Feature Article of Sunday, 2 February 2014

Columnist: Asante, Molefi Kete

I want my children to understand the world, but not just because the world is fascinating and the human mind is curious. I want them to understand it so that they will be positioned to make it a better place. Knowledge is not the same as morality, but we need to understand if we are to avoid past mistakes and move in productive directions. An important part of that understanding is knowing who we are and what we can doUltimately, we must synthesize our understandings for ourselves. The performance of understanding that try matters are the ones we carry out as human beings in an imperfect world which we can affect for good or for ill (Howard Gardner).

Critical thinking is a potent weapon for transforming society and individual human lives. In fact, critical thinking could potentially make de-linkage of theory from praxis a material reality. Lets not overstate its merits, however, for it can make and unmake societies and individuals for better or for worse. Eugenics, Apartheid, Nazism, bigotry, and scientific racism are creative products of critical thinking, so, too, are disease prevention, philanthropy, music, hygiene, poetry, dance, and unity. Namely, the classical music of Chevalier de Saint-George, the so-called Black Mozart, and the poetic imagism of Wole Soyinka have romantically assuaged the aural and psychological estrous of human curiosity down the years. Alternatively, we are also cognizant of how scientific racism made the lives of Hereros, Namaquas, African- and Native-Americans, Romas, and Jews a living hell.

The concept of rational choice theory may be useful in this direction. Therefore, it remains a heavy moral burden on society and individuals to carefully choose which of the dual directions of critical thinking to pursue. Do Akans want to use critical thinking to suppress the electoral franchise, cultural socialization, and economic expression of non-Akans? Do militant Hutus want to use critical thinking to make Tutsis and moderate Hutus stateless or vice versa? Do Boko Haram and Al-Shabab want to use critical thinking to alchemize nation-state into city-state or statelessness? What is critical thinking? Isnt thinking a normal human process? What separates critical thinking from thinking? Is critical thinking racial, ethnic, cultural, spiritual, or genetic? Can it be taught? How do we teach it if it can be taught? Is critical thinking a modern or pre-modern concept? Lets reject the latter as it exists only in Eurocentric imaginations!

Wasnt critical thinking part of ancient Egyptian educational system where priest-students entered universities and graduated after four decades of active study? Could the societal skyscraper of ancient Egyptian civilization have been erected without the foundational dynamics of critical thinking? To wit, Egyptian mathematics, mensuration, philosophy, science, statecraft, education, cosmology, and religion demonstrate a sophistication of critical thinking on every step of the ziggurat of Egyptian society. That is to say, critical thinking has always been integral to human evolution, psychologism, and intellection, past and present, irrespective of geography. Generally, African life itself is littered with exemplars of critical thinking.

Meanwhile, Kwame Anthony Appiahs deconstructionist critique of African Religion deprives it of critical thinking though his reservations are equally typical of Scientology, Christianity, Hinduism, Mormonism, Catholicism, Jehovahs Witnesses, Buddhism, Judaism, Shintoism, Taoism, Islam, or Anabaptism (Amish and Mennonites). Then again, the late Joseph Campbell, a mythologist, demonstrated how elements of critical thinking dangled behind esoteric cultural motifs and symbols. Further, Marcel Griaules conversations with Ogotemmeli, the famed Dogon sage and religious philosopher, expand our understanding as well as add to our storied storehouse of critical thinking in the context of African Religion. Yet again, Ron Eglash, a well-known cyberneticist, mathematician, and professor in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institutes Department of Science and Technology Studies, situated in Troy, New York, has unraveled an entire system of critical thinking behind African fractals.

In fact, Soyinkas Myth, Literature and the African World, a vigorously literarized defense of African thought, achieves the same height of corrective affirmation as Eglashs. In other words, an assortment of scholars, African and non-African, has assembled carefully-molded mountains of evidence questioning Eurocentrisms abjuration of any scientific ascription of critical thinking to the African world, for, among other achievements, these scholars have succeeded in finally overturning Western tendentious reinterpretation of the African as a clueless ontological totality, particularly, more so, with the African world, otherwise draped in the sartorial Westernity of phenomenological exclusiveness, tied to a surfeit of emotion and spirituality, yet, curiously, severed from the cranial concreteness of rationality. Lets be mindful of the fact that we are not dealing with the infamous apothegmatic Senghorian equation here, however.

In another context, Western obsession with obese African spirituality and overblown African emotionalism, technically, drove Theophile Obenga to subject ancient Egyptian philosophical papyri, a system of ancient African thought which formed the foundational statehood of Western thought, to another vigorous line of exegetical reformulation, a scientific project aimed at divesting ancient African philosophical thought of Western emotional and intellectual biases. Interestingly so, Obenga, too, noticed the DNA fingerprint of critical thinking waltzing behind the esoteric door of ancient African thought (See African Philosophy: The Pharaonic Period, 2780-330 BC). Yet, the reason the African world does seem to pride herself on the abnegation of Afrocentric thinking, videlicet, in respect of critical thinking, is ascribable, consciously or unconsciously, to cultural metastasis of Eurocentrism in the body politic. That is, Eurocentrism underwrites the claustrophobic cushioning of critical-thinking capabilities of the African world.

In addition, continued reliance of the African world on and her blind allegiance to the West and Asia is also a major part of the problem, the ostensible awayness or absence of critical thinking in todays African leadership, since she, like a joeys physiological attachment to a marsupium, has grown to see the West and Asia exclusively as embodiment of practical solutions capable of addressing her chronic problems. Otherwise what is the need for the African world to think critically for practical solutions when the said practical solutions themselves are already there, there in the groin of the West and in the axilla of Asia? In other words, wouldnt critical thinking on the part of Africans make the African world lazy? It does not make an atom of creative sense! Thus, on the one hand, we believe, quite generally, that critical thinking is best appreciated if evaluated from the standpoint of political and economic autonomy.

Link:
The Power of Critical Thinking(l)