I saw this article in the current Economist, and I liked it so much that I wanted to share part of it. It was written by an African author called Chigozie Obioma.
I BECAME CURIOUS at a young age, radically so as I grew older. In keeping with Albert Einstein’s dictum that “the important thing is not to stop questioning; curiosity has its own reason for existing,” I exposed myself to every possible idea.
I have studied religious texts from the Bible to the Koran to the Book of Mormon to the tenets of Odinani, the pantheistic religion of Nigeria’s Igbo people. I have read political philosophies from Winston Churchill’s “The River War” to Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto”. I have read books considered to be standard-bearers of leftist thinking and those seen as right-wing intellectual staples.
Sometimes I find myself holding several conflicting, incommensurable beliefs, but most often I arrive at a centre—a rich ground that enables me to fully appreciate the complexity of the human condition, to understand the substance of different ideas and why others might hold them. I am forever open to the possibility of changing my mind.
That is why I got such a shock in my first few weeks in America. At an event at the University of Michigan an African-American speaker was hectored and shouted down by a mob. I could not understand; why wouldn’t the audience hear him out? The response I received—that the speaker’s view was “problematic”—would reverberate through the next few months and years. Speakers across various platforms in America were drowned out, attacked and silenced …
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These conflicting actions and reactions, I think, are a result of a societal malaise that has been developing in the past decade or so: radical incuriosity. It is, in essence, the fear of ideas.
Obioma then goes on to describe the importance of what he calls ‘provisional thinking’: a capacious open-mindedness, encompassing both the moral and the political, in which one’s assumptions can constantly shift, unattached to ideology or dogma. And arrives at a natural resting place for him, namely agnosticism.
This is logical and I warmed so much to what he wrote. But I wonder if agnocisim itself is also a little flimsy as a resting-place for your soul. I may be wrong. But if you are open to everything, on what do you base any judgements you make? What values can you hold that are not themselves potentially valueless? I struggle to understand how being agnostic about everything (if that is what is being argued) can enable you to form judgements about anything? Presumably, better minds than mine, not hard to find, have views on this.
But that is why I like the position of Christ as truth, as he claimed to be. Perhaps with him (and what he said) as the foundation, we are able better to judge the value and utility of multiple different political and moral viewpoints? At least we have somewhere to start.
And that starting point, Christ himself, was and is iconoclastic, turning some truths upside down, reshaping others, fulfilling others, just like Truth would if ever, like some icebreaker, it started ploughing through the frigid accumulation of our reasonings. Hmmm..
