The Trouble with Charlie

The attack on the premises of the Paris-based satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, was a clash of two forms of absolutism. On one hand were the gunmen who claimed the right to summarily execute those they believed had insulted their faith. On the other hand were the artists of Charlie Hebdo who reserved the right to satirize whatever caught their fancy in an uncompromising exercise of their freedom of speech. From Islam’s founding prophet and Christianity’s holy trinity to France’s black female justice minister and the Chibok girls, no one has escaped the magazine’s irreverent depiction.

Without question, the murders were self-evidently wrong. The attack has been portrayed as an extremist assault on freedom of speech. Worldwide, there have been declarations of solidarity with France and affirmations of the sacredness of free speech.

The problem is that absolute free speech is a myth. If it truly existed, countries would not have laws against incitement, sedition, libel, defamation or slander. A world of such boundless liberty would not need Official Secrets Acts. Whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Mordecai Vanunu and Wikileaks would be garlanded for liberating information.

In this parallel universe, racist chants by European football fans would be unobjectionable. There would be no need for censors and artistic license would be completely unfettered. There would be no laws protecting public decency or religious sensibilities from the travesties of the irreverent. Charlie Hebdo would not have fired a staffer in 2009 for anti-Semitism. It would be acceptable to scrawl swastikas and choice portions of Hitler’s Mein Kampf on synagogues. People would not be prosecuted for homophobia, holocaust denial or anti-Semitism. Xenophobia and racism would not carry the whiff of moral odium.

Ironically, barely a week after the Paris attacks, French authorities arrested and charged the comedian, Dieudonne M’bala M’bala, for a Facebook post “glorifying terrorism”. The contradictions and hypocrisies are obvious enough and if prosecuting a comedian for a facebook post seems inconsistent with the odes to free speech that have emanated from Paris in recent days, it can be easily explained. Freedom of speech is a relative term entirely dependent on national experience, the evolutionary trajectory of political institutions and the distribution of power among various classes and interests.

The French Revolution was a revolt not only against the corrupt Bourbon monarchy but also its ally, the Church. It was the insurgence of enlightenment values against the medieval horrors of a religiously-backed tyranny. The 19^th Century French historian Jules Michelet believed that the French Republic would “take the place of the god who escapes us.” Thus, France is a fanatically secular realm whose Muslim population – the legacy of its imperial hey days – poses a particular challenge. Because of its history, France entertains a socio-cultural bias that enables a satirical magazine to caricature its religious and racial minorities (Muslims, Christians and those of African and Middle Eastern descent) under the cover of free speech while a comedian of colour who attempts to exercise the same right is charged with “glorifying terrorism.”

The West sees itself as the last outpost of rationality threatened by the superstitious idiocies of religion. In reality, when the nation-state supplanted religion as the West’s core communal principle, power and violence discarded their overtly religious vestments for secular garments. Secular ideologies appropriated popular devotion. As the English philosopher C.E.M. Joad observed, “Political doctrines such as fascism and communism assume for the twentieth century the status which religious doctrines possessed in the nineteenth.”

Our inherent blind spots prevent us from discerning the secular dogmas which approximate religion’s much vaunted irrationality. Consider Marxism’s assumption of the infallibility of an omniscient proletariat, capitalism’s assumption of the inerrancy of market forces and its veneration of the invisible hand, a metaphor of Calvinist origins that conflates an unfettered free market with providence; fascism’s deification of the state and secular liberalism’s divinization of the self and its sacralization of individual liberties including free speech.

Both religious and irreligious societies maintain speech codes. In the former, they may take the form of blasphemy laws and in the latter they take the form of utterances deemed threatening to the sociopolitical order. In secular France, cartoons that mock religion are not deemed dangerous to public order. Anti-Semitism is treated differently perhaps because of Europe’s lingering guilt over its complicity in the Nazi holocaust. Religious sensibilities are not protected from deliberate offence. Every society has its pet prejudices. France’s Muslim minority appears to be the convenient guinea pig for free speech absolutists but this trend also reflects France’s problem of racial and socio-cultural integration, European uncertainty about what multiculturalism and growing pluralism mean for national identity and coherence, and (largely Islamophobic and xenophobic) fears of a jihadist fifth column in Europe.

Absolute freedom of speech is a myth. There is no individual liberty that is not bounded by the responsibility of competent social being. It is impossible to simultaneously sustain absolute individual freedom and social cohesion. Our freedoms, even when not legally circumscribed, still need to be exercised with reason, empathy and responsibility. At what point does free speech morph into hate speech? This controversy is really about drawing the line between liberalism and extreme licentiousness and radical libertinism. How do we strike a fair balance between artistic license and decency, order and respect for all sensibilities? Isn’t such moderation the truly rational path in a diverse world?

