Title: Harmony of Human Nature
Author: Aderemi Folasayo
Publishers: Soloj Resources Ventures Ltd, Onipanu, Lagos (2016)
Reviewer: John ‘Lighthouse’ Oyewale
In March, 2011, 14 months after United States’ President Barack Obama delivered his Nobel Lecture, A Just and Lasting Peace, Syria erupted in protest against its repressive government. The Free Syria Army, bent on freeing the country from the government, was born. Syria’s suffering reached the ears of the international community, and, inevitably, the war-wary United States was drawn into the struggle. Next door, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) insurgents had begun their war for the establishment of a caliphate. The instability of United States-controlled Iraq had prepared it as a fitting breeding ground for the insurgents, a number of who had been imprisoned in their country by the occupiers. A war on more fronts than one was ignited, and now swathes of split-up Syria lie in ruins.
What had departed from Syria, leaving it to turn on itself, must be what the poet and singer Leonard Cohen alluded to in his ‘Anthem’:
Ah the wars
They will be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
Bought and sold and bought again
The dove is never free.
This dove, peace, is what Harmony of Human Nature concerns itself with. Its author, Aderemi Folasayo, sets forth the subject on various levels: personal, communal, national, global. He examines humanity’s search for the balance of Nature. In pursuit of personal equilibrium, humanity “must be spiritually, intellectually, emotionally, and physically satisfied”; the corporeal, emotional/intellectual, and spiritual dimensions of personal peace should intersect. Priority should be given to the spiritual dimension, the one involving “an urge within [the] innermost being which longs for fulfilment outside of Nature” (with “the Object of that longing [termed] the Supreme Being”: concrete, much more than an “energy”).
Given his theistic vantage point, Folasayo differentiates himself from secular anthropologists. Drawing from the life stories of St. Paul, St. Augustine, and C.S. Lewis, he argues that the search for God as the ultimate Source of peace with oneself and the environment is not merely a product of culture, but – quoting Lewis:
‘“God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on gasoline and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other.”’
The peace of Jonah aboard the storm-tossed Tarshish-bound vessel and that of Paul while ‘he made havock of the church’ differs from that of Christ ‘asleep on a pillow’ in the midst of the storm, inasmuch as the founts of their individual inner selves differ, writes Folasayo. Unlike that of Christ, triumphant yet sensitive, those of the runaway Jonah and the pre-conversion Paul were sadistic. Religious extremists today possess the same sadistic inner self, too, and Folasayo efficiently gives them a bad rap over the knuckles.
It is not enough to be for peace, states Folasayo: King David was; still, he complained, ‘when I speak, [others] are for war.’ Cooperation matters for peace to reign, just as it does for all the parts of the human eye to keep out an irritant. There must be a war, a just war, that of overcoming evil with good, for a trophy as complex, as elusive, as peace.
The book suffers a few limitations. One: understandably, as the author acknowledged, there are by far and away more whys about global turbulence than ‘a small work like this one’ can do justice to. Two: unfortunately, editorial flaws: the book, for all its decent effort at being at once polemical and pedagogical and systematic in approach, could have been rescued from its occasional desultoriness and spoon-feeding of the reader, and could have been freed of its few typographical errors, and its tone would not at times have come across as contrived, had it gone through the needle-eye of a keen editor.
Nonetheless, it is a clear-intentioned voice in the perpetual, ever more animated global discussion on the slippery subject of peace.