Donald Trump and the Right Nation

To put Donald Trump's president-electhood into perspective, I have been rereading my overthumbed John Micklethwait's and Adrian Woodridge's 'The Right Nation: Why America is Different.' Published in 2005, The Right Nation is a remarkably perspicuous book about how America, despite lapses of liberal-seeming regimes (both Democrat and Republican), is essentially a conservative country, politics-wise. I have found some of the passages of the book eerily relevant to recent events. Below is one: 'As for elitism, rather than dreaming about creating an educated 'clerisy' (class, if you will), the Republicans ever since the 1960s have played the populist card. Richard Nixon saw himself as the champion of the "silent majority." In 1988, the aristocratic George HW Bush presented himself as a defender of all-American values against the Harvard Yard liberalism of Michael Dukakis. In 2000, George W Bush, a president's son who was educated at Andover, Yale and Harvard Business School, played up the role of a down-to-earth Texan taking on the might of Washington.' Reading the book before Trump's tricky victory, I realised that this passage had melted into the larger analysis of American politics, but now it leaps out at me. Donald J Trump is the last in the gallery of Republican presidents who rode to power through the agency of crass populism. I say crass, but in one form or another, populism seems to have worked for these men, as evidenced by how they were able to harvest a number of American 'Belts'. There is the ever-dependable Bible Belt. The marginally moveable Rust Belt. The Gun-nutters' Belt. Amorphous White America Belt. And, particularly in the case of Trump, a sizable girth of Racist Belt, held up by sturdy and close-woven Braces of 'Deplorables.' Trump has been able to harness the hackneyed jingles of Republicanism, bellowing them from rooftops, haranguing from the tribune of tart politicking, he has been able to cram Nixon's 'silent majority,' Bush the Elder's 'all-American values,' and Bush the Younger's hail-fellow-well-met dudeishness into his 'make America great again' warcry. A few people have compared Trump with the slave-owning, Indian-hounding, frontiersmanlike Andrew Jackson, America's 7th president, a flighty and muddled comparison, but that is not my concern here. Anyway, the mugwumpish demiurge of the Democratic party had long been dead before the incubation and hatching of the ' Right Nation' in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Although loopier and kookier than his 'conservative' forebear, Trump took more than a few leaves out of the tract of Barry Goldwater, a Republican presidential candidate, in 1964. Goldwater opposed equal rights for blacks; he haughtily countervoted the Civil Rights Act. He was seen as a 'bigoted nut', and to a large extent, he was. Micklethwait and Woodridge sum him up: 'It wasn't just a question of extremism. Goldwater cheerfully broke all the basic rules of politics. He sometimes started speeches by listing all the people he didn't want to vote for him. He told an audience in Texas that an aeroplane contract should have gone to Boeing in Seattle rather than to a local company. He denounced Johnson's antipoverty program in poverty-stricken West Virginia... One fan created a soft drink called "Gold Water - The Right Drink for the Conservative Taste." With characteristic political sensitivity, the candidate (Goldwater) promptly spat it out. "This tastes like piss!" he spluttered. "I wouldn't drink it with gin." Needless to say, Goldwater was beaten by Lyndon B Johnson in the 1964 election. But then, it was a different America - or, shall we say, Uncle Sam. It was the Uncle Sam who could still see the difference between 'right-minded' and 'Right-minded,' uncynical Uncle Sam who hadn't developed a thick skin to nuance; conscientious Uncle Sam who was still mulling over ways to atone for past sins, who was still somewhat avuncular, trying as best as he could to commune with the ghost of Uncle Remus. At least in looks, Donald Trump is as different from Remus as possible. Even in temperament. For one thing, Trump is neither cuddly nor biddable. And for an heir to Goldwater, he is indeed a mutant, a Midas-pawed alchemist who has turned Barry Goldwater's baser ambitions into a frightfully garish reality. If anything, Trump is as loose-tongued as Goldwater, if not recklessly so. Because where Goldwater had only been antipoverty in impoverished West Virginia, Trump had told Iowans that they were stupid. But he had defeated Mrs Clinton in Iowa because Iowans had lapped up everything he said, including the slur. As it turned out, Trump's boast that he could shoot someone on New York's Fifth Avenue and get away with it is no hot air. He didn't shoot - or hasn't shot - anyone, but the way he was apotheosised during the campaigns, he would indeed have got away with murder. He disrespected women and boasted about abusing them, yet he got 53% of white women's votes. He called Mexicans rapists and ne'er-do-wells, yet 29% of Latinos voted for him. He lied, he bragged, he bullied. He taunted a disabled man. He faked piety, yet the majority of American Christians voted for him. He refused to release his tax records, yet almost half of the American electorate voted for him, with the fusty Electoral College system tipping the balance in his favour. This unlikely and considerably unlikeable monstre sacre is America's president-elect; he is now cakewalking towards the White House. One wonders what happened to Uncle Sam and the United States of America. Probably nothing. Or nothing. It is not as if Trump is a Satan-spurned golem let loose from far-flung badlands unconnected with America; he was birthed from the mouldering womb of the American body politic. Thomas Frank, that fantastic and prolific chronicler of the rise and rise of the American Right, is still pitching around for unambiguous answers in his books. Something stands out, though, as it does in the Right Nation: a discrete American character, a logic-shy New World ethos. Americans always yodel their exceptionalism - perhaps Trump is the exception that merely proves a slightly undifferentiated rule. The authors of The Right Nation got a few things right in the book - the pharisee politics of the Right, the Republican party's macropolitics, America's intrinsic conservatism, the lingering sainted odour of Ayn Rand, the ever-lurking hegemony of the Right - but even for them, a post-Platonic and cartoon-conservative figure like Donald Trump was difficult to adumbrate.