It is possible to deplore the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and concurrently condemn the magazine’s heedless worship of bad taste. It is also possible to support freedom of speech and also advocate using it responsibly.





images sourced from labourlist.org

The State of the Future

The Enugu State Government’s recent full page advert congratulating Chiwetel Ejiofor, the British actor of Nigerian descent, for his BAFTA award was a waste of public funds but it calls for reflection. As with Sade, Seal, or David Alaba, we often try to appropriate the successes of foreigners of Nigerian ancestry in a bid to achieve some vicarious proprietary pride. If Barack Obama’s dad had been Nigerian, the world would never have heard the end of it. Consider another high achiever, Jelani Aliyu, lead designer of General Motors’ first electric car. Could Ejiofor and Aliyu have succeeded in their chosen endeavours if they lived here instead?  It is a pertinent question.

Since the 1980s, we have lamented brain drain without interrogating it seriously.

Talent flows from regions with natural resource-based economies to regions with knowledge economies. Countries with value-added economic activities offer greater scope for self-actualization and upward mobility. Extractive economies end up watching their young literally follow their oil or diamonds to foreign lands. Countries that build their economies around people clearly outperform those that base their economies on natural resources.

The world can be divided into countries oriented towards the past and those oriented towards the future. Talent flows from the former to the latter. In societies of the past, access to opportunity is determined by questions of identity and ancestry. “Where do you come from?” is the most significant question in such places and the answer to it carries bread and butter and life and death implications. In states of the future, access to opportunity is based on the individual’s potential. The operative question is not where he or she comes from but what he or she can become.

In states of the past, citizens are defined by their heritage; in states of the future, they are defined by their aspirations. In the former, ancestry is destiny; in the latter, potential is destiny. States of the past consider shared memory the basic raw material for nation-building. For states of the future, it is a shared destiny. Talent flows from the former to the latter because above all else people want to transcend the limits of social ascription and be masters of their fate.

America’s ascent towards superpower status gained momentum in the early 20^th century when it absorbed talented Jewry fleeing anti-Semitic persecution in totalitarian European societies. These societies were states of the past where rabid identity politics excluded Jews and other minorities. That brain drain resulted in immense cultural, economic and military gains for America. Similarly, after Idi Amin expelled Indians from Uganda, the country’s economy tanked while many of the refugees made for England where they established businesses that boosted British commercial life.

When Martin Luther King declared his hope that his children would one day be judged not by their colour but by the content of their character he was urging America to more fully become a state of the future. Obama frequently says that his personal odyssey as an African-American in the White House could only have been possible in America. Given his Luo ancestry, Obama’s chances of similar success in his native Kenya would have been nil. A bitter joke which made the rounds in Nairobi after Kenya’s bloody 2007 polls held that a Luo could be elected president of America but not of Kenya.

In Nigeria, access to goods like public education and employment is shaped significantly by ethnicity and religion. Institutionalized discrimination in many places disqualifies Nigerians from accessing public goods that are theirs by right. Almost every official document defines us by our ancestry or “state of origin.” “Where do you come from?” is the most frequently asked question. Obviously, a culture of excellence and achievement cannot thrive where ethnocentric mediocrity and identity politics trump meritocracy.

It is more than likely that Ejiofor and Aliyu would not have made it here. At some point, their ancestry would have proven a fatal roadblock to their aspirations as it has for millions of talented Nigerians. They might have been labeled “non-indigenes”, or found to be surplus to acceptable ethnic quotas or in contravention of federal character. But they have been accepted by societies where a person’s true worth is not divined from his bloodline but derived from his gifts and dreams. People do not choose where they are born but they can choose to maximize their potential. Societies that enable them to make those choices without the fear that their heritage is a hindrance will always lead the world. Conversely, nations that define identity as a weapon or weakness minimize both their people and their chances of growth. A nation cannot outgrow the existential constraints on its citizens.

Enterprising Nigerians are daily defying psychic and institutional barriers in pursuit of the better life. The key to unleashing our national genius is to redefine ourselves as a state of the future. This means ending the use of identity as a determinant of access to opportunity and defining ourselves by where we are headed rather than we come from. It also means practically creating a meritocratic environment where people can aspire to their best knowing that their country genuinely rewards excellence. 

To be sure, heritage matters. But what is heritage if not the stock of ancestral dreams and visions? We inherit from our forebears what they made of themselves and their times just as our children will inherit from us what we make of ourselves and our times. What better bequest to our progeny than a society in which their genius rather than their genes will speak for them?

(All images sourced online)

(Published in Thisday, March 9, 2014) 

Globalization and Its Hypocrites

Since the 1885 Berlin Conference in which western nations carved up Africa among themselves, the relational dynamic between both regions has stayed the same. Africa remains a resource farm exporting primary products to the west and importing manufactured goods. Even after decolonization, the continent remained the site of resource extraction and structural adjustment programmes designed by western –dominated international financial institutions. Throughout the cold war era, western nations installed puppet dictators in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, to guarantee their control of natural resources and keep their countries from the communists’ clutches.

