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.

 

Translating the Nigerian Constitution into Yoruba

When I received Segun Akeredolu's message informing me that he had just finished translating the Nigerian Constitution from English into Yoruba, I knew he had accomplished something. I saw Segun the last time I visited Nigeria. He was one of the lawyers who came round to my friend's - Charles's - office at the Ministry of Justice in Akure to say hello to me. (Charles Olafimihan is a childhood friend and a barrister/advocate). Tony, another legal hotshot, was also a curious and shrewd questioner and listener. Another young man whose name now escapes me had also turned up, only to slink away a few moments later because he thought I was blaspheming his ancestors while atheologising his biblical ancestors like Abraham, David, Jesus, and Joshua!
Segun, whose office is next to my friend's, whom I had become acquainted with during previous visits to Nigeria, didn't tell me he had been working on rendering the Nigerian Constitution into Yoruba. When he sent the finished work to me, I was impressed by the integrity of the contents and the thoroughness implicit in the construction, and seeing that it took him five years to wrap it up, it was clearly a herculean toil. A somewhat heuristic exercise, too, because by the time he finished the job, he would have had a better, rounder and more nuanced grasp of Nigeria's laws. I have gone through Segun's Yoruba language Nigerian Constitution and it is indeed a remarkable feat of intellection. (Yoruba words are elaborately accented and Segun has gone to the trouble of marking every word).
This is also important given the pejoration of the Yoruba language over against English. A trend which began long ago - in days when Yoruba was by colonial impress described as a 'vernacular' - has now crescendoed in the complete inferiorisation of the language. Children born to Yoruba parents living in Yoruba cities cannot speak the language, and often, their efforts are twangily creolised and warped. I speak Yoruba to my children as frequently as I can in the UK, and no one can put anything past them in the language; they even try to converse in it. My teenage daughter was bemused when some children who came from Nigeria with their parents last summer could not speak Yoruba; these Yoruba post-millennials were also loath to be addressed in their supposed 'mother tongue.' The irrepressible Fela Kuti described this sort of behaviour as 'colo mentality' or, amply speaking, colonial mentality.
No, I am not a cultural essentialist and I know the English language has become global in its reach, the common patter of modern times. But then, I still consider the Yoruba language as important, just as a Frenchman or a German would take his language seriously and consider it worthy of preservation despite the superscription of another language, i.e., English. The Yoruba diaspora is larger and farther-flung than any from Africa, and echoes of the language can be picked up even in the heartlands of Brazil, Cuba and Haiti. This was why I thought I should congratulate another friend I saw on television in Nigeria. I knew Dr Olayinka Olatunde Ayinde through Facebook - an intelligent and reasoned thinker, and I could still recognise this sterling reasonableness when I saw him on TV offering medical counsel in the Yoruba language - his delivery was clean, urbane and eloquent. Beyond all, self-commisioned and labour-of-love acts like the translation of the Nigerian Constitution by Segun Akeredolu can reverse the slide of the Yoruba language into extinction.

