Where one thing stands, another thing will stand beside it.
Chinua Achebe, “The Truth of Fiction”
Come and see, American wonder, come and see American wonder!/Come and see American wonder, come and see American wonder!
The single, repeated line of a magicians’ song from my childhood
A big tidal wave, a tsunami, a landslide, a complete and unmitigated rout: these are some of the metaphors or terms that have been applied to the defeat of the Democratic Party by the Republicans in the just concluded American midterm elections of 2014. The defeat is so thorough, so crushing that you have to go back to almost a half century to see something close to it in modern American political and electoral history. The Republicans not only expanded their control of the House of Representatives and regained control of the Senate, they did so by taking seven senatorial seats away from the Democrats, four of those in so-called “purple or swing states” that had voted for Barrack Obama in the presidential elections of 2012. Moreover, in local and state elections around the country, the Republicans wrested control of governorships from states like Maryland and Massachusetts that are some of the “bluest” states in America where “blue” means heavily Democrat, red means heavily Republican and “purple” means a swing state that could vote Democratic or Republican depending on how successful the party which wins such state is in winning voters away from the other party.
As a matter of fact, the thorough defeat of the Democrats was compounded by the fact that many legislatures throughout the length and breadth of the American hinterland are now controlled by the Republicans. This means that with their expanded control of the machinery of local politics and administration across the country, the Republicans can, and will almost certainly, tinker with existing state and local laws so as to redraw the electoral map of the country to tilt things in their favor in future local, state, federal and presidential elections. There is not the slightest doubt about it: this week the Democrats, with their far more progressive positions on internal American and global affairs than the Republicans, suffered an electoral rout greater than any defeat they had experienced in recent memory.
With regard to my own emotions as I sat watching television coverage of the elections on Tuesday night, two things stood out above all others in mind. One: I recalled the famous, tongue-in-cheek observation of the contemporary German philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, that because of America’s significance for the rest of the world, all other countries on the planet ought to be able to vote in one way or another in American elections. Two: because as I watched and listened to the tidal wave of the rout of the Democrats I did so as a person from the Third World, a person who divides his time between Cambridge, Massachusetts and Ibadan, Nigeria, I was able to see a silver lining of progressive, liberal trends in the dark and ominous clouds of the Republicans’ conservative electoral victory that I imagine most Americans are probably not predisposed to perceive. These two observations lie at the root of my reflections in this piece.
First of all, let me highlight a few of indications of progressive undercurrents in what otherwise looks like a massive endorsement of the Republicans’ conservative politics and policies in the 2014 midterms. Some of these are in fact very pertinent to the state of affairs in the rest of the world, especially in our country and our continent. In this respect, perhaps the single most remarkable feature of these recent American midterm elections is the fact that everywhere in the country in which it was contested as a ballot initiative, an increase in mandatory minimum wage won by huge majorities. This victory for instituting a mandatory minimum wage was all the more remarkable in that it took place in even the “reddest” and most conservative states in the country. This rousing electoral victory for poor and average American working families should be seen against the background of the fact that – again in every part of the country – exit polls of voters indicated that most Americans believe that the American economy is massively rigged to favor the super-rich that constitute less than 2% of the population.
To readers who might think that I am placing so much emphasis on these “hidden” aspects of the 2014 midterm American elections only because I tend to see “talakawas” in every part of the world, my response is that if Americans, since the economic crash of 2008, have been speaking of an ever-widening gap between the few super-rich and the rest of the populace, I can only concur with them, based in part on the evidence of what I see with my own eyes and what I read in mainstream American news media. In this respect, one particularly pertinent thing that I read in virtually all the major news outlets in America is the fact that while these recent elections are by far the costliest in American electoral history, it so happens that these elections also recorded the lowest voter turnout in recent memory. Here are the specifics: the total amount spent was around $3.7 billion and it was financed by 0.2% of America’s population of 316 million; the percentage of registered voters that participated in the elections was about 34%. This is a staggering feature of American democracy at the present moment: electoral victories are being “bought” by lesser and lesser percentages of the population; but this is happening because voter apathy is getting higher and higher. This is why, in his first post-election press conference, Barrack Obama stated that he clearly hears both the verdict of the one-third who did vote in the elections and the verdict of the two-thirds of the electorate who did not vote.
