This book is a first person account of the phenomenon called near death experience, NDE. In 2008, Eben Alexander, a Harvard University Neurosurgeon apparently contracted bacterial meningitis (from E. coli) and his brain was severely attacked and he went into coma. He was in coma for seven days and was treated at Lynchburg, Virginia General Hospital.

The book is an account of what he claimed transpired during those seven days when his mind, as he said, checked out of his body and journeyed to heaven. He provided descriptions of the heavenly realms he journeyed to and those descriptions are in sync with similar descriptions offered by those who also claim to have had near death experience (going through a dark environment or tunnel, emerging in a place of light, a very beautiful place where people and things take on radiant quality; interacting with those people and eventually moving on to other realms that we might call the formless kingdom of God).

It is not so much the description of the spiritual realms provided by Dr. Alexander as it is who did the describing. Eben Alexander, MD is a highly trained neuroscientist who understands the intricacies of the human brain and has operated on numerous brains. He is trained in the scientific method and understands that according to science only phenomenon that all of us can observe and verify is considered scientific.

In fact, he showed a level of understanding of science not usually seen in medical doctors (strictly speaking, medical doctors are technicians of the body, not pure scientists, such as physicists, chemists, biologists, astronomers and geologists). He reviewed aspects of quantum physics and seem to know what he is talking about. He talked about Einstein’s Special and General Relativity, Neils Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Emil Schrodinger, Pauli, Paul Dirac, Jean, Born, Broglie and other giants of quantum physics. He grasped the developments in science since 1543 when Copernicus posited that the Sun is the center of our world, and in 1610 when Galileo proved Copernicus’ thesis with his telescopes.  In 1687 Isaac Newton posited his three laws of motion and the law of gravity and gave birth to physics (Greeks such as Democritus had some sort of physics but not as we now understand the subject).

In the eighteenth century we had Lavoisier, Laplace and Boyle (those gave birth to Chemistry); in the nineteenth century we had Dalton, Thomas Young, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, Charles Darwin, Ludwig Boltzmann, and J.J. Thompson. In the twentieth century we had (apart from the already mentioned quantum physicists) Max Planck, Pierre and Maria Curie, Ernest Rutherford, James Chadwick, Lise Meitner, Enrico Fermi, Strassman, Otto Hahn, Pauline, James Watson and Francis Crick, Wheeler, Murray Gell-Mann, Alan Aspect, Alan Goth.

Dr. Alexander understood how science succeeded in marginalizing people, presenting them as insignificant part of the universe, whereas our ancestors used to fancy that they were the center of the universe and, indeed, believed in a God who had nothing better to do with his time but to protect them. Because science has belittled man he is striving to rehabilitate his diminished self-esteem and often grasps on vacuous spirituality to make him seem to have existential value.

Alas, he has no apparent worth for he lives on an insignificant planet, in an ordinary solar system that is placed at the tail end of a spiral galaxy, a galaxy that is one of billions of galaxies. We live on a planet, along with its star that came into being four and half billion years ago, and would in five billion years die with that star. Indeed, the entire universe is scheduled to die a cold death in a few trillion years when its expansion leads to heat loss.

We seem nothing and are apparently looking for something to make us seem to have worth; belief in God seems to serve that purpose for some persons hence folks blindly latch unto talks about spirit and its alleged worth and immortality.

Talk about the spiritual realms generally are subjective; other persons , for example, seem unable to observe what NDE folks claim to have experienced hence many of us see them as sort of like dreams that are associated with death and dying.

Perhaps, as we are about to die certain biophysical and biochemical reactions in our brains provide us with spectacular dreams to bid us Farwell from the material universe?

Simply stated, those trained in scientific reductionism tend to disregard what NDE folks talk about. Perhaps, we are amused by talk of visiting the spiritual world and leave it at that but do not take it seriously.

In the past, mankind deluded itself with loads of spiritual talk that turned out as mere superstition. As far as we know, only the scientific method has enabled us to understand the world we live in and enabled us to devise technologies to control the physical environment hence make our lives pleasant.  Just imagine the world of yesteryears when our ancestors prayed to what they called gods but were killed by assorted bacteria and virus, lived pained and suffering existence and their so-called gods did not help them one bit.

Science has offered us the only help we have so far obtained in this seeming meaningless existence of ours. We are born, live, age, feel pain and then die. What a bummer! But such is the fate of all those living in flesh and there is no need crying over spilled milk. Hold your head high; chin out, march forward and take whatever life throws at you without complaint.

Try to understand physical phenomena, develop technology and make the most of our seeming pointless existence in space, time and matter and hopefully live to age 100 and then die. When you die the body you had enslaved yourself laboring to provide for decays, rots and smells worse than feces (our bodies are made of the various elements, especially Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, CHON, and traces of other elements such as iron, potassium, calcium, magnesium, zinc, copper, etc.). Upon death the elements that hitherto composed ones body decay to particles (such as electrons, protons and neutrons) that they are made of. Particles are made of quarks and quarks are made of photons (radiation) and those are made of (nothingness, the nothingness from which energy and matter emanated during the Big bang 13.7 billion years ago)?

Simply stated, most scientifically educated persons embrace materialism, the philosophy that we came from matter and return to matter. In so far that we have thinking, aka mind and consciousness most scientists seem to believe that it is epiphenomenal; that is, a throw up of the processes of the neurons in our brains. Certain biochemical and biophysical processes in our brains seem to produce consciousness. Consciousness is of the body and when we die dies with our bodies, and that is all there is to us.

All talk of consciousness being outside the human body seems to beg the question since none of us has seen consciousness outside our bodies. If spirits exist let them come and at the same time show themselves to many people. As long as they seem to express their existence only through certain individuals, such as NDE folk, we are prone to suspect that it is such individuals that produce the phenomenon (Kant’s numenon?) that they call spirit?

Dr. Alexander is aware of the arguments against belief in spirit and indeed seemed to have been skeptical about the existence of spirit although he nominally attended an Episcopal (Anglican) Church. But despite his sophistication his experience during his week in coma convinced him that spirits exist and that we live after we die.

He described the after death existence which other writers have provided us (there is no need to rehash them here, if you are not aware of this literature please read Raymond Moody’s writings and personal accounts of out of body experience such as the one provided by Betty Eadie...I wrote a lengthy review of Eadie’s book, Embraced by the light).

Is what Dr. Alexander wrote true or just an unusual dream, a fantasy produced by his brain? Honestly, I don’t know. Until I have had similar experience I am not in a position to state that it is true or false. I have an open mind and in the meantime operate from the perspective of the scientific method.

If heaven is real we shall get to it when we die; in the meantime, I have no need to believe in heaven and its supposed God.

What I have need to accept is love. Dr. Alexander says that heaven is a place of unconditional love.  I hope that he is correct. Be that as it may, I have no need to posit heaven and God before I accept the utility of love.

As I see it, love is the only thing that gives our lives on earth whatever meaning there is in it. We must love each other regardless of whether there is God and life after death or not. If, indeed, heaven is real and is a place of perfect love that is fantastic and welcome news.

Dr. Alexander, as a child was given up by his teenager parents and was adopted by Dr. Alexander, another neurosurgeon. He was apparently loved by his adoptive parents but most of his life felt like an orphan. He searched for his biological parents and after been put off by state authorities eventually connected with them. That seemed to have given him a modicum of satisfaction regarding his biological origin. Nevertheless, he had the psychology of an orphan and tried to create a loving family, apparently, to make up for what was lacking in his life. From his extensive description of his wife, two sons and his immediate relatives it seems that he had a loving circle around him. His family life actually made me envious since I do not have such family experience. I did not know that some people have such close and loving families?

The man still felt like an orphan who was abandoned in this material universe. His journey to the spiritual realm, apparently, gave him a sense of connection to the universe; his existential sense of separation and aloneness was temporarily eliminated and he felt one with all things, unified with the universe and that gave him peace and joy. Lucky him!

The message of his book is that we are all part of the universe and that we are loved by all people and by God.

We are loved by all people and God? This seems like wishful thinking since in the here and now world many of us do not experience the universal love he is talking about.

Dr. Alexander is a white southern gentleman. We all know how loving southern white folks are, don’t we?  These folks are rabid racists who treat black folks like shit, literally.  Therefore, all that love that Dr. Alexander and his alleged God claim to represent does not seem real (it seems make belief, fantasy).

We just went through a presidential election where “Christian” Republicans who call themselves believers in civil rights and civil liberties did everything in their powers to disenfranchise black folks; they made it almost impossible for them to vote; black folks had to stand in line for up to twelve hours to exercise their constitutional right to vote; and they were asked to provide evidence of their American citizenship (they had to produce IDs; many southern blacks were not born in hospitals hence do not have birth certificates, do not have drivers licenses or US passports hence had a difficult time proving their citizenship).

As we talk, these disingenuous Southern white folk are at work trying to redo the electoral college; at present the winner of each state takes the entire state’s electors; but white Republican governors and Republican controlled state legislatures have Gerrymandered  how representatives are apportioned so that they guarantee that mostly white folks are elected to the US Congress, and, more importantly if electors are divided in accordance with the gerrymandered Congressional districts  the presidential candidate that won most votes in a state could end up winning less electors in it. For example, Barack Obama won the popular vote in Virginia, but if electors were apportioned according to the gerrymandered districts he would have had fewer electors than the Mitt Romney he defeated in that state! Thus, despite winning the popular vote Romney would have won more electors (273) than Obama (268) hence became President despite receiving fewer votes!

In the 2012 election Obama won 332 electors and Romney won 206 electors; white southerners want to make sure that a black man never again win the presidency hence plan on rigging future elections via changing how electors are allotted.

Hello Apartheid South Africa, here comes white southerners replicating your system where a minority ruled the majority!

Would America still have the guts to preach to the world that it is democratic? Wouldn’t people see through its hypocrisy and laugh it away?

As the on-white population rise white folks will do desperate things to stay in power. At present whites are 72% of the US populations hence still the majority population but Latinos breed children at an amazing rate, and sneak across the border from Mexico and Latin America and in a few decades would probably surpass the white population. African Americans are 12% of the US population; Asians are about 5% of the US population.

I tell you, these white folks are an interesting bunch. Are they really Christians, if by Christians we mean those who love people?  I often wonder!  My philosophical mentor, Arthur Schopenhauer (World as Will and Idea) in the early 1800s wrote about Southern USA whites, who claimed to be Christians, and claimed to love God and people and yet treated their African slaves worse than most people treat the mosquitoes that suck their blood! That is correct; they maltreated their fellow human beings who did them no harm while talking about God and love!

Get these hypocrites out of my face, would you; they make me conclude with my beloved Schopenhauer that man is a mistake that should not have been made; the universe ought not to have produced human beings; people are a plague unto people; they are eyesore, they blight nature with their evil behaviors.

Dr. Alexander and his God of love did not persuade me one bit. I only see a world of pain, not the loving world he described as part of his earthly family and heavenly home.

Nevertheless, I highly recommend this book; it is easy reading; I read it, today, in less than five hours (and wrote this review of it in an hour). Perhaps, it could help those who need such first person accounts of the reality of heaven to convince themselves that God exists and that there is life after death.  However, if one is a diehard materialist I doubt that the book would sway one towards belief in God.

To me, if God exists the question is: how come he allows too much suffering in this damn world?  Theologians rationalize human evil and suffering by saying that God gave us freedom of choice and we chose what we experience? Great!

Here is a little question for theologians: does a loving father stand by as his children stick their hands into fire knowing that they would be burned? If such a father existed wouldn’t we see him as culpable in his children sustaining burns on their hands?

Give me a break, will you; let us please leave God out of human affairs. I am not interested in being told about a loving God; I am interested in how we can make our lives loving.

If Dr. Alexander’s book helps you to become a loving person, to realize that people live in suffering and you do whatever you can to reduce that suffering your behavior is welcome. Theology without practicing love is a bunch of scholastic rubbish.  Gautama Buddha remains my ideal religious philosopher for he asked people to have compassion for people, not because of God or desire for life after death but because they understand that people suffer and they want to reduce that suffering.

Love and the rest are details; love connects us to each other and to the universe and reduces our sense of alienation from the universe.

Love makes this strange universe our home whereas lovelesness estranges us from the universe. Our true self is love; the rest is noise.

PS: You could read Dr. Osuji’s books such as: (1) What exactly is love, (2) Living from the loving self, (3) the forthcoming monumental work on human nature, The Self versus the Self Concept.

Ozodi Osuji

January 30, 2013

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Ramana Maharshi, Talks with Ramana Maharshi. (Carlsbad California: Inner Directions, 2010) 550 pages

Book Review By Ozodi Osuji

This book is composed of a series of talks given by the Hindu Sage, Ramana Maharishi,  from 1935 to 1939. Those who compiled it say that it contains the essence of Maharishi’s teachings.  The book was originally published in India in 1955 and republished in California in 2010.

Ramana Maharshi was born in 1879 in India (his given name was Venkataraman). From an early age he heard one word voice, Arunachala. This word was repeated on a number of occasions and he did not know what it meant. In the meantime, he went to school but at the age of sixteen experienced intense fear of death and decided to help death out and die. He simulated death, tried to stop breathing, allowed his body to stay motionless, stiff. His goal was to die instead of live with the fear of death. Why live if all you are going to do is be afraid of dying. You either live fully, whatever that means to you, or you die and that is all there is to it. If you are going to live you had better not live in fear of dying, a fear that paralyzes most people. Well, he just laid there welcoming death to come and get him.

In doing so, that is, looking death in the face and not been afraid of it he defied the hold of death on people. He transcended the ego for the ego is that self that lives in fear of death and tells one to do this and that to avert death; the ego tells us to eat food, take medications, wear clothes, live in shelters etc. or else we died. We obey and live in fear of death.

We enslave our lives to doing senseless things in order to get what maintains our ego and body existence (the desire to live in body, by the way, is what gives the dictators of this world the power to control us; if one does not wish to live no tyrant has hold on one’s allegiance; no one can intimidate you into doing something he wants you to do unless you have an irrational desire to live in body at all costs).

Alas, despite all our struggles to live in ego and body, give or take one hundred years and we die. What is the point of the struggle? Now, suppose one accepts death what hold has the ego on one? None!

It was while Ramana was lying down and beckoning death to come get him that he experienced Samadhi, the death of his ego self (ahankara) and the reawakening of the awareness of his real self (atman).  He was liberated (Moksha) from the hold of the ego and its gift of fear to us.

Subsequent to that experience, people noticed that he was a different person. For one thing, he stopped going to school. His siblings began calling him holy man, Sadhu and asked him why he had not taken to the forest and go live there as Hindu Holy men did. Good idea, he thought and left home and kept walking. Several days later he found himself at the foothills of a hill and was told that the hill is called Arunachala, the word he had heard all his life. He decided to make the foothill his home.

Thus, the sixteen year old lived right there, sleeping in a cave in the hill.  He was disinterested in the things of this world and simply stayed there and meditated. He lived in perfect solitude, not talking to people. When hungry, like holy men are supposed to do, he begged for his food, not taking more than he needed at a time and returned to living his cave, silent existence.

Years later, folks discovered him and his unique manner of existence and talked to him and recognized that he spoke as a Hindu sage. Word spread and people from all over India flocked to listen to him talk. Later, people from all over the world, especially Europeans and Americans came and asked him questions.  He still lived in his cave.

Eventually, devotees built an ashram (where a holy man teaches his devotees) at the foothill  and he would be in the hall, sited on a couch, cross legged, in his one and only Dottie (shorts) and towel and answered questions posed to him by his visitors. He lived and slept on that couch and in that hall. However, after 1945 when his health became fragile he allowed his followers to build a hut behind the hall and lived there. He died in 1950 of cancer.

The word is that Ramana Maharshi was the greatest Indian sage (Sri Bhagavan) of the twentieth century. India had Sri Ramakrishna in the nineteenth century and Ramana in the twentieth century.

What did he teach? The book in question is written in questions and answers format. Visitors to his ashram would ask questions and he would answer them. In the process he essentially explicated most of Hinduism. However, the explication is not systematic, not done in a sequential, logical manner.  Indeed, the answers tend to be repetitive and tedious (only the most persistent reader would read this book from the beginning to the end).

The reader who is likely to benefit most from the book is one that has studied Hinduism (or taken classes in comparative religions with Hinduism as one of the religions covered). In formal studies teachers systematically explain what each religion stands for. This is not what took place in these talks. Instead, folks brought their issues to the saint and he gave them answers and the answers are in sync with Hinduism, especially his particular path (jnana Yoga), the path of knowledge and wisdom.

Since the reader may not be familiar with Hinduism let me briefly summarize Hinduism before we proceed.

Hinduism is one of the world’s great religions (the others are Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam). It is probably the oldest religion?  It has been written down, in Sanskrit, for about four thousand years.  The religion began in India.

The Indian subcontinent was originally inhabited by black folks (called Dravidians). Aryans (white folks from Persia, Iran) crossed the Cyndi River (from which Hindi was derived) and, apparently, conjoined their Aryan religion with the religion of the Dravidians they conquered.

The religion began when shepherds, called Rishis, would write poems about God. Those poems are now called Veda.  Subsequently, folks wrote long epic tales about their religion (such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata). Later, intellectuals wrote philosophical treatises on the religion called Upanishads (the Upanishads probably are the most rational explication of the doctrines of a religion known to man; it was the first attempt by people to explain God in pure reason, rather than mythopoeic language). Later still, pure philosophers like Shankara, Ramanuja and so on wrote systematic discourses on Hinduism (writings that Western Christian theology has not equaled).

A brief description of the religion is contained in the Bagavad Gita (which is a section of Mahabharata). In the book, Krishna (supposedly God in human form) talked to Arjuna. Arjuna was a general about to go to war and was bothered by his conscience. He did not want to kill people. Krishna came along as his charioteer and tried to encourage him to go do his duty, to go kill. In the process he explicated Hinduism, especially its teaching that people are eternal and are not born and do not die, that they merely seem to be born and die in bodies, those taking place in a dream hence Arjuna should not be bothered by killing folks for in actual fact he is killing no one.

While in God, people sleep and have dreams. They have many dreams, each dream a life time in body; they have many life times in bodies while all the time remaining as spirit.

Krishna also explicated the various paths to God taught by Hinduism.  Patanjalii wrote a book explaining those paths to God.

According to Hinduism, people are born with different temperaments, or as we would today say, different personalities. Each person’s personality disposes him to prefer a specific path to God. No specific path is better than others but folks must follow the path suited to them (while, of course, also trying the other paths). All paths, all religions are ways that lead to God.

The paths are collectively called Yoga. Yoga is Sanskrit for yoking, reconnecting people back to their source, God (religion is Latin word meaning the same thing, reconnecting to our source).

There are four main yogas: Jnana yoga, Bhakti yoga, Karma Yoga, and Raja yoga (there are also tangential yogas such as Hatha Yoga…flexibility exercises, Ayurveda Yoga…India’s folk medicine).

Jnana yoga is the intellectual path to God (it is also called Vedanta).  It teaches advaita philosophy, non-dualism (that everything is one thing; one thing manifests in seeming diverse things but they are one).The world of multiplicity and separation we see with our eyes is said to be an illusion, not real. What is real is oneness, the unity of all things.  It says that following pure thinking one can recognize that the ground of our being is one. One spirit, one self, called Brahman is all people.  One self, Braham, as it were, has many parts, each part called Atman. Each of us is Atman. The Atman is the same as Brahman. One of the Upanishads says; thou art that. You (your real self) are God.

Bhakta Yoga is for those who are devotional in nature, folks who like to see God as a person and worship him. These people like to see God as a powerful father figure and pray to him and worship him. In worshiping their God (or his surrogate, such as Jesus Christ) they sometimes lose sense of their individuality and become one with him (experience the oneness that the Jnana yogis realized intellectually). According to Hinduism, over 90% of mankind is Bhakti, whereas only 1% is Jnani (intellectuals, wise persons).The path of love of God or Bhakti is suited to people who value love. Christianity is a Bhakti Yoga path to God; here, you love God and love the symbol of his ideal son, Jesus Christ. In loving God and his ideal son you and them become one self (hence self-realization through Bhakta yoga).

Karma yoga is the path of selfless work; it is for doers, businessmen, administrators, those who do not reflect on the nature of reality but engage in action. These are the producers of the world. They work and produce what we live on. They make our existence in body possible by producing our food and other things without which we would not survive physically. In as much as Brahman manifests in all of us and they make it possible for us to live they are serving Brahman, God through their work.  Go ahead and make billions of dollars selling goods and services and you are serving God through whatever you produce and sell; you do not need to go to church and talk about your belief in God to be serving God, you can serve God by serving his children who are one with him.

Raja Yoga is the royal path, the path that leads to God quickest.  This is the path of meditation. Sit down and meditate. This means telling yourself that you are not your body, not your ego. It means negating your entire ego based thinking. Neti, neti, nothing that you can think of is the truth. So, what is the truth, and who are you if you are not the body, ego and your thoughts? You do not know who in fact you are and what anything means. So keep quiet with a mind emptied of all ego conceptions of who you are and what reality is. Let go of your ego personality and its thinking and become a void, a no- ego separated self; remain silent.

In meditation people claim to have escaped from their ego self and the egos world and experienced their real self, the unified self, Brahman and Atman.  In that state there is no you and I, no seer and seen, no subject and object; there is just one self-Brahman who is simultaneously infinite selves.

Hinduism teaches that our real self is Brahman who is at the same time infinite people.  When one experiences that real self (called self-realization) one is said to be enlightened to one’s real self, is illuminated to one’s true self. The person who is realized is characterized by peace and joy; he is now aware that he is not his body and ego and that he lives eternally in spirit.

Buddhism is another name for Raja Yoga (Gautama Buddha, in effect, was a raja yogi…in India his religion, Buddhism, was absorbed by Hinduism as part of its raja yoga, whereas outside India it is known as Buddhism).

Hinduism teaches that there is one self, that self is called Brahman. Brahman is one and simultaneously infinite in numbers. Each of his part is called Atman. Atman and Brahman are one. They are not two people; they are one self, one self that is simultaneously whole and parts.

You are a self, a whole (Brahman) and a part (Atman).There is no space and gap between whole and part, no gap between people. We are all one self, literally. You are all people.

One self, Braham cast Maya on his mind and sleep and in his sleep projected out his infinite selves, atman’s, out and made each of them seem housed in body and living in space, time and matter. Maya made each of them seem to be different from others. Thus, on earth, the great illusion, the universal dream each of us sees himself as different from other people.

The goal of Hinduism is to teach us that whereas we seem different and separated from other people that, in fact, we are one. You are all selves.

You sleep and in dreams project out a world that seems real and populate that world with seeming different people and call yourself Ozodi or whatever your earthly name is. You see space, time and distance between you and other people.

The external world seems real. Hinduism says that the external world is not real, that it is in your mind, in my mind; in our shared one mind (Hinduism is solipsistic).

The various yogas and other Hindu practices are designed to enable you to realize that you are the world. In meditation, for example, you escape from the separated self and experiences unified self and know from that experience (Samadhi, called Nirvana in Buddhism and Satori in Zen) that you are all people. When you do so you are liberated from the ego and its suffering (Moksha). You now live peacefully, lovingly and joyously. You love all people not because you are doing them a favor but because in loving all people you love your whole self (contracted as holy self).  Conversely, if you hate people you hate your holy self and must therefore live in conflict and be unhappy.

Hinduism believes in reincarnation (dreams). We are always in Brahman but while in it sleep and dream many life times in bodies. In each life time, each dream time we do things. Our actions have consequences for us and for other people.

If we love people we build positive samsara. If we hurt other people we build negative samsara. We get reborn on earth to take the consequences of our past actions.

If we were good in past lives we get born in loving circumstances; if we lived hurtful lives in past lives we are born in horrible circumstances  in this life time (Africans, the sellers of their  people, criminals,  come back to suffer in this life time until they learn to love rather than exploit their people).

As Hinduism sees it, we are each at different stages in our evolution on planet earth. Hinduism divided society into four classes: Brahmin, Kastriya, Sudra and Untouchables. Each of us is said to be in the group where his past life’s actions places him.

The Brahmin class is the highest group, they are the priestly class, those who loved and served humanity in past lives.

The next to the priests are the Kastriyas; they are the leaders of society, the soldiers and administrators.

The third class is the Sudra; they are the workers of society.

The untouchables are the lowest social class, they are outcastes. These people supposedly were evil in past lives… Hitler today is probably somewhere living as an outcast in Africa?

Whereas there is some merit to India’s class system it is now abused. The rulers of India categorize people as born into classes and treat them as such. Originally, the castes are not where you are born into but where your behavior places you. Now in India black folks are mostly the untouchables, the outcasts. The conquering light skinned Aryans relegated the dark skinned blacks into the outcasts and thus control them.  This is the bastardization of religion’s good idea.

Hinduism believes that those who love all people and work to serve all people when they die no longer are reborn on earth. They stay in the spiritual world (there are many levels of the spiritual world, including astral world, the world of light forms; there is the formless world of Brahman, Brahmaloca).

Enlightened people may choose to come back to the world and upon birth immediately reject the material world, for they know that it is transitory and ephemeral and focus on what is changeless and permanent, spiritual matters. They are the teachers of God, the avatars like Jesus Christ and Gautama Buddha.

Hinduism classifies people into three mental states; Sativa, Rajas and Tamas. Those with Sativa mind are calm and focused on spiritual matters; those with Rajas mind are the doers, active people; those with Tamas mind are lazy, unproductive and given to corruption (think Nigerians).

Hinduism says that the world of matter is composed of three strands, called three gunas (this is akin to physics notion that the atom has three parts, electrons, protons and neutrons).

Hinduism believes that the universe comes and goes. A universe, called Kalpa/Yuga, comes, lives and dies and another is born. Lord Shiva awakes and a new universe is born and goes to sleep and that universe dies; he awakens to another universe etc. Our current universe is said to be the era of worshipping of God (India has many gods, all representing the different aspects of Brahman, including Vishnu, Shiva, Kali etc.).

Hinduism believes in what it calls the seven chakras, energy centers in the body beginning at the base of the spine, and the top one at the head. Each of the chakras performs certain functions. The first three perform lower functions of adaptation to their world, whereas the upper three perform mental functions; the middle chakra is the heart function (the center of love and connection to other persons).

At the base of the spine is kundalini energy, coiled like a snake; it can be awakened and enables the individual to awaken the chakras. Many ways are employed in the effort to awaken the kundalini energy, including controlled deep breathing (puraka), meditation (raja yoga), repeating an assigned mantra (a name a guru gives to one to repeat to help him quiet and concentrate his mind in Japa, religious practice).

Hinduism posits that we on earth live in ignorance of our real self; our real self is said to be atman (the individual self is jivatman); the goal of Hinduism is for us to remember our real self and live from that awareness.

Actually, we are said to be always in the real self but choose to forget it so as to identify as the ego and body and dream that we are those false self-identities.

The world is an illusion; we are in a dream that we are who we are not. In the dream there is a past, present and future, but in reality there is only the now of God with no past and future.

The goal is to find out who our real self and the real world is. Ramana Mahaishi employs the self-inquiry method to find out “who am I”; am I the ego and body or am I the person who owns the ego and body?  Through asking these questions and ruling out false answers one is supposed to realize ones true self.

Now that we have a bird’s eye view of Hinduism let us see what Ramana Maharshi said? He called his path to God Self-inquiry method. His path, like all Hindu paths, is meant to lead to self-realization. In broad terms he was a jnana yogi, he embraced the path of wisdom and intellect to God (lased with Bhakti yoga every now and then…such as when he prays and sings to his God).

Ramana Maharshi asked people to find out who their real self is. So, who is your real self? Are you the self that you currently know yourself as, the ego self-housed in body? If that is all you are then you will die and that would be the end of you.

We know that your body is composed or nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon and oxygen and traces of other elements. Your body is a composed thing. All composed things must be decomposed. Whether you like it or not your body will die. Give or take, a hundred years and your pretty body, the body you slave for, that you work like a slave to earn a living to maintain it would die and decompose, and smell like feces. The atoms that compose your body would decompose.

The elements that are now your body would decay to their parts (electrons, neutrons and protons). Those particles would in time decay to quarks and then to photons (light particles). Light energy would ultimately decay to wherever it came from during the Big Bang that 13.7 billion years ago produced the universe of matter, space and time.

If all you are is your body then you are nothing since your body came from nothing and returns to nothing.

If, as science teaches us, your ego mind is epiphenomenal, that is, is produced by your body, brain, and when your body dies your ego mind dies and you end.

Is that who you are or do you have a different self, a self that does not live in body, does not die and disappear into nothingness?  Ramana says that we have a different self, one that is changeless, eternal and permanent.

Ramana tells us to go find out who is our real self. Through his questions and answers method he tells us that there is another self in us, the self, the I that asks the question who am I? This is called the I-I method of inquiry.

One I, the Brahman in us ask the question: who am I? The other I, the ego self obviously is temporary and Ramana believes that it is not who we are. He wants a person to go beyond the illusory self, the false self, the ego self and find out that his real self is the atman who is one with the Brahman.

Like all good teachers Ramana Maharshi used homespun metaphors to drive his point home.  For example, he liked to use what he calls the three states of being to make his point: the waking state, the sleeping state and the dreaming state.

In deep sleep we do not know that we have a self. In waking state we have awareness of the ego self. In dreaming state we also have the awareness of the ego separated self.  He says that both the waking state (our day self) and the dreaming self is of the ego.

The ego and its world are false; one self-dreams at night and one self-dreams in the day time. We have no awareness of our self when we are in deep sleep (dreamless sleep).

Did our self-die when we are not aware of it in deep sleep? Ramana says no. it returns to Brahman and other worlds, and when we are in those worlds we are not aware of our world. In effect, when you sleep and is not dreaming you could be in unified spirit, God, or the light world and since the categories of those worlds are different from those of our world when you awaken you cannot remember them.

This is an intriguing idea although if you are skeptical Ramana did not make a persuasive argument that convinces you that we exist in a different state in sleep. Pure reason tells me that in deep sleep I do not understand where the I in me am. To tell me that it is in God is Hinduism’s idea that I do not know is true or not.

We wish to have an eternal self and could delude ourselves into taking our wish as reality. Let us then say that if one is an agnostic one would not be convinced that one is eternal and that God exists by Ramana’s efforts.

Ramana presented just about every argument that Hindu thinkers have ever presented that convinces them that God exists. However, he would not persuade a materialist, an atheistic scientist that what he is saying is anything but wishful thinking.

If God exists, for example, and Ramana is a God realized person, as he claimed to be, and God is powerful, how come he had cancer and died of it; how come he could not use his god’s powerful mind to heal his body or prevent it from having cancer? You could come up with other reasons to disagree with his thesis but the problem is that we do not know that in fact there is another self that transcends body and ego.

Perhaps another self exists and only those who have experienced it know that it exists? If that is the case one has to take the word of those who claim to have experienced it that it exists, or solder on until one experience it or dismiss the idea as bunkum.

If one chooses to base ones belief on mere word of mouth report by those who claim to have experienced something one runs the risk of being deceived; humanity has been deceived by loads of charlatans claiming god experience they have not had. If one chooses to predicate ones belief in God on others feedback, not on one’s conviction, well, one lays one’s self open to be deceived by quacks who claim to speak for God (speak from psychosis, may be?).

Ramana Maharshi’s talks did not provide scientific proof for what he teaches. For example, he says that the world is our thoughts projected out, that the external world we see is a mirror reflecting what we are thinking, what is in our minds. Is this true or just a baseless assertion? The world I see does not seem to reflect my thinking. I wish that only love and peace exist in the world but I see a world at war with itself. If you say that a deeper part of me, the ego unconscious mind in me, wishes for war when it separated from God and other persons you merely made an assertion that I cannot verify as in me. It is not for you to tell me what is in my mind if I do not see it there. It is like Sigmund Freud and his bunch of Vienna sex perverts telling us that our unconscious minds are ridden with polymorphously perverse sexual desires and some of us told them that we do not see their claims in us and they told us to just accept them as there in us. Accept them because the god called Freud spoke and what he says must be accepted on authority. Human beings can deceive themselves no end. Only what I can verify as true is acceptable to me, not what so-called credible persons say is true.

For millennia Indians sought ways to negate this world and escape to another world, a blissful world. They did not focus on the material world of the here and now and seek science to understand it and technology to master it, as the West did. They ignored the realities of this world; they denied the existence of the outside world by telling themselves that the external world is not real and that it is in their minds.  The result of this escape from earthly reality is the abject poverty Indians lived in.

Indians, who are probably the most intelligent human beings on earth, ended up been backward Vis a Vis the West.  Therefore, Ramana Maharshi may be doing his people and those who embrace his solipsistic and idealistic philosophy a disservice; he may be encouraging folk to ignore paying attention to the external world that they live in; in effect, he might stymie science and technology, the best means for understanding and mastering our world. Religion’s hocus pocus does not understand and master this world.

There is a universe of space, time and matter out there and our business is to understand it as objectively as is possible, regardless of whether it is real or not. The last time I checked, if I want to travel from Los Angeles to New York, a distance of about three thousand miles, I have to fly in an airplane. I do not teleport myself from one city to the other, as religion’s mumbo jumbo would suggest that my mind is capable of doing. Until religion goes beyond positing merely interesting ideas about the nature of reality, proves its ideas as real, science and technology is mankind’s best way of understanding and coping with the exigencies of this world.

I see science as the best way to understand our physical world hence we must study physics, chemistry and biology. I see technology as the best way to make the most of our world hence we must engage in it. Religions talk consoling talk but do not really walk their talk; they do not deliver when it is needed, such as heal people’s physical sicknesses and provide food for them to subsist on.

However, that does not mean that God and the real self does not exist.it means that science and religion are two different views of reality and that they should not be mixed. If one can compartmentalize the two approaches to living and not mix them, do physics, science and also do metaphysics, meta- science that is fine.

From reading this book, I learned a lot of new Indian words; however, those did not help me experience Samadhi.   Until one experiences the oneness that Ramana Maharshi talked about one must remain quiet and nevertheless say with Polonius to his son Horatio (in Shakespeare’s Hamlet)that: there are many things in heaven and earth that are not known in our science (philosophy).

I recommend this book. Read and understand it for it helps you understand the Hindu view of reality (the East sees the world as inside us, as a projection of our thinking). Compare it to the western view of reality (the West sees the world as outside us and that we must study and understand it; this is scientism, aka materialism). Then decide for you what is reality.

You should not take refuge in what other people told you are the nature of reality; it is only what you yourself say is the nature of reality that matters to you and your behavior.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

December 22, 2012

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 Will Durant, The Story Of Philosophy. (New York: Simon And Schuster, 1926) 412 Pages. 

Book Review By Ozodi Thomas Osuji 

Western philosophy began at Athens, Greece. So, to Greece we go. Something happened in the little Greek city states between 600-300 BC to lead Greeks to produce thoughts that the entire world has not seen produced in a corner of it, again. As if they drank some sort of wine that led to philosophic thinking, Greeks thought about everything in their world.  Whereas in other parts of the world folks conformed to the religions of their people, individual Athenians questioned everything and sought to understand reality as it is, not as their culture or other people told them it is.

So, what is reality? What is the truth (Pontus Pilate asked the religious Jews asking him to crucify Jesus)?

Nobody knows what the truth is (religion gives people assumptions of the truth and folks go through their lives living with the unproven assumptions given to them by their religions and cultures).

Greek thinkers began from agnosticism and skepticism and then studied their world to see if they could figure out what the truth of things is.

Different individuals posited their views on reality. Democritus and others hypothesized that matter could be broken down into parts that could no longer be subdivided, and called that part atom. Democritus, Archimedes, Pythagoras etc. and their ideas gave rise to what we now call physics (the physical sciences).

(The Catholic Church’s interregnum that began with the fall of the Roman Empire in 450 AD banished physics and sentenced Europe to a thousand years of darkness until John Dalton rediscovered the idea of the atom in 1800.  In 1911, Ernest Rutherford showed that not even the atom is the smallest part of matter; Rutherford discovered the nucleus, proton of the atom. In 1932 James Chadwick discovered the neutron of the atom; J.J Thompson discovered the electron in 1897. Today the atom is seen as having a nucleus with protons and neutrons in it and electrons circling it; there are other sub-particles of the atom.)

The sophists went around debating with themselves and whoever wanted to debate with them as to the nature of reality. Socrates was the king of the sophists and insisted on people clarifying their terms. If, for example, you said that there is no justice in society he would ask you to tell him what justice means. An argument would ensue on the meaning of justice. Days, weeks, months and even years later it would become clear that the person talking about justice does not have clarity in his mind as to the meaning of justice.

What is justice? Is your opinion of what justice is the nature of justice, if so what is it? Is justice of God? What is God, does God exist, and have you proved that God exists?  How do you know that God exists, and if not how can you talk of the justice of God?

Your wish that God exists is exactly that, your wish? You do not have proof that God exists. If all you have is faith that there is a force called God then are you willing to accept that other people have faith in different conceptions of God and if so why should folks fight over God if God is their ideas and not self-evident reality?

Many schools went about teaching their ideas of what life is. Zeno propounded his stoicism. He said that we do not know what life is all about, that there is no knowing that life has meaning or not or that it was created by God. What matters is how one lives one’s life. You do not have control over what is happening in the world, what matters is how you respond to them. You can allow yourself to be disturbed by events that you do not have control over or be equanimous towards them.

Seneca, Cicero, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius (Roman stoics) said that one’s anger or depression or fear (ones emotional state, cheerful or sad) is a function of how one thinks about the events of this world but not caused by the events of this world. You can choose to see things differently. It is all up to you how you react to what happens to you; you do not have one set way that you must respond in.

Epicurus taught that given the pointlessness of living that the best lived life is one that enjoyed it. Horace said carpe diem, make the most of today, for you do not know what is going to happen to you tomorrow; you might be dead tomorrow. Have fun today and that is all there is to life. There is no point in depressing yourself about life, just make the most of it and leave it at that.

Epicureanism is often mistaken to mean indulging in hedonic life style; no, it does not mean eating too much food. One can find joy in intellectual pursuits and doing so is ones idea of living the good life.

Then there were the cynics and skeptics. Whatever you say from a positive perspective can be seen from a negative, pessimistic perspective. Life is good, right?   Didn’t the volcano of Vesuvius erupt and bury the whole city of Pompeii and charred people to death?  How then is life good? God loves his children, right?  God so loves his children that he gives them diseases, suffering and death! The cynic does not believe in anything; moreover, he is a killjoy. (That would suggest that joy is generally predicated on ignorance of the nature of reality. But then one may ask: what is reality, anyway?)

Good and bad are our opinions but not the verdict of nature, right? Is nature impersonal and does not give a damn about human affairs? How do you know that whatever your response is is the correct assessment of nature (and nature’s God, if there is one)?

Simply stated, many schools of thought were in Athens and each attracted followers. In this mix came Plato. Plato was a disciple of Socrates but when Socrates was judged a corrupter of youth (teaching them not to believe in God), imprisoned and forced to drink the hemlock and die Plato continued Socrates teaching. He employed the Socratic Method; his books were dialogues supposedly between prominent members of the Athenian society. These gentlemen would gather and talk about issues, such as justice, politics, ideal society, God etc.  Plato wrote on many subjects but he is famous for his idealism (explicated grandly in the Republic).

Plato’s idealism consists of his belief that what exists imperfectly in our world have perfect archetypes of them in the world of ideas (if you like, spiritual world). There are ideal things that we do not see; we are corruptions of those ideals. There are ideal human beings and ideal animals etc. and we are imperfect renditions of them.  (Are there ideals or are ideals wished for perfect state of being?)

In his politics Plato sketched how to govern an ideal society. He said that all children from about the age of ten should be offered compulsory education (mostly physical education) for ten years. At age twenty they are given examinations and a few pass and the rest are weeded out (and made to become farmers and laborers etc.).  The few that passed the examination are given further ten years of instruction on the nature of things. At age thirty there is another weeding out examination. Those that make it are thereafter taught philosophy. At age thirty five they are examined and thereafter told to go put what they learned into practice, to live in the world.  At age fifty those who have succeeded are gathered together to rule society as its guardians, the philosopher kings.

The philosopher kings are to live communal life, share things, including wives and generally not have private property. Their function is to do what is good for society. 

Plato was an idealist. He wanted to change people, change society and its institutions and bring about what seemed to him ideal society. His Republic delineated how he planned to go about getting guardians, philosopher kings’ rule his utopia. He was a little, timid man with a wish to change himself, change other people and change social institutions, all by his self. This showed that he had wish for power to recreate the world. He was teetering on delusion disorder, grandiose type. He was a dangerous lunatic.

His wish to replace god and recreate people and make them what he wanted them to be led him to justify infanticide. He wanted to be more powerful than God and all people hence he was living in fantasy land.

Plato, like Socrates ran afoul of the leaders of Athens; they imprisoned him and gave him the choice of exile or drinking the hemlock and he chose to go to exile. He was not going to allow Athens to kill another philosopher.

He went to Syracuse, Sicily (now part of Italy but then one of Greek outposts in the Mediterranean). He was welcomed by the king of Sicily, Dionysius. The king told him to implement his ideal republic.

What do you know? The unrealistic philosopher wanted to do away with the king and initiate his ideal pattern of governing society by philosopher kings. Plato had no clue about human egoism and desire for power. The king arrested and sold him into slavery!

His friends rescued him but thereafter he died, a broken man.  These timid men who are dreamers and want to transform the world into their dreams always come to tragic ends. 

Barbarians living two hundred miles to the north of Athens, Macedonians were rising to power. Their king, Philip eventually conquered Athens. His son, Alexander caught the conquering bug and embarked on conquering the known world. By the time he was done he had conquered Egypt, Judea, Mesopotamia (Iraq), Syria, Persia and India.

Alexander the great spread Greek culture to the areas he conquered just as Napoleon spread the French culture of reason and enlightenment to the parts of Europe he conquered.  Alexander drank himself to death at age thirty.

Aristotle was Alexander’s teacher. Apparently, with financial support from Alexander he established his school, Lyceum in Athens (to compete with Plato’s school, the academy). Unlike Plato Aristotle was a scientist of sorts. He gathered specimens of all animals, fauna and things around him and categorized them.  He tried to study things as they are, not as he wanted them to be, hence sowed the germ of the scientific method in the Western world.

Alas, he had strong opinions of what things are and propounded those without basing his conclusions on pure observations alone, as scientists do.  He proffered interesting but weird views of phenomena, most of them false.

Yet his ideas ruled the West for the next two thousand years and, more or less, retarded the growth of science (because he was deemed the authority on most issues and scholars referred to what he supposedly said to give their views credibility).

Democritus was on the right path to science but Aristotle attacked him for saying that atoms exist in a void. As he sees it void cannot exist.

Aristotle established syllogistic logical process. Even here he was wrong. Consider: 

All animals have four legs. (Major premise)

A dog has four legs (Minor premise)

Therefore, a dog is an animal (logical conclusion). 

This is the logic taught by Aristotle. The problem is that the major premise is assumed and not self-evident.  Are all animals four legged?  There are two legged animals, and animals with hundreds of legs (millipedes).  As long as one assumes the truth of the major premise the minor premise and conclusion follow as logical.  The point is that Aristotle did not help us understand the truth by positing his logical processes but merely showed us how we think. We tend to posit major premises, assume them to be true and then draw inferences from them.  For example, we say, God created people. Therefore people are the children of God, not the creator of God.  We say God is love and people are the children of God, therefore, people must love like their father, God. How do we know that that is true; how do we know that God is love, that we are his children hence are like him, loving? We have made many assumptions but given our major assumption our deductions are logical.

Aristotle’s famous statement that God is the unmoved mover is one of the instances in which he assumes a major premise to be true. He reasoned that all things are in motion. We can go on showing how one thing moved another and go as back as we could. If this logic is true then it is possible that there is infinite causation of motion. But that would not do, for it would lead to infinite regress so Aristotle suddenly ended the discourse by saying that there must be a beginning to the chain of causation and that beginning is God. God is the unmoved mover.

The assertion that God is the first cause is, of course, nonsense for it assumes that there is an unmoved mover.

When the Catholic Church embraced Aristotelian logic it used it to justify the existence of God. Thomas Aquinas, in the 1200s essentially posited a God that got everything in motion.  This is an assumption but an assumption that as we speak colors extant Catholic, Christian theology.

Aristotle had interesting ideas on politics. Essentially he believed that there are different types of people and that each person is suited for certain professions. There are those suited by nature and training to rule society (aristocrats) and there are those fitted by their nature to be in the military or trading, businessmen, or bureaucracy, or work as slaves. Slaves and women are not fitted to rule society.

Both Aristotle and Plato embraced aristocracy, as opposed to mob rule, democracy, or the rule of one man, monarchy or the rule of a few persons, oligarchy or the rule of the rich, plutocracy. They gave their reasons for their choice. We shall not concern ourselves with their complex and convoluted reasoning.  Our society’s choice is democracy, properly put, aristocratic democracy, and a society where all are given equal opportunity, and competition is allowed to select folks for whatever goods society gives people. 

Aristotle’s philosophy influenced the West and made the West stagnant until Francis Bacon (born 1561) came along and insisted that philosophy can be a forum for useless speculations and that what we need to do is base knowledge on empirical observation.

What is the truth? We do not know. The aspect of the truth that we can say something for sure is that aspect of it that we can observe, and experiment on and verify. Bacon established the philosophy of science in the West.

Copernicus was the first modern scientist when in 1543 he insisted that the sun is the center of the universe (he was wrong; the sun is the center of the solar system). Galileo in 1610 became the first empirical scientist when he actually used the telescope to prove that the planets revolve around the Sun. In 1687 Isaac Newton established his three laws of motion and gravity and established physics as a scientific discipline.

England embraced the scientific method and thus we had such hardnosed realists as Thomas Hobbes (men are atoms, they are individuals pursuing their self-interests, Leviathan), John Locke (there is no evidence of the notion that we are born with souls; we are born tabla-raza and experience write in our brains what we now have), David Hume (there is no proof that God exists, only experience is real), George Berkeley (tried to prove that God exists by saying that since scientist say the external world is known to us as ideas in our minds, therefore the world is ideas  in our minds and since we do not know everything, there must be a larger mind, God’s mind that everything is in it), Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill (utilitarianism, that laws should reflect what gives pleasure to the greatest number  of people in society, that is, laws are not what God say that they are but what is good for us). 

Let us shift gears a bit and focus on French philosophers such as Rene Descartes, Blasé Pascal, Voltaire, Jean Jacque Rousseau, and Denis Diderot (and thereafter shift to Spinoza and German idealistic philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and end by focusing on Herbert Spencer, Henri Bergson, William James, John Dewey and Bertrand Russell).

Rene Descartes studied mathematics (geometry) and philosophy. He brought his analytic geometry to bear on philosophy but his greatest contribution was in metaphysics, the issue of matter and spirit. Does God exists or does God not exist?  Descartes began from what he called skepticism, doubting all known ideas on everything. Having done so he proceeded to say that the only thing that he knows for sure is that he thinks that he exists (cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am).

Of course this is not persuasive for just because a person thinks does not prove that he exists, does not prove that God exist or that there is a part of him that exists as part of God. Contemporary neuroscience teaches us that thinking is epiphenomenal, is a product of the dance of neurons in our brains. Contemporary brain science teaches that thinking is strictly biological.

We do not see dead people thinking; what is empirical is that some life biological animals, human beings do think and to say anything beyond that is speculative.

Descartes tells us that human beings have two sides to them, their bodies and their souls. Their body he concedes is like any other material in the universe and is affected by the laws of motion (mechanics). The human body obeys the laws of motion and gravity (and, as we would today say, the laws of heat, light, electricity, sound, gases, liquids, solids).The human body is composed of matter and particles and obeys all the laws of matter, space and time.

The question is whether all we are are our bodies. Descartes thinks that there are spiritual parts of us hence his famous dualistic philosophy: man is composed of matter and spirit.

But where is this spirit that Descartes talked about? How do we know that spirit exists?  We do not have objective evidence that spirit exists. Of course, there are poetic writings on the nature of spirit but no one has demonstrated that those are anything but wishful thinking.

Descartes made seminal contribution to analytic geometry. However, his metaphysics is mere restatement of popular superstition: human beings believe that they are made of mind and matter, spirit and body. We know about the body part but have no idea about the spirit part and on that we leave the French man to console himself with his philosophy (Boethius). 

The English made hay of the idea that mind is determined by matter. David Hume showed that all we know is derived from our five senses. Our memory stores what our senses send to it. The senses of touching, feeling, seeing, smelling, and hearing are the only demonstrable source of information available to us. Claims that there are other ways of knowing are exactly those, claims.

Hume further talked about the nature of inductive and deductive reasoning, logic but those are not our present concern. What is salient in the great racists view (he believed that Africans are incapable of thinking or civilization) is his contention that experience is how we get to know what we think that we know.

John Locke reinforced that materialistic epistemology by showing that we are not born with memory of anything already in our minds. We do not remember anything before we are born; we remember only what, subsequent to our births, the five senses store in our memories.  In effect, we are mind and body made of matter, and the philosophy of materialism is the only real philosophy there is. Religion’s conception of God and life after we die is mere wishful thinking that has no bases in reality.

George Berkeley the Irish bishop tried very hard to demonstrate the existence of God through his solipsistic philosophy. If a tree fell and there is no human being to hear its sound or witness its fall did a tree fall? In other words, does the external world exist apart from us or does it exist in our minds?

We can have fun talking about metaphysics, epistemology and ontology, beauty and ethics but the fact is that we seem to live in a world that encompasses us.

Upon hearing about Berkeley’s philosophy, Dr. Johnson reportedly (to his side kick, Boswell) stomped his feet on a rock and felt pain and said that the world must be external to him for it caused his body pain (dream stones also cause our dream bodies pain, so Dr. Johnson may not have won his argument that the world is outside us).

If you walk into a wall you would bump your head and sustain bruises and feel pain. If you jump out of your upstairs window you would break your bones. If you want to get from point A to B in the world of space, time and matter you must travel (motion). Thus, in the here and now world the world is outside us; the world determines our activities. Materialism seems to be the reality of this world. (But is this true? John Bell’s theorem shows that entangled particles do communicate non-locally, that regardless of where they are in the universe they seem to know what others are doing and respond when one responds; that is to say that space, time and matter may be an illusion that seems to exist but in fact do not exist?  Perhaps, the sense of union and oneness of all things that Berkeley and mystics talk about is after all true? We are not here dealing with quantum mechanics and will not pursue that subject.) 

François Marie Arouet, aka Voltaire was a poet and skeptic. He was not an atheist but liked to make fun of theists’ conceptions of God. In his most famous novel, Candide, he wondered what kind of god allows earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, draughts, diseases etc. to destroy his creation.

It is said that the children of God chose to separate from God and have free will. Okay. Does this mean that a loving God should then ignore his separated children’s suffering?  What earthly father bases his relationship with his children on their past mistake, separation, and on their alleged freedom to do as they choose and suffer the consequences of their choices?

Do we in fact have freedom? If you have freedom can you choose not to die, do you even know when you will die?

You see your child put his hands in fire and you know that he will be burned and you ignore him and let him get burned?  It does not seem that God who supposedly loves practices the type of love we have on earth.

On the other hand, it is difficult to say that there is no God for how did matter write Shakespeare’s plays?

The French laughing philosopher made the best of this world without accepting religionists’ delusions about the nature of God.

Voltaire emphasized reason in what people do. Never mind whether God exists or not, just do what pure reason tells you is right. With pure reason we can solve our earthly problems. This is Voltaire’s humanist credo; we do not need the auspices of God to help us adapt to the exigencies of our world.

Blasé Pascal made contributions to mathematics and science but had mystical experiences that told him that God exist and that he and that God share one self and are one (in mystical union there is no space and separation between people and their creator, no you and I, no subject and object, no seer and seen; all share oneself and one mind). In his Pensees Pascal waxed eloquent about how we are all part of one unified spirit. Not all of us have had mystical experience hence can corroborate and verify Pascal’s subjective experience based ideas on God. 

Denis Diderot was an atheist and could do without what Laplace called the god hypothesis. What is salient is reason so let us use reason to solve our problems (the philosophy of secular humanism).

Diderot and Voltaire and others wrote the French encyclopedia; in it they tried to capture all known objective knowledge, not religious razzmatazz, in one book. 

Jean Jacque Rousseau rebelled against the enlightened philosophers over emphasis on pure reason, and recommendation that we should make decisions based on reason. As he sees it, we really do not make decisions based on our heads, reason but on our hearts, feelings.  When we make important choices we do not do so because of rational discourse but because of feeling. When you sacrifice for your children you do so for the reasons of the heart not your head.

Rousseau wanted to return to the world of feelings. He stimulated Romanticism, the emphasis on feelings rather than reason. He wanted to return to the alleged simpler world of our primitive forefathers that did not emphasize reason. As he sees it, the noble savages of North America lived happier lives than the civilized people of Parisian salons.

Unfortunately for the nostalgic Rousseau, his supposed noble Indians were actually busy hunting each other down, and scalping each other’s heads!  In his Novel, Emile Rousseau waxed sentimental but the realistic reader dismisses him as a child yearning for a return to a world where his mother took care of him. In the adult world there is no protector father figure.

In his book, social contract he talked about how men are born free but everywhere are on chains. Civilization is chaining people. Despite this sentimentalism, Rousseau did manage to talk about government been contractual, that we set it up to serve our good.

(When was this social contract, covenant actually enacted? There is no evidence that people sat down and negotiated to have governments; governments evolved as people tried to govern their affairs; the contractual theorists of government such as Rousseau, Hobbes and Locke were making a lot of assumptions but let us forgive them for we know what they are trying to accomplish: emphasize that governments exist to serve the people.)

In as much as the king was not elected by the people he ruled illegally. Rousseau’s pen stimulated the French revolution by delegitimizing the rule of unelected monarchs; claiming to rule the people by divine right of kings sounds hollow to those who do not believe in divinity. A legitimate ruler is one elected by the people and who represents their aspirations, will; we are talking about democratic government as the only legitimate form of government.

Of course there are other forms of government, such as oligarchy, aristocracy, monarchy, plutocracy, fascism and socialism but let us not pretend that they are legitimate governments elected by the people to serve the peoples interests. 

In Germany Leibnitz (and Goethe) joined the Romantic Movement and wrote holy nonsense about God and his parts. God projects himself into monads and each of these monads is in each of us as our souls, our real selves. Let us not go there; we have no time to indulge in philosophic abstractions here.

What Leibnitz did manage to do that is useful is invent calculus (independent of Isaac newton doing the same in England). 

Spinoza was born in Amsterdam (of Jewish parents who were driven out of Spain after the re-conquest of Spain from the Arabs in 1492). Jews living in reconquered Spain were told to choose between converting to Christianity and leaving the country. Spinoza’s Jewish parents left Spain and sought refuge in Holland. They prospered in their new country.

Spinoza received the best education in his synagogue but at some point his study of geometry and English materialists (such as Hobbes and Locke) convinced him that the biblical tale of God creating this world could not be true.  He made his views known and the Jewish synagogue fearing alienating their Christian neighbors asked him to recant his views and he refused and he was excommunicated from Judaism.

He thereafter committed his short life to philosophy. He made his living by polishing glasses.   Spinoza did not write many books. His primary work is his Ethics, and it was published posthumously. Essentially, he seems to be saying that there is what we might call spiritual and material substances at work in the universe and that the two of them are not separated but are the manifestations of one force.

One substance, let us call it god, acts as human thinking and also acts as the human body.  Body and mind are two manifestations of the same force.  This philosophy is often called pantheism.

This philosophy is not persuasive. Spinoza made his greatest contribution in ethics, our public behavior. Since we are all the manifestations of one force, loving all people loves our whole selves, Spinoza said. Virtue is not something done to please other people but that which is its own reward. You and other people are oneself so in loving and caring for other people you love your whole self. A world where we love our whole self, our individual and other selves is a peaceful and joyous world.

This is good metaphysics but it has not proved the unity of all things for we certainly see space and time between us. I do not know for sure that you and I are joined, unified but if talking about our eternal union in spirit makes us love our selves, such talk is happy fiction in my ears. 

We have talked about materialism, science, reason and romanticism in Western intellectual tradition; now, let us take a peek at our German friends and see how they reacted to all these movements in Western intellectual life.

Immanuel Kant (of Scottish parents who migrated to Germany) set out to prove that materialism, especially Locke and Hume are wrong.  His efforts are aimed at showing that God exists and that soul exists. He tried to build his argument on Newtonian physics and Kepler’s astronomy. He borrowed heavily from Newton’s mechanics but what he ended up saying is that matter seems incapable of moving itself and that there must be a force that moves it.

Think of your body. Something in you makes your hand to move and Kant would like us to believe that it is soul, spirit (Noumenon) that made your hand (phenomenon, matter) move.

We now know something about electro-magnetism and the behavior of atoms in the nervous system…fire, heat can make your hand withdraw itself without your mind telling it to do so.

Kant‘s philosophy was magnificent abstraction that to his mind proved that pure reason has its limitations (hence critique of pure reason). He talked about what he called apriori and posteriori ideas. Mathematics, for example, he thinks exists independent of matter. Two plus two is four and this seems to be an abstract reality (apriori) and exists regardless of the existence of matter (phenomena).

There is a part of knowledge (posteriori) that is a result of our experience. What Kant is really saying is that there is knowledge that is outside experience and matter and he associates that knowledge with God.  In his view he had dealt a blow to materialism.

But has he?  I would like to argue with Kant but that is not my goal here.  Let us just say that he did not persuade me or any materialist that pure reason is not all we have going for us.

At any rate, despite his labors to prove that God exists, in his old age Kant became insane and suffered Alzheimer’s diseases. The God he struggled mightily to prove exists did not come to his rescue. So, does his God exist?

If one may ask: why is it that men are always making arguments for the existence of God? Why not let god make arguments for his existence? And since he does not show us that he exists he does not exist.

You cannot prove to those who do not know that God exists that he exists by citing your subjective experience of him. It is only if God can appear to all of us at the same time so that we can verify his existence that we know that he exists. Let God, spirit, Jesus Christ stand where all of us can see him and we would all know that he exists.

If we have to do with a person telling us that God exists based on his experience, say, Mohammad telling us that God exists because he heard the voice of an angel Gabriel we can always suspect that angels do not exist and that he was hallucinating, was insane?

Many deluded religionists have misled mankind by claiming to hear the voice of God in their heads. It is now time for God to reach all of us, but not through select persons.

God is probably our creation. As psychoanalysts say, we are intimidated by the affairs of this world and are looking for some external force to protect and rescue us. Alas, no force comes to our rescue.

Until God speaks for himself and does so in such a manner that all of us can simultaneously hear him speak to us we cannot accept him as real. Whatever arguments that philosophers like Kant make or religionists say about God do not prove the existence of God.

Kant’s idealistic philosophy is wishful thinking, nothing more nothing less. A mind sees an ugly world out there and seeks an ideal version of it. Human beings always seek ideals.

As we all know when one takes ones ideals as reality one has left the world of reality and is now deluded, paranoid, and insane. The insane person thinks that his ideals are reality. If you are ugly and want to be handsome that is understandable wish but if you now believe that you are handsome, that your wish is your reality you have left the real world and fled to the world of fantasy. In the end Kant fled to the fantasy world he was hatching in his philosophy; he became mad. 

Georg Fredrick Wilhelm Hegel did not just play with ideals, he left the world and lived in his ideal world and was insane. The man was living in his idealistic world and had nothing to do with the real world we live in. He was simply insane. Try reading his books, especially the Phenomenology of spirit and I bet you that you would think that it is 800 pages of stuff written by an inmate in a psychiatric hospital. It does not make sense.

Hegel’s writing on history seems to have some rhyme and reason in it. He talked about what he called dialectic historicism (which his student, Karl Marx said that he stood on its head and called dialectic materialism).  Hegel talked about the movement of ideas and history. At any point in time there is a real-world, the idea. That historical situation has other ideas opposing it.

There is the present status quo (thesis) and opposition to it (antithesis); the two struggles and the result is a synthesis of the two in a new idea of history, a new stage of historical development. This is fair enough characterization of how history evolves.

Moreover, we seem to have ideas in our heads, ideas that oppose each other and we seek synthesis that reconciles them in new ideas. Society appears to have similar dynamics.

Having made this much sense Hegel proceeded to talk about the absolute idea where all the theses and antitheses, the world of opposites are resolved in a perfect state. That perfect state that resolves historical dynamics is Germany.

There you have it; Hegel the German nationalist was actually seeking ways to reconcile the differences in the Germanic world into one strong German state. He thinks that the progression of history would end with this absolute idea. His student, Karl Marx talked similar nonsense. 

Marx talked about how progress is due to the struggle of thesis and antithesis and resulting synthesis of both in a new society. However, instead of leaving the struggle at the ideational level, Marx said that it is economic.

In primitive communal society some persons decided to oppress others, enslave others. Thus slave owners and slaves conflicted and the synthesis is feudal society.

In feudal society the forces of the status quo, land owning aristocrats and those wishing for change, the middle class, the bourgeoisie led to struggle. This conflict led to a new society, a synthesis of the two warring parties, socialist society.

Having reached socialism or communism Marx suddenly ends history; the dynamic struggle of oppressors and oppressed, the war of opposites end.

We know that in communist states an oppressive class emerged. The leaders of the Soviet Union oppressed the workers. Thus, both ought to continue dialectical materialism, that is, conflict continues to form new synthesis, a new form of society, something different from socialist society.

Francis Fakuyama made the same mistake in 1991 when building on the collapse of the Soviet Union he talked about the end of history, how liberal democracy, American style, has prevailed.

Alas, his American liberal democracy that is supposed to be permanent is now experiencing the emergence of plutocrats like Mitt Romney who call themselves job creators and do not want to pay taxes to support the society they mercilessly exploit. The result would be French type revolution in America where the Jacobeans, masses would be led by a new Robespierre and cut off the heads of the plutocrats. As Thomas Paine said, the land is always cleansed with the blood of tyrants, oppressors. America is overdue for revolution and one is in the air.

The injustice of paying America’s corporate chief executive officers millions of dollars while paying their workers not even enough money to pay their bills cannot last forever. Conservatives may delude themselves with their claptrap of how job creators need to have all that money so as to create jobs for the people but soon the people would know that they are not creating jobs; the criminals are merely living off the people’s suffering; when this consciousness becomes mass the oppressed people would rise up and chop off the heads of their oppressors. Sooner or later, the Marie Antoinette’s of America will eat their cakes.

Society is characterized by constant struggle of opposing social forces; there seems no end to this conflict; we rest in peace only when we die!

Aristotle talked about the unmoved mover, well, everything is always in motion and there is no first mover. Aristotle was afraid of infinite regress, of seeking the original force that got things going to infinity and he did not want to do so and abruptly end the chain of causation; he should not have done so.

(If God created us the next logical question is: who created God? Uncorrupted children ask this question before society and religionists browbeat them into silence and conformism to the mass delusion called religion.)

Hegel needed to be in a psychiatric hospital and treated for delusion disorder; therefore, we do not need to waste more time on him.

His rival, Arthur Schopenhauer (he was the philosopher of my pessimistic youth) sees the world as a bleak place. The world is pointless and meaningless; man ought not to exist! But the world exists so let us understand it. 

As Schopenhauer sees it, built into people is a powerful instinct to live; he called it will to live. We are driven by this blind force to live.  We live because we have an instinct to live.

We do not live because of any well thought-out reasons why we should live. The day the individual no longer experiences a powerful blind desire to live and must consciously have reasons why he should live is the day he commits suicide.

Your reasoning alone cannot give you purpose and reason to live. First, you live and then you come up with excuses why you live.

The ideas we cloud our minds with as to why we live are not really why we live. But we can play with those intellectualistic ideas that tell us why we live, such as living for love, for God. No one lives to serve God; one lives because one experiences an urge to live.

If we thought about it life is awful; consider that we are born, suffer, age and die. Who would want this sort of life?  Pure reason does not justify living.

Because there are blind forces in us that make us do what we do we will always do what to our reasons seem irrational.

We have sex instinct and despite the fact that the sexual act is filthy and animalistic we must seek it if we are to reproduce the race, and, as some say, have pleasure (if we devote energy trying not to seek sex, as old Sigmund Freud tells us, we become more preoccupied with it or worse become perverted as in Catholic priests molesting children while pretending celibacy).

We have instinct for aggression and therefore will always go to war and kill each other and then give ourselves pseudo reasons why we went to war. The real reason we go to war is that we are driven to kill each other, what Freud called Thanatos (was Napoleon and Hitler powerful; one ended up on a piece of rock in the south Atlantic, St Helena, and the other killed himself and his body was incinerated into ashes and dumped at a rose garden near his fuhrer bunker).

Our pursuit of power does not give us power; why then do we pursue power and fame? Vanity? Why vanity?

Schopenhauer says that we do these things because they are part of our nature whereas our reasons inveigh against them yet we cannot stop doing them! Man is a miserable animal; he is addicted to his instincts, his will to live; live for no known rational purpose. 

Herbert Spencer responded to Charles Darwin’s book, the Origin of species published in 1859. Darwin made the argument that we are animals that evolved like other animals and that we are always in competition where the fittest adapt to changes in the environment and the weakest die out. Life is a perpetual struggle where the fit survive and the unfit die out.

If in nature the powerful survive and the weak die why not construct a society that reflects that reality in its ethics?

During the early stages of the industrial revolution, American robber barons, such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, J.P Morgan, Vanderbilt and Stanford etc. were powerful animals; they ate the weak with whose labor they built their economic empires. Spencer said that that was as it should be.

Do not waste your time crying for the proletariat workers used by the robber barons to build their economic empires, in nature the weak are used by the strong; big fish eats small fish; lions eat sheep. Society must therefore be brutally competitive and the able rewarded and the weak left to die.

If one may play the devil’s advocate and ask Mr. Spencer: do you really think that society can be organized as you fantasize? What prevents the workers exploited by the robber barons from killing the barons? Fear of God and his alleged punishment. What god, didn’t Darwin do away with God?

If each of us is for himself and not for others life would be as Hobbes said it was in the state of nature: war of each against all and life would be nasty, brutish and short. Would your robber barons enjoy their moneys in the early graves they would be relegated to by those trying to appropriate their wealth? (Karl Marx talked about expropriating from the appropriators; what is good for the goose is good for the gander.)

It is amusing how so-called philosophers are dumb asses and do not think about the consequences of their philosophies. Take away love from people and what is left is chaos and anarchy. I have learned to see Western philosophers as asses!

Nietzsche said that we are like camel; in our youth, like camels we squat down and other folks place heavy loads on us; give us culture that oppresses us; bid us to get up and walk; we walk around carrying that load of culture. Okay. But what prevents us from throwing away the load, and attacking those who loaded us down? Fear of harm and death.

When the people overcome the fear that holds them down they would do away with their oppressors; we would then have a fair and just society.

As John Stuart Mill observed (On Liberty) until a people can look death in the face and say come get us, we do not want to live if we must live as slaves they cannot fight and if needs be, die for their Liberty. The tree of liberty is watered with patriots’ blood. 

Frederick Nietzsche took Spencer’s realism to its logical and absurd conclusion.  Those who seek logical conclusions to human speculative ideas always go mad. Nietzsche went mad…he suffered from delusion disorder or mania, for he was going about boasting that he was the best man on earth hence delusion of grandeur, saying that his philosophy is the final word on the subject.