Atheists can't be 'Worshippers' of Satan

Against my self-drawn rule, a few days ago, I responded to a friend's quasi-religious post. In a slightly forked-tongue way, the friend wondered why atheists always deny the existence of God and never that of Satan. I responded solely because the person who posted the piece was an old friend and classmate. Even though we have not been in the presence of each other for decades, I still consider him a friend, such was our buddyhood in primary school. Notwithstanding that, while my friend may very well have steeped himself in the nether reaches of the ocean of Nigerian religionism, I now follow the not-so-beaten path of irreligion. I also responded because of the reference to atheists. I am not an atheist simply because it would be a misdescription of someone who doesn't care either way whether or not there are gods or a God. But I have been called an atheist a few times, and, electively speaking, I do have an affinity with atheists. So, I thought I should respond to my friend's post.
Here is what I wrote. 'In the Bible or the Qur'an or the Torah, Satan is the spawn of God, Jehovah, Allah or however you wish to describe him, or her, or it - Satan is one of your 'creator's' earlier angelic androids. So by a process of entailment, the denial of Satan must be subsumed by the denial of the middle-eastern monotheist god who I imagine you meant when you wrote 'God,' in the same way that the affirmation of that 'God' presupposes the cognitive factor of Satan. Satan cannot be separated from the 'God concept'; it subsists within the theology of the 'first cause' god who, or which, I think you believe in. The person who commented first appears to have helped you to clarify what you were trying to say by stealth: that atheists are believers in Satan. This is not true - in most cases. For instance, as an agnostic, when I cast doubt - strong doubt - on the theology of the Abrahamic god, the doubt extends roundly to Satan. To me, both of these entities - non-entities - signify nothing.'
Of course, I knew I was only preaching to the unconverted when I wrote the above. All right, it is slightly teacherly, but it had to be so because I thought it should be as clear as day why 'real' atheists would not bother with Satan. Should it? Maybe in some places, it is. Satan, or the Devil, or the arch-demon, is big in Africa, with South America coming far second. In so far as most African Christians are now evangelicals, Satan is indeed a huge, loomingly leviathan on the continent. Of course, Western theologians had been writing Satan out of the Bible even long before Kierkegaard arrived on the scene with his avant-garde, up-to-the-minute Christianity and for quite a while before the religion was introduced to Africans. And contemporary theologians would go to hell first before expending any intellectual time on Satan. Although the practice of Satanism is more of a neo-Gothic paganism rather than any Augustinian exercise which seeks to apprehend the sly biblical Satan, Carl Raschke's attempt at analysing Satanism in America in his book, Painted Black, is monumentally flawed. And here, within evangelical circuits, Satan is no longer a regular referent - except in the frenzied liturgy of mucky charismatics and hucksterish African pastors. Even in the sterner religion of Islam, there has been more emphasis on heaven, fruits, flowers and fuckable virgins than on hell and Iblis (Satan).
I will not go into why Satan has always been a feature of life in Africa (because it will take a book to do that), but I'll briefly touch on why it'll remain that way for a long time. Christianity is in a state of intellectual stasis in Africa. In other words, despite the mushrooming of churches and the multiplication of God memes, the religion has not approached in sophistication the sort of liberal theology which prodded David Strauss to write his 'Life of Christ' (1808), a sceptical and revisionist theobiography of Jesus, or the open-mindedness of JW Colenso, Bishop of Natal (1853), racial equalitarian and rational reader and interpreter of the Bible. Even in the biblicistic and Satan-obsessed minds of African Christians, Strauss and Bishop Colenso would be burning in hell now.
  As I pointed out above, atheists shouldn't be in the business of denying the existence of Satan. The confirmation or denial of the existence of Satan should be the preserve of theologians. The refutation of the existence of God, a paradoxically unnecessary exercise, is just about enough for atheists because the very negation of God implicates the nonexistence of Satan. By the same token, anyone who describes himself as a Satanist in any Abrahamic sense is, by simple extrapolation, a theist, not an atheist. The incarnation or spiritualisation of Satan is contingent on the moral coefficient of an Anti-Satan, and that can only mean God. For Satan to be an adversary and an antagonist, he needs a protagonist and a principal: God. The ever-thoughtful Martin Luther agrees: 'The Devil is God's Devil.' In other words, Satan is no more than the sidekick that God uses to tempt and try his creatures. It was necessary from the first that the creators of the fiction of God must come up with a foil, a countergod, a baddie to offset God's improbable goodness. To use a loose analogy, you can only deconstruct a Bond baddie within the construct of James-Bondology, or shall we say the theology of James Bond?