Is Rastafarianism A Proper Religion?

My daughter asked: Is Rastafarianism a proper religion? Although I could guess what she meant, I told her to clarify: What do you mean by 'proper religion'? Something like Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, she said. Oh, I see. Briefly, I set it into perspective for her. There's no such thing as a 'proper' religion. A religion is a religion, whether it is Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Sangoism, Mormonism or Rastafarianism. No hierarchy whatsoever. All religions are spawns of the imagination, figments of fear, delusion, ignorance, or straight-out battiness - or the throwup of phantasmagoria as in the case of Peyote Religion.
I don't think worshipping an Emperor of Ethiopia who was clearly bemused by it all is more ridiculous than the worship of a wraithlike ahistorical figure called Jesus who, in the stories written about him, was somewhat confused whether he was the 'son of man' or the 'son of God.' Nor will I use the attributive 'proper' to describe a religion whose followers take as holy writ a pieced-together chapbook of ancient tales, injunctions and diktats, all said to be spoken by an unbodied voice to a man under a rock or dune in Arabia. Although some Buddhists take themselves too seriously, the religion itself stresses maya - illusion -and it does not rejoice in blowing the sweet-sour raspberry of heaven and hell or bloviating about a draconian singular god.
If you grew up in Africa in the 1970s and 80s, you would - or might - go through a phase of Rasta consciousness. There was Bob Marley, of course, helming the 'Zion train' of dreadlocked Reggae-making Jamaicans who popularised and proselytised Rastafarianism. There was cannabis, the main constituent of Rasta eucharist, oodles of it. Impressionably enough, under the influence of this 'herb', I tried to listen and stomp to Peter Tosh's 'Legalise It' and 'Bush Doctor' while sporting scrubby unconvincing dreadlocks. Something I never quite understood was the deification of Haile Selassie, the late Emperor of Ethiopia. While recognising the Jamaicans' connection with Africa, I thought there was something off-beam about them making a god out of an Ethiopian monarch. Considered the scion of Solomon, he was also believed to be their King of kings, Lion of Judah. I remember asking myself: even if Selassie was all of these things, how are my Jamaican brothers and sisters connected to Judah or King Solomon? You see, there is an overlap between my deconstruction of Rastafarianism and rejection of Christianity. I could see some parallels between Selassie and Jesus - or between those who made both out as gods of some sort. There is the same mass delusion. Same hero-worship. Same idolatry. Same aggrandisement and over-identification with a father figure. Same embrace of absurdity and unreason.
In a recent post by a Facebook friend about the absurdity of God-belief, I commented that 'I can't get my head around the idea of God and religion.' Someone replied, 'Bro, smoke some weed.' I couldn't help but chuckle to myself. Sadly, I am now teetotal when it comes to pot-smoking. But then, having grown older and mellower, I think it might indeed work. If I dosed myself up with Fela Kuti-size rolls of skunk, I might, like Amerindians stoned out on peyote, begin to hear the call from God, see Moses and his burning bush, David, Solomon, Elijah. I might even glimpse Haile Selassie.

How I Became a Christian... Not.

Yesterday, I made an absolute burnt offering of a slice of bread which stayed in the toaster a few moments too long. I was about to toss it into the bin when I glimpsed the Face - that familiar, popular, bearded, iconic face. It leapt out at me so keenly that I nearly convinced myself that the stippled tracings I saw on the piece of burnt bread cohered into that stock face of Jesus. It was Sunday morning, and I could very well have gone on to zap a secular, carefully and thoughtfully constructed edifice of Reason and Irreligion, christianise myself there and then, make a 'spiritual' sea change, embrace God and his dearly beloved son and doppelganger, Jesus.
Let's pursue the counterfactual. It was indeed Sunday morning, and, alas, I saw the face of Jesus of Nazareth charcoaled across one side of the slice of carbonised bread. A voice descended from heaven and told me to stop being a bullheaded Saul and become Paul, Jesus of Nazareth's chief bullshitter, to stop being a scapegrace and enter into God's grace-scape, to stop being an unbelieving asshole and become part of the flock of Christian sheep. Amazingly, the voice had an effect - affect, more like - and I began to speak in tongues, sing and dance, glorifying and jitterbugging for Jehovah. Drunk with rapture, I sauntered off to a church, the nearest evangelical ark, to confess my sins and profess faith and born-again belief. Everyone was happy for me, and I became an effigy of the lapsed atheist, a lost rogue ant who found his way back to the teeming anthill. After all, it was only last week that someone I had not seen for years, aghast at how irreligiously unregenerate I still was, again forecast how I would truly become not just a Christian but a pastor. Tandem with this prediction, I made a beeline for pastorate after becoming a Christian. And miracle of miracles, within 24 hours, I became a 'Man of God,' ordained and all that. Praise be!
But it didn't exactly happen that way. The burnt toast with the cloudy outline of something that I couldn't very well persuade myself was a face that did not have that effect. And it could not. But let's proceed with the assumption that I discerned a face, and apparently the face of Jesus. Which Jesus? That of the Nazarene, who may or may not have lived in a place called Judea 2000 years ago? As we all know now, the received Jesus physiognomy could very well have been that of Cesare Borgia or that of Max Von Sydow or Robert Powell, whose lean, handsome, if hippieish, face still graces the walls and altars of evangelical churches. I knew that even if any image was singed on the incinerated slice of bread, it would be anything but that of a man from 2000 years ago or anyone from any time. It might well be a small, charred, nondescript surface whose random ridges and lines vaguely described a hairy face.
Which brings to mind a particular Jesus' optical illusion. You stare at some Rorschach-esque images for a minute or so, and when you lift up your head and focus on any wall around you, you see Jesus. I knew a Christian person who took this optical mindfuck so seriously that she thought Jesus had indeed popped up on her wall, who weaved the sign of the cross and breathed a momentary Jesus-themed prayer, who thought the illusion shouldn't be repeated often as it might offend Jesus and God, that it might amount to blasphemy, like calling the name of the Lord in vain. And thereby hangs the whole sorry tale of religion.
However, just as there isn't any Jesus on the wall and it's all fancy, there can't have been any Jesus face etched on burnt toast. When you say you see Jesus on the sea-lapped sands of a beach, or in a frothy cup of cappuccino, or in the areolae of your girlfriend's tits, you have only seen what your mind trickily tells your eyes to see. It's pareidolia, a relatively recent subcategory of apophenia - the tendency in humans to see patterns and meanings in random objects, in smoke and clouds.