What he was trying to do in “Thus Spake Zarathustra” and “The Will to power” is be logically consistent. He accepted Charles Darwin’s evolution theory and believed that it is true. If it is true that we are animals who compete for survival and the fittest survive and the weakest die out he then tried to apply that hypothesis to society. As he saw it, society is composed of people competing and the best should make it to the top and become supermen, the aristocrats who ruled society. He did not like democracy for he did not believe that all people are equal.  Let the strong lead the weak, the man believed.

But, alas, he was so foolish that it never occurred to him that in a world where there is no purpose and meaning and where we are all animals struggling for survival there is no reason why the weak should accept the leadership of the strong. Why shouldn’t the weak kill the strong?  If the strong should dominate the weak for the sake of dominating them, as he said, then the weak should kill the strong for the sake of doing so. There is no justice in the world.

If evolution theory is accepted, society is an artificial social contract for what is natural is for the strong to eat the weak. Since Nietzsche is weak he would be eaten by the strong. Nietzsche was almost blind as well as insane; Nazis probably would have considered him socially useless and a burden on the taxpayers and gassed him to death in one of the gas chambers and killing fields. We must be very careful what we write for unbalanced dictators who claim to be acting independently are almost always acting out the half-baked philosophies they heard from half crazed philosophers.

Nietzsche did not see the logical contradictions in his writings; he assumed that the rule of the strong is good for the weak; who said so, the weak? Why should the weak accept the rule of the strong?

Nietzsche was an immature writer, he never grew up. If he grew up he would have accepted inconsistence in logic.

Yes, we are born unequal;  some are strong and some weak yet to have society we must assume our equality and work for social good, as in democracy, some socialism and love (Nietzsche says let the weak die off and should not be helped by the strong).

Clearly, Adolf Hitler embraced this immature view of existence and embarked on trying to be the superman and kill the weak. He killed millions but other super men, Russians, killed him. In a world where we all struggle to be supermen there was no reason why Hitler should not be killed by other aspirants to superman-hood.

Nietzsche’s world would lead to anarchy and chaos and life would be nasty, brutish and short.  In the real world we need to accept the contradiction of strength and weakness, equality and inequality, we need the aristocracy of ability and some mass democracy. 

The late nineteenth century and early twentieth century gave us Henri Bergson, William James, John Dewey and Bertrand Russell and a few other philosophers. By the 1930s it was clear that the world had no more use for mere speculative philosophers. The physicists and chemists had replaced the speculators as the explainers of the world.

Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Ernest Rutherford, Neils Bohr, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Pauli, Dirac, Chadwick, Freidman, Lemaitre, Edwin Hubble, Alexander Fleming, Fred Hoyle, George Gamow, and other scientists have shown that we really do not have to merely speculate about nature, as philosophers did, that we can study nature through the scientific method. 

Henri Bergson was product of English empiricism/French positivism (Saint Simon, August Comte, Emil Durkheim etc.). He was trained in both biology and mathematics and was up to date in science. He could not deny the reality of matter. So what did he do? He could not accept epiphenomenalism, the idea that matter determined mind. He sought ways to show that there is a life force, what he called élan vital in our lives.  This is Rene Descartes all over. There is a part of us that is not material, that is pure life or spirit, operating inside matter.

Like his country man, Descartes, Bergson did not persuade us to see eye to eye with him that there is spirit in our lives. 

William James was an American medical doctor who went to Europe and studied psychology and philosophy. He returned to America and taught at Harvard University and wrote the first American text book on psychology. His fame, however, rested on his study of the American character.

The American white man is not interested in psychology or philosophy; he is a doer and wants to do what adapts to his world.  The American is that breed of humanity that does not worry its little mind with metaphysics, with questions about meaning and purpose. Just give him food and he is happy. He is a magnificent animal.

(Europeans who witnessed the massacres of the first and second world wars became depressed and invented existentialism, the philosophy of despair but Americans could care less for existentialism. Sartre, Camus, Jasper, Heidegger and other existentialists did not find takers of their ideas in America. I will not review existentialist philosophy here; I have written extensively on that subject elsewhere, besides, Will Durant did not cover it.)

The American works hard, earns his food, figures out a way to use science (he is not interested in theoretical science but in applied science, technology and business) to make a living.  He is a magnificent pagan and that is all there is to him.

The American does not even think about the Christianity that he professes to be a part of. If he thought about Christianity, what Jesus taught, love all people, would he enslave people?

The American is not thoughtful at all. If you’re interested in philosophy America is not a place for you, perhaps you should try France?

James says that since Americans are not interested in epistemology, ontology, metaphysics, or abstract matters in general that their philosophy is pragmatism. Americans do what works in this world; they take from philosophy whatever seems to enable them work and make a living on planet earth. We grant the American his choice to be happy cattle and move on. 

John Dewy asked pragmatic and realistic questions. Man must make a living; he must work to extract food from his world to live. Therefore, education should not be wasted on abstract subjects like philosophy, but must be centered on science and technology.

Our schools must work with industry to identify what industry needs and train students in those areas. We do not need to train students in the liberal arts and humanities, such as Latin, Greek, languages, History and philosophy; areas where there are no jobs. Train them in engineering, medicine and science. Teach folks how to farm the land and work in factories.

Dewey is down to earth but his dismissal of intellectual life is annoying. Man does not live by bread alone.  Philosophy may be impractical yet it enriches the human mind. The technocrat who does not enjoy the arts is a clod. 

Bertrand Russell, a scion of the English aristocracy, studied mathematics and dabbled in philosophy. He restated logical positivism, emphasized the English preference for experimental science over idle speculation on the nature of reality. To him there is no god but we can make the most of this world.

He was an atheist and pacifist; he opposed the First World War and for his troubles he was booted out of his teaching position in England. He came to America. When America joined the war he was also harassed. 

Will Durant gave us summaries of seminal Western philosophers’ ideas. He did not bother with oriental philosophers. As for African philosophers he probably did not think that Africans can think?  Do Africans have philosophers, and if they do who are they?

(For what it is worth, let it be stated that I am African. Am I a thinker, a philosopher, a psychologist? Has the West produced a mind like my mind, a mind at home in science and philosophy. What do you think?)

What shall we make of this book? It is a good read and should be read by every college graduate. When you have nothing to do instead of eating or drinking yourself to early death just coil up on a couch and read the book. Never mind if in the real world philosophy is useful or not, this book will give you information on the spirit of the West.

We need to understand the West, to understand how a few human beings managed to defeat all other human beings. If we are going to compete with them we must understand their psychology, philosophy and history. This book is an introduction to all three areas of western life. I highly recommend it to all people. 

(I read Will Durant’s book when I was in secondary school in the 1970s. Rereading it in my middle age has given me a different perspective on Western philosophers. In my youth I thought that these philosophers were supermen; now, I see them as a bunch of immature thinkers. How we change! We bring down those hitherto we had placed on a pedestal. The West initially seemed like something one ought to admire but at present one has seen through its underbelly and while respecting its science and technology is no longer enchanted with it. And such is the story of life. Finally, I enjoy talking philosophy, psychology and the history of science. If those are your cup of tea please do not hesitate in giving me a shout out. If these subjects are not your idea of having a good time please do not bother trying to talk to me, for you would bore me and I would not talk to you!) 

Ozodi Thomas Osuji, PhD

December 10, 2012

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Cyprian Ekwensi, Jagua Nana. (New York: Fawcett Premier Book, 1961), 207 Pages.

A Book Review By Ozodi Osuji

Yesterday, July 26, 2012, around 6PM, I went to a used book store to see if there are books that I could buy and read. I went to the section on Afro-Americans and browsed. Guess what I saw? I saw Cyprian Ekwensi's book, Jaguar Nana. I bought it (as well as other books). I quickly rushed home and started reading it. I did not go to sleep until I was done with it.

I decided to write a review of the book not because it is a new book and, as such, my review could influence its sales but because I was very impressed by it. Honestly, I did not know much about Cyprian Ekwensi. I did not know that he was such an impressive writer. Because he is such a fine writer I have to write this review and encourage folks to go out and buy his books and read them. I certainly plan to lay my hands on all his books that I can get.

SUMMARY OF THE BOOK

The book, although a novel, for all intents and purposes, is a sociological documentation of life in the Lagos and Nigeria of the time that Mr. Ekwensi wrote it (early 1960s).

On the surface, the book is about the life of a woman, Jagwa (also spelled Jagua) Nana. She was born at Ogabu (Ogide?), a village only a few miles from Onitsha, Eastern Nigeria. Her father was a pastor of a church. She was the only daughter of the family (she had three brothers). Her father doted on her.

Like most Igbo men, her father wanted his daughter to marry off and produce grandchildren for him. But Jagua was something of a Tomboy and was not really interested in marriage; she wanted to live her own life, independently. Nevertheless, she allowed her father to persuade her to marry; thus, she married a local boy living at the coal city (Enugu?).

She and her husband lived at Enugu. He was a business man; he owned petrol stations. For three years they tried getting a child but could not succeed. As is the case in Igbo land, men marry for children, not for love. Thus, the Husband began making plans for another wife. She got wind of what was going on.

In the meantime, she felt stifled by the need to pretend to like her life as a housewife. She had a restless spirit that sought adventure. Her restless spirit began to yarn for life elsewhere, life on the fast lane. She learned that Lagos is where it is at, and went to the train station and boarded a train headed to Lagos. Three days later she was at Lagos and had no place to live!

She walked around until she attracted the attention of a local musician, Hot Lips, who took her in. She lived with him but was not satisfied with his meager income; he did not have what she wanted, money and what money provides, an exciting life. Thus, she began to look around for something better.

While walking about Tinunbu Square, Lagos looking at stores with expensive merchandise that she would like to buy, she noticed that some folks were following her. She turned around and asked them why they were following her. They told her that they were looking for a woman to take to their white master at Ikoyi. Apparently, they were house servants for a white man at Ikoyi and their master who had left his wife and two children in England was searching for a local mistress. She agreed to the deal and they took her to the man's house.

She was surprised at how well white folks at Ikoyi lived. The white man had sex with her and liked her and decided to keep her as his always ready sex toy. He rented a place for her, and fronted her money for her daily living expenses; she became a white man's concubine.

Eventually, the man left for England and she did not hear from him again. Apparently, she had saved some money and used that money to travel to Accra, Ghana and liked the city. She decided to trade between Accra and Lagos. Thus, she would go to Accra and buy clothes and bring them to Lagos and sell them.

She lived in an upstairs room in a rooming house at Lagos. Downstairs was a young teacher, Freddie Namme. Freddie taught at a secondary school while taking correspondence courses to qualify as attorney. The man was twenty five years old. At this time Jagwa was forty five years old hence could be his mother. Nevertheless, she fell in love with him. She used her female wiles to entice him into a relationship he did not seek out (men are supposed to chase women, not women men, remember). At first he resisted because of the twenty year difference in their age. But sex is a powerful drug and if it is robbed into a man's face he is likely to give in. Thus, they became paramours.

She gave up on her trading business and began frequenting a local night club called the Tropicana. She practically went there every evening and stayed until it closed at 2AM. She would pick up rich folks, especially white folks and have sex with them and that way make money.

Thus, she was able to make ends meet by being a high end prostitute; those generally pick up one customer per night, a loaded customer able to give them the kind of money their luxurious lifestyle demanded.

Initially, Freddie did not know about this seamy side of Jagwa's life; he was pretty much preoccupied with his studies. He sat and passed preliminary examinations towards the law degree and needed to go to one of the Inns of courts in London for a year to be called to the bar. He applied to the federal government of Nigeria for scholarship and was waiting for the result of his application when he learned about Jagwa's whorism.

He confronted her and she mollified him by promising to send him to London. She actually fronted the money, paid for his stay in London and wangled a passport for him and all was set for him to go to London. He made arrangements to board a ship soon leaving Lagos for England.

One of the habitué of Tropicana was called Mama Nancy. She, too, was a middle aged sex merchant on the prowl for rich white men who want to buy the ware between her legs. She had a regular customer, a Syrian businessmen who came in most evenings, picked her up and took her out for sex and paid her handsomely.

One evening Ma Nancy was not at the Tropicana and the rich Syrian picked up Jagua and did what he wanted and paid her. Mama Nancy later learned about what Jagua did, and the two women got into a brawl. The scene of the two women having a cat fight in the night club is hilarious; imagine two middle aged whores going at each other, tearing each other's clothes, making each other naked, thus showing their ugly aging bodies.

As an aside, one may ask: why do fighting women like to disrobe each other; is it to expose their holy of hollies, show their genitals for all the world to see; do they want the world to see that which they think makes them valuable in men's eyes? (The scene made me laugh so loudly until my throat hurt)! The short of the story is that the two old harlots became enemies.

In the meantime, Mama Nancy heard that Jagua was planning to send her young boy friend, Freddie, to London. She maneuvered to have her nineteen year old daughter, Nancy, to ambush Freddie. Being young and closer to his age, Freddie fell for her. Mama Nancy also managed to get one of her rich white customers to pay for Nancy to travel to London and take secretarial courses. Her intention was for Nancy to meet up with Freddie in London and marry him over there.

Jagua heard what was afoot; one evening, suspecting that some hanky-panky was going on in Freddie's room, on the impulse (women's intuition?) she bagged into Freddie's room and saw Nancy with him (they had just had sex).

The two women got into a fight. The younger woman held her own (you must admire the younger woman's guts; she defended herself rather well!).

Enraged, Jagwa went through Freddie's packed suitcases, fished out his passport and shredded it to pieces. She dissolved her support for his plans to study in England.

Freddie tried to get his passport reissued but as is the case with such things in Nigeria was given the run around. Apparently, nobody told him to bribe the passport folks for that were how folks obtained passports in Nigeria. He gave up and resigned himself to not going to London.

As luck would have it, however, his father, David Namme, of Bagana (near Port Harcourt) decided to pay for his study in London. He made arrangements and the next time he met up with Jaguar, he was at the airport.

Jagwa, through the grapevines, had heard that Freddie was flying off to London and with her latest flame, a local politician called Uncle Taiwo, went to the airport to say her goodbyes. She saw him as he was about to board his plane and tried to talk to him. He relented and talked to her. They seem to have buried their hatchets and he flew off to London.

During the first three months of his stay in London, Freddie wrote Jagwa but eventually the writing stopped. In the meantime, operating under the illusion that he still loved her, Jaguar decided to visit Freddie's village at Bagana.

Lo and behold who she saw there? Mama Nancy and Nancy were there visiting the village to acquaint themselves with Freddie's family. The two women had a verbal fight (good scene).

The high-water mark of the visit was that one morning Nancy was out swimming when Jagua met up with her and both of them got into a fight. Jaguar chased Nancy in the waters. Nancy swam towards another village, Krinameh, a village in deadly quarrels with Bagana.

She swam to Krinameh's end of the waters and was seized by the folks of that village, held a prisoner, possibly to be killed. Since Jagua was responsible for her situation she asked to go try to rescue her. After much begging, she was allowed and a canoe took her over.

She met with chief Ofubara, the chief of Krinameh. She persuaded him to release the girl, Nancy. Her ace in the hole is her vagina and she manipulated it rather cleverly. She ended up getting the girl released and stayed with Ofubara as his sexual partner for ten days.

Although the chief already has three wives, he had never had sex with a Lagos girl before. He was unused to a woman fucking a man rather than a man fucking her; that experience, apparently, made him fall hopelessly in love with Jagua. He offered to marry her on the spot; indeed, he paid her bride price, one hundred and twenty pounds to her.

Jagwa got tired of the country bumpkin chief and the rustic life of the creeks of the Niger Delta and wanted to return to the bright lights of Lagos. She left but promised to think about the chief's marriage proposal (after all he had already paid her dowry to her...but not properly, for dowries are paid to the parents of proposed wives).

Upon her return to Lagos, Jagwa resumed her prostituting life style. This time, Uncle Taiwo paid her rent and gave her monetary allowances to subsist on. She became his paid up always available sex object (cheating on the side when he is not around). Once a whore always a whore, they say.

Almost two years later, Freddie qualified for the bar and returned to Nigeria. Nancy had met up with him in London and they married and had two children when both returned to Lagos.

Freddie decided that the quickest way to make money is to run for a position in the Lagos City Council. He had joined a party and the party ran him as their candidate for the Obanla district in Lagos (Obalinde?). His opponent was no other than his former mistress's latest consort, Uncle Taiwo!

The competition was stiff. Uncle Taiwo's goon squad on a number of occasions waylaid Freddie and beat him up. Eventually, they roughed him up so badly that he later died.

On Election Day, surprise, surprise, Uncle Taiwo lost to the substitute to Freddie. Because he had lost and wasted the party's moneys and stolen some, he became a liability to his party, a persona non-grata to his political party; he became a marked man and was on the run for his life.

Those Uncle Taiwo had borrowed money from to finance his election were searching for the absconded politician; they wanted to recoup their money. They learned about his mistress, Jagua and where she lived and came to her asking for his whereabouts. She told them that she did not know where he was. They resolved to take all her property as part of their recouping of their financial losses.

Before they could come to Jagua's house to seize her and her belongings, an old acquaintance, a younger prostitute called Rosa, gave Jagua the heads up and she packed a suitcase and fled to her Rosa's room at Gunle (Ajagunle?). Both of them now lived in this squalid, seedy section of Lagos.

Jagua had gone from a high class prostitute to a low class street walker, for now she took a cab to Lagos, walked the streets and picked up whoever is willing to have sex with an aging whore (whores seldom find customers after age thirty five; who wants to have sex with an old ho and her unsightly body?)

The two whores sometimes brought their Johns to their shared one room at Ajagunle. One of them would use the single bed for sex with her john and the other would have sex with her john on the floor.

In the meantime, Jagua's father got sick and wanted to see her before he died. The family sent her brother, Fonso, a trader at Onitsha, to Lagos to search for her and bring her home. He tracked her to her shack at Ajagunle. He saw her and Rosa go into their single room brothel with two johns in tow. He knocked on the door and told Jagwa that her father wanted to see her before he died.

Jagwa did not have the money to go home and gave excuses why she could not go with him. He left without her. Three days later, Jagwa borrowed the money and travelled to her village. By the time she got there her father was already dead and was buried.

Her mother was now a widow in mourning and needed someone to take care of her. Her brothers persuaded her to stay in the village and take care of their mother.

As is the case in Igbo land, the men agreed that she is too independent to marry and that she is free to have casual male friends provided she lived in the family compound. They tacitly gave her permission, if needs be, to get pregnant and have children with her village johns.

(Editorial Note: In Igbo villages' girls are supposed to marry and leave their parents villages and become part of their husbands' households in different villages. But in certain instances, if the woman is too headstrong and is not the marrying type members of her family allowed her to live in their compound and tacitly allowed her to have boyfriends, even have children. Ordinarily, a woman is supposed to have children in her husband's village, not her father's village. It should also be noted that some women are lesbians and do not marry and their relatives tacitly allow them to live with them, aware that they are having affairs with other women. I saw these otherwise abominations with my own eyes in my village; I saw an unmarried woman living in her father's compound with her children; I saw a woman whose female lover visited discretely.)

Jagua lived in her village and was bored out of her mind. Her adventurous soul itched for geographical therapy. She went to Onitsha and bought a sewing machine and opened a sewing business near her father's house. Her business thrived for she sewed the latest Lagos style clothes for her country dwelling customers fascinated by what women wore in the big city of Lagos.

As allowed to do by her brothers, she had causal sex with other men. One, a man who had come home on leave had extended sexual dealings with her and when his vacation was up returned to wherever he came from. A few months later Jagua missed her period and a doctor's examination confirmed that the middle aged Jagua is now pregnant.

In the meantime, her former roommate at Ajagunle, Rosa, came to visit her in her village (and also to visit a nearby village where one of her steady johns hailed from). Her mother liked the teenage prostitute.

Rosa brought Jagua up to date with what is going on in their old hunting grounds at Lagos. She told her how Uncle Taiwo was murdered by members of his own party...apparently for absconding with the party's money?

Now that Uncle Taiwo is dead, Jagua remembered that he had given her an envelope to keep for him. She opened the envelope and inside it was several hundred thousand pounds sterling. She decided to use the money to go to Onitsha and open a trading store and become a merchant princess.

She sent Chief Ofubara the one hundred and twenty pounds he had paid for her hand in marriage. Thereafter, she decided to go visit him. She took her young girl friend with her; they headed to Port Harcourt.

From Port Harcourt they took a canoe to Bagana and found out that Chief Ofubara, David Ofubara (Freddie's father) and other local big wigs had gone to Lagos on local government business.

Both women headed back to Ogabu. A few months later she had a boy child and her mother named him Onichi (replacement of her dead husband, the future generation of the family). Three days later the boy child died.

Jagua thereafter left her village, with her mother's blessing, to go to Onitsha, buy a lorry (truck) and open her store and, hopefully, become an Onitsha merchant princess. At this point the story ended.

APPRECIATION

This book tells us about city life in an emergent African urban area. It tells us about rural populations coming to the city trying to make it big and wounding up side tracked by the city's get rich quick schemes.

The chief protagonist of the novel, Jagua Nana, is a rustic wench who came to Lagos with an eye to living her fantasy understanding of the good life offered by life in a big. Appearances are deceiving; she wound up becoming a prostitute.

In Lagos, certain so-called high class prostitutes prefer to have white men and Africa's neuve-rich men as their johns; these women's lives often become nightmarish.

Ekwensi described the nightmarish life of one Igbo woman drawn by Lagos city lights. This woman quickly got entangled with night club life where she picked up well paying johns. A former denizen of a village without tap water and electricity (she did not even go to school for crying out loud) found herself co-habiting the same venue with the rich of Lagos. She was bound to be used and dumped as rags are discarded when they are no longer useful in cleaning up dirt. She thought that she was living a high class life but actually she was no more than a common prostitute, a sewage into which men discharged their bothersome semen.

Ekwensi gave us an amazingly accurate description of life on the fast lane in an Urban African town. The Lagos he was describing is a city where all that mattered is having money. As they say, money talks; you either have it or you do not; and if you do not have money you are nothing; as far as Nigerians are concerned, if you are poor you do not exist!

Since to be seen as socially important one must have money, Nigerians chase money by all means necessary. They would do any and everything for money, including selling their disease ridden vaginas (these days such vaginas have HIV viruses in them and yet they are sold to willing johns who unwittingly pay to be killed).

Uncle Taiwo, the politician, is representative of the Nigerian politician to whom winning political office is a do or dies affair. These folks go into politics to steal as much money as they could from the national treasury, so winning office is a guarantee of wealth. They see winning elections as war, literally war. As in war, they kill their opponents, as Taiwo killed his opponent, Freddie (and, in turn, he was killed by members of his own party).

Freddie Namme was not an innocent victim; he was an active participant in the corruption hell called Nigeria. He came back from London and instead of trying to establish himself as a successful attorney or use his legal knowledge to fight for the improvement of Nigeria, he was motivated to become as rich as he could and do so quickly. He believed that politics was the quickest way to make money hence he entered politics and was killed. He represents Nigeria's attitude towards politics: a quick way to make money, not a profession folks go into to serve the national interest.

Freddie's death is not a heroic death; it did not elicit sympathy from the reader. He was just another thieving Nigerian politician and his death is therefore of no existential consequence.

What are Nigerians living for, anyway? If all Nigerians died today it would not matter to existence at all. I certainly would not lose sleep if I heard that all Nigerians are dead; they are living for nothing hence their death is of no significance to me or to history; Nigerians are surplus human beings who are not doing anything to improve the human condition.

In a manner of speaking, Nigerians are probably better off dead; the manner they live is a disgrace to living. Apparently, no one has told Nigerians that the best lived life is one devoted to doing something useful for humanity.

If you are not doing anything that serves public good and die why should the public care about your death? I certainly do not care when I hear that a Nigerian has died. If I hear that the Nigerian chief-thief at Abuja is dead I would rejoice; his death is the passing of a useless life.

Jagwa Nana's life is symbolic of what Nigerian lives amount to. She was willing to sell her body and soul for money; she was a prostitute. Nigerians are willing to sell their bodies and souls for money; Nigerians are literally, not figuratively prostitutes.

Prostitutes are the detritus of humanity. Therefore, Jagua and Nigerians are the detritus of humanity; they are not relevant to existence.

This is the lesson one drew from reading this amazingly well written book by Cyprian Ekwensi.

I am sorry that I had not discovered that Ekwensi was such an excellent writer. I apologize but now that I have discovered him, within a few months I would have read most of his books (I am going online, to Amazon and Barnes and Nobles to see if I can order his books).

What else can one ask from another human being other than to ask him to do his best at whatever he does?

Mr. Ekwensi, although trained as a pharmacist, turned out to be an outstanding writer of novels. I do not like to compare apples and oranges, white writers and black writers, since they address different experiences, be that as it may, in my opinion this novel is in the same class as Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.

Though parts of the book are written in broken English hence probably not easily understandable to readers in Standard English, I believe that this book is a classic in English literature (the portion in broken English, parts mainly spoken by the illiterate Jagua Nana and her associates in the whoring and criminal underworld, in my opinion, makes the book authentic literature).

There is too much phony sophistication in false literature; Ekwensi injected controlled literary realism. Although the book is mainly about the sex trade he did not actually describe a sex scene; the sex thing was tastefully done! Some persons probably would consider Ekwensi a prude, for description of one raunchy sex scene would have made his book more realistic!

Cyprian Ekwensi is a first rate writer. I slap myself for not having discovered him before!

I encourage folks to go and read his books, as I am going to do. He gives us sociological and psychological insights into modern Nigerians.

Ozodi Osuji

July 27, 2012

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Dr. Osuji enjoys reading novels; when he finds a novel that is contributory to the understanding of human psychology, and he has the time, he writes a review of it.

Jacob Carruthers, Intellectual Warfare. (Chicago: Third World Press, 1999)310 Pages.

A Book Review By Ozodi Osuji

I had asked a friend who is in the know about African American Studies at American Universities to recommend ten books that he felt that anyone interested in the field ought to read. He gave me a list and ranked them in order of importance. I read each and reviewed it for those who might want to read it, too. I have just got to Jacob Caruthers book, Intellectual warfare.

I must confess that because I read it last I read it without much enthusiasm primary because it is repeating what I had already read elsewhere. I was kind of bored hearing the same thing over and over, again. It seems that once one has read the first two or three books in this genre one has read them all and the others are repetitive.

Moreover, the title of this book is somewhat misleading. I had expected a robust debate on the war of the West with the non-west for intellectual leadership.

There are all kinds of wars, wars fought with bullets and wars fought with ideas. The West had declared war on the non-West for quite some time now. They had told non-Westerners that they are superior to them; they had claimed ownership of everything good in life. They made themselves the masters of the universe and this kind of makes non-Westerners to feel inferior.

Since no human being ever accepts that he is inferior to others, for to do so is to accept those persons' leadership, those made to feel inferior fight back and try to prove that they are superior to those who claimed superiority to them.

You see, the West wanted to make itself seem superior to the rest of the world and if the rest of the world accepted that self-serving propaganda they would then look to the West to rule them and guide them. This is clever effort to make one's self the leader of the rest of the world; it is psychological warfare.

Non-Westerners being human beings appreciated what the West was doing and fought back. Some fought back by trying to prove that they are superior to the West; others do so by trying to prove that they are the equals of the West. Some quietly try to acquire skills in science and technology so as to be able to compete with westerners and in the process prove that they are not deficient.

Asians adopted the last method. Today, they are almost as scientifically and technological developed as Europe. No European in his rational state of mind would go about saying that he is superior to the Chinese or Japanese or even Indian (Indians still have jarring poverty making it possible for rich Europeans to fancy that they are better than them).

African scholars traditionally talked about how Europe exploited Africans; perhaps, they were trying to engender guilt feeling in Western liberals.

Western conservatives do not even bother reading what Africans write so they do not know what Africans say. In so far that Western conservatives think about Africans poverty at all, they attribute it to Africans supposed lack of intelligence. They say that Africans are too dull to do what they need to do to transform their continent into a modern economy. They say: look at Africa, a continent with perhaps the most abundant natural resources but dumb Africans are too lazy to do something with their resources; African politicians are always stealing from their national treasuries and their people remain poor and they try to make white folks feel guilty for their suffering and come to their aid with some monetary handouts, money that they redirect into their personal pockets instead of use them to help their people. They tune out pictures of starving Africans they see on television. Some overtly say: let Africans die; what are they living for if they cannot develop their economies?

I had expected Dr. Caruthers to give the reader of his book a battle aimed at refuting Western assertions about Africans inadequacy. For example, I had expected him to tell me something about Murray and Heinstein's claim in the Bell Curve that black folks are intellectually deficient, have lower IQ and that without affirmative action would not be able to get into America's top one hundred universities and must settle for second tier universities; their claim that in the competitive world black folks cannot compete with white folks and therefore must settle for minor jobs, such as being bus drivers, janitors, postal clerks etc. I really wanted a robust war with the children of Europe, a war to put them in their place.

Instead, what I saw was a rehashing of what I had read in Chancellor Williams Destruction of Black Civilization and John Jacksons Introduction to African Civilizations. I read how ancient Egypt was a black civilization before white folks appropriated it, how black folks started the first civilizations and therefore the ones who civilized Europe (via the Greeks copying from Egypt).

I have heard these stories one million times and therefore did not hear anything new. I began to wonder whether black scholars can write something new other than make claims to ancient Egypt. Thus, I put the book away, bored.

I then asked myself whether Dr. Caruthers perhaps gave a new twist to the same old story. Every story teller, even if he is telling the same story told by other story tellers, gives his own twist to it. So, did Caruthers add something new to the old story of Egypt is African?

I know that African-Americans kind of feel an obsessive compulsion to prove that they started a civilization. White men had accused them of not starting anything big, presented them as being part of primitive Africans who did not start any great civilization. That kind of makes them feel inferior relative to Europeans so they latch onto the hypothesis that Egypt is Africa and harp on that over and over, again.

If they can make it stick that Egypt is African then it means that black folks started something big and important and that kind of washes away the accusation that they are primitive.

I understand the psychological role of the claim that Egypt is African for black Americans; it makes them feel civilized and important so they must latch unto it.

Personally, I do not have a need to prove that Egypt is African. I do not feel inferior to white men; I do not even consider Western civilization a civilization!

I consider Europe and North America primitive! I want to replace them with what seems to me a civilized state of human beings: loving people, not predatory people who go all over the world killing and stealing from people.

Whereas I do not consider myself a Christian, I am agnostic, I want a Christ based world, by that I mean a world based on love; a world where we love each other and serve each other's needs rather than exploit each other (see Alfred Adler's Individual Psychology).

I want the type of world that Jesus Christ talked about in his sermon on the mountain. The West is nowhere near that world so I had no reason to see the West as ideal and do not admire it.

Because I do not elevate the west to high heavens I do not have a need to prove that they are the product of Egypt/Africa.

The point is that I understand what African Americans are doing in their war with the white man and had expected Caruthers to give me that war, if only to entertain the part of my mind that enjoys competition, but, instead, he gave me a rehash of what I had read elsewhere.

Did he add something new to the same old, same old story of Egypt is Africa and Africa influenced the West? Let us see.

The book states that Western thought and civilization has its root in Africa; it says that Greek and Roman thought was influenced by Egyptian and Ethiopian thought; the Roman Empire, it says, is a byproduct of African civilization.

Dr. Caruthers examined what he believed is classic literature and from them inferred the role of Africa in shaping what most of us were led to believe had their root in the European world.

Greek philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, he tells us were influenced by Egyptian philosophy. Dr. Caruthers wants his reader to discard the notion that the ideas we generally believe are Western is Western; he wants him to rethink such beliefs and come to the new belief that those ideas are, in fact, African ideas stolen by the West.

He wants to correct the situation and get us to see everything we see in our world as African in origin. In other words, do not give thanks to the white man for your civilization, instead give thanks to the black man for it.

Dr. Caruthers is presenting an African centered philosophy (afrocentricism), as opposed to Eurocentric philosophy. He wants his readers, who are expected to be African Americans, to be on the lookout lest their past civilization is stolen from them, again, and the West is given credit for what is rightfully their contribution to civilization.

Racist Americans, scholars and ordinary folk, deliberately set out to tell the world that Africans have contributed nothing to human civilization and, as such, that Africans are a deficient people, a people fit to be ruled by allegedly superior white folks.

Racist America deliberately damaged African Americans self-esteem and tried to destroy their self-confidence so that they would then look up to supposed superior white folks to rule them forever.

Naturally, African Americans realized what was been done to them and fought back; they fought back with efforts to show that they not only contributed to civilization but had the first civilizations, Sumer and Egypt.

If they can prove that those first civilizations were African then they would with one fell swoop rehabilitate their damaged self-esteem and carry their heads high, even feel superior to white folks (who allegedly lived in caves before Africa civilized them).

Make no mistake about it, there is an intellectual war going on out there; this is a war of the races; white folks declared this war on black folks and black folks have a right to fight back. In war every means that leads to defeat of the enemy is appropriate.

Dr. Carruthers designed an educational curriculum that would be Africa centered so that African Americans are taught about their contributions to Western civilization. His apparent goal is to make African-Americans to feel very proud of themselves after all if they are responsible for everything good in our world why shouldn't they be proud of their past instead of be ashamed of it as they seem to be at the moment.

Dr. Caruthers wants to incorporate his views that Africa is the originator of civilization into America education. Indeed, he wants to rewrite American history and the history of Western civilization and give glory to Africa, not Greece or Rome or Paris or London or Washington for anything good in the West.

Dr. Carruthers goal is no less than total revolutionary alteration of what we currently believe is knowledge and its source.

Dr. Carruthers is one aggressive black man fighting white folk's aggression with his own African aggression. Why not; is aggression only allowed the children of Europe? If Europeans can be aggressive so can Africans!

As an African I naturally sympathize with Dr. Caruthers goal. Alas, I also know that he is swimming against the current. He is living in the past, not present and future.

In the present most of us know who contributed what idea in physics, chemistry and biology. We know who invented what in the world of technology.

If we look at the world from Copernicus (1543) to the present we know who is who in science and technology. If we do not see African names in the mix there is nothing that Dr. Caruthers is saying that would make us not feel lacking.

I feel bad that Africans are not contributing to science and technology. I could care less if they kick started civilization five thousand years ago. I am interested in the now, today.

When I go to any American university department of physics, I seldom see black folks; I mostly see Asians and a handful of white folks. I ask why that is the case. I know why it is the case and this paper is not the place to grapple with that issue.

I am interested in increasing the representation of black folks in the sciences, now. If I see a list of Nobel Prize winners in the physical sciences and see black names on it I would feel good.

Telling me about Egypt is so much nonsense. What has Egypt got to do with Newton's mechanics, Einstein's relativity and Rutherford and Bohr's quantum mechanics?

I do not live in the past; I live in the present. Common on you guys, let us be realistic and do what we have to do to get black kids into Caltech and MIT to study science and technology and not sit around talking about what happened five thousand years ago.

This book should be read when one has nothing better to do with one's time and wants to kill time stimulating ones brain cells, neurons, with ideas, any kind of ideas. If you are bored and do crosswords puzzles it keeps your brain cells firing and engaged but that does not mean that you are learning anything useful in the economic world.

This book is something to be read for the sake of reading and keeping one's mind busy not because it adds to the acquisition of new skills set that adapts to the twenty first century, a century with intertwined economics and to the best competitors goes the price.

We now need physical scientists, engineers and medical doctors, not afrocentrists; we need leaders in science and technology. Of course we also need some cultural leaders but not too many of them.

*The next paper is the concluding essay in this ten part series. In it I will look at the effect of Africans running around kidnaping their people and selling them to Arabs and white men for over one thousand years, on African society, culture, morality and individual psychologies.

Ozodi Osuji

July 6, 2012

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The term religion derives from Latin, religio. Religio is any effort to yoke one's self back to whatever one considers being one's source. Apparently, some human beings believe that they have a source (origin) outside this world and have always made efforts to reconnect themselves to that source. The source is generally construed as spirit, as opposed to our world which is a place of space, time and matter. Spirit is that which transcends matter.

Since matter is a place of death and dying, of mortality, spirit is a place of immortality and eternity, permanence, changelessness, timelessness, spacelessness; spirit is a world that is the opposite of matter and its mortality.

Apparently, people are in search of immortality and eternity and seem to get it in their conceptions of the spiritual world and its alleged God.

If there is a characteristic that define human beings it is their tendency to religion. In every human group there is always religion. Religion is found in all human groups.

Religion comprises of a series of rituals and ceremonies through which a people attempt to worship their God; religion is always a group, team thing hence is controlled by society and the powers that rule society.

On the other hand, spirituality is always an individual's effort to reach his God and is not controlled by the group; the leaders of society do not control it hence it is a more authentic means of reaching ones supposed creator. The great mystics of all time, delineated by Evelyn Underhill in her book, Mysticism, were always individualistic in their search for God.

Priests serve society and are enforcers of social rules; mystics search for their higher selves and are not interested in upholding the extant social order.

If there is a human group without religion, without efforts to reconnect to their source they would not be human beings as we know them to be.

As we know human beings to be they are always in search of their source, their creator, their real home. Apparently, they believe that this world is not their real home and they want to return to their real home.

As it were, human beings see themselves as temporary visitors to our earth; they are foreigners, aliens in our world. Their real home is spirit land. Religion is those things they do in an effort to return to their real home.

That real home is the opposite of this world; therefore, the perceptual lenses we employ in seeing this world does not see the spiritual world. In our world we relate to it with our five senses, eyes, ears, nose, skin and thinking. None of those enables us to understand the spiritual world. That makes it necessary for most people to not know anything about the spiritual world for most people can only relate to their world through the five senses.

Some people, on the other hand, claim ability to shut down their five senses and tune into the operations of the spiritual world. They claim that when they ignore responding to stimuli from our material world they enter the parameters of the spiritual world and are able to understand it and later return to our world and try to translate the nature of the spiritual world to our earthly categories (and claim that they cannot really do so since it is difficult to translate one order of being to another but they try anyway).

We do not know whether what those who claim ability to tune into the spiritual world tell us about it is true or not. What is salient is that in every human group there are those who claim this ability; this is a worldwide phenomenon. Thus, in every group of human beings we find religion and religious practices.

Those belonging to one religion often find the religion of others strange and difficult to grasp. What is relevant is that these people are trying to reconnect to their source and we generally respect them and though we do not understand what they are doing leave them alone.

Only a fool says that there is no God, or that people who are practicing their religion are insane. Using the categories of psychiatry to examine believers in God there is no sign that they are insane; in fact, they are often the sanest people around (when their religion makes them to love one another and work for one another's welfare, for what better can human beings do than love one another?).

The only thing is that pure reason based on the five senses cannot understand what religious folks say that they experience and most rational folks leave it at that and not try to ascertain whether what they claim to experience is true or not.

I do not know that God exists or does not and that is not relevant to anything for since I do not know who am I to tell a person who believes in God that his belief is not true? As for atheists they do not know that there is no God; they look at the evidence their five senses give to them and on that bases conclude that there is no god. Okay, that is their judgment and they are entitled to it.

Just as we accept theists we accept atheists (actually, atheism is a religion for it is belief in what one does not know is true; we do not know that there is no god so to say that there is no god is a belief, just as it is a belief to say that god exists), both have conclusions that agnostics do not understand. That is pretty much where things stand.

African Americans were kidnapped by their fellow Africans and sold to Europeans and shipped to the Americas (from the United States to Brazil). Africans are found in the two Americas and the Caribbean Islands.

Africans were first brought to Brazil in the early 1500s so they have been in America for five hundred years (four hundred years in the USA...where they were brought in 1619, to Jamestown, Virginia, USA).

African Americans were brought in as slaves. Their slave masters made sure that those from the same tribe were dispersed so that only strangers could be around each other. This was to prevent the Africans from developing a sense of unity hence organize insurrections (still, Nat Turner and other slaves did mount insurrections in the 1830s).

The slave master made sure that the slave lost his religion, his language and culture. For our present purpose, the slave master destroyed the slave's culture, which includes his religion and language. Worse, the slave master refused to admit the slave to his own culture and language, afraid that education would make the slave know too much hence challenge the slave master's rule over him. The slave master got to keep the slave ignorant to prevent him from learning that it is unnatural for one human being to lord it over others.

(Both Adolf Hitler and White Apartheid South Africans learned their criminal terroristic behaviors from white racist Americans; both said that Africans are not to be educated lest they know too much to challenge the unnatural rule of white folks over black folk.)

Human beings mostly learn by observation so Africans learned a bit about their slave masters culture, language and religion.

Over time Africans in the Americas, folk who had their own African religions (it is estimated that 20% of them were Muslims when they were kidnapped and sold) lost their peoples religions and became Christians (whatever that may mean...are white Americans Christians, and if as Arthur Schopenhauer said that they are not Christians, if by Christianity we mean those who love and do not exploit people, how can slaves imitate their Christianity?). Until recently it can be said that almost all black Americans were Christians.

During the 1930s some African Americans living at Detroit, Michigan recognized that Christianity, their religion, is the religion of their slave masters. They said that that religion was meant to enslave them. Certain passages in their bible, such as Paul's advice to a slave to obey his slave master, were used to justify slavery.

Elijah Mohammad concluded that Christianity is the religion of slave masters, and since he saw slave masters as devils the religion of devils. Elijah Mohammad believed that Islam was a religion for the black man. Thus, he founded the Nation of Islam, a Black Muslim group.

Many black folks left their Christianity and flocked to Islam. They actually believed that Islam is the black man's religion!

But as these things always turn out, they soon learned something about Islam. Islam was founded in 610 AD by an Arab man, Mohammad. Mohammad and his Arabs are Caucasians (Semitic people are white people).

More importantly, Arab Muslims practiced slavery. In fact, they had been buying African slaves since about 700 AD, a full eight hundred years before the founding of America.

Indeed, the Portuguese learned about slavery when while searching for a sea route to India in the 1490s they ran into Arab islands in the Indian Ocean and saw Arabs using African slaves on their plantations. When the Portuguese got to Brazil in 1500 and could not use the native Indians to do their work they came to West Africa to buy African slaves. That is to say that Arabs taught Europeans about using African slaves.

Thus, Islam is also the religion of slave masters. In fact, more slaves were sold to Arabia than to America. Most Arabs today are mixtures of black and white. That is why we tend to see Arabs as nonwhites; it is because they mixed with Africans. Originally, they were as white as other Europeans but one thousand years of mixing with their African slaves changed their color to what it is today, mulattto.

For our present interests, Islam is the religion of slave masters. Christianity is the religion of slave masters. Now, those black Americans who did not want to participate in the religion of their slave masters, Christianity, have no place to turn to; they were caught between a rock and a hard place!

They looked to Africa for help. Africa is composed of about 3000 tribes; each of whom has its own religion.

African Americans came from many West African tribes, from Senegal to Namibia. In the Americas Africans from different tribes were deliberately mixed so that African Americans are now a product of many African peoples genes.

Additionally, the African-American is likely to have his slave masters and Indian genes in him. Simply stated, the African American does not belong to any specific African tribe. Therefore, the religion of a specific African tribe may not appeal to him.

The African American is now a different tribe of Africans, actually a different human tribe; they belong to the tribe of new man; they are made from composite of Africans, Europeans and Indians; the African American genetically came from all over the world, he is the new human being (in the new land).

If Christianity, Islam and specific African tribal religions cannot appeal to African Americans and they still want to have religion, now what do they do?

Why not found their religion? Alas, folks do not just get up one day and found new religions; folks tend to want old religions for they want that which has been around for some time and the older the better.

Old religions kind of give folks a sense of doing what their ancient ancestors did and therefore must be correct in their practice. The older a religion is the better it is seen.

So, instead of founding their own religion, as one would expect African Americans to do, they went to Egypt in search of an authentic African religion for them.

First, they convinced themselves that the civilization of ancient Egypt was a black civilization (see Chancellor Williams, The Destruction of Black Civilization; John Jackson, Introduction to African Civilizations; Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilizations).

True, the original Egyptians were black, there is no argument there. Egypt was started by black folk then Caucasians entered and eventually took it over and gave it their own culture. Arabs took it over around 640 AD and gave it their Muslim religion. Before the Arabs, Hyksos, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Christians and many others ruled Egypt and gave it their religions.

So what was the religion of the black Egyptians before the various foreigners imposed their religion on them?

African Americans think that they have found out what ancient Egyptian religion was. They call it Kemet. Some of them, particularly Karenga and Jacob Caruthers, have written books on what they consider Kemet philosophy is. They have told us about this supposed ancient African religion and its Ma'at morality (there are forty-two principles of Ma'at, sort of like the ten commandments of Christians).

It should be noted that there is no place where this philosophy is written down in ancient Egyptian writings; Kemet is thus put together by African Americans. If you like, Kemet is a reconstructed religion.

The founders of Kemet, African Americans, are looking at Egypt from a period removed from it by 5000 years.

As we all know, when we talk about the past we invariably inject into it our present experience. The past is gone and is only remembered. The past of our childhood is almost always not what it was when we remember it in adult life.

The point is that what are now called Kemet religion and philosophy is a made up idea and not necessarily what ancient Egyptians had as their religion and or philosophy.

Be that caution as it may, it is still useful for African Americans to try to practice a religion that is not the religion of their slave masters. They ought to have their own religion.

Whatever a group of people do to try to reconnect themselves to their source is acceptable for who are we to criticize them since we do not know that there is a source or no source.

Let me say that I went to the library and checked out books on Egyptian religion and glanced through some of them and did not find reference to Kemet. I then did an Internet search on Kemet. I did not find anything on Kemet as ancient Egyptian religion.

The only thing on Kemet that I found was the writings of Maulana Karenga and Jacob Carruthers and their followers. In effect, it is these two individuals who are responsible for what they now call Kemet religion.

I therefore prefer to look at this religion as the religious ideas of Karenga and Carruthers instead of Egyptian religion. Karenga is the same individual who initiated what is now called Kwanza and called it African version of Christmas. During Christmas his followers celebrate Kwanza rather than the birth of Jesus Christ. Kwanza is interesting practice.

I think that Kemet is interesting ideas on religion but is by no means the truth. At any rate, who knows what the truth is when it comes to religion and philosophy? So let us then see Kemet as ideas on God rather than the truth.

Kemetic philosophy says that it is a body of ideas that embrace reverence for life. It believes that this reverence for life is what makes life able to persist on planet earth. It says that there is a creator called Neter, Atum, Ptah. This creator created people and apparently people return to him after they leave planet earth.

Our dead are our ancestors and they are back with our creator, Atum. The ancestors are those who lived before us and now help in teaching us to respect all life. They teach us to respect all human beings, and respect peoples relationships. Life must be sustaining life.

The ancestors teach that life is good; life is essential; life is sacred. The ancestors teach us to revere life in each individual.

Karenga and company believe that they are helping African Americans learn to revere life. Apparently, they know that in North American ghettos (where white folks shunted Africans into) folks do not respect life; black folks kill each other as if they are rats.

Karenga and company want to help African-Americans to respect their lives and not destroy them. The African ancestors, the original people of Egypt, say that life is to be revered so revere life and do not kill yourself or other people.

Kemet believes that it is the religion of the flow of life living life. It sees Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism as Aryan religions and philosophies whose only intention is to control people and worship a king (on earth and supposedly in spirit land). As Kemet sees it, these Aryan religions are false religions and only Kemet is true religion.

The Aryan religions and philosophies teach destructive behavior and are destructive of life whereas the Kemetic religion teaches reverence for life. Kemet is in harmony with the flow of life.

Kemet religion has a series of teachings which are almost always ranked in the order of sevens. For example it is says that human beings have levels of spiritual development ranked from the lowest level to the highest:

(7) Physical (6) Energetic/Ethereal (5) Emotional (4) Lower Mental (3) Upper Mental (2) Intuitive and (1) Divine Will.

Another series denoting human development has it as follows:

(7) Perception (6) Examination (5) Reflection (4) Knowledge (3) Understanding (2) Wisdom and (1) Truth.

Then there are the seven deadly sins of:

(7) Lust (6) Gluttony (5) Sloth (4) Greed (3) Wrath (2) Envy and (1) Pride.

According to Kemet, individuals are at different levels in their development and the teaching is aimed at enabling people to increase their level until they attain the highest level, Divine will; here, they realize that they are one with God and begin to manifest divine will on earth. It is said that the ancient Egyptians who built the pyramids used spiritual forces (levitation) to lift those huge rocks up and lay them on each other (modern lifting cranes are unable to lift the rocks that folks lifted 4000 years ago: how did they do it?).

On the whole, Kemet hypothesizes that Africans are a spiritual people whereas Europeans are a mechanical people. White folks are said to be at the lower levels of development: physical, energetic, emotional and lower mental and are able to manipulate nature, study science and technology but lacking in ability to understand spiritual matters (which is left to those operating at the upper mental, intuitive and divine will level).

All these are interesting speculations but as to their truth I am not in a position to ascertain.

As noted, this Kemet religion is the brain child of Karenga (he teaches African Studies at California State University, Long Beach) and Carruthers (he teaches Political Science and Inner City Studies at Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago) , two combative individuals known for their fighting spirit. Their ideas are worth consideration; however, as to whether they are serious ideas on God only the reader could judge for himself.

I am not in the market to buy any religion. I made up my mind long ago, actually, at age 14, that we do not know anything about God. I am an agnostic.

If I have religion it is science. Science is a methodological approach to phenomena that accepts only what is verified and discards all ideas that we cannot verify.

I do not see any evidence for what folks call religion and its gods. The God hypothesis, as Laplace said, is a luxury that I cannot afford. I accept only what I can verify.

If there is life after death it is probably in line with what physics teaches. Contemporary physics teach that there are probably multiverses and that there are probably people in some of those infinite universes and there may even be replicas of each of us in some of those universes.

The search to understand how multiverses work and the development of technology to tunnel our way to some of them is what makes sense to me.

In the meantime, if Karenga's often disjointed and rambling writing about ancient Egyptian, aka African religion appeals to you, by all means accept it. Who among us is qualified to tell you what is true or false in the department of religion? To each of us his own ideas about God and after death life!

• The next review is Dr. Jacob Carruthers, Intellectual Warfare, followed by my concluding Essay (of the ten part series) on The Effects of Africans kidnapping and selling their people into slavery on Africans Psycho-Social functioning today.

Ozodi Osuji

July 6, 2012

Dr. Osuji can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask (1952). New York: Grove Press.

A Book Review By Ozodi Osuji

From a political angle Franz Fanon's most important books are The Wretched of the Earth and A Dying Colonialism. However, I decided to review this particular book, Black Skin, White Mask, primarily because I noticed that many Africans have a tendency to talk about inferiority feeling in Africans. Generally, such Africans lob the term inferiority feeling at some Africans and do so as a put down. That would seem to suggest that they have healthy self-concept. However, when you come close to them you find that they are the most inferior feeling Africans on planet earth!

What they do is see something in them, deny it and then project it to other persons that in their opinion seem to have what they denied in their selves, inferiority feeling. Having grandstanded as black loving they then think that their inferiority feeling is not apparent to professionals trained to discern such matters in people. These people deceive themselves and want to deceive other Africans; if you allow them to deceive you they would take you to the cleaners.

It is such Africans who pretend to love Africa who when they come to positions of political power in Africa literally cart the wealth of Africa to the Western world; they run to the West upon the slightest medical ailment for treatment. This shows that deep down they feel inferior; they believe that their own African medical professionals are not good and that only white medical professionals are good.

They have not dealt with their inferiority feeling at the objective level and are merely mouthing concepts they do not fully understand.

What I decided to do is use Franz Fanon as a point of departure to talk about inferiority and superiority feeling in Africans and African Americans. In effect, this is really not a typical book review that limits itself to a particular book but a spring board from which I talk about a subject that I believe needs to be understood by Africans.

The nature of this subject makes it necessary for me to elaborate on the human psyche hence the paper is going to be longer than the usual two pages book review (It will be twelve pages long).

Franz Fanon (1925-1961) was born in Martinique, a French department in the Caribbean in 1925. His parents were middle class and sent him to the best secondary school on the Island (one of his teachers was Aime Cesaire, the famous poet of Negritude). Upon completing his secondary schooling at age 18, which was during the Second World War, he joined the French army and was shipped off to Algeria. After further training in Algeria he saw fighting against the Germans in Europe.

At the end of war he returned to Martinique and did his undergraduate education and returned to France for medical studies. He obtained the MD degree and specialized in psychiatry, which he completed in 1951.

He wrote Black Skin, White Mask originally as his doctoral thesis but it was rejected and he had to write a more acceptable thesis. In 1952 he published the book (he published the Wretched of the Earth in 1961; Dying Colonialism was published after his death in 1961).

Fanon was what we would today call a radical student. Whereas he did not consider himself a communist he associated with leftists and ultimately joined the Algerians fighting for their liberation from French rule. Upon completing his medical training he sought and got a job in Algeria. There he worked in a psychiatric hospital while participating in Algerians efforts to liberate themselves from French rule. Apparently, the French authorities got wind of what he was up to and repatriated him back to France in 1957.

He immediately left France and went to Tunisia to join up with Arab freedom fighters. Apparently, Tunisia sent him to Accra, Ghana as its ambassador. He participated in the several conferences that President Kwame Nkrumah's burgeoning government had organized. He was later diagnosed with Leukemia and sent to the United States for treatment. He died at age 36 at Maryland, USA.

Franz Fanon was a psychiatrist. Let me therefore expand a bit on the state of psychiatry when he was educated in the field in the 1940s. I do so to give us an idea of the type of education he received thus what shaped his thinking.

Psychiatry as we know it today is a late nineteenth century phenomenon. In Europe, as elsewhere, human beings were baffled by mental illness and did not really know what to make of it. Many attributed it to possession by demons. If you recall, in the bible there is a scene where Jesus cast out the demons that had allegedly taken hold of the mind of a mentally ill person. Thus, many Christians believed that the mentally ill were so as a result of possession by the devil. Mentally ill persons therefore were shunned. Many of them roamed the pathways of their villages and towns ignored by the people.

In the mid nineteenth century Europe and North America there was social work movement to help the poor and homeless. One manifestation of that movement was to house the mentally ill in asylums where they were at least fed properly. Thus, all over Europe and North America the mentally ill in an area were gathered in one place (asylum) and fed.

In Nigeria the mentally ill are still left to roam the streets; Nigerians are not even where Europe was in the mid nineteenth century. The few asylums in Nigeria (built by the British) seldom take good care of the mentally ill and they might as well be left to wander the streets eating from garbage dumps.

In the West, the mentally ill were simply housed and fed. There was no known treatment for them so no efforts were made to treat them. Indeed, no one even knew what to call their mental disorder.

In the late 1800s, a German medical doctor by the name of Emil Kraepelin began what is generally considered the first serious study of mental illness. He delineated the symptoms of what we now call Schizophrenia and Manic-depression (the two major psychoses). However, he did not call the disorder Schizophrenia; that was left to the Swiss psychiatrist, Eugene Bleuler to do.

Kraepelin called what we now call schizophrenia dementia praecox and called the other major mental disorder manic depression (we now call it bipolar affective disorder).

For our present interest, the salient point is that Emil Kraepelin described the symptoms of what we now call schizophrenia and manic depression. What he described is pretty much how mental health professionals still see these mental disorders.

Whereas my goal here is not to transform the reader into a mental health professional, let me briefly say that psychosis is a mental disorder characterized by thought disorder. The individual generally has delusions and or hallucinations.

Delusion means believing what is not true as true (if you believe that you are Jesus Christ and you are not Jesus Christ obviously you are deluded...many mentally ill persons believe that they are Jesus or similar perceived important persons).

Hallucination is perception of what is not there as there; hallucination could occur in any of the five senses: auditory, visual, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, proprioceptive, nociceptive, hypnagogic etc. The psychotic is deluded and hallucinates.

Kraepelin described these symptoms back in the late 1800s and early 1900s and the symptoms remain the same.

There are primarily two major mental disorders, schizophrenia and manic depression. Schizophrenia itself has many subtypes, such as disorganized (this is every person's idea of a mentally ill person, he is the guy dirty and disheveled walking the street and eating from garbage cans), paranoid (this type believes that other people are out to get him, is suspicious, guarded and defensive), undifferentiated (not disorganized or paranoid), catatonic (withdrawn from the world, is in a state of waxy stupor), residual (usual after medications have reduced the major symptoms the person still shows some residual symptoms of schizophrenia but not in a bizarre manner) etc.

Whatever is the type the schizophrenic usually has bizarre delusions and generally also has auditory hallucinations (where there are visual hallucinations often there is an organic issue involved)?

In manic-depression the individual swings from mania to depression. In mania he feels extraordinarily happy, is euphoric, laughs as if he won billions of dollars in the lotto and generally has affect that is out of touch with his immediate environment (if someone around you is dead and you are happy and laughing your affect is not appropriate to the occasion, is it?). The manic person generally has delusions (he may believe that he is the richest man on earth, has millions of dollars in the bank that he does not have, such as claim to be Bill Gates or Barack Obama). Generally, his affect shifts from euphoric mood to depressed mood.

In depression he suddenly feels that life is not worth living and loses interests in the activities of daily living, such as exhibit no interest in work, sports, schools, socialization, and self-care and generally wants to kill himself.

In normal persons the individual's affect tends to be stable and if they shift there is almost always an environmental cause for it. If your child died you would probably feel sad (depressed); if you won the lotto you would probably feel euphoric. In bipolar affective disorder there is no environmental cause for the shifts in mood; therefore, it has to be somatic, internal.

These days we know that there are biochemical factors at work in mental disorders, such as excessive neuro-exciter (neuropinipohrine) in mania, deficient neuro-depressor (serotonin) in depression; excessive dopamine in schizophrenia and deficient GABA in anxiety disorders.

There are variants of the two major psychoses, such as delusion disorder, schizophreniform, and organic mental disorder etc. Additionally, there are hundreds of emotional disorders, disorders induced by drugs, aging brains and disorders found exclusively in children. There are personality disorders found in people in all walks of life (your country's president or work boss, for example, may have narcissistic and or anti-social personality disorder). I doubt that there is a human being that does not have a psychological issue (are you mentally healthy; what does that mean; is stealing from the Nigerian government mental health or antisocial personality disorder; in my experience 99% of Nigerians have treatable mental disorders and, worse, they do not know it; no wonder the country is in a mess!).

For our present purposes, Emil Kraepelin described the two major mental disorders. Emil Kraepelin is considered the father of psychiatry in the Western world. He did not come up with cure for mental illness; and no one has done that to the present (medications merely mask the disorders but do not cure them).

Just out of curiosity, may I ask: how do Africans define mental disorders? Do Africans have cure for mental disorders? I want to see your answer in writing, not just talking. Africans talk too much and do not like to read and write. It is now time for Africans to show the world their science and technology rather than always claim to have had those in abundance in ancient Egypt, not in the contemporary world where they are literally nowhere to be found in science and technology!

While Kraepelin was setting up psychiatry (psychiatry is that branch of medicine that deals with the mentally ill) Sigmund Freud was setting up psychoanalysis to study neurosis; that is, normal persons with living issues.

In the 1890s Freud began paying attention to his clients' emotional issues (he was a regular medical doctor then). He noticed that many of the patients who came to complain about this or that somatic disorder upon examination did not have physical disorders. Yet they believed that they had medical issues. So, what was going on? (Some of them were starved of attention and just needed someone to listen to them...to the present many of the women who go to doctors go to talk to someone who would listen to them because their husbands do not listen to them and the larger society does not listen to women.)

Freud went to Paris and studied with Charcot, a guy who was saying something about hypnosis as a useful tool in medicine. Upon return to Vienna, Austria he began what is now called psychoanalysis, talking therapy. He felt that many of the Victorian women who came to see him actually had sexual issues and not medical problems.

The Victorian society repressed sexuality, especially female sexuality. Women did not even dare mention the sexual part of their bodies. The world would collapse if a woman said that she had a vagina and god forbid that she called it cunt (say that word now; you probably cannot get yourself to say it!). It was simply out of the question for folks to even acknowledge their sexual organs and sexual activities.

Interestingly, whereas the folks were pretending lack of interest in sex, London had more prostitutes during the Victorian era than at any other time!

Anyway, old Freud figured that many of the women who fainted upon the mere mention of certain words were really repressed sexually. He began studying what he called hysteria in women.

To cut a long story short, Freud came to the conclusion that human beings, men and women, are not the refined sexual beings that the Christian religion made them out to be or wants them to be. He said that people in nature are polymorphously sexually perverse.

According to Freud, the average guy not only wants to have sex with all the women around him but also with his own mother and sisters. The average girl not only wants to have sex with all the men around her but with her own father and brothers. Of course, neither of them dare acknowledge these desires.

In childhood society makes sure that folks don't even acknowledge their sexuality (I, a graduate student, nearly fainted when my clinical supervisor told a woman to go the bathroom and masturbate or something instead making the sexual innuendos she was making; he said that there was nothing wrong with masturbation; I actually thought that I was in hell when in a class on human sexuality the professor showed a movie of man and woman having sex; my Catholic upbringing simply did not go that far in what is acceptable sexual behavior).

As Freud sees it, in childhood all of us were forced by our societies to suppress our natural sexuality (which he called Id). Our Id simply wants to have sex with any person around (men and women, Freud said that people are bisexual). The boy child wants to have sex with his mother and sisters and all women; the girl child wants to have sex with her brothers and father.

Society saw to it that none of us even remembers having these sort of forbidden desires (do you remember ever having a desire to have sex with your mother...your mind probably cannot even tolerate such a question!).

There are, of course, medical reasons why sex among family members should be forbidden. Genetic disorders in recessive forms can become dominant if members of the same family have sex and produce sick children. The survival of the human race requires suppressing sex in the immediate family. Sexual taboos had roots in biological reality!

Freud contends that the Id desire is suppressed by what he called the Superego (social mores, which we internalize as our conscience).

The properly socialized child internalized his society's superego (laws, norms, rules etc.) and they are now part of his conscience and he uses it to check his id, his natural inclinations for perverse sexuality and aggression...as animals we took whatever we wanted to eat but in organized society we are told that stealing is bad.

Properly socialized persons with strong superegos do not steal; only those with weak superegos steal. Freud would say that male children from broken families where there are no strong male figures to enforce rules internalize weak superegos and hence tend to commit crimes. By that standard a country like Nigeria where many of the people steal from the government the people have weak superegos.

A third part of the psyche comes into being in what Freud called the ego. The ego is sort of like a referee balancing the desires of the Id and the injunctions of the superego. The id says fuck your mother; the superego says you dare not even think about it, the ego redirects your attention to other sex objects in your world, such as the beautiful damsels at your school.

You get the point; our heads, Freud believes, are battle fields where three forces are at war, our nature, id; society, and superego; and reason, ego fight it out. The normal person balances the three forces in his head.

As Freud sees it, the oedipal conflict in our heads are often not properly resolved (when it is smoothly resolved the girl gives up her desire for her father and instead identifies with her mother and the boy identifies with his father).

In some situations the oedipal complex is not properly resolved and the child still wants to do what society asks him not to do. Consciously, he, of course, cannot say: I want to have sex with my mother. That thought is totally unacceptable to his conscious mind. But Freud says that it is there in the back of his mind, in his unconscious mind, making a mess of his life (for example, making it impossible for him to have satisfactory sexual relationship with his girlfriend or wife).

Neurotic folks come to Freud's office, lay on his famous couch and Freud tells them to say whatever enter their minds without using reason to block unacceptable thoughts (this is called free association). Believe it or not, when folks engage in free association they often say that as children they wanted to see their mothers naked or even have sex with her!

Freud, in effect, said: get what you repressed into your unconscious mind out into the open. Let it all hang out, man. He would then analyze all that stuff dredged out of your unconscious mind (and charge you several hundred dollars per hour of his time). When what is hidden comes out folks feel relief (Catharsis).

(Poor people do not go to psychotherapists, except as in cheap group therapy, not individual sessions. In twenty five years of doing that sort of work I seldom had African-American clients; most of my clients were white folks, usually from families with incomes of over $100, 000 a year. The rich and their children go get analyzed and the poor drink alcohol or mess up, big time. Someone should appoint analysts for the criminals ruling Nigeria.)

When you come to terms with the warring forces in your unconscious mind your life is straightened up a bit. For example, why don't you love your wife? Could it be that you still love your mother and only want to have sex with her, not your wife? You never know what old Sigmund would tell you!

If you can enter into transference relationship with the old boy (analyst) and project what is in your unconscious mind to him, say to him what you wished that you said to your father and repressed you never know what kind of shit would come tumbling out of your filthy mouth (and this time no adult is there to wash your mouth with soup for the analyst gave you permission to say anything; you are not a naughty boy anymore!).

For our present interest Freud began psychoanalysis and rich folks came to his office to analyze what is in their unconscious minds, to find out what is preventing them from living fully. If your wife can get up the courage to tell you to make love to her like you would to a whore she is making progress! Ordinarily, she pretends disinterest in kinky sex but then is angry at you for not making her have gazillion orgasms. Now she tells you exactly what to do to her to give her those much wished for orgasm! Darling, here, give me your hand, here is the G-sport, stroke it. That is good, keep on going, and don't stop (then she shouts from satiation of her sexual needs and for the rest of the day walks in cloud nine, instead of brooding, unhappy).

Do you get the point? After analysis folks feel free to be human, unrepressed by social forces (mores).

I bet that as a Christian some of my language is offensive to you? You would rather I employed sanitized language, eh? And while at it, you would rather they banned pornography?

Here is some information for you. If you banned pornography today rape of women would go up exponentially.

And here is another piece of news for you. Your minister at church who talks poetry is probably visiting prostitutes at night! Worse, he is most likely to rape your child, boy or girl. You have heard what Catholic priests have been up to, haven't you?

Reverend Swaggard talks about the need to not have sex outside marriage and goes to a motel room to have sex with prostitutes; Reverend Jim Baker talks shop about marriage and in the meantime is having sex with men, not just his wife!

Old Freud wants people to quit their pretenses over sex and permit themselves to satisfy their sexuality with consenting adults.

The point is that Freud tells us that adult society is based on pretentious morality and that we ought to accept our true selves; he said that we are sexual animals.

As a psychotherapist I have heard it all, those we call the pillars of society, medical doctors, lawyers etc. telling me how they cruise the streets picking up hookers for sex and going home to their wives to pretend proper behavior. Old Freud would say that all these happen because of our repression of our Id. Understand the Id and manage it and you would do fine, but whatever you do please do not pretend to be who you are not; you are not an angel; you are an animal with animal needs and that is all there is to you.

Freud blew the whole sex thing wide open. His contribution to psychology is his feedback that we look at our sexuality with a bit more honesty than pretension.

When Freud began his psychoanalysis other medical doctors in Vienna joined the psychoanalytic club (you have to be analyzed before you can analyze other people, for among other reasons so as to understand yourself and not project your issues to other people). One of those doctors was Alfred Adler. Adler became second in command to Freud. However, right from the beginning he was not happy with Freud's over emphasis on sex as the primary motivator of our behaviors.

By 1910 Adler had developed his own ideas about the nature of neurosis. He no longer saw eye to eye with Freud and naturally he was kicked out by Freud (Freud was dictatorial). Adler formed his own psychoanalytic club called Individual psychology.

Now, pay attention to Adler for all that Fanon did was use Adler's psychological framework to develop his view of black folk's psychology in his book, black skin, white mask.