U.S. and European farm subsidies, which clearly violate the gospel of free trade, have helped to decimate Africa’s agrarian economies. The unfair economic relations between the west and Africa are further fortified by existing economic conventions that effectively subvert the continent’s potential for industrial growth and perpetuate her status as a dumping ground for foreign goods.  Even so, western envoys continue to lecture poorer nations about the civilizing virtues of unfettered markets and trade liberalization.

Western experts often talk about how failed states led by corrupt despots have become terrorist havens. They ignore other salient factors – errant colonial cartography in Africa and the Middle East, the subversion of African and Middle Eastern publics by western intriguers to prevent nationalists or Islamists from coming to power, the legacy of resource extraction, unfettered deregulation, and the inequities built into globalization which have degraded the sovereign capacities of the said failed states.

            The most significant consequence of these policies has been the epic flow of migration from benighted third world enclaves to the rich first world. This was triggered by the repression and recession that western-backed dictators inflicted upon their countries. During the late 1980s and 1990s, the trickle became a deluge. Denied economic opportunities that would have been provided by large scale industrialization, poor third worlders followed the bread crumbs to where the opportunities were. The magnetism of the markets proved irresistible. It is profoundly ironic that migration is now altering the complexion of first world nations.

The recent implosion of Anglo-Saxon capitalism has triggered a severe bout of cultural hysteria. In Britain, the unspoken reason why the Conservatives, Labourites and Liberal Democrats are competing to craft the most Draconian immigration laws is the fear that Britain, so historically tolerant of immigration, is losing her sense of collective identity. In the post 9-11 world, and particularly after the 2005 terrorist attacks on the London underground, the notion that some British citizens might feel a greater allegiance to obscure Imams in Pakistan than to the Queen is deeply disturbing to the guardians of the realm. The ideal of a multicultural Britain is dissipating in a climate of creeping recessionary xenophobia. There is a sense that British identity which has always been a tenuous veneer overlaying the older Scottish, English, Welsh and Irish allegiances, is being frayed by the relentless influx of foreigners.

In Continental Europe, right wing demagogues have stoked similar panic over “Eurabia”, the supposedly imminent overrunning of the continent through stealthy overpopulation by Arab Muslims. This is far from reality but bigots are not inclined to let facts get in the way of populist fictions. 

In America, the already robust immigration debate has been inflamed by projections that she will shortly cease to be a white majority country and become a nation of minorities – Hispanics, African-Americans, Asians and others. Some pundits despondently attribute Barack Obama’s reelection to the emerging “post-white” electoral coalition. Rightwing scare mongers warn of America being seized from her white owners by liberals consorting with subversive foreigners. The lingering rumours in some quarters about Obama’s birthplace and the belief that he is a foreign-born Muslim reflect this paranoia which rightwing politicians habitually play on.

But why should immigration be so frightening to western nations? In the global order they have long advocated, it should not be strange that for political and economic reasons, Africa and the Middle East will export labour in prodigious proportions to the first world just as crude oil and other natural resources flow in the same direction and just as jobs have moved from the first world to China and India (via outsourcing). 

After all, the logical end of globalization is a borderless planet in every sense; a world of infinitely expanding diasporas. Why should western countries worry about the coherence of national identities when nations are, in globalization’s orthodoxy, obsolete chauvinisms? Aren’t we all supposed to be global citizens now? National borders are a relatively recent innovation; a mere blip in humanity’s long history of free-ranging migration. Why should giant transnational corporations be global citizens but not intrepid people seeking their fortune from far-flung places?

It is incongruous to insist upon the mobility of capital as western leaders have done for decades while raising barriers against the mobility of labour. So what if migrants depress wages and deprive locals of jobs? This is exactly how market forces are supposed to operate. Why is economic Darwinism ideal for poor nations but not for Charles Darwin’s country?

If western nations can dictate policy to African countries, then the latter should protest the illiberal immigration policies being adopted by the first world as unfair trade practices and violations of the spirit of globalization. In preaching capitalism and democracy worldwide, western nations have implied that the quest for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is a universal human right. Surely, the logical extension of this doctrine is to permit people seeking life, liberty and happiness to go wherever these treasures are evidently domiciled. Indeed, why can’t we all just jet out to any country that catches our fancy without the nuisance of travel documents? After all, the natural corollary of free trade is free migration.

This is what globalization means. Unless, of course, globalization is a relative term – a protean theme that merely fits the prejudices of its proponents – and therefore has a different meaning in Davos than it does in Delhi or Dakar. 

All images sourced online.