With the advent of the holiday season, as the entire globe unites to usher in a new year, man’s ugly capabilities to spread havoc, destruction and murder confront us all. On cue, and just this week, we witnessed the assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey at the hands of a member of the Ankara riot police, the killing of 12 at Berlin’s popular Christmas market at the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Germany, and, of course, we continued to be numbed by ongoing deaths in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere.
All of this illustrates our bankruptcy as pseudo believers who talk the talk but seldom walk the walk.
Since our parents and educators did not teach us to behave like this, it may be useful to ask where we learned to adapt to such carelessness and, for those who are mere spectators, what may well be the origin of our long-term indifference. Why are we now willing to turn away from established values towards viciousness and why do we tolerate irrelevance? Are we now embarked on a new evolutionary pattern that celebrates worthlessness?
To be sure, we live in surreal times, with many complex transformations everywhere that dizzy in our meagre attempts to understand what is happening. The list is long and familiar: Brexit, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Fidel Castro, fake news, terrorism attacks, poverty, wars in various corners and on and on and on. There is a global meltdown of leadership and stability as common sense withers at the proverbial vine.
Truth be told, we no longer look-up to our religious and political leaders for guidance. There was a point in recent times when elders were respected and while many still are, few of those endure in the public eye. Of course, we pay lip-service to Pope Francis — even some Cardinals are scornful — or to Shaikh Ahmad Al Tayyib, but dismiss the Vatican or Al Azhar as little more than glorified monuments to the past.
We resent intellectual voices and when one offers insights, scores of comments, and instantaneous tweets ridicule the author. Somehow, we seem to have concluded that a tweet is the equivalent of a philosophical tome, the product of hours, months, often years of reflection, careful evaluation, and elegant communication. All of that is replaced by a message in the clumsy hands of a tweeter who assumes that he or she is the answer to John Locke or Voltaire.
Mercifully, not everyone around the globe flounders in shallowness, as Japan, for example, offers a useful model to deliberate upon. The country’s Living National Treasure programme is an unwritten part of a regulation, known as the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties, whose aim is to preserve important even if intangible cultural properties that are backed by several government ministries to venerate elders who are role models. An individual who has attained high mastery of an art form, for example, like a painter or a dancer, or even a metalworker whose artistry added value, is respected, protected, supported and, more important than any of these, is given the appropriate platforms to share skills and pass them on to future generations.
This does not mean that Japan is not confronting some of the same challenges that most developed societies face, but that there are alternatives to hopelessness and irrelevance.
Less-developed societies encounter similar trials though the absence of laws and, equally important, the spread of authoritarianism, add to their woes. Carefully meted violence is the norm, as elites abscond authority, impose unadulterated power, and otherwise assume that poorly educated masses are as good as fuel to add to man-made fodder. Naturally, it does not have to be like that, and there are incredible profiles of courage to give one hope that wise thinkers can direct their societies to add value. One is reminded of Archbishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa, who has devoted his entire life to oppose apartheid [institutionalised racism], defend human rights, and campaign for social justice. His 1984 Nobel Peace Prize was earned, but Tutu is prouder of his work to instil in his nation’s soul the dual concepts of truth and reconciliation, which truly transformed the very nature of forgiveness and the uniquely African concept of Ubuntu, which maintains that when wars end, only forgiveness enables people to fully move away from conflict.
Learning from wise elders ought to motivate mankind to take the necessary time to reflect instead of merely react. We are all privileged to live in the 21st century, a time that is the pinnacle of knowledge, though we ought to remember the words of the great Malian ethnologist Amadou Hampate Ba, who, in 1960, told a Unesco panel in Paris that “when an old man dies [in Africa], it’s a library that burns”. One way to end viciousness and irrelevance is to see how valuable our traditions and elders are as they teach us to distance ourselves from instantaneous triviality.
Dr Joseph A. Kechichian is the author of the forthcoming The Attempt to Uproot Sunni Arab Influence: A Geo-Strategic Analysis of the Western, Israeli and Iranian Quest for Domination (Sussex: January 2017).