Adler's basic view is that all human beings feel inferior. The next time you call somebody inferior feeling stop and ask about your own inferiority feeling!

The African who calls other people inferior feeling must pause and understand his own feelings of inferiority. You must first remove the plank in your eyes before you see the speck of sand in other people's eyes. Or, as they say, those who live in glass houses should not throw stones.

Let me reiterate; Adler said that all of us feel inferior, in degrees. Those born with organic problems (biological issues that make them feel weaker than others tend to feel exaggerated sense of inferiority). Social factors like racism could also exaggerate our sense of inferiority.

The point is that all people feel inferior but some more so than others. Where it is exaggerated there are biological and or sociological factors at work.

To be human is to feel inadequate and inferior Vis a Vis the environment. We are born and will die and that makes us feel inferior. The physical and social environment does not care for our safety and does things to us that we do not like. Tsunami, earthquake, volcano, flood, drought, tornado, plagues virus, fungus, bacteria etc. could destroy you at any moment. We are vulnerable and feel weak.

In addition some have physical issues and or social issues that exacerbate their sense of weakness. Black Americans are told that they are unintelligent by white folks; this exacerbates their existential sense of nothingness.

To live we must try to overcome our weakness. It takes power to master our environment hence survive on it. Thus, we struggle to overcome our inferiority.

Every child feels inferior and compensates with drive to power and superiority. All of us seek power and superiority, Adler says. This is a human issue but it is exaggerated in some persons.

Some feel more inferior and compensate with more superiority. As Adler sees it, the normal person has little inferiority and little superiority; the neurotic has too much inferiority and too much superiority.

The neurotic has an all or nothing approach to superiority. His whole life is lived as if he is the fictional important person he desires to become; he cannot tolerate not becoming important. At school he must be first in his class or he feels that he is the last, best or nothing (Adler called it all or nothing approach to living).

(Adler, by the way, built on his own experience. As a child he felt shy, that is, inadequate relative to the other boys and compensated with drive to be good at his studies. He struggled to be the first boy in his class or he felt like he was a failure; that way he bulldozed his way to obtaining a medical degree from the University of Vienna at a very Young age. Adler was the neurotic he was talking about; and you are also a neurotic if you are a successful person.)

Feeling of inferiority has nothing to do with intelligence; in fact, the more intelligent a person is the more likely he is to feel insecure than averagely intelligent persons. Consider Adolf Hitler.

Adolf Hitler was a neurotic (in today's diagnostic categories he could be diagnosed as having narcissistic, antisocial and paranoid personality disorders...personality disorder is another name for neurosis). He was born with organic issues. His stomach could not handle all kinds of food. He literally fainted if you smoked around him. He fainted if he drank a cup of coffee. His body could not even handle meat. He was a vegetarian. All said he felt inferior as a result of his biological issues.

Like all people he did not like to feel inferior. He tried to feel superior. The way he could do so is to tell him that he is superior to all people. I estimate his IQ at around 140 so in truth he is superior to 99% of the people. But he could have used that intelligence to serve the people. Instead, he used it to try dominating the people.

Adler said that each of us must use his abilities to serve people (he called it social interest). What Adler teaches is that people should accept their inferiority feeling and pursue superiority but put their pursuit to serving society. He said that we cannot get to a point where we do not feel inferior. A neurotic must redirect his movement to serving people rather than trying to merely seem superior to them.

Freud began psychoanalysis. Adler joined him and expanded it. Other folks, such as Carl Jung, Otto Rank and Karen Horney joined up the movement to understand how the human mind works in scientific term (not from religious or philosophical speculations) took off.

Thus, we have German psychoanalysis (actually it was mostly a Jewish affair) club working with worried well neurotics. On the other end of the spectrum was Kraepelin expanding our understanding of psychosis. Kraepelin helped us understand psychosis and Freud, Adler and Jung helped us understand neurosis.

Psychology and Psychiatry began as a German affair. The Germans, as you know from philosophy, think abstractly. Have you read Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Feuerbach? Did you understand what you read? These folks tend to go off on a tangent talking abstract nonsense. Try reading Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind and see if you understand what the hell the man is saying or read Kant's Critique of Pure reason or Schopenhauer's World as Will and Idea. You get the idea, they are speculative and idealistic. German psychology is speculative.

The English has something about them. They are grounded on planet earth. They take this world seriously and want to study it as it is and understand it on its own terms and make the most of it. They are logical positivists, empiricists and scientists (the scientific method studies the world as it is, not as we want it to be; it posits ideas, hypotheses about the world and accepts those verified as true and discards those without empirical evidence supporting them).

They do not listen to you if you go on a trip talking abstract stuff. John Bull wants you to show him how your ideas work in our world of space, time and matter.

Englishmen did not like all that German speculative psychoanalysis. They wanted a science of psychology. Watson, B.F. Skinner, Esynck and other Angelo Saxon thinkers came into psychology rather late and brought their realism to bear on it (the Russian, Pavlov joined them). They, in effect, told Freud: don't talk about what goes inside peoples unconscious minds for we do not see it; what we see are people's actual behaviors.

The English redirected psychology to behaviorism. Behaviorism does not speculate about peoples thinking but observes their actual behavior.

How does it work? If I praise your ego you like it. If I give you something tangible you like it. Therefore, instead of worrying about what is in your head I will concentrate on doing what works in getting you to do what I want you to do for me.

Psychology then should be about people's actual behavior, not their ideal behavior. If you want someone to do something positively reinforce such behavior in him? Do you want your child to be a good student? Don't moralize about the virtues of education. Praise him or her when he studies; give him psychological and or material gifts when he studies.

This is called classical and operant conditioning. It works in behavior modification.

By the 1952s certain accidental discoveries led psychiatry to realize that mental illness is not only in folk's minds but in their bodies. Someone had discovered the medication, Thorazine, to treat Tuberculosis. Somehow someone discovered that it calmed down agitated psychotics. So from 1952 we began giving psychotics Thorazine (the first psychotropic medication for psychosis).

Similar medications were soon discovered, such as millaril, navane, prolixine, Haldol etc. By the 1990s we have improved medications for treating psychosis, such as Risperdal, Zyprexa etc.

For mania we now have lithium and Depakote and others; for depression we now have Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil; for anxiety disorders we now have the various anxiolytic medications.

The relevant point is that beginning in the 1950s we discovered that mental illness has something to do with the role of the various neurotransmitters (dopamine, neuropiniphren serotonin, GABA etc.) in the brain and we began treating the mentally ill with medications. As a result we had to empty our asylums

In the past folks used to be sent to asylums and stayed there all their lives. These days the average stay at psychiatric hospitals is only a few weeks. Folks are stabilized with medications and released into the community (and treated by medical practionners in the community and also case managed).

Psychiatry has gone from merely weigh-housing the mentally ill to actually giving them neuroleptic medications that help control their symptoms although not cure them.

Franz Fanon went to medical school in the 1940s. From what I said above what can you say about his psychiatric training? He was trained in psychoanalysis; he was exposed to Freud and Adler. He was exposed to some behaviorism (Watson, Pavlov etc.).

He was not exposed to medicinal psychiatry. He would have known nothing about giving the mentally ill medications (except may be try electric shock or lobotomy on the depressed)!

Franz Fanon gravitated to Alfred Adler's individual psychology, and less so to Freud. Fanon took Adler and used his ideas to apply to himself and to his fellow black folks. The book, Back Skin, White Mask is based on Adlerian psychology. Now let us see what the book said.

The book did not waste time but dived right into the matter. Fanon said that upon coming to Paris, France, that is, white man's land., his fellow Martinique's who had lived in the colonies and essentially were told that white folks were like gods had one thing and one thing in mind, to find out if white men were really god like.

White women were placed on a pedestal so black folks want to have sex with them. Fanon and his friends went to a brothel and had sex with white women.

In effect, Africans want to have sex with white women. White women are supposed to represent the almighty white race so having sex with them is finding out what this whole race thing is all about.

Fanon found out that the white woman is exactly like the black woman he had sex with in Martinique. There is absolutely no difference between white women and black women (except cultural differences).

So what was that all about? What it was all about was that the white man had exalted his women and dangled them in front of black men and say: come get them if you can (not before I have first lynched you); they are pure and your own black women are filthy.

Black men think that they should have sex with white women and they always do and find them the same as their black women. Having found that the white woman is exactly like the black woman the normal black man returns to his black women.

Generally, normal black men, Africans included, return to black women. For one thing they understand them culturally and do not want to deal with women from a different culture. Life is easier if you married somebody from your culture and that is exactly what black men do.

But there are few black men who want to transcend their culture. Fanon wanted to transcend his culture. Therefore, having experimented with white women he moved on and eventually devoted himself to his work.

In devoting himself to his life's work, which was fighting for the liberation of colonized people, especially Algerians he found out that leftist French women were active in this war. He found himself around white women committed to the course he was committed to.

He gravitated to one such woman. This time not because of sex but because of common purpose. Not all black men who marry white women do so because they are fascinated by white vagina, as idiot Africans tend to think.

There are many reasons why folks do what they do. To attribute interracial marriage only to black men feeling inferior and seeking superiority by proximity to white folks is to be a lazy thinker. A lazy thinker does not understand that there are complex motivations actuating people's behaviors.

Most Africans who talk about inferiority actuating black men who marry white women are lazy thinkers. In fact, they are not even thinkers, they are dummies.

Some of those blacks who have made the most seminal contributions to the liberation of the black race where married to white women. I can think of Franz Fanon, Richard Wright etc.

People are cultural animals and generally gravitate to those who share their culture. You may be black and your culture is every bit as German as the most blond German. You may be black and love Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Handel, Hayden, Straus, Wagner etc. You are going to be around those with similar interests. Race has got nothing to with anything.

Black Skin, White Mask? What does this really mean? Fanon is telling us that some folks with black skin feel compelled by the exigencies of their times, white dominated world and perception of things white as better than things black, to desire being white like. He is saying that black folks deny their real black selves and put on a mask that shows them to be white. Black folks act as if they are white folks.

The concept of mask is actually what human personality is all about. The term personality comes from persona meaning mask. Greek actors wore masks to prevent those in the audience from recognizing who they are as they try to enact their behaviors; it would not be nice if the actors enacted the pretended importance of local big wigs and made fun of their pretensions. Those whose behaviors are caricatured tend to feel shamed and angry at those who shamed them.

When people feel unmasked and humiliated they tend to attack whoever did that to them. Generally, people prefer to live as the phony pretended important selves they present themselves as. People are weak animals who pretend to be special beings. If you want to get along with folks collude with them and tell them that they are who they pretend to be, godlike; if you want to alienate them dare tell them the truth of how you see them and how they are (I dared, for example, telling Igbos that they are not the angels they present themselves as and for being truthful many of them have been after my skin!).

Greek actors had to hide their identity to avoid been attacked by those whose personalities they were portraying on the stage. People do not like you to bring the skeletons in their closets out to the public; they prefer to keep presenting sham selves to other people to relate to as who they are.

In doing so, social dances, all lies, in engaging in this Games people play, as Eric Berne called it, people live in their private worlds, lonely and unhappy lives.

The purpose of clinical psychology, inter alia, is to enable people to put away their masks and live more authentic lives; when they live from their real selves they are spontaneous and happy.

Personality means that human beings real selves are not known to them, that they put on persona, masks that they act in the public.

When I see you I see a mask, your set of social behaviors, behaviors you learned in society that you believe that if you act them out other people would accept you. That is what child socialization is all about; it is to get the child to act as other people would accept him to act or else they reject him, disapprove of him, even arrest and jail him (if he deviates from accepted social Norms).

To have a personality is to wear a mask. So who then are we? Carl Jung said that beneath the mask, persona, personality is a different self. He thinks that that self is spirit. We all, as it were, are spirit but are enacting personal social dances.

Jung's therapy aims at helping the individual to understand his personality (introverted, extroverted, ambivalent etc.) and then transcending it; the individual is to understand his conscious self, his unconscious self (which dreams help us to understand) and his collective unconscious self (group self in the individual). He is also to understand his animal self. After all these have been done the individual is now ready to reach his spiritual self.

I am saying that Fanon employing the concept of mask is not exactly novel in psychology. The entirety of personality theory is to understand peoples masks and removing them so that they would live more fully hence happily and peacefully.

Fanon told us that black folks feel inferior Vis a Vis white folk. Western civilization presented itself as superior to all other civilizations. Africa is called the heart of darkness by the Polish writer, Joseph Conrad.

Considered primitive Africans want to be seen as civilized (to be civilized is to live in cities...so Africans now live in cities). White skin is presented as the most civilized skin so Africans want to be like white folks (African women even bleach their skin white). They want their societies to be like Western societies... Lagos wants to be like London, may be as beautiful as Paris or Rome.

What does that mean? It means that Lagosians assume that London and Paris are already better than their city, superior to it and by generalization Parisians are superior to Lagosians.

The message of Fanon's book is that black folk must stop wishing to be like white folk and accept their black selves.

Fanon was not the first or only person who talked about the Negro personality as self-hating, stunted and imitative of white folks. There is a whole genre of studies and writings on the subject. The reader could see Gunnar Myrdal, The American Dilemma, Karon, The Negro Personality; Thomas Pettigrew, A profile of the American Negro; Franklin Frazier, The Negro Middle Class; Octavos Omanini, Prospero and Caliban, the Psychology of Colonization; Albert Memi, The Colonizer and the Colonized. These books essentially said that the Negro hates his black self and wants to become a white like self.

Of course, the Negro is always black and therefore cannot succeed in his efforts to be white like. He is thus stock being a divided self, hence a weakened self for if one has a split self, black and white in him one is bound to be weak.

In 1903 W.E.B. Dubois wrote a whole book, Soul of Black Folk, in which he said that the Negro has two selves, his African self and his white self.

Gordon Allport in his book, The Nature of Prejudice told is how racism works in America and what it disposed the discriminated, Jews and Blacks, to do: always trying to imitate white folks and to be close to white folks(proximity to white folks makes inferiority feeling minority persons feel as superior as white folks are supposed to be).

The life of always trying to imitate others takes its toll on folks, it depowers them. Not to talk about the time it takes to imitate other folks instead of just being one 's self.

Michelle Obama and Condoleezza Rice spend hours every week straightening their wooly hair, all in vain attempt to make their hair seem white like. Why not just accept their hair as Ms. Eleanor Norton (the lady representing Washington DC in Congress) does?

Thank God Negro men are no longer frying their hair to look like white hair, as Malcolm X said that they used to do in the 1940s.

Fanon's point is that Negroes are always trying to be white like; he wants them to stop doing so. Look, you all, stop trying to be like white folks; accept yourself as you are. Black skin is okay; I am black and proud James Brown said (and still fried his hair).

(In his other books, especially The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon ventured into discourse of political philosophy; we are not dealing with that here; we are dealing with the psychological here.)

Talk is cheap, is it not? What is difficult is action. It is easy to tell the Negro to quit trying to be like his master and accept his black self. The real question is: what exactly is his real self that he has to accept?

Is it the self in Africa before he was kidnapped and sold into slavery by Africans? If Africans were that good would they roam their world kidnapping their people and selling them to Arabs and white folks? Should Negroes imitate Africans who sold them? Is the African-self ideal (do ideal people sell their siblings into slavery and instead of feeling guilty for their wrong blame those they sold them to)?

In contemporary Africa what are African leaders but thieves in government? Are criminals in government to be imitated? No.

Negroes now look to ancient Egypt for religion and culture, not to black Africa for black Africa is not ideal.

Clearly, the Negro has to examine his behavior and jettison those that are not congruent with his nature but I doubt that that means jettisoning Western Europe. We live in a world dominated by the West. Even Asians with ancient cultures are increasingly accepting European culture. Chinese business men and leaders are now wearing Western business suits, instead of what their ancestors wore. The world is increasingly remade in the image of the white man.

I am saying that all these loose talk about being African is exactly that, talk. What is the African that folks are supposed to be like? Wear agbada that handicaps one from working efficiently in the new global economy? Agbada clad Nigerians are the least productive people on earth; they are living off oil revenue and when it is gone they become laborers for productive others, for China man, white man.

Black Americans are Americans not Africans. Of course they can study Africa and borrow what is acceptable in it for them. In the here and now they are Americans.

I am saying that the only choice left modern Africans is to take from all over the world what serves their interests and quit talking rubbish about inferiority and superiority (both inferiority and superiority are delusions, they are not real; what is real is human sameness and equality), imitating white folks for everyone is imitating very one.

Personality is learned; it is something we develop from imitating others. The only choice we have is to make our personalities relatively healthy by making them approximate our real selves.

What are our real selves? What is your real self, do you know who you in truth are? Are you an animal, ego or spirit? What are you? Quit making noise and taking your noise as profound knowledge.

Franz Fanon died at the age of 36. That means that he did not live long enough to truly have deep understanding of human nature. His thoughts were the thoughts of a young man, shallow but interesting. He was a bright Negro who studied Adlerian psychology and used it to try to understand his people. But his understanding of psychology was superficial and therefore what he said in black skin, white mask showed school boy level of understanding of the human phenomenon.

He is, of course, worth reading but most people above age forty probably would find him childish and not pay much attention to his hypothesizing.

We do not know what the human self is so to pretend that if one just accepts ones skin color or African culture one would have found one's self is to talk arrant nonsense.

Man is too complex for mere sociological approach to him to explicate who he is entirely. The objective of living on earth is to struggle to gradually find out who we are; we do not already know who we are. If we already know who we are I doubt that we would be here on earth.

When we find out who we are we are done with this world and move on to other universes and continue the learning and knowing that is our nature; there is infinite stuff to be learned and understood in the multiverses that exist where we are.

Ozodi Osuji

July 4, 2012

Dr. Osuji can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Next Reviews are (1) Kemet (2) Caruthers, Intellectual warfare (3) and finally a paper on the effect of Africans kidnapping and selling their people to Arabs and White men on Africans (paranoid persons and corrupt cultures that do not respect human beings). 

Joy Degruy Leary, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome. (Milwaukie, Oregon: Upton Press, 2005) 235 Pages.

Book Review By Ozodi Osuji

In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (2005 Edition) there is a nosological category called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This is a grab bag diagnosis because it encompasses symptoms found in other psychiatric disorders such as anxiety disorder and depression, even delusion disorder. The idea is that those who were exposed to stressful and or traumatic situations tend to exhibit certain symptoms.

For example, children who were abused, housewives who were terrorized by abusive husbands, soldiers who were exposed to killing at battlefronts, children who were caught up in war zones and other areas where they were exposed to abuse and see death and dying felt their lives threatened. Generally, when human beings are exposed to life threatening situations they experience fear (anxiety is the name for fear without immediate known cause).

When a person points a gun at you or threatens your life you experience fear (panic). You feel your life threatened and experience a powerful urge to run away or fight back. Your body elicits certain powerful neurochemicals, such as adrenalin and they force you to either run or fight. The neurochemicals make most of the organs in your body to work rapidly. Your heart beats faster; your lungs beat faster. Your lungs drag in more air (oxygen from the outside) and your heart transports that oxygen to all parts of your body via blood.

Your body releases sugar (source of energy) and that energy is rushed to all the muscles in your body by blood. The energy and oxygen rushed to all parts of your body prepare them to either run away from the source of danger or fight it.

In danger, generally you find yourself able to do what ordinarily you were unable to do. When your life is threatened you can run the 100 meters dash at a speed that would make an Olympian athlete proud. You are running to save your life and there is no time to waste for it is do or die.

Your nervous system works faster than it normally does, due to elicited excitatory neurotransmitters that make the neurons fire faster than normal.

Your body sends messages to and from the brain quicker than normal and the brain searches its memory bank asking it how you should respond to the present threat to your life, to stay and fight back or run away. If you have a history of fighting back in such situations you stay and fight but if your memory tells you that you have no chance in hell of overcoming the threat you are pushed to run away.

When you try talking you talk very fast because your vocal cords as all other parts of your body has been speeded up by the various neurochemical reactions in your body.

Essentially, your nature (biological organism) perceives threat to it and does what it has to do to enable you survive, fight or flee. You do not have the time to do calm thinking; you just react, as it were, in an instinctual manner. Nature wants you to survive and makes you do what you have to do to survive.

What I described above is the famous flight or fight response to danger to our lives. The flight part of the response is called fear; the fight part of it is called anger. Fear and anger, therefore, have the same physiological reactions in our bodies; the same neurochemicals are involved in both responses. From a physiological perspective you could not tell the difference between fear and anger response; the body responds the same way except that in one your brain judges you able to fight back and you stay and fight and in the other your brain judges you unable to fight back and forces you to run away. (This probably accounts for the fact that angry people are generally fearful people; the biological reactions are the same. These days the medications given to angry people and fearful people are the same, the various anti-anxiety medications.)

Most people have experienced fear in their lives and understand the reaction I have just described. In normal situations our lives are only occasionally threatened so we experience fear only once in a while. Nature, apparently, anticipated that we will occasionally be attacked and built into our bodies an involuntary fear/anger response. When you are attacked nature does not ask you how you should respond, you just respond with fear or anger.

If one is in a situation where one's life is constantly threatened, such as in an abusive home, one experiences fear and anger most of the time. That which nature made to prepare one to run or fight for one's safety is now employed every day. Worse, in the case of a child who is abused (consider a five year old being raped by her father and or other adults in her life...and these days, boys are also raped especially by Catholic priests) the child cannot even run away. The body reacts as just described and urges the child to run away but where is she going to run to if the father is abusing her? The child is thus caught between a rock and a hard place. There is no escape for her.

Some sexually traumatized children sometimes try to use their minds to escape the abuse. In which case, an abused girl denies that the body and sexual organ being raped by the adult belongs to her. She dissociates from her body and invents another self, a self that is not being abused.

It is hypothesized that this is the origin of dissociative disorders, such as multiple personality disorder. A child subjected to abuse dissociates from herself and invents a different self; the long term consequence is that she now has two or more selves, the abused self and the self that is not abused. Thus, she ends up with many selves: her real self, the abused self and the alter egos that are not abused...Leary did not go into the type of detail I have ventured into here.

I would suggest that black psychologists look into the possibility that some of the behaviors of African Americans are dissociative, as in abused persons dissociating from their real selves; that is, African Americans are not being their real selves in their behaviors but are being alter egos they evolved to adapt to a terrorizing environment? If so, the question is: what is their real self?

Soldiers at the battle front are constantly shot at and shoot at others. They kill and fear being killed. The killing business takes a toll on their psyche. Many of them experience what used to be called shell shock (now called PTSD). Their minds quit the battle front and they simply go numb, and they are now in shock. They become unable to do anything. Folks used to say that such soldiers were pretending illness trying to avoid being at the war front to go kill for their political leaders and their nations (recall the famous scene where George C. Scott enacted out what General Patton supposedly did when he saw shell shocked soldiers at a military hospital: dressed them down as cowards). No, something in them had had enough of this unnatural business of training people to go kill or get killed when they would rather be loved and love their fellow human beings.

All told, those exposed to constant danger to their lives tend to experience trauma to their psychological selves as well as to their bodies. If a child has been raped or abused his mind and body is traumatized. Thereafter that person shows certain symptoms, mainly anxiety, depression and paranoia, the syndrome called post-traumatic stress disorder by psychiatry.

An abused woman could now be walking down a street and see a man that looks like the man that raped or abused her and feel all the fear she felt when she was been abused (she may run across the street to get away from him, even though he is not the person who abused her). She could be walking down a Street and see a house that reminds her of a house where she was abused and she experiences the intense fear, panic she had felt when actually abused.

Once traumatized, abused the human mind is easily triggered by danger that reminds it of that abuse. Once traumatized a person could be sitting in the comfort of his home and then suddenly for no apparent reason experiences all the symptoms of intense fear, feel as he felt when he was being abused and his life was in actual danger. Now he is supposedly in the safety of his house and experiences panic and terror.

Anticipatory fear could be at work. Once traumatized your mind could anticipate similar trauma or think of the past abuse and your body elicits reactions as if it is actually being attacked now.

A soldier who had been at the battle field can now be in his room and feel as he felt when he was at the battlefield. He feels intense fear and stress and reacts with the same fear and or anger response.

He may go buy alcohol and other drugs in an effort to calm his body down. Stress and traumatic reaction often leads to abuse of drugs that calm one's body (such as alcohol, anti-anxiety agents...Valium, Xanax, Ativan, Librium, Klonipine; heroine, morphine, anything that calms the body). Past abuse and trauma tends to lead to abuse of drugs and to drug addiction in the abused person; additionally, it messes up that person's emotional state and of course interpersonal relationships (would you be able to deal with a person who is often panicking and running from situations that you do not consider life threatening or would you be able to cope with a person who falsely accuses you of trying to harm, kill him?).

Post-traumatic stress disorder is found in many soldiers who returned from battle fields (such as Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan). The various VA hospitals are filled with soldiers suffering from PTSD. They are usually treated with a combination of medications and psychotherapy (they are often given anxiolytics but since those are addictive, anti-depressants such as Paxil, Prozac, and Zoloft are tried).

Psychotherapy entails understanding the nature of the trauma the individual went through and working through the issues aroused for him. Individual, group and family therapies are often tried. Generally, it takes years to work through the issues associated with PTSD. It is doubtful that anyone can be completely healed of their traumatic experiences; such experiences tend to stay in the individual's mind and affect his or her behavior for the rest of his life.

And, worse, such persons often develop behavior patterns that they may pass on to their children (hence multi-generational effect of abuse). For example, if you abuse someone and make him fearful most of the time he may develop paranoid tenancies.

In paranoia the individual anticipates that other people could attack, him or even kill him. He defends himself by avoiding those he believes are out to harm him. This behavior pattern, anticipatory avoidance of danger, may be passed to the individual's children. He socializes them to be afraid of other people and the children learn to anticipate danger and avoid it. These ways paranoid persons produce paranoid children! However, there may be biological factors involved, such as tendency to higher somatic arousal, more or quicker adrenalin elicitation etc.

I hope that I have, more or less, given a bird's eye view of what PTSD is. What Dr. Leary did in her book is extrapolate from what psychiatry knows about PTSD and apply it to the African American situation. She considers the experience of African-Americans in America traumatic hence caused PTSD in many of them (she called her diagnosis post traumatic slave syndrome or PTSS).

Consider what happened. Africans, some of them under ten years old, were yanked away from their homes in Africa. They were packed like sardines in slave ships and brought to the Americas (many died in the middle passage). In the Americas they were sold as slaves and used to do farm work by their white slave masters. They were worked like animals, in fact, often worse than folks worked their mules. They were worked until they dropped dead.

They were not considered human beings, just farm animals. Even as they were considered animals their white masters and their children gratified their sexual urges on them. When the slave master felt sexual he took any female (perhaps males too) slave he wanted and raped her (that way many African Americans became mixed race, all due to the man who is preaching racial superiority!).

White teenage boys learned all about sex by raping black women, some often as young as twelve years old. Rape is a terrorizing experience.

African slaves were subjected to such terrible treatment that it is difficult to believe that those who did this thing to their fellow human beings are human beings. Are white folks human beings?

Bobby Wright, a black psychologist believes that white folks are born psychopathic and sociopathic; that is, are brutes. He thinks that they have no conscience, no sense of guilt or shame or remorse feeling.

Dr. Leary provided what she called the symptoms of post traumatic slavery syndrome, PTSS. Actually, what she did is package most of what most people already know as issues in the African American community and attributed them to the trauma of slavery and racism. In other words, she attributed causality without proof.

Going along with her hypothesis, she said that PTSS is characterized by the tendency for black folks to be prone to anger. We all know that black folks appear to have smoldering anger in them and any little trigger leads to the explosion of that anger. Friends could be having fun and one says what annoys the other and he goes home and grabs a gun and blows the others head away. Dr. Leary thinks that this tendency to rage in the African American is attributable to slavery and the frustrations African Americans, especially the males experience in America.

We all know that African Americans are usually the last hired for jobs and the first fired. We know that they are disrespected by the white community. We know that police harass them, especially black males; we know that they are disproportionately represented in the penal community. All these issues cause anger and the African American has anger issues. Whether this anger issue is directly caused by slavery is debatable but one suspect that it probably has something to do with it.

Dr. Leary talked about low self-esteem (in her words, vacant esteem) in the African Americans. What is racism but the propaganda that black folks are less intelligent than white folks and are supposedly closer to animals than people? We all know that the intention of racism is to make black folks doubt their worth; everything in the American polity is deigned to impress on Africans how stupid they are. It is therefore not a wonder that many African Americans have low self-esteem.

Kenneth Clark's doll experiment in the 1950s showed that black kids preferred white dolls to black dolls; one doubts that the situation has changed greatly today.

Black children generally do not have positive expectations from their society. Indeed, they see bleak futures for them. Dr. Leary talked about ten year old black boys already making plans for their death and funeral in the Washington DC area; they were already planning about what clothes they would be buried in! In their neighborhoods (called the murder capital of the USA) black kids kill other black kids as if they are rats. Drive by killing is part of their everyday experience. If they are not killed by their fellow blacks they can expect to have run-ins with the police and probably wound up in jails and prisons in their teenage years.

In jails and prisons (where one out of four black youth are) they are likely going to be raped and eventually marked for murder. (The jail experience is probably an immediate traumatizing experience for African Americans.)

Racism does wonders in these United States of America; it socializes black children to expect death at a very early age. You find young black men not expecting to live past twenty four years old. You find forty year old black men who tell you that most of the people they grew up with are either dead or are in prisons. And they tell you all these as a matter of fact. Theirs is a hopeless existence.

Dr. Leary talked about the effect of PTSS on black male and female relationships. We know that during slavery marriage was discouraged by the slave owners but after slavery blacks did make a valiant effort to restart and rehabilitate marriage between them. Today, over 70% of black children are raised by single black women.

It seems that black men get the sisters pregnant and do not want to stick around for marriage and raising the children. And before you start blaming any one you had better realize that the brothers may be unemployed and do not have money and may have been in and out of prisons since age twelve. They feel their manhood denigrated by poverty. It takes money to support children and if one does not have money one is no good to the children. We also know that generally speaking women tend to prefer men with money and tend to respect men with money. Poor and unemployed men are seldom respected by women (black or white women).

The few black men that manage to make it through some kind of college education, Dr. Leary said, appear motivated to run away from the sisters and shack up with white women. In America white womanhood is presented as ideal womanhood and some of the brothers apparently have internalized the idea that white women are preferable to black women, she said.

Black women, too, judge their beauty relative to white ideals of beauty: consider what they do to straighten their hair and lighten their color etc.; it may well be that racial influences also dispose black women not to respect black men, after all the white world does not respect black men and the white man at least finds black women tolerable as sex toys hence has value for him and that kind of gives black women perverted sense of more worth than black men in racist America?

What Dr. Leary did was enumerate what we all know are the problems found in the black community and attributed them all to PTSS; she appears to say that the social breakdown we find in the black community is symptomatic of the past and present traumatic experience of black folk in the hands of white folks. Whether she is right or not is a different story.

Her book is her perception, her opinion, not a social-psychological study that finds correlation between two variables. I am supposing that it is a gold mine for those who want to do actual studies to take specific ideas from her book and study them. Is there really correlation between PTSS and, say, drug taking?

Couldn't drug taking be due to a whole set of causes including perceived meaninglessness of life in North America? Those living in the great cities of America, such as Los Angeles, Chicago and New York are essentially like animals in a zoo; nature probably did not mean for people to live like that; ghetto living, it seems to me, is unnatural living.

Not too long ago people lived in country villages where they lived in nature and breathed fresh air. These days they are inhaling fumes from the millions of cars on the streets of big cities. This is not exactly how life is meant to be?

This kind of life is probably enough to give people a feeling that life is pointless and they then try to escape from their pessimistic perception of being by taking recourse in alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, excessive sexual activity and over eating, anything to make them feel pleasurable in a depressing world. (A few weeks in Washington DC depressed me; I kept asking: how could people live in such a bleak and depressing environment; why can't they escape to the country side and inhale fresh air and enjoy the beauty of unspoilt nature; I left as soon as I could to the greener pastures of the pacific northwest where one could live in the country side).

I am saying that the causal factors for all the problems that Dr. Leary enumerated may not be what she thinks that they are. It is very easy to reduce everything wrong with black America to supposed origin in the trauma of slavery and racism. Her book is probably another reductionistic social science; it reduced complex issues to sociological causes only.

There happen to be biological and existential factors at work in people's lives. Indeed, biology probably determines over 75% of human behavior. There is a tendency for black scholars to totally ignore biological variables and only harp on self-evident social factors at play in folk's lives. Those social factors are only the partial causes of folk's problems.

Even if you improve people's social lives they would still grapple with biological and existential issues, such as why are they alive, what are they living for, is life worth living.

Dr. Leary obviously is not a philosopher or even a psychologist; she is a social worker and her book reflects her social work background; it lacks grounding in theoretical understanding of human nature and human behavior; it is a string of hastily thrown together ideas that may not be causally related.

A good portion of Dr. Leary's book is narration of the history of slavery in the United States. She gave an acceptable history of the African American experience from 1619 when the first slaves were brought to Jamestown, Virginia to the present USA. She gave us a picture of the slaves' lot in America: unmitigated abuse from sun up to sun down.

She told us about how slavery and subsequent discrimination against black Americans amounted to terrorizing them. I agree. Slavery was terrorism. Let us stop minimizing what white Americans did to black Americans. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and other slave masters were terrorists; they terrorized their slaves. Of course, that was not how they saw their victims; they fancied themselves Christians giving benighted Africans the light of Christ. Christians indeed!

Jesus asked his followers to love all people and these predatory monsters exploited people's labor for free, worked them to death and did not even mark their burial grounds.

I have on a number of occasions visited Jefferson's Monticello, Washington's Mount Vernon, Madison's Montpellier and the other mansions of the founder terrorists and saw where they buried their kindred and asked the tourist guides where they buried their slaves and they looked at me as if I was crazy. The slaves were apparently thrown into unmarked graves (if indeed they were buried; who knows whether these savages calling themselves civilized folk ate the bodies of their slaves, too; one wouldn't put it pass them!).

Dr. Leary made an acceptable argument that slavery and racial discrimination was traumatic to African Americans. Her argument is persuasive and one accepts it.

Since we know that the effects of trauma are often passed to future generation, even when the abused is no longer abused, Dr. Leary believes that former slaves passed the behavior patterns developed during slavery to contemporary African Americans.

Although she did not really develop this hypothesis beyond anecdotal extrapolations I think that she is telling the truth. I think that contemporary African Americans are still suffering from the effects of slavery on their ancestors.

Much of what seems like unnatural behaviors found in contemporary African Americans can be traced to their history of abuse. Drug abuse, dropping out of school, criminal behavior, lack of self-respect and respect for other black folks and tendency to fear white folks and so on could all be the after effect of slavery and abuse African Americans suffered in the hands of white Americans.

Having made her case that slavery produced post traumatic disorder in African Americans she proceeded to make a case for what seems to her healing interventions. Her suggestions were in the nature of social work, reflecting her social work background. In my judgment they are not worth consideration, just namby-pamby social worker feel good talk.

She did elaborate on the role of religion in enabling African Americans cope with their ordeal. It is doubtful that they could have survived their torture chamber, for that is what America is for black folk, without the consolation provided by religion. Religion enables people to try to make sense of their life.

Unfortunately, the religion that most African-Americans are socialized into is Christianity, the religion of the racists who terrorized them.

Is it a good idea to practice the religion of one's terrorizer? There seems a contradiction in terms here. To solve this problem many African Americans walked away from Christianity and walked right into the religion of other terrorists, Islam.

Muslim Arabs actually enslaved more Africans than white Americans did; therefore, their religion is hardly the panacea that black folks are looking for.

Thus, realizing that Islam is also the enemy's religion many African Muslims are jettisoning it. Now what is the alternative?

Dr. Leary appears to have toyed with Baha'ism; an Islam derived religion that talks about human unity and oppressed folks find solace in it (provided they allow Bahaullah and his children to rule them forever).

Some African Americans are now identifying with ancient Egypt as their origin and thus go to Egypt looking for religion. With the understanding that ancient Egypt was an African civilization these African Americans seek to resurrect ancient Egyptian religion and see it as their own. They call their new religion Kemet (I will do a review of it in this ten part series).

How about looking into West African religions since most African Americans came from West Africa, not Egypt? Unfortunately, each West African religion tends to be limited to each tribe hence do not appeal to those from different types. African Americans came from most of the tribes in West Africa, from, Senegal to Namibia, it is therefore doubtful that any specific West Africa religion would appeal to them.

Perhaps, African-Americans need to formulate their own religion; why not? They are after all another African tribe!

Alas, willy-nilly they are also partly European and Indian! Clearly their religion must encompass their multiracial experience, that is, not specifically African but universal?

Franz Fanon (who I will focus on in my next review) had his own ideas on what needs to be done to rehabilitate formerly enslaved and or colonized people.

In sum, Dr. Leary gave us a simplistic picture of PTSD and applied it to the African American experience. Her book is interesting. However, it did not take much thought to write it; all she did was read DSM IV and extrapolate from it and apply it to the African American experience, and injected a bit of African American history into her write up. The rest of the book was filled with her personal experiences with racism and travelling around the USA and South Africa sharing her views.

I urge folks to read her book, especially since it is a very simple read and the ideas are not difficult to grasp. More sophisticated readers, especially mental health professionals would not benefit from the book. I found it overly childlike.

I do not want to sound sexist but I must observe that there is something feminine about this book; it is the type of thing one expects to hear from ones grandmother. In the real world life is a bit more complicated than the solutions she proffered.

Those who caused the trauma she talked about are still bent on continuing it. Therefore, the solution would seem to require manly political intervention. There needs to be a concerted effort to throw off the oppressor. Omelets are not made without breaking eggs so blood may be required in righting wrong.

Until someone pays a serious price for abusing human beings I doubt that he would give up his war on people's bodies and minds.

Those in power seldom give it up willingly; they generally need to be defeated in a battle field for them to see the reality of not oppressing people.

As a man I see the need for death and dying in order to checkmate other men's aggression. Therapeutic talk does not seem enough to alter horrible political situations, although it certainly does help.

*The next review is Franz Fanon's writings, followed by an examination of the Egyptian religion, Kemet. I will thereafter do a heuristic paper on whether the high level of paranoia found in many west Africans is a residue of their traumatic experience during slavery; imagine what life looked like in West Africa, with slave catchers roaming all over the place capturing people, including children (as narrated by Olauda Equano in his biography); it must have created tremendous fear and insecurity in the people and this probably accounts for the high level or paranoia I see in West Africans?

Ozodi Osuji

July 3, 2012

Dr. Osuji can be reached at 213-807-5944 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Yosef Ben Jochannan, Africa, Mother of Western Civilization. (Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1971) 700 Pages.

A Book Review By Ozodi Osuji

It seems that many African people (in Africa and in the Americas) during the post second world war world were immensely affected by what they believed was Europe’s concerted effort to put Africans down.  They perceived themselves attacked by the mere presence of Europe and went on a warpath to defend their selves.

Africans are a proud people; colonialism induced subordinate relationship between Africans and Europeans pricked Africans egos, pride and vanity; they felt narcissistic injury; in fact, many Africans felt narcissistic rage and sought combative ways to assuage perceived European attacks on their sense of manhood. Part of this defense is to show that almighty Europe owed its very existence to Africa.

Science has proved that all human beings evolved in Africa and later moved to other parts of the world; it is now  generally accepted that people as we currently know them to be were so fifty thousand years ago and were in Africa and later migrated to other continents. In that sense all people are Africans and all developments elsewhere were initiated by Africans, but that is not what our current object of interest, Dr. Ben meant by Africa, Mother of Western Civilization.

Dr. Ben (as I will hereafter call our current protagonist) went to war writing on how everything good in Europe derived from ancient Africa. Europe, he believes, owes its intellectual, scientific and technological achievements to Africa.  If Africa had not existed and accomplished the great things, he believed that it did, Europe would not have done anything. It is all glory to Africa the initiator of human civilization!

I have to say that this book is very annoying; its claims are so outrageous that it takes enormous patience to wade through the hundreds of pages of verbiage the man spilled out. He tells us that ancient Greece derived everything it did from Africans (Egyptians and Ethiopians).

Dr. Ben, like many of the writers of this genre, such as Cheikh Anta Diop, seems to believe that most contemporary Africans descend from ancient Egyptians/Ethiopians.  Apparently, rooting their origin in  Egypt and its great civilization makes these Africans kind of feel civilized; otherwise they would probably feel that they are not civilized, are the naked folks running around African jungles that certain European anthropologists depict Africans as on the pages of National Geographic magazine.

Africans were presented as primitive and some Africans felt offended and wanted to show the world that they are civilized, in fact, prove to a skeptical world that they were the first civilized people on earth, Egyptians.

Just out of curiosity, are there those living in present Egypt, some of whom are descendants of ancient Egyptians before the Arab conquest and takeover of Egypt in the seventh century of our common era,  going about clamoring that they are Africans, or is it the case that only Africans clamor that they are Egyptians?

What Dr. Ben is doing is obvious: his pride probably felt belittled by almighty Western civilization and is trying to seem grand by attaching himself to the alleged grandeur that was ancient Egypt. In doing so he went overboard and claimed everything good in Europe as derived from Egypt, Africa.

Of course, Africa influenced Europe as Europe influenced Africa; it was and still is a symbiotic relationship. Even contemporary European and American culture is influenced by Africans just as contemporary African culture is influenced by European culture.

Can you think of anything considered part of American culture that was not influenced by African Americans? There is no such thing as the USA without the influence of African Americans. African Americans, in turn, were influenced by the congeries of Europeans that now live in the USA. That is the nature of human civilization; it is a system and each part of it influences all other parts; each part is always responding to what other parts are doing; there is no such thing as an isolated culture that is entirely responsible for generating its cultural categories. (Latin America is totally shaped by the Africans living there; Europeans also contributed to Latin culture but the African influence is so obvious that there is no denying it; Brazil, for example, reminds one of Nigeria.)

Aristotle, Dr. Ben said, came down to Egypt to learn his stuff so his teaching is Africa derived. Okay. But what part of Egyptian philosophy is like what Aristotle taught, Kemet...is that not totally different from Greek religion?  Never mind; Aristotle did not visit Egypt and even if he did he was still a Greek, not an Egyptian; his world view reflects European, not African worldview.

Suppose we give him the benefit of doubt and take him at his word and ask: where are the books written in Ethiopia that Plato and Aristotle and other Greeks supposedly copied?  Who were the Ethiopians that supposedly wrote all those non-existent books that the Greeks copied? Who was the Ethiopian Democritus that wrote that the atom is the smallest part of matter? Who was the Ethiopian Archimedes?

I must say that the claims of Dr. Ben (he claims to be an Ethiopian Falasha Jew and that Jews originally came from Ethiopia) made me wonder about his mental health.  I actually deliberately examined his writing to see if they are the writing of a mad man. He is not mad but he is obsessed by the need to prove that Africans are superior to white people.

I do not understand why certain human beings cannot just accept that all human beings are the same and equal and instead have an obsessive-compulsive desire to prove that this or that race is superior to others.

How can one human being be superior to others? Are we not all animals who live and die like animals; we are born in body and in a hundred years that body dies and smells worse than feces? What could make one of us superior to another, the human intellect?  Now, Dr. Ben does not want to go there; I mean talk about intelligence for if he does some deranged white psychologists such as Arthur Jensen and Richard Heinstein (of Bell Curve) would bring out the bugaboo that Africans relative to white folks have lower IQ.

We all agree that in spirit we are the same, equal and one. There is really no basis for talking about human differences at all but Dr. Ben would like to think that there is such basis.

God, it is really exasperating reading material whose undertone is that one group of people are better than others. We are all the same and any talk of racial differences is delusional.

Dr. Ben wanted to help African Americans, his readers, to feel superior to white folks. He is acutely aware that in America African Americans feel marginalized and some feel inferior to white folk, so he set out to make them feel superior to white folk. To accomplish his aim, he had to give them distorted history and philosophy.

He is doing what Adolf Hitler did. If you recall, at the end of the first world war Germany was defeated by the Allies and humiliated because the Allies essentially dismantled her army (what she was proud of )and made her pay  indemnity to the victors.  Germans felt humiliated and young Adolf went on a war path making speeches that made Germans feel good, telling them that Jews were responsible for their defeat, that they are superior to all other people, especially to those who defeated them.

In his nihilistic book, Mein Kampf, Hitler presented a made up philosophy that attempted to make Germans feel superior to their neighbors by presenting non Germans as inferior people. Germans listened to him for he made them temporarily feel superior.

Human beings existentially feel little Vis a Vis the powerful forces of nature arrayed against them. Their existential smallness is often exaggerated by social forces, such as racism, that tell them that they are no good. Since they do not like to see themselves as small, and want to feel special, anyone who tells them how important they are is listened to. Thus, Germans listened to Hitler and elected him to political office. The rest, as they say, is history.

Dr. Ben wrote nonsense that aimed at making African Americans feel superior to white Americans; he appealed to certain African Americans hence they celebrate his books.

I forced myself to read Dr. Ben because he is recognized as one of the gurus of Afrocentrism and since I am motivated to understand Afrocentrists I had to read him. If not my desire to understand Afrocentricism I would not have tortured my mind reading what I automatically realized is bullshit.

In my judgment, it is now time for human beings to have the courage to accept our sameness and equality and quit talking about differences for there are no racial differences at all. People of all races are 99.9% the same; their only difference is their skin color and texture of hair.  We must stop emphasizing what separates us and stress what unifies us, our common humanity.

Dr. Ben did not write anything that could withstand empirical verification; his writing lacks academic rigor. He merely took from this or that writer that seemed to have encountered some light in old Africa and used this thread to weave his elaborate lies about how Africa produced Western civilizations (such as Greece and Rome).

Everything in the ancient world, in Persia, Greece, and Rome and indeed in the modern world has its origin in Africa. Africa is tops and all others are imitating her.

Really, one asks.  He was living in Harlem, New York, why not Addis Ababa his supposed home (it is even doubtful that he came from Ethiopia;  he said that he was taken to Puerto Rico as a child and had his education there, had an engineering degree  from a university that did not offer engineering at the time he graduated; he claims to have a master’s degree in engineering from a university in Havana, Cuba and later a doctorate from Havana and Spain...his story is very fishy, to say the least).

If his Ethiopia is so great why not go live in it and from it spill his philosophy?  Why did he have to go live in the Western world, in the den of the lion, to talk about how great Africa is? If the West is darkness why opt to live in the belly of the beast (whale), in the heart of Western darkness, New York, New York?

If Africa is so great one would have expected him to live in Africa. The fact that he chose to live in the West means that by his action, deed, not words he has voted where he thinks greatness is.

Dr. Ben appears loose with facts and his book reflects inability to respect facts; he weaves stories and claims that they are true.

Since his stories are palpably false it makes me wonder who exactly he believes would accept them, mentally challenged persons? Perhaps, he has negative views of his audience, African Americans; perhaps, he thinks that they are so dumb that they would uncritically accept whatever he dishes out to them!

I think that what is going on here is that Africans of a certain generation were oppressed by their awareness of how far Europe has progressed and left them behind; somehow, they imagined that Europeans were out to tell them that they are inferior persons.

Yes, there were and still are a few misguided Europeans such as Gorbeneau, Chamberlain and Hitler etc. out to prove their supremacy but the average European was not an inferior feeling neurotic who wanted to present himself as a superior person, who lived for one purpose:  to prove to Africans that they are inferior to Europeans.

European missionaries came to Africa and built schools and lived in thatch houses to train Africans. Many of those missionaries caught terrible diseases and died from them; they sacrificed their lives trying to bring light to Africans.

The point is that not all Europeans were out to humiliate Africans by telling them that they are inferior.  I believe that folks like Dr. Ben are persons who feel inferior and are trying to compensate with a feeling of false superiority. Somehow, they had it in their heads that white people made them feel inferior (something in their biological constitution probably made them feel inferior) and went on war trying to prove that ancient Africa (Egypt, Ethiopia) was the mother of everything good in the world.  They belabored their thesis to the point that it is not believable.

One is interested in physics, chemistry, biology and astronomy. One therefore would have liked Dr. Ben to tell one about ancient Africans that made discoveries in the physical sciences that Western Europeans copied. It is one thing claiming that Europeans copied everything from Africans but what Africans did they copy from?  So who were those fantasy Africans that gave the world science?  Where are Africa’s Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Huygens, Tyco Brahe, Newton, Harvey, Boyle, Dalton, Young, Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, Charles Darwin, Boltzmann, Becquerel, Pierre and Marie Curie, Max Plank, Einstein, Rutherford, Bohr, Broglie, Eddington, Pauli, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Friedman, Lemaitre, Hobble, Gamow, Hoyle, Meitner, Fermi, Oppenheimer, Strassman, Hahn, Flaming, Pauline, Watson, Crick, Gell-Mann, Wheeler, Hugh Everett, John Bell, Alan Aspect, Alan Guth; where are Africa’s technological equivalents of James Watt, Alexander Graham, Bell, Thomas Edison, Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and so on.

And while at it what Africans discovered electricity in Africa?  What exactly has Africans demonstrably given to the world in the world of science and technology?  Are trains, cars, airplanes, radio, television, computer, Internet, microwave oven, fridge, air conditioner etc. invented in Africa? What exactly has Africa discovered to make it this land of geniuses of Dr. Ben’s fantasy?

Give me a break, will you. One is not putting Africa down for one knows that Africans are as good as other people but what irks one is Africans deliberately setting out to tell lies about their past. The present Africa is one of human suffering and starvation, misgovernment and everything bad in humanity. Africa needs to become a project for modernization rather than celebrated as light on the hill.

This book is one long make belief story of how everything we accept as important in the world is of African origin. I do not think that it is necessary to take any particular idea from it and examine it closely, for none of them is true.

I am not comfortable with lies. I understand that Dr. Ben’s lies appeal to those Africans who felt devastated by colonialism and racism, who were made to feel inferior by Western civilization and are looking for a way to feel that they as Africans are good, are even superior to white folks. I do not think that a people’s self-esteem should be based on lies.

I am not interested in black supremacy or white supremacy. I am only interested in what benefits all humanity, not what elevates some and denigrates others.

This book is garbage, I am sorry to say that.  Since some African American studies departments apparently have their students read this book I can now understand why graduates of these programs are ill-educated.

Go study the physical sciences and stop massaging data from the past to prove the improvable: that some human beings are better than others and generated all others civilizations. Intelligence is not given to only one group of people; all people are independently intelligent and therefore can generate civilization in their local world. Indians initiated their civilization. Chinese initiated their civilization (we do not have to build on a couple black figures discovered in China to say that Africans are responsible for Chinese civilization).

Europe generated its civilization, influenced by other civilizations, of course; there is such a thing as cultural diffusion; all cultures influence all cultures they come in contact with; but to say that Africa shaped Europe is absurd. This book is a pile of rubbish.

Those who write such trash should undergo psychotherapy to find out why they have obsessive-compulsive desire to present stories that make some people superior to others.

Someone should have compelled Adolf Hitler to see his fellow Viennese, Alfred Adler, for Individual psychological therapy; that would have enabled him to understand his individual psychology, his inordinate sense of inferiority and efforts to compensate with a superiority feeling that put other persons down, and prevented the world from his murderous rampage to make it seem that he and his people are superior to other people. All Human beings are the same and equal.

Dr. Ben would have benefited from a psychotherapy that made him see himself as the  equal and same with all human beings so that he did not run around talking trash about how the black race is the mother of all that is good in other races’ civilizations.

We must learn to appreciate what is good in all people and not elevate one above others. Read Dr. Ben’s book if you must; however, what it is trying to say has been better articulated by more refined writers, such as Cheikh Anta  Diop (African Origin of Civilization) and John G. Jackson (Introduction to African Civilizations).

Ozodi Osuji

July 2, 2012

Dr. Osuji can be reached at 213-807-5944 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Dr. Woodson (1875-1950) is an interesting man; interesting because he was born shortly after slavery ended in the United States and still he managed to give himself a world class education (he was the second black man, after W.E.B Dubois, to obtain a doctorate degree from Harvard University and like Dubois he, too, studied in Europe, Paris, France, and travelled extensively in Africa and other parts of the world). Dr. Woodson was very cosmopolitan from his extensive travels around the world and therefore his observations are urbane and to be taken seriously.

It should be observed that when Dr. Woodson obtained his doctorate black folks were still not considered intelligent enough to be hired by white universities, so, like Dr. Dubois he settled for teaching at secondary schools and later Howard University, Washington DC. Dr. Woodson's experience with the public school system (K through 12) and the black university system gave him unique opportunity to observe how Negroes were educated during his time and the result of that education.

Further, it should be noted that he lived at the time Booker T. Washington and Dr. Dubois were battling it out as to the best way to educate newly freed slaves. Booker agreed with those white folks who believed that Negroes seem to have limited intelligence and are not suited for higher education in the liberal arts and sciences and thus should be trained in the trades (vocational training). Booker built his Tuskegee Institute to train Negroes as carpenters, mechanics, agricultural workers etc.

Dr. Dubois believed that the Negro is as intelligent as anyone else and ought to be given the opportunity to pursue higher education. He observed that like in other races about "ten percent" (his term, not mine, mine is that 33% of all kids ought to go to university and study science and technology, paid for by society) of the people are really very intelligent and naturally meant to be educated at the professional level. The point is that doors should not be closed to the Negro in higher education; offer him the same education that you offer white children and let natural selection determine how far he goes.

Booker would not hear that and insisted that given the racism of white America that whites are not going to hire educated Negros any way so why train them to frustrate them with unemployment, why not give them vocational training with which at least they could obtain jobs?

Many white folks do not feel threatened by black mechanics but feel scared shitless by black professors. Adolf Hitler, in his books, Mein Kampf and Table Talks, had talked about the need to limit black and Slavic Eastern Europeans (white folks, mind you) to only elementary school education, to train them to do minor jobs but never to allow them to go to higher institutions of learning lest they feel the equal of whites and challenge them. As Hitler saw it, just give them sufficient education to read the instructions that their Aryan masters give to them and leave it at that. Booker agreed with Hitler and similar white racists and wanted to accommodate them.

Booker's mother was a recent slave from Africa, an Igbo woman; her slave master had gotten her pregnant hence Booker was a mulatto.

Dr. Woodson saw the debate between Booker T and Dubois play itself out. He appreciated the merits of both sides but steered clear of the debate for that was not where he was meant to make his contribution. The man's was destined to make contribution in other areas, and, boy, did he do so!

I should observe that although I just read this book all that the man said about the mis-education of the Negro is already known to me either through osmosis (that is, absorbed from other Negroes) or through my own direct observation.

Thematically this book dealt with such topics as the outside control of Negro education; that is, the white power establishment decides what is taught at negro schools and who does the teaching, funds what they want to fund and do not fund what they do not perceive as in their self-interests, such as teaching that Negroes had glorious pasts; it is in their self-interests to teach that Africa is the heart of darkness and that nothing good came from it in the past and, as such, nothing good is expected to come from it in the present and future; this is calculated to make the negro feel inferior about his past and to elevate his master to high heavens.

Dr. Woodson would like to change the situation and have Negroes control their education and teach about subjects that made Negroes feel fine about their past history hence their present selves.

Many negroes are at the margins of society and are not gainfully employed; they do not have the requisite skills that the economy needs (today the American economy needs those with technical skills and jobs in those areas go begging yet a large number of Negroes do not have jobs for they do not have the right skills. If you studied black studies, what exactly would you do with it when the economy needs computer programmers and medical doctors? You would teach it? The Negro community has a surfeit of teachers and ministers but isn't it time it had professionals in other areas, areas demanded by a technologically complex society?

The unskilled and unemployed Negro gravitates to criminal activities to make a living and the result is that Negroes constitute over half of the inmates of US jails and prisons. A people who are twelve percent of the population produce over fifty percent of the incarcerated population; something is wrong with this picture.

The few educated Negroes tend to feel estranged from the mass of uneducated Negroes and often flee to white suburbs (where whites tolerate them but do not really see them as their equals). Wouldn't it be nice if they stayed in the black community? You wish, right? But don't the educated of the white race also flee from white trailer trash? Is there any particular justification for those who can afford it to live in the ghettos where the air is more polluted than in the country side hence court earlier death as is the case for Negroes? Should educated Negroes have death wish in the service of the Negro community or should all of them strive to break out of inner city slums and breathe fresh air in the country side?

Professionally educated Negroes are caught between a rock and a hard place; they neither belong to the Negro masses nor to the white community; therefore, many of them are discouraged. They eat and eat and die from heart attack and stroke at an early age whereas their white counterparts live to be over eighty.

The white power structure does not encourage Negroes to learn about the nature of the American polity, read the US constitution for to do so is to know their rights and fight for them and that is not tolerated. As we speak, Republican governors and those state legislatures controlled by Republicans are throwing road blocks to illiterate blacks' path to exercising their citizenship rights: voting; they are making it difficult for African Americans to vote by requiring certain identity cards. Many African Americans do not have the right identity cards saying that they are who they claim to be or live where they claim to live (many of them cannot even open bank accounts because of this identity card issue and have to cash their checks at check cashing joints and those take certain cuts from their checks).

One would think that a Democratic polity would want many people to vote but instead the American Republican democracy discourages Negroes from voting! In the past they used to have such obstacles as poll taxes, reading and literacy tests; they did whatever they felt was not in favor of the Negro to prevent him from voting, such as apportionment (gerrymandering) shenanigans that made sure that negroes were not a majority in any legislative district to be able to elect the legislator; they cut negro neighborhoods and spread the pieces into white districts and that way guaranteed that white folks would win elections. Today there are about forty million Negroes out of a total US population of three hundred and ten million persons. Generally, each Congressional district is about half a million persons. By that standard there ought to be, at least, 80 black Congressmen and, at least, 10 black Senators but in reality there are only 43 black Congressmen and no black Senator.

It is amazing that a country that goes around the world preaching how democracy is the best form of government discourages a large section of its people from participating in democracy.

The book talks about such other things as the Negroes need to produce a service oriented leadership, a leadership with clear vision on how to uplift the down trodden race, the need to produce leaders and workers who serve the negro community and not hirelings doing the bidding of the white race. Other subjects were broached but they all basically say the same thing: train the Negro to respect himself and respect his fellow Negroes and serve the Negro community and ultimately the American nation. I am not going to dwell on all the topics addressed by Dr. Woodson but, instead, will expatiate on topics that I feel are still germane in today's negro-social discourse.

I should also observe that what the man said about the Negro appear to have been addressed by America's responses to the Negro question since the 1960s. It appears that efforts have been made to redress the problems he observed.

The black studies movement that now exist at major American universities appear to have resulted from an effort to address the issues that Dr. Woodson highlighted in the past (his book is actually a series of lectures and articles he gave, collated into a book in 1933).

Alas, the black mission of injecting what is now called afrocentricism into American education to correct its perceived eurocentricism has not appeared to solve the problem of the Negro, for the Negro American and African is still as problematic as ever. Nothing in the black man has changed from how Dr. Woodson described him in the first part of the twentieth century. The black man I see around me today is exactly as Dr. Woodson described him almost a hundred years ago!

Let me tell you how I see the black man; I will do so by citing examples from personal experience. I walk into a store and the cashier is a black woman. She would be extremely unprofessional, disrespectful, sullen and often disregarding of my presence. She would treat the customer as if she does not care that he is there to spend his money on her business. The customer, you feel disrespected and angry and do what you come to do and leave and resolve never to patronize her store again.

Now compare and contrast with what happens with an encounter with a white sales woman. You walk into a store and the cashier is a white woman. She smiles at you; she asks you if you found all that you were looking for and generally treats you respectfully; you feel respected and before you know it you take your business to her store, come next time you want to shop.

You enter a bus and the driver is a black man. He completely ignores you and as far as he is concerned you do not even exist.

Compare and contrast with a white bus driver. You enter a bus and the driver is a white man. The moment you enter the bus he says, come aboard. Howdy? The man generally has a welcoming smile on his face. When you leave he says to you, have a good day, sir.

Now who has provided you with a better service, the sullen black driver who does not seem to understand that the bus rider is employing him or the white driver who makes you feel so good that you park your car and take buses to work?

You go to black universities (such as Howard University) and you see the professors all dressed in suits and look like business executives. You go to their classes and what they teach is deficient. Now go to a white university, especially the top ones, such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Berkeley, and UCLA etc. You see the professors in khaki pants, in simple shirt and generally bent over books, reading, writing and doing research. You see them walking from libraries or laboratories to their classrooms and offices. They engage you in intellectual discussions. In their classrooms you feel that they are true professors (a professor is a person who has learned a subject and dedicates his life to professing it, teaching and writing about it).

Black professors are there to seem very important clowns but not as persons dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge.

You go to a hospital where the doctors are black. They appear in suits and generally see you as a beggar that they are condescending to treat. They are generally third rate and do not know what they are doing (try this after you see one: go get a copy of Physicians' Desk Reference book and read the diagnoses and medications the black doctor gave you; the chances are that one out of two times he misdiagnosed your problem and gave you the wrong medications).

In Africa the medical doctors don't even bother trying to be medical doctors, they do not bother treating their patients; you could be bleeding to death and if you do not have money to bribe Nigerian doctors they would ignore you.

Dr. Woodson observed these sorts of things going on in his world and asked how it came to be that black folks behave as they behave. He attributed it to the miseducation of black folk. Apparently, he believed that the problem is socially caused.

Like many African-Americans, Dr. Woodson tended to believe that black folk's problems were caused by the man, by white folks.

According to this view of things, everything wrong with the Negro is always caused by white men. The unarticulated presupposition of this philosophy is that Negroes are children and are therefore never responsible for their fate; only those presupposed to be adults, hence responsible for their behaviors, white folks are perceived to be responsible for Negroes problems.

In Africa the leaders are mostly criminals stealing from the people and never doing anything to uplift the people. Whose fault is it?

We are told that it is the white man's fault. They tell us that African leaders are merely the neocolonial servants of their white masters. They are the compradors in a neocolonial world; idiots put into offices by their white masters to stabilize their countries and make them easier for white men to come and take the raw material they need to serve their industries, transform them into saleable products and return the manufactured products back to Africa and sell them at exorbitant prices to Africans hence perpetuating Africans poverty.

The metropolis (West) exploits the periphery (Africa). It is always the white man's fault that nothing good comes out of Africa.

It is the white man's fault that British run secondary schools in Nigeria produced graduates who were as good as any boy who went to Eton, Harrow and other elite secondary schools in Britain and such graduates from contemporary Nigerian secondary schools cannot be considered elementary school graduates.

The only British built university in Nigeria, University of Ibadan, used to graduate students who were as good as any college graduate in Britain. Now, Nigerian university graduates cannot be seen as fit graduates from secondary schools.

So, what are the suited black professors doing, are they not supposed to be professors, teachers taking pride in producing well educated students?

In Nigeria the college instructors literally see themselves as there to collect bribes from their students and fuck (pardon my French) their female students for grades. That is correct; what passes as professors in Nigeria are crooks in higher education and the result is the collapsed education system in Nigeria.

Now, whose fault is it? You got it right if you blamed it on the white man. You see, nothing is ever the black man's fault. He is a five year old child and is not responsible for his behavior. Europeans are adults and as such are responsible for black (children) folk's lives. According to this logic, everything wrong with the black man must be blamed on the white man.

This blaming of the white man actually began when Africans, like savages, ran around their neck of the woods capturing their people and marching them across the Sahara desert and selling them to Arabs (which they did from about 700 AD to about 1900 AD), and later selling them to Europeans (from about 1500 to 1900 AD).

For over 1000 years Africans sold their people to Arabs and Europeans and the only explanation they could come up with for this dreadful behavior is that other people (white folks, they don't even blame Arabs to whom they sold more Africans)made them do it. I say shame on them. They ought to feel guilty and remorseful for their ancestors' outrageous behavior. I say that contemporary African states be made to pay reparation to black Americans and black Arabs, say give ten percent of their annual budgets to those they sold (for a specified amount of time, say, 100 years). Africans must make amends for the crime of their ancestors before they can stop thinking that they can just commit crimes, as they now do by transforming their governments into criminal activities, and have no consequences for their behaviors. As long as the world tolerates Africans always blaming other persons for their antisocial behaviors nothing good is going to come out of Africa. Africa will remain a place of suffering; Africans will continue to be those the rest of the world have pity for and give some handouts out of compassion.

(Of course, white folks and Arabs also must be made to pay reparation to those Africans they used as slaves in Europe, America and Arabia.)

Now, whose fault is it that these people sold their own people? If you guessed white folks you got it right. It is not Africans fault that they captured their people and sold them to whomever wanted to buy them, it is the buyers fault.

One would think that since the buyer is white and therefore not identified with blacks that his crime is less heinous than the black seller who ought to identify with his own black people hence not sell them. No, we are given convoluted arguments on how slavery is an economic thing, how the economy of Europe and America need black slaves to work in the fields and Europeans thus stimulated Africans into selling their people, so it is the white man's fault that slavery existed.

Of course, the buyer of slaves, Arabs and whites, were guilty but the point is that Africans are also guilty. But instead of appreciating the role of Africans in selling their people, Africans glibly blame the sordid episode of selling their people to white folk on white folks.

To say that Africans ought to take fifty percent of the blame for slavery (as I insist they must) is to be accused of self-hatred by African idiots masquerading as scholars (those who produce illiterates as university graduates).

Nothing is ever the Africans fault is the trip these people are on. The trip has led to misgoverning in all of Africa.

No African country is properly governed. The reason why Africans house has fallen is, I believe, because Africans do not take responsibility for their behavior; they are always blaming others for their fate.

If they are not blaming white folks, each tribe is blaming other tribes for their fate. In Nigeria, all Nigerians blame whites for the shitty nature of Nigeria; thereafter, each Nigerian tribe blames other tribes for its fate.

Igbos blame Hausas and Yoruba's for their rotten fate. In the meantime their leaders cart the money they ought to have expended developing their people to Western banks. Igbo land is like what you would expect in the tenth century, and no one is trying to modernize it. But whose fault is it? Why, Hausa or Yoruba, of course!

At the individual level Africans do not take responsibility for the outcomes of their behaviors. They are always talking about how God is responsible for their fate (or they blame their failures on other people). Even when Nigerians steal government money to become rich they thank their God, for apparently he enabled them to steal and become rich!

The black man has been trained to project his fault to other people. Until he takes responsibility for his collapsed house he is not going anywhere. I certainly do not expect Nigerian leaders to do anything useful for their people; I expect them to steal and be thieves in government, but do something to improve their people's lives is not part of their job description. President Goodluck (actually, Badluck) Jonathan junkets to all over the world and in five years in office has not done anything to improve any Nigerians life (except the thieving club in government). The man is literally an idiot in office but who is to take responsibility for his do-nothing administration? Why, of course, the white man! Or blame it "on the complexity of governing a multiethnic society"! Excuses, Excuses, Excuse galore that is what you expect from Africans!

These people never learn that every problem is an opportunity to solve it. The multiethnic nature of Nigeria ought to produce unique leaders up to the challenge but instead what we have are whiners and complainers like the man at Aso Rock.

Descriptively, Dr. Woodson delineated what is wrong with the black man accurately. His description of the black man in the early twentieth century is still the black man I see in the early twenty first century! Nothing has changed.

When Dr. Woodson is not attributing the cause of the black man's pathetic situation to the white man he attributes it to self-hatred (which is caused by the white man hence another issue for which to blame the white man).

