Having read Yuval Noah Harari’s book, ‘21 Lessons for the 21st Century’, I want to reflect on what we have become as human beings in the ‘modern’ world. Man (used in the generic sense) is a gregarious being; he is also a dependent being.
The Ultimate Reality created man to have two spectrums of dependence: theocentric dependence and anthropocentric dependence. In other words, for man to subsist in this beleaguered world, man MUST have both horizontal and vertical relations. In sum, man is a man because he depends on his fellow man and God, his creator. The propensity for man to have a sociogenic relation that is manifestly expressed in group living is what resulted in the creation of human society.
Thus, through the careful processes of socialisation, which thrives on man’s cognitive and physical abilities, man is transitioned from a biological being to a social being. This is not coterminous as saying that the humanity of man depends on his fellow man. It simply means that, while man is ontologically a human being and has inalienable rights, his capacity to live well in human society depends on how well he is socialised. Impliedly, while no one is born an American, British, French, German, Batswana, Muganda, Luo, Ewe, Akan, Dagomba, Ga and so on, it is a human society that assigns ethnicity and nationality to one. Indeed, man has the potential to learn to socialise because the Triune God has deposited that capacity in him.
Given the sociogenic proclivity of man, pre-industrial society had a strong social network and capital that were closely knitted together to ensure that man survived the vicissitudes of life. Since pre-industrial man depended on nature and nurture for subsistence, he had to cherish group living. In the course of farming, one man was incapable of clearing an entire acre of land. He needed his fellow human being to do that. In his work as a hunter and gatherer, he had to depend on his fellow human being to succeed. Added to that, he had to live with some animals, like dogs and cats, that could aid man in his earthly journey. The sociality of the pre-industrial man was universally shared. It is for this reason that some cultures developed concepts like Ubuntu, which John Mbiti philosophised as, ‘I am because we are and since we are, therefore, I am.’ Virtually every human society had a cliché or witty sayings that enforced the centrality of collective living.
Pre-industrial societies were also deeply religious. It is either they were pragmatic in their appropriation of religion or they had no choice but to create deities whom they can trust. When a pre-industrial man was sick, he had no doctor to attend to him. He had to go to a ritual functionary for treatment. When he wanted to farm, he had to depend on a deity for rainfall. He did not have the sophistication of the ‘modern’ world to unlock the ‘mysteries’ of life. The pre-industrial man had to explore the utilitarian value of faith and belief to shape his morals. Whether through the help of the deities or individual ingenuities, the pre-industrial man enacted multiple taboos that served as the protector and vanguard of collective living. Private and public delits were defined from the perspective of creative and imaginary taboos. Because there was no written culture, the pre-industrial man had to embed his beliefs, taboos, aspirations, anxieties, and hopes in folklore. These folklores included myths, legends, riddles, proverbs, songs and so on. The sharing of folklore created communities.
The social structure of pre-industrial society was such that things were collectively owned. While individuals could creatively device new ways of doing things, the new ‘technology’, in the long run, became collective property. It is, therefore, difficult, if not entirely impossible, to determine the inventors of folklore. With time, traditions were (re)invented to update man on changes in society. More importantly, pre-industrial life encouraged slavery, subjecting other human beings to the position of servitude, and the imposition of oligarchy, in the long run.
Gradually, pre-industrial society gave way to an industrialised society. As cultures advanced, man progressively move from primitivity to civility in his ways of doing things. In the modern world, the eighteenth-century marked an important watershed as man-made progress in controlling nature. The scientific and technological breakthrough since the eighteenth century contributed significantly to changing the contours of pre-industrial life. Slavery was abolished. Collective ownership of property succumbed to individual ownership of property. As science and technology proved effective in curing sickness and enhancing agriculture, the belief in God suffered atrophy. The industrial man receded from both vertical and horizontal relations. The twenty-first century man is hardly a slave of nature, as he is a master of nature.
In the twenty-first world, man has made unprecedented progress in science and technology. It is almost as if man no longer needs the help of his fellow man. The atomisation of man in the twenty-first century world is unprecedented. The fact that the twenty-first century world is a world built around biotech and infotech has also made material resources virtually redundant. The nations that rule the world are nations with information, not material resources. This development in line with the progress made in Artificial Intelligence (also known as AI) is going to make human beings redundant. Thus, contrary to the prediction of Karl Marx, labour will move from being exploited to being made redundant! The revolution that Karl Marx and other prescient sages predicted will not follow the old tactics.