The Meaning of Life (Or Its Meaninglessness)

                                 

Many years ago, I wrote an essay entitled The Meaning of Life, a consequence, I suppose, of being not so much a paid-up ponderer on such things - like a professional philosopher or a theologian - as being merely a thinking animal whose mind had been encroached upon by a rather cerebral matter. Without realising it, I engaged in abstruse reasoning in the piece. Since I could not, as a human, truly define the meaning or purpose of life, I had merely skirted the boundaries of being and beingness (and, of course, those of nothing and nothingness) in the short piece. The essay was published in a newspaper I wrote for in West Africa. Much of the feedback I got harped on the essay’s indecipherability; in other words, the promise the title gave was not met by the contents; if I had proffered any meaning of life at all, it was lost in the complexity of the essay.

I was slightly surprised by this observation because I was under the impression that my ‘take’ on the meaning of life was clear and accessible. Inasmuch as I would like to be seen as an essayist who had expressed his views as lucidly as he could, the imputation of intellectual esotericism and verbal denseness was not quite something to whoop about – although these days, I don’t give two hoots about how what I write comes across to anyone. Even then, how does one begin to write about the metaphysics of the meaning of life without running the risk of stylistic heavy-handedness or even piffling meaninglessness? One must necessarily walk a tightrope and be careful lest one fall into a dark intellectual abyss. 

But then, shouldn’t every essay or book entitled The Meaning of Life be approached with common sense, with the preknowledge that however eloquent and reader-friendly the author may be, she is never going to offer any substantive explanation of the meaning of life, even if the writing style is as clear as the retina of Gautama Buddha’s eye, the value will be opaque, at the very best. No Guru, no Teacher, no Polymath has been able to hazard a definitive and provable interpretation of the essence of life. No book, either - not the Bible, Quran, or Vedas; neither Aristotle’s nor Spinoza’s Ethics, nor Collected Shakespeare, Shaw or Soyinka can offer anyone a conclusive explanation of all things. Of course, Christians might find a sort of meaning in the Bible, and Muslims might see the Quran as the book that sheds gnostic light on the shadowiness of being, but a neutral-minded reader of both books would only encounter bemusement, some poetry, contradictions, myths, antediluvian tales, reductio ad absurdum, cautionary bugaboos in the shape of hell and eternal roasting and a temperamental inadequate ‘creator’ and ‘controller’ of the world – and possibly wafts of self-induced spiritualism.          

   The question of the meaning of life came up again a few weeks ago (years now; this article was written a few years ago) when I ran into Professor Terry Eagleton’s book of the same title. Eagleton is a literary critic, not a philosopher, and maybe that is why his short introduction to this nagging, if pointless, question is not one of the most original. He goes over the same old grounds. Without explicitly declaring himself religious, hews the line of believers over against ‘unbelievers’ - he is, by the way, the arch-Anti-Dawkins. Although the book is fairly readable, Eagleton offers no meaning for life, and he actually warns against frequent posing of the question. He rounds on philosophers he considers nihilists, such as the profoundly pessimistic Schopenhauer. He touches on how modernism and its mongrel offspring, postmodernism, have been detrimental to the grand narrative of meaning. Enough of Eagleton now – he committed blasphemy with his reproof of Schopenhauer! Viktor E Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning, the author’s quest for meaning against the background of his experiences as a Holocaust survivor, makes for better reading.

Have I just had a brainwave of what the meaning of life might consist in? You bet - not. Isn’t this a triangulation we had better leave to the three Fates to deal with, particularly Atropos, who would inevitably cut off the thread spun by Clotho and measured by Lachesis? Does religion offer any meaning as ‘believers’ would like to imagine? Well, even when I was a kind of believer, the galleon that carries the Minotaur of Meaning in its underdeck was very far from the offing. Even the finest explainer or interpreter of the Bible or Quran could not crystallise their readings into an epiphany of unassailable truth or summa. Like many things in life, religion offers some consolation and acts as a placebo, a potent narcosis, which may truly help some to cope with humans’ common Oedipian blindness. Rather than being the polar light, religion is no more than a bendable cane - a ‘walking stick’ - with which some try to feel their way through the vast dark jumble-room, or even charnel house, of life.   