As he sees it, the white man has trained the Negro to hate his black self and to see everything in Negroes as bad. The Negro is trained to see his people as bad and to see white folks as good. For example, consider that Negroes go to white schools for they believe that black teachers are not good and white teachers are better; Negroes go to white medical doctors for they believe that black medical doctors are no good...these days rich Nigerians go to Europe or North America to treat even their headaches, a negative judgment that their own Nigerian doctors are no good; Negroes give their business to white business but not black business; Nigerians trust German and Italian companies to build their buildings for them for they know that if a Nigerian construction company build them that they would collapse before the damn things are finished being constructed.

Descriptively all these are true. What Dr. Woodson said that the Negro Middle Class does is what I do. I am a black man but I would only go to a black medical doctor if he is the only one in town. Why? Because my experience with black medical doctors and nurses is that they are mediocre and do not care for their clients.

Here is further evidence for my position. In Los Angeles, the only black medical hospital, Martin Luther King Hospital, was threatened with closure by the state because the black doctors and nurses would actually leave the patients brought on stretchers to die there, not treating them. In the Los Angeles area those with money go to UCLA for medical treatment (that hospital is ranked number two in the USA).

If you want your child given good education you send him to UCLA or Harvard but certainly not to Howard where upon graduation he would likely not pass the bar exam on first try (or any professional examination).

Generally, the belief is that if you want something done right for you that even Negroes go to white professionals. Dr. Woodson would say that you did all these because you have been trained to hate yourself, project your self-hatred to your fellow blacks.

Up to a point, Dr. Woodson is correct in his assessment of the behavior of the black middle class (also so described by the black sociologist, Franklyn Frazier in his famous book, the Black Middle Class). However, what would change the situation is not talking about black self-hatred but producing black professionals who are like white and Asian professionals.

People make decisions based on their experiences. I was once in a hospital at Washington DC, and experienced the services of three nurses, each from the three racial groups. During her shift, the black nurse at no time came into my room to check on me (actually, she did once and did not even bother looking at me; I might as well be a log of wood on the bed). The next shift brought in a different nurse, a white nurse. The white nurse came in every thirty minutes to ask me how I am doing, sit by my bed and ask me questions about my family. The third shift brought a Chinese nurse. The Chinese woman, from a technical point of view, provided the most efficient service. The Caucasian nurse provided the most humane service. The black nurse is not a nurse; I do not know what to call her, certainly she does not know what nurse means: a person who cares for those who are sick, a caring person (she was probably working two jobs to make money to buy a Mercedes Benz car so as to impress her fellow blacks of how important a person she is...as Franklyn Frazier pointed out, black folks are hung up on trying to seem very important persons; they literally devote their entire lives to efforts to seem important but not to professionalism).

So, who do you think I would go to next time I am sick, a black medical health professional? People behave in accordance with their self-interest and their experience, not from intellectual masturbation. If it is in my best interest to stay alive I would be motivated to go to medical professionals likely to treat me correctly.

Reasonable persons avoid black professionals (the Washington DC school district produce students who cannot even fill out job application forms and always blame it on poor funding even though they are paid higher than their counterparts in parochial schools). Black folks do shoddy work and blame it on everybody else but themselves. This is terrible and must be corrected. How do you correct it is the real question.

Dr. Woodson seems to think that training black folks to like themselves is part of the answer. Of course black folks must be helped to like themselves.

However, the way folks have gone about trying to obtain self- like in black folks is to attribute all their faults to white folks.

If you took a course from the typical black studies program you would have your ears filled with what white men did to screw black men up. True.

So, what is the solution? What is the solution to the black situation other than just blaming white folks and proving that black folks started the Egyptian civilization and claiming that all black Africans are descendants of Egyptians who went south (as Dr. Diop said in his African Origin of Civilization).

Okay, Africans are descendants of proud Egypt and that ought to make them proud of their heritage but how about now? How come Nigerian leaders are thieves? How do you explain that one, blame it on the man? Is fifty years of self-rule sufficient time to take responsibility and do the right thing by your people?

By the way, don't Nigerians independent of what the white man does, have the capacity to figure out what is right behavior, such as serving other people, and do them instead of always messing up, big time and leaving it to black so-called intellectuals to always try explain away their mess?

God, these people make me throw up; I am sick and tired of always trying to rationalize the black man's stupidity.

Afrocentrists tell us that they know the answer to black folk's problems. They urge us to train black folks to like themselves and their African culture. This is good.

I add that we must also train black folk to become true professionals in their behaviors. Let the black bus driver smile at his clients, let the black cashier be courteous to her clients (not long ago I went to a FedEx store to mail something to my son and the clerk was a twenty something year old black girl; she was as courteous and friendly as any human being could be; first, the moment I approached her counter, she said: good afternoon sir, how may I help you today; all the while with a smile on her face. She proceeded do what I asked for in a manner that made me feel proud to be a member of the black race. If it was not inappropriate I was willing to give to her a tip of a hundred dollars! I drove home in cloud nine, proud that the black race is now beginning to produce professionals rather than the sullen idiots one is used to in dealing with black service providers).

I am saying that you can talk afrocentricism all you want but until you produce black professionals that are as good as white and Asian professionals you are screwing yourself. I would not send my child to a school where Cornel West talks shop but does not produce the type of literature expected of public scholars like him (Louis Gates is okay).

Dr. Woodson delineated what most of us now know as what is wrong with the black man. He tried to change the situation. For example, he believed that one of the reasons black men hate themselves is that white American schools did not teach black history and tell blacks that their people started the great Egyptian civilization, so he helped in initiating the study of black history. The man did his best to correct the awful situation he saw. He is a great Blackman and one takes off ones hat for him.

However, I think that his solutions are just a first step. Clearly, we have to educate the black man to like himself and to be proud of his race. But what happens after race pride is attained is a different matter.

A black man who is proud of his race but cannot perform as well as a Chinese medical doctor or Indian physicist is useless in our global economy.

Actually, I do not think that black folks can develop positive self-esteem by merely seeing their past as glorious and blaming white folks for their issues. There are other factors that lead to positive self-esteem or lack of it (* I had planned this review to be five pages and since it is getting too long, I will elaborate on existential factors affecting black self-esteem in a separate paper).

In sum, Dr. Woodson objectively described the black man as I see him to be. For doing that I thank him. His solutions lie in what folks are now doing in black studies departments. These are useful first steps.

The long term solution to our African, and if truth be said, our human problem for there is only one species, Homo sapiens and we are the same and have similar problems, is science and technology.

We must study science and technology and produce as many Nobel laureates as white folks produce. Damn it, they are not smarter than us.

I recommend this book to you but in all honesty must tell you that it contains mere beginners' effort in the quest to understand the human condition and its variation, the black man's condition. I had a difficult time reading it for it did not tell me anything that I did not already know, and that may be the same for you.

Ozodi Osuji

June 30, 2012

Dr. Osuji can be reached at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (213-807-5944)

The next Review is: Joseph Ben-Jochannan, Africa, Mother of Western Civilization. (Baltimore, MD: Black Classics Press, 1971) 700 pages. He will be followed by Joy Degruy Leary, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome. (Milwaukie, Oregon: Upton Press, 2005)240 Pages. Ultimately, in this series, I will review ten books.

* African-Americans were influenced by powerful sociological factors, such as slavery and racial discrimination and must grapple with those. It is therefore understandable why their approach to phenomena tends to be sociological. Much of what is called black studies is really sociological perspective on phenomena. This gives the products of these programs a specific quality that those who have different perspectives on phenomena find shallow. Carter Woodson's book is sociological in its causal analysis of the Negro problem. His sociological approach is understandable but not comprehensive enough. I would say that his proffered solutions are not going to solve the Negro problem. This is because until we have fully understood a problem we cannot solve it. There is an existential aspect to the genesis of the Negro problem. I, therefore, added as part two of this review an existentialist approach that black folks ought to think a bit about for there are existential reasons why folks do what they do. The second paper occurred to me as I thought about Woodson's sociological analysis. If the reader is interested in existentialism he can contact me for it informs my perspective on phenomena. 

This book is a first person account of the phenomenon called near death experience, NDE. In 2008, Eben Alexander, a Harvard University Neurosurgeon apparently contracted bacterial meningitis (from E. coli) and his brain was severely attacked and he went into coma. He was in coma for seven days and was treated at Lynchburg, Virginia General Hospital.

The book is an account of what he claimed transpired during those seven days when his mind, as he said, checked out of his body and journeyed to heaven. He provided descriptions of the heavenly realms he journeyed to and those descriptions are in sync with similar descriptions offered by those who also claim to have had near death experience (going through a dark environment or tunnel, emerging in a place of light, a very beautiful place where people and things take on radiant quality; interacting with those people and eventually moving on to other realms that we might call the formless kingdom of God).

It is not so much the description of the spiritual realms provided by Dr. Alexander as it is who did the describing. Eben Alexander, MD is a highly trained neuroscientist who understands the intricacies of the human brain and has operated on numerous brains. He is trained in the scientific method and understands that according to science only phenomenon that all of us can observe and verify is considered scientific.

In fact, he showed a level of understanding of science not usually seen in medical doctors (strictly speaking, medical doctors are technicians of the body, not pure scientists, such as physicists, chemists, biologists, astronomers and geologists). He reviewed aspects of quantum physics and seem to know what he is talking about. He talked about Einstein’s Special and General Relativity, Neils Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Emil Schrodinger, Pauli, Paul Dirac, Jean, Born, Broglie and other giants of quantum physics. He grasped the developments in science since 1543 when Copernicus posited that the Sun is the center of our world, and in 1610 when Galileo proved Copernicus’ thesis with his telescopes.  In 1687 Isaac Newton posited his three laws of motion and the law of gravity and gave birth to physics (Greeks such as Democritus had some sort of physics but not as we now understand the subject).

In the eighteenth century we had Lavoisier, Laplace and Boyle (those gave birth to Chemistry); in the nineteenth century we had Dalton, Thomas Young, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, Charles Darwin, Ludwig Boltzmann, and J.J. Thompson. In the twentieth century we had (apart from the already mentioned quantum physicists) Max Planck, Pierre and Maria Curie, Ernest Rutherford, James Chadwick, Lise Meitner, Enrico Fermi, Strassman, Otto Hahn, Pauline, James Watson and Francis Crick, Wheeler, Murray Gell-Mann, Alan Aspect, Alan Goth.

Dr. Alexander understood how science succeeded in marginalizing people, presenting them as insignificant part of the universe, whereas our ancestors used to fancy that they were the center of the universe and, indeed, believed in a God who had nothing better to do with his time but to protect them. Because science has belittled man he is striving to rehabilitate his diminished self-esteem and often grasps on vacuous spirituality to make him seem to have existential value.

Alas, he has no apparent worth for he lives on an insignificant planet, in an ordinary solar system that is placed at the tail end of a spiral galaxy, a galaxy that is one of billions of galaxies. We live on a planet, along with its star that came into being four and half billion years ago, and would in five billion years die with that star. Indeed, the entire universe is scheduled to die a cold death in a few trillion years when its expansion leads to heat loss.

We seem nothing and are apparently looking for something to make us seem to have worth; belief in God seems to serve that purpose for some persons hence folks blindly latch unto talks about spirit and its alleged worth and immortality.

Talk about the spiritual realms generally are subjective; other persons , for example, seem unable to observe what NDE folks claim to have experienced hence many of us see them as sort of like dreams that are associated with death and dying.

Perhaps, as we are about to die certain biophysical and biochemical reactions in our brains provide us with spectacular dreams to bid us Farwell from the material universe?

Simply stated, those trained in scientific reductionism tend to disregard what NDE folks talk about. Perhaps, we are amused by talk of visiting the spiritual world and leave it at that but do not take it seriously.

In the past, mankind deluded itself with loads of spiritual talk that turned out as mere superstition. As far as we know, only the scientific method has enabled us to understand the world we live in and enabled us to devise technologies to control the physical environment hence make our lives pleasant.  Just imagine the world of yesteryears when our ancestors prayed to what they called gods but were killed by assorted bacteria and virus, lived pained and suffering existence and their so-called gods did not help them one bit.

Science has offered us the only help we have so far obtained in this seeming meaningless existence of ours. We are born, live, age, feel pain and then die. What a bummer! But such is the fate of all those living in flesh and there is no need crying over spilled milk. Hold your head high; chin out, march forward and take whatever life throws at you without complaint.

Try to understand physical phenomena, develop technology and make the most of our seeming pointless existence in space, time and matter and hopefully live to age 100 and then die. When you die the body you had enslaved yourself laboring to provide for decays, rots and smells worse than feces (our bodies are made of the various elements, especially Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, CHON, and traces of other elements such as iron, potassium, calcium, magnesium, zinc, copper, etc.). Upon death the elements that hitherto composed ones body decay to particles (such as electrons, protons and neutrons) that they are made of. Particles are made of quarks and quarks are made of photons (radiation) and those are made of (nothingness, the nothingness from which energy and matter emanated during the Big bang 13.7 billion years ago)?

Simply stated, most scientifically educated persons embrace materialism, the philosophy that we came from matter and return to matter. In so far that we have thinking, aka mind and consciousness most scientists seem to believe that it is epiphenomenal; that is, a throw up of the processes of the neurons in our brains. Certain biochemical and biophysical processes in our brains seem to produce consciousness. Consciousness is of the body and when we die dies with our bodies, and that is all there is to us.

All talk of consciousness being outside the human body seems to beg the question since none of us has seen consciousness outside our bodies. If spirits exist let them come and at the same time show themselves to many people. As long as they seem to express their existence only through certain individuals, such as NDE folk, we are prone to suspect that it is such individuals that produce the phenomenon (Kant’s numenon?) that they call spirit?

Dr. Alexander is aware of the arguments against belief in spirit and indeed seemed to have been skeptical about the existence of spirit although he nominally attended an Episcopal (Anglican) Church. But despite his sophistication his experience during his week in coma convinced him that spirits exist and that we live after we die.

He described the after death existence which other writers have provided us (there is no need to rehash them here, if you are not aware of this literature please read Raymond Moody’s writings and personal accounts of out of body experience such as the one provided by Betty Eadie...I wrote a lengthy review of Eadie’s book, Embraced by the light).

Is what Dr. Alexander wrote true or just an unusual dream, a fantasy produced by his brain? Honestly, I don’t know. Until I have had similar experience I am not in a position to state that it is true or false. I have an open mind and in the meantime operate from the perspective of the scientific method.

If heaven is real we shall get to it when we die; in the meantime, I have no need to believe in heaven and its supposed God.

What I have need to accept is love. Dr. Alexander says that heaven is a place of unconditional love.  I hope that he is correct. Be that as it may, I have no need to posit heaven and God before I accept the utility of love.

As I see it, love is the only thing that gives our lives on earth whatever meaning there is in it. We must love each other regardless of whether there is God and life after death or not. If, indeed, heaven is real and is a place of perfect love that is fantastic and welcome news.

Dr. Alexander, as a child was given up by his teenager parents and was adopted by Dr. Alexander, another neurosurgeon. He was apparently loved by his adoptive parents but most of his life felt like an orphan. He searched for his biological parents and after been put off by state authorities eventually connected with them. That seemed to have given him a modicum of satisfaction regarding his biological origin. Nevertheless, he had the psychology of an orphan and tried to create a loving family, apparently, to make up for what was lacking in his life. From his extensive description of his wife, two sons and his immediate relatives it seems that he had a loving circle around him. His family life actually made me envious since I do not have such family experience. I did not know that some people have such close and loving families?

The man still felt like an orphan who was abandoned in this material universe. His journey to the spiritual realm, apparently, gave him a sense of connection to the universe; his existential sense of separation and aloneness was temporarily eliminated and he felt one with all things, unified with the universe and that gave him peace and joy. Lucky him!

The message of his book is that we are all part of the universe and that we are loved by all people and by God.

We are loved by all people and God? This seems like wishful thinking since in the here and now world many of us do not experience the universal love he is talking about.

Dr. Alexander is a white southern gentleman. We all know how loving southern white folks are, don’t we?  These folks are rabid racists who treat black folks like shit, literally.  Therefore, all that love that Dr. Alexander and his alleged God claim to represent does not seem real (it seems make belief, fantasy).

We just went through a presidential election where “Christian” Republicans who call themselves believers in civil rights and civil liberties did everything in their powers to disenfranchise black folks; they made it almost impossible for them to vote; black folks had to stand in line for up to twelve hours to exercise their constitutional right to vote; and they were asked to provide evidence of their American citizenship (they had to produce IDs; many southern blacks were not born in hospitals hence do not have birth certificates, do not have drivers licenses or US passports hence had a difficult time proving their citizenship).

As we talk, these disingenuous Southern white folk are at work trying to redo the electoral college; at present the winner of each state takes the entire state’s electors; but white Republican governors and Republican controlled state legislatures have Gerrymandered  how representatives are apportioned so that they guarantee that mostly white folks are elected to the US Congress, and, more importantly if electors are divided in accordance with the gerrymandered Congressional districts  the presidential candidate that won most votes in a state could end up winning less electors in it. For example, Barack Obama won the popular vote in Virginia, but if electors were apportioned according to the gerrymandered districts he would have had fewer electors than the Mitt Romney he defeated in that state! Thus, despite winning the popular vote Romney would have won more electors (273) than Obama (268) hence became President despite receiving fewer votes!

In the 2012 election Obama won 332 electors and Romney won 206 electors; white southerners want to make sure that a black man never again win the presidency hence plan on rigging future elections via changing how electors are allotted.

Hello Apartheid South Africa, here comes white southerners replicating your system where a minority ruled the majority!

Would America still have the guts to preach to the world that it is democratic? Wouldn’t people see through its hypocrisy and laugh it away?

As the on-white population rise white folks will do desperate things to stay in power. At present whites are 72% of the US populations hence still the majority population but Latinos breed children at an amazing rate, and sneak across the border from Mexico and Latin America and in a few decades would probably surpass the white population. African Americans are 12% of the US population; Asians are about 5% of the US population.

I tell you, these white folks are an interesting bunch. Are they really Christians, if by Christians we mean those who love people?  I often wonder!  My philosophical mentor, Arthur Schopenhauer (World as Will and Idea) in the early 1800s wrote about Southern USA whites, who claimed to be Christians, and claimed to love God and people and yet treated their African slaves worse than most people treat the mosquitoes that suck their blood! That is correct; they maltreated their fellow human beings who did them no harm while talking about God and love!

Get these hypocrites out of my face, would you; they make me conclude with my beloved Schopenhauer that man is a mistake that should not have been made; the universe ought not to have produced human beings; people are a plague unto people; they are eyesore, they blight nature with their evil behaviors.

Dr. Alexander and his God of love did not persuade me one bit. I only see a world of pain, not the loving world he described as part of his earthly family and heavenly home.

Nevertheless, I highly recommend this book; it is easy reading; I read it, today, in less than five hours (and wrote this review of it in an hour). Perhaps, it could help those who need such first person accounts of the reality of heaven to convince themselves that God exists and that there is life after death.  However, if one is a diehard materialist I doubt that the book would sway one towards belief in God.

To me, if God exists the question is: how come he allows too much suffering in this damn world?  Theologians rationalize human evil and suffering by saying that God gave us freedom of choice and we chose what we experience? Great!

Here is a little question for theologians: does a loving father stand by as his children stick their hands into fire knowing that they would be burned? If such a father existed wouldn’t we see him as culpable in his children sustaining burns on their hands?

Give me a break, will you; let us please leave God out of human affairs. I am not interested in being told about a loving God; I am interested in how we can make our lives loving.

If Dr. Alexander’s book helps you to become a loving person, to realize that people live in suffering and you do whatever you can to reduce that suffering your behavior is welcome. Theology without practicing love is a bunch of scholastic rubbish.  Gautama Buddha remains my ideal religious philosopher for he asked people to have compassion for people, not because of God or desire for life after death but because they understand that people suffer and they want to reduce that suffering.

Love and the rest are details; love connects us to each other and to the universe and reduces our sense of alienation from the universe.

Love makes this strange universe our home whereas lovelesness estranges us from the universe. Our true self is love; the rest is noise.

PS: You could read Dr. Osuji’s books such as: (1) What exactly is love, (2) Living from the loving self, (3) the forthcoming monumental work on human nature, The Self versus the Self Concept.

Ozodi Osuji

January 30, 2013

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Ramana Maharshi, Talks with Ramana Maharshi. (Carlsbad California: Inner Directions, 2010) 550 pages

Book Review By Ozodi Osuji

This book is composed of a series of talks given by the Hindu Sage, Ramana Maharishi,  from 1935 to 1939. Those who compiled it say that it contains the essence of Maharishi’s teachings.  The book was originally published in India in 1955 and republished in California in 2010.

Ramana Maharshi was born in 1879 in India (his given name was Venkataraman). From an early age he heard one word voice, Arunachala. This word was repeated on a number of occasions and he did not know what it meant. In the meantime, he went to school but at the age of sixteen experienced intense fear of death and decided to help death out and die. He simulated death, tried to stop breathing, allowed his body to stay motionless, stiff. His goal was to die instead of live with the fear of death. Why live if all you are going to do is be afraid of dying. You either live fully, whatever that means to you, or you die and that is all there is to it. If you are going to live you had better not live in fear of dying, a fear that paralyzes most people. Well, he just laid there welcoming death to come and get him.

In doing so, that is, looking death in the face and not been afraid of it he defied the hold of death on people. He transcended the ego for the ego is that self that lives in fear of death and tells one to do this and that to avert death; the ego tells us to eat food, take medications, wear clothes, live in shelters etc. or else we died. We obey and live in fear of death.

We enslave our lives to doing senseless things in order to get what maintains our ego and body existence (the desire to live in body, by the way, is what gives the dictators of this world the power to control us; if one does not wish to live no tyrant has hold on one’s allegiance; no one can intimidate you into doing something he wants you to do unless you have an irrational desire to live in body at all costs).

Alas, despite all our struggles to live in ego and body, give or take one hundred years and we die. What is the point of the struggle? Now, suppose one accepts death what hold has the ego on one? None!

It was while Ramana was lying down and beckoning death to come get him that he experienced Samadhi, the death of his ego self (ahankara) and the reawakening of the awareness of his real self (atman).  He was liberated (Moksha) from the hold of the ego and its gift of fear to us.

Subsequent to that experience, people noticed that he was a different person. For one thing, he stopped going to school. His siblings began calling him holy man, Sadhu and asked him why he had not taken to the forest and go live there as Hindu Holy men did. Good idea, he thought and left home and kept walking. Several days later he found himself at the foothills of a hill and was told that the hill is called Arunachala, the word he had heard all his life. He decided to make the foothill his home.

Thus, the sixteen year old lived right there, sleeping in a cave in the hill.  He was disinterested in the things of this world and simply stayed there and meditated. He lived in perfect solitude, not talking to people. When hungry, like holy men are supposed to do, he begged for his food, not taking more than he needed at a time and returned to living his cave, silent existence.

Years later, folks discovered him and his unique manner of existence and talked to him and recognized that he spoke as a Hindu sage. Word spread and people from all over India flocked to listen to him talk. Later, people from all over the world, especially Europeans and Americans came and asked him questions.  He still lived in his cave.

Eventually, devotees built an ashram (where a holy man teaches his devotees) at the foothill  and he would be in the hall, sited on a couch, cross legged, in his one and only Dottie (shorts) and towel and answered questions posed to him by his visitors. He lived and slept on that couch and in that hall. However, after 1945 when his health became fragile he allowed his followers to build a hut behind the hall and lived there. He died in 1950 of cancer.

The word is that Ramana Maharshi was the greatest Indian sage (Sri Bhagavan) of the twentieth century. India had Sri Ramakrishna in the nineteenth century and Ramana in the twentieth century.

What did he teach? The book in question is written in questions and answers format. Visitors to his ashram would ask questions and he would answer them. In the process he essentially explicated most of Hinduism. However, the explication is not systematic, not done in a sequential, logical manner.  Indeed, the answers tend to be repetitive and tedious (only the most persistent reader would read this book from the beginning to the end).

The reader who is likely to benefit most from the book is one that has studied Hinduism (or taken classes in comparative religions with Hinduism as one of the religions covered). In formal studies teachers systematically explain what each religion stands for. This is not what took place in these talks. Instead, folks brought their issues to the saint and he gave them answers and the answers are in sync with Hinduism, especially his particular path (jnana Yoga), the path of knowledge and wisdom.

Since the reader may not be familiar with Hinduism let me briefly summarize Hinduism before we proceed.

Hinduism is one of the world’s great religions (the others are Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam). It is probably the oldest religion?  It has been written down, in Sanskrit, for about four thousand years.  The religion began in India.

The Indian subcontinent was originally inhabited by black folks (called Dravidians). Aryans (white folks from Persia, Iran) crossed the Cyndi River (from which Hindi was derived) and, apparently, conjoined their Aryan religion with the religion of the Dravidians they conquered.

The religion began when shepherds, called Rishis, would write poems about God. Those poems are now called Veda.  Subsequently, folks wrote long epic tales about their religion (such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata). Later, intellectuals wrote philosophical treatises on the religion called Upanishads (the Upanishads probably are the most rational explication of the doctrines of a religion known to man; it was the first attempt by people to explain God in pure reason, rather than mythopoeic language). Later still, pure philosophers like Shankara, Ramanuja and so on wrote systematic discourses on Hinduism (writings that Western Christian theology has not equaled).

A brief description of the religion is contained in the Bagavad Gita (which is a section of Mahabharata). In the book, Krishna (supposedly God in human form) talked to Arjuna. Arjuna was a general about to go to war and was bothered by his conscience. He did not want to kill people. Krishna came along as his charioteer and tried to encourage him to go do his duty, to go kill. In the process he explicated Hinduism, especially its teaching that people are eternal and are not born and do not die, that they merely seem to be born and die in bodies, those taking place in a dream hence Arjuna should not be bothered by killing folks for in actual fact he is killing no one.

While in God, people sleep and have dreams. They have many dreams, each dream a life time in body; they have many life times in bodies while all the time remaining as spirit.

Krishna also explicated the various paths to God taught by Hinduism.  Patanjalii wrote a book explaining those paths to God.

According to Hinduism, people are born with different temperaments, or as we would today say, different personalities. Each person’s personality disposes him to prefer a specific path to God. No specific path is better than others but folks must follow the path suited to them (while, of course, also trying the other paths). All paths, all religions are ways that lead to God.

The paths are collectively called Yoga. Yoga is Sanskrit for yoking, reconnecting people back to their source, God (religion is Latin word meaning the same thing, reconnecting to our source).

There are four main yogas: Jnana yoga, Bhakti yoga, Karma Yoga, and Raja yoga (there are also tangential yogas such as Hatha Yoga…flexibility exercises, Ayurveda Yoga…India’s folk medicine).

Jnana yoga is the intellectual path to God (it is also called Vedanta).  It teaches advaita philosophy, non-dualism (that everything is one thing; one thing manifests in seeming diverse things but they are one).The world of multiplicity and separation we see with our eyes is said to be an illusion, not real. What is real is oneness, the unity of all things.  It says that following pure thinking one can recognize that the ground of our being is one. One spirit, one self, called Brahman is all people.  One self, Braham, as it were, has many parts, each part called Atman. Each of us is Atman. The Atman is the same as Brahman. One of the Upanishads says; thou art that. You (your real self) are God.

Bhakta Yoga is for those who are devotional in nature, folks who like to see God as a person and worship him. These people like to see God as a powerful father figure and pray to him and worship him. In worshiping their God (or his surrogate, such as Jesus Christ) they sometimes lose sense of their individuality and become one with him (experience the oneness that the Jnana yogis realized intellectually). According to Hinduism, over 90% of mankind is Bhakti, whereas only 1% is Jnani (intellectuals, wise persons).The path of love of God or Bhakti is suited to people who value love. Christianity is a Bhakti Yoga path to God; here, you love God and love the symbol of his ideal son, Jesus Christ. In loving God and his ideal son you and them become one self (hence self-realization through Bhakta yoga).

Karma yoga is the path of selfless work; it is for doers, businessmen, administrators, those who do not reflect on the nature of reality but engage in action. These are the producers of the world. They work and produce what we live on. They make our existence in body possible by producing our food and other things without which we would not survive physically. In as much as Brahman manifests in all of us and they make it possible for us to live they are serving Brahman, God through their work.  Go ahead and make billions of dollars selling goods and services and you are serving God through whatever you produce and sell; you do not need to go to church and talk about your belief in God to be serving God, you can serve God by serving his children who are one with him.

Raja Yoga is the royal path, the path that leads to God quickest.  This is the path of meditation. Sit down and meditate. This means telling yourself that you are not your body, not your ego. It means negating your entire ego based thinking. Neti, neti, nothing that you can think of is the truth. So, what is the truth, and who are you if you are not the body, ego and your thoughts? You do not know who in fact you are and what anything means. So keep quiet with a mind emptied of all ego conceptions of who you are and what reality is. Let go of your ego personality and its thinking and become a void, a no- ego separated self; remain silent.

In meditation people claim to have escaped from their ego self and the egos world and experienced their real self, the unified self, Brahman and Atman.  In that state there is no you and I, no seer and seen, no subject and object; there is just one self-Brahman who is simultaneously infinite selves.

Hinduism teaches that our real self is Brahman who is at the same time infinite people.  When one experiences that real self (called self-realization) one is said to be enlightened to one’s real self, is illuminated to one’s true self. The person who is realized is characterized by peace and joy; he is now aware that he is not his body and ego and that he lives eternally in spirit.

Buddhism is another name for Raja Yoga (Gautama Buddha, in effect, was a raja yogi…in India his religion, Buddhism, was absorbed by Hinduism as part of its raja yoga, whereas outside India it is known as Buddhism).

Hinduism teaches that there is one self, that self is called Brahman. Brahman is one and simultaneously infinite in numbers. Each of his part is called Atman. Atman and Brahman are one. They are not two people; they are one self, one self that is simultaneously whole and parts.

You are a self, a whole (Brahman) and a part (Atman).There is no space and gap between whole and part, no gap between people. We are all one self, literally. You are all people.

One self, Braham cast Maya on his mind and sleep and in his sleep projected out his infinite selves, atman’s, out and made each of them seem housed in body and living in space, time and matter. Maya made each of them seem to be different from others. Thus, on earth, the great illusion, the universal dream each of us sees himself as different from other people.

The goal of Hinduism is to teach us that whereas we seem different and separated from other people that, in fact, we are one. You are all selves.

You sleep and in dreams project out a world that seems real and populate that world with seeming different people and call yourself Ozodi or whatever your earthly name is. You see space, time and distance between you and other people.

The external world seems real. Hinduism says that the external world is not real, that it is in your mind, in my mind; in our shared one mind (Hinduism is solipsistic).

The various yogas and other Hindu practices are designed to enable you to realize that you are the world. In meditation, for example, you escape from the separated self and experiences unified self and know from that experience (Samadhi, called Nirvana in Buddhism and Satori in Zen) that you are all people. When you do so you are liberated from the ego and its suffering (Moksha). You now live peacefully, lovingly and joyously. You love all people not because you are doing them a favor but because in loving all people you love your whole self (contracted as holy self).  Conversely, if you hate people you hate your holy self and must therefore live in conflict and be unhappy.

Hinduism believes in reincarnation (dreams). We are always in Brahman but while in it sleep and dream many life times in bodies. In each life time, each dream time we do things. Our actions have consequences for us and for other people.

If we love people we build positive samsara. If we hurt other people we build negative samsara. We get reborn on earth to take the consequences of our past actions.

If we were good in past lives we get born in loving circumstances; if we lived hurtful lives in past lives we are born in horrible circumstances  in this life time (Africans, the sellers of their  people, criminals,  come back to suffer in this life time until they learn to love rather than exploit their people).

As Hinduism sees it, we are each at different stages in our evolution on planet earth. Hinduism divided society into four classes: Brahmin, Kastriya, Sudra and Untouchables. Each of us is said to be in the group where his past life’s actions places him.

The Brahmin class is the highest group, they are the priestly class, those who loved and served humanity in past lives.

The next to the priests are the Kastriyas; they are the leaders of society, the soldiers and administrators.

The third class is the Sudra; they are the workers of society.

The untouchables are the lowest social class, they are outcastes. These people supposedly were evil in past lives… Hitler today is probably somewhere living as an outcast in Africa?

Whereas there is some merit to India’s class system it is now abused. The rulers of India categorize people as born into classes and treat them as such. Originally, the castes are not where you are born into but where your behavior places you. Now in India black folks are mostly the untouchables, the outcasts. The conquering light skinned Aryans relegated the dark skinned blacks into the outcasts and thus control them.  This is the bastardization of religion’s good idea.

Hinduism believes that those who love all people and work to serve all people when they die no longer are reborn on earth. They stay in the spiritual world (there are many levels of the spiritual world, including astral world, the world of light forms; there is the formless world of Brahman, Brahmaloca).

Enlightened people may choose to come back to the world and upon birth immediately reject the material world, for they know that it is transitory and ephemeral and focus on what is changeless and permanent, spiritual matters. They are the teachers of God, the avatars like Jesus Christ and Gautama Buddha.

Hinduism classifies people into three mental states; Sativa, Rajas and Tamas. Those with Sativa mind are calm and focused on spiritual matters; those with Rajas mind are the doers, active people; those with Tamas mind are lazy, unproductive and given to corruption (think Nigerians).

Hinduism says that the world of matter is composed of three strands, called three gunas (this is akin to physics notion that the atom has three parts, electrons, protons and neutrons).

Hinduism believes that the universe comes and goes. A universe, called Kalpa/Yuga, comes, lives and dies and another is born. Lord Shiva awakes and a new universe is born and goes to sleep and that universe dies; he awakens to another universe etc. Our current universe is said to be the era of worshipping of God (India has many gods, all representing the different aspects of Brahman, including Vishnu, Shiva, Kali etc.).

Hinduism believes in what it calls the seven chakras, energy centers in the body beginning at the base of the spine, and the top one at the head. Each of the chakras performs certain functions. The first three perform lower functions of adaptation to their world, whereas the upper three perform mental functions; the middle chakra is the heart function (the center of love and connection to other persons).

At the base of the spine is kundalini energy, coiled like a snake; it can be awakened and enables the individual to awaken the chakras. Many ways are employed in the effort to awaken the kundalini energy, including controlled deep breathing (puraka), meditation (raja yoga), repeating an assigned mantra (a name a guru gives to one to repeat to help him quiet and concentrate his mind in Japa, religious practice).

Hinduism posits that we on earth live in ignorance of our real self; our real self is said to be atman (the individual self is jivatman); the goal of Hinduism is for us to remember our real self and live from that awareness.

Actually, we are said to be always in the real self but choose to forget it so as to identify as the ego and body and dream that we are those false self-identities.

The world is an illusion; we are in a dream that we are who we are not. In the dream there is a past, present and future, but in reality there is only the now of God with no past and future.

The goal is to find out who our real self and the real world is. Ramana Mahaishi employs the self-inquiry method to find out “who am I”; am I the ego and body or am I the person who owns the ego and body?  Through asking these questions and ruling out false answers one is supposed to realize ones true self.

Now that we have a bird’s eye view of Hinduism let us see what Ramana Maharshi said? He called his path to God Self-inquiry method. His path, like all Hindu paths, is meant to lead to self-realization. In broad terms he was a jnana yogi, he embraced the path of wisdom and intellect to God (lased with Bhakti yoga every now and then…such as when he prays and sings to his God).

Ramana Maharshi asked people to find out who their real self is. So, who is your real self? Are you the self that you currently know yourself as, the ego self-housed in body? If that is all you are then you will die and that would be the end of you.

We know that your body is composed or nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon and oxygen and traces of other elements. Your body is a composed thing. All composed things must be decomposed. Whether you like it or not your body will die. Give or take, a hundred years and your pretty body, the body you slave for, that you work like a slave to earn a living to maintain it would die and decompose, and smell like feces. The atoms that compose your body would decompose.

The elements that are now your body would decay to their parts (electrons, neutrons and protons). Those particles would in time decay to quarks and then to photons (light particles). Light energy would ultimately decay to wherever it came from during the Big Bang that 13.7 billion years ago produced the universe of matter, space and time.

If all you are is your body then you are nothing since your body came from nothing and returns to nothing.

If, as science teaches us, your ego mind is epiphenomenal, that is, is produced by your body, brain, and when your body dies your ego mind dies and you end.

Is that who you are or do you have a different self, a self that does not live in body, does not die and disappear into nothingness?  Ramana says that we have a different self, one that is changeless, eternal and permanent.

Ramana tells us to go find out who is our real self. Through his questions and answers method he tells us that there is another self in us, the self, the I that asks the question who am I? This is called the I-I method of inquiry.

One I, the Brahman in us ask the question: who am I? The other I, the ego self obviously is temporary and Ramana believes that it is not who we are. He wants a person to go beyond the illusory self, the false self, the ego self and find out that his real self is the atman who is one with the Brahman.

Like all good teachers Ramana Maharshi used homespun metaphors to drive his point home.  For example, he liked to use what he calls the three states of being to make his point: the waking state, the sleeping state and the dreaming state.

In deep sleep we do not know that we have a self. In waking state we have awareness of the ego self. In dreaming state we also have the awareness of the ego separated self.  He says that both the waking state (our day self) and the dreaming self is of the ego.

The ego and its world are false; one self-dreams at night and one self-dreams in the day time. We have no awareness of our self when we are in deep sleep (dreamless sleep).

Did our self-die when we are not aware of it in deep sleep? Ramana says no. it returns to Brahman and other worlds, and when we are in those worlds we are not aware of our world. In effect, when you sleep and is not dreaming you could be in unified spirit, God, or the light world and since the categories of those worlds are different from those of our world when you awaken you cannot remember them.

This is an intriguing idea although if you are skeptical Ramana did not make a persuasive argument that convinces you that we exist in a different state in sleep. Pure reason tells me that in deep sleep I do not understand where the I in me am. To tell me that it is in God is Hinduism’s idea that I do not know is true or not.

We wish to have an eternal self and could delude ourselves into taking our wish as reality. Let us then say that if one is an agnostic one would not be convinced that one is eternal and that God exists by Ramana’s efforts.

Ramana presented just about every argument that Hindu thinkers have ever presented that convinces them that God exists. However, he would not persuade a materialist, an atheistic scientist that what he is saying is anything but wishful thinking.

If God exists, for example, and Ramana is a God realized person, as he claimed to be, and God is powerful, how come he had cancer and died of it; how come he could not use his god’s powerful mind to heal his body or prevent it from having cancer? You could come up with other reasons to disagree with his thesis but the problem is that we do not know that in fact there is another self that transcends body and ego.

Perhaps another self exists and only those who have experienced it know that it exists? If that is the case one has to take the word of those who claim to have experienced it that it exists, or solder on until one experience it or dismiss the idea as bunkum.

If one chooses to base ones belief on mere word of mouth report by those who claim to have experienced something one runs the risk of being deceived; humanity has been deceived by loads of charlatans claiming god experience they have not had. If one chooses to predicate ones belief in God on others feedback, not on one’s conviction, well, one lays one’s self open to be deceived by quacks who claim to speak for God (speak from psychosis, may be?).

Ramana Maharshi’s talks did not provide scientific proof for what he teaches. For example, he says that the world is our thoughts projected out, that the external world we see is a mirror reflecting what we are thinking, what is in our minds. Is this true or just a baseless assertion? The world I see does not seem to reflect my thinking. I wish that only love and peace exist in the world but I see a world at war with itself. If you say that a deeper part of me, the ego unconscious mind in me, wishes for war when it separated from God and other persons you merely made an assertion that I cannot verify as in me. It is not for you to tell me what is in my mind if I do not see it there. It is like Sigmund Freud and his bunch of Vienna sex perverts telling us that our unconscious minds are ridden with polymorphously perverse sexual desires and some of us told them that we do not see their claims in us and they told us to just accept them as there in us. Accept them because the god called Freud spoke and what he says must be accepted on authority. Human beings can deceive themselves no end. Only what I can verify as true is acceptable to me, not what so-called credible persons say is true.

For millennia Indians sought ways to negate this world and escape to another world, a blissful world. They did not focus on the material world of the here and now and seek science to understand it and technology to master it, as the West did. They ignored the realities of this world; they denied the existence of the outside world by telling themselves that the external world is not real and that it is in their minds.  The result of this escape from earthly reality is the abject poverty Indians lived in.

Indians, who are probably the most intelligent human beings on earth, ended up been backward Vis a Vis the West.  Therefore, Ramana Maharshi may be doing his people and those who embrace his solipsistic and idealistic philosophy a disservice; he may be encouraging folk to ignore paying attention to the external world that they live in; in effect, he might stymie science and technology, the best means for understanding and mastering our world. Religion’s hocus pocus does not understand and master this world.

There is a universe of space, time and matter out there and our business is to understand it as objectively as is possible, regardless of whether it is real or not. The last time I checked, if I want to travel from Los Angeles to New York, a distance of about three thousand miles, I have to fly in an airplane. I do not teleport myself from one city to the other, as religion’s mumbo jumbo would suggest that my mind is capable of doing. Until religion goes beyond positing merely interesting ideas about the nature of reality, proves its ideas as real, science and technology is mankind’s best way of understanding and coping with the exigencies of this world.

I see science as the best way to understand our physical world hence we must study physics, chemistry and biology. I see technology as the best way to make the most of our world hence we must engage in it. Religions talk consoling talk but do not really walk their talk; they do not deliver when it is needed, such as heal people’s physical sicknesses and provide food for them to subsist on.

However, that does not mean that God and the real self does not exist.it means that science and religion are two different views of reality and that they should not be mixed. If one can compartmentalize the two approaches to living and not mix them, do physics, science and also do metaphysics, meta- science that is fine.

From reading this book, I learned a lot of new Indian words; however, those did not help me experience Samadhi.   Until one experiences the oneness that Ramana Maharshi talked about one must remain quiet and nevertheless say with Polonius to his son Horatio (in Shakespeare’s Hamlet)that: there are many things in heaven and earth that are not known in our science (philosophy).

I recommend this book. Read and understand it for it helps you understand the Hindu view of reality (the East sees the world as inside us, as a projection of our thinking). Compare it to the western view of reality (the West sees the world as outside us and that we must study and understand it; this is scientism, aka materialism). Then decide for you what is reality.

You should not take refuge in what other people told you are the nature of reality; it is only what you yourself say is the nature of reality that matters to you and your behavior.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

December 22, 2012

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 Will Durant, The Story Of Philosophy. (New York: Simon And Schuster, 1926) 412 Pages. 

Book Review By Ozodi Thomas Osuji 

Western philosophy began at Athens, Greece. So, to Greece we go. Something happened in the little Greek city states between 600-300 BC to lead Greeks to produce thoughts that the entire world has not seen produced in a corner of it, again. As if they drank some sort of wine that led to philosophic thinking, Greeks thought about everything in their world.  Whereas in other parts of the world folks conformed to the religions of their people, individual Athenians questioned everything and sought to understand reality as it is, not as their culture or other people told them it is.

So, what is reality? What is the truth (Pontus Pilate asked the religious Jews asking him to crucify Jesus)?

Nobody knows what the truth is (religion gives people assumptions of the truth and folks go through their lives living with the unproven assumptions given to them by their religions and cultures).

Greek thinkers began from agnosticism and skepticism and then studied their world to see if they could figure out what the truth of things is.

Different individuals posited their views on reality. Democritus and others hypothesized that matter could be broken down into parts that could no longer be subdivided, and called that part atom. Democritus, Archimedes, Pythagoras etc. and their ideas gave rise to what we now call physics (the physical sciences).

(The Catholic Church’s interregnum that began with the fall of the Roman Empire in 450 AD banished physics and sentenced Europe to a thousand years of darkness until John Dalton rediscovered the idea of the atom in 1800.  In 1911, Ernest Rutherford showed that not even the atom is the smallest part of matter; Rutherford discovered the nucleus, proton of the atom. In 1932 James Chadwick discovered the neutron of the atom; J.J Thompson discovered the electron in 1897. Today the atom is seen as having a nucleus with protons and neutrons in it and electrons circling it; there are other sub-particles of the atom.)

The sophists went around debating with themselves and whoever wanted to debate with them as to the nature of reality. Socrates was the king of the sophists and insisted on people clarifying their terms. If, for example, you said that there is no justice in society he would ask you to tell him what justice means. An argument would ensue on the meaning of justice. Days, weeks, months and even years later it would become clear that the person talking about justice does not have clarity in his mind as to the meaning of justice.

What is justice? Is your opinion of what justice is the nature of justice, if so what is it? Is justice of God? What is God, does God exist, and have you proved that God exists?  How do you know that God exists, and if not how can you talk of the justice of God?

Your wish that God exists is exactly that, your wish? You do not have proof that God exists. If all you have is faith that there is a force called God then are you willing to accept that other people have faith in different conceptions of God and if so why should folks fight over God if God is their ideas and not self-evident reality?

Many schools went about teaching their ideas of what life is. Zeno propounded his stoicism. He said that we do not know what life is all about, that there is no knowing that life has meaning or not or that it was created by God. What matters is how one lives one’s life. You do not have control over what is happening in the world, what matters is how you respond to them. You can allow yourself to be disturbed by events that you do not have control over or be equanimous towards them.

Seneca, Cicero, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius (Roman stoics) said that one’s anger or depression or fear (ones emotional state, cheerful or sad) is a function of how one thinks about the events of this world but not caused by the events of this world. You can choose to see things differently. It is all up to you how you react to what happens to you; you do not have one set way that you must respond in.

Epicurus taught that given the pointlessness of living that the best lived life is one that enjoyed it. Horace said carpe diem, make the most of today, for you do not know what is going to happen to you tomorrow; you might be dead tomorrow. Have fun today and that is all there is to life. There is no point in depressing yourself about life, just make the most of it and leave it at that.

Epicureanism is often mistaken to mean indulging in hedonic life style; no, it does not mean eating too much food. One can find joy in intellectual pursuits and doing so is ones idea of living the good life.

Then there were the cynics and skeptics. Whatever you say from a positive perspective can be seen from a negative, pessimistic perspective. Life is good, right?   Didn’t the volcano of Vesuvius erupt and bury the whole city of Pompeii and charred people to death?  How then is life good? God loves his children, right?  God so loves his children that he gives them diseases, suffering and death! The cynic does not believe in anything; moreover, he is a killjoy. (That would suggest that joy is generally predicated on ignorance of the nature of reality. But then one may ask: what is reality, anyway?)

Good and bad are our opinions but not the verdict of nature, right? Is nature impersonal and does not give a damn about human affairs? How do you know that whatever your response is is the correct assessment of nature (and nature’s God, if there is one)?

Simply stated, many schools of thought were in Athens and each attracted followers. In this mix came Plato. Plato was a disciple of Socrates but when Socrates was judged a corrupter of youth (teaching them not to believe in God), imprisoned and forced to drink the hemlock and die Plato continued Socrates teaching. He employed the Socratic Method; his books were dialogues supposedly between prominent members of the Athenian society. These gentlemen would gather and talk about issues, such as justice, politics, ideal society, God etc.  Plato wrote on many subjects but he is famous for his idealism (explicated grandly in the Republic).

Plato’s idealism consists of his belief that what exists imperfectly in our world have perfect archetypes of them in the world of ideas (if you like, spiritual world). There are ideal things that we do not see; we are corruptions of those ideals. There are ideal human beings and ideal animals etc. and we are imperfect renditions of them.  (Are there ideals or are ideals wished for perfect state of being?)

In his politics Plato sketched how to govern an ideal society. He said that all children from about the age of ten should be offered compulsory education (mostly physical education) for ten years. At age twenty they are given examinations and a few pass and the rest are weeded out (and made to become farmers and laborers etc.).  The few that passed the examination are given further ten years of instruction on the nature of things. At age thirty there is another weeding out examination. Those that make it are thereafter taught philosophy. At age thirty five they are examined and thereafter told to go put what they learned into practice, to live in the world.  At age fifty those who have succeeded are gathered together to rule society as its guardians, the philosopher kings.

The philosopher kings are to live communal life, share things, including wives and generally not have private property. Their function is to do what is good for society. 

Plato was an idealist. He wanted to change people, change society and its institutions and bring about what seemed to him ideal society. His Republic delineated how he planned to go about getting guardians, philosopher kings’ rule his utopia. He was a little, timid man with a wish to change himself, change other people and change social institutions, all by his self. This showed that he had wish for power to recreate the world. He was teetering on delusion disorder, grandiose type. He was a dangerous lunatic.

His wish to replace god and recreate people and make them what he wanted them to be led him to justify infanticide. He wanted to be more powerful than God and all people hence he was living in fantasy land.

Plato, like Socrates ran afoul of the leaders of Athens; they imprisoned him and gave him the choice of exile or drinking the hemlock and he chose to go to exile. He was not going to allow Athens to kill another philosopher.

He went to Syracuse, Sicily (now part of Italy but then one of Greek outposts in the Mediterranean). He was welcomed by the king of Sicily, Dionysius. The king told him to implement his ideal republic.

What do you know? The unrealistic philosopher wanted to do away with the king and initiate his ideal pattern of governing society by philosopher kings. Plato had no clue about human egoism and desire for power. The king arrested and sold him into slavery!

His friends rescued him but thereafter he died, a broken man.  These timid men who are dreamers and want to transform the world into their dreams always come to tragic ends. 

Barbarians living two hundred miles to the north of Athens, Macedonians were rising to power. Their king, Philip eventually conquered Athens. His son, Alexander caught the conquering bug and embarked on conquering the known world. By the time he was done he had conquered Egypt, Judea, Mesopotamia (Iraq), Syria, Persia and India.

Alexander the great spread Greek culture to the areas he conquered just as Napoleon spread the French culture of reason and enlightenment to the parts of Europe he conquered.  Alexander drank himself to death at age thirty.

Aristotle was Alexander’s teacher. Apparently, with financial support from Alexander he established his school, Lyceum in Athens (to compete with Plato’s school, the academy). Unlike Plato Aristotle was a scientist of sorts. He gathered specimens of all animals, fauna and things around him and categorized them.  He tried to study things as they are, not as he wanted them to be, hence sowed the germ of the scientific method in the Western world.

Alas, he had strong opinions of what things are and propounded those without basing his conclusions on pure observations alone, as scientists do.  He proffered interesting but weird views of phenomena, most of them false.

Yet his ideas ruled the West for the next two thousand years and, more or less, retarded the growth of science (because he was deemed the authority on most issues and scholars referred to what he supposedly said to give their views credibility).

Democritus was on the right path to science but Aristotle attacked him for saying that atoms exist in a void. As he sees it void cannot exist.

Aristotle established syllogistic logical process. Even here he was wrong. Consider: 

All animals have four legs. (Major premise)

A dog has four legs (Minor premise)

Therefore, a dog is an animal (logical conclusion). 

This is the logic taught by Aristotle. The problem is that the major premise is assumed and not self-evident.  Are all animals four legged?  There are two legged animals, and animals with hundreds of legs (millipedes).  As long as one assumes the truth of the major premise the minor premise and conclusion follow as logical.  The point is that Aristotle did not help us understand the truth by positing his logical processes but merely showed us how we think. We tend to posit major premises, assume them to be true and then draw inferences from them.  For example, we say, God created people. Therefore people are the children of God, not the creator of God.  We say God is love and people are the children of God, therefore, people must love like their father, God. How do we know that that is true; how do we know that God is love, that we are his children hence are like him, loving? We have made many assumptions but given our major assumption our deductions are logical.

Aristotle’s famous statement that God is the unmoved mover is one of the instances in which he assumes a major premise to be true. He reasoned that all things are in motion. We can go on showing how one thing moved another and go as back as we could. If this logic is true then it is possible that there is infinite causation of motion. But that would not do, for it would lead to infinite regress so Aristotle suddenly ended the discourse by saying that there must be a beginning to the chain of causation and that beginning is God. God is the unmoved mover.

The assertion that God is the first cause is, of course, nonsense for it assumes that there is an unmoved mover.

When the Catholic Church embraced Aristotelian logic it used it to justify the existence of God. Thomas Aquinas, in the 1200s essentially posited a God that got everything in motion.  This is an assumption but an assumption that as we speak colors extant Catholic, Christian theology.

Aristotle had interesting ideas on politics. Essentially he believed that there are different types of people and that each person is suited for certain professions. There are those suited by nature and training to rule society (aristocrats) and there are those fitted by their nature to be in the military or trading, businessmen, or bureaucracy, or work as slaves. Slaves and women are not fitted to rule society.

Both Aristotle and Plato embraced aristocracy, as opposed to mob rule, democracy, or the rule of one man, monarchy or the rule of a few persons, oligarchy or the rule of the rich, plutocracy. They gave their reasons for their choice. We shall not concern ourselves with their complex and convoluted reasoning.  Our society’s choice is democracy, properly put, aristocratic democracy, and a society where all are given equal opportunity, and competition is allowed to select folks for whatever goods society gives people. 

Aristotle’s philosophy influenced the West and made the West stagnant until Francis Bacon (born 1561) came along and insisted that philosophy can be a forum for useless speculations and that what we need to do is base knowledge on empirical observation.

What is the truth? We do not know. The aspect of the truth that we can say something for sure is that aspect of it that we can observe, and experiment on and verify. Bacon established the philosophy of science in the West.

Copernicus was the first modern scientist when in 1543 he insisted that the sun is the center of the universe (he was wrong; the sun is the center of the solar system). Galileo in 1610 became the first empirical scientist when he actually used the telescope to prove that the planets revolve around the Sun. In 1687 Isaac Newton established his three laws of motion and gravity and established physics as a scientific discipline.

England embraced the scientific method and thus we had such hardnosed realists as Thomas Hobbes (men are atoms, they are individuals pursuing their self-interests, Leviathan), John Locke (there is no evidence of the notion that we are born with souls; we are born tabla-raza and experience write in our brains what we now have), David Hume (there is no proof that God exists, only experience is real), George Berkeley (tried to prove that God exists by saying that since scientist say the external world is known to us as ideas in our minds, therefore the world is ideas  in our minds and since we do not know everything, there must be a larger mind, God’s mind that everything is in it), Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill (utilitarianism, that laws should reflect what gives pleasure to the greatest number  of people in society, that is, laws are not what God say that they are but what is good for us). 

Let us shift gears a bit and focus on French philosophers such as Rene Descartes, Blasé Pascal, Voltaire, Jean Jacque Rousseau, and Denis Diderot (and thereafter shift to Spinoza and German idealistic philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and end by focusing on Herbert Spencer, Henri Bergson, William James, John Dewey and Bertrand Russell).

Rene Descartes studied mathematics (geometry) and philosophy. He brought his analytic geometry to bear on philosophy but his greatest contribution was in metaphysics, the issue of matter and spirit. Does God exists or does God not exist?  Descartes began from what he called skepticism, doubting all known ideas on everything. Having done so he proceeded to say that the only thing that he knows for sure is that he thinks that he exists (cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am).

Of course this is not persuasive for just because a person thinks does not prove that he exists, does not prove that God exist or that there is a part of him that exists as part of God. Contemporary neuroscience teaches us that thinking is epiphenomenal, is a product of the dance of neurons in our brains. Contemporary brain science teaches that thinking is strictly biological.

We do not see dead people thinking; what is empirical is that some life biological animals, human beings do think and to say anything beyond that is speculative.

Descartes tells us that human beings have two sides to them, their bodies and their souls. Their body he concedes is like any other material in the universe and is affected by the laws of motion (mechanics). The human body obeys the laws of motion and gravity (and, as we would today say, the laws of heat, light, electricity, sound, gases, liquids, solids).The human body is composed of matter and particles and obeys all the laws of matter, space and time.

The question is whether all we are are our bodies. Descartes thinks that there are spiritual parts of us hence his famous dualistic philosophy: man is composed of matter and spirit.

But where is this spirit that Descartes talked about? How do we know that spirit exists?  We do not have objective evidence that spirit exists. Of course, there are poetic writings on the nature of spirit but no one has demonstrated that those are anything but wishful thinking.

Descartes made seminal contribution to analytic geometry. However, his metaphysics is mere restatement of popular superstition: human beings believe that they are made of mind and matter, spirit and body. We know about the body part but have no idea about the spirit part and on that we leave the French man to console himself with his philosophy (Boethius). 

The English made hay of the idea that mind is determined by matter. David Hume showed that all we know is derived from our five senses. Our memory stores what our senses send to it. The senses of touching, feeling, seeing, smelling, and hearing are the only demonstrable source of information available to us. Claims that there are other ways of knowing are exactly those, claims.

Hume further talked about the nature of inductive and deductive reasoning, logic but those are not our present concern. What is salient in the great racists view (he believed that Africans are incapable of thinking or civilization) is his contention that experience is how we get to know what we think that we know.

John Locke reinforced that materialistic epistemology by showing that we are not born with memory of anything already in our minds. We do not remember anything before we are born; we remember only what, subsequent to our births, the five senses store in our memories.  In effect, we are mind and body made of matter, and the philosophy of materialism is the only real philosophy there is. Religion’s conception of God and life after we die is mere wishful thinking that has no bases in reality.

George Berkeley the Irish bishop tried very hard to demonstrate the existence of God through his solipsistic philosophy. If a tree fell and there is no human being to hear its sound or witness its fall did a tree fall? In other words, does the external world exist apart from us or does it exist in our minds?

We can have fun talking about metaphysics, epistemology and ontology, beauty and ethics but the fact is that we seem to live in a world that encompasses us.

Upon hearing about Berkeley’s philosophy, Dr. Johnson reportedly (to his side kick, Boswell) stomped his feet on a rock and felt pain and said that the world must be external to him for it caused his body pain (dream stones also cause our dream bodies pain, so Dr. Johnson may not have won his argument that the world is outside us).

If you walk into a wall you would bump your head and sustain bruises and feel pain. If you jump out of your upstairs window you would break your bones. If you want to get from point A to B in the world of space, time and matter you must travel (motion). Thus, in the here and now world the world is outside us; the world determines our activities. Materialism seems to be the reality of this world. (But is this true? John Bell’s theorem shows that entangled particles do communicate non-locally, that regardless of where they are in the universe they seem to know what others are doing and respond when one responds; that is to say that space, time and matter may be an illusion that seems to exist but in fact do not exist?  Perhaps, the sense of union and oneness of all things that Berkeley and mystics talk about is after all true? We are not here dealing with quantum mechanics and will not pursue that subject.) 

François Marie Arouet, aka Voltaire was a poet and skeptic. He was not an atheist but liked to make fun of theists’ conceptions of God. In his most famous novel, Candide, he wondered what kind of god allows earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, draughts, diseases etc. to destroy his creation.

It is said that the children of God chose to separate from God and have free will. Okay. Does this mean that a loving God should then ignore his separated children’s suffering?  What earthly father bases his relationship with his children on their past mistake, separation, and on their alleged freedom to do as they choose and suffer the consequences of their choices?

Do we in fact have freedom? If you have freedom can you choose not to die, do you even know when you will die?

You see your child put his hands in fire and you know that he will be burned and you ignore him and let him get burned?  It does not seem that God who supposedly loves practices the type of love we have on earth.

On the other hand, it is difficult to say that there is no God for how did matter write Shakespeare’s plays?

The French laughing philosopher made the best of this world without accepting religionists’ delusions about the nature of God.

Voltaire emphasized reason in what people do. Never mind whether God exists or not, just do what pure reason tells you is right. With pure reason we can solve our earthly problems. This is Voltaire’s humanist credo; we do not need the auspices of God to help us adapt to the exigencies of our world.

Blasé Pascal made contributions to mathematics and science but had mystical experiences that told him that God exist and that he and that God share one self and are one (in mystical union there is no space and separation between people and their creator, no you and I, no subject and object, no seer and seen; all share oneself and one mind). In his Pensees Pascal waxed eloquent about how we are all part of one unified spirit. Not all of us have had mystical experience hence can corroborate and verify Pascal’s subjective experience based ideas on God. 

Denis Diderot was an atheist and could do without what Laplace called the god hypothesis. What is salient is reason so let us use reason to solve our problems (the philosophy of secular humanism).

Diderot and Voltaire and others wrote the French encyclopedia; in it they tried to capture all known objective knowledge, not religious razzmatazz, in one book. 

Jean Jacque Rousseau rebelled against the enlightened philosophers over emphasis on pure reason, and recommendation that we should make decisions based on reason. As he sees it, we really do not make decisions based on our heads, reason but on our hearts, feelings.  When we make important choices we do not do so because of rational discourse but because of feeling. When you sacrifice for your children you do so for the reasons of the heart not your head.

Rousseau wanted to return to the world of feelings. He stimulated Romanticism, the emphasis on feelings rather than reason. He wanted to return to the alleged simpler world of our primitive forefathers that did not emphasize reason. As he sees it, the noble savages of North America lived happier lives than the civilized people of Parisian salons.

Unfortunately for the nostalgic Rousseau, his supposed noble Indians were actually busy hunting each other down, and scalping each other’s heads!  In his Novel, Emile Rousseau waxed sentimental but the realistic reader dismisses him as a child yearning for a return to a world where his mother took care of him. In the adult world there is no protector father figure.

In his book, social contract he talked about how men are born free but everywhere are on chains. Civilization is chaining people. Despite this sentimentalism, Rousseau did manage to talk about government been contractual, that we set it up to serve our good.

(When was this social contract, covenant actually enacted? There is no evidence that people sat down and negotiated to have governments; governments evolved as people tried to govern their affairs; the contractual theorists of government such as Rousseau, Hobbes and Locke were making a lot of assumptions but let us forgive them for we know what they are trying to accomplish: emphasize that governments exist to serve the people.)

In as much as the king was not elected by the people he ruled illegally. Rousseau’s pen stimulated the French revolution by delegitimizing the rule of unelected monarchs; claiming to rule the people by divine right of kings sounds hollow to those who do not believe in divinity. A legitimate ruler is one elected by the people and who represents their aspirations, will; we are talking about democratic government as the only legitimate form of government.

Of course there are other forms of government, such as oligarchy, aristocracy, monarchy, plutocracy, fascism and socialism but let us not pretend that they are legitimate governments elected by the people to serve the peoples interests. 

In Germany Leibnitz (and Goethe) joined the Romantic Movement and wrote holy nonsense about God and his parts. God projects himself into monads and each of these monads is in each of us as our souls, our real selves. Let us not go there; we have no time to indulge in philosophic abstractions here.

What Leibnitz did manage to do that is useful is invent calculus (independent of Isaac newton doing the same in England). 

Spinoza was born in Amsterdam (of Jewish parents who were driven out of Spain after the re-conquest of Spain from the Arabs in 1492). Jews living in reconquered Spain were told to choose between converting to Christianity and leaving the country. Spinoza’s Jewish parents left Spain and sought refuge in Holland. They prospered in their new country.

Spinoza received the best education in his synagogue but at some point his study of geometry and English materialists (such as Hobbes and Locke) convinced him that the biblical tale of God creating this world could not be true.  He made his views known and the Jewish synagogue fearing alienating their Christian neighbors asked him to recant his views and he refused and he was excommunicated from Judaism.

He thereafter committed his short life to philosophy. He made his living by polishing glasses.   Spinoza did not write many books. His primary work is his Ethics, and it was published posthumously. Essentially, he seems to be saying that there is what we might call spiritual and material substances at work in the universe and that the two of them are not separated but are the manifestations of one force.

One substance, let us call it god, acts as human thinking and also acts as the human body.  Body and mind are two manifestations of the same force.  This philosophy is often called pantheism.

This philosophy is not persuasive. Spinoza made his greatest contribution in ethics, our public behavior. Since we are all the manifestations of one force, loving all people loves our whole selves, Spinoza said. Virtue is not something done to please other people but that which is its own reward. You and other people are oneself so in loving and caring for other people you love your whole self. A world where we love our whole self, our individual and other selves is a peaceful and joyous world.

This is good metaphysics but it has not proved the unity of all things for we certainly see space and time between us. I do not know for sure that you and I are joined, unified but if talking about our eternal union in spirit makes us love our selves, such talk is happy fiction in my ears. 

We have talked about materialism, science, reason and romanticism in Western intellectual tradition; now, let us take a peek at our German friends and see how they reacted to all these movements in Western intellectual life.

Immanuel Kant (of Scottish parents who migrated to Germany) set out to prove that materialism, especially Locke and Hume are wrong.  His efforts are aimed at showing that God exists and that soul exists. He tried to build his argument on Newtonian physics and Kepler’s astronomy. He borrowed heavily from Newton’s mechanics but what he ended up saying is that matter seems incapable of moving itself and that there must be a force that moves it.

Think of your body. Something in you makes your hand to move and Kant would like us to believe that it is soul, spirit (Noumenon) that made your hand (phenomenon, matter) move.

We now know something about electro-magnetism and the behavior of atoms in the nervous system…fire, heat can make your hand withdraw itself without your mind telling it to do so.

Kant‘s philosophy was magnificent abstraction that to his mind proved that pure reason has its limitations (hence critique of pure reason). He talked about what he called apriori and posteriori ideas. Mathematics, for example, he thinks exists independent of matter. Two plus two is four and this seems to be an abstract reality (apriori) and exists regardless of the existence of matter (phenomena).

There is a part of knowledge (posteriori) that is a result of our experience. What Kant is really saying is that there is knowledge that is outside experience and matter and he associates that knowledge with God.  In his view he had dealt a blow to materialism.

But has he?  I would like to argue with Kant but that is not my goal here.  Let us just say that he did not persuade me or any materialist that pure reason is not all we have going for us.

At any rate, despite his labors to prove that God exists, in his old age Kant became insane and suffered Alzheimer’s diseases. The God he struggled mightily to prove exists did not come to his rescue. So, does his God exist?

If one may ask: why is it that men are always making arguments for the existence of God? Why not let god make arguments for his existence? And since he does not show us that he exists he does not exist.

You cannot prove to those who do not know that God exists that he exists by citing your subjective experience of him. It is only if God can appear to all of us at the same time so that we can verify his existence that we know that he exists. Let God, spirit, Jesus Christ stand where all of us can see him and we would all know that he exists.

If we have to do with a person telling us that God exists based on his experience, say, Mohammad telling us that God exists because he heard the voice of an angel Gabriel we can always suspect that angels do not exist and that he was hallucinating, was insane?

Many deluded religionists have misled mankind by claiming to hear the voice of God in their heads. It is now time for God to reach all of us, but not through select persons.

God is probably our creation. As psychoanalysts say, we are intimidated by the affairs of this world and are looking for some external force to protect and rescue us. Alas, no force comes to our rescue.

Until God speaks for himself and does so in such a manner that all of us can simultaneously hear him speak to us we cannot accept him as real. Whatever arguments that philosophers like Kant make or religionists say about God do not prove the existence of God.

Kant’s idealistic philosophy is wishful thinking, nothing more nothing less. A mind sees an ugly world out there and seeks an ideal version of it. Human beings always seek ideals.

As we all know when one takes ones ideals as reality one has left the world of reality and is now deluded, paranoid, and insane. The insane person thinks that his ideals are reality. If you are ugly and want to be handsome that is understandable wish but if you now believe that you are handsome, that your wish is your reality you have left the real world and fled to the world of fantasy. In the end Kant fled to the fantasy world he was hatching in his philosophy; he became mad. 

