CONCEPT: Chaos

Chaos: Philosophers, poets and painters have, at least since the Greek philosopher Pythagoras (6th century BCE), held a categorical view of  the universe -- or indeed all creation -- as a unity, or Cosmos. They attached to Cosmos such attributes as good order, calmness and peace -- indeed, symphony -- despite the complexity of its many and diverse parts. Their imagined opposite for this clock-work verity or metaphor was Chaos -- meaning, disorder, disharmony, disconnect and even jarring noise (or cacophony). 

In the 19th century, Alexander von Humbolt re-imagined Kosmos (Cosmos) for the modern world as a vast, complex but interconnected and harmonious unity. And in the 20th century, George Santayana suggested that Cosmos had no empirical opposite. There was only Order, often too hidden (or too obvious) to casually see. He saw Chaos as a figment of the imagination, arguing that it was "a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds". That is, the order or complexity imprinted in discrete phenomena or processes observable "out there" in the natural and social worlds may appear chaotic, but only so appear, to the observer who does not have the wherewithal (tools, time, training, frame-of-mind or the like) to grasp their essential or 'below-the-surface' nature. 

Dutto (2000), on the other hand, has argued that chaos is "...the complex and unpredictable motion or dynamics of systems that are sensitive to their initial conditions". These initial conditions may include a system's initial size/magnitude, position, weight, direction or velocity. But he adds that "Chaotic systems are mathematically deterministic -- that is, they follow precise laws, but their irregular behavior can appear to be random to the casual observer." In a word, they are 'ordered', and their orderliness is out there for the well-prepared to discover. 

His examples of chaotic behavior commonly observable within systems include: measles outbreaks, heart rhythms, electrical brain activity, fluids, animal populations and chemical reactions. Even the highs and lows of the stock market may appear chaotic to the more casual observer (see William Dutto, 2000, "Chaos Theory", Encarta). 

The organismic view of society, such as is dominant in structural-functionalism, strongly suggests that social life -- indeed human society -- is founded on a certain 'order of things'. In other words, society cannot properly function and thrive without a preponderance of it. Public policy implicitly or explicitly labels it "Law and Order", a breakdown of which must be prevented from degenerating into civil disorder or anarchy -- or, yes, Chaos.

Conflict (or Social Change) theorists of various persuasions, on the other hand, generally argue that an uncompromising emphasis on Order weakens society by stifling needed short-term and long-term change. Further, they argue that labeling agitators for change or reform as agents of anarchy or Chaos is, deep down, a reflection of the rulers' self-interest and determination to preserve the status quo -- which is beneficial to them. From this perspective, then/too, Chaos is in the eye of the beholder; and Conflict (or Change, or Reform) is, potentially at least, transformative.   

READ "Chaos" Plato, Stanford University.



UPDATED: March 2nd and 8th, 2018

Independence Day

The people deserve the leaders they get, so the saying goes. Then the leaders get the respect they deserve from the people, who deserve them, or so it seems these days.

Kenya's Independence Day celebrations of 12th December 2008, the 45th since 1963, were the most chaotic ever. We prefer to call it Jamhuri Day – Republic Day – for on December 12th 1964, exactly a year after independence, Kenya became a republic – finally putting an end to the Queen of England’s constitutional role as Kenya’s residual Head of State. That same Elizabeth II who, once upon a time in Kenya, went up a tree a princess and came down a queen the very following morning! We still love her!

A DIGRESSION: Don’t get me wrong: chaos, Santayana teaches, is any order that causes confusion in our minds. The confusion is not in the order, not in the extant state of affairs, but in our minds, says he. It’s the mind that the order, ordered as the order might be, confuses. Yet Santayana does not say whose mind’s eye sees the order when our minds are, as he sees it, confused. DIGRESSION ENDS.

For the first time ever, unthinkable (funny?) but it’s true, the President could not finish his address to the nation – historically the centerpiece of the day’s events. The speech is in fact supposed to cascade throughout the country. Not only is it aired live by the electronic media, but the text is also read out, though not simultaneously, in all of Kenya’s Provinces by the Provincial Commissioners (PCs), in all the Districts by the DC’s, and in all the Divisions by the District Officers (DOs). In the Districts and Divisions, the occasion offers an opportunity to local dignitaries to address the gatherings before the President’s speech is read and the proceedings closed.

Incidentally, on this same occasion last year, near Holo, the Kisumu West DC would not let me talk, though he was aware of my presence and allowed others conected to the incumbent MP, who was himself not there. I belonged to the wrong party, I suppose; but I also thought he was trying to stay on the right side of an incumbent several aspirants were trying to dislodge. I was of course disgusted, and I could see that other people were too. I felt the kind of discust which I imagine all gagging engenders, and which the President must have felt this December 12th.

But some eight Kilometers away at Kombewa, last year, I had caught up with the on-going events at the Divisional level, and the DO, a lady, had let me speak without a fuss and even with the respect befitting a parliamentary aspirant. I was pleased and, let me confess, offered crates of soda to the 150 or so raia in attendance. Others drank too. It was a hot day, but talk about cocacolonization! I also knew that the President entertains plenty at State House on this day, after the public gathering, but he does not use his own money!

Back to this year: It is not Yambo who cannot speak at the District gathering, I was happily at my computer “on” Gandhi Wing this time, but the President who cannot complete his speech, and so continue a tradition, at the national event! It is not Yambo whom some District “arm of government” with no civic virtue stops, but the President (and I suspect the Prime Minister) whom the people give the respect they think he deserves (both deserve) these days – just about two weeks from the first anniversary of his ECK-declared ”victory”, and the latter's "defeat”!

