Oro po ninu iwe kobo [There are innumerable words (even) in a cheap tabloid]
A popular saying dating back to the beginnings of newspapers in colonial Nigeria
What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are small matters compared with what lies within us Ralph Waldo Emerson
How many of those who will read this piece will follow the advice, the injunction in the title of this week’s essay? Probably close to zero. At best, a number countable only in single digits. Leave one’s cellphone or smartphone at home when one goes out? What a futile and even cranky proposal, most would say. So why am I in all seriousness making the suggestion? Well, that is the question. However, before we get to this underlying question, we have first, to ask another question and this is: how, in the first place, did it arise, my advice, my plea that people should leave their cellphones and smartphones at home every time that they go out? Oro po ninu iwe kobo!
For the answer to the question behind the underlying question that prompted the idea for this piece, I have to start by telling readers about what normally should be a quite unremarkable fact: for the first time ever, I bought a smartphone last month. Incidentally, this fact reveals as a blatant lie my friend, Femi Osofisan’s “revelation” that my cellphone is a very cheap and primitive Nokia. This “revelation” was made in a tribute that FO recently wrote to mark my 71st birthday anniversary. Up until about a month ago, what FO said about my Nokia cellphone was absolutely correct. But that is no longer the case, alas! For years, even for decades, FO with the active collaboration of my other great friend, Yemi Ogunbiyi, had done all that he could to get me to replace my old phone with a “proper phone”, a “real phone” as they put it. Yemi’s shaming teasing of me on account of the beloved Nokia cellphone was merciless. In the company of people I barely knew and/or who barely knew me, Yemi would display my discarded cellphone for all to see with the cutting commentary of, “look at his phone, a whole Harvard professor”!
FO’s “strategy” for shaming me into discarding the redoubtable Nokia contraption was less dramatic than Yemi’s, but it was no less spirited. In his case, he was in addition deeply affronted by the loudness of my ancient Nokia phone, as if the very fact that something so cheap would dare to be so offensively loud was a great and insufferable outrage. This feeling of FO was worsened by the fact that, as he has now informed the whole world in his recent tribute to me, I had and still have a habit, a tendency not to answer phone calls, no matter the decibel of the loudness of the ringtone. [More on this later]. Once, without my permission and my knowledge, FO went so far as to take it upon himself to reduce the loudness of the phone’s ringtone to a buzz that was closer to a whisper than a muffled whistle. Of course, when I discovered what my friend had done, I restored the ringtone of the phone to its lordly decibel and secretly enjoyed my friend’s frustration. My phone is my phone is my phone, if you please!
But strange and powerfully affecting is the unrelenting war of friends like mine to rid one of habit(s) deemed unworthy! To this day, I can offer no explanation other than Femi’s and Yemi’s conjuration for what happened one day last month when I accompanied a friend to a SLOT franchise outlet – and suddenly, on an impulse I had absolutely not anticipated, I decided to buy a smartphone and did so on the spot. The rest, as the saying goes, is history, a tantalizing or confounding history. Where I never once lost or misplaced the old Nokia, in less than a month that I have had the new smartphone in my possession, I have on three occasions had to run or drive back like a madman to a place where I had absentmindedly left my new smartphone. The most recent episode of this drama took place only yesterday, Thursday, January 5, 2017. So far, I have been lucky and have recovered the phone before it was picked up by a “lucky” finder. But how long will the luck hold? And how can I drill into the nerve cells of my memory or my mind the fact that I no longer own a Nokia contraption but a real, ultramodern smartphone? Or, as a matter of pragmatic reasoning, why not leave the smartphone at home every time I go out? That is the underlying question of this piece, compatriots.
You see, dear reader, it had never been my habit or practice to carry the old Nokia phone around with me everywhere I went. As a matter of fact, even in my own house, I neither had it with me all the time nor made it habit to have it on my person in one of the pockets of my clothing. Indeed, quite often, it was the ringtones of a phone call that enabled me to locate where the phone was in the house. And then, I buy this expensive smartphone and old habits collapse and things begin to fall apart, so to speak! I begin to take the smartphone with me everywhere I go. And I begin to absent-mindedly leave the phone in some places – three times in one month, the first month of my possession of the phone! Consequently, I am forced to think back to why I had for so long stuck to the Nokia phone and resisted all the spirited stratagems and efforts of my friends to shame me into buying into the world and the habits and the rituals of those who have smartphones and/or iPhones. And I discover, to my amazement, that the first law, the first obligation of smartphone owners and users is that you do not ever, ever leave the phone at home when you go out. Nobody told me of, or formally inducted me into the rigid operation of this “law”. I had seen it operate, silently but implacably, and had internalized it, absolutely without being conscious that I had done so. That is the central problem in this discussion, compatriots: internalization of habits and dispositions of which one is barely conscious.