Georg Fredrick Wilhelm Hegel did not just play with ideals, he left the world and lived in his ideal world and was insane. The man was living in his idealistic world and had nothing to do with the real world we live in. He was simply insane. Try reading his books, especially the Phenomenology of spirit and I bet you that you would think that it is 800 pages of stuff written by an inmate in a psychiatric hospital. It does not make sense.

Hegel’s writing on history seems to have some rhyme and reason in it. He talked about what he called dialectic historicism (which his student, Karl Marx said that he stood on its head and called dialectic materialism).  Hegel talked about the movement of ideas and history. At any point in time there is a real-world, the idea. That historical situation has other ideas opposing it.

There is the present status quo (thesis) and opposition to it (antithesis); the two struggles and the result is a synthesis of the two in a new idea of history, a new stage of historical development. This is fair enough characterization of how history evolves.

Moreover, we seem to have ideas in our heads, ideas that oppose each other and we seek synthesis that reconciles them in new ideas. Society appears to have similar dynamics.

Having made this much sense Hegel proceeded to talk about the absolute idea where all the theses and antitheses, the world of opposites are resolved in a perfect state. That perfect state that resolves historical dynamics is Germany.

There you have it; Hegel the German nationalist was actually seeking ways to reconcile the differences in the Germanic world into one strong German state. He thinks that the progression of history would end with this absolute idea. His student, Karl Marx talked similar nonsense. 

Marx talked about how progress is due to the struggle of thesis and antithesis and resulting synthesis of both in a new society. However, instead of leaving the struggle at the ideational level, Marx said that it is economic.

In primitive communal society some persons decided to oppress others, enslave others. Thus slave owners and slaves conflicted and the synthesis is feudal society.

In feudal society the forces of the status quo, land owning aristocrats and those wishing for change, the middle class, the bourgeoisie led to struggle. This conflict led to a new society, a synthesis of the two warring parties, socialist society.

Having reached socialism or communism Marx suddenly ends history; the dynamic struggle of oppressors and oppressed, the war of opposites end.

We know that in communist states an oppressive class emerged. The leaders of the Soviet Union oppressed the workers. Thus, both ought to continue dialectical materialism, that is, conflict continues to form new synthesis, a new form of society, something different from socialist society.

Francis Fakuyama made the same mistake in 1991 when building on the collapse of the Soviet Union he talked about the end of history, how liberal democracy, American style, has prevailed.

Alas, his American liberal democracy that is supposed to be permanent is now experiencing the emergence of plutocrats like Mitt Romney who call themselves job creators and do not want to pay taxes to support the society they mercilessly exploit. The result would be French type revolution in America where the Jacobeans, masses would be led by a new Robespierre and cut off the heads of the plutocrats. As Thomas Paine said, the land is always cleansed with the blood of tyrants, oppressors. America is overdue for revolution and one is in the air.

The injustice of paying America’s corporate chief executive officers millions of dollars while paying their workers not even enough money to pay their bills cannot last forever. Conservatives may delude themselves with their claptrap of how job creators need to have all that money so as to create jobs for the people but soon the people would know that they are not creating jobs; the criminals are merely living off the people’s suffering; when this consciousness becomes mass the oppressed people would rise up and chop off the heads of their oppressors. Sooner or later, the Marie Antoinette’s of America will eat their cakes.

Society is characterized by constant struggle of opposing social forces; there seems no end to this conflict; we rest in peace only when we die!

Aristotle talked about the unmoved mover, well, everything is always in motion and there is no first mover. Aristotle was afraid of infinite regress, of seeking the original force that got things going to infinity and he did not want to do so and abruptly end the chain of causation; he should not have done so.

(If God created us the next logical question is: who created God? Uncorrupted children ask this question before society and religionists browbeat them into silence and conformism to the mass delusion called religion.)

Hegel needed to be in a psychiatric hospital and treated for delusion disorder; therefore, we do not need to waste more time on him.

His rival, Arthur Schopenhauer (he was the philosopher of my pessimistic youth) sees the world as a bleak place. The world is pointless and meaningless; man ought not to exist! But the world exists so let us understand it. 

As Schopenhauer sees it, built into people is a powerful instinct to live; he called it will to live. We are driven by this blind force to live.  We live because we have an instinct to live.

We do not live because of any well thought-out reasons why we should live. The day the individual no longer experiences a powerful blind desire to live and must consciously have reasons why he should live is the day he commits suicide.

Your reasoning alone cannot give you purpose and reason to live. First, you live and then you come up with excuses why you live.

The ideas we cloud our minds with as to why we live are not really why we live. But we can play with those intellectualistic ideas that tell us why we live, such as living for love, for God. No one lives to serve God; one lives because one experiences an urge to live.

If we thought about it life is awful; consider that we are born, suffer, age and die. Who would want this sort of life?  Pure reason does not justify living.

Because there are blind forces in us that make us do what we do we will always do what to our reasons seem irrational.

We have sex instinct and despite the fact that the sexual act is filthy and animalistic we must seek it if we are to reproduce the race, and, as some say, have pleasure (if we devote energy trying not to seek sex, as old Sigmund Freud tells us, we become more preoccupied with it or worse become perverted as in Catholic priests molesting children while pretending celibacy).

We have instinct for aggression and therefore will always go to war and kill each other and then give ourselves pseudo reasons why we went to war. The real reason we go to war is that we are driven to kill each other, what Freud called Thanatos (was Napoleon and Hitler powerful; one ended up on a piece of rock in the south Atlantic, St Helena, and the other killed himself and his body was incinerated into ashes and dumped at a rose garden near his fuhrer bunker).

Our pursuit of power does not give us power; why then do we pursue power and fame? Vanity? Why vanity?

Schopenhauer says that we do these things because they are part of our nature whereas our reasons inveigh against them yet we cannot stop doing them! Man is a miserable animal; he is addicted to his instincts, his will to live; live for no known rational purpose. 

Herbert Spencer responded to Charles Darwin’s book, the Origin of species published in 1859. Darwin made the argument that we are animals that evolved like other animals and that we are always in competition where the fittest adapt to changes in the environment and the weakest die out. Life is a perpetual struggle where the fit survive and the unfit die out.

If in nature the powerful survive and the weak die why not construct a society that reflects that reality in its ethics?

During the early stages of the industrial revolution, American robber barons, such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, J.P Morgan, Vanderbilt and Stanford etc. were powerful animals; they ate the weak with whose labor they built their economic empires. Spencer said that that was as it should be.

Do not waste your time crying for the proletariat workers used by the robber barons to build their economic empires, in nature the weak are used by the strong; big fish eats small fish; lions eat sheep. Society must therefore be brutally competitive and the able rewarded and the weak left to die.

If one may play the devil’s advocate and ask Mr. Spencer: do you really think that society can be organized as you fantasize? What prevents the workers exploited by the robber barons from killing the barons? Fear of God and his alleged punishment. What god, didn’t Darwin do away with God?

If each of us is for himself and not for others life would be as Hobbes said it was in the state of nature: war of each against all and life would be nasty, brutish and short. Would your robber barons enjoy their moneys in the early graves they would be relegated to by those trying to appropriate their wealth? (Karl Marx talked about expropriating from the appropriators; what is good for the goose is good for the gander.)

It is amusing how so-called philosophers are dumb asses and do not think about the consequences of their philosophies. Take away love from people and what is left is chaos and anarchy. I have learned to see Western philosophers as asses!

Nietzsche said that we are like camel; in our youth, like camels we squat down and other folks place heavy loads on us; give us culture that oppresses us; bid us to get up and walk; we walk around carrying that load of culture. Okay. But what prevents us from throwing away the load, and attacking those who loaded us down? Fear of harm and death.

When the people overcome the fear that holds them down they would do away with their oppressors; we would then have a fair and just society.

As John Stuart Mill observed (On Liberty) until a people can look death in the face and say come get us, we do not want to live if we must live as slaves they cannot fight and if needs be, die for their Liberty. The tree of liberty is watered with patriots’ blood. 

Frederick Nietzsche took Spencer’s realism to its logical and absurd conclusion.  Those who seek logical conclusions to human speculative ideas always go mad. Nietzsche went mad…he suffered from delusion disorder or mania, for he was going about boasting that he was the best man on earth hence delusion of grandeur, saying that his philosophy is the final word on the subject.

What he was trying to do in “Thus Spake Zarathustra” and “The Will to power” is be logically consistent. He accepted Charles Darwin’s evolution theory and believed that it is true. If it is true that we are animals who compete for survival and the fittest survive and the weakest die out he then tried to apply that hypothesis to society. As he saw it, society is composed of people competing and the best should make it to the top and become supermen, the aristocrats who ruled society. He did not like democracy for he did not believe that all people are equal.  Let the strong lead the weak, the man believed.

But, alas, he was so foolish that it never occurred to him that in a world where there is no purpose and meaning and where we are all animals struggling for survival there is no reason why the weak should accept the leadership of the strong. Why shouldn’t the weak kill the strong?  If the strong should dominate the weak for the sake of dominating them, as he said, then the weak should kill the strong for the sake of doing so. There is no justice in the world.

If evolution theory is accepted, society is an artificial social contract for what is natural is for the strong to eat the weak. Since Nietzsche is weak he would be eaten by the strong. Nietzsche was almost blind as well as insane; Nazis probably would have considered him socially useless and a burden on the taxpayers and gassed him to death in one of the gas chambers and killing fields. We must be very careful what we write for unbalanced dictators who claim to be acting independently are almost always acting out the half-baked philosophies they heard from half crazed philosophers.

Nietzsche did not see the logical contradictions in his writings; he assumed that the rule of the strong is good for the weak; who said so, the weak? Why should the weak accept the rule of the strong?

Nietzsche was an immature writer, he never grew up. If he grew up he would have accepted inconsistence in logic.

Yes, we are born unequal;  some are strong and some weak yet to have society we must assume our equality and work for social good, as in democracy, some socialism and love (Nietzsche says let the weak die off and should not be helped by the strong).

Clearly, Adolf Hitler embraced this immature view of existence and embarked on trying to be the superman and kill the weak. He killed millions but other super men, Russians, killed him. In a world where we all struggle to be supermen there was no reason why Hitler should not be killed by other aspirants to superman-hood.

Nietzsche’s world would lead to anarchy and chaos and life would be nasty, brutish and short.  In the real world we need to accept the contradiction of strength and weakness, equality and inequality, we need the aristocracy of ability and some mass democracy. 

The late nineteenth century and early twentieth century gave us Henri Bergson, William James, John Dewey and Bertrand Russell and a few other philosophers. By the 1930s it was clear that the world had no more use for mere speculative philosophers. The physicists and chemists had replaced the speculators as the explainers of the world.

Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Ernest Rutherford, Neils Bohr, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Pauli, Dirac, Chadwick, Freidman, Lemaitre, Edwin Hubble, Alexander Fleming, Fred Hoyle, George Gamow, and other scientists have shown that we really do not have to merely speculate about nature, as philosophers did, that we can study nature through the scientific method. 

Henri Bergson was product of English empiricism/French positivism (Saint Simon, August Comte, Emil Durkheim etc.). He was trained in both biology and mathematics and was up to date in science. He could not deny the reality of matter. So what did he do? He could not accept epiphenomenalism, the idea that matter determined mind. He sought ways to show that there is a life force, what he called élan vital in our lives.  This is Rene Descartes all over. There is a part of us that is not material, that is pure life or spirit, operating inside matter.

Like his country man, Descartes, Bergson did not persuade us to see eye to eye with him that there is spirit in our lives. 

William James was an American medical doctor who went to Europe and studied psychology and philosophy. He returned to America and taught at Harvard University and wrote the first American text book on psychology. His fame, however, rested on his study of the American character.

The American white man is not interested in psychology or philosophy; he is a doer and wants to do what adapts to his world.  The American is that breed of humanity that does not worry its little mind with metaphysics, with questions about meaning and purpose. Just give him food and he is happy. He is a magnificent animal.

(Europeans who witnessed the massacres of the first and second world wars became depressed and invented existentialism, the philosophy of despair but Americans could care less for existentialism. Sartre, Camus, Jasper, Heidegger and other existentialists did not find takers of their ideas in America. I will not review existentialist philosophy here; I have written extensively on that subject elsewhere, besides, Will Durant did not cover it.)

The American works hard, earns his food, figures out a way to use science (he is not interested in theoretical science but in applied science, technology and business) to make a living.  He is a magnificent pagan and that is all there is to him.

The American does not even think about the Christianity that he professes to be a part of. If he thought about Christianity, what Jesus taught, love all people, would he enslave people?

The American is not thoughtful at all. If you’re interested in philosophy America is not a place for you, perhaps you should try France?

James says that since Americans are not interested in epistemology, ontology, metaphysics, or abstract matters in general that their philosophy is pragmatism. Americans do what works in this world; they take from philosophy whatever seems to enable them work and make a living on planet earth. We grant the American his choice to be happy cattle and move on. 

John Dewy asked pragmatic and realistic questions. Man must make a living; he must work to extract food from his world to live. Therefore, education should not be wasted on abstract subjects like philosophy, but must be centered on science and technology.

Our schools must work with industry to identify what industry needs and train students in those areas. We do not need to train students in the liberal arts and humanities, such as Latin, Greek, languages, History and philosophy; areas where there are no jobs. Train them in engineering, medicine and science. Teach folks how to farm the land and work in factories.

Dewey is down to earth but his dismissal of intellectual life is annoying. Man does not live by bread alone.  Philosophy may be impractical yet it enriches the human mind. The technocrat who does not enjoy the arts is a clod. 

Bertrand Russell, a scion of the English aristocracy, studied mathematics and dabbled in philosophy. He restated logical positivism, emphasized the English preference for experimental science over idle speculation on the nature of reality. To him there is no god but we can make the most of this world.

He was an atheist and pacifist; he opposed the First World War and for his troubles he was booted out of his teaching position in England. He came to America. When America joined the war he was also harassed. 

Will Durant gave us summaries of seminal Western philosophers’ ideas. He did not bother with oriental philosophers. As for African philosophers he probably did not think that Africans can think?  Do Africans have philosophers, and if they do who are they?

(For what it is worth, let it be stated that I am African. Am I a thinker, a philosopher, a psychologist? Has the West produced a mind like my mind, a mind at home in science and philosophy. What do you think?)

What shall we make of this book? It is a good read and should be read by every college graduate. When you have nothing to do instead of eating or drinking yourself to early death just coil up on a couch and read the book. Never mind if in the real world philosophy is useful or not, this book will give you information on the spirit of the West.

We need to understand the West, to understand how a few human beings managed to defeat all other human beings. If we are going to compete with them we must understand their psychology, philosophy and history. This book is an introduction to all three areas of western life. I highly recommend it to all people. 

(I read Will Durant’s book when I was in secondary school in the 1970s. Rereading it in my middle age has given me a different perspective on Western philosophers. In my youth I thought that these philosophers were supermen; now, I see them as a bunch of immature thinkers. How we change! We bring down those hitherto we had placed on a pedestal. The West initially seemed like something one ought to admire but at present one has seen through its underbelly and while respecting its science and technology is no longer enchanted with it. And such is the story of life. Finally, I enjoy talking philosophy, psychology and the history of science. If those are your cup of tea please do not hesitate in giving me a shout out. If these subjects are not your idea of having a good time please do not bother trying to talk to me, for you would bore me and I would not talk to you!) 

Ozodi Thomas Osuji, PhD

December 10, 2012

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Cyprian Ekwensi, Jagua Nana. (New York: Fawcett Premier Book, 1961), 207 Pages.

A Book Review By Ozodi Osuji

Yesterday, July 26, 2012, around 6PM, I went to a used book store to see if there are books that I could buy and read. I went to the section on Afro-Americans and browsed. Guess what I saw? I saw Cyprian Ekwensi's book, Jaguar Nana. I bought it (as well as other books). I quickly rushed home and started reading it. I did not go to sleep until I was done with it.

I decided to write a review of the book not because it is a new book and, as such, my review could influence its sales but because I was very impressed by it. Honestly, I did not know much about Cyprian Ekwensi. I did not know that he was such an impressive writer. Because he is such a fine writer I have to write this review and encourage folks to go out and buy his books and read them. I certainly plan to lay my hands on all his books that I can get.

SUMMARY OF THE BOOK

The book, although a novel, for all intents and purposes, is a sociological documentation of life in the Lagos and Nigeria of the time that Mr. Ekwensi wrote it (early 1960s).

On the surface, the book is about the life of a woman, Jagwa (also spelled Jagua) Nana. She was born at Ogabu (Ogide?), a village only a few miles from Onitsha, Eastern Nigeria. Her father was a pastor of a church. She was the only daughter of the family (she had three brothers). Her father doted on her.

Like most Igbo men, her father wanted his daughter to marry off and produce grandchildren for him. But Jagua was something of a Tomboy and was not really interested in marriage; she wanted to live her own life, independently. Nevertheless, she allowed her father to persuade her to marry; thus, she married a local boy living at the coal city (Enugu?).

She and her husband lived at Enugu. He was a business man; he owned petrol stations. For three years they tried getting a child but could not succeed. As is the case in Igbo land, men marry for children, not for love. Thus, the Husband began making plans for another wife. She got wind of what was going on.

In the meantime, she felt stifled by the need to pretend to like her life as a housewife. She had a restless spirit that sought adventure. Her restless spirit began to yarn for life elsewhere, life on the fast lane. She learned that Lagos is where it is at, and went to the train station and boarded a train headed to Lagos. Three days later she was at Lagos and had no place to live!

She walked around until she attracted the attention of a local musician, Hot Lips, who took her in. She lived with him but was not satisfied with his meager income; he did not have what she wanted, money and what money provides, an exciting life. Thus, she began to look around for something better.

While walking about Tinunbu Square, Lagos looking at stores with expensive merchandise that she would like to buy, she noticed that some folks were following her. She turned around and asked them why they were following her. They told her that they were looking for a woman to take to their white master at Ikoyi. Apparently, they were house servants for a white man at Ikoyi and their master who had left his wife and two children in England was searching for a local mistress. She agreed to the deal and they took her to the man's house.

She was surprised at how well white folks at Ikoyi lived. The white man had sex with her and liked her and decided to keep her as his always ready sex toy. He rented a place for her, and fronted her money for her daily living expenses; she became a white man's concubine.

Eventually, the man left for England and she did not hear from him again. Apparently, she had saved some money and used that money to travel to Accra, Ghana and liked the city. She decided to trade between Accra and Lagos. Thus, she would go to Accra and buy clothes and bring them to Lagos and sell them.

She lived in an upstairs room in a rooming house at Lagos. Downstairs was a young teacher, Freddie Namme. Freddie taught at a secondary school while taking correspondence courses to qualify as attorney. The man was twenty five years old. At this time Jagwa was forty five years old hence could be his mother. Nevertheless, she fell in love with him. She used her female wiles to entice him into a relationship he did not seek out (men are supposed to chase women, not women men, remember). At first he resisted because of the twenty year difference in their age. But sex is a powerful drug and if it is robbed into a man's face he is likely to give in. Thus, they became paramours.

She gave up on her trading business and began frequenting a local night club called the Tropicana. She practically went there every evening and stayed until it closed at 2AM. She would pick up rich folks, especially white folks and have sex with them and that way make money.

Thus, she was able to make ends meet by being a high end prostitute; those generally pick up one customer per night, a loaded customer able to give them the kind of money their luxurious lifestyle demanded.

Initially, Freddie did not know about this seamy side of Jagwa's life; he was pretty much preoccupied with his studies. He sat and passed preliminary examinations towards the law degree and needed to go to one of the Inns of courts in London for a year to be called to the bar. He applied to the federal government of Nigeria for scholarship and was waiting for the result of his application when he learned about Jagwa's whorism.

He confronted her and she mollified him by promising to send him to London. She actually fronted the money, paid for his stay in London and wangled a passport for him and all was set for him to go to London. He made arrangements to board a ship soon leaving Lagos for England.

One of the habitué of Tropicana was called Mama Nancy. She, too, was a middle aged sex merchant on the prowl for rich white men who want to buy the ware between her legs. She had a regular customer, a Syrian businessmen who came in most evenings, picked her up and took her out for sex and paid her handsomely.

One evening Ma Nancy was not at the Tropicana and the rich Syrian picked up Jagua and did what he wanted and paid her. Mama Nancy later learned about what Jagua did, and the two women got into a brawl. The scene of the two women having a cat fight in the night club is hilarious; imagine two middle aged whores going at each other, tearing each other's clothes, making each other naked, thus showing their ugly aging bodies.

As an aside, one may ask: why do fighting women like to disrobe each other; is it to expose their holy of hollies, show their genitals for all the world to see; do they want the world to see that which they think makes them valuable in men's eyes? (The scene made me laugh so loudly until my throat hurt)! The short of the story is that the two old harlots became enemies.

In the meantime, Mama Nancy heard that Jagua was planning to send her young boy friend, Freddie, to London. She maneuvered to have her nineteen year old daughter, Nancy, to ambush Freddie. Being young and closer to his age, Freddie fell for her. Mama Nancy also managed to get one of her rich white customers to pay for Nancy to travel to London and take secretarial courses. Her intention was for Nancy to meet up with Freddie in London and marry him over there.

Jagua heard what was afoot; one evening, suspecting that some hanky-panky was going on in Freddie's room, on the impulse (women's intuition?) she bagged into Freddie's room and saw Nancy with him (they had just had sex).

The two women got into a fight. The younger woman held her own (you must admire the younger woman's guts; she defended herself rather well!).

Enraged, Jagwa went through Freddie's packed suitcases, fished out his passport and shredded it to pieces. She dissolved her support for his plans to study in England.

Freddie tried to get his passport reissued but as is the case with such things in Nigeria was given the run around. Apparently, nobody told him to bribe the passport folks for that were how folks obtained passports in Nigeria. He gave up and resigned himself to not going to London.

As luck would have it, however, his father, David Namme, of Bagana (near Port Harcourt) decided to pay for his study in London. He made arrangements and the next time he met up with Jaguar, he was at the airport.

Jagwa, through the grapevines, had heard that Freddie was flying off to London and with her latest flame, a local politician called Uncle Taiwo, went to the airport to say her goodbyes. She saw him as he was about to board his plane and tried to talk to him. He relented and talked to her. They seem to have buried their hatchets and he flew off to London.

During the first three months of his stay in London, Freddie wrote Jagwa but eventually the writing stopped. In the meantime, operating under the illusion that he still loved her, Jaguar decided to visit Freddie's village at Bagana.

Lo and behold who she saw there? Mama Nancy and Nancy were there visiting the village to acquaint themselves with Freddie's family. The two women had a verbal fight (good scene).

The high-water mark of the visit was that one morning Nancy was out swimming when Jagua met up with her and both of them got into a fight. Jaguar chased Nancy in the waters. Nancy swam towards another village, Krinameh, a village in deadly quarrels with Bagana.

She swam to Krinameh's end of the waters and was seized by the folks of that village, held a prisoner, possibly to be killed. Since Jagua was responsible for her situation she asked to go try to rescue her. After much begging, she was allowed and a canoe took her over.

She met with chief Ofubara, the chief of Krinameh. She persuaded him to release the girl, Nancy. Her ace in the hole is her vagina and she manipulated it rather cleverly. She ended up getting the girl released and stayed with Ofubara as his sexual partner for ten days.

Although the chief already has three wives, he had never had sex with a Lagos girl before. He was unused to a woman fucking a man rather than a man fucking her; that experience, apparently, made him fall hopelessly in love with Jagua. He offered to marry her on the spot; indeed, he paid her bride price, one hundred and twenty pounds to her.

Jagwa got tired of the country bumpkin chief and the rustic life of the creeks of the Niger Delta and wanted to return to the bright lights of Lagos. She left but promised to think about the chief's marriage proposal (after all he had already paid her dowry to her...but not properly, for dowries are paid to the parents of proposed wives).

Upon her return to Lagos, Jagwa resumed her prostituting life style. This time, Uncle Taiwo paid her rent and gave her monetary allowances to subsist on. She became his paid up always available sex object (cheating on the side when he is not around). Once a whore always a whore, they say.

Almost two years later, Freddie qualified for the bar and returned to Nigeria. Nancy had met up with him in London and they married and had two children when both returned to Lagos.

Freddie decided that the quickest way to make money is to run for a position in the Lagos City Council. He had joined a party and the party ran him as their candidate for the Obanla district in Lagos (Obalinde?). His opponent was no other than his former mistress's latest consort, Uncle Taiwo!

The competition was stiff. Uncle Taiwo's goon squad on a number of occasions waylaid Freddie and beat him up. Eventually, they roughed him up so badly that he later died.

On Election Day, surprise, surprise, Uncle Taiwo lost to the substitute to Freddie. Because he had lost and wasted the party's moneys and stolen some, he became a liability to his party, a persona non-grata to his political party; he became a marked man and was on the run for his life.

Those Uncle Taiwo had borrowed money from to finance his election were searching for the absconded politician; they wanted to recoup their money. They learned about his mistress, Jagua and where she lived and came to her asking for his whereabouts. She told them that she did not know where he was. They resolved to take all her property as part of their recouping of their financial losses.

Before they could come to Jagua's house to seize her and her belongings, an old acquaintance, a younger prostitute called Rosa, gave Jagua the heads up and she packed a suitcase and fled to her Rosa's room at Gunle (Ajagunle?). Both of them now lived in this squalid, seedy section of Lagos.

Jagua had gone from a high class prostitute to a low class street walker, for now she took a cab to Lagos, walked the streets and picked up whoever is willing to have sex with an aging whore (whores seldom find customers after age thirty five; who wants to have sex with an old ho and her unsightly body?)

The two whores sometimes brought their Johns to their shared one room at Ajagunle. One of them would use the single bed for sex with her john and the other would have sex with her john on the floor.

In the meantime, Jagua's father got sick and wanted to see her before he died. The family sent her brother, Fonso, a trader at Onitsha, to Lagos to search for her and bring her home. He tracked her to her shack at Ajagunle. He saw her and Rosa go into their single room brothel with two johns in tow. He knocked on the door and told Jagwa that her father wanted to see her before he died.

Jagwa did not have the money to go home and gave excuses why she could not go with him. He left without her. Three days later, Jagwa borrowed the money and travelled to her village. By the time she got there her father was already dead and was buried.

Her mother was now a widow in mourning and needed someone to take care of her. Her brothers persuaded her to stay in the village and take care of their mother.

As is the case in Igbo land, the men agreed that she is too independent to marry and that she is free to have casual male friends provided she lived in the family compound. They tacitly gave her permission, if needs be, to get pregnant and have children with her village johns.

(Editorial Note: In Igbo villages' girls are supposed to marry and leave their parents villages and become part of their husbands' households in different villages. But in certain instances, if the woman is too headstrong and is not the marrying type members of her family allowed her to live in their compound and tacitly allowed her to have boyfriends, even have children. Ordinarily, a woman is supposed to have children in her husband's village, not her father's village. It should also be noted that some women are lesbians and do not marry and their relatives tacitly allow them to live with them, aware that they are having affairs with other women. I saw these otherwise abominations with my own eyes in my village; I saw an unmarried woman living in her father's compound with her children; I saw a woman whose female lover visited discretely.)

Jagua lived in her village and was bored out of her mind. Her adventurous soul itched for geographical therapy. She went to Onitsha and bought a sewing machine and opened a sewing business near her father's house. Her business thrived for she sewed the latest Lagos style clothes for her country dwelling customers fascinated by what women wore in the big city of Lagos.

As allowed to do by her brothers, she had causal sex with other men. One, a man who had come home on leave had extended sexual dealings with her and when his vacation was up returned to wherever he came from. A few months later Jagua missed her period and a doctor's examination confirmed that the middle aged Jagua is now pregnant.

In the meantime, her former roommate at Ajagunle, Rosa, came to visit her in her village (and also to visit a nearby village where one of her steady johns hailed from). Her mother liked the teenage prostitute.

Rosa brought Jagua up to date with what is going on in their old hunting grounds at Lagos. She told her how Uncle Taiwo was murdered by members of his own party...apparently for absconding with the party's money?

Now that Uncle Taiwo is dead, Jagua remembered that he had given her an envelope to keep for him. She opened the envelope and inside it was several hundred thousand pounds sterling. She decided to use the money to go to Onitsha and open a trading store and become a merchant princess.

She sent Chief Ofubara the one hundred and twenty pounds he had paid for her hand in marriage. Thereafter, she decided to go visit him. She took her young girl friend with her; they headed to Port Harcourt.

From Port Harcourt they took a canoe to Bagana and found out that Chief Ofubara, David Ofubara (Freddie's father) and other local big wigs had gone to Lagos on local government business.

Both women headed back to Ogabu. A few months later she had a boy child and her mother named him Onichi (replacement of her dead husband, the future generation of the family). Three days later the boy child died.

Jagua thereafter left her village, with her mother's blessing, to go to Onitsha, buy a lorry (truck) and open her store and, hopefully, become an Onitsha merchant princess. At this point the story ended.

APPRECIATION

This book tells us about city life in an emergent African urban area. It tells us about rural populations coming to the city trying to make it big and wounding up side tracked by the city's get rich quick schemes.

The chief protagonist of the novel, Jagua Nana, is a rustic wench who came to Lagos with an eye to living her fantasy understanding of the good life offered by life in a big. Appearances are deceiving; she wound up becoming a prostitute.

In Lagos, certain so-called high class prostitutes prefer to have white men and Africa's neuve-rich men as their johns; these women's lives often become nightmarish.

Ekwensi described the nightmarish life of one Igbo woman drawn by Lagos city lights. This woman quickly got entangled with night club life where she picked up well paying johns. A former denizen of a village without tap water and electricity (she did not even go to school for crying out loud) found herself co-habiting the same venue with the rich of Lagos. She was bound to be used and dumped as rags are discarded when they are no longer useful in cleaning up dirt. She thought that she was living a high class life but actually she was no more than a common prostitute, a sewage into which men discharged their bothersome semen.

Ekwensi gave us an amazingly accurate description of life on the fast lane in an Urban African town. The Lagos he was describing is a city where all that mattered is having money. As they say, money talks; you either have it or you do not; and if you do not have money you are nothing; as far as Nigerians are concerned, if you are poor you do not exist!

Since to be seen as socially important one must have money, Nigerians chase money by all means necessary. They would do any and everything for money, including selling their disease ridden vaginas (these days such vaginas have HIV viruses in them and yet they are sold to willing johns who unwittingly pay to be killed).

Uncle Taiwo, the politician, is representative of the Nigerian politician to whom winning political office is a do or dies affair. These folks go into politics to steal as much money as they could from the national treasury, so winning office is a guarantee of wealth. They see winning elections as war, literally war. As in war, they kill their opponents, as Taiwo killed his opponent, Freddie (and, in turn, he was killed by members of his own party).

Freddie Namme was not an innocent victim; he was an active participant in the corruption hell called Nigeria. He came back from London and instead of trying to establish himself as a successful attorney or use his legal knowledge to fight for the improvement of Nigeria, he was motivated to become as rich as he could and do so quickly. He believed that politics was the quickest way to make money hence he entered politics and was killed. He represents Nigeria's attitude towards politics: a quick way to make money, not a profession folks go into to serve the national interest.

Freddie's death is not a heroic death; it did not elicit sympathy from the reader. He was just another thieving Nigerian politician and his death is therefore of no existential consequence.

What are Nigerians living for, anyway? If all Nigerians died today it would not matter to existence at all. I certainly would not lose sleep if I heard that all Nigerians are dead; they are living for nothing hence their death is of no significance to me or to history; Nigerians are surplus human beings who are not doing anything to improve the human condition.

In a manner of speaking, Nigerians are probably better off dead; the manner they live is a disgrace to living. Apparently, no one has told Nigerians that the best lived life is one devoted to doing something useful for humanity.

If you are not doing anything that serves public good and die why should the public care about your death? I certainly do not care when I hear that a Nigerian has died. If I hear that the Nigerian chief-thief at Abuja is dead I would rejoice; his death is the passing of a useless life.

Jagwa Nana's life is symbolic of what Nigerian lives amount to. She was willing to sell her body and soul for money; she was a prostitute. Nigerians are willing to sell their bodies and souls for money; Nigerians are literally, not figuratively prostitutes.

Prostitutes are the detritus of humanity. Therefore, Jagua and Nigerians are the detritus of humanity; they are not relevant to existence.

This is the lesson one drew from reading this amazingly well written book by Cyprian Ekwensi.

I am sorry that I had not discovered that Ekwensi was such an excellent writer. I apologize but now that I have discovered him, within a few months I would have read most of his books (I am going online, to Amazon and Barnes and Nobles to see if I can order his books).

What else can one ask from another human being other than to ask him to do his best at whatever he does?

Mr. Ekwensi, although trained as a pharmacist, turned out to be an outstanding writer of novels. I do not like to compare apples and oranges, white writers and black writers, since they address different experiences, be that as it may, in my opinion this novel is in the same class as Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.

Though parts of the book are written in broken English hence probably not easily understandable to readers in Standard English, I believe that this book is a classic in English literature (the portion in broken English, parts mainly spoken by the illiterate Jagua Nana and her associates in the whoring and criminal underworld, in my opinion, makes the book authentic literature).

There is too much phony sophistication in false literature; Ekwensi injected controlled literary realism. Although the book is mainly about the sex trade he did not actually describe a sex scene; the sex thing was tastefully done! Some persons probably would consider Ekwensi a prude, for description of one raunchy sex scene would have made his book more realistic!

Cyprian Ekwensi is a first rate writer. I slap myself for not having discovered him before!

I encourage folks to go and read his books, as I am going to do. He gives us sociological and psychological insights into modern Nigerians.

Ozodi Osuji

July 27, 2012

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Dr. Osuji enjoys reading novels; when he finds a novel that is contributory to the understanding of human psychology, and he has the time, he writes a review of it.

Jacob Carruthers, Intellectual Warfare. (Chicago: Third World Press, 1999)310 Pages.

A Book Review By Ozodi Osuji

I had asked a friend who is in the know about African American Studies at American Universities to recommend ten books that he felt that anyone interested in the field ought to read. He gave me a list and ranked them in order of importance. I read each and reviewed it for those who might want to read it, too. I have just got to Jacob Caruthers book, Intellectual warfare.

I must confess that because I read it last I read it without much enthusiasm primary because it is repeating what I had already read elsewhere. I was kind of bored hearing the same thing over and over, again. It seems that once one has read the first two or three books in this genre one has read them all and the others are repetitive.

Moreover, the title of this book is somewhat misleading. I had expected a robust debate on the war of the West with the non-west for intellectual leadership.

There are all kinds of wars, wars fought with bullets and wars fought with ideas. The West had declared war on the non-West for quite some time now. They had told non-Westerners that they are superior to them; they had claimed ownership of everything good in life. They made themselves the masters of the universe and this kind of makes non-Westerners to feel inferior.

Since no human being ever accepts that he is inferior to others, for to do so is to accept those persons' leadership, those made to feel inferior fight back and try to prove that they are superior to those who claimed superiority to them.

You see, the West wanted to make itself seem superior to the rest of the world and if the rest of the world accepted that self-serving propaganda they would then look to the West to rule them and guide them. This is clever effort to make one's self the leader of the rest of the world; it is psychological warfare.

Non-Westerners being human beings appreciated what the West was doing and fought back. Some fought back by trying to prove that they are superior to the West; others do so by trying to prove that they are the equals of the West. Some quietly try to acquire skills in science and technology so as to be able to compete with westerners and in the process prove that they are not deficient.

Asians adopted the last method. Today, they are almost as scientifically and technological developed as Europe. No European in his rational state of mind would go about saying that he is superior to the Chinese or Japanese or even Indian (Indians still have jarring poverty making it possible for rich Europeans to fancy that they are better than them).

African scholars traditionally talked about how Europe exploited Africans; perhaps, they were trying to engender guilt feeling in Western liberals.

Western conservatives do not even bother reading what Africans write so they do not know what Africans say. In so far that Western conservatives think about Africans poverty at all, they attribute it to Africans supposed lack of intelligence. They say that Africans are too dull to do what they need to do to transform their continent into a modern economy. They say: look at Africa, a continent with perhaps the most abundant natural resources but dumb Africans are too lazy to do something with their resources; African politicians are always stealing from their national treasuries and their people remain poor and they try to make white folks feel guilty for their suffering and come to their aid with some monetary handouts, money that they redirect into their personal pockets instead of use them to help their people. They tune out pictures of starving Africans they see on television. Some overtly say: let Africans die; what are they living for if they cannot develop their economies?

I had expected Dr. Caruthers to give the reader of his book a battle aimed at refuting Western assertions about Africans inadequacy. For example, I had expected him to tell me something about Murray and Heinstein's claim in the Bell Curve that black folks are intellectually deficient, have lower IQ and that without affirmative action would not be able to get into America's top one hundred universities and must settle for second tier universities; their claim that in the competitive world black folks cannot compete with white folks and therefore must settle for minor jobs, such as being bus drivers, janitors, postal clerks etc. I really wanted a robust war with the children of Europe, a war to put them in their place.

Instead, what I saw was a rehashing of what I had read in Chancellor Williams Destruction of Black Civilization and John Jacksons Introduction to African Civilizations. I read how ancient Egypt was a black civilization before white folks appropriated it, how black folks started the first civilizations and therefore the ones who civilized Europe (via the Greeks copying from Egypt).

I have heard these stories one million times and therefore did not hear anything new. I began to wonder whether black scholars can write something new other than make claims to ancient Egypt. Thus, I put the book away, bored.

I then asked myself whether Dr. Caruthers perhaps gave a new twist to the same old story. Every story teller, even if he is telling the same story told by other story tellers, gives his own twist to it. So, did Caruthers add something new to the old story of Egypt is African?

I know that African-Americans kind of feel an obsessive compulsion to prove that they started a civilization. White men had accused them of not starting anything big, presented them as being part of primitive Africans who did not start any great civilization. That kind of makes them feel inferior relative to Europeans so they latch onto the hypothesis that Egypt is Africa and harp on that over and over, again.

If they can make it stick that Egypt is African then it means that black folks started something big and important and that kind of washes away the accusation that they are primitive.

I understand the psychological role of the claim that Egypt is African for black Americans; it makes them feel civilized and important so they must latch unto it.

Personally, I do not have a need to prove that Egypt is African. I do not feel inferior to white men; I do not even consider Western civilization a civilization!

I consider Europe and North America primitive! I want to replace them with what seems to me a civilized state of human beings: loving people, not predatory people who go all over the world killing and stealing from people.

Whereas I do not consider myself a Christian, I am agnostic, I want a Christ based world, by that I mean a world based on love; a world where we love each other and serve each other's needs rather than exploit each other (see Alfred Adler's Individual Psychology).

I want the type of world that Jesus Christ talked about in his sermon on the mountain. The West is nowhere near that world so I had no reason to see the West as ideal and do not admire it.

Because I do not elevate the west to high heavens I do not have a need to prove that they are the product of Egypt/Africa.

The point is that I understand what African Americans are doing in their war with the white man and had expected Caruthers to give me that war, if only to entertain the part of my mind that enjoys competition, but, instead, he gave me a rehash of what I had read elsewhere.

Did he add something new to the same old, same old story of Egypt is Africa and Africa influenced the West? Let us see.

The book states that Western thought and civilization has its root in Africa; it says that Greek and Roman thought was influenced by Egyptian and Ethiopian thought; the Roman Empire, it says, is a byproduct of African civilization.

Dr. Caruthers examined what he believed is classic literature and from them inferred the role of Africa in shaping what most of us were led to believe had their root in the European world.

Greek philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, he tells us were influenced by Egyptian philosophy. Dr. Caruthers wants his reader to discard the notion that the ideas we generally believe are Western is Western; he wants him to rethink such beliefs and come to the new belief that those ideas are, in fact, African ideas stolen by the West.

He wants to correct the situation and get us to see everything we see in our world as African in origin. In other words, do not give thanks to the white man for your civilization, instead give thanks to the black man for it.

Dr. Caruthers is presenting an African centered philosophy (afrocentricism), as opposed to Eurocentric philosophy. He wants his readers, who are expected to be African Americans, to be on the lookout lest their past civilization is stolen from them, again, and the West is given credit for what is rightfully their contribution to civilization.

Racist Americans, scholars and ordinary folk, deliberately set out to tell the world that Africans have contributed nothing to human civilization and, as such, that Africans are a deficient people, a people fit to be ruled by allegedly superior white folks.

Racist America deliberately damaged African Americans self-esteem and tried to destroy their self-confidence so that they would then look up to supposed superior white folks to rule them forever.

Naturally, African Americans realized what was been done to them and fought back; they fought back with efforts to show that they not only contributed to civilization but had the first civilizations, Sumer and Egypt.

If they can prove that those first civilizations were African then they would with one fell swoop rehabilitate their damaged self-esteem and carry their heads high, even feel superior to white folks (who allegedly lived in caves before Africa civilized them).

Make no mistake about it, there is an intellectual war going on out there; this is a war of the races; white folks declared this war on black folks and black folks have a right to fight back. In war every means that leads to defeat of the enemy is appropriate.

Dr. Carruthers designed an educational curriculum that would be Africa centered so that African Americans are taught about their contributions to Western civilization. His apparent goal is to make African-Americans to feel very proud of themselves after all if they are responsible for everything good in our world why shouldn't they be proud of their past instead of be ashamed of it as they seem to be at the moment.

Dr. Caruthers wants to incorporate his views that Africa is the originator of civilization into America education. Indeed, he wants to rewrite American history and the history of Western civilization and give glory to Africa, not Greece or Rome or Paris or London or Washington for anything good in the West.

Dr. Carruthers goal is no less than total revolutionary alteration of what we currently believe is knowledge and its source.

Dr. Carruthers is one aggressive black man fighting white folk's aggression with his own African aggression. Why not; is aggression only allowed the children of Europe? If Europeans can be aggressive so can Africans!

As an African I naturally sympathize with Dr. Caruthers goal. Alas, I also know that he is swimming against the current. He is living in the past, not present and future.

In the present most of us know who contributed what idea in physics, chemistry and biology. We know who invented what in the world of technology.

If we look at the world from Copernicus (1543) to the present we know who is who in science and technology. If we do not see African names in the mix there is nothing that Dr. Caruthers is saying that would make us not feel lacking.

I feel bad that Africans are not contributing to science and technology. I could care less if they kick started civilization five thousand years ago. I am interested in the now, today.

When I go to any American university department of physics, I seldom see black folks; I mostly see Asians and a handful of white folks. I ask why that is the case. I know why it is the case and this paper is not the place to grapple with that issue.

I am interested in increasing the representation of black folks in the sciences, now. If I see a list of Nobel Prize winners in the physical sciences and see black names on it I would feel good.

Telling me about Egypt is so much nonsense. What has Egypt got to do with Newton's mechanics, Einstein's relativity and Rutherford and Bohr's quantum mechanics?

I do not live in the past; I live in the present. Common on you guys, let us be realistic and do what we have to do to get black kids into Caltech and MIT to study science and technology and not sit around talking about what happened five thousand years ago.

This book should be read when one has nothing better to do with one's time and wants to kill time stimulating ones brain cells, neurons, with ideas, any kind of ideas. If you are bored and do crosswords puzzles it keeps your brain cells firing and engaged but that does not mean that you are learning anything useful in the economic world.

This book is something to be read for the sake of reading and keeping one's mind busy not because it adds to the acquisition of new skills set that adapts to the twenty first century, a century with intertwined economics and to the best competitors goes the price.

We now need physical scientists, engineers and medical doctors, not afrocentrists; we need leaders in science and technology. Of course we also need some cultural leaders but not too many of them.

*The next paper is the concluding essay in this ten part series. In it I will look at the effect of Africans running around kidnaping their people and selling them to Arabs and white men for over one thousand years, on African society, culture, morality and individual psychologies.

Ozodi Osuji

July 6, 2012

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The term religion derives from Latin, religio. Religio is any effort to yoke one's self back to whatever one considers being one's source. Apparently, some human beings believe that they have a source (origin) outside this world and have always made efforts to reconnect themselves to that source. The source is generally construed as spirit, as opposed to our world which is a place of space, time and matter. Spirit is that which transcends matter.

Since matter is a place of death and dying, of mortality, spirit is a place of immortality and eternity, permanence, changelessness, timelessness, spacelessness; spirit is a world that is the opposite of matter and its mortality.

Apparently, people are in search of immortality and eternity and seem to get it in their conceptions of the spiritual world and its alleged God.

If there is a characteristic that define human beings it is their tendency to religion. In every human group there is always religion. Religion is found in all human groups.

Religion comprises of a series of rituals and ceremonies through which a people attempt to worship their God; religion is always a group, team thing hence is controlled by society and the powers that rule society.

On the other hand, spirituality is always an individual's effort to reach his God and is not controlled by the group; the leaders of society do not control it hence it is a more authentic means of reaching ones supposed creator. The great mystics of all time, delineated by Evelyn Underhill in her book, Mysticism, were always individualistic in their search for God.

Priests serve society and are enforcers of social rules; mystics search for their higher selves and are not interested in upholding the extant social order.

If there is a human group without religion, without efforts to reconnect to their source they would not be human beings as we know them to be.

As we know human beings to be they are always in search of their source, their creator, their real home. Apparently, they believe that this world is not their real home and they want to return to their real home.

As it were, human beings see themselves as temporary visitors to our earth; they are foreigners, aliens in our world. Their real home is spirit land. Religion is those things they do in an effort to return to their real home.

That real home is the opposite of this world; therefore, the perceptual lenses we employ in seeing this world does not see the spiritual world. In our world we relate to it with our five senses, eyes, ears, nose, skin and thinking. None of those enables us to understand the spiritual world. That makes it necessary for most people to not know anything about the spiritual world for most people can only relate to their world through the five senses.

Some people, on the other hand, claim ability to shut down their five senses and tune into the operations of the spiritual world. They claim that when they ignore responding to stimuli from our material world they enter the parameters of the spiritual world and are able to understand it and later return to our world and try to translate the nature of the spiritual world to our earthly categories (and claim that they cannot really do so since it is difficult to translate one order of being to another but they try anyway).

We do not know whether what those who claim ability to tune into the spiritual world tell us about it is true or not. What is salient is that in every human group there are those who claim this ability; this is a worldwide phenomenon. Thus, in every group of human beings we find religion and religious practices.

Those belonging to one religion often find the religion of others strange and difficult to grasp. What is relevant is that these people are trying to reconnect to their source and we generally respect them and though we do not understand what they are doing leave them alone.

Only a fool says that there is no God, or that people who are practicing their religion are insane. Using the categories of psychiatry to examine believers in God there is no sign that they are insane; in fact, they are often the sanest people around (when their religion makes them to love one another and work for one another's welfare, for what better can human beings do than love one another?).

The only thing is that pure reason based on the five senses cannot understand what religious folks say that they experience and most rational folks leave it at that and not try to ascertain whether what they claim to experience is true or not.

I do not know that God exists or does not and that is not relevant to anything for since I do not know who am I to tell a person who believes in God that his belief is not true? As for atheists they do not know that there is no God; they look at the evidence their five senses give to them and on that bases conclude that there is no god. Okay, that is their judgment and they are entitled to it.

Just as we accept theists we accept atheists (actually, atheism is a religion for it is belief in what one does not know is true; we do not know that there is no god so to say that there is no god is a belief, just as it is a belief to say that god exists), both have conclusions that agnostics do not understand. That is pretty much where things stand.

African Americans were kidnapped by their fellow Africans and sold to Europeans and shipped to the Americas (from the United States to Brazil). Africans are found in the two Americas and the Caribbean Islands.

Africans were first brought to Brazil in the early 1500s so they have been in America for five hundred years (four hundred years in the USA...where they were brought in 1619, to Jamestown, Virginia, USA).

African Americans were brought in as slaves. Their slave masters made sure that those from the same tribe were dispersed so that only strangers could be around each other. This was to prevent the Africans from developing a sense of unity hence organize insurrections (still, Nat Turner and other slaves did mount insurrections in the 1830s).

The slave master made sure that the slave lost his religion, his language and culture. For our present purpose, the slave master destroyed the slave's culture, which includes his religion and language. Worse, the slave master refused to admit the slave to his own culture and language, afraid that education would make the slave know too much hence challenge the slave master's rule over him. The slave master got to keep the slave ignorant to prevent him from learning that it is unnatural for one human being to lord it over others.

(Both Adolf Hitler and White Apartheid South Africans learned their criminal terroristic behaviors from white racist Americans; both said that Africans are not to be educated lest they know too much to challenge the unnatural rule of white folks over black folk.)

Human beings mostly learn by observation so Africans learned a bit about their slave masters culture, language and religion.

Over time Africans in the Americas, folk who had their own African religions (it is estimated that 20% of them were Muslims when they were kidnapped and sold) lost their peoples religions and became Christians (whatever that may mean...are white Americans Christians, and if as Arthur Schopenhauer said that they are not Christians, if by Christianity we mean those who love and do not exploit people, how can slaves imitate their Christianity?). Until recently it can be said that almost all black Americans were Christians.

During the 1930s some African Americans living at Detroit, Michigan recognized that Christianity, their religion, is the religion of their slave masters. They said that that religion was meant to enslave them. Certain passages in their bible, such as Paul's advice to a slave to obey his slave master, were used to justify slavery.

Elijah Mohammad concluded that Christianity is the religion of slave masters, and since he saw slave masters as devils the religion of devils. Elijah Mohammad believed that Islam was a religion for the black man. Thus, he founded the Nation of Islam, a Black Muslim group.

Many black folks left their Christianity and flocked to Islam. They actually believed that Islam is the black man's religion!

But as these things always turn out, they soon learned something about Islam. Islam was founded in 610 AD by an Arab man, Mohammad. Mohammad and his Arabs are Caucasians (Semitic people are white people).

More importantly, Arab Muslims practiced slavery. In fact, they had been buying African slaves since about 700 AD, a full eight hundred years before the founding of America.

Indeed, the Portuguese learned about slavery when while searching for a sea route to India in the 1490s they ran into Arab islands in the Indian Ocean and saw Arabs using African slaves on their plantations. When the Portuguese got to Brazil in 1500 and could not use the native Indians to do their work they came to West Africa to buy African slaves. That is to say that Arabs taught Europeans about using African slaves.

Thus, Islam is also the religion of slave masters. In fact, more slaves were sold to Arabia than to America. Most Arabs today are mixtures of black and white. That is why we tend to see Arabs as nonwhites; it is because they mixed with Africans. Originally, they were as white as other Europeans but one thousand years of mixing with their African slaves changed their color to what it is today, mulattto.

For our present interests, Islam is the religion of slave masters. Christianity is the religion of slave masters. Now, those black Americans who did not want to participate in the religion of their slave masters, Christianity, have no place to turn to; they were caught between a rock and a hard place!

They looked to Africa for help. Africa is composed of about 3000 tribes; each of whom has its own religion.

African Americans came from many West African tribes, from Senegal to Namibia. In the Americas Africans from different tribes were deliberately mixed so that African Americans are now a product of many African peoples genes.

Additionally, the African-American is likely to have his slave masters and Indian genes in him. Simply stated, the African American does not belong to any specific African tribe. Therefore, the religion of a specific African tribe may not appeal to him.

The African American is now a different tribe of Africans, actually a different human tribe; they belong to the tribe of new man; they are made from composite of Africans, Europeans and Indians; the African American genetically came from all over the world, he is the new human being (in the new land).

If Christianity, Islam and specific African tribal religions cannot appeal to African Americans and they still want to have religion, now what do they do?

Why not found their religion? Alas, folks do not just get up one day and found new religions; folks tend to want old religions for they want that which has been around for some time and the older the better.

Old religions kind of give folks a sense of doing what their ancient ancestors did and therefore must be correct in their practice. The older a religion is the better it is seen.

So, instead of founding their own religion, as one would expect African Americans to do, they went to Egypt in search of an authentic African religion for them.

First, they convinced themselves that the civilization of ancient Egypt was a black civilization (see Chancellor Williams, The Destruction of Black Civilization; John Jackson, Introduction to African Civilizations; Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilizations).

True, the original Egyptians were black, there is no argument there. Egypt was started by black folk then Caucasians entered and eventually took it over and gave it their own culture. Arabs took it over around 640 AD and gave it their Muslim religion. Before the Arabs, Hyksos, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Christians and many others ruled Egypt and gave it their religions.

So what was the religion of the black Egyptians before the various foreigners imposed their religion on them?

African Americans think that they have found out what ancient Egyptian religion was. They call it Kemet. Some of them, particularly Karenga and Jacob Caruthers, have written books on what they consider Kemet philosophy is. They have told us about this supposed ancient African religion and its Ma'at morality (there are forty-two principles of Ma'at, sort of like the ten commandments of Christians).

It should be noted that there is no place where this philosophy is written down in ancient Egyptian writings; Kemet is thus put together by African Americans. If you like, Kemet is a reconstructed religion.

The founders of Kemet, African Americans, are looking at Egypt from a period removed from it by 5000 years.

As we all know, when we talk about the past we invariably inject into it our present experience. The past is gone and is only remembered. The past of our childhood is almost always not what it was when we remember it in adult life.

The point is that what are now called Kemet religion and philosophy is a made up idea and not necessarily what ancient Egyptians had as their religion and or philosophy.

Be that caution as it may, it is still useful for African Americans to try to practice a religion that is not the religion of their slave masters. They ought to have their own religion.

Whatever a group of people do to try to reconnect themselves to their source is acceptable for who are we to criticize them since we do not know that there is a source or no source.

Let me say that I went to the library and checked out books on Egyptian religion and glanced through some of them and did not find reference to Kemet. I then did an Internet search on Kemet. I did not find anything on Kemet as ancient Egyptian religion.

The only thing on Kemet that I found was the writings of Maulana Karenga and Jacob Carruthers and their followers. In effect, it is these two individuals who are responsible for what they now call Kemet religion.

I therefore prefer to look at this religion as the religious ideas of Karenga and Carruthers instead of Egyptian religion. Karenga is the same individual who initiated what is now called Kwanza and called it African version of Christmas. During Christmas his followers celebrate Kwanza rather than the birth of Jesus Christ. Kwanza is interesting practice.

I think that Kemet is interesting ideas on religion but is by no means the truth. At any rate, who knows what the truth is when it comes to religion and philosophy? So let us then see Kemet as ideas on God rather than the truth.

Kemetic philosophy says that it is a body of ideas that embrace reverence for life. It believes that this reverence for life is what makes life able to persist on planet earth. It says that there is a creator called Neter, Atum, Ptah. This creator created people and apparently people return to him after they leave planet earth.

Our dead are our ancestors and they are back with our creator, Atum. The ancestors are those who lived before us and now help in teaching us to respect all life. They teach us to respect all human beings, and respect peoples relationships. Life must be sustaining life.

The ancestors teach that life is good; life is essential; life is sacred. The ancestors teach us to revere life in each individual.

Karenga and company believe that they are helping African Americans learn to revere life. Apparently, they know that in North American ghettos (where white folks shunted Africans into) folks do not respect life; black folks kill each other as if they are rats.

Karenga and company want to help African-Americans to respect their lives and not destroy them. The African ancestors, the original people of Egypt, say that life is to be revered so revere life and do not kill yourself or other people.

Kemet believes that it is the religion of the flow of life living life. It sees Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism as Aryan religions and philosophies whose only intention is to control people and worship a king (on earth and supposedly in spirit land). As Kemet sees it, these Aryan religions are false religions and only Kemet is true religion.

The Aryan religions and philosophies teach destructive behavior and are destructive of life whereas the Kemetic religion teaches reverence for life. Kemet is in harmony with the flow of life.

Kemet religion has a series of teachings which are almost always ranked in the order of sevens. For example it is says that human beings have levels of spiritual development ranked from the lowest level to the highest:

(7) Physical (6) Energetic/Ethereal (5) Emotional (4) Lower Mental (3) Upper Mental (2) Intuitive and (1) Divine Will.

Another series denoting human development has it as follows:

(7) Perception (6) Examination (5) Reflection (4) Knowledge (3) Understanding (2) Wisdom and (1) Truth.

Then there are the seven deadly sins of:

(7) Lust (6) Gluttony (5) Sloth (4) Greed (3) Wrath (2) Envy and (1) Pride.

According to Kemet, individuals are at different levels in their development and the teaching is aimed at enabling people to increase their level until they attain the highest level, Divine will; here, they realize that they are one with God and begin to manifest divine will on earth. It is said that the ancient Egyptians who built the pyramids used spiritual forces (levitation) to lift those huge rocks up and lay them on each other (modern lifting cranes are unable to lift the rocks that folks lifted 4000 years ago: how did they do it?).

On the whole, Kemet hypothesizes that Africans are a spiritual people whereas Europeans are a mechanical people. White folks are said to be at the lower levels of development: physical, energetic, emotional and lower mental and are able to manipulate nature, study science and technology but lacking in ability to understand spiritual matters (which is left to those operating at the upper mental, intuitive and divine will level).

All these are interesting speculations but as to their truth I am not in a position to ascertain.

As noted, this Kemet religion is the brain child of Karenga (he teaches African Studies at California State University, Long Beach) and Carruthers (he teaches Political Science and Inner City Studies at Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago) , two combative individuals known for their fighting spirit. Their ideas are worth consideration; however, as to whether they are serious ideas on God only the reader could judge for himself.

I am not in the market to buy any religion. I made up my mind long ago, actually, at age 14, that we do not know anything about God. I am an agnostic.

If I have religion it is science. Science is a methodological approach to phenomena that accepts only what is verified and discards all ideas that we cannot verify.

I do not see any evidence for what folks call religion and its gods. The God hypothesis, as Laplace said, is a luxury that I cannot afford. I accept only what I can verify.

If there is life after death it is probably in line with what physics teaches. Contemporary physics teach that there are probably multiverses and that there are probably people in some of those infinite universes and there may even be replicas of each of us in some of those universes.

The search to understand how multiverses work and the development of technology to tunnel our way to some of them is what makes sense to me.

In the meantime, if Karenga's often disjointed and rambling writing about ancient Egyptian, aka African religion appeals to you, by all means accept it. Who among us is qualified to tell you what is true or false in the department of religion? To each of us his own ideas about God and after death life!

• The next review is Dr. Jacob Carruthers, Intellectual Warfare, followed by my concluding Essay (of the ten part series) on The Effects of Africans kidnapping and selling their people into slavery on Africans Psycho-Social functioning today.

Ozodi Osuji

July 6, 2012

Dr. Osuji can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask (1952). New York: Grove Press.

A Book Review By Ozodi Osuji

From a political angle Franz Fanon's most important books are The Wretched of the Earth and A Dying Colonialism. However, I decided to review this particular book, Black Skin, White Mask, primarily because I noticed that many Africans have a tendency to talk about inferiority feeling in Africans. Generally, such Africans lob the term inferiority feeling at some Africans and do so as a put down. That would seem to suggest that they have healthy self-concept. However, when you come close to them you find that they are the most inferior feeling Africans on planet earth!

What they do is see something in them, deny it and then project it to other persons that in their opinion seem to have what they denied in their selves, inferiority feeling. Having grandstanded as black loving they then think that their inferiority feeling is not apparent to professionals trained to discern such matters in people. These people deceive themselves and want to deceive other Africans; if you allow them to deceive you they would take you to the cleaners.

It is such Africans who pretend to love Africa who when they come to positions of political power in Africa literally cart the wealth of Africa to the Western world; they run to the West upon the slightest medical ailment for treatment. This shows that deep down they feel inferior; they believe that their own African medical professionals are not good and that only white medical professionals are good.

They have not dealt with their inferiority feeling at the objective level and are merely mouthing concepts they do not fully understand.

What I decided to do is use Franz Fanon as a point of departure to talk about inferiority and superiority feeling in Africans and African Americans. In effect, this is really not a typical book review that limits itself to a particular book but a spring board from which I talk about a subject that I believe needs to be understood by Africans.

The nature of this subject makes it necessary for me to elaborate on the human psyche hence the paper is going to be longer than the usual two pages book review (It will be twelve pages long).

Franz Fanon (1925-1961) was born in Martinique, a French department in the Caribbean in 1925. His parents were middle class and sent him to the best secondary school on the Island (one of his teachers was Aime Cesaire, the famous poet of Negritude). Upon completing his secondary schooling at age 18, which was during the Second World War, he joined the French army and was shipped off to Algeria. After further training in Algeria he saw fighting against the Germans in Europe.

At the end of war he returned to Martinique and did his undergraduate education and returned to France for medical studies. He obtained the MD degree and specialized in psychiatry, which he completed in 1951.

He wrote Black Skin, White Mask originally as his doctoral thesis but it was rejected and he had to write a more acceptable thesis. In 1952 he published the book (he published the Wretched of the Earth in 1961; Dying Colonialism was published after his death in 1961).

Fanon was what we would today call a radical student. Whereas he did not consider himself a communist he associated with leftists and ultimately joined the Algerians fighting for their liberation from French rule. Upon completing his medical training he sought and got a job in Algeria. There he worked in a psychiatric hospital while participating in Algerians efforts to liberate themselves from French rule. Apparently, the French authorities got wind of what he was up to and repatriated him back to France in 1957.

He immediately left France and went to Tunisia to join up with Arab freedom fighters. Apparently, Tunisia sent him to Accra, Ghana as its ambassador. He participated in the several conferences that President Kwame Nkrumah's burgeoning government had organized. He was later diagnosed with Leukemia and sent to the United States for treatment. He died at age 36 at Maryland, USA.

Franz Fanon was a psychiatrist. Let me therefore expand a bit on the state of psychiatry when he was educated in the field in the 1940s. I do so to give us an idea of the type of education he received thus what shaped his thinking.

Psychiatry as we know it today is a late nineteenth century phenomenon. In Europe, as elsewhere, human beings were baffled by mental illness and did not really know what to make of it. Many attributed it to possession by demons. If you recall, in the bible there is a scene where Jesus cast out the demons that had allegedly taken hold of the mind of a mentally ill person. Thus, many Christians believed that the mentally ill were so as a result of possession by the devil. Mentally ill persons therefore were shunned. Many of them roamed the pathways of their villages and towns ignored by the people.

In the mid nineteenth century Europe and North America there was social work movement to help the poor and homeless. One manifestation of that movement was to house the mentally ill in asylums where they were at least fed properly. Thus, all over Europe and North America the mentally ill in an area were gathered in one place (asylum) and fed.

In Nigeria the mentally ill are still left to roam the streets; Nigerians are not even where Europe was in the mid nineteenth century. The few asylums in Nigeria (built by the British) seldom take good care of the mentally ill and they might as well be left to wander the streets eating from garbage dumps.

In the West, the mentally ill were simply housed and fed. There was no known treatment for them so no efforts were made to treat them. Indeed, no one even knew what to call their mental disorder.

In the late 1800s, a German medical doctor by the name of Emil Kraepelin began what is generally considered the first serious study of mental illness. He delineated the symptoms of what we now call Schizophrenia and Manic-depression (the two major psychoses). However, he did not call the disorder Schizophrenia; that was left to the Swiss psychiatrist, Eugene Bleuler to do.

Kraepelin called what we now call schizophrenia dementia praecox and called the other major mental disorder manic depression (we now call it bipolar affective disorder).

For our present interest, the salient point is that Emil Kraepelin described the symptoms of what we now call schizophrenia and manic depression. What he described is pretty much how mental health professionals still see these mental disorders.

Whereas my goal here is not to transform the reader into a mental health professional, let me briefly say that psychosis is a mental disorder characterized by thought disorder. The individual generally has delusions and or hallucinations.

Delusion means believing what is not true as true (if you believe that you are Jesus Christ and you are not Jesus Christ obviously you are deluded...many mentally ill persons believe that they are Jesus or similar perceived important persons).

Hallucination is perception of what is not there as there; hallucination could occur in any of the five senses: auditory, visual, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, proprioceptive, nociceptive, hypnagogic etc. The psychotic is deluded and hallucinates.

Kraepelin described these symptoms back in the late 1800s and early 1900s and the symptoms remain the same.

There are primarily two major mental disorders, schizophrenia and manic depression. Schizophrenia itself has many subtypes, such as disorganized (this is every person's idea of a mentally ill person, he is the guy dirty and disheveled walking the street and eating from garbage cans), paranoid (this type believes that other people are out to get him, is suspicious, guarded and defensive), undifferentiated (not disorganized or paranoid), catatonic (withdrawn from the world, is in a state of waxy stupor), residual (usual after medications have reduced the major symptoms the person still shows some residual symptoms of schizophrenia but not in a bizarre manner) etc.

Whatever is the type the schizophrenic usually has bizarre delusions and generally also has auditory hallucinations (where there are visual hallucinations often there is an organic issue involved)?

In manic-depression the individual swings from mania to depression. In mania he feels extraordinarily happy, is euphoric, laughs as if he won billions of dollars in the lotto and generally has affect that is out of touch with his immediate environment (if someone around you is dead and you are happy and laughing your affect is not appropriate to the occasion, is it?). The manic person generally has delusions (he may believe that he is the richest man on earth, has millions of dollars in the bank that he does not have, such as claim to be Bill Gates or Barack Obama). Generally, his affect shifts from euphoric mood to depressed mood.

In depression he suddenly feels that life is not worth living and loses interests in the activities of daily living, such as exhibit no interest in work, sports, schools, socialization, and self-care and generally wants to kill himself.

In normal persons the individual's affect tends to be stable and if they shift there is almost always an environmental cause for it. If your child died you would probably feel sad (depressed); if you won the lotto you would probably feel euphoric. In bipolar affective disorder there is no environmental cause for the shifts in mood; therefore, it has to be somatic, internal.

These days we know that there are biochemical factors at work in mental disorders, such as excessive neuro-exciter (neuropinipohrine) in mania, deficient neuro-depressor (serotonin) in depression; excessive dopamine in schizophrenia and deficient GABA in anxiety disorders.

There are variants of the two major psychoses, such as delusion disorder, schizophreniform, and organic mental disorder etc. Additionally, there are hundreds of emotional disorders, disorders induced by drugs, aging brains and disorders found exclusively in children. There are personality disorders found in people in all walks of life (your country's president or work boss, for example, may have narcissistic and or anti-social personality disorder). I doubt that there is a human being that does not have a psychological issue (are you mentally healthy; what does that mean; is stealing from the Nigerian government mental health or antisocial personality disorder; in my experience 99% of Nigerians have treatable mental disorders and, worse, they do not know it; no wonder the country is in a mess!).

For our present purposes, Emil Kraepelin described the two major mental disorders. Emil Kraepelin is considered the father of psychiatry in the Western world. He did not come up with cure for mental illness; and no one has done that to the present (medications merely mask the disorders but do not cure them).

Just out of curiosity, may I ask: how do Africans define mental disorders? Do Africans have cure for mental disorders? I want to see your answer in writing, not just talking. Africans talk too much and do not like to read and write. It is now time for Africans to show the world their science and technology rather than always claim to have had those in abundance in ancient Egypt, not in the contemporary world where they are literally nowhere to be found in science and technology!

While Kraepelin was setting up psychiatry (psychiatry is that branch of medicine that deals with the mentally ill) Sigmund Freud was setting up psychoanalysis to study neurosis; that is, normal persons with living issues.

In the 1890s Freud began paying attention to his clients' emotional issues (he was a regular medical doctor then). He noticed that many of the patients who came to complain about this or that somatic disorder upon examination did not have physical disorders. Yet they believed that they had medical issues. So, what was going on? (Some of them were starved of attention and just needed someone to listen to them...to the present many of the women who go to doctors go to talk to someone who would listen to them because their husbands do not listen to them and the larger society does not listen to women.)