Culture and Its Christian Enemies

The notion that the Second World and Black Festival of Black Arts and Culture (FESTAC), which took place in Nigeria in 1977, called down a curse on the country has been in the air for some time. This muddleheaded underthinking was broached in the late 1980s as Nigeria began to trundle towards the morass of economic depression, sociomoral decay and the corresponding weedlike flowering of a species of Christianity - pentecostalism - and its dopey consolations. When this hypothesis was first hazarded, it erred on the side of causation: the economic troubles Nigeria was experiencing could be blamed on the overspend on FESTAC. Crude calculus, of course, but it was relatively semilogical, marginally more sensible than the daft supernaturalism of blaming the shitty wicket in which Nigeria finds itself on the Festival of Arts and Culture. I heard the latter argument 20 years ago, and someone, an evangelical pastor, tried to impress me again last week. Here's the routine: Nigeria is in this state because we turned the country into a vast Baalist basilica dedicated to the worship of 'traditional' idols, images and false gods in 1977. To say I nearly lost it is to understate it - overstate, in fact. Because all I did was shrug and say to myself: why waste my time, breath and vocal chord on trying to educate anyone so superstition-bound as to sacrifice arts and culture on the altar of a foreign religion foisted on and fed to us with the opiate kernel of cultural supremacism?
In 1966, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Senegalese president, poet, homme de culture and honorary Gaul, hosted the first Festival of Arts and Culture in Dakar. In those post-independence years, Africa was awash with hope and cultural pride; the continent felt it was ready to show and tell the world that it was not the cultureless Conradian Black Chaos whose occupiers were only capable of unlanguaged gibbering while wallowing in the barest jungle existence. The budding African culturati repaired to Dakar to celebrate Africa. The black diaspora also made an appearance, and a few dashikistas and cultural pilgrims made their way to Dakar, reconnecting with Mother Continent. It was a high-tone spectacular and cosmopolitan, too. Even the hard-to-please Wole Soyinka, who attended the event, testified to it as a succès fou. In one of his books, he gives Senghor a grudging pass for curating a cultural do which went beyond the ambit of the poet-president's ideological preoccupation: negritude. Contrariwise, Soyinka often trashes the Festival of Arts and Culture that the Olusegun Obasanjo military government staged in 1977. Although the Nobel Laureate had participated in the month-long festival, his later postmortems and revisits of the event are damning. The degree to which this has to do with his animosity towards Obasanjo can only be surmised. Soyinka thinks the Black Arts Festival 1977 was not 'cultural' enough, too low-brow, too derivative. But I was around in 1977, although a preteen, a curious, intellectually ambitious youngster (what you'd call a nerd today). However, no quotient of curiosity or precocity could have pushed my interest in FESTAC 77 as far as it went if my dad had not been there. The old man had made sure I was distracted from mere play to watch and sit in on what was happening on TV. The opening ceremony. The songs. Miriam Makeba. Odyssey. Osibisa. Dramatic performances like Langbodo. With his early-type tape recorder, Dad recorded many of the musical performances, particularly Miriam Makeba, and in the next few years, the distinctive Makeba lilt suffused my world. For all its blemishes, FESTAC 77 was a leaven for my cultural sensibility. It helped to shape my appreciation of the arts. So one wonders: How could a festival celebrating African traditions and cultures be bad? Where did that come from? To blame the foreign religions of Christianity and Islam is to absolve most of their Nigerian adherents, slavish, forbiddingly hollow adherents. Why would any self-respecting human pay so much obeisance to the cultures and religions of others at the expense of his own, regretting the celebration of the ways and world in which he was born and raised?
The FESTAC mascot was the ivory pendant mask stolen from the palace of the Edo (Bini) King by the British. Only the representation of the mask was used: the British Museum, which has been its home for almost a hundred years, would not allow Nigeria to have it, not even on loan. Some cultural imperialists have argued that artefacts stolen by the British are better kept and safer in the British Museum. At first, you want to yell and swear at the superlative carefreeness with which this lofty paternalism is expressed, but when you hear Nigerians describe such an artefact as an 'idol,' you baulk. The mind boggles when it contemplates Isis barbarians smashing up and destroying museums and ancient sites, but it boggles no less when it ponders the cultural illiteracy and ignorance-driven iconoclasm of Nigerian Christians. The phrase 'when I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver' has been attributed to a few sources (mainly German), but not to muddy the waters even more, I will rest content with the transposition: 'when I hear the word culture, I reach for my Bible' - apropos of the Merry Christians of Nigeria. The problem with this kind of attitude is how the apparently educated, those who have been through university classrooms, still choose to get blissed out on a cocktail of ignorance and religion-concocted pigswill. In 1977, the barbarians were at the gates, raring to overrun the country; now, they have fully occupied the whole of Nigeria, all of 170 million, give or take a few. In this light, I think Soyinka's stingy appraisal of FESTAC 77 as less than perfect is superfluous - after all, a diamond is a diamond, even if it is rough. For all it might be worth, a jamboree-like arts and culture festival, even one as grandiloquent as 77, would today be wasted on Nigeria. In his Freedom and its Enemies, Isaiah Berlin analyses six thinkers who stood athwart freedom in Enlightenment Europe: one of the men is Hegel, a dismisser of Africa as a place devoid of history and, consequently, culture. Isn't it shameful that we have turned Hegel's 300-year-old postulate into a self-fulfilling prophecy? No, I am not about to argue that cultural and artistic refinement and Christianity are mutually exclusive. The high priest of high culture, TS Eliot, indeed made cultural and poetic capital of his almost ideological devotion to Christian Neoplatonism and the High Church. But while new-wave Pentecostalism in Nigeria does not (and cannot) even pretend to be Low Church, it is obscurantist and anti-knowledge; it is a movement in which the common denominator is marked so low as to be merely imaginary.