Philosophy gives its own consolations, too, although less pompously than religion. As a matter of fact, philosophy offers no consolations – despite the flavoursome proffering of such by writers/philosophers from Boethius to Alain de Botton – what it does is to turn anyone who embraces it (or her, Boethius’s Lady Philosophy) into the ballast in the very boat of his/her life - you sink or float by your own devices. Philosophy does not attempt the concentring of life’s rather spiky spokes onto any hub – in other words, philosophy is only a cog and not the hub. Philosophy does not offer saccharine julep that kills the bitter taste of life. Philosophy offers counterpoison; it offers hemlock, which destroys the candied sweetness and light in your mouth and guts, which will not kill you and will not make you stronger, but probably savvier. Philosophy removes your milk teeth and especial sweet tooth and replaces them with nicotine-coloured wisdom teeth. Backgrounding any philosophical study of life’s meaning is the Socratic axiom that he knew nothing. Socrates would not have been able to offer any definitive meaning of life if you asked him. At best, he would ask you to tell him what meaning you thought life, or your life, had - loading the question so lightly that you would certainly be shown up.                

So how does one get a purchase on the meaning of life? One might as well shin up a slippery Babel-tall thread to Christian heaven to arrive at it. So far as I am concerned, there is no definable meaning at all to life; it only behoves every person to seek and define the meaning of his or her life (a very anti-Eagleton subjectivism). I see nihility in many things we give undue weight to, but I am not a nihilist in the sense of being completely enamoured of nothing and nothingness. I have a family and kin; I have friends. Even if I fancy myself a great understander of nihilism, I am a poor nihilist just like I failed to be a true antinatalist (a practiser of the Silenian ideal of better-never-to-have-been-born). I only try to give meaning to things within reason. For instance, I reject the possibility or existence of any god because even if there is any conclusive evidence of a ‘god’ being there, it will add zilch meaning to my own existence – as a matter of fact, the thought of any entity called ‘god,’ or worse, ‘God,’ detracts from any meaning I may want to give to life. In a way, the monotheist God reminds me of the story of Diogenes the Cynic and Alexander the Great, God being the latter: a distraction, a kibitzer who interferes in the treacherous card game of life – except, of course, that Alexander the Great was real and God is a figment of our imagination. Before the Distinguished Thing - the name Henry James gave to death - arrives to do the not-so-distinguished thing, humans do their best to shamble and blunder, Oedipus-like, for any kind of meaning for their lives. We quest for meaning in religion. In spiritualism. In food. In various forms of antifoodism. In friendship. In freemasonry and kindred organisations. In family. In love. In books. In art. In music. In bullshit and bullshitting. In drugs. In gambling and every kind of addiction, including the Internet. In procreation. In philoprogenitiveness. In childlessness. In many ruts and rituals of everyday life. In masturbation. In sex and its manifold kinks. Oh yes, in sex. Or why would the late English poet laureate, John Betjeman, say in his last days that the only regret he had was that he did not have enough sex? And the latest pop-psych weasel word, ‘sex addiction,’ is indeed nonsense. In my opinion, consenting adults can have as much sex as they can. Now, the once ragingly goatish Bill Clinton seems to have ‘mortified the flesh’ and zenned out, but in a rampant Freudian alter-world, the ageing man would not say 'no' if he were gifted an Abishag to warm the cockles of his heart – or some other cockled organ. However, whether these things offer any ‘real’ meaning is another matter. Again, take the primal sop we offer ourselves: sex. For good reasons, the French describe the act’s orgasmic finale as ‘la petite mort’ or ‘the little death,’ but then for many who recover from ‘the little death,’ post-coital tristesse, or after-sex sadness, melancholy, sometimes overtakes the momentary spasms of ecstasy.   

