Posted by dillon on Sunday, February 6, 2011 at 7:12pm.
Can anybody help in evaluating this essay. i have to write an evaluation on it
its by Wole Soyinka called Every Dictator's Nightmare
With the blood-soaked banner of religious fanaticism billowing across the skies as one prominent legacy of this millennium, Martin Luther's famous theses against religious absolutism struck me early as a strong candidate for the best idea of the last thousand years. By progressive association, so did the microprocessor and its implications -- the liberalization of access to knowledge, and a quantum boost for the transmission of ideas. There is, however, a nobler idea that has spread by its own power in this millennium and that has now begun to flourish: the idea that certain fundamental rights are inherent to all humanity.
Humankind has always struggled to assert certain values in their own right, values that the individual intuitively felt belonged to each person as part of natural existence. It is difficult to imagine a period when such values were not pursued in spasmodic acts of dissent from norms that appeared to govern society even in its most rudimentary form. Even after years of conformity to hallowed precedents, a few dissidents always arise, and they obtain their primary impulse in crucial instances from the individual's seizure of his or her subjective worth.
In the devolution of authority to one individual as the head of a collective, a system of checks on arbitrary authority is prevalent. Take, for instance, monarchical rule among the Yoruba, the people now concentrated in western Nigeria. At the apex is a quasi-deified personage, endowed with supreme authority over his subjects. To preserve the mystic aura of such a ruler, he is never seen to eat or drink. In earlier times, he was not permitted to speak directly to his people but had to employ an intermediary voice, a spokesman. For the highest-ranked kings in the Yoruban world, the ekeji orisa (companions to the deities), it was forbidden even to see their faces. Despite the social and psychological distance between the leader and his subjects, the monarch was pledged to rule within a strict contract of authority. Transgression of a taboo, say, or failure to fulfill ceremonial duties on time, resulted in fines, rituals of appeasement or a period of ostracism. The major crime, however, was abuse of power, excessive authoritarianism and a trampling on the rights of the citizenry. For this category of crimes, there was only one response: the king, on being found guilty, was given a covered calabash and invited to retreat to his inner chambers. He understood the sentence: he must never again be seen among the living.
Sometimes, of course, an individual manages to convert collective authority into a personal monopoly. In these instances, society is characterized by tensions, palpable or hidden, between the suppressed rights of the people and the power rapacity of one individual. But where does society ground its claims, its resistant will, in such circumstances? We know that rebellion may be triggered by recollections of more equitable relationships, by material expropriation or by a cultural transgression that affects the spiritual well-being of the community or individual. Such rebellion finds its authority in the belief, in one citizen after another, that the ruler has violated a fundamental condition of human existence.
The droit du seigneur, the ''right'' that confers on the lord the pleasure of deflowering, on her marriage night, the bride of any of his vassals -- on what does the ritually cuckolded groom finally ground his rebellion other than a subjective sense of self-worth? What of the Yoruban monarch who, even today in certain parts of my world, tries to exercise his ''right'' to gbese le -- that is, to place his royal slipper, symbolically, on any woman who catches his fancy, and thus assign her to his harem? The manor lord's entitlement to compulsory labor from his peasants, the ownership of another being as a slave, the new age of enslavement of womanhood in countries like Afghanistan -- the challenges to these and other so-called rights surely commence with the interrogation of self-worth, expanding progressively toward an examination of the common worth of the human entity as a unit of irreducible properties and rights.
It took centuries for societies to influence one another to the critical extent needed to incite the philosophic mind to address the concept of the human race in general, and not simply as members of a specific race or occupants of a geographical space. In its rudimentary beginnings, each society remained limited by a process that codified its own now-recognizable collective interests against all others, like the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights. Such oaths of fealty by petty chieftains imposed duties on the suzerain but also entrenched their own equally arbitrary mechanisms of authority and coercion over the next level of society. This sometimes resulted in the bizarre alliance of the monarch with his lowest vassals against his overreaching barons and chieftains.