Yinka Shonibare's Art

Yesterday, I went to Turner Contemporary in seaside Margate to see the exhibition of Yinka Shonibare's 'Empire' doublet. Although my little boy got underfoot a few times, it was still a treat. I like some of Shonibare's works. For instance, Nelson's Ship in a Bottle: a warship immured, like a genie, in a blown-up glass wine jug - a montage of art, craft, and history. But do I like everything Shonibare does with the so-called 'African wax fabrics?' Not quite. The multiplicity of colours is pleasing but not always to my taste. The polychrome overload dazzles, but not always in a wow way. Well, even if I were to paraphrase George Braque and remind myself, 'Hey, art is meant to disturb,' I am, sadly, neither disturbed nor perturbed by much of Shonibare's print art. Anyway, I think Braque overeggs the art pudding with the 'shock' saw. Art is meant to affect. Despite its colourfulness, Shonibare's vibrancy of expression falls between the stools of overwhelming and underwhelming. Whelming? Probably to a degree. (Recognising that besides the quirk of currency and incurrency, 'whelm' and 'overwhelm' are much and muchness). But to quickly double back, a few of Shonibare's works pack affect, particularly when they reach beyond hyperaesthetic chic.
By the way, is the 'African print' fabric he works with truly African? I'll look for an answer through the Yoruba lens because I, like Shonibare, am Yoruba. I don't know how the people of southwestern Nigeria came up with the name 'ankara' for the fabric - probably some Turkish traders, or 'drapers' as they might be called, used to sell them in Yoruba markets. Even so this sort of cotton print is not native to Turkey, or its city of Ankara. Maybe ankara is a corruption of Accra; the Yoruba moniker for the fabric may have descended from the capital of Ghana rather than the capital of Turkey.
The fabric has its provenance in Indonesia. It's a species of Indonesian batik. The Dutch liked the art of the design. As colonial intruders in what was then Java, or Dutch East Indies, later Indonesia, they took both the fabric and the idea back home and started to mass-produce batik in their factories. Often by way of Rotterdam, once the largest port in the world, the fabric found its way to Africa.
The issue of autochthon - that is, origin, authenticity, indigeneity - is crucial in postcolonial, post-imperial politics. Is Indonesian batik or Dutch print or ankara or African print African? One shouldn't be too bothered about this, really. Dutch interest in the cloth was and is only mercantile. And while its popularity has waxed in most of Africa, Indonesia has had a kind of fast-and-loose relationship with it for some hundred years. Would anyone escape the snort of pedantry or pettiness if they got into a huff about the roots of a certain kind of fabric? The word batik may be Javanese, but how could one know for certain that wax-resist dyeing began in Java? Might it not have begun in China? Japan? India? Finland? Or even somewhere in Africa. The tie-and-dye Yoruba adire shares cognate technology with the batik, with starch replacing wax.
Would it have looked and sounded more 'African' if Shonibare were using adire? Maybe. But what difference would that make? Probably none. Although Shonibare works on a more cerebral level, Nike Davies-Okundaye is doing wonderful things with the adire, some brilliant palettework reminiscent, somewhat, of Frida Kahlo's nature arabesques. Even so, Davies-Okundaye sometimes drifts into pastiching batik style and design. The cultural town of Osogbo overflows mainly with adire artists - artisans. Besides being intellectually do-as-you-please, I am also against pointless nativism; I don't subscribe to the bad faith of drawing the juices of inspiration from any localised parish pump. Although the batik may have its font in Indonesia or Java,  Shonibare can own it - as he has - in the same way that Africa, especially West Africa, has appropriated it, splashing the batik with narratives and themes, ranging from the dramatic to the sublime.
Shonibare's The British Library exhibited alongside The End of Empire, is fantastic. Both works are great, but The British Library 'affects' me more. Call me a bibliophile if you like, but not in the way of liking books for the sake of it, but liking books because of what I can get out of them. I have gone past the juvenile stage when I'd allow myself the indulgence of being called a 'bookworm,' or a bibliophage, literally bookeater - although there is something almost decadently scrumptious about the confection of books on the lofty shelves. But 'The British Library' must be judged beyond the book covers. It is a work about how the British Empire almost made Britain, made London, where the British Library is situated, the centre of the world. And there is something yet still 'central' about the library, the hub of cosmopolitan bookery. I have dropped in and out of the library a few times - frequenter, lately. The library: the books, journals, authors, readers, researchers, a reliquary of literaria, ancient and contemporary - it's where the world and his wife meet. And that is what Shonibare's 'The British Library' is all about how the library represents the home where the chicks of the Empire have all come to roost. The manifold colours of the books, the different shapes and sizes, and the 'multiculturalism' inherent in the names on the spines of the books: Olufemi Majekodunmi. Anne Bronte. Otto Neurath. Majita Nastasic. Indigenes. Immigrants. Émigrés. Authors. Artists. Scientists.
And concerning cultural appropriation, sometimes what Shonibare works with is described as 'African print fabric,' sometimes as 'Indonesian batik', and in the Turner exhibition, it is described, wordily, as 'Dutch wax printed cotton textile.' Which seems to have given the word 'transculture' a fresh, interesting value. This, I think, should serve as an object lesson to that ditzy African-American girl who was apparently peeved that the cool-looking Jewish dude wore dreadlocks - and sadly, on a university campus. That's profound miseducation and racial tunnel vision. She should come round and see Shonibare's humane multicoloured canvases. By the way, my children and I were the only Africans pottering around the two exhibits on that balmy mid-spring Friday afternoon. Perhaps I should have scolded the European and Asian co-potterers in the gallery: why are you looking at the works of a man who bears a Yoruba name and who wears dreadlocks!