In the last one month that I have had this new smartphone – and lost and found it three times – I have rediscovered why, for a very long time, I had stuck to my old, ancient, even antediluvian Nokia phone in complete rejection of smartphones and the protocols and rituals that they seem to impose on their owners and users. Permit me to put this rediscovered aversion to the social universe of smartphones and their uses in the simplest manner possible: I hated it that one had to spend so much time with and on the phone at all times of the day, absolutely without any exception. Another way of putting the matter is to say that I found smartphones massively intrusive in the daily, even hourly sociality of my fellow citizens. The “worst” cases pertain to those who have two or three smartphones and rather punctiliously and/or happily attend to the demands, the impositions of their multiple smartphones.
Yes of course, they have no problem with having and using many smartphones, so what is my own business in the matter, you might ask. It is a fair question. But so also is it fair for you, dear reader, to accept and affirm my own right not to have to be with and on the phone at all times of the day if that is what I choose. That was my choice when I had the Nokia cellphone. The most consequential of the expression of that right was my habit of not taking the phone with me everywhere I went and not answering all or even most phone calls that I received. [Let me qualify the actual workings of this “right”: during the day, I get a great deal of missed calls; later in the course of a day, I try to return as many of the missed calls as I can] When I bought that smartphone in early December 2016, this right was put under severe pressure. This essay is a first attempt, admittedly prompted by FO’s tribute on my 71st birthday, to reflect on what this experience means, for me in particular but hopefully for all of us.
FO in that tribute correctly says that I am very jealous of my privacy and often resent any and all attempts to break down or into my privacy. [Actually, he expressed the idea in much stronger language, saying that I am often “fanatical” in the protection of my privacy. This is true, but why should my friend be the one to reveal my “fanaticism” to the whole world?!] To privacy, I would add “interiority”, this being the inner space of thoughts, feelings, introspections and imaginings that we all constitutively have as human beings and ought to take every step possible to cherish, nurture and protect. In an often quoted statement that serves as the second epigraph to this essay, here is what Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the great American neo-Romantic writers had to say on the significance of this space of human individual and collective interiority: What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are small matters compared with what lies within us”.
The past history of our planet and our species is vast beyond measure and so is the infinity of the future that lies ahead of us. And yet Emerson avers that they are small matters in comparison with what lies inside of us. There is no doubt that this claim is hyperbolic. But it is deliberate and exemplary hyperbole. What Emerson is arguing is the idea that if we do not know what is inside of us, we cannot really know what lies ahead of us. What does this mean?
All societies and cultures of the past in all the regions of the world to varying degrees recognized that human beings have a vital need to know and be in connection with the inner life of their psychic, emotional, intellectual and spiritual selves. It is necessary to emphasize the common human dimension of this point because, ordinarily, it is a select group of thinkers, artists, visionaries and psychics that are credited with the will and the capacity to cherish and protect the interior spaces of their personalities and identities. There is also this: this inner space of Being, this interiority that all human beings have, is morally neutral; it is filled with and by both good and evil, both the impulse for creation and that for destruction. We can direct or channel it to the good, the beneficial only if we stay in touch with it. It is impossible to overstate the need for this in a society like ours that is so full of needless hardship, suffering and despair.
Compatriot, it may seem like a mad injunction, but for heaven’s sake, leave your smartphones at home, unless of course you are a barber, a tailor, a bricklayer or the CEO of a big business enterprise who, in order to stay on top of things, has to have your cellphone or smartphone with you all the time. For the thousands or even millions among us who do not belong to any of these groups, leave your phones at home when you go out and you will once again have the chance to connect with your inner life. I promise you a liberation that will astonish you. And who knows, you/we may even start a movement!
Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