Exactly what happened this December 12th, and why, is all over Saturday's newspapers. Let me summarize as follows: There were demonstrations and heckling in Nairobi and certain other parts of Kenya at venues where the day’s celebrations were held. The crowd was simply not its usual cheering self – something which had been noticed with less buzz at Raila’s home-coming party in the Kibera slums about two weeks ago. It had reason, reasons, to be glum. And serious security lapse was witnessed, at the VIP section of Nyayo Stadium, the venue. An un-vetted man with an agenda, a Mr. Frederick Odhiambo – a known member of Bunge la Wananchi (Parliament of the People, or The People’s Parliament) – deliberately found his way to a seat just ten meters away from the President. He did not sit quietly throughout, nor did make noise till close to the end (which is when his presence was noticed by the President’s security detail, and his unscripted noise caused a helter-skelter of action) – which is when the Nyayo Stadium show came to a sudden stop!

Let’s put it this other way: The public’s foul mood was already much in evidence when that happened. And so was the President’s. Both President Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga had already been openly heckled. The manhandling earlier in the day, in full view of the crowd, of a protesting Mong’are (aka Nyambane), one of Kenya’s most famous comedians, had not helped matters. It was all so contagious, as Christakis might have noted were he there. Still, the belated discovery of Odhiambo’s presence was the proximate catalyst for that abrupt end.

Three wedge issues were the reason for all this unbecoming turn of events on a great ceremonial day. First, the continuing shortage and escalating price of unga (maize flour) and other consumables across the country. This is partly the consequence of widespread post-election violence which the country suffered early this year, and partly the result of mafia-like scheming in certain high places broadly in the docket of the Minister for Agriculture. Talk on the street is that YK92 is regrouping at the Ministry. Lack of access to unga of course means njaa (hunger), which sections of the crowd periodically reminded the leaders of.

Second, the disquieting continuation of tax-free emoluments to Parliamentarians and other holders of constitutional offices. Third, the passage by Parliament of the much-resented Media Bill -- the Kenya Communications (Amendment ) Bill, 2008, known in certain quarters as the ICT Bill – whose effect will be, inter alia, to vigorously gag the media, and which now awaits only the President’s assent before it becomes law.

It is of course hypocritical for certain circles in ODM to declare belatedly that they will take government to court, a government in which they are coalition partners, if the President signs the Media Bill into law. Where were they when Parliament, in which they control nearly 50% of the votes, was voting in the bill? Yet that is not the only reason for the public’s gripe, and it is hypocritical to make pronouncements and act as though it is. Why have they not mobilized their voting block to get Parliamentarians to pay taxes like other law-abiding citizens? In fact, to demonstrate seriousness of purpose and unequivocal empathy with the people, ODM MPs should voluntarily ask for their pay to be taxed as they wait for Parliament to act. Anything less than that is just so much hot air.

Feast of The Immaculate Conception

Today, Catholics the world over celebrate the feast of The Immaculate Conception of Mary mother of Jesus. It is the 532nd such celebration, the first having been presided over by Pope Sixtus IV on December 8th 1476, so long ago. However, historical evidence suggests that the memetic roots of the Immaculate Conception trace back to ninth century England.

As a Catholic, who was once a Sacristan, I must confess that at some point I lost the distinction -- which I suppose we were once as catechists taught, taught when our English was still raw (which is not the same thing as the English in us) and when, perhaps, our attention was raging to be elsewhere -- between the immaculate conception of Mary herself and the virginal birth of her son, and God's son, Jesus Christ the Redeemer. The point being made to us was that she conceived and delivered Him when/while/though she was a virgin, but her own mother had not herself been a virgin.

Over the years I have fused the two notions, forgetting (and presently and belatedly surprised) that we were in our youth asked to believe that Mary herself was born without original sin, essentially taking the immaculate conception to be about the conditions of Jesus' own birth. I totally missed that fine point. No wonder I didn't become the priest my late father, a devout Catholic who must now be in heaven, had dreamt that I, his eldest, would be.

As it turns out, however, I was not alone in this. It is even possible that many and perhaps most Catholics, nowadays, wallow in that confusion. To re-frame Santayana's notion of chaos, that distinction is an "order of thought", a liturgical order, which brings confusion in our minds.

Though her conception was shorn of the "stain" of the original sin, which Adam and Eve committed somewhere here in Africa and perhaps East Africa (if the human-origin narrative of DNA experts is to be tagged to the biblical account of the Garden of Eden and the goings on at the Forbidden Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge), it was the product of sexual intercourse. In contrast, Jesus was conceived as a result of the Word, relayed to Mary by God's own angelic emissary, Gabriel. His was virginal conception, and just as endowed with grace.

When first mooted by Sixtus IV, the concept of the Immaculate Conception was not labelled a dogma of the Church; that is, as something which believers must believe. This left Catholics, who chose to, free to treat it as untrue, without the risk of excommunication on grounds of heresy. It was declared a dogma only in the 19th Century -- more precisely on December 8th, 1854 -- by Pope Pius IX.

That dogma was taught to my parents, both devout; and later to us, but perhaps only in passing. I think the confusion in our minds arose from the fact that we were being asked to believe two very ngumu ("hard"), very counter-intuitive, ideas rolled up essentially into one. A choice was made. And since Mary was not the Daughter of God, nobody went that far, it was easier to take away from her the more poetic and graceful notion of immaculate conception, which was indeed her's, and to attach it to Jesus -- whose own label of "virginal birth" somehow rang too mundane. Perhaps I am projecting a present thought-process into a past in which we thought rather more at face value, rather more intuitively. But perhaps the point here is that the two thought-processes meet at the very same standpoint.

I stop here, for I simply wanted somehow to link this day with a part of my youth, to toss up ideas which continue to puzzle. To learn more about all this, the reader must click here: A History of the Immaculate Conception.