Now I am done with the God-debate: It's Pointless.

I have just finished reading Gary Cox's The God Confusion: Why Nobody Knows the Answer to the Ultimate Question, and I think I am now done with reading books about God - for or against. Gary Cox is an agnostic, an atheistic agnostic who prefers to be called an agnostic, so his book is more against than for it. In fact, The God Confusion is a well-written and philosophical counterargument about the dusty entity called God. You could describe the book as popular philosophy, and this is not to undercut the integrity of the contents or the bona fides of the author, a reputable philosopher, but to stress his uncomplicated, slightly primerlike writing style.
Cox grounds his agnosticism in philosophy or being a philosopher because, according to him, doubt should be the default position of every thinking person. He thinks atheism is as absurd, if not impossible, a position to take as theism - you cannot strike the attitude of negating the existence of a god whose nonexistence defines your position; therefore, he gives short shrift to 'new atheism' and its popularisers like Richard Dawkins. But like the secular philosopher he is, he is not particularly interested in setting Richard Dawkins or his imaginary enemy, God, down from the pedestals on which some people have installed them. He only tries to offer empirical and invariably contrary datums to the question of God.
The God Confusion is worthy of review, but I will let that pass because that is not the point. As a matter of fact, to attempt to review or critique this book is to squelch the very purpose of putting this down. However, while solidly ensconced in his sceptical stance, Cox upends the many fanciful building blocks of the entity called 'God.' The idea of God. The concept of God. Ontological argument. Cosmological argument. The Unmoved Mover argument. Theodicean argument. Teleological Argument. Evolution. And many more. And the many dramatis personae in the God superdebate. Bishop Berkeley. Anselm. Pascal. Voltaire. Descartes. Darwin. Aquinas. Augustine. Nietzsche. Kant. Hume. Durkheim. William James. Freud. Even bit players like Aristotle, Gaunilo, Wittgenstein, Plato, JL Mackie. Cox's conclusions are balanced and unhysterical but surefootedly agnostic and sceptical.
However, in spite of the book's satisfactoriness, halfway through, I had a sort of reverse epiphany: now I am getting bored by all this, I thought. This eternal God Argument. By the time I finished the illuminating book, my mind was made up. I will not waste time and dissipate mental heat on books about God again - I am done with them. This is probably an unintellectual attitude, but seeing the number of books I have read, pro and con, about something patently a chimaera, I thought it was about time to pack it in. Note that The God Confusion is a play on Dawkins's The God Delusion, which itself is an allusion to Freud's religion-is-illusion observation. Being the urtext of 'New Atheist' thinking, Dawkins's The God Delusion has spawned mostly alliterative textual responses, what I'd call 'Delusion industry,' anything from the two theocentric 'Dawkins Delusion' to the utterly misbegotten 'Deluded By Dawkins.'
The God Confusion is in a different league, as it neither seeks to counter Dawkins nor recompound his heady atheistic absinthe, it's only a book which points out the irrationality of thinking, or believing, in any being called God. I am an agnostic of sorts, so that argument agrees with my thinking. But even a fine, well-written book like this would not help relieve the intellectual bloatedness I now suffer about the question of God, having ingested and engorged spoonloads of treacle, bile, pap, and even heaps of crap, owing to a hunger for understanding, clarification, for better insight into the nonthing described as 'God.' From the Bible to the Qur'an, to GB Shaw's Black Girl in Search of Her God, to Kierkegaard and many books by atheists, agnostics, philosophers, and theologians. A few weeks ago, I picked up Karen Armstrong's The Case For God (why she used 'The' and not 'A' I don't know). Armstrong's lawyering in God's behalf is very much in character: slipperiness, jargoneering, a shuffling of apriorism and aposteriorism, clever apologetics, heavy deployment of 'dead languages,' I mean Latin and Greek. God the Being itself is ipsum Esse subsitens, God as the Prime Mover...the Necessary Being is quod omnes dicunt Deum. I guess it would be seen as facetious if I translated the latter into 'God is a Fat Bearded Cunt,' but then that was as much sense as Armstrong's book made to me. Not too long ago, I read Terry Eagleton's 'Culture and the Death of God.' Now, this is one of the more cryptic and difficult parts of Eagleton's high-tone tomes. In the book he stylisedly skirts the death of God and he uses an elaborate trudge through the lush historical meadows of the French\English Enlightenment, German idealism, and Romanticism to confront, in a backhanded way, the death of God.
By the way, every book written by every atheist, agnostic, apatheist - antitheists in sum - in the last 150 years or so has been a kind of variation on, and a rehash of, searching intellectual firstfruits of freethought by early 'disbelievers' like Baron D'Holbach and Jean Meslier, or a comparatively latter one like Ludwig Feuerbach. Although I will continue to read books about the inanities of religion, which, of course, will always carry with it the negation of God and its existence, I don't think I will again spend time reading any book that seeks to prove or disprove the existence of God. Now, so saturated with the anodyne reagent of God-debate, I might very well go John Updike's Dale Kohler one better and try to extrude a cast-iron God from the entrails of my computer.
In spite of having always preferred the label agnostic to atheist, I have never truly been an either\or person - 'either-there-is-God-or-there-is-no-God' person. By the time I reached high-noon as a nonbeliever in God or gods a few years ago, the golden mean had become neither\nor, and it still is: I no longer err on the side of doubt nor certainty. For me, the question of whether there is or there is no God is superfluous, time-wasting waffle. This attitude somehow bears on what some have described as ignosticism or igtheism, meaning, broadly, that the lack of a clear definition of the term 'God' tends to make any debate about it unnecessary. Oh, I am not about to suggest that I should be described as an ignosticist or igtheist or a contratheist or antignostic etc. An alternation between agnostic and apatheist is just about enough. Is it? So, how would you describe yourself if you spurned all debate about God because you thought it was nonsense? An I-dont-give-a-fuckist.