I like reading books, and I have immensely enjoyed reading some of them, even experiencing Barthes’ version of ‘le petit mort’ while perusing certain books, for instance, Tolstoy’s War and Peace. But what is the sum of meaning that I have found in the sum of every book that I have read? It is incalculable, and this is not because I have found in them a googol (or Google?) of meaning that has led me to resolve and ratiocinate the surds of life, but incalculable because even now I cannot begin to unravel how the reading of George Eliot’s magnificent Middlemarch has contributed to the sum of my intellect. Or Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason – or Critique of Practical Reason, or even his Critique of Judgement. Or Achebe’s Arrow of God. Or American Psycho. When you throw the latter novel into the mix and yet another offbeat beast like Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, in which a character gets his kick from eating shit, then I think it becomes clear that one tittle of meaning you take from life is the bilge in its underbelly, the utter shittiness (notwithstanding that the books are fiction, I would imagine that murderous psychopathy and pathological coprophilia are humanly probable).  This is what depth psychology tries to help us to crystallise, sometimes with goodish results. Even though I am a keen reader of Freud, Freudianism and its offshoots, Jungian psychology is my guilty pleasure, guilt because, even with the best will in the world, I can’t embrace Jung’s God/paranormal placebo...

Now, why stop abruptly? Or isn’t that how the lives of many of us are cut off, suddenly, unwarned, even painfully. To conclude, I will quote Flaubert. ‘Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread and want to know the whole design.’ We simply can’t.          