It is instructive to compare the voter turnout figure of 34% in these recent American midterm elections with the figure of close to 85% of registered voters that participated in the referendum on Scotland’s continued membership of the United Kingdom in September. In our own part of the world, the Ekiti State governorship election recorded voter apathy of immense proportions last April. Thus, voter apathy is not a constant and invariant aspect of 21st century democracy in our world. In the first epigraph to this essay, I make an allusion to one of my favorite aphorisms from Chinua Achebe’s writings: where one thing stands, another thing will stand beside it. I must add here that I have never thought that Achebe intended in that adage for us to think that the thing that stands beside another thing does so complacently, lost in confusion or perplexity. Rather, in nature and society, one thing stands beside another as a corrective, an alternative, an indication other choices and directions. The tidal wave of Republican victory in the 2014 midterm elections will be repeated only if the two-thirds continue to stand lamely and ineffectually beside the one-third that is bought and tied up by big capital. American domestic affairs are remarkably similar to the domestic affairs of most of the nations of the planet precisely because in most of the regions and nations of the planet, nearly everyone is in the shadow of big capital. What sets America apart from most of the rest of the world is the fact that its foreign interests and affairs are unlike the foreign affairs and interests of most of the other nations of the world. The Republicans know this and know it well; and they exploit this knowledge to the fullest extent possible. One of the most notable aspects of Obama’s presidency has been the attempt to align and bring closer together American domestic and foreign affairs and interests. He and the Democrats will never succeed in this attempt unless and until they make the idle and complacent two-thirds struggle powerfully against the bought and delivered one-third of the American electorate.
An atheist obsessed with preaching the gospel of the non-existence of God
When, about four and half decades ago I stopped being a Christian and a religionist, one of the things I decided was that I would never seriously concern myself with questions concerning the existence and non-existence of God. This decision was at first rather subconscious; when people tried to draw me into discussion of the issue, I would simply avoid it without any comment. But by the time that I entered into my forties, the decision became something of a guiding ethical principle of my mental and psychic life. As a consequence, I made a solemn promise to myself that as far as religious beliefs and practices were concerned, I would never strive to change any person’s belief in the existence of God and neither would I make it my business to shore up any person’s unbelief in God’s existence. The issues involved in this resolution are very complex and perhaps in future essays in this column, I may take them up.
I make this observation against the background of a response to the recent series in this column on “religion and science, faith and rationality” from one Gilbert Alabi Diche that was titled “Jeyifo, religion and science” and was published last Sunday in this paper on page 15. Before sending this response to the Editor of The Nation on Sunday for publication, Mr. Diche had sent me two long emails in which he argued passionately that I was being too soft, too accommodating to religion in my series. In particular, Mr. Diche argued in his emails to me that I should have kept belief in God completely out of and separate from science and the scientific ethos. In my one response to his two emails, I told Mr. Diche that I had no interest whatsoever in being drawn into the controversy over the existence or non-existence of God. I went further to inform him that the essential difference for me between human beings was not whether one believed or did not believe in God; the essential difference was between those who used either their belief or unbelief in the service of the human community or against the public good.
Apparently, Mr. Diche was not satisfied with my response to his private emails to me and for this reason, he went public and had his rejoinder published last week. Fair enough; that is his right. But he has no right to completely and willfully distort the things I had stated in my series. As a matter of fact, it is extremely damaging to his arguments to resort to deliberate distortions and fabrications of the things I had stated in my series, things that can be very easily shown to be deliberate inventions or fabrications. In most of these fabrications, parts of sentences from diverse parts of the series are brought together through ellipsis to make new sentences or assertions that were not there in my series. The most egregious of these can be found where Mr. Diche writes in his rejoinder last Sunday: “Jeyifo also claims that ‘All Nobel laureates in the sciences … also believe in God’. This is a blatant lie”. This is simply beyond belief because there is no such sentence in any of the three articles in my series on religion and science. As I ponder the reason why Mr. Diche HAD to invent this and other fabrications in his rejoinder, I wonder whether or not he has not metamorphosed into the thing about religion that he so passionately opposes: the human transmitter of the gospel of an avatar that has taken complete control of his rationality, this being the deity of unbelief in the existence of God.
Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