Deconstructing Prayer Before Connecting to The Internet

Almighty and eternal God,
who created us in Thy image and bade us to seek after all that is good,
true and beautiful,
especially in the divine person of Thy only-begotten Son,
our Lord Jesus Christ,
grant we beseech Thee that,
through the intercession of Saint Isidore,
bishop and doctor,
during our journeys through the internet was  , we will direct our hands and eyes only to that which is pleasing to Thee
and treat with charity and patience all those souls whom we encounter.
Through Christ our Lord.
Amen.

I couldn't believe the above when I saw it. An English translation of Prayer Before Connecting to the Internet was originally written in Latin by a certain Father, John Zulsdorf. This was and may remain my greatest WTF moment this year. I thought it was a kind of popish joke, the work of a clowning lapsed Catholic, probably Dave Allen. If you know you'll be 'tempted' when you use the internet, why use it? Why not get yourself cloistered, throw on a hairshirt or a sackcloth blouse, and whip yourself all day? And the Guardian spirit of the Internet! Isidore - who lived hundreds of years before the Internet was dreamt up.
I know that religion, more so Catholicism, is an anachronism, but to try to father the guardianship of safe browsing on a medieval religioso is the height of religious pomposity. And what has happened to freewill, the theological cheat that Christian apologetics always try to palm off on us? Because if having a computer in your house, a phone in your pocket, or a tablet in your bag is a matter of choice, shouldn't the choice be left to you what you would do on the phone or computer?
A man could very well pray that 'Lord, as I go out to sit and drink some wine on the porch of my house, help me to avert my eyes from the sizable derriere of neighbour's wife when she walks past.' Now the problem is, the man had consciously gone out into the porch to stake out the ass of his neighbour's wife. Before you blame the man for exercising his free will to sit on the porch in the first place, reread the line in the 'Lord's Prayer' which says, 'Lead us not into temptation, deliver us from evil.' If God had had the power to lead the man into temptation, despite his silly little prayer, who is to say it wasn't the great 'He' who had made him commit the 'sin' of leching after the ass of his neighbour's wife from the first time he saw the woman, or saw the ass itself? By the way, if people still read the 'Lord's Prayer' and can't see the absurdity embedded within it, why would a Catholic priest not write Prayer Before Connecting to the Internet and not expect anyone to read it with a straight face? Would anyone?
Think of a callow pubescent Catholic boy brainstorming for pristine, clean internet sites to visit, praying to Saint Isidore to help him direct his eyes and mind to nothing but...But what! The Sound of Music? Sister Act? Who knows what he would find on the tenth page of 'Sister Act' search result? Perhaps a sorority of nuns cavorting with a brotherhood of friars - or even cavorting among themselves with sapphic abandon. Let's face it, when the Catholic Father Zulsdorf sat down to write his prayer before using the internet, the mortification of porn, or the flesh, couldn't have been far from his God-clouded imagination. Since I know there's no avoiding what the priest seeks to suppress, I'd advise the Catholic youth that instead of wasting his time on such a prayer, he should recite the last movement of WB Yeats's poem, Long-Legged Fly:

That girls at puberty may find
The first Adam in their thought,
Shut the door of the Pope's chapel,
Keep those children out...

By the way, if prayer before using the internet does work, Arab countries will not be recording high tallies of visits to pornographic sites - extreme, kinky ones, for that matter. These are countries where praying five times a day is mandatory. However, somehow, between those quintet of devotions, the antsy denizens of Greater Levant still find a way to commit the grave sin of onanism with the aid of their computers and whatnot. Or maybe they are not exactly praying that Allah should help them avert their eyes from earthly infidel whores online. By the way, why should anyone who has three scores and some virgins waiting for him in the afterlife waste his time on porn?

'So you think there is no supernatural force, the metaphysical?'