The Starers of Prague: A Kafka-inspired Essay

There should be a word for the act of staring at people who do not look - racially speaking - like you. Xenoscopia? This is a neology that just came to me, but I am always very careful about giving the import of racism, or even the slightly euphemised racialism, to everything. When you shout and wolf-cry 'race' at every glance, wink, or even bodycheck, it will inevitably stew your mind into a witch's brew of paranoia, self-pitying prickliness, victimism and even inverted racism. Racism must be confronted and properly chastened, but to put the exponential of race and racism on everything is to teeter on the borderline of maladaptive neurosis - which most racists suffer from, anyway.
Prague is the capital of the Czech Republic in Central Europe - not in Eastern Europe, as the late Iron Curtain might have delineated it.  Perhaps this is why someone from the United Kingdom, say, would call someone from the Czech Republic an Eastern European (and for other reasons). The point I am trying to make is that Prague is not exactly in the farthest corner of Siberia or in some sort of bumpkinish Boratland where the apparition of a black person would call forth a million stares during a metro ride. I am fairly well-travelled in Western Europe: France, Belgium, Spain, Austria, and I can say that even in free-spirited Spinozaland (Holland), in Amsterdam to be specific, interracial gawpy stares have not exactly become passé, except that in a comparatively fair-sized city like Hamburg in Germany it is not as monomaniacal and zombie-like as in Prague. I daresay, though, that straying into the hinterlands of Bavaria or the steppes of Finland might, understandably, invite such spectatorial interest.
Patronage has not been wholly threshed out of the 'collective unconscious' of Europe and Europeans (not all), particularly concerning people from Africa. David Cameron, British Prime Minister, set off a squall of debate over the word 'swarm' when he used it for immigrants trying to get into Britain from France, the most visible of whom are Africans from the so-called 'horn' of the continent. Only a couple of weeks ago, editors of NRC Handelsblad in Holland thought it was cool to write: Nigger, Are You Crazy? This is clearly reminiscent of how the editors of Charlie Hebdo thought it was kosher to simianise a black woman as a kind of appropriative satire. Even so, I am instancing things that one might use the careless derivate 'casual racism' for (I'd call it 'cavalier racism'). But when you are stared at with such autistic automatism that the good citizens of Prague contrive to enact and sustain everlastingly, then I think it would be unfair on them to call it 'casual racism.' How do you begin to second-guess the thoughts of a young man, woman, or an elderly man or woman eyeballing you? Of course, you know it might have something to do with your race, your colour, your muchness of melanin - or, in my own case, my bald pate. After all, there has always been an under-discussed lookist dimension to baldness. It's even possible to give the stares racist overtones, but I am, alas, a thoughtful person. Now these are not dirty looks, not glowering, smouldering transfixions, not the sort of stares that followers of Santeria in South America would call 'evil eye.' These Prague stares are mostly chess player-like, dry, seemingly incurious, eyes-wide-shut deadpan. They are by no means friendly gawps, nor are they staringly unfriendly; they are neither cold nor warm, neither furtive nor shifty, not an astonished goggle nor the kind lovestruck gazey ogle you might direct at the object of your admiration.
My teenage daughter, who spent much of the time reading on the metro, exclaimed to me as we came out at a stop: oh, people stare here, don't they? I replied: yes, they do. Why? I don't know, I replied. Thank goodness she's always been a good reader of books; I would have thought she was trying to screen herself behind the book. This would not have worked anyway because if there was a word for anyone watching someone as they read, I would have used it to describe a young woman who eyeballed my daughter for so long that you might wonder whether she was furiously incubating a short story entitled 'Young African Girl Reading On Prague Metro.'
After all, Prague is the quintessential city of culture, writerly culture for that matter. The first thing I saw when the plane taxied to a stop was Vaclav Havel Airport. This had induced a favourable impression on me: here is a country naming its major airport after a writer. Can we have Chinua Achebe Airport in Lagos or Abuja? Then I remembered that Havel was not only a writer but also a 'statesman' who became the first president of the Czech Republic in 1990. Havel had brought up Milan Kundera and Ivan Klima. I recalled Klima's book of short stories set in Prague, in which I mainly read dark tales about ordinary lives in the city. It's not really hard to see how Klima came up with those stories. It's almost 30 years since the long death rattle of communism in Czechoslovakia lost all momentum, giving life to free-market openness with its accompanying palette of late-modernity. However, you could still see the signs of statist regularity and brooding amplitude in Prague's architecture. The hotel we stayed in, the International, is a huge secular cathedral, limestony, Soviet-built, its massive columns capstoned by sturdy simulacra of workers.
I did not go to Prague as a culture vulture, hungering for and grubbing through the rich entrails of the city's bohemian soul; I only went for a short break with my family. But I had to 'see' and 'do' Prague. There were the bookshops, so many of them. Posters advertising Mozart's Don Giovanni. Plays. Operas. Galleries. Museums. Alfresco cafes. The Jewish quarters. Medieval synagogues and churches. With its abiding images of Spring 1968, Wenceslas Square is a large screen showing films about the event. The square recalled Paris's Champs Elysée, a boulevard, foreshortened, like a monumental upended plinth at the head of which rests the huge National Museum. A quick visit to the Naprstek Museum of Asian, African and American Cultures - which has its own corner of 'African' artefacts. And the black-themed Franz Kafka museum, the piece de resistance of my touristy saunter. Kafka might not have been subjected to 'xenoscopia' in Prague, but -  as a Jew in a country full of Czechs, with a sizable German population, and at a moment in history when the poison of antisemitism which would culminate in the 2nd World War was marinating, he was, potentially, a 'marked man.'