Like race and citizenship, religion was not far behind in the exclusionist philosophy of rights, formulating codes to protect the rights of the faithful but denying the same to others -- the Cross against the Crescent, Buddhist versus Hindu, the believer against the infidel. Or simply religion versus secularism. Ground into powder beneath the hooves of the contending behemoths of religion, ideology and race, each social unit ponders, at least periodically, how he or she differs from cattle or sheep, from the horses that pull the carriages of majesty, even when such choices are the mere expressions of the collective will. If order alone, ornamentation, social organization, technology, bonding and even productive structures were all that defined the human species, then what significant properties marked out Homo sapiens as distinct from the rest of the living species?
Polarizations within various micro-worlds -- us versus the inferior them -- have long been armed with industrious rationalizations. Christian and Islamic theologians throughout history have quarried their scriptures for passages that stress the incontestable primacy of an unseen and unknowable Supreme Deity who has conferred authority on them. And to what end? Largely to divide the world into us and the rest. The great philosophical minds of Europe, like Hume, Hegel and Kant, bent their prodigious talents to separating the species into those with rights and those with none, founded on the convenient theory that some people were human and others less so. The Encyclopedists of France, products of the so-called Age of Reason, remain the most prolific codifiers of the human (and other) species on an ambitiously comprehensive scale, and their scholarly industry conferred a scientific benediction on a purely commercial project that saw millions of souls dragged across the ocean to serve as beasts of burden. Religion and commerce -- far older professions than the one that is sometimes granted that distinction, but of an often-identical temperament -- were reinforced by the authority of new scientific theories to divide humanity into higher and lower manifestations of the species. The dichotomy of the world was complete.
It took the near triumph of fascism to bring the world to its senses. The horror of the Holocaust finally took the rulers of the world back to the original question: what is the true value of humanity? It is to be doubted if the victorious three meeting in Yalta actually went into any profound philosophical niceties in the discussions that resulted in the United Nations, that partial attempt to reverse the dichotomizing course of humanity. That course, taken to its ultimate conclusion, had just resulted in an attempted purification of the species, the systematic elimination of millions in gas chambers and a war that mired the potential of Europe in the blood of its youth. After all, the concept of the master race was not new, but it was never before so obsessively articulated and systematically pursued. It was time to rethink the entire fate of humanity. The conversations at Yalta, conversations that led to the birth of the United Nations, were a partial answer to that question.The first stage was to render the new thinking in concrete terms, to enshrine in a charter of rights the product of the bruising lessons of the immediate past: the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The informing recognition is that long-suppressed extract of the intuition that humanity had guarded through evolution, one that had been proposed, compromised, amended, vitiated, subverted but never abandoned: that, for all human beings, there do exist certain fundamental rights.
The idea already exists in the Bible, in the Koran, in the Bhagavad-Gita, in the Upanishads, but always in curtailed form, relativist, patriarchal, always subject to the invisible divine realms whose interpreters are mortals with distinct, secular agendas, usually allied to the very arbitrary controls that are a contradiction to such ideas. Quiet, restrained, ignored by but also blissfully indifferent to the so-called world religions, Ifa, the corpus of Yoruban spiritual precepts and secular philosophy, its origins lost in antiquity but preserved and applied till today, annunciates identical ideas through Orunmila, the god of divination:
Dandan enia l'ayan ko mu ire lo s'aye . . . Ipo rere naa ni aye-amotan ohungbogbo, ayo nnigbagbogbo, igbesi laisi ominu tabi iberu ota.
Certainly, it is the human being that was elected to bring values to the world . . . and his place of good is the knowledge of all things, joy at all times, freedom from anxiety and freedom from fear of the enemy. [Irosu Wori] Humanity has been straining to seize the fullness of this doctrine, the right to knowledge, the freedom from anxiety, the right to security of existence as inherent to the species. It is only the process of promulgating its pertinence to all mankind that has been long and costly. The kernel of the idea, therefore, is both timeless and new. Its resurrection -- the concrete seizure of the idea within this millennium, answering the exigencies of politics, religion and power and securing it within the bedrock of universality -- was a destiny that would first be embraced by France.