I have been asked a few times: So you think there is no supernatural force, metaphysical force, unseen energy, etc.? I'll give a brief answer. One man's supernatural force is another woman's mumbo-jumbo, and what you consider 'the metaphysical' may not be more than what an illusionist will conjure from his bag of tricks. Derren Brown is a British illusionist who always tells his audiences that what they are about to watch is no more than tricks, the sleight of hand and plain illusioneering (which includes endlessly fascinating mathematical magic). To many people, Derren Brown can only be nothing but a jujuman, a wizard, someone who got his wondrous 'powers' from mammy wata (water nymph) or from behind a burning bush or some otherworldly thing. But this is not the case: everything Brown does can be unpacked. In my book, Schopenhauer's Child, I describe him as a mindfuck artist. He does that very well: mindfuckery. Which is another name for metaphysical claptrap. One of his easier routines is hypnosis and mind control. To many, you can only make someone 'go to sleep' or behave in specific ways with juju or by some kind of fetishised drivel. But even I, though magically untrained, am au fait with the trick of hypnosis; it has nothing to do with the supernatural; it's a suggestional trick of the mind.
So, can anything be described as preternatural, hyperphysical or paranormal? The simple answer is No. Anything possible, doable, conjurable, and achievable is natural, immanent within nature, not extranatural. I'll use astroscience - simply because it's science - before I begin to speculate on voodoo, animism, miracles and other forms of superstition. Many pragmatic achievements in space travel and orbital mechanics are decidedly and literally out of the world. Not only cargo-cult islanders who see England's Prince Phillip as God would marvel at the science of space travel, but the majority of other humans, including those who understand the physics, would find it intriguing - and even if humans were to conquer Mars, tame it, transplant themselves there, that would count as a phenomenon, a signal human phenomenon. Although the trajectory might be squiggly, tortuous and complex I will always double-back agential responsibility on the human.
Besides the fantastic accomplishments in space science, the antics and farcicalities of voodoo, juju, and muti are paltry and insignificant. But hundreds of millions of people, many from my dear continent, still take these things seriously despite their overappropriation of foreign religions like Islam and Christianity. As it is, these Middle Eastern religions have further metastasised belief in Africa's primal shibboleths. But for the sake of philosophical argument, I will not dismiss out of hand what millions and millions of people hold true; such absolutism does not have a place in philosophy, not even in science, although secular positivists like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking uncompromisingly and rightly pooh-pooh supernaturalism. Even then, using philosophy to prove or disprove supernaturalism is all but impossible - which is why the occasionally forced consilience between philosophy and theology is forbiddingly loose. The weakest link in the vast galaxy of Immanuel Kant's philosophy is where, in Critique of Practical Reason, he clumsily tries to manipulate transcendence and God into being.
In the same way that the burden rests with theists to prove the existence of God, so does it rest on the believer in juju to prove its virtues, efficacy, and, above all, preterhuman potency. But proving this is as impossible as proving the existence of God. If someone came to me and said a young girl who died yesterday was killed by a witch through invultuation - sticking pins and needles in her mini graven image - I would tell the person to prove the truth of his statement to me. In the best of all philosophical worlds, proving or disproving this assertion would necessitate a rollout of arguments, which might include anyone from Aristotle through Hume to Sartre, anything from causality to counterfactuality. But we do not live in the best of philosophical worlds; we do not even live in a philosophical world; as a matter of fact, maggots like paranormal investigation, shamanism, and other religions not only thrive on the corrupt meat of antiscience but also on the ordure of antiphilosophy (in its pure literal sense). If no concrete evidence has been provided for any kind of 'paranormal activity,' if no one has been able to win the 1 million dollars prize for solving the Miracle Question from James Randi Foundation, if no substantiation has ever been provided that the 'witch who cackled last night when she flew past caused the death of my neighbour's child' then I will never get any tangible and satisfactory explanation from the person who purports that a witch had killed a young girl. Hume's scepticism about what he called 'the idea of necessary connection' still holds true today, and nowhere is this more relevant than in the attempt to anchor the galleon of reality in the quicksand of irreality. All I would expect from the dewy-eyed supernaturalist is obfuscation, mystification and a regress into infinite idiocy.
If I felt pain, a growth, anywhere, for example, I'd prefer to go and see a doctor who would make the correct diagnosis and prognosis rather than a babalawo, a sorcerer or a witchdoctor who would maunder about a poison-tipped arrow shot from the invisible bow of an 'enemy,' who would then fob snake oil on me after extorting shedloads of money. Or a 'pastor' or 'prophet' who would offer another kind of greasy placebo. There has also been a rather clever argument that juju, or mojo, might work owing to a sort of telepathic synchronicity between wishful thinking and wish fulfilment, that in societies which believe in these sorts of things, a critical mass of magical thinking might on occasion trigger results. The submission is if Africans stop believing in fantasia like curses and spells, juju and whatever horseshit is out there, they will no longer have no effect - just as it has happened in Europe over hundreds of years. Is this really the case? Did the slippery hacceitas, thisness, of witchcraft, spell-casting, and vampirism ever come near the testability, for instance, of Newton's laws of motion? Did alchemists ever find the philosopher's stone, the elixir? Did 'witches' ever use broomsticks to fly in Pendle, and were there 'possessions' in Loudun? A mere browse through the protosadistic and sinister document called The Malleus Maleficarum would show the houndlike cussedness, the utter ignorance, at the heart of the medieval embrace of superstition and the supernatural in Europe.
For argument's sake, let's put the problematic of causality aside, cool the ardour of our scepticism and hazard belief in the supernatural, but then the measliness, the limitations and the poverty of the signifiers of 'fancies' like witchcraft are enough to short-change any argument for their importance. Even if juju, or witchcraft, did succeed in killing one person, or two, or three, could it have been useful in winning the First or Second World War, or even any war for that matter? A Yoruba politician who was once seen as the embodiment of juju, the incarnation of an ancient Yoruba shogun-like General with occult powers, was routed and blasted to eternity with the guns of young soldiers during a coup after his mojo failed him; he had picked up a gun and used it to defend himself - to no avail. And just as Christian miracles and faith healing cannot help bring back a missing limb, witchcraft can only do so much in killing anyone. This is the biggest argument against superstition, its insignificance, its blurred myopic scope - the worm's-eye view captives have of the world around them. Put a coven of shamans and sorcerers in a dark room with a group of physicists and electricians and challenge either side to bring forth light...