Now back to the stares - I'd rather give the apparently compulsive, even instinctual, act an anthropological explanation rather than racial. Humans generally tend to subject the unfamiliar, the other, to 'the gaze.' If a Czech person found himself in a local market in Niamey, Niger, he might also attract glances and double-takes, not because some of the people who stared may never have seen a European but because the 'white man' looked different. Now some of the more irate race warriors might argue that there is always subterranean politics to stares. Implicit in one stare is innocuous curiosity, even slightly quizzical adoration, if not approbation, and inherent in another is detestation, even dehumanisation - since the stares I received were not indicative of Afrophilia, the reasoning might go, it was undoubtedly Afrophobia, there can be nothing inbetween. As an African I understand this prejudice very well: while it might seem black-and-white and not the sort of position I would take without good reason, it cannot be dismissed out of hand. The stares might very well be an expression of a certain kind of unease, discomfiture; it might be the bemusing attempt to grasp what some scholars have called the 'idea of Africa,' the Hegelian, louche idea of Africa conceptualised and nurtured by the European mind.
Rather than fling the word 'phobia' around lightly, I would  use the term 'betenoire complex' to describe the spectrum of unconscious responses to the 'idea' of racial 'blackness.' I had to plumb humanity's psychic depths to come up with this coinage. I'll illustrate. Close to midnight, I was walking down a well-lit, if solitary, street of the north Kent town I live in and a few meters before me, I made out the apparitions of two young women saying goodbyes as they descended from the porch of a house, making a beeline for a car which had just been smart-readied. As if by a cue, both women had turned to see the dark figure looming, and both had slewed on their stilettos and skittered towards the house like chicks who had glimpsed a bird of prey in good time. As I went past, I could see them disappearing into the porch. Would they have panicked and doubled back to the safety of the house if they had glimpsed a 'white' rather than a 'black' face? I don't know, but over against philosophical balance and dispassion, it would be difficult to argue that a dormant, if unreasonable, reflex had not been in play or undercut the fact that measuring the panic threshold of the women's response might borrow some percentage from pigmentation. Not so long ago, the 'black man' was used by some white parents to induce good behaviour in their children - here comes the nigger, the monster, the ogre. This is the sum of the 'betenoire complex', and those who suffer from it greatly, clinically, may still find the black-bogeyman cautionary stratagem useful.
The stares of Prague may be set down in the Kafka-absurd, vague, and minor end of the scale of the 'betenoire complex' - at least many of them. Because, again, the motive behind stare A may be different from that of stare B. For instance, in the concourse of Prague's central train station, there were posters depicting global 'cultures' and peoples. I noticed that the only representation of Africa was a montage of black-and-white pictures of Pygmies of the Kalahari, half-naked, 'primitive,' and peculiarly picturesque. In one of the frames, a white man stands amidst the Pygmies, tall, commanding, like Gulliver among Lilliputians, beaming with with paternal aplomb. Against the background of this poster, I'd caught a couple of people lost in a glaring brown study. I also found subliminal images of racialism in the lobby of Czech's Academy of the Sciences, where I was welcomed with images of Mursi women in various states of undress, dust-coloured, lips stretched out with large discs, disked dangling earlobes, cropped hair, and knocked-out teeth. Beautiful women all right, and one has to acknowledge the scientific good intentions and the anthropological truth-seeking which informed such displays. But you do not need to be a close reader of Chinua Achebe's disquisition on the politics of 'image' to know that if a child is fed with certain stereotypes, inoculated with single-coloured impressions of peoples of a continent, he might grow up to stare and stare again, puzzled, puzzling over this black being, mulling the dark vision he's just seen over, probably to validate the preconceptions he had. Even then, this cannot be defined as racism; some of the stares might very well be informed by other aesthetic, impressionistic or even anthropological rationales. 
After a few hours in Prague, I came up with a strategy. Stare back, hold your stare, and make it a grainless, straight-faced stare. Turn the whole thing into a staring game; do not be outstared; stare down whoever you entered into the game with. I actually wished I had a talent for hypnosis, to put those who stared for too long into deep sleep and make them miss their stop. I wished I had the power, African voodoo if you please, to turn anyone who overstared at me into stone or a pillar of salt.

PS: I had to end this piece with lighthearted satire. A lot is going on in the world. Hunger. Famine. Wars. Genocides. Untold human suffering. Racism in its most malign form. The so-called 'migrant crisis.' And, of course, xenophobia. With all these, why should I get myself worked up about mere stares? About mere xenoscopia.