Freud went to Paris and studied with Charcot, a guy who was saying something about hypnosis as a useful tool in medicine. Upon return to Vienna, Austria he began what is now called psychoanalysis, talking therapy. He felt that many of the Victorian women who came to see him actually had sexual issues and not medical problems.

The Victorian society repressed sexuality, especially female sexuality. Women did not even dare mention the sexual part of their bodies. The world would collapse if a woman said that she had a vagina and god forbid that she called it cunt (say that word now; you probably cannot get yourself to say it!). It was simply out of the question for folks to even acknowledge their sexual organs and sexual activities.

Interestingly, whereas the folks were pretending lack of interest in sex, London had more prostitutes during the Victorian era than at any other time!

Anyway, old Freud figured that many of the women who fainted upon the mere mention of certain words were really repressed sexually. He began studying what he called hysteria in women.

To cut a long story short, Freud came to the conclusion that human beings, men and women, are not the refined sexual beings that the Christian religion made them out to be or wants them to be. He said that people in nature are polymorphously sexually perverse.

According to Freud, the average guy not only wants to have sex with all the women around him but also with his own mother and sisters. The average girl not only wants to have sex with all the men around her but with her own father and brothers. Of course, neither of them dare acknowledge these desires.

In childhood society makes sure that folks don't even acknowledge their sexuality (I, a graduate student, nearly fainted when my clinical supervisor told a woman to go the bathroom and masturbate or something instead making the sexual innuendos she was making; he said that there was nothing wrong with masturbation; I actually thought that I was in hell when in a class on human sexuality the professor showed a movie of man and woman having sex; my Catholic upbringing simply did not go that far in what is acceptable sexual behavior).

As Freud sees it, in childhood all of us were forced by our societies to suppress our natural sexuality (which he called Id). Our Id simply wants to have sex with any person around (men and women, Freud said that people are bisexual). The boy child wants to have sex with his mother and sisters and all women; the girl child wants to have sex with her brothers and father.

Society saw to it that none of us even remembers having these sort of forbidden desires (do you remember ever having a desire to have sex with your mother...your mind probably cannot even tolerate such a question!).

There are, of course, medical reasons why sex among family members should be forbidden. Genetic disorders in recessive forms can become dominant if members of the same family have sex and produce sick children. The survival of the human race requires suppressing sex in the immediate family. Sexual taboos had roots in biological reality!

Freud contends that the Id desire is suppressed by what he called the Superego (social mores, which we internalize as our conscience).

The properly socialized child internalized his society's superego (laws, norms, rules etc.) and they are now part of his conscience and he uses it to check his id, his natural inclinations for perverse sexuality and aggression...as animals we took whatever we wanted to eat but in organized society we are told that stealing is bad.

Properly socialized persons with strong superegos do not steal; only those with weak superegos steal. Freud would say that male children from broken families where there are no strong male figures to enforce rules internalize weak superegos and hence tend to commit crimes. By that standard a country like Nigeria where many of the people steal from the government the people have weak superegos.

A third part of the psyche comes into being in what Freud called the ego. The ego is sort of like a referee balancing the desires of the Id and the injunctions of the superego. The id says fuck your mother; the superego says you dare not even think about it, the ego redirects your attention to other sex objects in your world, such as the beautiful damsels at your school.

You get the point; our heads, Freud believes, are battle fields where three forces are at war, our nature, id; society, and superego; and reason, ego fight it out. The normal person balances the three forces in his head.

As Freud sees it, the oedipal conflict in our heads are often not properly resolved (when it is smoothly resolved the girl gives up her desire for her father and instead identifies with her mother and the boy identifies with his father).

In some situations the oedipal complex is not properly resolved and the child still wants to do what society asks him not to do. Consciously, he, of course, cannot say: I want to have sex with my mother. That thought is totally unacceptable to his conscious mind. But Freud says that it is there in the back of his mind, in his unconscious mind, making a mess of his life (for example, making it impossible for him to have satisfactory sexual relationship with his girlfriend or wife).

Neurotic folks come to Freud's office, lay on his famous couch and Freud tells them to say whatever enter their minds without using reason to block unacceptable thoughts (this is called free association). Believe it or not, when folks engage in free association they often say that as children they wanted to see their mothers naked or even have sex with her!

Freud, in effect, said: get what you repressed into your unconscious mind out into the open. Let it all hang out, man. He would then analyze all that stuff dredged out of your unconscious mind (and charge you several hundred dollars per hour of his time). When what is hidden comes out folks feel relief (Catharsis).

(Poor people do not go to psychotherapists, except as in cheap group therapy, not individual sessions. In twenty five years of doing that sort of work I seldom had African-American clients; most of my clients were white folks, usually from families with incomes of over $100, 000 a year. The rich and their children go get analyzed and the poor drink alcohol or mess up, big time. Someone should appoint analysts for the criminals ruling Nigeria.)

When you come to terms with the warring forces in your unconscious mind your life is straightened up a bit. For example, why don't you love your wife? Could it be that you still love your mother and only want to have sex with her, not your wife? You never know what old Sigmund would tell you!

If you can enter into transference relationship with the old boy (analyst) and project what is in your unconscious mind to him, say to him what you wished that you said to your father and repressed you never know what kind of shit would come tumbling out of your filthy mouth (and this time no adult is there to wash your mouth with soup for the analyst gave you permission to say anything; you are not a naughty boy anymore!).

For our present interest Freud began psychoanalysis and rich folks came to his office to analyze what is in their unconscious minds, to find out what is preventing them from living fully. If your wife can get up the courage to tell you to make love to her like you would to a whore she is making progress! Ordinarily, she pretends disinterest in kinky sex but then is angry at you for not making her have gazillion orgasms. Now she tells you exactly what to do to her to give her those much wished for orgasm! Darling, here, give me your hand, here is the G-sport, stroke it. That is good, keep on going, and don't stop (then she shouts from satiation of her sexual needs and for the rest of the day walks in cloud nine, instead of brooding, unhappy).

Do you get the point? After analysis folks feel free to be human, unrepressed by social forces (mores).

I bet that as a Christian some of my language is offensive to you? You would rather I employed sanitized language, eh? And while at it, you would rather they banned pornography?

Here is some information for you. If you banned pornography today rape of women would go up exponentially.

And here is another piece of news for you. Your minister at church who talks poetry is probably visiting prostitutes at night! Worse, he is most likely to rape your child, boy or girl. You have heard what Catholic priests have been up to, haven't you?

Reverend Swaggard talks about the need to not have sex outside marriage and goes to a motel room to have sex with prostitutes; Reverend Jim Baker talks shop about marriage and in the meantime is having sex with men, not just his wife!

Old Freud wants people to quit their pretenses over sex and permit themselves to satisfy their sexuality with consenting adults.

The point is that Freud tells us that adult society is based on pretentious morality and that we ought to accept our true selves; he said that we are sexual animals.

As a psychotherapist I have heard it all, those we call the pillars of society, medical doctors, lawyers etc. telling me how they cruise the streets picking up hookers for sex and going home to their wives to pretend proper behavior. Old Freud would say that all these happen because of our repression of our Id. Understand the Id and manage it and you would do fine, but whatever you do please do not pretend to be who you are not; you are not an angel; you are an animal with animal needs and that is all there is to you.

Freud blew the whole sex thing wide open. His contribution to psychology is his feedback that we look at our sexuality with a bit more honesty than pretension.

When Freud began his psychoanalysis other medical doctors in Vienna joined the psychoanalytic club (you have to be analyzed before you can analyze other people, for among other reasons so as to understand yourself and not project your issues to other people). One of those doctors was Alfred Adler. Adler became second in command to Freud. However, right from the beginning he was not happy with Freud's over emphasis on sex as the primary motivator of our behaviors.

By 1910 Adler had developed his own ideas about the nature of neurosis. He no longer saw eye to eye with Freud and naturally he was kicked out by Freud (Freud was dictatorial). Adler formed his own psychoanalytic club called Individual psychology.

Now, pay attention to Adler for all that Fanon did was use Adler's psychological framework to develop his view of black folk's psychology in his book, black skin, white mask.

Adler's basic view is that all human beings feel inferior. The next time you call somebody inferior feeling stop and ask about your own inferiority feeling!

The African who calls other people inferior feeling must pause and understand his own feelings of inferiority. You must first remove the plank in your eyes before you see the speck of sand in other people's eyes. Or, as they say, those who live in glass houses should not throw stones.

Let me reiterate; Adler said that all of us feel inferior, in degrees. Those born with organic problems (biological issues that make them feel weaker than others tend to feel exaggerated sense of inferiority). Social factors like racism could also exaggerate our sense of inferiority.

The point is that all people feel inferior but some more so than others. Where it is exaggerated there are biological and or sociological factors at work.

To be human is to feel inadequate and inferior Vis a Vis the environment. We are born and will die and that makes us feel inferior. The physical and social environment does not care for our safety and does things to us that we do not like. Tsunami, earthquake, volcano, flood, drought, tornado, plagues virus, fungus, bacteria etc. could destroy you at any moment. We are vulnerable and feel weak.

In addition some have physical issues and or social issues that exacerbate their sense of weakness. Black Americans are told that they are unintelligent by white folks; this exacerbates their existential sense of nothingness.

To live we must try to overcome our weakness. It takes power to master our environment hence survive on it. Thus, we struggle to overcome our inferiority.

Every child feels inferior and compensates with drive to power and superiority. All of us seek power and superiority, Adler says. This is a human issue but it is exaggerated in some persons.

Some feel more inferior and compensate with more superiority. As Adler sees it, the normal person has little inferiority and little superiority; the neurotic has too much inferiority and too much superiority.

The neurotic has an all or nothing approach to superiority. His whole life is lived as if he is the fictional important person he desires to become; he cannot tolerate not becoming important. At school he must be first in his class or he feels that he is the last, best or nothing (Adler called it all or nothing approach to living).

(Adler, by the way, built on his own experience. As a child he felt shy, that is, inadequate relative to the other boys and compensated with drive to be good at his studies. He struggled to be the first boy in his class or he felt like he was a failure; that way he bulldozed his way to obtaining a medical degree from the University of Vienna at a very Young age. Adler was the neurotic he was talking about; and you are also a neurotic if you are a successful person.)

Feeling of inferiority has nothing to do with intelligence; in fact, the more intelligent a person is the more likely he is to feel insecure than averagely intelligent persons. Consider Adolf Hitler.

Adolf Hitler was a neurotic (in today's diagnostic categories he could be diagnosed as having narcissistic, antisocial and paranoid personality disorders...personality disorder is another name for neurosis). He was born with organic issues. His stomach could not handle all kinds of food. He literally fainted if you smoked around him. He fainted if he drank a cup of coffee. His body could not even handle meat. He was a vegetarian. All said he felt inferior as a result of his biological issues.

Like all people he did not like to feel inferior. He tried to feel superior. The way he could do so is to tell him that he is superior to all people. I estimate his IQ at around 140 so in truth he is superior to 99% of the people. But he could have used that intelligence to serve the people. Instead, he used it to try dominating the people.

Adler said that each of us must use his abilities to serve people (he called it social interest). What Adler teaches is that people should accept their inferiority feeling and pursue superiority but put their pursuit to serving society. He said that we cannot get to a point where we do not feel inferior. A neurotic must redirect his movement to serving people rather than trying to merely seem superior to them.

Freud began psychoanalysis. Adler joined him and expanded it. Other folks, such as Carl Jung, Otto Rank and Karen Horney joined up the movement to understand how the human mind works in scientific term (not from religious or philosophical speculations) took off.

Thus, we have German psychoanalysis (actually it was mostly a Jewish affair) club working with worried well neurotics. On the other end of the spectrum was Kraepelin expanding our understanding of psychosis. Kraepelin helped us understand psychosis and Freud, Adler and Jung helped us understand neurosis.

Psychology and Psychiatry began as a German affair. The Germans, as you know from philosophy, think abstractly. Have you read Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Feuerbach? Did you understand what you read? These folks tend to go off on a tangent talking abstract nonsense. Try reading Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind and see if you understand what the hell the man is saying or read Kant's Critique of Pure reason or Schopenhauer's World as Will and Idea. You get the idea, they are speculative and idealistic. German psychology is speculative.

The English has something about them. They are grounded on planet earth. They take this world seriously and want to study it as it is and understand it on its own terms and make the most of it. They are logical positivists, empiricists and scientists (the scientific method studies the world as it is, not as we want it to be; it posits ideas, hypotheses about the world and accepts those verified as true and discards those without empirical evidence supporting them).

They do not listen to you if you go on a trip talking abstract stuff. John Bull wants you to show him how your ideas work in our world of space, time and matter.

Englishmen did not like all that German speculative psychoanalysis. They wanted a science of psychology. Watson, B.F. Skinner, Esynck and other Angelo Saxon thinkers came into psychology rather late and brought their realism to bear on it (the Russian, Pavlov joined them). They, in effect, told Freud: don't talk about what goes inside peoples unconscious minds for we do not see it; what we see are people's actual behaviors.

The English redirected psychology to behaviorism. Behaviorism does not speculate about peoples thinking but observes their actual behavior.

How does it work? If I praise your ego you like it. If I give you something tangible you like it. Therefore, instead of worrying about what is in your head I will concentrate on doing what works in getting you to do what I want you to do for me.

Psychology then should be about people's actual behavior, not their ideal behavior. If you want someone to do something positively reinforce such behavior in him? Do you want your child to be a good student? Don't moralize about the virtues of education. Praise him or her when he studies; give him psychological and or material gifts when he studies.

This is called classical and operant conditioning. It works in behavior modification.

By the 1952s certain accidental discoveries led psychiatry to realize that mental illness is not only in folk's minds but in their bodies. Someone had discovered the medication, Thorazine, to treat Tuberculosis. Somehow someone discovered that it calmed down agitated psychotics. So from 1952 we began giving psychotics Thorazine (the first psychotropic medication for psychosis).

Similar medications were soon discovered, such as millaril, navane, prolixine, Haldol etc. By the 1990s we have improved medications for treating psychosis, such as Risperdal, Zyprexa etc.

For mania we now have lithium and Depakote and others; for depression we now have Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil; for anxiety disorders we now have the various anxiolytic medications.

The relevant point is that beginning in the 1950s we discovered that mental illness has something to do with the role of the various neurotransmitters (dopamine, neuropiniphren serotonin, GABA etc.) in the brain and we began treating the mentally ill with medications. As a result we had to empty our asylums

In the past folks used to be sent to asylums and stayed there all their lives. These days the average stay at psychiatric hospitals is only a few weeks. Folks are stabilized with medications and released into the community (and treated by medical practionners in the community and also case managed).

Psychiatry has gone from merely weigh-housing the mentally ill to actually giving them neuroleptic medications that help control their symptoms although not cure them.

Franz Fanon went to medical school in the 1940s. From what I said above what can you say about his psychiatric training? He was trained in psychoanalysis; he was exposed to Freud and Adler. He was exposed to some behaviorism (Watson, Pavlov etc.).

He was not exposed to medicinal psychiatry. He would have known nothing about giving the mentally ill medications (except may be try electric shock or lobotomy on the depressed)!

Franz Fanon gravitated to Alfred Adler's individual psychology, and less so to Freud. Fanon took Adler and used his ideas to apply to himself and to his fellow black folks. The book, Back Skin, White Mask is based on Adlerian psychology. Now let us see what the book said.

The book did not waste time but dived right into the matter. Fanon said that upon coming to Paris, France, that is, white man's land., his fellow Martinique's who had lived in the colonies and essentially were told that white folks were like gods had one thing and one thing in mind, to find out if white men were really god like.

White women were placed on a pedestal so black folks want to have sex with them. Fanon and his friends went to a brothel and had sex with white women.

In effect, Africans want to have sex with white women. White women are supposed to represent the almighty white race so having sex with them is finding out what this whole race thing is all about.

Fanon found out that the white woman is exactly like the black woman he had sex with in Martinique. There is absolutely no difference between white women and black women (except cultural differences).

So what was that all about? What it was all about was that the white man had exalted his women and dangled them in front of black men and say: come get them if you can (not before I have first lynched you); they are pure and your own black women are filthy.

Black men think that they should have sex with white women and they always do and find them the same as their black women. Having found that the white woman is exactly like the black woman the normal black man returns to his black women.

Generally, normal black men, Africans included, return to black women. For one thing they understand them culturally and do not want to deal with women from a different culture. Life is easier if you married somebody from your culture and that is exactly what black men do.

But there are few black men who want to transcend their culture. Fanon wanted to transcend his culture. Therefore, having experimented with white women he moved on and eventually devoted himself to his work.

In devoting himself to his life's work, which was fighting for the liberation of colonized people, especially Algerians he found out that leftist French women were active in this war. He found himself around white women committed to the course he was committed to.

He gravitated to one such woman. This time not because of sex but because of common purpose. Not all black men who marry white women do so because they are fascinated by white vagina, as idiot Africans tend to think.

There are many reasons why folks do what they do. To attribute interracial marriage only to black men feeling inferior and seeking superiority by proximity to white folks is to be a lazy thinker. A lazy thinker does not understand that there are complex motivations actuating people's behaviors.

Most Africans who talk about inferiority actuating black men who marry white women are lazy thinkers. In fact, they are not even thinkers, they are dummies.

Some of those blacks who have made the most seminal contributions to the liberation of the black race where married to white women. I can think of Franz Fanon, Richard Wright etc.

People are cultural animals and generally gravitate to those who share their culture. You may be black and your culture is every bit as German as the most blond German. You may be black and love Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Handel, Hayden, Straus, Wagner etc. You are going to be around those with similar interests. Race has got nothing to with anything.

Black Skin, White Mask? What does this really mean? Fanon is telling us that some folks with black skin feel compelled by the exigencies of their times, white dominated world and perception of things white as better than things black, to desire being white like. He is saying that black folks deny their real black selves and put on a mask that shows them to be white. Black folks act as if they are white folks.

The concept of mask is actually what human personality is all about. The term personality comes from persona meaning mask. Greek actors wore masks to prevent those in the audience from recognizing who they are as they try to enact their behaviors; it would not be nice if the actors enacted the pretended importance of local big wigs and made fun of their pretensions. Those whose behaviors are caricatured tend to feel shamed and angry at those who shamed them.

When people feel unmasked and humiliated they tend to attack whoever did that to them. Generally, people prefer to live as the phony pretended important selves they present themselves as. People are weak animals who pretend to be special beings. If you want to get along with folks collude with them and tell them that they are who they pretend to be, godlike; if you want to alienate them dare tell them the truth of how you see them and how they are (I dared, for example, telling Igbos that they are not the angels they present themselves as and for being truthful many of them have been after my skin!).

Greek actors had to hide their identity to avoid been attacked by those whose personalities they were portraying on the stage. People do not like you to bring the skeletons in their closets out to the public; they prefer to keep presenting sham selves to other people to relate to as who they are.

In doing so, social dances, all lies, in engaging in this Games people play, as Eric Berne called it, people live in their private worlds, lonely and unhappy lives.

The purpose of clinical psychology, inter alia, is to enable people to put away their masks and live more authentic lives; when they live from their real selves they are spontaneous and happy.

Personality means that human beings real selves are not known to them, that they put on persona, masks that they act in the public.

When I see you I see a mask, your set of social behaviors, behaviors you learned in society that you believe that if you act them out other people would accept you. That is what child socialization is all about; it is to get the child to act as other people would accept him to act or else they reject him, disapprove of him, even arrest and jail him (if he deviates from accepted social Norms).

To have a personality is to wear a mask. So who then are we? Carl Jung said that beneath the mask, persona, personality is a different self. He thinks that that self is spirit. We all, as it were, are spirit but are enacting personal social dances.

Jung's therapy aims at helping the individual to understand his personality (introverted, extroverted, ambivalent etc.) and then transcending it; the individual is to understand his conscious self, his unconscious self (which dreams help us to understand) and his collective unconscious self (group self in the individual). He is also to understand his animal self. After all these have been done the individual is now ready to reach his spiritual self.

I am saying that Fanon employing the concept of mask is not exactly novel in psychology. The entirety of personality theory is to understand peoples masks and removing them so that they would live more fully hence happily and peacefully.

Fanon told us that black folks feel inferior Vis a Vis white folk. Western civilization presented itself as superior to all other civilizations. Africa is called the heart of darkness by the Polish writer, Joseph Conrad.

Considered primitive Africans want to be seen as civilized (to be civilized is to live in cities...so Africans now live in cities). White skin is presented as the most civilized skin so Africans want to be like white folks (African women even bleach their skin white). They want their societies to be like Western societies... Lagos wants to be like London, may be as beautiful as Paris or Rome.

What does that mean? It means that Lagosians assume that London and Paris are already better than their city, superior to it and by generalization Parisians are superior to Lagosians.

The message of Fanon's book is that black folk must stop wishing to be like white folk and accept their black selves.

Fanon was not the first or only person who talked about the Negro personality as self-hating, stunted and imitative of white folks. There is a whole genre of studies and writings on the subject. The reader could see Gunnar Myrdal, The American Dilemma, Karon, The Negro Personality; Thomas Pettigrew, A profile of the American Negro; Franklin Frazier, The Negro Middle Class; Octavos Omanini, Prospero and Caliban, the Psychology of Colonization; Albert Memi, The Colonizer and the Colonized. These books essentially said that the Negro hates his black self and wants to become a white like self.

Of course, the Negro is always black and therefore cannot succeed in his efforts to be white like. He is thus stock being a divided self, hence a weakened self for if one has a split self, black and white in him one is bound to be weak.

In 1903 W.E.B. Dubois wrote a whole book, Soul of Black Folk, in which he said that the Negro has two selves, his African self and his white self.

Gordon Allport in his book, The Nature of Prejudice told is how racism works in America and what it disposed the discriminated, Jews and Blacks, to do: always trying to imitate white folks and to be close to white folks(proximity to white folks makes inferiority feeling minority persons feel as superior as white folks are supposed to be).

The life of always trying to imitate others takes its toll on folks, it depowers them. Not to talk about the time it takes to imitate other folks instead of just being one 's self.

Michelle Obama and Condoleezza Rice spend hours every week straightening their wooly hair, all in vain attempt to make their hair seem white like. Why not just accept their hair as Ms. Eleanor Norton (the lady representing Washington DC in Congress) does?

Thank God Negro men are no longer frying their hair to look like white hair, as Malcolm X said that they used to do in the 1940s.

Fanon's point is that Negroes are always trying to be white like; he wants them to stop doing so. Look, you all, stop trying to be like white folks; accept yourself as you are. Black skin is okay; I am black and proud James Brown said (and still fried his hair).

(In his other books, especially The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon ventured into discourse of political philosophy; we are not dealing with that here; we are dealing with the psychological here.)

Talk is cheap, is it not? What is difficult is action. It is easy to tell the Negro to quit trying to be like his master and accept his black self. The real question is: what exactly is his real self that he has to accept?

Is it the self in Africa before he was kidnapped and sold into slavery by Africans? If Africans were that good would they roam their world kidnapping their people and selling them to Arabs and white folks? Should Negroes imitate Africans who sold them? Is the African-self ideal (do ideal people sell their siblings into slavery and instead of feeling guilty for their wrong blame those they sold them to)?

In contemporary Africa what are African leaders but thieves in government? Are criminals in government to be imitated? No.

Negroes now look to ancient Egypt for religion and culture, not to black Africa for black Africa is not ideal.

Clearly, the Negro has to examine his behavior and jettison those that are not congruent with his nature but I doubt that that means jettisoning Western Europe. We live in a world dominated by the West. Even Asians with ancient cultures are increasingly accepting European culture. Chinese business men and leaders are now wearing Western business suits, instead of what their ancestors wore. The world is increasingly remade in the image of the white man.

I am saying that all these loose talk about being African is exactly that, talk. What is the African that folks are supposed to be like? Wear agbada that handicaps one from working efficiently in the new global economy? Agbada clad Nigerians are the least productive people on earth; they are living off oil revenue and when it is gone they become laborers for productive others, for China man, white man.

Black Americans are Americans not Africans. Of course they can study Africa and borrow what is acceptable in it for them. In the here and now they are Americans.

I am saying that the only choice left modern Africans is to take from all over the world what serves their interests and quit talking rubbish about inferiority and superiority (both inferiority and superiority are delusions, they are not real; what is real is human sameness and equality), imitating white folks for everyone is imitating very one.

Personality is learned; it is something we develop from imitating others. The only choice we have is to make our personalities relatively healthy by making them approximate our real selves.

What are our real selves? What is your real self, do you know who you in truth are? Are you an animal, ego or spirit? What are you? Quit making noise and taking your noise as profound knowledge.

Franz Fanon died at the age of 36. That means that he did not live long enough to truly have deep understanding of human nature. His thoughts were the thoughts of a young man, shallow but interesting. He was a bright Negro who studied Adlerian psychology and used it to try to understand his people. But his understanding of psychology was superficial and therefore what he said in black skin, white mask showed school boy level of understanding of the human phenomenon.

He is, of course, worth reading but most people above age forty probably would find him childish and not pay much attention to his hypothesizing.

We do not know what the human self is so to pretend that if one just accepts ones skin color or African culture one would have found one's self is to talk arrant nonsense.

Man is too complex for mere sociological approach to him to explicate who he is entirely. The objective of living on earth is to struggle to gradually find out who we are; we do not already know who we are. If we already know who we are I doubt that we would be here on earth.

When we find out who we are we are done with this world and move on to other universes and continue the learning and knowing that is our nature; there is infinite stuff to be learned and understood in the multiverses that exist where we are.

Ozodi Osuji

July 4, 2012

Dr. Osuji can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Next Reviews are (1) Kemet (2) Caruthers, Intellectual warfare (3) and finally a paper on the effect of Africans kidnapping and selling their people to Arabs and White men on Africans (paranoid persons and corrupt cultures that do not respect human beings). 

Joy Degruy Leary, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome. (Milwaukie, Oregon: Upton Press, 2005) 235 Pages.

Book Review By Ozodi Osuji

In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (2005 Edition) there is a nosological category called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This is a grab bag diagnosis because it encompasses symptoms found in other psychiatric disorders such as anxiety disorder and depression, even delusion disorder. The idea is that those who were exposed to stressful and or traumatic situations tend to exhibit certain symptoms.

For example, children who were abused, housewives who were terrorized by abusive husbands, soldiers who were exposed to killing at battlefronts, children who were caught up in war zones and other areas where they were exposed to abuse and see death and dying felt their lives threatened. Generally, when human beings are exposed to life threatening situations they experience fear (anxiety is the name for fear without immediate known cause).

When a person points a gun at you or threatens your life you experience fear (panic). You feel your life threatened and experience a powerful urge to run away or fight back. Your body elicits certain powerful neurochemicals, such as adrenalin and they force you to either run or fight. The neurochemicals make most of the organs in your body to work rapidly. Your heart beats faster; your lungs beat faster. Your lungs drag in more air (oxygen from the outside) and your heart transports that oxygen to all parts of your body via blood.

Your body releases sugar (source of energy) and that energy is rushed to all the muscles in your body by blood. The energy and oxygen rushed to all parts of your body prepare them to either run away from the source of danger or fight it.

In danger, generally you find yourself able to do what ordinarily you were unable to do. When your life is threatened you can run the 100 meters dash at a speed that would make an Olympian athlete proud. You are running to save your life and there is no time to waste for it is do or die.

Your nervous system works faster than it normally does, due to elicited excitatory neurotransmitters that make the neurons fire faster than normal.

Your body sends messages to and from the brain quicker than normal and the brain searches its memory bank asking it how you should respond to the present threat to your life, to stay and fight back or run away. If you have a history of fighting back in such situations you stay and fight but if your memory tells you that you have no chance in hell of overcoming the threat you are pushed to run away.

When you try talking you talk very fast because your vocal cords as all other parts of your body has been speeded up by the various neurochemical reactions in your body.

Essentially, your nature (biological organism) perceives threat to it and does what it has to do to enable you survive, fight or flee. You do not have the time to do calm thinking; you just react, as it were, in an instinctual manner. Nature wants you to survive and makes you do what you have to do to survive.

What I described above is the famous flight or fight response to danger to our lives. The flight part of the response is called fear; the fight part of it is called anger. Fear and anger, therefore, have the same physiological reactions in our bodies; the same neurochemicals are involved in both responses. From a physiological perspective you could not tell the difference between fear and anger response; the body responds the same way except that in one your brain judges you able to fight back and you stay and fight and in the other your brain judges you unable to fight back and forces you to run away. (This probably accounts for the fact that angry people are generally fearful people; the biological reactions are the same. These days the medications given to angry people and fearful people are the same, the various anti-anxiety medications.)

Most people have experienced fear in their lives and understand the reaction I have just described. In normal situations our lives are only occasionally threatened so we experience fear only once in a while. Nature, apparently, anticipated that we will occasionally be attacked and built into our bodies an involuntary fear/anger response. When you are attacked nature does not ask you how you should respond, you just respond with fear or anger.

If one is in a situation where one's life is constantly threatened, such as in an abusive home, one experiences fear and anger most of the time. That which nature made to prepare one to run or fight for one's safety is now employed every day. Worse, in the case of a child who is abused (consider a five year old being raped by her father and or other adults in her life...and these days, boys are also raped especially by Catholic priests) the child cannot even run away. The body reacts as just described and urges the child to run away but where is she going to run to if the father is abusing her? The child is thus caught between a rock and a hard place. There is no escape for her.

Some sexually traumatized children sometimes try to use their minds to escape the abuse. In which case, an abused girl denies that the body and sexual organ being raped by the adult belongs to her. She dissociates from her body and invents another self, a self that is not being abused.

It is hypothesized that this is the origin of dissociative disorders, such as multiple personality disorder. A child subjected to abuse dissociates from herself and invents a different self; the long term consequence is that she now has two or more selves, the abused self and the self that is not abused. Thus, she ends up with many selves: her real self, the abused self and the alter egos that are not abused...Leary did not go into the type of detail I have ventured into here.

I would suggest that black psychologists look into the possibility that some of the behaviors of African Americans are dissociative, as in abused persons dissociating from their real selves; that is, African Americans are not being their real selves in their behaviors but are being alter egos they evolved to adapt to a terrorizing environment? If so, the question is: what is their real self?

Soldiers at the battle front are constantly shot at and shoot at others. They kill and fear being killed. The killing business takes a toll on their psyche. Many of them experience what used to be called shell shock (now called PTSD). Their minds quit the battle front and they simply go numb, and they are now in shock. They become unable to do anything. Folks used to say that such soldiers were pretending illness trying to avoid being at the war front to go kill for their political leaders and their nations (recall the famous scene where George C. Scott enacted out what General Patton supposedly did when he saw shell shocked soldiers at a military hospital: dressed them down as cowards). No, something in them had had enough of this unnatural business of training people to go kill or get killed when they would rather be loved and love their fellow human beings.

All told, those exposed to constant danger to their lives tend to experience trauma to their psychological selves as well as to their bodies. If a child has been raped or abused his mind and body is traumatized. Thereafter that person shows certain symptoms, mainly anxiety, depression and paranoia, the syndrome called post-traumatic stress disorder by psychiatry.

An abused woman could now be walking down a street and see a man that looks like the man that raped or abused her and feel all the fear she felt when she was been abused (she may run across the street to get away from him, even though he is not the person who abused her). She could be walking down a Street and see a house that reminds her of a house where she was abused and she experiences the intense fear, panic she had felt when actually abused.

Once traumatized, abused the human mind is easily triggered by danger that reminds it of that abuse. Once traumatized a person could be sitting in the comfort of his home and then suddenly for no apparent reason experiences all the symptoms of intense fear, feel as he felt when he was being abused and his life was in actual danger. Now he is supposedly in the safety of his house and experiences panic and terror.

Anticipatory fear could be at work. Once traumatized your mind could anticipate similar trauma or think of the past abuse and your body elicits reactions as if it is actually being attacked now.

A soldier who had been at the battle field can now be in his room and feel as he felt when he was at the battlefield. He feels intense fear and stress and reacts with the same fear and or anger response.

He may go buy alcohol and other drugs in an effort to calm his body down. Stress and traumatic reaction often leads to abuse of drugs that calm one's body (such as alcohol, anti-anxiety agents...Valium, Xanax, Ativan, Librium, Klonipine; heroine, morphine, anything that calms the body). Past abuse and trauma tends to lead to abuse of drugs and to drug addiction in the abused person; additionally, it messes up that person's emotional state and of course interpersonal relationships (would you be able to deal with a person who is often panicking and running from situations that you do not consider life threatening or would you be able to cope with a person who falsely accuses you of trying to harm, kill him?).

Post-traumatic stress disorder is found in many soldiers who returned from battle fields (such as Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan). The various VA hospitals are filled with soldiers suffering from PTSD. They are usually treated with a combination of medications and psychotherapy (they are often given anxiolytics but since those are addictive, anti-depressants such as Paxil, Prozac, and Zoloft are tried).

Psychotherapy entails understanding the nature of the trauma the individual went through and working through the issues aroused for him. Individual, group and family therapies are often tried. Generally, it takes years to work through the issues associated with PTSD. It is doubtful that anyone can be completely healed of their traumatic experiences; such experiences tend to stay in the individual's mind and affect his or her behavior for the rest of his life.

And, worse, such persons often develop behavior patterns that they may pass on to their children (hence multi-generational effect of abuse). For example, if you abuse someone and make him fearful most of the time he may develop paranoid tenancies.

In paranoia the individual anticipates that other people could attack, him or even kill him. He defends himself by avoiding those he believes are out to harm him. This behavior pattern, anticipatory avoidance of danger, may be passed to the individual's children. He socializes them to be afraid of other people and the children learn to anticipate danger and avoid it. These ways paranoid persons produce paranoid children! However, there may be biological factors involved, such as tendency to higher somatic arousal, more or quicker adrenalin elicitation etc.

I hope that I have, more or less, given a bird's eye view of what PTSD is. What Dr. Leary did in her book is extrapolate from what psychiatry knows about PTSD and apply it to the African American situation. She considers the experience of African-Americans in America traumatic hence caused PTSD in many of them (she called her diagnosis post traumatic slave syndrome or PTSS).

Consider what happened. Africans, some of them under ten years old, were yanked away from their homes in Africa. They were packed like sardines in slave ships and brought to the Americas (many died in the middle passage). In the Americas they were sold as slaves and used to do farm work by their white slave masters. They were worked like animals, in fact, often worse than folks worked their mules. They were worked until they dropped dead.

They were not considered human beings, just farm animals. Even as they were considered animals their white masters and their children gratified their sexual urges on them. When the slave master felt sexual he took any female (perhaps males too) slave he wanted and raped her (that way many African Americans became mixed race, all due to the man who is preaching racial superiority!).

White teenage boys learned all about sex by raping black women, some often as young as twelve years old. Rape is a terrorizing experience.

African slaves were subjected to such terrible treatment that it is difficult to believe that those who did this thing to their fellow human beings are human beings. Are white folks human beings?

Bobby Wright, a black psychologist believes that white folks are born psychopathic and sociopathic; that is, are brutes. He thinks that they have no conscience, no sense of guilt or shame or remorse feeling.

Dr. Leary provided what she called the symptoms of post traumatic slavery syndrome, PTSS. Actually, what she did is package most of what most people already know as issues in the African American community and attributed them to the trauma of slavery and racism. In other words, she attributed causality without proof.

Going along with her hypothesis, she said that PTSS is characterized by the tendency for black folks to be prone to anger. We all know that black folks appear to have smoldering anger in them and any little trigger leads to the explosion of that anger. Friends could be having fun and one says what annoys the other and he goes home and grabs a gun and blows the others head away. Dr. Leary thinks that this tendency to rage in the African American is attributable to slavery and the frustrations African Americans, especially the males experience in America.

We all know that African Americans are usually the last hired for jobs and the first fired. We know that they are disrespected by the white community. We know that police harass them, especially black males; we know that they are disproportionately represented in the penal community. All these issues cause anger and the African American has anger issues. Whether this anger issue is directly caused by slavery is debatable but one suspect that it probably has something to do with it.

Dr. Leary talked about low self-esteem (in her words, vacant esteem) in the African Americans. What is racism but the propaganda that black folks are less intelligent than white folks and are supposedly closer to animals than people? We all know that the intention of racism is to make black folks doubt their worth; everything in the American polity is deigned to impress on Africans how stupid they are. It is therefore not a wonder that many African Americans have low self-esteem.

Kenneth Clark's doll experiment in the 1950s showed that black kids preferred white dolls to black dolls; one doubts that the situation has changed greatly today.

Black children generally do not have positive expectations from their society. Indeed, they see bleak futures for them. Dr. Leary talked about ten year old black boys already making plans for their death and funeral in the Washington DC area; they were already planning about what clothes they would be buried in! In their neighborhoods (called the murder capital of the USA) black kids kill other black kids as if they are rats. Drive by killing is part of their everyday experience. If they are not killed by their fellow blacks they can expect to have run-ins with the police and probably wound up in jails and prisons in their teenage years.

In jails and prisons (where one out of four black youth are) they are likely going to be raped and eventually marked for murder. (The jail experience is probably an immediate traumatizing experience for African Americans.)

Racism does wonders in these United States of America; it socializes black children to expect death at a very early age. You find young black men not expecting to live past twenty four years old. You find forty year old black men who tell you that most of the people they grew up with are either dead or are in prisons. And they tell you all these as a matter of fact. Theirs is a hopeless existence.

Dr. Leary talked about the effect of PTSS on black male and female relationships. We know that during slavery marriage was discouraged by the slave owners but after slavery blacks did make a valiant effort to restart and rehabilitate marriage between them. Today, over 70% of black children are raised by single black women.

It seems that black men get the sisters pregnant and do not want to stick around for marriage and raising the children. And before you start blaming any one you had better realize that the brothers may be unemployed and do not have money and may have been in and out of prisons since age twelve. They feel their manhood denigrated by poverty. It takes money to support children and if one does not have money one is no good to the children. We also know that generally speaking women tend to prefer men with money and tend to respect men with money. Poor and unemployed men are seldom respected by women (black or white women).

The few black men that manage to make it through some kind of college education, Dr. Leary said, appear motivated to run away from the sisters and shack up with white women. In America white womanhood is presented as ideal womanhood and some of the brothers apparently have internalized the idea that white women are preferable to black women, she said.

Black women, too, judge their beauty relative to white ideals of beauty: consider what they do to straighten their hair and lighten their color etc.; it may well be that racial influences also dispose black women not to respect black men, after all the white world does not respect black men and the white man at least finds black women tolerable as sex toys hence has value for him and that kind of gives black women perverted sense of more worth than black men in racist America?

What Dr. Leary did was enumerate what we all know are the problems found in the black community and attributed them all to PTSS; she appears to say that the social breakdown we find in the black community is symptomatic of the past and present traumatic experience of black folk in the hands of white folks. Whether she is right or not is a different story.

Her book is her perception, her opinion, not a social-psychological study that finds correlation between two variables. I am supposing that it is a gold mine for those who want to do actual studies to take specific ideas from her book and study them. Is there really correlation between PTSS and, say, drug taking?

Couldn't drug taking be due to a whole set of causes including perceived meaninglessness of life in North America? Those living in the great cities of America, such as Los Angeles, Chicago and New York are essentially like animals in a zoo; nature probably did not mean for people to live like that; ghetto living, it seems to me, is unnatural living.

Not too long ago people lived in country villages where they lived in nature and breathed fresh air. These days they are inhaling fumes from the millions of cars on the streets of big cities. This is not exactly how life is meant to be?

This kind of life is probably enough to give people a feeling that life is pointless and they then try to escape from their pessimistic perception of being by taking recourse in alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, excessive sexual activity and over eating, anything to make them feel pleasurable in a depressing world. (A few weeks in Washington DC depressed me; I kept asking: how could people live in such a bleak and depressing environment; why can't they escape to the country side and inhale fresh air and enjoy the beauty of unspoilt nature; I left as soon as I could to the greener pastures of the pacific northwest where one could live in the country side).

I am saying that the causal factors for all the problems that Dr. Leary enumerated may not be what she thinks that they are. It is very easy to reduce everything wrong with black America to supposed origin in the trauma of slavery and racism. Her book is probably another reductionistic social science; it reduced complex issues to sociological causes only.

There happen to be biological and existential factors at work in people's lives. Indeed, biology probably determines over 75% of human behavior. There is a tendency for black scholars to totally ignore biological variables and only harp on self-evident social factors at play in folk's lives. Those social factors are only the partial causes of folk's problems.

Even if you improve people's social lives they would still grapple with biological and existential issues, such as why are they alive, what are they living for, is life worth living.

Dr. Leary obviously is not a philosopher or even a psychologist; she is a social worker and her book reflects her social work background; it lacks grounding in theoretical understanding of human nature and human behavior; it is a string of hastily thrown together ideas that may not be causally related.

A good portion of Dr. Leary's book is narration of the history of slavery in the United States. She gave an acceptable history of the African American experience from 1619 when the first slaves were brought to Jamestown, Virginia to the present USA. She gave us a picture of the slaves' lot in America: unmitigated abuse from sun up to sun down.

She told us about how slavery and subsequent discrimination against black Americans amounted to terrorizing them. I agree. Slavery was terrorism. Let us stop minimizing what white Americans did to black Americans. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and other slave masters were terrorists; they terrorized their slaves. Of course, that was not how they saw their victims; they fancied themselves Christians giving benighted Africans the light of Christ. Christians indeed!

Jesus asked his followers to love all people and these predatory monsters exploited people's labor for free, worked them to death and did not even mark their burial grounds.

I have on a number of occasions visited Jefferson's Monticello, Washington's Mount Vernon, Madison's Montpellier and the other mansions of the founder terrorists and saw where they buried their kindred and asked the tourist guides where they buried their slaves and they looked at me as if I was crazy. The slaves were apparently thrown into unmarked graves (if indeed they were buried; who knows whether these savages calling themselves civilized folk ate the bodies of their slaves, too; one wouldn't put it pass them!).

Dr. Leary made an acceptable argument that slavery and racial discrimination was traumatic to African Americans. Her argument is persuasive and one accepts it.

Since we know that the effects of trauma are often passed to future generation, even when the abused is no longer abused, Dr. Leary believes that former slaves passed the behavior patterns developed during slavery to contemporary African Americans.

Although she did not really develop this hypothesis beyond anecdotal extrapolations I think that she is telling the truth. I think that contemporary African Americans are still suffering from the effects of slavery on their ancestors.

Much of what seems like unnatural behaviors found in contemporary African Americans can be traced to their history of abuse. Drug abuse, dropping out of school, criminal behavior, lack of self-respect and respect for other black folks and tendency to fear white folks and so on could all be the after effect of slavery and abuse African Americans suffered in the hands of white Americans.

Having made her case that slavery produced post traumatic disorder in African Americans she proceeded to make a case for what seems to her healing interventions. Her suggestions were in the nature of social work, reflecting her social work background. In my judgment they are not worth consideration, just namby-pamby social worker feel good talk.

She did elaborate on the role of religion in enabling African Americans cope with their ordeal. It is doubtful that they could have survived their torture chamber, for that is what America is for black folk, without the consolation provided by religion. Religion enables people to try to make sense of their life.

Unfortunately, the religion that most African-Americans are socialized into is Christianity, the religion of the racists who terrorized them.

Is it a good idea to practice the religion of one's terrorizer? There seems a contradiction in terms here. To solve this problem many African Americans walked away from Christianity and walked right into the religion of other terrorists, Islam.

Muslim Arabs actually enslaved more Africans than white Americans did; therefore, their religion is hardly the panacea that black folks are looking for.

Thus, realizing that Islam is also the enemy's religion many African Muslims are jettisoning it. Now what is the alternative?

Dr. Leary appears to have toyed with Baha'ism; an Islam derived religion that talks about human unity and oppressed folks find solace in it (provided they allow Bahaullah and his children to rule them forever).

Some African Americans are now identifying with ancient Egypt as their origin and thus go to Egypt looking for religion. With the understanding that ancient Egypt was an African civilization these African Americans seek to resurrect ancient Egyptian religion and see it as their own. They call their new religion Kemet (I will do a review of it in this ten part series).

How about looking into West African religions since most African Americans came from West Africa, not Egypt? Unfortunately, each West African religion tends to be limited to each tribe hence do not appeal to those from different types. African Americans came from most of the tribes in West Africa, from, Senegal to Namibia, it is therefore doubtful that any specific West Africa religion would appeal to them.

Perhaps, African-Americans need to formulate their own religion; why not? They are after all another African tribe!

Alas, willy-nilly they are also partly European and Indian! Clearly their religion must encompass their multiracial experience, that is, not specifically African but universal?

Franz Fanon (who I will focus on in my next review) had his own ideas on what needs to be done to rehabilitate formerly enslaved and or colonized people.

In sum, Dr. Leary gave us a simplistic picture of PTSD and applied it to the African American experience. Her book is interesting. However, it did not take much thought to write it; all she did was read DSM IV and extrapolate from it and apply it to the African American experience, and injected a bit of African American history into her write up. The rest of the book was filled with her personal experiences with racism and travelling around the USA and South Africa sharing her views.

I urge folks to read her book, especially since it is a very simple read and the ideas are not difficult to grasp. More sophisticated readers, especially mental health professionals would not benefit from the book. I found it overly childlike.

I do not want to sound sexist but I must observe that there is something feminine about this book; it is the type of thing one expects to hear from ones grandmother. In the real world life is a bit more complicated than the solutions she proffered.

Those who caused the trauma she talked about are still bent on continuing it. Therefore, the solution would seem to require manly political intervention. There needs to be a concerted effort to throw off the oppressor. Omelets are not made without breaking eggs so blood may be required in righting wrong.

Until someone pays a serious price for abusing human beings I doubt that he would give up his war on people's bodies and minds.

Those in power seldom give it up willingly; they generally need to be defeated in a battle field for them to see the reality of not oppressing people.

As a man I see the need for death and dying in order to checkmate other men's aggression. Therapeutic talk does not seem enough to alter horrible political situations, although it certainly does help.

*The next review is Franz Fanon's writings, followed by an examination of the Egyptian religion, Kemet. I will thereafter do a heuristic paper on whether the high level of paranoia found in many west Africans is a residue of their traumatic experience during slavery; imagine what life looked like in West Africa, with slave catchers roaming all over the place capturing people, including children (as narrated by Olauda Equano in his biography); it must have created tremendous fear and insecurity in the people and this probably accounts for the high level or paranoia I see in West Africans?

Ozodi Osuji

July 3, 2012

Dr. Osuji can be reached at 213-807-5944 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Yosef Ben Jochannan, Africa, Mother of Western Civilization. (Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1971) 700 Pages.

A Book Review By Ozodi Osuji

It seems that many African people (in Africa and in the Americas) during the post second world war world were immensely affected by what they believed was Europe’s concerted effort to put Africans down.  They perceived themselves attacked by the mere presence of Europe and went on a warpath to defend their selves.

Africans are a proud people; colonialism induced subordinate relationship between Africans and Europeans pricked Africans egos, pride and vanity; they felt narcissistic injury; in fact, many Africans felt narcissistic rage and sought combative ways to assuage perceived European attacks on their sense of manhood. Part of this defense is to show that almighty Europe owed its very existence to Africa.

Science has proved that all human beings evolved in Africa and later moved to other parts of the world; it is now  generally accepted that people as we currently know them to be were so fifty thousand years ago and were in Africa and later migrated to other continents. In that sense all people are Africans and all developments elsewhere were initiated by Africans, but that is not what our current object of interest, Dr. Ben meant by Africa, Mother of Western Civilization.

Dr. Ben (as I will hereafter call our current protagonist) went to war writing on how everything good in Europe derived from ancient Africa. Europe, he believes, owes its intellectual, scientific and technological achievements to Africa.  If Africa had not existed and accomplished the great things, he believed that it did, Europe would not have done anything. It is all glory to Africa the initiator of human civilization!

I have to say that this book is very annoying; its claims are so outrageous that it takes enormous patience to wade through the hundreds of pages of verbiage the man spilled out. He tells us that ancient Greece derived everything it did from Africans (Egyptians and Ethiopians).

Dr. Ben, like many of the writers of this genre, such as Cheikh Anta Diop, seems to believe that most contemporary Africans descend from ancient Egyptians/Ethiopians.  Apparently, rooting their origin in  Egypt and its great civilization makes these Africans kind of feel civilized; otherwise they would probably feel that they are not civilized, are the naked folks running around African jungles that certain European anthropologists depict Africans as on the pages of National Geographic magazine.

Africans were presented as primitive and some Africans felt offended and wanted to show the world that they are civilized, in fact, prove to a skeptical world that they were the first civilized people on earth, Egyptians.

Just out of curiosity, are there those living in present Egypt, some of whom are descendants of ancient Egyptians before the Arab conquest and takeover of Egypt in the seventh century of our common era,  going about clamoring that they are Africans, or is it the case that only Africans clamor that they are Egyptians?

What Dr. Ben is doing is obvious: his pride probably felt belittled by almighty Western civilization and is trying to seem grand by attaching himself to the alleged grandeur that was ancient Egypt. In doing so he went overboard and claimed everything good in Europe as derived from Egypt, Africa.

Of course, Africa influenced Europe as Europe influenced Africa; it was and still is a symbiotic relationship. Even contemporary European and American culture is influenced by Africans just as contemporary African culture is influenced by European culture.

Can you think of anything considered part of American culture that was not influenced by African Americans? There is no such thing as the USA without the influence of African Americans. African Americans, in turn, were influenced by the congeries of Europeans that now live in the USA. That is the nature of human civilization; it is a system and each part of it influences all other parts; each part is always responding to what other parts are doing; there is no such thing as an isolated culture that is entirely responsible for generating its cultural categories. (Latin America is totally shaped by the Africans living there; Europeans also contributed to Latin culture but the African influence is so obvious that there is no denying it; Brazil, for example, reminds one of Nigeria.)

Aristotle, Dr. Ben said, came down to Egypt to learn his stuff so his teaching is Africa derived. Okay. But what part of Egyptian philosophy is like what Aristotle taught, Kemet...is that not totally different from Greek religion?  Never mind; Aristotle did not visit Egypt and even if he did he was still a Greek, not an Egyptian; his world view reflects European, not African worldview.

Suppose we give him the benefit of doubt and take him at his word and ask: where are the books written in Ethiopia that Plato and Aristotle and other Greeks supposedly copied?  Who were the Ethiopians that supposedly wrote all those non-existent books that the Greeks copied? Who was the Ethiopian Democritus that wrote that the atom is the smallest part of matter? Who was the Ethiopian Archimedes?

I must say that the claims of Dr. Ben (he claims to be an Ethiopian Falasha Jew and that Jews originally came from Ethiopia) made me wonder about his mental health.  I actually deliberately examined his writing to see if they are the writing of a mad man. He is not mad but he is obsessed by the need to prove that Africans are superior to white people.

I do not understand why certain human beings cannot just accept that all human beings are the same and equal and instead have an obsessive-compulsive desire to prove that this or that race is superior to others.

How can one human being be superior to others? Are we not all animals who live and die like animals; we are born in body and in a hundred years that body dies and smells worse than feces? What could make one of us superior to another, the human intellect?  Now, Dr. Ben does not want to go there; I mean talk about intelligence for if he does some deranged white psychologists such as Arthur Jensen and Richard Heinstein (of Bell Curve) would bring out the bugaboo that Africans relative to white folks have lower IQ.

We all agree that in spirit we are the same, equal and one. There is really no basis for talking about human differences at all but Dr. Ben would like to think that there is such basis.

God, it is really exasperating reading material whose undertone is that one group of people are better than others. We are all the same and any talk of racial differences is delusional.

Dr. Ben wanted to help African Americans, his readers, to feel superior to white folks. He is acutely aware that in America African Americans feel marginalized and some feel inferior to white folk, so he set out to make them feel superior to white folk. To accomplish his aim, he had to give them distorted history and philosophy.

He is doing what Adolf Hitler did. If you recall, at the end of the first world war Germany was defeated by the Allies and humiliated because the Allies essentially dismantled her army (what she was proud of )and made her pay  indemnity to the victors.  Germans felt humiliated and young Adolf went on a war path making speeches that made Germans feel good, telling them that Jews were responsible for their defeat, that they are superior to all other people, especially to those who defeated them.

In his nihilistic book, Mein Kampf, Hitler presented a made up philosophy that attempted to make Germans feel superior to their neighbors by presenting non Germans as inferior people. Germans listened to him for he made them temporarily feel superior.

Human beings existentially feel little Vis a Vis the powerful forces of nature arrayed against them. Their existential smallness is often exaggerated by social forces, such as racism, that tell them that they are no good. Since they do not like to see themselves as small, and want to feel special, anyone who tells them how important they are is listened to. Thus, Germans listened to Hitler and elected him to political office. The rest, as they say, is history.

Dr. Ben wrote nonsense that aimed at making African Americans feel superior to white Americans; he appealed to certain African Americans hence they celebrate his books.

I forced myself to read Dr. Ben because he is recognized as one of the gurus of Afrocentrism and since I am motivated to understand Afrocentrists I had to read him. If not my desire to understand Afrocentricism I would not have tortured my mind reading what I automatically realized is bullshit.

In my judgment, it is now time for human beings to have the courage to accept our sameness and equality and quit talking about differences for there are no racial differences at all. People of all races are 99.9% the same; their only difference is their skin color and texture of hair.  We must stop emphasizing what separates us and stress what unifies us, our common humanity.

Dr. Ben did not write anything that could withstand empirical verification; his writing lacks academic rigor. He merely took from this or that writer that seemed to have encountered some light in old Africa and used this thread to weave his elaborate lies about how Africa produced Western civilizations (such as Greece and Rome).

Everything in the ancient world, in Persia, Greece, and Rome and indeed in the modern world has its origin in Africa. Africa is tops and all others are imitating her.

Really, one asks.  He was living in Harlem, New York, why not Addis Ababa his supposed home (it is even doubtful that he came from Ethiopia;  he said that he was taken to Puerto Rico as a child and had his education there, had an engineering degree  from a university that did not offer engineering at the time he graduated; he claims to have a master’s degree in engineering from a university in Havana, Cuba and later a doctorate from Havana and Spain...his story is very fishy, to say the least).

If his Ethiopia is so great why not go live in it and from it spill his philosophy?  Why did he have to go live in the Western world, in the den of the lion, to talk about how great Africa is? If the West is darkness why opt to live in the belly of the beast (whale), in the heart of Western darkness, New York, New York?

If Africa is so great one would have expected him to live in Africa. The fact that he chose to live in the West means that by his action, deed, not words he has voted where he thinks greatness is.

Dr. Ben appears loose with facts and his book reflects inability to respect facts; he weaves stories and claims that they are true.

Since his stories are palpably false it makes me wonder who exactly he believes would accept them, mentally challenged persons? Perhaps, he has negative views of his audience, African Americans; perhaps, he thinks that they are so dumb that they would uncritically accept whatever he dishes out to them!

I think that what is going on here is that Africans of a certain generation were oppressed by their awareness of how far Europe has progressed and left them behind; somehow, they imagined that Europeans were out to tell them that they are inferior persons.

Yes, there were and still are a few misguided Europeans such as Gorbeneau, Chamberlain and Hitler etc. out to prove their supremacy but the average European was not an inferior feeling neurotic who wanted to present himself as a superior person, who lived for one purpose:  to prove to Africans that they are inferior to Europeans.

European missionaries came to Africa and built schools and lived in thatch houses to train Africans. Many of those missionaries caught terrible diseases and died from them; they sacrificed their lives trying to bring light to Africans.

The point is that not all Europeans were out to humiliate Africans by telling them that they are inferior.  I believe that folks like Dr. Ben are persons who feel inferior and are trying to compensate with a feeling of false superiority. Somehow, they had it in their heads that white people made them feel inferior (something in their biological constitution probably made them feel inferior) and went on war trying to prove that ancient Africa (Egypt, Ethiopia) was the mother of everything good in the world.  They belabored their thesis to the point that it is not believable.

One is interested in physics, chemistry, biology and astronomy. One therefore would have liked Dr. Ben to tell one about ancient Africans that made discoveries in the physical sciences that Western Europeans copied. It is one thing claiming that Europeans copied everything from Africans but what Africans did they copy from?  So who were those fantasy Africans that gave the world science?  Where are Africa’s Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Huygens, Tyco Brahe, Newton, Harvey, Boyle, Dalton, Young, Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, Charles Darwin, Boltzmann, Becquerel, Pierre and Marie Curie, Max Plank, Einstein, Rutherford, Bohr, Broglie, Eddington, Pauli, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Friedman, Lemaitre, Hobble, Gamow, Hoyle, Meitner, Fermi, Oppenheimer, Strassman, Hahn, Flaming, Pauline, Watson, Crick, Gell-Mann, Wheeler, Hugh Everett, John Bell, Alan Aspect, Alan Guth; where are Africa’s technological equivalents of James Watt, Alexander Graham, Bell, Thomas Edison, Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and so on.

And while at it what Africans discovered electricity in Africa?  What exactly has Africans demonstrably given to the world in the world of science and technology?  Are trains, cars, airplanes, radio, television, computer, Internet, microwave oven, fridge, air conditioner etc. invented in Africa? What exactly has Africa discovered to make it this land of geniuses of Dr. Ben’s fantasy?

Give me a break, will you. One is not putting Africa down for one knows that Africans are as good as other people but what irks one is Africans deliberately setting out to tell lies about their past. The present Africa is one of human suffering and starvation, misgovernment and everything bad in humanity. Africa needs to become a project for modernization rather than celebrated as light on the hill.

This book is one long make belief story of how everything we accept as important in the world is of African origin. I do not think that it is necessary to take any particular idea from it and examine it closely, for none of them is true.

I am not comfortable with lies. I understand that Dr. Ben’s lies appeal to those Africans who felt devastated by colonialism and racism, who were made to feel inferior by Western civilization and are looking for a way to feel that they as Africans are good, are even superior to white folks. I do not think that a people’s self-esteem should be based on lies.

I am not interested in black supremacy or white supremacy. I am only interested in what benefits all humanity, not what elevates some and denigrates others.

This book is garbage, I am sorry to say that.  Since some African American studies departments apparently have their students read this book I can now understand why graduates of these programs are ill-educated.

Go study the physical sciences and stop massaging data from the past to prove the improvable: that some human beings are better than others and generated all others civilizations. Intelligence is not given to only one group of people; all people are independently intelligent and therefore can generate civilization in their local world. Indians initiated their civilization. Chinese initiated their civilization (we do not have to build on a couple black figures discovered in China to say that Africans are responsible for Chinese civilization).

Europe generated its civilization, influenced by other civilizations, of course; there is such a thing as cultural diffusion; all cultures influence all cultures they come in contact with; but to say that Africa shaped Europe is absurd. This book is a pile of rubbish.

Those who write such trash should undergo psychotherapy to find out why they have obsessive-compulsive desire to present stories that make some people superior to others.

Someone should have compelled Adolf Hitler to see his fellow Viennese, Alfred Adler, for Individual psychological therapy; that would have enabled him to understand his individual psychology, his inordinate sense of inferiority and efforts to compensate with a superiority feeling that put other persons down, and prevented the world from his murderous rampage to make it seem that he and his people are superior to other people. All Human beings are the same and equal.

Dr. Ben would have benefited from a psychotherapy that made him see himself as the  equal and same with all human beings so that he did not run around talking trash about how the black race is the mother of all that is good in other races’ civilizations.

We must learn to appreciate what is good in all people and not elevate one above others. Read Dr. Ben’s book if you must; however, what it is trying to say has been better articulated by more refined writers, such as Cheikh Anta  Diop (African Origin of Civilization) and John G. Jackson (Introduction to African Civilizations).

Ozodi Osuji

July 2, 2012

Dr. Osuji can be reached at 213-807-5944 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Dr. Woodson (1875-1950) is an interesting man; interesting because he was born shortly after slavery ended in the United States and still he managed to give himself a world class education (he was the second black man, after W.E.B Dubois, to obtain a doctorate degree from Harvard University and like Dubois he, too, studied in Europe, Paris, France, and travelled extensively in Africa and other parts of the world). Dr. Woodson was very cosmopolitan from his extensive travels around the world and therefore his observations are urbane and to be taken seriously.

It should be observed that when Dr. Woodson obtained his doctorate black folks were still not considered intelligent enough to be hired by white universities, so, like Dr. Dubois he settled for teaching at secondary schools and later Howard University, Washington DC. Dr. Woodson's experience with the public school system (K through 12) and the black university system gave him unique opportunity to observe how Negroes were educated during his time and the result of that education.

Further, it should be noted that he lived at the time Booker T. Washington and Dr. Dubois were battling it out as to the best way to educate newly freed slaves. Booker agreed with those white folks who believed that Negroes seem to have limited intelligence and are not suited for higher education in the liberal arts and sciences and thus should be trained in the trades (vocational training). Booker built his Tuskegee Institute to train Negroes as carpenters, mechanics, agricultural workers etc.

Dr. Dubois believed that the Negro is as intelligent as anyone else and ought to be given the opportunity to pursue higher education. He observed that like in other races about "ten percent" (his term, not mine, mine is that 33% of all kids ought to go to university and study science and technology, paid for by society) of the people are really very intelligent and naturally meant to be educated at the professional level. The point is that doors should not be closed to the Negro in higher education; offer him the same education that you offer white children and let natural selection determine how far he goes.

Booker would not hear that and insisted that given the racism of white America that whites are not going to hire educated Negros any way so why train them to frustrate them with unemployment, why not give them vocational training with which at least they could obtain jobs?

Many white folks do not feel threatened by black mechanics but feel scared shitless by black professors. Adolf Hitler, in his books, Mein Kampf and Table Talks, had talked about the need to limit black and Slavic Eastern Europeans (white folks, mind you) to only elementary school education, to train them to do minor jobs but never to allow them to go to higher institutions of learning lest they feel the equal of whites and challenge them. As Hitler saw it, just give them sufficient education to read the instructions that their Aryan masters give to them and leave it at that. Booker agreed with Hitler and similar white racists and wanted to accommodate them.

Booker's mother was a recent slave from Africa, an Igbo woman; her slave master had gotten her pregnant hence Booker was a mulatto.

Dr. Woodson saw the debate between Booker T and Dubois play itself out. He appreciated the merits of both sides but steered clear of the debate for that was not where he was meant to make his contribution. The man's was destined to make contribution in other areas, and, boy, did he do so!

I should observe that although I just read this book all that the man said about the mis-education of the Negro is already known to me either through osmosis (that is, absorbed from other Negroes) or through my own direct observation.

Thematically this book dealt with such topics as the outside control of Negro education; that is, the white power establishment decides what is taught at negro schools and who does the teaching, funds what they want to fund and do not fund what they do not perceive as in their self-interests, such as teaching that Negroes had glorious pasts; it is in their self-interests to teach that Africa is the heart of darkness and that nothing good came from it in the past and, as such, nothing good is expected to come from it in the present and future; this is calculated to make the negro feel inferior about his past and to elevate his master to high heavens.

Dr. Woodson would like to change the situation and have Negroes control their education and teach about subjects that made Negroes feel fine about their past history hence their present selves.

Many negroes are at the margins of society and are not gainfully employed; they do not have the requisite skills that the economy needs (today the American economy needs those with technical skills and jobs in those areas go begging yet a large number of Negroes do not have jobs for they do not have the right skills. If you studied black studies, what exactly would you do with it when the economy needs computer programmers and medical doctors? You would teach it? The Negro community has a surfeit of teachers and ministers but isn't it time it had professionals in other areas, areas demanded by a technologically complex society?

The unskilled and unemployed Negro gravitates to criminal activities to make a living and the result is that Negroes constitute over half of the inmates of US jails and prisons. A people who are twelve percent of the population produce over fifty percent of the incarcerated population; something is wrong with this picture.

The few educated Negroes tend to feel estranged from the mass of uneducated Negroes and often flee to white suburbs (where whites tolerate them but do not really see them as their equals). Wouldn't it be nice if they stayed in the black community? You wish, right? But don't the educated of the white race also flee from white trailer trash? Is there any particular justification for those who can afford it to live in the ghettos where the air is more polluted than in the country side hence court earlier death as is the case for Negroes? Should educated Negroes have death wish in the service of the Negro community or should all of them strive to break out of inner city slums and breathe fresh air in the country side?

Professionally educated Negroes are caught between a rock and a hard place; they neither belong to the Negro masses nor to the white community; therefore, many of them are discouraged. They eat and eat and die from heart attack and stroke at an early age whereas their white counterparts live to be over eighty.

The white power structure does not encourage Negroes to learn about the nature of the American polity, read the US constitution for to do so is to know their rights and fight for them and that is not tolerated. As we speak, Republican governors and those state legislatures controlled by Republicans are throwing road blocks to illiterate blacks' path to exercising their citizenship rights: voting; they are making it difficult for African Americans to vote by requiring certain identity cards. Many African Americans do not have the right identity cards saying that they are who they claim to be or live where they claim to live (many of them cannot even open bank accounts because of this identity card issue and have to cash their checks at check cashing joints and those take certain cuts from their checks).

One would think that a Democratic polity would want many people to vote but instead the American Republican democracy discourages Negroes from voting! In the past they used to have such obstacles as poll taxes, reading and literacy tests; they did whatever they felt was not in favor of the Negro to prevent him from voting, such as apportionment (gerrymandering) shenanigans that made sure that negroes were not a majority in any legislative district to be able to elect the legislator; they cut negro neighborhoods and spread the pieces into white districts and that way guaranteed that white folks would win elections. Today there are about forty million Negroes out of a total US population of three hundred and ten million persons. Generally, each Congressional district is about half a million persons. By that standard there ought to be, at least, 80 black Congressmen and, at least, 10 black Senators but in reality there are only 43 black Congressmen and no black Senator.

It is amazing that a country that goes around the world preaching how democracy is the best form of government discourages a large section of its people from participating in democracy.

The book talks about such other things as the Negroes need to produce a service oriented leadership, a leadership with clear vision on how to uplift the down trodden race, the need to produce leaders and workers who serve the negro community and not hirelings doing the bidding of the white race. Other subjects were broached but they all basically say the same thing: train the Negro to respect himself and respect his fellow Negroes and serve the Negro community and ultimately the American nation. I am not going to dwell on all the topics addressed by Dr. Woodson but, instead, will expatiate on topics that I feel are still germane in today's negro-social discourse.

I should also observe that what the man said about the Negro appear to have been addressed by America's responses to the Negro question since the 1960s. It appears that efforts have been made to redress the problems he observed.

The black studies movement that now exist at major American universities appear to have resulted from an effort to address the issues that Dr. Woodson highlighted in the past (his book is actually a series of lectures and articles he gave, collated into a book in 1933).

Alas, the black mission of injecting what is now called afrocentricism into American education to correct its perceived eurocentricism has not appeared to solve the problem of the Negro, for the Negro American and African is still as problematic as ever. Nothing in the black man has changed from how Dr. Woodson described him in the first part of the twentieth century. The black man I see around me today is exactly as Dr. Woodson described him almost a hundred years ago!

Let me tell you how I see the black man; I will do so by citing examples from personal experience. I walk into a store and the cashier is a black woman. She would be extremely unprofessional, disrespectful, sullen and often disregarding of my presence. She would treat the customer as if she does not care that he is there to spend his money on her business. The customer, you feel disrespected and angry and do what you come to do and leave and resolve never to patronize her store again.