‘What god do I worship, what do I believe in?'

This question, unexceptional though it seems, plumbs the depths - the depths of depthlessness. Fewer people ask me the question now than, say, 25 years ago - this may have to do with the fact that I now live in a country where you don’t need to worship any god or believe in any religious idol or any newfangled Neoplatonic idea, or seek the validation of a heavenly superwanker, aka the Almighty, to be reassured of your humanity.
But then, occasionally, a religionist (a Nigerian often) does fling the question at me. A few days weeks ago, I was again assailed with the rather needless poser. Below is the give-and-take:
'What god do you worship? What do you believe in?’
'Why must I worship any god? Why believe in any deity?'
'One must believe in something, anything.'
'Why?'
'Because one must.'
'Why?'
'One cannot just be like that?'
'Like what?'
'Be without anything – without God, it’s like being empty.'
'Empty of what?'
'Of God, spirit...'
'Do I look spiritless to you?'
'Not that kind of spirit, the spirit of God.'
'Aha, that.'
But I had stopped because I could not continue the metaphysics-light exchange with the person beyond that point. For one thing, I’ve made the decision not to engage with anyone who possesses neither the liberal imagination nor the moral breadth to know that the choice between belief in God or gods and belief in the existence of dogs is not exactly analogous to a choice between Gog and Magog - or argue with someone who could not cotton on that her declaration that I was ‘empty of God’ was doctrinally self-defeating. Kenosis is a theological term for ‘self-emptying' - particularly how Jesus, the Nazarene, is said to have emptied himself of divinity and godhead to become human. If Jesus made himself 'empty,' why could I not?
Okay, enough irony. Enough of digressive strawmanship. Not believing in God or not worshipping anything does not make me ‘empty.’ As a matter of fact, I have never felt more ‘full,’ whole, more self-contented and relaxed, within humanly possible bounds. And let me repeat: I do not need religion or God to achieve plenitude; all I need is to get to grips with my inner Buddhahood. Needless to say, I am not a Buddhist (even though I see the point of Arthur Schopenhauer’s dalliance with Buddhism, I have no interest) and no time for any new-age east-meets-west eyewash. 'Inner buddhahood,' if you will, is a playful metaphor for chilled-out godlessness. But then I am still often asked what I believe in because it is received wisdom in most of Africa to see belief, faith, worship and sacramental mush as an existential necessity.
And what about the gods and religions of the Yoruba world? After all, I am Yoruba, and someone had once made a curious assumption that my rejection of Semitic religions and their ethnocentric god equals an embrace of Ogun, the iron-clad Yoruba deity, or Sango, the belcher of fire and brimstone, or any of the scores of he- and she-gods in the Yoruba pantheon. This thinking is not as far-fetched as it seems. The eminent Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka makes a virtue of being an Ogun votary. I will not second-guess what Soyinka finds in Ogun (although it's easily parsable), but I have never felt there is a need for any back-to-the-roots posturing; I am as unconcerned about Jesus or Mohammed as I am about Ogun or Obatala. And if I do not see anything in the divinities of the Yoruba world, I can't see myself gathering with tunic-wearing 'neopagans' to worship the sun at Stonehenge or becoming a Freysgodhi, although I have been giving Jediism or the Way of the Jedi, a cool and considered thought lately. What with the hoopla around the latest instalment of Star Wars! Well, if I wrote it down for a Yoruba person that I am a Jedi, the likelihood is that I would remind her of the trots, okay, diarrhoea, before Star Wars because that is what the word 'jedi' means in the language. Oh, this is becoming too anal-expulsive now.
And being from a society in which there is the instinctual desire to mystify everything masquerade reality behind the shroud of the supernatural, the unsayable, the unreachable, the unknowable, it is not unlikely that some would surmise that I may very well belong to a 'secret society,' that I am an allegiant of some fraternity or some hugger-mugger cult. But then the very thought of this is as laughable as giving a thought to becoming a serious devotee of Dudeism or the Church of SubGenius and its great god, Jehovah 1. Even then, these latter two 'religions' make more sense to me than any fraternity or cult with its self-important, sobersided ceremonials. After all, I like the Coen brothers' The Big Lebowski, which is the matrix of Dudeism, and I find Momus, the true god of SubGenius, amusing.
So what god do I worship, to which religion do I belong, and in what faith do I have? To answer 'nothing' to all these questions is to snare myself in the ideological slough of nihilism - nothingness for its own sake - which is a philosophically tricky situation to place oneself in if nihilism is broken and ground down to its brutally dusty lowest common denominator. But then, I do not worship any god or belong to any religion. As regards faith,  I have none except faith and belief in humanist ethos, sustained neither by ritual, worship nor by a cacophony of self-indulgent pieties. This is why I would not also think of becoming a member of August Comte's Positivist\Humanist Church, a needless parody of Abrahamism, or even its hipper, newishly laidback offspring, The Sunday Assembly.