There, alas, the events that gave new life to this idea did not encourage its adoption on a universal scale, indeed not even durably within France itself. The restoration of slavery by Napoleon was surely the most blatant contradiction of the idea, but this did not much trouble the Emperor.
Still, the idea had taken hold, the idea of the rights of man as a universal principle. It certainly motored the passion of the genuine idealists in the abolition of the slave trade, who must always be distinguished from those to whom abolition was simply a shrewd commercial calculation. The idea of the American Declaration of Independence -- an idea that still lacks full realization -- that ''all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights'' is an adumbration of that original idea from which the French Revolution obtained its inspiration, one that has continued to convulse the unjust order of the world wherever it has been grasped: the fundamental rights of man.
It is an idea whose suppression is the main occupation of dictatorships -- be these military or civilian, of the right or the left, secular or theocratic. It is, however, their nightmare, their single province of terror, one that they cannot exorcise, not even through the most unconscionable pogroms, scorched-earth campaigns and crimes against humanity. It is an idea that has transformed the lives of billions and remains poised to liberate billions more, since it is an idea that will not settle for tokenism or for relativism -- it implicitly links the liberation of one to the liberation of all. Its gospel of universalism is anchored in the most affective impulse that cynics attribute to the choices made by humanity, self-love, but one that now translates humanity as one's own self.
- English - Ms. Sue, Sunday, February 6, 2011 at 7:15pm
On what is your evaluation supposed to be based? What are your guidelines?
- English - SraJMcGin, Sunday, February 6, 2011 at 7:17pm
Sorry, Dillon, but I don't have time to do this assignment justice. I might suggest a good dictionary for any vocabulary you don't fully understand. If you post specific questions concerning what it is difficult to grasp, I'll do my best to help.
Shame on that teacher if you didn't get a rubric to follow!
Sra (aka Mme)
- English - dillon, Sunday, February 6, 2011 at 7:18pm
well we are supposed to make analytical judgments and defend them and give the essay's significance also
here are some questions we have to also look at while evaluating it
What are your reactions to the work? What in the work are you responding to?
How sound are the works central idea and evidence? Does the main idea make sense? Does the evidence match the claim? Is the evidence sound and persuasive?
How well does the author achieve his or her purpose? How worthwhile is the purpose?
How authoritative, trustworthy, and sincere is the author?
How unified and coherent is the work? Do its parts all support a central idea and clearly relate to one another?
What is the overall quality and significance of the work? Is it well written? Are the ideas contained within deep and meaningful or trivial and shallow? Does the essay speak about an isolated incident or is it a timeless piece whose meaning reverberates regardless of the current situation? Does the essay have the potential to change lives, change societies?
Do you agree or disagree with the work? Can you support, refute, or extend it?
- English - Ms. Sue, Sunday, February 6, 2011 at 7:26pm
Thank you. Your guidelines/assignment are very useful.
Which questions don't you understand?
- English - dillon, Sunday, February 6, 2011 at 7:30pm
well i do understand the essay. its just that i am not able to write an evaluation on it. i need help with it. i mean if you had to write it, how will you write an evaluation on it. and we have to use third person in it
- English - Ms. Sue, Sunday, February 6, 2011 at 7:46pm
Take each question and answer it.
Soyinka has taken what many people believe to be almost a truism, "certain fundamental rights are inherent to all humanity," and argued it forefully.
- English - dillon, Sunday, February 6, 2011 at 8:31pm
okay.. can you answers more question about it.
- English - Ms. Sue, Sunday, February 6, 2011 at 8:40pm
Yes. I can answer more questions about it. But I won't.
I wouldn't dream of depriving you of your opportunity to learn from answering these questions yourself!
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