Now compare and contrast with what happens with an encounter with a white sales woman. You walk into a store and the cashier is a white woman. She smiles at you; she asks you if you found all that you were looking for and generally treats you respectfully; you feel respected and before you know it you take your business to her store, come next time you want to shop.

You enter a bus and the driver is a black man. He completely ignores you and as far as he is concerned you do not even exist.

Compare and contrast with a white bus driver. You enter a bus and the driver is a white man. The moment you enter the bus he says, come aboard. Howdy? The man generally has a welcoming smile on his face. When you leave he says to you, have a good day, sir.

Now who has provided you with a better service, the sullen black driver who does not seem to understand that the bus rider is employing him or the white driver who makes you feel so good that you park your car and take buses to work?

You go to black universities (such as Howard University) and you see the professors all dressed in suits and look like business executives. You go to their classes and what they teach is deficient. Now go to a white university, especially the top ones, such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Berkeley, and UCLA etc. You see the professors in khaki pants, in simple shirt and generally bent over books, reading, writing and doing research. You see them walking from libraries or laboratories to their classrooms and offices. They engage you in intellectual discussions. In their classrooms you feel that they are true professors (a professor is a person who has learned a subject and dedicates his life to professing it, teaching and writing about it).

Black professors are there to seem very important clowns but not as persons dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge.

You go to a hospital where the doctors are black. They appear in suits and generally see you as a beggar that they are condescending to treat. They are generally third rate and do not know what they are doing (try this after you see one: go get a copy of Physicians' Desk Reference book and read the diagnoses and medications the black doctor gave you; the chances are that one out of two times he misdiagnosed your problem and gave you the wrong medications).

In Africa the medical doctors don't even bother trying to be medical doctors, they do not bother treating their patients; you could be bleeding to death and if you do not have money to bribe Nigerian doctors they would ignore you.

Dr. Woodson observed these sorts of things going on in his world and asked how it came to be that black folks behave as they behave. He attributed it to the miseducation of black folk. Apparently, he believed that the problem is socially caused.

Like many African-Americans, Dr. Woodson tended to believe that black folk's problems were caused by the man, by white folks.

According to this view of things, everything wrong with the Negro is always caused by white men. The unarticulated presupposition of this philosophy is that Negroes are children and are therefore never responsible for their fate; only those presupposed to be adults, hence responsible for their behaviors, white folks are perceived to be responsible for Negroes problems.

In Africa the leaders are mostly criminals stealing from the people and never doing anything to uplift the people. Whose fault is it?

We are told that it is the white man's fault. They tell us that African leaders are merely the neocolonial servants of their white masters. They are the compradors in a neocolonial world; idiots put into offices by their white masters to stabilize their countries and make them easier for white men to come and take the raw material they need to serve their industries, transform them into saleable products and return the manufactured products back to Africa and sell them at exorbitant prices to Africans hence perpetuating Africans poverty.

The metropolis (West) exploits the periphery (Africa). It is always the white man's fault that nothing good comes out of Africa.

It is the white man's fault that British run secondary schools in Nigeria produced graduates who were as good as any boy who went to Eton, Harrow and other elite secondary schools in Britain and such graduates from contemporary Nigerian secondary schools cannot be considered elementary school graduates.

The only British built university in Nigeria, University of Ibadan, used to graduate students who were as good as any college graduate in Britain. Now, Nigerian university graduates cannot be seen as fit graduates from secondary schools.

So, what are the suited black professors doing, are they not supposed to be professors, teachers taking pride in producing well educated students?

In Nigeria the college instructors literally see themselves as there to collect bribes from their students and fuck (pardon my French) their female students for grades. That is correct; what passes as professors in Nigeria are crooks in higher education and the result is the collapsed education system in Nigeria.

Now, whose fault is it? You got it right if you blamed it on the white man. You see, nothing is ever the black man's fault. He is a five year old child and is not responsible for his behavior. Europeans are adults and as such are responsible for black (children) folk's lives. According to this logic, everything wrong with the black man must be blamed on the white man.

This blaming of the white man actually began when Africans, like savages, ran around their neck of the woods capturing their people and marching them across the Sahara desert and selling them to Arabs (which they did from about 700 AD to about 1900 AD), and later selling them to Europeans (from about 1500 to 1900 AD).

For over 1000 years Africans sold their people to Arabs and Europeans and the only explanation they could come up with for this dreadful behavior is that other people (white folks, they don't even blame Arabs to whom they sold more Africans)made them do it. I say shame on them. They ought to feel guilty and remorseful for their ancestors' outrageous behavior. I say that contemporary African states be made to pay reparation to black Americans and black Arabs, say give ten percent of their annual budgets to those they sold (for a specified amount of time, say, 100 years). Africans must make amends for the crime of their ancestors before they can stop thinking that they can just commit crimes, as they now do by transforming their governments into criminal activities, and have no consequences for their behaviors. As long as the world tolerates Africans always blaming other persons for their antisocial behaviors nothing good is going to come out of Africa. Africa will remain a place of suffering; Africans will continue to be those the rest of the world have pity for and give some handouts out of compassion.

(Of course, white folks and Arabs also must be made to pay reparation to those Africans they used as slaves in Europe, America and Arabia.)

Now, whose fault is it that these people sold their own people? If you guessed white folks you got it right. It is not Africans fault that they captured their people and sold them to whomever wanted to buy them, it is the buyers fault.

One would think that since the buyer is white and therefore not identified with blacks that his crime is less heinous than the black seller who ought to identify with his own black people hence not sell them. No, we are given convoluted arguments on how slavery is an economic thing, how the economy of Europe and America need black slaves to work in the fields and Europeans thus stimulated Africans into selling their people, so it is the white man's fault that slavery existed.

Of course, the buyer of slaves, Arabs and whites, were guilty but the point is that Africans are also guilty. But instead of appreciating the role of Africans in selling their people, Africans glibly blame the sordid episode of selling their people to white folk on white folks.

To say that Africans ought to take fifty percent of the blame for slavery (as I insist they must) is to be accused of self-hatred by African idiots masquerading as scholars (those who produce illiterates as university graduates).

Nothing is ever the Africans fault is the trip these people are on. The trip has led to misgoverning in all of Africa.

No African country is properly governed. The reason why Africans house has fallen is, I believe, because Africans do not take responsibility for their behavior; they are always blaming others for their fate.

If they are not blaming white folks, each tribe is blaming other tribes for their fate. In Nigeria, all Nigerians blame whites for the shitty nature of Nigeria; thereafter, each Nigerian tribe blames other tribes for its fate.

Igbos blame Hausas and Yoruba's for their rotten fate. In the meantime their leaders cart the money they ought to have expended developing their people to Western banks. Igbo land is like what you would expect in the tenth century, and no one is trying to modernize it. But whose fault is it? Why, Hausa or Yoruba, of course!

At the individual level Africans do not take responsibility for the outcomes of their behaviors. They are always talking about how God is responsible for their fate (or they blame their failures on other people). Even when Nigerians steal government money to become rich they thank their God, for apparently he enabled them to steal and become rich!

The black man has been trained to project his fault to other people. Until he takes responsibility for his collapsed house he is not going anywhere. I certainly do not expect Nigerian leaders to do anything useful for their people; I expect them to steal and be thieves in government, but do something to improve their people's lives is not part of their job description. President Goodluck (actually, Badluck) Jonathan junkets to all over the world and in five years in office has not done anything to improve any Nigerians life (except the thieving club in government). The man is literally an idiot in office but who is to take responsibility for his do-nothing administration? Why, of course, the white man! Or blame it "on the complexity of governing a multiethnic society"! Excuses, Excuses, Excuse galore that is what you expect from Africans!

These people never learn that every problem is an opportunity to solve it. The multiethnic nature of Nigeria ought to produce unique leaders up to the challenge but instead what we have are whiners and complainers like the man at Aso Rock.

Descriptively, Dr. Woodson delineated what is wrong with the black man accurately. His description of the black man in the early twentieth century is still the black man I see in the early twenty first century! Nothing has changed.

When Dr. Woodson is not attributing the cause of the black man's pathetic situation to the white man he attributes it to self-hatred (which is caused by the white man hence another issue for which to blame the white man).

As he sees it, the white man has trained the Negro to hate his black self and to see everything in Negroes as bad. The Negro is trained to see his people as bad and to see white folks as good. For example, consider that Negroes go to white schools for they believe that black teachers are not good and white teachers are better; Negroes go to white medical doctors for they believe that black medical doctors are no good...these days rich Nigerians go to Europe or North America to treat even their headaches, a negative judgment that their own Nigerian doctors are no good; Negroes give their business to white business but not black business; Nigerians trust German and Italian companies to build their buildings for them for they know that if a Nigerian construction company build them that they would collapse before the damn things are finished being constructed.

Descriptively all these are true. What Dr. Woodson said that the Negro Middle Class does is what I do. I am a black man but I would only go to a black medical doctor if he is the only one in town. Why? Because my experience with black medical doctors and nurses is that they are mediocre and do not care for their clients.

Here is further evidence for my position. In Los Angeles, the only black medical hospital, Martin Luther King Hospital, was threatened with closure by the state because the black doctors and nurses would actually leave the patients brought on stretchers to die there, not treating them. In the Los Angeles area those with money go to UCLA for medical treatment (that hospital is ranked number two in the USA).

If you want your child given good education you send him to UCLA or Harvard but certainly not to Howard where upon graduation he would likely not pass the bar exam on first try (or any professional examination).

Generally, the belief is that if you want something done right for you that even Negroes go to white professionals. Dr. Woodson would say that you did all these because you have been trained to hate yourself, project your self-hatred to your fellow blacks.

Up to a point, Dr. Woodson is correct in his assessment of the behavior of the black middle class (also so described by the black sociologist, Franklyn Frazier in his famous book, the Black Middle Class). However, what would change the situation is not talking about black self-hatred but producing black professionals who are like white and Asian professionals.

People make decisions based on their experiences. I was once in a hospital at Washington DC, and experienced the services of three nurses, each from the three racial groups. During her shift, the black nurse at no time came into my room to check on me (actually, she did once and did not even bother looking at me; I might as well be a log of wood on the bed). The next shift brought in a different nurse, a white nurse. The white nurse came in every thirty minutes to ask me how I am doing, sit by my bed and ask me questions about my family. The third shift brought a Chinese nurse. The Chinese woman, from a technical point of view, provided the most efficient service. The Caucasian nurse provided the most humane service. The black nurse is not a nurse; I do not know what to call her, certainly she does not know what nurse means: a person who cares for those who are sick, a caring person (she was probably working two jobs to make money to buy a Mercedes Benz car so as to impress her fellow blacks of how important a person she is...as Franklyn Frazier pointed out, black folks are hung up on trying to seem very important persons; they literally devote their entire lives to efforts to seem important but not to professionalism).

So, who do you think I would go to next time I am sick, a black medical health professional? People behave in accordance with their self-interest and their experience, not from intellectual masturbation. If it is in my best interest to stay alive I would be motivated to go to medical professionals likely to treat me correctly.

Reasonable persons avoid black professionals (the Washington DC school district produce students who cannot even fill out job application forms and always blame it on poor funding even though they are paid higher than their counterparts in parochial schools). Black folks do shoddy work and blame it on everybody else but themselves. This is terrible and must be corrected. How do you correct it is the real question.

Dr. Woodson seems to think that training black folks to like themselves is part of the answer. Of course black folks must be helped to like themselves.

However, the way folks have gone about trying to obtain self- like in black folks is to attribute all their faults to white folks.

If you took a course from the typical black studies program you would have your ears filled with what white men did to screw black men up. True.

So, what is the solution? What is the solution to the black situation other than just blaming white folks and proving that black folks started the Egyptian civilization and claiming that all black Africans are descendants of Egyptians who went south (as Dr. Diop said in his African Origin of Civilization).

Okay, Africans are descendants of proud Egypt and that ought to make them proud of their heritage but how about now? How come Nigerian leaders are thieves? How do you explain that one, blame it on the man? Is fifty years of self-rule sufficient time to take responsibility and do the right thing by your people?

By the way, don't Nigerians independent of what the white man does, have the capacity to figure out what is right behavior, such as serving other people, and do them instead of always messing up, big time and leaving it to black so-called intellectuals to always try explain away their mess?

God, these people make me throw up; I am sick and tired of always trying to rationalize the black man's stupidity.

Afrocentrists tell us that they know the answer to black folk's problems. They urge us to train black folks to like themselves and their African culture. This is good.

I add that we must also train black folk to become true professionals in their behaviors. Let the black bus driver smile at his clients, let the black cashier be courteous to her clients (not long ago I went to a FedEx store to mail something to my son and the clerk was a twenty something year old black girl; she was as courteous and friendly as any human being could be; first, the moment I approached her counter, she said: good afternoon sir, how may I help you today; all the while with a smile on her face. She proceeded do what I asked for in a manner that made me feel proud to be a member of the black race. If it was not inappropriate I was willing to give to her a tip of a hundred dollars! I drove home in cloud nine, proud that the black race is now beginning to produce professionals rather than the sullen idiots one is used to in dealing with black service providers).

I am saying that you can talk afrocentricism all you want but until you produce black professionals that are as good as white and Asian professionals you are screwing yourself. I would not send my child to a school where Cornel West talks shop but does not produce the type of literature expected of public scholars like him (Louis Gates is okay).

Dr. Woodson delineated what most of us now know as what is wrong with the black man. He tried to change the situation. For example, he believed that one of the reasons black men hate themselves is that white American schools did not teach black history and tell blacks that their people started the great Egyptian civilization, so he helped in initiating the study of black history. The man did his best to correct the awful situation he saw. He is a great Blackman and one takes off ones hat for him.

However, I think that his solutions are just a first step. Clearly, we have to educate the black man to like himself and to be proud of his race. But what happens after race pride is attained is a different matter.

A black man who is proud of his race but cannot perform as well as a Chinese medical doctor or Indian physicist is useless in our global economy.

Actually, I do not think that black folks can develop positive self-esteem by merely seeing their past as glorious and blaming white folks for their issues. There are other factors that lead to positive self-esteem or lack of it (* I had planned this review to be five pages and since it is getting too long, I will elaborate on existential factors affecting black self-esteem in a separate paper).

In sum, Dr. Woodson objectively described the black man as I see him to be. For doing that I thank him. His solutions lie in what folks are now doing in black studies departments. These are useful first steps.

The long term solution to our African, and if truth be said, our human problem for there is only one species, Homo sapiens and we are the same and have similar problems, is science and technology.

We must study science and technology and produce as many Nobel laureates as white folks produce. Damn it, they are not smarter than us.

I recommend this book to you but in all honesty must tell you that it contains mere beginners' effort in the quest to understand the human condition and its variation, the black man's condition. I had a difficult time reading it for it did not tell me anything that I did not already know, and that may be the same for you.

Ozodi Osuji

June 30, 2012

Dr. Osuji can be reached at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (213-807-5944)

The next Review is: Joseph Ben-Jochannan, Africa, Mother of Western Civilization. (Baltimore, MD: Black Classics Press, 1971) 700 pages. He will be followed by Joy Degruy Leary, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome. (Milwaukie, Oregon: Upton Press, 2005)240 Pages. Ultimately, in this series, I will review ten books.

* African-Americans were influenced by powerful sociological factors, such as slavery and racial discrimination and must grapple with those. It is therefore understandable why their approach to phenomena tends to be sociological. Much of what is called black studies is really sociological perspective on phenomena. This gives the products of these programs a specific quality that those who have different perspectives on phenomena find shallow. Carter Woodson's book is sociological in its causal analysis of the Negro problem. His sociological approach is understandable but not comprehensive enough. I would say that his proffered solutions are not going to solve the Negro problem. This is because until we have fully understood a problem we cannot solve it. There is an existential aspect to the genesis of the Negro problem. I, therefore, added as part two of this review an existentialist approach that black folks ought to think a bit about for there are existential reasons why folks do what they do. The second paper occurred to me as I thought about Woodson's sociological analysis. If the reader is interested in existentialism he can contact me for it informs my perspective on phenomena. 

This book is a first person account of the phenomenon called near death experience, NDE. In 2008, Eben Alexander, a Harvard University Neurosurgeon apparently contracted bacterial meningitis (from E. coli) and his brain was severely attacked and he went into coma. He was in coma for seven days and was treated at Lynchburg, Virginia General Hospital.

The book is an account of what he claimed transpired during those seven days when his mind, as he said, checked out of his body and journeyed to heaven. He provided descriptions of the heavenly realms he journeyed to and those descriptions are in sync with similar descriptions offered by those who also claim to have had near death experience (going through a dark environment or tunnel, emerging in a place of light, a very beautiful place where people and things take on radiant quality; interacting with those people and eventually moving on to other realms that we might call the formless kingdom of God).

It is not so much the description of the spiritual realms provided by Dr. Alexander as it is who did the describing. Eben Alexander, MD is a highly trained neuroscientist who understands the intricacies of the human brain and has operated on numerous brains. He is trained in the scientific method and understands that according to science only phenomenon that all of us can observe and verify is considered scientific.

In fact, he showed a level of understanding of science not usually seen in medical doctors (strictly speaking, medical doctors are technicians of the body, not pure scientists, such as physicists, chemists, biologists, astronomers and geologists). He reviewed aspects of quantum physics and seem to know what he is talking about. He talked about Einstein’s Special and General Relativity, Neils Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Emil Schrodinger, Pauli, Paul Dirac, Jean, Born, Broglie and other giants of quantum physics. He grasped the developments in science since 1543 when Copernicus posited that the Sun is the center of our world, and in 1610 when Galileo proved Copernicus’ thesis with his telescopes.  In 1687 Isaac Newton posited his three laws of motion and the law of gravity and gave birth to physics (Greeks such as Democritus had some sort of physics but not as we now understand the subject).

In the eighteenth century we had Lavoisier, Laplace and Boyle (those gave birth to Chemistry); in the nineteenth century we had Dalton, Thomas Young, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, Charles Darwin, Ludwig Boltzmann, and J.J. Thompson. In the twentieth century we had (apart from the already mentioned quantum physicists) Max Planck, Pierre and Maria Curie, Ernest Rutherford, James Chadwick, Lise Meitner, Enrico Fermi, Strassman, Otto Hahn, Pauline, James Watson and Francis Crick, Wheeler, Murray Gell-Mann, Alan Aspect, Alan Goth.

Dr. Alexander understood how science succeeded in marginalizing people, presenting them as insignificant part of the universe, whereas our ancestors used to fancy that they were the center of the universe and, indeed, believed in a God who had nothing better to do with his time but to protect them. Because science has belittled man he is striving to rehabilitate his diminished self-esteem and often grasps on vacuous spirituality to make him seem to have existential value.

Alas, he has no apparent worth for he lives on an insignificant planet, in an ordinary solar system that is placed at the tail end of a spiral galaxy, a galaxy that is one of billions of galaxies. We live on a planet, along with its star that came into being four and half billion years ago, and would in five billion years die with that star. Indeed, the entire universe is scheduled to die a cold death in a few trillion years when its expansion leads to heat loss.

We seem nothing and are apparently looking for something to make us seem to have worth; belief in God seems to serve that purpose for some persons hence folks blindly latch unto talks about spirit and its alleged worth and immortality.

Talk about the spiritual realms generally are subjective; other persons , for example, seem unable to observe what NDE folks claim to have experienced hence many of us see them as sort of like dreams that are associated with death and dying.

Perhaps, as we are about to die certain biophysical and biochemical reactions in our brains provide us with spectacular dreams to bid us Farwell from the material universe?

Simply stated, those trained in scientific reductionism tend to disregard what NDE folks talk about. Perhaps, we are amused by talk of visiting the spiritual world and leave it at that but do not take it seriously.

In the past, mankind deluded itself with loads of spiritual talk that turned out as mere superstition. As far as we know, only the scientific method has enabled us to understand the world we live in and enabled us to devise technologies to control the physical environment hence make our lives pleasant.  Just imagine the world of yesteryears when our ancestors prayed to what they called gods but were killed by assorted bacteria and virus, lived pained and suffering existence and their so-called gods did not help them one bit.

Science has offered us the only help we have so far obtained in this seeming meaningless existence of ours. We are born, live, age, feel pain and then die. What a bummer! But such is the fate of all those living in flesh and there is no need crying over spilled milk. Hold your head high; chin out, march forward and take whatever life throws at you without complaint.

Try to understand physical phenomena, develop technology and make the most of our seeming pointless existence in space, time and matter and hopefully live to age 100 and then die. When you die the body you had enslaved yourself laboring to provide for decays, rots and smells worse than feces (our bodies are made of the various elements, especially Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, CHON, and traces of other elements such as iron, potassium, calcium, magnesium, zinc, copper, etc.). Upon death the elements that hitherto composed ones body decay to particles (such as electrons, protons and neutrons) that they are made of. Particles are made of quarks and quarks are made of photons (radiation) and those are made of (nothingness, the nothingness from which energy and matter emanated during the Big bang 13.7 billion years ago)?

Simply stated, most scientifically educated persons embrace materialism, the philosophy that we came from matter and return to matter. In so far that we have thinking, aka mind and consciousness most scientists seem to believe that it is epiphenomenal; that is, a throw up of the processes of the neurons in our brains. Certain biochemical and biophysical processes in our brains seem to produce consciousness. Consciousness is of the body and when we die dies with our bodies, and that is all there is to us.

All talk of consciousness being outside the human body seems to beg the question since none of us has seen consciousness outside our bodies. If spirits exist let them come and at the same time show themselves to many people. As long as they seem to express their existence only through certain individuals, such as NDE folk, we are prone to suspect that it is such individuals that produce the phenomenon (Kant’s numenon?) that they call spirit?

Dr. Alexander is aware of the arguments against belief in spirit and indeed seemed to have been skeptical about the existence of spirit although he nominally attended an Episcopal (Anglican) Church. But despite his sophistication his experience during his week in coma convinced him that spirits exist and that we live after we die.

He described the after death existence which other writers have provided us (there is no need to rehash them here, if you are not aware of this literature please read Raymond Moody’s writings and personal accounts of out of body experience such as the one provided by Betty Eadie...I wrote a lengthy review of Eadie’s book, Embraced by the light).

Is what Dr. Alexander wrote true or just an unusual dream, a fantasy produced by his brain? Honestly, I don’t know. Until I have had similar experience I am not in a position to state that it is true or false. I have an open mind and in the meantime operate from the perspective of the scientific method.

If heaven is real we shall get to it when we die; in the meantime, I have no need to believe in heaven and its supposed God.

What I have need to accept is love. Dr. Alexander says that heaven is a place of unconditional love.  I hope that he is correct. Be that as it may, I have no need to posit heaven and God before I accept the utility of love.

As I see it, love is the only thing that gives our lives on earth whatever meaning there is in it. We must love each other regardless of whether there is God and life after death or not. If, indeed, heaven is real and is a place of perfect love that is fantastic and welcome news.

Dr. Alexander, as a child was given up by his teenager parents and was adopted by Dr. Alexander, another neurosurgeon. He was apparently loved by his adoptive parents but most of his life felt like an orphan. He searched for his biological parents and after been put off by state authorities eventually connected with them. That seemed to have given him a modicum of satisfaction regarding his biological origin. Nevertheless, he had the psychology of an orphan and tried to create a loving family, apparently, to make up for what was lacking in his life. From his extensive description of his wife, two sons and his immediate relatives it seems that he had a loving circle around him. His family life actually made me envious since I do not have such family experience. I did not know that some people have such close and loving families?

The man still felt like an orphan who was abandoned in this material universe. His journey to the spiritual realm, apparently, gave him a sense of connection to the universe; his existential sense of separation and aloneness was temporarily eliminated and he felt one with all things, unified with the universe and that gave him peace and joy. Lucky him!

The message of his book is that we are all part of the universe and that we are loved by all people and by God.

We are loved by all people and God? This seems like wishful thinking since in the here and now world many of us do not experience the universal love he is talking about.

Dr. Alexander is a white southern gentleman. We all know how loving southern white folks are, don’t we?  These folks are rabid racists who treat black folks like shit, literally.  Therefore, all that love that Dr. Alexander and his alleged God claim to represent does not seem real (it seems make belief, fantasy).

We just went through a presidential election where “Christian” Republicans who call themselves believers in civil rights and civil liberties did everything in their powers to disenfranchise black folks; they made it almost impossible for them to vote; black folks had to stand in line for up to twelve hours to exercise their constitutional right to vote; and they were asked to provide evidence of their American citizenship (they had to produce IDs; many southern blacks were not born in hospitals hence do not have birth certificates, do not have drivers licenses or US passports hence had a difficult time proving their citizenship).

As we talk, these disingenuous Southern white folk are at work trying to redo the electoral college; at present the winner of each state takes the entire state’s electors; but white Republican governors and Republican controlled state legislatures have Gerrymandered  how representatives are apportioned so that they guarantee that mostly white folks are elected to the US Congress, and, more importantly if electors are divided in accordance with the gerrymandered Congressional districts  the presidential candidate that won most votes in a state could end up winning less electors in it. For example, Barack Obama won the popular vote in Virginia, but if electors were apportioned according to the gerrymandered districts he would have had fewer electors than the Mitt Romney he defeated in that state! Thus, despite winning the popular vote Romney would have won more electors (273) than Obama (268) hence became President despite receiving fewer votes!

In the 2012 election Obama won 332 electors and Romney won 206 electors; white southerners want to make sure that a black man never again win the presidency hence plan on rigging future elections via changing how electors are allotted.

Hello Apartheid South Africa, here comes white southerners replicating your system where a minority ruled the majority!

Would America still have the guts to preach to the world that it is democratic? Wouldn’t people see through its hypocrisy and laugh it away?

As the on-white population rise white folks will do desperate things to stay in power. At present whites are 72% of the US populations hence still the majority population but Latinos breed children at an amazing rate, and sneak across the border from Mexico and Latin America and in a few decades would probably surpass the white population. African Americans are 12% of the US population; Asians are about 5% of the US population.

I tell you, these white folks are an interesting bunch. Are they really Christians, if by Christians we mean those who love people?  I often wonder!  My philosophical mentor, Arthur Schopenhauer (World as Will and Idea) in the early 1800s wrote about Southern USA whites, who claimed to be Christians, and claimed to love God and people and yet treated their African slaves worse than most people treat the mosquitoes that suck their blood! That is correct; they maltreated their fellow human beings who did them no harm while talking about God and love!

Get these hypocrites out of my face, would you; they make me conclude with my beloved Schopenhauer that man is a mistake that should not have been made; the universe ought not to have produced human beings; people are a plague unto people; they are eyesore, they blight nature with their evil behaviors.

Dr. Alexander and his God of love did not persuade me one bit. I only see a world of pain, not the loving world he described as part of his earthly family and heavenly home.

Nevertheless, I highly recommend this book; it is easy reading; I read it, today, in less than five hours (and wrote this review of it in an hour). Perhaps, it could help those who need such first person accounts of the reality of heaven to convince themselves that God exists and that there is life after death.  However, if one is a diehard materialist I doubt that the book would sway one towards belief in God.

To me, if God exists the question is: how come he allows too much suffering in this damn world?  Theologians rationalize human evil and suffering by saying that God gave us freedom of choice and we chose what we experience? Great!

Here is a little question for theologians: does a loving father stand by as his children stick their hands into fire knowing that they would be burned? If such a father existed wouldn’t we see him as culpable in his children sustaining burns on their hands?

Give me a break, will you; let us please leave God out of human affairs. I am not interested in being told about a loving God; I am interested in how we can make our lives loving.

If Dr. Alexander’s book helps you to become a loving person, to realize that people live in suffering and you do whatever you can to reduce that suffering your behavior is welcome. Theology without practicing love is a bunch of scholastic rubbish.  Gautama Buddha remains my ideal religious philosopher for he asked people to have compassion for people, not because of God or desire for life after death but because they understand that people suffer and they want to reduce that suffering.

Love and the rest are details; love connects us to each other and to the universe and reduces our sense of alienation from the universe.

Love makes this strange universe our home whereas lovelesness estranges us from the universe. Our true self is love; the rest is noise.

PS: You could read Dr. Osuji’s books such as: (1) What exactly is love, (2) Living from the loving self, (3) the forthcoming monumental work on human nature, The Self versus the Self Concept.

Ozodi Osuji

January 30, 2013

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Ramana Maharshi, Talks with Ramana Maharshi. (Carlsbad California: Inner Directions, 2010) 550 pages

Book Review By Ozodi Osuji

This book is composed of a series of talks given by the Hindu Sage, Ramana Maharishi,  from 1935 to 1939. Those who compiled it say that it contains the essence of Maharishi’s teachings.  The book was originally published in India in 1955 and republished in California in 2010.

Ramana Maharshi was born in 1879 in India (his given name was Venkataraman). From an early age he heard one word voice, Arunachala. This word was repeated on a number of occasions and he did not know what it meant. In the meantime, he went to school but at the age of sixteen experienced intense fear of death and decided to help death out and die. He simulated death, tried to stop breathing, allowed his body to stay motionless, stiff. His goal was to die instead of live with the fear of death. Why live if all you are going to do is be afraid of dying. You either live fully, whatever that means to you, or you die and that is all there is to it. If you are going to live you had better not live in fear of dying, a fear that paralyzes most people. Well, he just laid there welcoming death to come and get him.

In doing so, that is, looking death in the face and not been afraid of it he defied the hold of death on people. He transcended the ego for the ego is that self that lives in fear of death and tells one to do this and that to avert death; the ego tells us to eat food, take medications, wear clothes, live in shelters etc. or else we died. We obey and live in fear of death.

We enslave our lives to doing senseless things in order to get what maintains our ego and body existence (the desire to live in body, by the way, is what gives the dictators of this world the power to control us; if one does not wish to live no tyrant has hold on one’s allegiance; no one can intimidate you into doing something he wants you to do unless you have an irrational desire to live in body at all costs).

Alas, despite all our struggles to live in ego and body, give or take one hundred years and we die. What is the point of the struggle? Now, suppose one accepts death what hold has the ego on one? None!

It was while Ramana was lying down and beckoning death to come get him that he experienced Samadhi, the death of his ego self (ahankara) and the reawakening of the awareness of his real self (atman).  He was liberated (Moksha) from the hold of the ego and its gift of fear to us.

Subsequent to that experience, people noticed that he was a different person. For one thing, he stopped going to school. His siblings began calling him holy man, Sadhu and asked him why he had not taken to the forest and go live there as Hindu Holy men did. Good idea, he thought and left home and kept walking. Several days later he found himself at the foothills of a hill and was told that the hill is called Arunachala, the word he had heard all his life. He decided to make the foothill his home.

Thus, the sixteen year old lived right there, sleeping in a cave in the hill.  He was disinterested in the things of this world and simply stayed there and meditated. He lived in perfect solitude, not talking to people. When hungry, like holy men are supposed to do, he begged for his food, not taking more than he needed at a time and returned to living his cave, silent existence.

Years later, folks discovered him and his unique manner of existence and talked to him and recognized that he spoke as a Hindu sage. Word spread and people from all over India flocked to listen to him talk. Later, people from all over the world, especially Europeans and Americans came and asked him questions.  He still lived in his cave.

Eventually, devotees built an ashram (where a holy man teaches his devotees) at the foothill  and he would be in the hall, sited on a couch, cross legged, in his one and only Dottie (shorts) and towel and answered questions posed to him by his visitors. He lived and slept on that couch and in that hall. However, after 1945 when his health became fragile he allowed his followers to build a hut behind the hall and lived there. He died in 1950 of cancer.

The word is that Ramana Maharshi was the greatest Indian sage (Sri Bhagavan) of the twentieth century. India had Sri Ramakrishna in the nineteenth century and Ramana in the twentieth century.

What did he teach? The book in question is written in questions and answers format. Visitors to his ashram would ask questions and he would answer them. In the process he essentially explicated most of Hinduism. However, the explication is not systematic, not done in a sequential, logical manner.  Indeed, the answers tend to be repetitive and tedious (only the most persistent reader would read this book from the beginning to the end).

The reader who is likely to benefit most from the book is one that has studied Hinduism (or taken classes in comparative religions with Hinduism as one of the religions covered). In formal studies teachers systematically explain what each religion stands for. This is not what took place in these talks. Instead, folks brought their issues to the saint and he gave them answers and the answers are in sync with Hinduism, especially his particular path (jnana Yoga), the path of knowledge and wisdom.

Since the reader may not be familiar with Hinduism let me briefly summarize Hinduism before we proceed.

Hinduism is one of the world’s great religions (the others are Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam). It is probably the oldest religion?  It has been written down, in Sanskrit, for about four thousand years.  The religion began in India.

The Indian subcontinent was originally inhabited by black folks (called Dravidians). Aryans (white folks from Persia, Iran) crossed the Cyndi River (from which Hindi was derived) and, apparently, conjoined their Aryan religion with the religion of the Dravidians they conquered.

The religion began when shepherds, called Rishis, would write poems about God. Those poems are now called Veda.  Subsequently, folks wrote long epic tales about their religion (such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata). Later, intellectuals wrote philosophical treatises on the religion called Upanishads (the Upanishads probably are the most rational explication of the doctrines of a religion known to man; it was the first attempt by people to explain God in pure reason, rather than mythopoeic language). Later still, pure philosophers like Shankara, Ramanuja and so on wrote systematic discourses on Hinduism (writings that Western Christian theology has not equaled).

A brief description of the religion is contained in the Bagavad Gita (which is a section of Mahabharata). In the book, Krishna (supposedly God in human form) talked to Arjuna. Arjuna was a general about to go to war and was bothered by his conscience. He did not want to kill people. Krishna came along as his charioteer and tried to encourage him to go do his duty, to go kill. In the process he explicated Hinduism, especially its teaching that people are eternal and are not born and do not die, that they merely seem to be born and die in bodies, those taking place in a dream hence Arjuna should not be bothered by killing folks for in actual fact he is killing no one.

While in God, people sleep and have dreams. They have many dreams, each dream a life time in body; they have many life times in bodies while all the time remaining as spirit.

Krishna also explicated the various paths to God taught by Hinduism.  Patanjalii wrote a book explaining those paths to God.

According to Hinduism, people are born with different temperaments, or as we would today say, different personalities. Each person’s personality disposes him to prefer a specific path to God. No specific path is better than others but folks must follow the path suited to them (while, of course, also trying the other paths). All paths, all religions are ways that lead to God.

The paths are collectively called Yoga. Yoga is Sanskrit for yoking, reconnecting people back to their source, God (religion is Latin word meaning the same thing, reconnecting to our source).

There are four main yogas: Jnana yoga, Bhakti yoga, Karma Yoga, and Raja yoga (there are also tangential yogas such as Hatha Yoga…flexibility exercises, Ayurveda Yoga…India’s folk medicine).

Jnana yoga is the intellectual path to God (it is also called Vedanta).  It teaches advaita philosophy, non-dualism (that everything is one thing; one thing manifests in seeming diverse things but they are one).The world of multiplicity and separation we see with our eyes is said to be an illusion, not real. What is real is oneness, the unity of all things.  It says that following pure thinking one can recognize that the ground of our being is one. One spirit, one self, called Brahman is all people.  One self, Braham, as it were, has many parts, each part called Atman. Each of us is Atman. The Atman is the same as Brahman. One of the Upanishads says; thou art that. You (your real self) are God.

Bhakta Yoga is for those who are devotional in nature, folks who like to see God as a person and worship him. These people like to see God as a powerful father figure and pray to him and worship him. In worshiping their God (or his surrogate, such as Jesus Christ) they sometimes lose sense of their individuality and become one with him (experience the oneness that the Jnana yogis realized intellectually). According to Hinduism, over 90% of mankind is Bhakti, whereas only 1% is Jnani (intellectuals, wise persons).The path of love of God or Bhakti is suited to people who value love. Christianity is a Bhakti Yoga path to God; here, you love God and love the symbol of his ideal son, Jesus Christ. In loving God and his ideal son you and them become one self (hence self-realization through Bhakta yoga).

Karma yoga is the path of selfless work; it is for doers, businessmen, administrators, those who do not reflect on the nature of reality but engage in action. These are the producers of the world. They work and produce what we live on. They make our existence in body possible by producing our food and other things without which we would not survive physically. In as much as Brahman manifests in all of us and they make it possible for us to live they are serving Brahman, God through their work.  Go ahead and make billions of dollars selling goods and services and you are serving God through whatever you produce and sell; you do not need to go to church and talk about your belief in God to be serving God, you can serve God by serving his children who are one with him.

Raja Yoga is the royal path, the path that leads to God quickest.  This is the path of meditation. Sit down and meditate. This means telling yourself that you are not your body, not your ego. It means negating your entire ego based thinking. Neti, neti, nothing that you can think of is the truth. So, what is the truth, and who are you if you are not the body, ego and your thoughts? You do not know who in fact you are and what anything means. So keep quiet with a mind emptied of all ego conceptions of who you are and what reality is. Let go of your ego personality and its thinking and become a void, a no- ego separated self; remain silent.

In meditation people claim to have escaped from their ego self and the egos world and experienced their real self, the unified self, Brahman and Atman.  In that state there is no you and I, no seer and seen, no subject and object; there is just one self-Brahman who is simultaneously infinite selves.

Hinduism teaches that our real self is Brahman who is at the same time infinite people.  When one experiences that real self (called self-realization) one is said to be enlightened to one’s real self, is illuminated to one’s true self. The person who is realized is characterized by peace and joy; he is now aware that he is not his body and ego and that he lives eternally in spirit.

Buddhism is another name for Raja Yoga (Gautama Buddha, in effect, was a raja yogi…in India his religion, Buddhism, was absorbed by Hinduism as part of its raja yoga, whereas outside India it is known as Buddhism).

Hinduism teaches that there is one self, that self is called Brahman. Brahman is one and simultaneously infinite in numbers. Each of his part is called Atman. Atman and Brahman are one. They are not two people; they are one self, one self that is simultaneously whole and parts.

You are a self, a whole (Brahman) and a part (Atman).There is no space and gap between whole and part, no gap between people. We are all one self, literally. You are all people.

One self, Braham cast Maya on his mind and sleep and in his sleep projected out his infinite selves, atman’s, out and made each of them seem housed in body and living in space, time and matter. Maya made each of them seem to be different from others. Thus, on earth, the great illusion, the universal dream each of us sees himself as different from other people.

The goal of Hinduism is to teach us that whereas we seem different and separated from other people that, in fact, we are one. You are all selves.

You sleep and in dreams project out a world that seems real and populate that world with seeming different people and call yourself Ozodi or whatever your earthly name is. You see space, time and distance between you and other people.

The external world seems real. Hinduism says that the external world is not real, that it is in your mind, in my mind; in our shared one mind (Hinduism is solipsistic).

The various yogas and other Hindu practices are designed to enable you to realize that you are the world. In meditation, for example, you escape from the separated self and experiences unified self and know from that experience (Samadhi, called Nirvana in Buddhism and Satori in Zen) that you are all people. When you do so you are liberated from the ego and its suffering (Moksha). You now live peacefully, lovingly and joyously. You love all people not because you are doing them a favor but because in loving all people you love your whole self (contracted as holy self).  Conversely, if you hate people you hate your holy self and must therefore live in conflict and be unhappy.

Hinduism believes in reincarnation (dreams). We are always in Brahman but while in it sleep and dream many life times in bodies. In each life time, each dream time we do things. Our actions have consequences for us and for other people.

If we love people we build positive samsara. If we hurt other people we build negative samsara. We get reborn on earth to take the consequences of our past actions.

If we were good in past lives we get born in loving circumstances; if we lived hurtful lives in past lives we are born in horrible circumstances  in this life time (Africans, the sellers of their  people, criminals,  come back to suffer in this life time until they learn to love rather than exploit their people).

As Hinduism sees it, we are each at different stages in our evolution on planet earth. Hinduism divided society into four classes: Brahmin, Kastriya, Sudra and Untouchables. Each of us is said to be in the group where his past life’s actions places him.

The Brahmin class is the highest group, they are the priestly class, those who loved and served humanity in past lives.

The next to the priests are the Kastriyas; they are the leaders of society, the soldiers and administrators.

The third class is the Sudra; they are the workers of society.

The untouchables are the lowest social class, they are outcastes. These people supposedly were evil in past lives… Hitler today is probably somewhere living as an outcast in Africa?

Whereas there is some merit to India’s class system it is now abused. The rulers of India categorize people as born into classes and treat them as such. Originally, the castes are not where you are born into but where your behavior places you. Now in India black folks are mostly the untouchables, the outcasts. The conquering light skinned Aryans relegated the dark skinned blacks into the outcasts and thus control them.  This is the bastardization of religion’s good idea.

Hinduism believes that those who love all people and work to serve all people when they die no longer are reborn on earth. They stay in the spiritual world (there are many levels of the spiritual world, including astral world, the world of light forms; there is the formless world of Brahman, Brahmaloca).

Enlightened people may choose to come back to the world and upon birth immediately reject the material world, for they know that it is transitory and ephemeral and focus on what is changeless and permanent, spiritual matters. They are the teachers of God, the avatars like Jesus Christ and Gautama Buddha.

Hinduism classifies people into three mental states; Sativa, Rajas and Tamas. Those with Sativa mind are calm and focused on spiritual matters; those with Rajas mind are the doers, active people; those with Tamas mind are lazy, unproductive and given to corruption (think Nigerians).

Hinduism says that the world of matter is composed of three strands, called three gunas (this is akin to physics notion that the atom has three parts, electrons, protons and neutrons).

Hinduism believes that the universe comes and goes. A universe, called Kalpa/Yuga, comes, lives and dies and another is born. Lord Shiva awakes and a new universe is born and goes to sleep and that universe dies; he awakens to another universe etc. Our current universe is said to be the era of worshipping of God (India has many gods, all representing the different aspects of Brahman, including Vishnu, Shiva, Kali etc.).

Hinduism believes in what it calls the seven chakras, energy centers in the body beginning at the base of the spine, and the top one at the head. Each of the chakras performs certain functions. The first three perform lower functions of adaptation to their world, whereas the upper three perform mental functions; the middle chakra is the heart function (the center of love and connection to other persons).

At the base of the spine is kundalini energy, coiled like a snake; it can be awakened and enables the individual to awaken the chakras. Many ways are employed in the effort to awaken the kundalini energy, including controlled deep breathing (puraka), meditation (raja yoga), repeating an assigned mantra (a name a guru gives to one to repeat to help him quiet and concentrate his mind in Japa, religious practice).

Hinduism posits that we on earth live in ignorance of our real self; our real self is said to be atman (the individual self is jivatman); the goal of Hinduism is for us to remember our real self and live from that awareness.

Actually, we are said to be always in the real self but choose to forget it so as to identify as the ego and body and dream that we are those false self-identities.

The world is an illusion; we are in a dream that we are who we are not. In the dream there is a past, present and future, but in reality there is only the now of God with no past and future.

The goal is to find out who our real self and the real world is. Ramana Mahaishi employs the self-inquiry method to find out “who am I”; am I the ego and body or am I the person who owns the ego and body?  Through asking these questions and ruling out false answers one is supposed to realize ones true self.

Now that we have a bird’s eye view of Hinduism let us see what Ramana Maharshi said? He called his path to God Self-inquiry method. His path, like all Hindu paths, is meant to lead to self-realization. In broad terms he was a jnana yogi, he embraced the path of wisdom and intellect to God (lased with Bhakti yoga every now and then…such as when he prays and sings to his God).

Ramana Maharshi asked people to find out who their real self is. So, who is your real self? Are you the self that you currently know yourself as, the ego self-housed in body? If that is all you are then you will die and that would be the end of you.

We know that your body is composed or nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon and oxygen and traces of other elements. Your body is a composed thing. All composed things must be decomposed. Whether you like it or not your body will die. Give or take, a hundred years and your pretty body, the body you slave for, that you work like a slave to earn a living to maintain it would die and decompose, and smell like feces. The atoms that compose your body would decompose.

The elements that are now your body would decay to their parts (electrons, neutrons and protons). Those particles would in time decay to quarks and then to photons (light particles). Light energy would ultimately decay to wherever it came from during the Big Bang that 13.7 billion years ago produced the universe of matter, space and time.

If all you are is your body then you are nothing since your body came from nothing and returns to nothing.

If, as science teaches us, your ego mind is epiphenomenal, that is, is produced by your body, brain, and when your body dies your ego mind dies and you end.

Is that who you are or do you have a different self, a self that does not live in body, does not die and disappear into nothingness?  Ramana says that we have a different self, one that is changeless, eternal and permanent.

Ramana tells us to go find out who is our real self. Through his questions and answers method he tells us that there is another self in us, the self, the I that asks the question who am I? This is called the I-I method of inquiry.

One I, the Brahman in us ask the question: who am I? The other I, the ego self obviously is temporary and Ramana believes that it is not who we are. He wants a person to go beyond the illusory self, the false self, the ego self and find out that his real self is the atman who is one with the Brahman.

Like all good teachers Ramana Maharshi used homespun metaphors to drive his point home.  For example, he liked to use what he calls the three states of being to make his point: the waking state, the sleeping state and the dreaming state.

In deep sleep we do not know that we have a self. In waking state we have awareness of the ego self. In dreaming state we also have the awareness of the ego separated self.  He says that both the waking state (our day self) and the dreaming self is of the ego.

The ego and its world are false; one self-dreams at night and one self-dreams in the day time. We have no awareness of our self when we are in deep sleep (dreamless sleep).

Did our self-die when we are not aware of it in deep sleep? Ramana says no. it returns to Brahman and other worlds, and when we are in those worlds we are not aware of our world. In effect, when you sleep and is not dreaming you could be in unified spirit, God, or the light world and since the categories of those worlds are different from those of our world when you awaken you cannot remember them.

This is an intriguing idea although if you are skeptical Ramana did not make a persuasive argument that convinces you that we exist in a different state in sleep. Pure reason tells me that in deep sleep I do not understand where the I in me am. To tell me that it is in God is Hinduism’s idea that I do not know is true or not.

We wish to have an eternal self and could delude ourselves into taking our wish as reality. Let us then say that if one is an agnostic one would not be convinced that one is eternal and that God exists by Ramana’s efforts.

Ramana presented just about every argument that Hindu thinkers have ever presented that convinces them that God exists. However, he would not persuade a materialist, an atheistic scientist that what he is saying is anything but wishful thinking.

If God exists, for example, and Ramana is a God realized person, as he claimed to be, and God is powerful, how come he had cancer and died of it; how come he could not use his god’s powerful mind to heal his body or prevent it from having cancer? You could come up with other reasons to disagree with his thesis but the problem is that we do not know that in fact there is another self that transcends body and ego.

Perhaps another self exists and only those who have experienced it know that it exists? If that is the case one has to take the word of those who claim to have experienced it that it exists, or solder on until one experience it or dismiss the idea as bunkum.

If one chooses to base ones belief on mere word of mouth report by those who claim to have experienced something one runs the risk of being deceived; humanity has been deceived by loads of charlatans claiming god experience they have not had. If one chooses to predicate ones belief in God on others feedback, not on one’s conviction, well, one lays one’s self open to be deceived by quacks who claim to speak for God (speak from psychosis, may be?).

Ramana Maharshi’s talks did not provide scientific proof for what he teaches. For example, he says that the world is our thoughts projected out, that the external world we see is a mirror reflecting what we are thinking, what is in our minds. Is this true or just a baseless assertion? The world I see does not seem to reflect my thinking. I wish that only love and peace exist in the world but I see a world at war with itself. If you say that a deeper part of me, the ego unconscious mind in me, wishes for war when it separated from God and other persons you merely made an assertion that I cannot verify as in me. It is not for you to tell me what is in my mind if I do not see it there. It is like Sigmund Freud and his bunch of Vienna sex perverts telling us that our unconscious minds are ridden with polymorphously perverse sexual desires and some of us told them that we do not see their claims in us and they told us to just accept them as there in us. Accept them because the god called Freud spoke and what he says must be accepted on authority. Human beings can deceive themselves no end. Only what I can verify as true is acceptable to me, not what so-called credible persons say is true.

For millennia Indians sought ways to negate this world and escape to another world, a blissful world. They did not focus on the material world of the here and now and seek science to understand it and technology to master it, as the West did. They ignored the realities of this world; they denied the existence of the outside world by telling themselves that the external world is not real and that it is in their minds.  The result of this escape from earthly reality is the abject poverty Indians lived in.

Indians, who are probably the most intelligent human beings on earth, ended up been backward Vis a Vis the West.  Therefore, Ramana Maharshi may be doing his people and those who embrace his solipsistic and idealistic philosophy a disservice; he may be encouraging folk to ignore paying attention to the external world that they live in; in effect, he might stymie science and technology, the best means for understanding and mastering our world. Religion’s hocus pocus does not understand and master this world.

There is a universe of space, time and matter out there and our business is to understand it as objectively as is possible, regardless of whether it is real or not. The last time I checked, if I want to travel from Los Angeles to New York, a distance of about three thousand miles, I have to fly in an airplane. I do not teleport myself from one city to the other, as religion’s mumbo jumbo would suggest that my mind is capable of doing. Until religion goes beyond positing merely interesting ideas about the nature of reality, proves its ideas as real, science and technology is mankind’s best way of understanding and coping with the exigencies of this world.

I see science as the best way to understand our physical world hence we must study physics, chemistry and biology. I see technology as the best way to make the most of our world hence we must engage in it. Religions talk consoling talk but do not really walk their talk; they do not deliver when it is needed, such as heal people’s physical sicknesses and provide food for them to subsist on.

However, that does not mean that God and the real self does not exist.it means that science and religion are two different views of reality and that they should not be mixed. If one can compartmentalize the two approaches to living and not mix them, do physics, science and also do metaphysics, meta- science that is fine.

From reading this book, I learned a lot of new Indian words; however, those did not help me experience Samadhi.   Until one experiences the oneness that Ramana Maharshi talked about one must remain quiet and nevertheless say with Polonius to his son Horatio (in Shakespeare’s Hamlet)that: there are many things in heaven and earth that are not known in our science (philosophy).

I recommend this book. Read and understand it for it helps you understand the Hindu view of reality (the East sees the world as inside us, as a projection of our thinking). Compare it to the western view of reality (the West sees the world as outside us and that we must study and understand it; this is scientism, aka materialism). Then decide for you what is reality.

You should not take refuge in what other people told you are the nature of reality; it is only what you yourself say is the nature of reality that matters to you and your behavior.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

December 22, 2012

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 Will Durant, The Story Of Philosophy. (New York: Simon And Schuster, 1926) 412 Pages. 

Book Review By Ozodi Thomas Osuji 

Western philosophy began at Athens, Greece. So, to Greece we go. Something happened in the little Greek city states between 600-300 BC to lead Greeks to produce thoughts that the entire world has not seen produced in a corner of it, again. As if they drank some sort of wine that led to philosophic thinking, Greeks thought about everything in their world.  Whereas in other parts of the world folks conformed to the religions of their people, individual Athenians questioned everything and sought to understand reality as it is, not as their culture or other people told them it is.

So, what is reality? What is the truth (Pontus Pilate asked the religious Jews asking him to crucify Jesus)?

Nobody knows what the truth is (religion gives people assumptions of the truth and folks go through their lives living with the unproven assumptions given to them by their religions and cultures).

Greek thinkers began from agnosticism and skepticism and then studied their world to see if they could figure out what the truth of things is.

Different individuals posited their views on reality. Democritus and others hypothesized that matter could be broken down into parts that could no longer be subdivided, and called that part atom. Democritus, Archimedes, Pythagoras etc. and their ideas gave rise to what we now call physics (the physical sciences).

(The Catholic Church’s interregnum that began with the fall of the Roman Empire in 450 AD banished physics and sentenced Europe to a thousand years of darkness until John Dalton rediscovered the idea of the atom in 1800.  In 1911, Ernest Rutherford showed that not even the atom is the smallest part of matter; Rutherford discovered the nucleus, proton of the atom. In 1932 James Chadwick discovered the neutron of the atom; J.J Thompson discovered the electron in 1897. Today the atom is seen as having a nucleus with protons and neutrons in it and electrons circling it; there are other sub-particles of the atom.)

The sophists went around debating with themselves and whoever wanted to debate with them as to the nature of reality. Socrates was the king of the sophists and insisted on people clarifying their terms. If, for example, you said that there is no justice in society he would ask you to tell him what justice means. An argument would ensue on the meaning of justice. Days, weeks, months and even years later it would become clear that the person talking about justice does not have clarity in his mind as to the meaning of justice.

What is justice? Is your opinion of what justice is the nature of justice, if so what is it? Is justice of God? What is God, does God exist, and have you proved that God exists?  How do you know that God exists, and if not how can you talk of the justice of God?

Your wish that God exists is exactly that, your wish? You do not have proof that God exists. If all you have is faith that there is a force called God then are you willing to accept that other people have faith in different conceptions of God and if so why should folks fight over God if God is their ideas and not self-evident reality?

Many schools went about teaching their ideas of what life is. Zeno propounded his stoicism. He said that we do not know what life is all about, that there is no knowing that life has meaning or not or that it was created by God. What matters is how one lives one’s life. You do not have control over what is happening in the world, what matters is how you respond to them. You can allow yourself to be disturbed by events that you do not have control over or be equanimous towards them.

Seneca, Cicero, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius (Roman stoics) said that one’s anger or depression or fear (ones emotional state, cheerful or sad) is a function of how one thinks about the events of this world but not caused by the events of this world. You can choose to see things differently. It is all up to you how you react to what happens to you; you do not have one set way that you must respond in.

Epicurus taught that given the pointlessness of living that the best lived life is one that enjoyed it. Horace said carpe diem, make the most of today, for you do not know what is going to happen to you tomorrow; you might be dead tomorrow. Have fun today and that is all there is to life. There is no point in depressing yourself about life, just make the most of it and leave it at that.

Epicureanism is often mistaken to mean indulging in hedonic life style; no, it does not mean eating too much food. One can find joy in intellectual pursuits and doing so is ones idea of living the good life.

Then there were the cynics and skeptics. Whatever you say from a positive perspective can be seen from a negative, pessimistic perspective. Life is good, right?   Didn’t the volcano of Vesuvius erupt and bury the whole city of Pompeii and charred people to death?  How then is life good? God loves his children, right?  God so loves his children that he gives them diseases, suffering and death! The cynic does not believe in anything; moreover, he is a killjoy. (That would suggest that joy is generally predicated on ignorance of the nature of reality. But then one may ask: what is reality, anyway?)

Good and bad are our opinions but not the verdict of nature, right? Is nature impersonal and does not give a damn about human affairs? How do you know that whatever your response is is the correct assessment of nature (and nature’s God, if there is one)?

Simply stated, many schools of thought were in Athens and each attracted followers. In this mix came Plato. Plato was a disciple of Socrates but when Socrates was judged a corrupter of youth (teaching them not to believe in God), imprisoned and forced to drink the hemlock and die Plato continued Socrates teaching. He employed the Socratic Method; his books were dialogues supposedly between prominent members of the Athenian society. These gentlemen would gather and talk about issues, such as justice, politics, ideal society, God etc.  Plato wrote on many subjects but he is famous for his idealism (explicated grandly in the Republic).

Plato’s idealism consists of his belief that what exists imperfectly in our world have perfect archetypes of them in the world of ideas (if you like, spiritual world). There are ideal things that we do not see; we are corruptions of those ideals. There are ideal human beings and ideal animals etc. and we are imperfect renditions of them.  (Are there ideals or are ideals wished for perfect state of being?)

In his politics Plato sketched how to govern an ideal society. He said that all children from about the age of ten should be offered compulsory education (mostly physical education) for ten years. At age twenty they are given examinations and a few pass and the rest are weeded out (and made to become farmers and laborers etc.).  The few that passed the examination are given further ten years of instruction on the nature of things. At age thirty there is another weeding out examination. Those that make it are thereafter taught philosophy. At age thirty five they are examined and thereafter told to go put what they learned into practice, to live in the world.  At age fifty those who have succeeded are gathered together to rule society as its guardians, the philosopher kings.

The philosopher kings are to live communal life, share things, including wives and generally not have private property. Their function is to do what is good for society. 

Plato was an idealist. He wanted to change people, change society and its institutions and bring about what seemed to him ideal society. His Republic delineated how he planned to go about getting guardians, philosopher kings’ rule his utopia. He was a little, timid man with a wish to change himself, change other people and change social institutions, all by his self. This showed that he had wish for power to recreate the world. He was teetering on delusion disorder, grandiose type. He was a dangerous lunatic.

His wish to replace god and recreate people and make them what he wanted them to be led him to justify infanticide. He wanted to be more powerful than God and all people hence he was living in fantasy land.

Plato, like Socrates ran afoul of the leaders of Athens; they imprisoned him and gave him the choice of exile or drinking the hemlock and he chose to go to exile. He was not going to allow Athens to kill another philosopher.

He went to Syracuse, Sicily (now part of Italy but then one of Greek outposts in the Mediterranean). He was welcomed by the king of Sicily, Dionysius. The king told him to implement his ideal republic.

What do you know? The unrealistic philosopher wanted to do away with the king and initiate his ideal pattern of governing society by philosopher kings. Plato had no clue about human egoism and desire for power. The king arrested and sold him into slavery!

His friends rescued him but thereafter he died, a broken man.  These timid men who are dreamers and want to transform the world into their dreams always come to tragic ends. 

Barbarians living two hundred miles to the north of Athens, Macedonians were rising to power. Their king, Philip eventually conquered Athens. His son, Alexander caught the conquering bug and embarked on conquering the known world. By the time he was done he had conquered Egypt, Judea, Mesopotamia (Iraq), Syria, Persia and India.

Alexander the great spread Greek culture to the areas he conquered just as Napoleon spread the French culture of reason and enlightenment to the parts of Europe he conquered.  Alexander drank himself to death at age thirty.

Aristotle was Alexander’s teacher. Apparently, with financial support from Alexander he established his school, Lyceum in Athens (to compete with Plato’s school, the academy). Unlike Plato Aristotle was a scientist of sorts. He gathered specimens of all animals, fauna and things around him and categorized them.  He tried to study things as they are, not as he wanted them to be, hence sowed the germ of the scientific method in the Western world.

Alas, he had strong opinions of what things are and propounded those without basing his conclusions on pure observations alone, as scientists do.  He proffered interesting but weird views of phenomena, most of them false.

Yet his ideas ruled the West for the next two thousand years and, more or less, retarded the growth of science (because he was deemed the authority on most issues and scholars referred to what he supposedly said to give their views credibility).

Democritus was on the right path to science but Aristotle attacked him for saying that atoms exist in a void. As he sees it void cannot exist.

Aristotle established syllogistic logical process. Even here he was wrong. Consider: 

All animals have four legs. (Major premise)

A dog has four legs (Minor premise)

Therefore, a dog is an animal (logical conclusion). 

This is the logic taught by Aristotle. The problem is that the major premise is assumed and not self-evident.  Are all animals four legged?  There are two legged animals, and animals with hundreds of legs (millipedes).  As long as one assumes the truth of the major premise the minor premise and conclusion follow as logical.  The point is that Aristotle did not help us understand the truth by positing his logical processes but merely showed us how we think. We tend to posit major premises, assume them to be true and then draw inferences from them.  For example, we say, God created people. Therefore people are the children of God, not the creator of God.  We say God is love and people are the children of God, therefore, people must love like their father, God. How do we know that that is true; how do we know that God is love, that we are his children hence are like him, loving? We have made many assumptions but given our major assumption our deductions are logical.

Aristotle’s famous statement that God is the unmoved mover is one of the instances in which he assumes a major premise to be true. He reasoned that all things are in motion. We can go on showing how one thing moved another and go as back as we could. If this logic is true then it is possible that there is infinite causation of motion. But that would not do, for it would lead to infinite regress so Aristotle suddenly ended the discourse by saying that there must be a beginning to the chain of causation and that beginning is God. God is the unmoved mover.

The assertion that God is the first cause is, of course, nonsense for it assumes that there is an unmoved mover.

When the Catholic Church embraced Aristotelian logic it used it to justify the existence of God. Thomas Aquinas, in the 1200s essentially posited a God that got everything in motion.  This is an assumption but an assumption that as we speak colors extant Catholic, Christian theology.

Aristotle had interesting ideas on politics. Essentially he believed that there are different types of people and that each person is suited for certain professions. There are those suited by nature and training to rule society (aristocrats) and there are those fitted by their nature to be in the military or trading, businessmen, or bureaucracy, or work as slaves. Slaves and women are not fitted to rule society.

Both Aristotle and Plato embraced aristocracy, as opposed to mob rule, democracy, or the rule of one man, monarchy or the rule of a few persons, oligarchy or the rule of the rich, plutocracy. They gave their reasons for their choice. We shall not concern ourselves with their complex and convoluted reasoning.  Our society’s choice is democracy, properly put, aristocratic democracy, and a society where all are given equal opportunity, and competition is allowed to select folks for whatever goods society gives people. 

Aristotle’s philosophy influenced the West and made the West stagnant until Francis Bacon (born 1561) came along and insisted that philosophy can be a forum for useless speculations and that what we need to do is base knowledge on empirical observation.

What is the truth? We do not know. The aspect of the truth that we can say something for sure is that aspect of it that we can observe, and experiment on and verify. Bacon established the philosophy of science in the West.

Copernicus was the first modern scientist when in 1543 he insisted that the sun is the center of the universe (he was wrong; the sun is the center of the solar system). Galileo in 1610 became the first empirical scientist when he actually used the telescope to prove that the planets revolve around the Sun. In 1687 Isaac Newton established his three laws of motion and gravity and established physics as a scientific discipline.

England embraced the scientific method and thus we had such hardnosed realists as Thomas Hobbes (men are atoms, they are individuals pursuing their self-interests, Leviathan), John Locke (there is no evidence of the notion that we are born with souls; we are born tabla-raza and experience write in our brains what we now have), David Hume (there is no proof that God exists, only experience is real), George Berkeley (tried to prove that God exists by saying that since scientist say the external world is known to us as ideas in our minds, therefore the world is ideas  in our minds and since we do not know everything, there must be a larger mind, God’s mind that everything is in it), Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill (utilitarianism, that laws should reflect what gives pleasure to the greatest number  of people in society, that is, laws are not what God say that they are but what is good for us). 

Let us shift gears a bit and focus on French philosophers such as Rene Descartes, Blasé Pascal, Voltaire, Jean Jacque Rousseau, and Denis Diderot (and thereafter shift to Spinoza and German idealistic philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and end by focusing on Herbert Spencer, Henri Bergson, William James, John Dewey and Bertrand Russell).

Rene Descartes studied mathematics (geometry) and philosophy. He brought his analytic geometry to bear on philosophy but his greatest contribution was in metaphysics, the issue of matter and spirit. Does God exists or does God not exist?  Descartes began from what he called skepticism, doubting all known ideas on everything. Having done so he proceeded to say that the only thing that he knows for sure is that he thinks that he exists (cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am).

Of course this is not persuasive for just because a person thinks does not prove that he exists, does not prove that God exist or that there is a part of him that exists as part of God. Contemporary neuroscience teaches us that thinking is epiphenomenal, is a product of the dance of neurons in our brains. Contemporary brain science teaches that thinking is strictly biological.

We do not see dead people thinking; what is empirical is that some life biological animals, human beings do think and to say anything beyond that is speculative.

Descartes tells us that human beings have two sides to them, their bodies and their souls. Their body he concedes is like any other material in the universe and is affected by the laws of motion (mechanics). The human body obeys the laws of motion and gravity (and, as we would today say, the laws of heat, light, electricity, sound, gases, liquids, solids).The human body is composed of matter and particles and obeys all the laws of matter, space and time.

The question is whether all we are are our bodies. Descartes thinks that there are spiritual parts of us hence his famous dualistic philosophy: man is composed of matter and spirit.

But where is this spirit that Descartes talked about? How do we know that spirit exists?  We do not have objective evidence that spirit exists. Of course, there are poetic writings on the nature of spirit but no one has demonstrated that those are anything but wishful thinking.

Descartes made seminal contribution to analytic geometry. However, his metaphysics is mere restatement of popular superstition: human beings believe that they are made of mind and matter, spirit and body. We know about the body part but have no idea about the spirit part and on that we leave the French man to console himself with his philosophy (Boethius). 

The English made hay of the idea that mind is determined by matter. David Hume showed that all we know is derived from our five senses. Our memory stores what our senses send to it. The senses of touching, feeling, seeing, smelling, and hearing are the only demonstrable source of information available to us. Claims that there are other ways of knowing are exactly those, claims.

Hume further talked about the nature of inductive and deductive reasoning, logic but those are not our present concern. What is salient in the great racists view (he believed that Africans are incapable of thinking or civilization) is his contention that experience is how we get to know what we think that we know.

John Locke reinforced that materialistic epistemology by showing that we are not born with memory of anything already in our minds. We do not remember anything before we are born; we remember only what, subsequent to our births, the five senses store in our memories.  In effect, we are mind and body made of matter, and the philosophy of materialism is the only real philosophy there is. Religion’s conception of God and life after we die is mere wishful thinking that has no bases in reality.

George Berkeley the Irish bishop tried very hard to demonstrate the existence of God through his solipsistic philosophy. If a tree fell and there is no human being to hear its sound or witness its fall did a tree fall? In other words, does the external world exist apart from us or does it exist in our minds?

We can have fun talking about metaphysics, epistemology and ontology, beauty and ethics but the fact is that we seem to live in a world that encompasses us.

Upon hearing about Berkeley’s philosophy, Dr. Johnson reportedly (to his side kick, Boswell) stomped his feet on a rock and felt pain and said that the world must be external to him for it caused his body pain (dream stones also cause our dream bodies pain, so Dr. Johnson may not have won his argument that the world is outside us).

If you walk into a wall you would bump your head and sustain bruises and feel pain. If you jump out of your upstairs window you would break your bones. If you want to get from point A to B in the world of space, time and matter you must travel (motion). Thus, in the here and now world the world is outside us; the world determines our activities. Materialism seems to be the reality of this world. (But is this true? John Bell’s theorem shows that entangled particles do communicate non-locally, that regardless of where they are in the universe they seem to know what others are doing and respond when one responds; that is to say that space, time and matter may be an illusion that seems to exist but in fact do not exist?  Perhaps, the sense of union and oneness of all things that Berkeley and mystics talk about is after all true? We are not here dealing with quantum mechanics and will not pursue that subject.) 

François Marie Arouet, aka Voltaire was a poet and skeptic. He was not an atheist but liked to make fun of theists’ conceptions of God. In his most famous novel, Candide, he wondered what kind of god allows earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, draughts, diseases etc. to destroy his creation.

It is said that the children of God chose to separate from God and have free will. Okay. Does this mean that a loving God should then ignore his separated children’s suffering?  What earthly father bases his relationship with his children on their past mistake, separation, and on their alleged freedom to do as they choose and suffer the consequences of their choices?

Do we in fact have freedom? If you have freedom can you choose not to die, do you even know when you will die?

You see your child put his hands in fire and you know that he will be burned and you ignore him and let him get burned?  It does not seem that God who supposedly loves practices the type of love we have on earth.

On the other hand, it is difficult to say that there is no God for how did matter write Shakespeare’s plays?

The French laughing philosopher made the best of this world without accepting religionists’ delusions about the nature of God.