More significantly, the liberal democracy we cherish will also give way to digital dictatorship! It is therefore certain that the combination of biotech and infotech will lead digital oligarchy. In the twenty-first century world, we no longer have a secret to ourselves. The marked progress in biodata collection and processing is such that almost every information about me is on the internet. When I google my name, for example, information about where I have ever travelled to, conferences I have attended and topics I have discussed, friends I have and so on all pop up. The internet (AI) knows the kind of books I love to read. It knows the kind of music I love to listen to. The ubiquity of biodata is such that the is a digital panopticon that is watching me. We live in a world where we cannot run and hide. The cyber-world will locate us from wherever we are.
More importantly, in the twenty-first century world, we have moved from having offline friends to online friends. In pre-industrial societies, people had to cherish group living, enforced by regular physical contact to survive, but in the twenty-first century, online friendship has made us virtual beings. Thus, man has moved from being a social being to a virtual being! When I was graduating from West African Secondary School (WASS) in 2001, some of my colleagues could not hold back their tears. They cried uncontrollably because it was almost as if we were never going to meet physically again. Since we had congregated at WASS from different regions and areas, the unpopularity of cell phones and the internet at the time meant that we were fated to lose contact forever. One of my colleagues Doreen Nudanu did not just cry, she looked so distressed and miserable at the thought of losing her friends.
But alas, the twenty-first century world has dispelled the fears of Doreen and all my colleagues. Since 2015, we have congregated in the cyber world. We have a WhatsApp platform where we chat and engage in a virtual conversation. Some of us are also hooked up on Facebook. A few are on other social media handles. In the end, we are together again. But we are together from a different perspective. We are no longer social beings as we were in our days at senior secondary school, we are now virtual beings. Since 2015, I have always asked for a real re-membering (bringing us together physically), but we have never succeeded. Any attempts at ensuring that we re-congregate physically have failed. The same challenge of re-membering has beset my basic and university schoolmates. On a big platform for all WASS students, we are about 250 in number and yet when we have our monthly meetings, those who attend physically are less than 20. This is against the background that most of us are in Accra and meetings are held on Sundays after church service.
To show that we have become virtual beings, when I celebrated my birthday on July 16, I received more than 100 ‘likes’ for a brief biography I posted on social media from my friends. I was also inundated with good wishes on social media. BUT, I never had a handshake or hug from any of my online friends. I, therefore, spent my birthday with my computer in Dr. Patricia Serwaa Afrifa’s office at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, writing a chapter of my thesis. To state it simply, on my birthday, I understood how fast and quick we have become virtual beings and isolated from community life.
Facebook presently has more than 2 billion active users online. This is a huge number. The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has since 2017 published a manifesto that seeks to build a global community, using Facebook as the vector. While this is necessary, it appears that stemming the tide against man’s disposition now as a virtual being is such a herculean task. From every perspective, it is clear that man in the twenty-first century world is more isolated and alienated. This has given rise to depression and increment in suicide rate globally. The challenge has found a spillover effect in the gradual breakdown of internationalism. Nationalism, which suffered recession after World War II, is hitting back strongly on the global map. Donald Trump’s mantra of ‘Making America Great Again’ and the Brexit of the United Kingdom will add to the already burden of atomisation that man faces in the ‘modern’ world.
Incidentally, the twenty-first world is faced with global challenges, such as climate change, nuclear war, and damaging science and technology. While it will take the pre-industrial communalism to resolve these gapping threats to man, the liberalism and individualism of the twenty-first century world is our major hurdle. In his magnum opus, The Muqadimmah, Ibn Khaldun, the fourteen-century eminent pre-modern Tunisian Arab sociologist and historian, said that it was the collapse of Asabiyya – group solidarity – that brought about the downfall of the Islamic civilisation. Is our civilisation getting to the brink of collapse in the face of atomisation of man?
The world is heading to a cataclysmic end. We are at the tipping point of a global crisis. We need to recover our pre-industrial and Edenic collective self to save the world. More importantly, we need faith to rebuild human communities. This is precisely because science needs beliefs to blend well to redeem the world. When we trash God and collectivism, we imperil our chances of survival.
Satyagraha