The Dead Heart

“We may note in passing that one other race (not counting ourselves) has made this sharp distinction between itself and all other foreigners, namely the Hebrews. Here were two races, each very conscious of being different from its neighbors, living not very apart, yet for the most part in complete ignorance of each other and influencing each other not at all until the period following Alexander's conquests, when Greek thought influenced Hebraic thought considerably -- as in Ecclesiastes. Yet it was the fusion of what was most characteristic in these two cultures -- the religious earnestness of the Hebrews with the reason and humanity of the Greeks -- which was to form the basis of later European culture, the Christian religion. But Gentile and Barbaros were very different conceptions; the one purely racial and religious, the other only incidentally racial and not in the least religious.” — H.D.F Kitto, The Greeks, 1951

A quarter of the way through the 21st century democracy is on the run across the globe. The continuing tragedy of Tanzania being the latest example,

“Tanzania’s main opposition party has been disqualified from upcoming general elections, the country’s election chief said, after it refused to sign an electoral code of conduct.”

The east African nation has increasingly cracked down on its opposition ahead of a general election due in October.

The opposition Chadema party has accused President Samia Suluhu Hassan of returning to the repressive tactics of her predecessor, John Magufuli.

Chadema leader Tundu Lissu, who was arrested and charged with treason earlier in the week, previously said that his party would not participate in the polls without electoral reform.

On Saturday, Chadema said the party’s secretary-general John Mnyika would not attend an Independent National Elections Commission (INEC) meeting to sign the government’s electoral code of conduct.

The decision was “informed by the lack of a written response” to the party’s “proposal and demands for essential electoral reforms”, it said in a statement.”

And I can assure you, Tanzania, just like every place on this planet even feigning a notion of modern republicanism, take these United States as example one, is in desperate need of electoral reform.

It should be noted, in let’s call it the two-thousand year history of Christian Europe, democracy has been an historical anomaly. In fact, it’s only been in the last two and half centuries with the establishment of the American republic, that democracy, if not in deed but at least in notion, spread across the globe. As far as the Ancient Greeks, you could say democracy lasted two and half centuries and with Rome, more or less twice as long. So, historically, its modern incarnation has had a good run.

Of course as far as Tanzania, any good American today, in the dead heart of modern republicanism, would say, “What the hell does that have to do with me?” Certainly, you’d like to scold ignorance, but J. Robert Oppenheimer, assembler of the first atomic bomb, explained the deeper problem in a sublime and still relevant political address in 1955,

Everything has gotten enormously bigger. This is partly, of course, because there are more people. It is partly because the units of human activity have gotten bigger. It is partly because of the pervasive almost instantaneous nature of something that one could call communication, it is not in all senses properly called communication.

When we observe ourselves, we notice that our ability to deal with people is one thing when there are very few and that it rapidly changes when we have larger groups, and this can be studied, and has been studied. As soon as you go beyond a very small number of people, you no longer have the sense of their integrity as a person, instead you are forced to create a kind of abstract stereotype, a parking, a position, a leader just in order to be able to cope with it. You can imagine what that amounts to in a world with two and a half billion (8 billion today) people.

As an almost inevitable consequence of this, but also as a peculiarity of the way we run our affairs, the notion of choice, never a simple notion, of deciding something which is really one of the basic traits of being human and perhaps that function where one is most concerned with his integrity. This whole area of responsibility has become extremely befogged and clouded.

We talk to each other about our responsibilities and our duties, and in simple situations, the family, parts of the community, we recognize them, we try to to live up to them. But our duty to the larger units, to mankind these are indeed very foggy notions.

I think much of the anguish talk about how we are to live in the new situation. How we are to avoid the dangers and reap the benefits. How we are to retain a kind of kindness and not all kill each other. Much of the futile, rasping, horrid quality of this talk is because no one really has any sense of what does devolve on him. What he can as a person do. There is a frightful disproportion between our willingness to undertake a true or a secular (action) and our ability to find any way at all in which to do it.

Simone Weil wrote, and this was 20 years ago, that in comparison and contrast to all the earlier generations, hers was marked by the paucity of true responsibilities and the prolific proliferation of imaginary ones. She went on to say this circumstance once properly, once fully appreciated, conduces a marvelous serenity of the spirit. But then she was not disinterested, that is not right to say she despaired of social betterment, she was interested and she died of this interest.

In a world in which change is so great that tradition is emptied of much of its content, emptied not because the tradition is not solid, but empty because as I said earlier it has nothing in it to correspond to the questions, the problems, and the realities which erupt partly because we know more, partly because we do more, partly because we act differently.

The citizens of Chadema are the most courageous I ever had the honor to work with. They struggle for a democratic tradition that in the recorded history of Europe is limited, but in the much longer, unrecorded history of Africa may very well have been long established and very well cherished.

Peoples Power!