Voltaire emphasized reason in what people do. Never mind whether God exists or not, just do what pure reason tells you is right. With pure reason we can solve our earthly problems. This is Voltaire’s humanist credo; we do not need the auspices of God to help us adapt to the exigencies of our world.

Blasé Pascal made contributions to mathematics and science but had mystical experiences that told him that God exist and that he and that God share one self and are one (in mystical union there is no space and separation between people and their creator, no you and I, no subject and object, no seer and seen; all share oneself and one mind). In his Pensees Pascal waxed eloquent about how we are all part of one unified spirit. Not all of us have had mystical experience hence can corroborate and verify Pascal’s subjective experience based ideas on God. 

Denis Diderot was an atheist and could do without what Laplace called the god hypothesis. What is salient is reason so let us use reason to solve our problems (the philosophy of secular humanism).

Diderot and Voltaire and others wrote the French encyclopedia; in it they tried to capture all known objective knowledge, not religious razzmatazz, in one book. 

Jean Jacque Rousseau rebelled against the enlightened philosophers over emphasis on pure reason, and recommendation that we should make decisions based on reason. As he sees it, we really do not make decisions based on our heads, reason but on our hearts, feelings.  When we make important choices we do not do so because of rational discourse but because of feeling. When you sacrifice for your children you do so for the reasons of the heart not your head.

Rousseau wanted to return to the world of feelings. He stimulated Romanticism, the emphasis on feelings rather than reason. He wanted to return to the alleged simpler world of our primitive forefathers that did not emphasize reason. As he sees it, the noble savages of North America lived happier lives than the civilized people of Parisian salons.

Unfortunately for the nostalgic Rousseau, his supposed noble Indians were actually busy hunting each other down, and scalping each other’s heads!  In his Novel, Emile Rousseau waxed sentimental but the realistic reader dismisses him as a child yearning for a return to a world where his mother took care of him. In the adult world there is no protector father figure.

In his book, social contract he talked about how men are born free but everywhere are on chains. Civilization is chaining people. Despite this sentimentalism, Rousseau did manage to talk about government been contractual, that we set it up to serve our good.

(When was this social contract, covenant actually enacted? There is no evidence that people sat down and negotiated to have governments; governments evolved as people tried to govern their affairs; the contractual theorists of government such as Rousseau, Hobbes and Locke were making a lot of assumptions but let us forgive them for we know what they are trying to accomplish: emphasize that governments exist to serve the people.)

In as much as the king was not elected by the people he ruled illegally. Rousseau’s pen stimulated the French revolution by delegitimizing the rule of unelected monarchs; claiming to rule the people by divine right of kings sounds hollow to those who do not believe in divinity. A legitimate ruler is one elected by the people and who represents their aspirations, will; we are talking about democratic government as the only legitimate form of government.

Of course there are other forms of government, such as oligarchy, aristocracy, monarchy, plutocracy, fascism and socialism but let us not pretend that they are legitimate governments elected by the people to serve the peoples interests. 

In Germany Leibnitz (and Goethe) joined the Romantic Movement and wrote holy nonsense about God and his parts. God projects himself into monads and each of these monads is in each of us as our souls, our real selves. Let us not go there; we have no time to indulge in philosophic abstractions here.

What Leibnitz did manage to do that is useful is invent calculus (independent of Isaac newton doing the same in England). 

Spinoza was born in Amsterdam (of Jewish parents who were driven out of Spain after the re-conquest of Spain from the Arabs in 1492). Jews living in reconquered Spain were told to choose between converting to Christianity and leaving the country. Spinoza’s Jewish parents left Spain and sought refuge in Holland. They prospered in their new country.

Spinoza received the best education in his synagogue but at some point his study of geometry and English materialists (such as Hobbes and Locke) convinced him that the biblical tale of God creating this world could not be true.  He made his views known and the Jewish synagogue fearing alienating their Christian neighbors asked him to recant his views and he refused and he was excommunicated from Judaism.

He thereafter committed his short life to philosophy. He made his living by polishing glasses.   Spinoza did not write many books. His primary work is his Ethics, and it was published posthumously. Essentially, he seems to be saying that there is what we might call spiritual and material substances at work in the universe and that the two of them are not separated but are the manifestations of one force.

One substance, let us call it god, acts as human thinking and also acts as the human body.  Body and mind are two manifestations of the same force.  This philosophy is often called pantheism.

This philosophy is not persuasive. Spinoza made his greatest contribution in ethics, our public behavior. Since we are all the manifestations of one force, loving all people loves our whole selves, Spinoza said. Virtue is not something done to please other people but that which is its own reward. You and other people are oneself so in loving and caring for other people you love your whole self. A world where we love our whole self, our individual and other selves is a peaceful and joyous world.

This is good metaphysics but it has not proved the unity of all things for we certainly see space and time between us. I do not know for sure that you and I are joined, unified but if talking about our eternal union in spirit makes us love our selves, such talk is happy fiction in my ears. 

We have talked about materialism, science, reason and romanticism in Western intellectual tradition; now, let us take a peek at our German friends and see how they reacted to all these movements in Western intellectual life.

Immanuel Kant (of Scottish parents who migrated to Germany) set out to prove that materialism, especially Locke and Hume are wrong.  His efforts are aimed at showing that God exists and that soul exists. He tried to build his argument on Newtonian physics and Kepler’s astronomy. He borrowed heavily from Newton’s mechanics but what he ended up saying is that matter seems incapable of moving itself and that there must be a force that moves it.

Think of your body. Something in you makes your hand to move and Kant would like us to believe that it is soul, spirit (Noumenon) that made your hand (phenomenon, matter) move.

We now know something about electro-magnetism and the behavior of atoms in the nervous system…fire, heat can make your hand withdraw itself without your mind telling it to do so.

Kant‘s philosophy was magnificent abstraction that to his mind proved that pure reason has its limitations (hence critique of pure reason). He talked about what he called apriori and posteriori ideas. Mathematics, for example, he thinks exists independent of matter. Two plus two is four and this seems to be an abstract reality (apriori) and exists regardless of the existence of matter (phenomena).

There is a part of knowledge (posteriori) that is a result of our experience. What Kant is really saying is that there is knowledge that is outside experience and matter and he associates that knowledge with God.  In his view he had dealt a blow to materialism.

But has he?  I would like to argue with Kant but that is not my goal here.  Let us just say that he did not persuade me or any materialist that pure reason is not all we have going for us.

At any rate, despite his labors to prove that God exists, in his old age Kant became insane and suffered Alzheimer’s diseases. The God he struggled mightily to prove exists did not come to his rescue. So, does his God exist?

If one may ask: why is it that men are always making arguments for the existence of God? Why not let god make arguments for his existence? And since he does not show us that he exists he does not exist.

You cannot prove to those who do not know that God exists that he exists by citing your subjective experience of him. It is only if God can appear to all of us at the same time so that we can verify his existence that we know that he exists. Let God, spirit, Jesus Christ stand where all of us can see him and we would all know that he exists.

If we have to do with a person telling us that God exists based on his experience, say, Mohammad telling us that God exists because he heard the voice of an angel Gabriel we can always suspect that angels do not exist and that he was hallucinating, was insane?

Many deluded religionists have misled mankind by claiming to hear the voice of God in their heads. It is now time for God to reach all of us, but not through select persons.

God is probably our creation. As psychoanalysts say, we are intimidated by the affairs of this world and are looking for some external force to protect and rescue us. Alas, no force comes to our rescue.

Until God speaks for himself and does so in such a manner that all of us can simultaneously hear him speak to us we cannot accept him as real. Whatever arguments that philosophers like Kant make or religionists say about God do not prove the existence of God.

Kant’s idealistic philosophy is wishful thinking, nothing more nothing less. A mind sees an ugly world out there and seeks an ideal version of it. Human beings always seek ideals.

As we all know when one takes ones ideals as reality one has left the world of reality and is now deluded, paranoid, and insane. The insane person thinks that his ideals are reality. If you are ugly and want to be handsome that is understandable wish but if you now believe that you are handsome, that your wish is your reality you have left the real world and fled to the world of fantasy. In the end Kant fled to the fantasy world he was hatching in his philosophy; he became mad. 

Georg Fredrick Wilhelm Hegel did not just play with ideals, he left the world and lived in his ideal world and was insane. The man was living in his idealistic world and had nothing to do with the real world we live in. He was simply insane. Try reading his books, especially the Phenomenology of spirit and I bet you that you would think that it is 800 pages of stuff written by an inmate in a psychiatric hospital. It does not make sense.

Hegel’s writing on history seems to have some rhyme and reason in it. He talked about what he called dialectic historicism (which his student, Karl Marx said that he stood on its head and called dialectic materialism).  Hegel talked about the movement of ideas and history. At any point in time there is a real-world, the idea. That historical situation has other ideas opposing it.

There is the present status quo (thesis) and opposition to it (antithesis); the two struggles and the result is a synthesis of the two in a new idea of history, a new stage of historical development. This is fair enough characterization of how history evolves.

Moreover, we seem to have ideas in our heads, ideas that oppose each other and we seek synthesis that reconciles them in new ideas. Society appears to have similar dynamics.

Having made this much sense Hegel proceeded to talk about the absolute idea where all the theses and antitheses, the world of opposites are resolved in a perfect state. That perfect state that resolves historical dynamics is Germany.

There you have it; Hegel the German nationalist was actually seeking ways to reconcile the differences in the Germanic world into one strong German state. He thinks that the progression of history would end with this absolute idea. His student, Karl Marx talked similar nonsense. 

Marx talked about how progress is due to the struggle of thesis and antithesis and resulting synthesis of both in a new society. However, instead of leaving the struggle at the ideational level, Marx said that it is economic.

In primitive communal society some persons decided to oppress others, enslave others. Thus slave owners and slaves conflicted and the synthesis is feudal society.

In feudal society the forces of the status quo, land owning aristocrats and those wishing for change, the middle class, the bourgeoisie led to struggle. This conflict led to a new society, a synthesis of the two warring parties, socialist society.

Having reached socialism or communism Marx suddenly ends history; the dynamic struggle of oppressors and oppressed, the war of opposites end.

We know that in communist states an oppressive class emerged. The leaders of the Soviet Union oppressed the workers. Thus, both ought to continue dialectical materialism, that is, conflict continues to form new synthesis, a new form of society, something different from socialist society.

Francis Fakuyama made the same mistake in 1991 when building on the collapse of the Soviet Union he talked about the end of history, how liberal democracy, American style, has prevailed.

Alas, his American liberal democracy that is supposed to be permanent is now experiencing the emergence of plutocrats like Mitt Romney who call themselves job creators and do not want to pay taxes to support the society they mercilessly exploit. The result would be French type revolution in America where the Jacobeans, masses would be led by a new Robespierre and cut off the heads of the plutocrats. As Thomas Paine said, the land is always cleansed with the blood of tyrants, oppressors. America is overdue for revolution and one is in the air.

The injustice of paying America’s corporate chief executive officers millions of dollars while paying their workers not even enough money to pay their bills cannot last forever. Conservatives may delude themselves with their claptrap of how job creators need to have all that money so as to create jobs for the people but soon the people would know that they are not creating jobs; the criminals are merely living off the people’s suffering; when this consciousness becomes mass the oppressed people would rise up and chop off the heads of their oppressors. Sooner or later, the Marie Antoinette’s of America will eat their cakes.

Society is characterized by constant struggle of opposing social forces; there seems no end to this conflict; we rest in peace only when we die!

Aristotle talked about the unmoved mover, well, everything is always in motion and there is no first mover. Aristotle was afraid of infinite regress, of seeking the original force that got things going to infinity and he did not want to do so and abruptly end the chain of causation; he should not have done so.

(If God created us the next logical question is: who created God? Uncorrupted children ask this question before society and religionists browbeat them into silence and conformism to the mass delusion called religion.)

Hegel needed to be in a psychiatric hospital and treated for delusion disorder; therefore, we do not need to waste more time on him.

His rival, Arthur Schopenhauer (he was the philosopher of my pessimistic youth) sees the world as a bleak place. The world is pointless and meaningless; man ought not to exist! But the world exists so let us understand it. 

As Schopenhauer sees it, built into people is a powerful instinct to live; he called it will to live. We are driven by this blind force to live.  We live because we have an instinct to live.

We do not live because of any well thought-out reasons why we should live. The day the individual no longer experiences a powerful blind desire to live and must consciously have reasons why he should live is the day he commits suicide.

Your reasoning alone cannot give you purpose and reason to live. First, you live and then you come up with excuses why you live.

The ideas we cloud our minds with as to why we live are not really why we live. But we can play with those intellectualistic ideas that tell us why we live, such as living for love, for God. No one lives to serve God; one lives because one experiences an urge to live.

If we thought about it life is awful; consider that we are born, suffer, age and die. Who would want this sort of life?  Pure reason does not justify living.

Because there are blind forces in us that make us do what we do we will always do what to our reasons seem irrational.

We have sex instinct and despite the fact that the sexual act is filthy and animalistic we must seek it if we are to reproduce the race, and, as some say, have pleasure (if we devote energy trying not to seek sex, as old Sigmund Freud tells us, we become more preoccupied with it or worse become perverted as in Catholic priests molesting children while pretending celibacy).

We have instinct for aggression and therefore will always go to war and kill each other and then give ourselves pseudo reasons why we went to war. The real reason we go to war is that we are driven to kill each other, what Freud called Thanatos (was Napoleon and Hitler powerful; one ended up on a piece of rock in the south Atlantic, St Helena, and the other killed himself and his body was incinerated into ashes and dumped at a rose garden near his fuhrer bunker).

Our pursuit of power does not give us power; why then do we pursue power and fame? Vanity? Why vanity?

Schopenhauer says that we do these things because they are part of our nature whereas our reasons inveigh against them yet we cannot stop doing them! Man is a miserable animal; he is addicted to his instincts, his will to live; live for no known rational purpose. 

Herbert Spencer responded to Charles Darwin’s book, the Origin of species published in 1859. Darwin made the argument that we are animals that evolved like other animals and that we are always in competition where the fittest adapt to changes in the environment and the weakest die out. Life is a perpetual struggle where the fit survive and the unfit die out.

If in nature the powerful survive and the weak die why not construct a society that reflects that reality in its ethics?

During the early stages of the industrial revolution, American robber barons, such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, J.P Morgan, Vanderbilt and Stanford etc. were powerful animals; they ate the weak with whose labor they built their economic empires. Spencer said that that was as it should be.

Do not waste your time crying for the proletariat workers used by the robber barons to build their economic empires, in nature the weak are used by the strong; big fish eats small fish; lions eat sheep. Society must therefore be brutally competitive and the able rewarded and the weak left to die.

If one may play the devil’s advocate and ask Mr. Spencer: do you really think that society can be organized as you fantasize? What prevents the workers exploited by the robber barons from killing the barons? Fear of God and his alleged punishment. What god, didn’t Darwin do away with God?

If each of us is for himself and not for others life would be as Hobbes said it was in the state of nature: war of each against all and life would be nasty, brutish and short. Would your robber barons enjoy their moneys in the early graves they would be relegated to by those trying to appropriate their wealth? (Karl Marx talked about expropriating from the appropriators; what is good for the goose is good for the gander.)

It is amusing how so-called philosophers are dumb asses and do not think about the consequences of their philosophies. Take away love from people and what is left is chaos and anarchy. I have learned to see Western philosophers as asses!

Nietzsche said that we are like camel; in our youth, like camels we squat down and other folks place heavy loads on us; give us culture that oppresses us; bid us to get up and walk; we walk around carrying that load of culture. Okay. But what prevents us from throwing away the load, and attacking those who loaded us down? Fear of harm and death.

When the people overcome the fear that holds them down they would do away with their oppressors; we would then have a fair and just society.

As John Stuart Mill observed (On Liberty) until a people can look death in the face and say come get us, we do not want to live if we must live as slaves they cannot fight and if needs be, die for their Liberty. The tree of liberty is watered with patriots’ blood. 

Frederick Nietzsche took Spencer’s realism to its logical and absurd conclusion.  Those who seek logical conclusions to human speculative ideas always go mad. Nietzsche went mad…he suffered from delusion disorder or mania, for he was going about boasting that he was the best man on earth hence delusion of grandeur, saying that his philosophy is the final word on the subject.

What he was trying to do in “Thus Spake Zarathustra” and “The Will to power” is be logically consistent. He accepted Charles Darwin’s evolution theory and believed that it is true. If it is true that we are animals who compete for survival and the fittest survive and the weakest die out he then tried to apply that hypothesis to society. As he saw it, society is composed of people competing and the best should make it to the top and become supermen, the aristocrats who ruled society. He did not like democracy for he did not believe that all people are equal.  Let the strong lead the weak, the man believed.

But, alas, he was so foolish that it never occurred to him that in a world where there is no purpose and meaning and where we are all animals struggling for survival there is no reason why the weak should accept the leadership of the strong. Why shouldn’t the weak kill the strong?  If the strong should dominate the weak for the sake of dominating them, as he said, then the weak should kill the strong for the sake of doing so. There is no justice in the world.

If evolution theory is accepted, society is an artificial social contract for what is natural is for the strong to eat the weak. Since Nietzsche is weak he would be eaten by the strong. Nietzsche was almost blind as well as insane; Nazis probably would have considered him socially useless and a burden on the taxpayers and gassed him to death in one of the gas chambers and killing fields. We must be very careful what we write for unbalanced dictators who claim to be acting independently are almost always acting out the half-baked philosophies they heard from half crazed philosophers.

Nietzsche did not see the logical contradictions in his writings; he assumed that the rule of the strong is good for the weak; who said so, the weak? Why should the weak accept the rule of the strong?

Nietzsche was an immature writer, he never grew up. If he grew up he would have accepted inconsistence in logic.

Yes, we are born unequal;  some are strong and some weak yet to have society we must assume our equality and work for social good, as in democracy, some socialism and love (Nietzsche says let the weak die off and should not be helped by the strong).

Clearly, Adolf Hitler embraced this immature view of existence and embarked on trying to be the superman and kill the weak. He killed millions but other super men, Russians, killed him. In a world where we all struggle to be supermen there was no reason why Hitler should not be killed by other aspirants to superman-hood.

Nietzsche’s world would lead to anarchy and chaos and life would be nasty, brutish and short.  In the real world we need to accept the contradiction of strength and weakness, equality and inequality, we need the aristocracy of ability and some mass democracy. 

The late nineteenth century and early twentieth century gave us Henri Bergson, William James, John Dewey and Bertrand Russell and a few other philosophers. By the 1930s it was clear that the world had no more use for mere speculative philosophers. The physicists and chemists had replaced the speculators as the explainers of the world.

Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Ernest Rutherford, Neils Bohr, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Pauli, Dirac, Chadwick, Freidman, Lemaitre, Edwin Hubble, Alexander Fleming, Fred Hoyle, George Gamow, and other scientists have shown that we really do not have to merely speculate about nature, as philosophers did, that we can study nature through the scientific method. 

Henri Bergson was product of English empiricism/French positivism (Saint Simon, August Comte, Emil Durkheim etc.). He was trained in both biology and mathematics and was up to date in science. He could not deny the reality of matter. So what did he do? He could not accept epiphenomenalism, the idea that matter determined mind. He sought ways to show that there is a life force, what he called élan vital in our lives.  This is Rene Descartes all over. There is a part of us that is not material, that is pure life or spirit, operating inside matter.

Like his country man, Descartes, Bergson did not persuade us to see eye to eye with him that there is spirit in our lives. 

William James was an American medical doctor who went to Europe and studied psychology and philosophy. He returned to America and taught at Harvard University and wrote the first American text book on psychology. His fame, however, rested on his study of the American character.

The American white man is not interested in psychology or philosophy; he is a doer and wants to do what adapts to his world.  The American is that breed of humanity that does not worry its little mind with metaphysics, with questions about meaning and purpose. Just give him food and he is happy. He is a magnificent animal.

(Europeans who witnessed the massacres of the first and second world wars became depressed and invented existentialism, the philosophy of despair but Americans could care less for existentialism. Sartre, Camus, Jasper, Heidegger and other existentialists did not find takers of their ideas in America. I will not review existentialist philosophy here; I have written extensively on that subject elsewhere, besides, Will Durant did not cover it.)

The American works hard, earns his food, figures out a way to use science (he is not interested in theoretical science but in applied science, technology and business) to make a living.  He is a magnificent pagan and that is all there is to him.

The American does not even think about the Christianity that he professes to be a part of. If he thought about Christianity, what Jesus taught, love all people, would he enslave people?

The American is not thoughtful at all. If you’re interested in philosophy America is not a place for you, perhaps you should try France?

James says that since Americans are not interested in epistemology, ontology, metaphysics, or abstract matters in general that their philosophy is pragmatism. Americans do what works in this world; they take from philosophy whatever seems to enable them work and make a living on planet earth. We grant the American his choice to be happy cattle and move on. 

John Dewy asked pragmatic and realistic questions. Man must make a living; he must work to extract food from his world to live. Therefore, education should not be wasted on abstract subjects like philosophy, but must be centered on science and technology.

Our schools must work with industry to identify what industry needs and train students in those areas. We do not need to train students in the liberal arts and humanities, such as Latin, Greek, languages, History and philosophy; areas where there are no jobs. Train them in engineering, medicine and science. Teach folks how to farm the land and work in factories.

Dewey is down to earth but his dismissal of intellectual life is annoying. Man does not live by bread alone.  Philosophy may be impractical yet it enriches the human mind. The technocrat who does not enjoy the arts is a clod. 

Bertrand Russell, a scion of the English aristocracy, studied mathematics and dabbled in philosophy. He restated logical positivism, emphasized the English preference for experimental science over idle speculation on the nature of reality. To him there is no god but we can make the most of this world.

He was an atheist and pacifist; he opposed the First World War and for his troubles he was booted out of his teaching position in England. He came to America. When America joined the war he was also harassed. 

Will Durant gave us summaries of seminal Western philosophers’ ideas. He did not bother with oriental philosophers. As for African philosophers he probably did not think that Africans can think?  Do Africans have philosophers, and if they do who are they?

(For what it is worth, let it be stated that I am African. Am I a thinker, a philosopher, a psychologist? Has the West produced a mind like my mind, a mind at home in science and philosophy. What do you think?)

What shall we make of this book? It is a good read and should be read by every college graduate. When you have nothing to do instead of eating or drinking yourself to early death just coil up on a couch and read the book. Never mind if in the real world philosophy is useful or not, this book will give you information on the spirit of the West.

We need to understand the West, to understand how a few human beings managed to defeat all other human beings. If we are going to compete with them we must understand their psychology, philosophy and history. This book is an introduction to all three areas of western life. I highly recommend it to all people. 

(I read Will Durant’s book when I was in secondary school in the 1970s. Rereading it in my middle age has given me a different perspective on Western philosophers. In my youth I thought that these philosophers were supermen; now, I see them as a bunch of immature thinkers. How we change! We bring down those hitherto we had placed on a pedestal. The West initially seemed like something one ought to admire but at present one has seen through its underbelly and while respecting its science and technology is no longer enchanted with it. And such is the story of life. Finally, I enjoy talking philosophy, psychology and the history of science. If those are your cup of tea please do not hesitate in giving me a shout out. If these subjects are not your idea of having a good time please do not bother trying to talk to me, for you would bore me and I would not talk to you!) 

Ozodi Thomas Osuji, PhD

December 10, 2012

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Cyprian Ekwensi, Jagua Nana. (New York: Fawcett Premier Book, 1961), 207 Pages.

A Book Review By Ozodi Osuji

Yesterday, July 26, 2012, around 6PM, I went to a used book store to see if there are books that I could buy and read. I went to the section on Afro-Americans and browsed. Guess what I saw? I saw Cyprian Ekwensi's book, Jaguar Nana. I bought it (as well as other books). I quickly rushed home and started reading it. I did not go to sleep until I was done with it.

I decided to write a review of the book not because it is a new book and, as such, my review could influence its sales but because I was very impressed by it. Honestly, I did not know much about Cyprian Ekwensi. I did not know that he was such an impressive writer. Because he is such a fine writer I have to write this review and encourage folks to go out and buy his books and read them. I certainly plan to lay my hands on all his books that I can get.

SUMMARY OF THE BOOK

The book, although a novel, for all intents and purposes, is a sociological documentation of life in the Lagos and Nigeria of the time that Mr. Ekwensi wrote it (early 1960s).

On the surface, the book is about the life of a woman, Jagwa (also spelled Jagua) Nana. She was born at Ogabu (Ogide?), a village only a few miles from Onitsha, Eastern Nigeria. Her father was a pastor of a church. She was the only daughter of the family (she had three brothers). Her father doted on her.

Like most Igbo men, her father wanted his daughter to marry off and produce grandchildren for him. But Jagua was something of a Tomboy and was not really interested in marriage; she wanted to live her own life, independently. Nevertheless, she allowed her father to persuade her to marry; thus, she married a local boy living at the coal city (Enugu?).

She and her husband lived at Enugu. He was a business man; he owned petrol stations. For three years they tried getting a child but could not succeed. As is the case in Igbo land, men marry for children, not for love. Thus, the Husband began making plans for another wife. She got wind of what was going on.

In the meantime, she felt stifled by the need to pretend to like her life as a housewife. She had a restless spirit that sought adventure. Her restless spirit began to yarn for life elsewhere, life on the fast lane. She learned that Lagos is where it is at, and went to the train station and boarded a train headed to Lagos. Three days later she was at Lagos and had no place to live!

She walked around until she attracted the attention of a local musician, Hot Lips, who took her in. She lived with him but was not satisfied with his meager income; he did not have what she wanted, money and what money provides, an exciting life. Thus, she began to look around for something better.

While walking about Tinunbu Square, Lagos looking at stores with expensive merchandise that she would like to buy, she noticed that some folks were following her. She turned around and asked them why they were following her. They told her that they were looking for a woman to take to their white master at Ikoyi. Apparently, they were house servants for a white man at Ikoyi and their master who had left his wife and two children in England was searching for a local mistress. She agreed to the deal and they took her to the man's house.

She was surprised at how well white folks at Ikoyi lived. The white man had sex with her and liked her and decided to keep her as his always ready sex toy. He rented a place for her, and fronted her money for her daily living expenses; she became a white man's concubine.

Eventually, the man left for England and she did not hear from him again. Apparently, she had saved some money and used that money to travel to Accra, Ghana and liked the city. She decided to trade between Accra and Lagos. Thus, she would go to Accra and buy clothes and bring them to Lagos and sell them.

She lived in an upstairs room in a rooming house at Lagos. Downstairs was a young teacher, Freddie Namme. Freddie taught at a secondary school while taking correspondence courses to qualify as attorney. The man was twenty five years old. At this time Jagwa was forty five years old hence could be his mother. Nevertheless, she fell in love with him. She used her female wiles to entice him into a relationship he did not seek out (men are supposed to chase women, not women men, remember). At first he resisted because of the twenty year difference in their age. But sex is a powerful drug and if it is robbed into a man's face he is likely to give in. Thus, they became paramours.

She gave up on her trading business and began frequenting a local night club called the Tropicana. She practically went there every evening and stayed until it closed at 2AM. She would pick up rich folks, especially white folks and have sex with them and that way make money.

Thus, she was able to make ends meet by being a high end prostitute; those generally pick up one customer per night, a loaded customer able to give them the kind of money their luxurious lifestyle demanded.

Initially, Freddie did not know about this seamy side of Jagwa's life; he was pretty much preoccupied with his studies. He sat and passed preliminary examinations towards the law degree and needed to go to one of the Inns of courts in London for a year to be called to the bar. He applied to the federal government of Nigeria for scholarship and was waiting for the result of his application when he learned about Jagwa's whorism.

He confronted her and she mollified him by promising to send him to London. She actually fronted the money, paid for his stay in London and wangled a passport for him and all was set for him to go to London. He made arrangements to board a ship soon leaving Lagos for England.

One of the habitué of Tropicana was called Mama Nancy. She, too, was a middle aged sex merchant on the prowl for rich white men who want to buy the ware between her legs. She had a regular customer, a Syrian businessmen who came in most evenings, picked her up and took her out for sex and paid her handsomely.

One evening Ma Nancy was not at the Tropicana and the rich Syrian picked up Jagua and did what he wanted and paid her. Mama Nancy later learned about what Jagua did, and the two women got into a brawl. The scene of the two women having a cat fight in the night club is hilarious; imagine two middle aged whores going at each other, tearing each other's clothes, making each other naked, thus showing their ugly aging bodies.

As an aside, one may ask: why do fighting women like to disrobe each other; is it to expose their holy of hollies, show their genitals for all the world to see; do they want the world to see that which they think makes them valuable in men's eyes? (The scene made me laugh so loudly until my throat hurt)! The short of the story is that the two old harlots became enemies.

In the meantime, Mama Nancy heard that Jagua was planning to send her young boy friend, Freddie, to London. She maneuvered to have her nineteen year old daughter, Nancy, to ambush Freddie. Being young and closer to his age, Freddie fell for her. Mama Nancy also managed to get one of her rich white customers to pay for Nancy to travel to London and take secretarial courses. Her intention was for Nancy to meet up with Freddie in London and marry him over there.

Jagua heard what was afoot; one evening, suspecting that some hanky-panky was going on in Freddie's room, on the impulse (women's intuition?) she bagged into Freddie's room and saw Nancy with him (they had just had sex).

The two women got into a fight. The younger woman held her own (you must admire the younger woman's guts; she defended herself rather well!).

Enraged, Jagwa went through Freddie's packed suitcases, fished out his passport and shredded it to pieces. She dissolved her support for his plans to study in England.

Freddie tried to get his passport reissued but as is the case with such things in Nigeria was given the run around. Apparently, nobody told him to bribe the passport folks for that were how folks obtained passports in Nigeria. He gave up and resigned himself to not going to London.

As luck would have it, however, his father, David Namme, of Bagana (near Port Harcourt) decided to pay for his study in London. He made arrangements and the next time he met up with Jaguar, he was at the airport.

Jagwa, through the grapevines, had heard that Freddie was flying off to London and with her latest flame, a local politician called Uncle Taiwo, went to the airport to say her goodbyes. She saw him as he was about to board his plane and tried to talk to him. He relented and talked to her. They seem to have buried their hatchets and he flew off to London.

During the first three months of his stay in London, Freddie wrote Jagwa but eventually the writing stopped. In the meantime, operating under the illusion that he still loved her, Jaguar decided to visit Freddie's village at Bagana.

Lo and behold who she saw there? Mama Nancy and Nancy were there visiting the village to acquaint themselves with Freddie's family. The two women had a verbal fight (good scene).

The high-water mark of the visit was that one morning Nancy was out swimming when Jagua met up with her and both of them got into a fight. Jaguar chased Nancy in the waters. Nancy swam towards another village, Krinameh, a village in deadly quarrels with Bagana.

She swam to Krinameh's end of the waters and was seized by the folks of that village, held a prisoner, possibly to be killed. Since Jagua was responsible for her situation she asked to go try to rescue her. After much begging, she was allowed and a canoe took her over.

She met with chief Ofubara, the chief of Krinameh. She persuaded him to release the girl, Nancy. Her ace in the hole is her vagina and she manipulated it rather cleverly. She ended up getting the girl released and stayed with Ofubara as his sexual partner for ten days.

Although the chief already has three wives, he had never had sex with a Lagos girl before. He was unused to a woman fucking a man rather than a man fucking her; that experience, apparently, made him fall hopelessly in love with Jagua. He offered to marry her on the spot; indeed, he paid her bride price, one hundred and twenty pounds to her.

Jagwa got tired of the country bumpkin chief and the rustic life of the creeks of the Niger Delta and wanted to return to the bright lights of Lagos. She left but promised to think about the chief's marriage proposal (after all he had already paid her dowry to her...but not properly, for dowries are paid to the parents of proposed wives).

Upon her return to Lagos, Jagwa resumed her prostituting life style. This time, Uncle Taiwo paid her rent and gave her monetary allowances to subsist on. She became his paid up always available sex object (cheating on the side when he is not around). Once a whore always a whore, they say.

Almost two years later, Freddie qualified for the bar and returned to Nigeria. Nancy had met up with him in London and they married and had two children when both returned to Lagos.

Freddie decided that the quickest way to make money is to run for a position in the Lagos City Council. He had joined a party and the party ran him as their candidate for the Obanla district in Lagos (Obalinde?). His opponent was no other than his former mistress's latest consort, Uncle Taiwo!

The competition was stiff. Uncle Taiwo's goon squad on a number of occasions waylaid Freddie and beat him up. Eventually, they roughed him up so badly that he later died.

On Election Day, surprise, surprise, Uncle Taiwo lost to the substitute to Freddie. Because he had lost and wasted the party's moneys and stolen some, he became a liability to his party, a persona non-grata to his political party; he became a marked man and was on the run for his life.

Those Uncle Taiwo had borrowed money from to finance his election were searching for the absconded politician; they wanted to recoup their money. They learned about his mistress, Jagua and where she lived and came to her asking for his whereabouts. She told them that she did not know where he was. They resolved to take all her property as part of their recouping of their financial losses.

Before they could come to Jagua's house to seize her and her belongings, an old acquaintance, a younger prostitute called Rosa, gave Jagua the heads up and she packed a suitcase and fled to her Rosa's room at Gunle (Ajagunle?). Both of them now lived in this squalid, seedy section of Lagos.

Jagua had gone from a high class prostitute to a low class street walker, for now she took a cab to Lagos, walked the streets and picked up whoever is willing to have sex with an aging whore (whores seldom find customers after age thirty five; who wants to have sex with an old ho and her unsightly body?)

The two whores sometimes brought their Johns to their shared one room at Ajagunle. One of them would use the single bed for sex with her john and the other would have sex with her john on the floor.

In the meantime, Jagua's father got sick and wanted to see her before he died. The family sent her brother, Fonso, a trader at Onitsha, to Lagos to search for her and bring her home. He tracked her to her shack at Ajagunle. He saw her and Rosa go into their single room brothel with two johns in tow. He knocked on the door and told Jagwa that her father wanted to see her before he died.

Jagwa did not have the money to go home and gave excuses why she could not go with him. He left without her. Three days later, Jagwa borrowed the money and travelled to her village. By the time she got there her father was already dead and was buried.

Her mother was now a widow in mourning and needed someone to take care of her. Her brothers persuaded her to stay in the village and take care of their mother.

As is the case in Igbo land, the men agreed that she is too independent to marry and that she is free to have casual male friends provided she lived in the family compound. They tacitly gave her permission, if needs be, to get pregnant and have children with her village johns.

(Editorial Note: In Igbo villages' girls are supposed to marry and leave their parents villages and become part of their husbands' households in different villages. But in certain instances, if the woman is too headstrong and is not the marrying type members of her family allowed her to live in their compound and tacitly allowed her to have boyfriends, even have children. Ordinarily, a woman is supposed to have children in her husband's village, not her father's village. It should also be noted that some women are lesbians and do not marry and their relatives tacitly allow them to live with them, aware that they are having affairs with other women. I saw these otherwise abominations with my own eyes in my village; I saw an unmarried woman living in her father's compound with her children; I saw a woman whose female lover visited discretely.)

Jagua lived in her village and was bored out of her mind. Her adventurous soul itched for geographical therapy. She went to Onitsha and bought a sewing machine and opened a sewing business near her father's house. Her business thrived for she sewed the latest Lagos style clothes for her country dwelling customers fascinated by what women wore in the big city of Lagos.

As allowed to do by her brothers, she had causal sex with other men. One, a man who had come home on leave had extended sexual dealings with her and when his vacation was up returned to wherever he came from. A few months later Jagua missed her period and a doctor's examination confirmed that the middle aged Jagua is now pregnant.

In the meantime, her former roommate at Ajagunle, Rosa, came to visit her in her village (and also to visit a nearby village where one of her steady johns hailed from). Her mother liked the teenage prostitute.

Rosa brought Jagua up to date with what is going on in their old hunting grounds at Lagos. She told her how Uncle Taiwo was murdered by members of his own party...apparently for absconding with the party's money?

Now that Uncle Taiwo is dead, Jagua remembered that he had given her an envelope to keep for him. She opened the envelope and inside it was several hundred thousand pounds sterling. She decided to use the money to go to Onitsha and open a trading store and become a merchant princess.

She sent Chief Ofubara the one hundred and twenty pounds he had paid for her hand in marriage. Thereafter, she decided to go visit him. She took her young girl friend with her; they headed to Port Harcourt.

From Port Harcourt they took a canoe to Bagana and found out that Chief Ofubara, David Ofubara (Freddie's father) and other local big wigs had gone to Lagos on local government business.

Both women headed back to Ogabu. A few months later she had a boy child and her mother named him Onichi (replacement of her dead husband, the future generation of the family). Three days later the boy child died.

Jagua thereafter left her village, with her mother's blessing, to go to Onitsha, buy a lorry (truck) and open her store and, hopefully, become an Onitsha merchant princess. At this point the story ended.

APPRECIATION

This book tells us about city life in an emergent African urban area. It tells us about rural populations coming to the city trying to make it big and wounding up side tracked by the city's get rich quick schemes.

The chief protagonist of the novel, Jagua Nana, is a rustic wench who came to Lagos with an eye to living her fantasy understanding of the good life offered by life in a big. Appearances are deceiving; she wound up becoming a prostitute.

In Lagos, certain so-called high class prostitutes prefer to have white men and Africa's neuve-rich men as their johns; these women's lives often become nightmarish.

Ekwensi described the nightmarish life of one Igbo woman drawn by Lagos city lights. This woman quickly got entangled with night club life where she picked up well paying johns. A former denizen of a village without tap water and electricity (she did not even go to school for crying out loud) found herself co-habiting the same venue with the rich of Lagos. She was bound to be used and dumped as rags are discarded when they are no longer useful in cleaning up dirt. She thought that she was living a high class life but actually she was no more than a common prostitute, a sewage into which men discharged their bothersome semen.

Ekwensi gave us an amazingly accurate description of life on the fast lane in an Urban African town. The Lagos he was describing is a city where all that mattered is having money. As they say, money talks; you either have it or you do not; and if you do not have money you are nothing; as far as Nigerians are concerned, if you are poor you do not exist!

Since to be seen as socially important one must have money, Nigerians chase money by all means necessary. They would do any and everything for money, including selling their disease ridden vaginas (these days such vaginas have HIV viruses in them and yet they are sold to willing johns who unwittingly pay to be killed).

Uncle Taiwo, the politician, is representative of the Nigerian politician to whom winning political office is a do or dies affair. These folks go into politics to steal as much money as they could from the national treasury, so winning office is a guarantee of wealth. They see winning elections as war, literally war. As in war, they kill their opponents, as Taiwo killed his opponent, Freddie (and, in turn, he was killed by members of his own party).

Freddie Namme was not an innocent victim; he was an active participant in the corruption hell called Nigeria. He came back from London and instead of trying to establish himself as a successful attorney or use his legal knowledge to fight for the improvement of Nigeria, he was motivated to become as rich as he could and do so quickly. He believed that politics was the quickest way to make money hence he entered politics and was killed. He represents Nigeria's attitude towards politics: a quick way to make money, not a profession folks go into to serve the national interest.

Freddie's death is not a heroic death; it did not elicit sympathy from the reader. He was just another thieving Nigerian politician and his death is therefore of no existential consequence.

What are Nigerians living for, anyway? If all Nigerians died today it would not matter to existence at all. I certainly would not lose sleep if I heard that all Nigerians are dead; they are living for nothing hence their death is of no significance to me or to history; Nigerians are surplus human beings who are not doing anything to improve the human condition.

In a manner of speaking, Nigerians are probably better off dead; the manner they live is a disgrace to living. Apparently, no one has told Nigerians that the best lived life is one devoted to doing something useful for humanity.

If you are not doing anything that serves public good and die why should the public care about your death? I certainly do not care when I hear that a Nigerian has died. If I hear that the Nigerian chief-thief at Abuja is dead I would rejoice; his death is the passing of a useless life.

Jagwa Nana's life is symbolic of what Nigerian lives amount to. She was willing to sell her body and soul for money; she was a prostitute. Nigerians are willing to sell their bodies and souls for money; Nigerians are literally, not figuratively prostitutes.

Prostitutes are the detritus of humanity. Therefore, Jagua and Nigerians are the detritus of humanity; they are not relevant to existence.

This is the lesson one drew from reading this amazingly well written book by Cyprian Ekwensi.

I am sorry that I had not discovered that Ekwensi was such an excellent writer. I apologize but now that I have discovered him, within a few months I would have read most of his books (I am going online, to Amazon and Barnes and Nobles to see if I can order his books).

What else can one ask from another human being other than to ask him to do his best at whatever he does?

Mr. Ekwensi, although trained as a pharmacist, turned out to be an outstanding writer of novels. I do not like to compare apples and oranges, white writers and black writers, since they address different experiences, be that as it may, in my opinion this novel is in the same class as Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.

Though parts of the book are written in broken English hence probably not easily understandable to readers in Standard English, I believe that this book is a classic in English literature (the portion in broken English, parts mainly spoken by the illiterate Jagua Nana and her associates in the whoring and criminal underworld, in my opinion, makes the book authentic literature).

There is too much phony sophistication in false literature; Ekwensi injected controlled literary realism. Although the book is mainly about the sex trade he did not actually describe a sex scene; the sex thing was tastefully done! Some persons probably would consider Ekwensi a prude, for description of one raunchy sex scene would have made his book more realistic!

Cyprian Ekwensi is a first rate writer. I slap myself for not having discovered him before!

I encourage folks to go and read his books, as I am going to do. He gives us sociological and psychological insights into modern Nigerians.

Ozodi Osuji

July 27, 2012

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Dr. Osuji enjoys reading novels; when he finds a novel that is contributory to the understanding of human psychology, and he has the time, he writes a review of it.

Jacob Carruthers, Intellectual Warfare. (Chicago: Third World Press, 1999)310 Pages.

A Book Review By Ozodi Osuji

I had asked a friend who is in the know about African American Studies at American Universities to recommend ten books that he felt that anyone interested in the field ought to read. He gave me a list and ranked them in order of importance. I read each and reviewed it for those who might want to read it, too. I have just got to Jacob Caruthers book, Intellectual warfare.

I must confess that because I read it last I read it without much enthusiasm primary because it is repeating what I had already read elsewhere. I was kind of bored hearing the same thing over and over, again. It seems that once one has read the first two or three books in this genre one has read them all and the others are repetitive.

Moreover, the title of this book is somewhat misleading. I had expected a robust debate on the war of the West with the non-west for intellectual leadership.

There are all kinds of wars, wars fought with bullets and wars fought with ideas. The West had declared war on the non-West for quite some time now. They had told non-Westerners that they are superior to them; they had claimed ownership of everything good in life. They made themselves the masters of the universe and this kind of makes non-Westerners to feel inferior.

Since no human being ever accepts that he is inferior to others, for to do so is to accept those persons' leadership, those made to feel inferior fight back and try to prove that they are superior to those who claimed superiority to them.

You see, the West wanted to make itself seem superior to the rest of the world and if the rest of the world accepted that self-serving propaganda they would then look to the West to rule them and guide them. This is clever effort to make one's self the leader of the rest of the world; it is psychological warfare.

Non-Westerners being human beings appreciated what the West was doing and fought back. Some fought back by trying to prove that they are superior to the West; others do so by trying to prove that they are the equals of the West. Some quietly try to acquire skills in science and technology so as to be able to compete with westerners and in the process prove that they are not deficient.

Asians adopted the last method. Today, they are almost as scientifically and technological developed as Europe. No European in his rational state of mind would go about saying that he is superior to the Chinese or Japanese or even Indian (Indians still have jarring poverty making it possible for rich Europeans to fancy that they are better than them).

African scholars traditionally talked about how Europe exploited Africans; perhaps, they were trying to engender guilt feeling in Western liberals.

Western conservatives do not even bother reading what Africans write so they do not know what Africans say. In so far that Western conservatives think about Africans poverty at all, they attribute it to Africans supposed lack of intelligence. They say that Africans are too dull to do what they need to do to transform their continent into a modern economy. They say: look at Africa, a continent with perhaps the most abundant natural resources but dumb Africans are too lazy to do something with their resources; African politicians are always stealing from their national treasuries and their people remain poor and they try to make white folks feel guilty for their suffering and come to their aid with some monetary handouts, money that they redirect into their personal pockets instead of use them to help their people. They tune out pictures of starving Africans they see on television. Some overtly say: let Africans die; what are they living for if they cannot develop their economies?

I had expected Dr. Caruthers to give the reader of his book a battle aimed at refuting Western assertions about Africans inadequacy. For example, I had expected him to tell me something about Murray and Heinstein's claim in the Bell Curve that black folks are intellectually deficient, have lower IQ and that without affirmative action would not be able to get into America's top one hundred universities and must settle for second tier universities; their claim that in the competitive world black folks cannot compete with white folks and therefore must settle for minor jobs, such as being bus drivers, janitors, postal clerks etc. I really wanted a robust war with the children of Europe, a war to put them in their place.

Instead, what I saw was a rehashing of what I had read in Chancellor Williams Destruction of Black Civilization and John Jacksons Introduction to African Civilizations. I read how ancient Egypt was a black civilization before white folks appropriated it, how black folks started the first civilizations and therefore the ones who civilized Europe (via the Greeks copying from Egypt).

I have heard these stories one million times and therefore did not hear anything new. I began to wonder whether black scholars can write something new other than make claims to ancient Egypt. Thus, I put the book away, bored.

I then asked myself whether Dr. Caruthers perhaps gave a new twist to the same old story. Every story teller, even if he is telling the same story told by other story tellers, gives his own twist to it. So, did Caruthers add something new to the old story of Egypt is African?

I know that African-Americans kind of feel an obsessive compulsion to prove that they started a civilization. White men had accused them of not starting anything big, presented them as being part of primitive Africans who did not start any great civilization. That kind of makes them feel inferior relative to Europeans so they latch onto the hypothesis that Egypt is Africa and harp on that over and over, again.

If they can make it stick that Egypt is African then it means that black folks started something big and important and that kind of washes away the accusation that they are primitive.

I understand the psychological role of the claim that Egypt is African for black Americans; it makes them feel civilized and important so they must latch unto it.

Personally, I do not have a need to prove that Egypt is African. I do not feel inferior to white men; I do not even consider Western civilization a civilization!

I consider Europe and North America primitive! I want to replace them with what seems to me a civilized state of human beings: loving people, not predatory people who go all over the world killing and stealing from people.

Whereas I do not consider myself a Christian, I am agnostic, I want a Christ based world, by that I mean a world based on love; a world where we love each other and serve each other's needs rather than exploit each other (see Alfred Adler's Individual Psychology).

I want the type of world that Jesus Christ talked about in his sermon on the mountain. The West is nowhere near that world so I had no reason to see the West as ideal and do not admire it.

Because I do not elevate the west to high heavens I do not have a need to prove that they are the product of Egypt/Africa.

The point is that I understand what African Americans are doing in their war with the white man and had expected Caruthers to give me that war, if only to entertain the part of my mind that enjoys competition, but, instead, he gave me a rehash of what I had read elsewhere.

Did he add something new to the same old, same old story of Egypt is Africa and Africa influenced the West? Let us see.

The book states that Western thought and civilization has its root in Africa; it says that Greek and Roman thought was influenced by Egyptian and Ethiopian thought; the Roman Empire, it says, is a byproduct of African civilization.

Dr. Caruthers examined what he believed is classic literature and from them inferred the role of Africa in shaping what most of us were led to believe had their root in the European world.

Greek philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, he tells us were influenced by Egyptian philosophy. Dr. Caruthers wants his reader to discard the notion that the ideas we generally believe are Western is Western; he wants him to rethink such beliefs and come to the new belief that those ideas are, in fact, African ideas stolen by the West.

He wants to correct the situation and get us to see everything we see in our world as African in origin. In other words, do not give thanks to the white man for your civilization, instead give thanks to the black man for it.

Dr. Caruthers is presenting an African centered philosophy (afrocentricism), as opposed to Eurocentric philosophy. He wants his readers, who are expected to be African Americans, to be on the lookout lest their past civilization is stolen from them, again, and the West is given credit for what is rightfully their contribution to civilization.

Racist Americans, scholars and ordinary folk, deliberately set out to tell the world that Africans have contributed nothing to human civilization and, as such, that Africans are a deficient people, a people fit to be ruled by allegedly superior white folks.

Racist America deliberately damaged African Americans self-esteem and tried to destroy their self-confidence so that they would then look up to supposed superior white folks to rule them forever.

Naturally, African Americans realized what was been done to them and fought back; they fought back with efforts to show that they not only contributed to civilization but had the first civilizations, Sumer and Egypt.

If they can prove that those first civilizations were African then they would with one fell swoop rehabilitate their damaged self-esteem and carry their heads high, even feel superior to white folks (who allegedly lived in caves before Africa civilized them).

Make no mistake about it, there is an intellectual war going on out there; this is a war of the races; white folks declared this war on black folks and black folks have a right to fight back. In war every means that leads to defeat of the enemy is appropriate.

Dr. Carruthers designed an educational curriculum that would be Africa centered so that African Americans are taught about their contributions to Western civilization. His apparent goal is to make African-Americans to feel very proud of themselves after all if they are responsible for everything good in our world why shouldn't they be proud of their past instead of be ashamed of it as they seem to be at the moment.

Dr. Caruthers wants to incorporate his views that Africa is the originator of civilization into America education. Indeed, he wants to rewrite American history and the history of Western civilization and give glory to Africa, not Greece or Rome or Paris or London or Washington for anything good in the West.

Dr. Carruthers goal is no less than total revolutionary alteration of what we currently believe is knowledge and its source.

Dr. Carruthers is one aggressive black man fighting white folk's aggression with his own African aggression. Why not; is aggression only allowed the children of Europe? If Europeans can be aggressive so can Africans!

As an African I naturally sympathize with Dr. Caruthers goal. Alas, I also know that he is swimming against the current. He is living in the past, not present and future.

In the present most of us know who contributed what idea in physics, chemistry and biology. We know who invented what in the world of technology.

If we look at the world from Copernicus (1543) to the present we know who is who in science and technology. If we do not see African names in the mix there is nothing that Dr. Caruthers is saying that would make us not feel lacking.

I feel bad that Africans are not contributing to science and technology. I could care less if they kick started civilization five thousand years ago. I am interested in the now, today.

When I go to any American university department of physics, I seldom see black folks; I mostly see Asians and a handful of white folks. I ask why that is the case. I know why it is the case and this paper is not the place to grapple with that issue.

I am interested in increasing the representation of black folks in the sciences, now. If I see a list of Nobel Prize winners in the physical sciences and see black names on it I would feel good.

Telling me about Egypt is so much nonsense. What has Egypt got to do with Newton's mechanics, Einstein's relativity and Rutherford and Bohr's quantum mechanics?

I do not live in the past; I live in the present. Common on you guys, let us be realistic and do what we have to do to get black kids into Caltech and MIT to study science and technology and not sit around talking about what happened five thousand years ago.

This book should be read when one has nothing better to do with one's time and wants to kill time stimulating ones brain cells, neurons, with ideas, any kind of ideas. If you are bored and do crosswords puzzles it keeps your brain cells firing and engaged but that does not mean that you are learning anything useful in the economic world.

This book is something to be read for the sake of reading and keeping one's mind busy not because it adds to the acquisition of new skills set that adapts to the twenty first century, a century with intertwined economics and to the best competitors goes the price.

We now need physical scientists, engineers and medical doctors, not afrocentrists; we need leaders in science and technology. Of course we also need some cultural leaders but not too many of them.

*The next paper is the concluding essay in this ten part series. In it I will look at the effect of Africans running around kidnaping their people and selling them to Arabs and white men for over one thousand years, on African society, culture, morality and individual psychologies.

Ozodi Osuji

July 6, 2012

Dr. Osuji can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The term religion derives from Latin, religio. Religio is any effort to yoke one's self back to whatever one considers being one's source. Apparently, some human beings believe that they have a source (origin) outside this world and have always made efforts to reconnect themselves to that source. The source is generally construed as spirit, as opposed to our world which is a place of space, time and matter. Spirit is that which transcends matter.

Since matter is a place of death and dying, of mortality, spirit is a place of immortality and eternity, permanence, changelessness, timelessness, spacelessness; spirit is a world that is the opposite of matter and its mortality.

Apparently, people are in search of immortality and eternity and seem to get it in their conceptions of the spiritual world and its alleged God.

If there is a characteristic that define human beings it is their tendency to religion. In every human group there is always religion. Religion is found in all human groups.

Religion comprises of a series of rituals and ceremonies through which a people attempt to worship their God; religion is always a group, team thing hence is controlled by society and the powers that rule society.

On the other hand, spirituality is always an individual's effort to reach his God and is not controlled by the group; the leaders of society do not control it hence it is a more authentic means of reaching ones supposed creator. The great mystics of all time, delineated by Evelyn Underhill in her book, Mysticism, were always individualistic in their search for God.

Priests serve society and are enforcers of social rules; mystics search for their higher selves and are not interested in upholding the extant social order.

If there is a human group without religion, without efforts to reconnect to their source they would not be human beings as we know them to be.

As we know human beings to be they are always in search of their source, their creator, their real home. Apparently, they believe that this world is not their real home and they want to return to their real home.

As it were, human beings see themselves as temporary visitors to our earth; they are foreigners, aliens in our world. Their real home is spirit land. Religion is those things they do in an effort to return to their real home.

That real home is the opposite of this world; therefore, the perceptual lenses we employ in seeing this world does not see the spiritual world. In our world we relate to it with our five senses, eyes, ears, nose, skin and thinking. None of those enables us to understand the spiritual world. That makes it necessary for most people to not know anything about the spiritual world for most people can only relate to their world through the five senses.

Some people, on the other hand, claim ability to shut down their five senses and tune into the operations of the spiritual world. They claim that when they ignore responding to stimuli from our material world they enter the parameters of the spiritual world and are able to understand it and later return to our world and try to translate the nature of the spiritual world to our earthly categories (and claim that they cannot really do so since it is difficult to translate one order of being to another but they try anyway).

We do not know whether what those who claim ability to tune into the spiritual world tell us about it is true or not. What is salient is that in every human group there are those who claim this ability; this is a worldwide phenomenon. Thus, in every group of human beings we find religion and religious practices.

Those belonging to one religion often find the religion of others strange and difficult to grasp. What is relevant is that these people are trying to reconnect to their source and we generally respect them and though we do not understand what they are doing leave them alone.

Only a fool says that there is no God, or that people who are practicing their religion are insane. Using the categories of psychiatry to examine believers in God there is no sign that they are insane; in fact, they are often the sanest people around (when their religion makes them to love one another and work for one another's welfare, for what better can human beings do than love one another?).

The only thing is that pure reason based on the five senses cannot understand what religious folks say that they experience and most rational folks leave it at that and not try to ascertain whether what they claim to experience is true or not.

I do not know that God exists or does not and that is not relevant to anything for since I do not know who am I to tell a person who believes in God that his belief is not true? As for atheists they do not know that there is no God; they look at the evidence their five senses give to them and on that bases conclude that there is no god. Okay, that is their judgment and they are entitled to it.

Just as we accept theists we accept atheists (actually, atheism is a religion for it is belief in what one does not know is true; we do not know that there is no god so to say that there is no god is a belief, just as it is a belief to say that god exists), both have conclusions that agnostics do not understand. That is pretty much where things stand.

African Americans were kidnapped by their fellow Africans and sold to Europeans and shipped to the Americas (from the United States to Brazil). Africans are found in the two Americas and the Caribbean Islands.

Africans were first brought to Brazil in the early 1500s so they have been in America for five hundred years (four hundred years in the USA...where they were brought in 1619, to Jamestown, Virginia, USA).

African Americans were brought in as slaves. Their slave masters made sure that those from the same tribe were dispersed so that only strangers could be around each other. This was to prevent the Africans from developing a sense of unity hence organize insurrections (still, Nat Turner and other slaves did mount insurrections in the 1830s).

The slave master made sure that the slave lost his religion, his language and culture. For our present purpose, the slave master destroyed the slave's culture, which includes his religion and language. Worse, the slave master refused to admit the slave to his own culture and language, afraid that education would make the slave know too much hence challenge the slave master's rule over him. The slave master got to keep the slave ignorant to prevent him from learning that it is unnatural for one human being to lord it over others.

(Both Adolf Hitler and White Apartheid South Africans learned their criminal terroristic behaviors from white racist Americans; both said that Africans are not to be educated lest they know too much to challenge the unnatural rule of white folks over black folk.)

Human beings mostly learn by observation so Africans learned a bit about their slave masters culture, language and religion.

Over time Africans in the Americas, folk who had their own African religions (it is estimated that 20% of them were Muslims when they were kidnapped and sold) lost their peoples religions and became Christians (whatever that may mean...are white Americans Christians, and if as Arthur Schopenhauer said that they are not Christians, if by Christianity we mean those who love and do not exploit people, how can slaves imitate their Christianity?). Until recently it can be said that almost all black Americans were Christians.

During the 1930s some African Americans living at Detroit, Michigan recognized that Christianity, their religion, is the religion of their slave masters. They said that that religion was meant to enslave them. Certain passages in their bible, such as Paul's advice to a slave to obey his slave master, were used to justify slavery.

Elijah Mohammad concluded that Christianity is the religion of slave masters, and since he saw slave masters as devils the religion of devils. Elijah Mohammad believed that Islam was a religion for the black man. Thus, he founded the Nation of Islam, a Black Muslim group.

Many black folks left their Christianity and flocked to Islam. They actually believed that Islam is the black man's religion!

But as these things always turn out, they soon learned something about Islam. Islam was founded in 610 AD by an Arab man, Mohammad. Mohammad and his Arabs are Caucasians (Semitic people are white people).

More importantly, Arab Muslims practiced slavery. In fact, they had been buying African slaves since about 700 AD, a full eight hundred years before the founding of America.

Indeed, the Portuguese learned about slavery when while searching for a sea route to India in the 1490s they ran into Arab islands in the Indian Ocean and saw Arabs using African slaves on their plantations. When the Portuguese got to Brazil in 1500 and could not use the native Indians to do their work they came to West Africa to buy African slaves. That is to say that Arabs taught Europeans about using African slaves.

Thus, Islam is also the religion of slave masters. In fact, more slaves were sold to Arabia than to America. Most Arabs today are mixtures of black and white. That is why we tend to see Arabs as nonwhites; it is because they mixed with Africans. Originally, they were as white as other Europeans but one thousand years of mixing with their African slaves changed their color to what it is today, mulattto.

For our present interests, Islam is the religion of slave masters. Christianity is the religion of slave masters. Now, those black Americans who did not want to participate in the religion of their slave masters, Christianity, have no place to turn to; they were caught between a rock and a hard place!

They looked to Africa for help. Africa is composed of about 3000 tribes; each of whom has its own religion.

African Americans came from many West African tribes, from Senegal to Namibia. In the Americas Africans from different tribes were deliberately mixed so that African Americans are now a product of many African peoples genes.

Additionally, the African-American is likely to have his slave masters and Indian genes in him. Simply stated, the African American does not belong to any specific African tribe. Therefore, the religion of a specific African tribe may not appeal to him.

The African American is now a different tribe of Africans, actually a different human tribe; they belong to the tribe of new man; they are made from composite of Africans, Europeans and Indians; the African American genetically came from all over the world, he is the new human being (in the new land).

If Christianity, Islam and specific African tribal religions cannot appeal to African Americans and they still want to have religion, now what do they do?

Why not found their religion? Alas, folks do not just get up one day and found new religions; folks tend to want old religions for they want that which has been around for some time and the older the better.

Old religions kind of give folks a sense of doing what their ancient ancestors did and therefore must be correct in their practice. The older a religion is the better it is seen.

So, instead of founding their own religion, as one would expect African Americans to do, they went to Egypt in search of an authentic African religion for them.

First, they convinced themselves that the civilization of ancient Egypt was a black civilization (see Chancellor Williams, The Destruction of Black Civilization; John Jackson, Introduction to African Civilizations; Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilizations).

True, the original Egyptians were black, there is no argument there. Egypt was started by black folk then Caucasians entered and eventually took it over and gave it their own culture. Arabs took it over around 640 AD and gave it their Muslim religion. Before the Arabs, Hyksos, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Christians and many others ruled Egypt and gave it their religions.

So what was the religion of the black Egyptians before the various foreigners imposed their religion on them?

African Americans think that they have found out what ancient Egyptian religion was. They call it Kemet. Some of them, particularly Karenga and Jacob Caruthers, have written books on what they consider Kemet philosophy is. They have told us about this supposed ancient African religion and its Ma'at morality (there are forty-two principles of Ma'at, sort of like the ten commandments of Christians).

It should be noted that there is no place where this philosophy is written down in ancient Egyptian writings; Kemet is thus put together by African Americans. If you like, Kemet is a reconstructed religion.

The founders of Kemet, African Americans, are looking at Egypt from a period removed from it by 5000 years.

As we all know, when we talk about the past we invariably inject into it our present experience. The past is gone and is only remembered. The past of our childhood is almost always not what it was when we remember it in adult life.

The point is that what are now called Kemet religion and philosophy is a made up idea and not necessarily what ancient Egyptians had as their religion and or philosophy.

Be that caution as it may, it is still useful for African Americans to try to practice a religion that is not the religion of their slave masters. They ought to have their own religion.

Whatever a group of people do to try to reconnect themselves to their source is acceptable for who are we to criticize them since we do not know that there is a source or no source.

Let me say that I went to the library and checked out books on Egyptian religion and glanced through some of them and did not find reference to Kemet. I then did an Internet search on Kemet. I did not find anything on Kemet as ancient Egyptian religion.

The only thing on Kemet that I found was the writings of Maulana Karenga and Jacob Carruthers and their followers. In effect, it is these two individuals who are responsible for what they now call Kemet religion.

I therefore prefer to look at this religion as the religious ideas of Karenga and Carruthers instead of Egyptian religion. Karenga is the same individual who initiated what is now called Kwanza and called it African version of Christmas. During Christmas his followers celebrate Kwanza rather than the birth of Jesus Christ. Kwanza is interesting practice.

I think that Kemet is interesting ideas on religion but is by no means the truth. At any rate, who knows what the truth is when it comes to religion and philosophy? So let us then see Kemet as ideas on God rather than the truth.

Kemetic philosophy says that it is a body of ideas that embrace reverence for life. It believes that this reverence for life is what makes life able to persist on planet earth. It says that there is a creator called Neter, Atum, Ptah. This creator created people and apparently people return to him after they leave planet earth.

Our dead are our ancestors and they are back with our creator, Atum. The ancestors are those who lived before us and now help in teaching us to respect all life. They teach us to respect all human beings, and respect peoples relationships. Life must be sustaining life.

The ancestors teach that life is good; life is essential; life is sacred. The ancestors teach us to revere life in each individual.

Karenga and company believe that they are helping African Americans learn to revere life. Apparently, they know that in North American ghettos (where white folks shunted Africans into) folks do not respect life; black folks kill each other as if they are rats.

Karenga and company want to help African-Americans to respect their lives and not destroy them. The African ancestors, the original people of Egypt, say that life is to be revered so revere life and do not kill yourself or other people.

Kemet believes that it is the religion of the flow of life living life. It sees Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism as Aryan religions and philosophies whose only intention is to control people and worship a king (on earth and supposedly in spirit land). As Kemet sees it, these Aryan religions are false religions and only Kemet is true religion.

The Aryan religions and philosophies teach destructive behavior and are destructive of life whereas the Kemetic religion teaches reverence for life. Kemet is in harmony with the flow of life.

Kemet religion has a series of teachings which are almost always ranked in the order of sevens. For example it is says that human beings have levels of spiritual development ranked from the lowest level to the highest:

(7) Physical (6) Energetic/Ethereal (5) Emotional (4) Lower Mental (3) Upper Mental (2) Intuitive and (1) Divine Will.

Another series denoting human development has it as follows:

(7) Perception (6) Examination (5) Reflection (4) Knowledge (3) Understanding (2) Wisdom and (1) Truth.

Then there are the seven deadly sins of:

(7) Lust (6) Gluttony (5) Sloth (4) Greed (3) Wrath (2) Envy and (1) Pride.

According to Kemet, individuals are at different levels in their development and the teaching is aimed at enabling people to increase their level until they attain the highest level, Divine will; here, they realize that they are one with God and begin to manifest divine will on earth. It is said that the ancient Egyptians who built the pyramids used spiritual forces (levitation) to lift those huge rocks up and lay them on each other (modern lifting cranes are unable to lift the rocks that folks lifted 4000 years ago: how did they do it?).

On the whole, Kemet hypothesizes that Africans are a spiritual people whereas Europeans are a mechanical people. White folks are said to be at the lower levels of development: physical, energetic, emotional and lower mental and are able to manipulate nature, study science and technology but lacking in ability to understand spiritual matters (which is left to those operating at the upper mental, intuitive and divine will level).

All these are interesting speculations but as to their truth I am not in a position to ascertain.

As noted, this Kemet religion is the brain child of Karenga (he teaches African Studies at California State University, Long Beach) and Carruthers (he teaches Political Science and Inner City Studies at Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago) , two combative individuals known for their fighting spirit. Their ideas are worth consideration; however, as to whether they are serious ideas on God only the reader could judge for himself.

I am not in the market to buy any religion. I made up my mind long ago, actually, at age 14, that we do not know anything about God. I am an agnostic.

If I have religion it is science. Science is a methodological approach to phenomena that accepts only what is verified and discards all ideas that we cannot verify.

I do not see any evidence for what folks call religion and its gods. The God hypothesis, as Laplace said, is a luxury that I cannot afford. I accept only what I can verify.

If there is life after death it is probably in line with what physics teaches. Contemporary physics teach that there are probably multiverses and that there are probably people in some of those infinite universes and there may even be replicas of each of us in some of those universes.

The search to understand how multiverses work and the development of technology to tunnel our way to some of them is what makes sense to me.

In the meantime, if Karenga's often disjointed and rambling writing about ancient Egyptian, aka African religion appeals to you, by all means accept it. Who among us is qualified to tell you what is true or false in the department of religion? To each of us his own ideas about God and after death life!

• The next review is Dr. Jacob Carruthers, Intellectual Warfare, followed by my concluding Essay (of the ten part series) on The Effects of Africans kidnapping and selling their people into slavery on Africans Psycho-Social functioning today.

Ozodi Osuji

July 6, 2012

Dr. Osuji can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask (1952). New York: Grove Press.

A Book Review By Ozodi Osuji

From a political angle Franz Fanon's most important books are The Wretched of the Earth and A Dying Colonialism. However, I decided to review this particular book, Black Skin, White Mask, primarily because I noticed that many Africans have a tendency to talk about inferiority feeling in Africans. Generally, such Africans lob the term inferiority feeling at some Africans and do so as a put down. That would seem to suggest that they have healthy self-concept. However, when you come close to them you find that they are the most inferior feeling Africans on planet earth!

What they do is see something in them, deny it and then project it to other persons that in their opinion seem to have what they denied in their selves, inferiority feeling. Having grandstanded as black loving they then think that their inferiority feeling is not apparent to professionals trained to discern such matters in people. These people deceive themselves and want to deceive other Africans; if you allow them to deceive you they would take you to the cleaners.

It is such Africans who pretend to love Africa who when they come to positions of political power in Africa literally cart the wealth of Africa to the Western world; they run to the West upon the slightest medical ailment for treatment. This shows that deep down they feel inferior; they believe that their own African medical professionals are not good and that only white medical professionals are good.