been familiar to the very Western European and North American classes when once – after those classes had colonised the entire human world and later, in an attempt to render less painful the whole process of Euro-North America’s world political overlordship – imposed on it the process alleged to be “democracy” in an attempt to render it less painful and  less able to create a revolutionary climate. 

Quite surely, to err is human. But our humanity becomes even astoundingly more manifest only when  we take steps to correct the errors with which humanity has wronged humanity ever since we elbowed our way into the evolutionary landscape.  

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