Subordinate to a system

It’s astonishing how the UK population are pushed to and fro in a technological system designed to make things easy and simple. I guess everyone is happy with it. Life has become systematised. It provides convenience and  ease and streamlines products and services. But everything has its downside. Everyone is boxed and packaged by the ready-made lifestyles they are offered.  In the supermarket, I scanned and paid for my own shopping. I didn’t have to even talk to or deal with another human being. When we have to talk to staff they act as if they have been your best friend for 20 years. The illusion is that we are still having meaningful relationships with other people.

The noise from the media, advertising and the internet allows people to believe they have their own opinions when really their heads are being filled with someone else's ideas. Ideas which, when they reinforce their existing views, they slot into their minds and regard them as their own well-formed beliefs. I suspect that, deep down, people know there is a problem. Maybe that is why everyone is desperately screaming that they are an individual!

Passing the imaculate houses with the old people tending their gardens I felt so sad. What do they feel about the death of the England they once knew? Maybe their beautiful gardens are the last memorials to English humanity?

Capitalist-created harlots

Fashion has assigned women the role of harlot (Merton). It was convincingly sold. Women believe dressing this way comes from their personal desires and is an expression of independence and freedom. Even to challenge this is to be accused of being a right-wing, Christian moralist (each word an insult in its own right). Living in Africa where women cover their bodies, it is always shocking to see someone dressing like a cheap actress from an MTV music video. Does expressing female sexuality mean virtually exposing ones private parts?

Good fit or bad fit?

In Ghana, people often address you according to the role you are assumed to have in society. I’m usually called daddy or da and was once called grandpa! My friend hates being called mamma. But these terms all define as members of a community which everyone aspires to be part of...at least you do if you are Ghanaian.

In the UK we hate to be defined this way. We don’t want to fit in and want define ourselves in our opposition to society. We call this being an individual. But, of course, there isn’t really any such thing as an individual. The term is only possible when other people exist that you want to be in opposition to. But if a whole community is attempting to define themselves this way, what are we left with?

Jobs for the Lazy?

I think a job as a government bureaucrat in Ghana must be the easiest job around. My friend describes his boss’s morning - Gets into the office very early to sleep. Wakes up around 10am to eat. Perhaps a drive around the neighbourhood – well one has to look busy doesn’t one! They haven’t had electricity in their building for over a month and nothing has been done about it. I read somewhere that poverty breeds laziness but can these people really claim to be poverty stricken?

The levels of monitoring, target setting and evaluation in the UK have become a big joke, if they weren’t so tragic, but Ghana is the other extreme. It is not unusual to walk into a business at 10am and find all the staff with their heads on the tables sleeping. One of them will probably be the manager. Maybe there just isn’t enough work to do? And most Ghanaians don’t have the initiative to think further than the task they have been given.
There are reasons for this.

As a child you are taught to do exactly as you are told. You never challenge or question your parents, even when they are wrong. Children are supposed to be seen and not heard. Children are taught to sit and do nothing (a formula for becoming brain dead). A foreign student brought a book to school to read during one of their regular ‘30 minute sit and stare and the wall in silence’ sessions. The other students were horrified telling the person they are supposed to sit and do nothing. In school, if you ask questions the teacher thinks you are rude and disrespectful.

Much may not be expected from a local business but I have higher expectations from the government. Many of them have been educated in the UK or the USA. The idea was for them to learn another way of doing things. Yet all they bring back is greed and a desire for personal wealth.

The problems in Ghana are very complex and intertwined. There are no simple solutions and, if there are, they have to come from within the culture, not imposed by the IMF, the EU and other foreign institutions. Yes, colonialism and neo-colonialism is partly responsible for the problems but equally responsible is the role of religion and Ghanaian culture itself.

But the bottom line is, as Ghanaians like to say, ‘Ghana is cool’. When you ask people how they are they use a word which means both ‘taking is easy’ and ‘slow’. People get by, no one is really starving, people manage, life is slow. Who would have it any other way?

Aid for the lazy

A friend of mine wrote to me and said:

I have been a development planning advisor to local government in Ghana for 2 years. I took over the planning as the planning officer was not interested at planning at all (none of the planning officers are: they just want to manage EU funded projects so they get "supervision allowances"). I think Ghana should transfer government of the country over to KPMG, PriceWaterhouseCoopers or Ernest & Young.

Doesn’t this example just sum up the whole problem? Bureaucrats sitting on their fat arses when the people have put their trust in them to improve the country and their lives. What’s worse, the ministers are aware of the problem but no one is taking steps to deal with it. Probably because they are all at the same game! Where is the accountability, monitoring and evaluation?

It just reinforces the position of all those who say that sending aid to Africa is not the solution.

How to live - part 2

I heard Vivian Westwood say on the radio that rebellion was no longer possible in our [post-industrial] society. She used the example of how the punk scene had been assimilated into the system. In doing so, punk gave the system more energy: rather than destroying it, it made it stronger. Her rather disappointing solution was to work from within the system.

It seems to me that all social and political movements, including communism, are now part of the show. In their act of challenging the system they in fact strengthen it. All dissent is (to use a Situationist term) recuperated into the system; the system neutralises it then sells it back to us. To be crass, the revolution will be televised as yet another reality TV show.

One response is to stop playing; to cease to comply with the rules of the game. For me it meant turning my back on the whole spectacle and quietly walking away. But did I?

How to live?

I want desperately to complete my goal – to turn my back and walk away from a set of values I see as wrong and unhealthy. I thought coming to Ghana was the first step. Maybe it was. But now I’m in a country of wannabe materialists that are trying to construct what I’ve just left. My dream is to take to the hills and live in the mountains. My fear is that I would be bored stupid. Are our lives and identities forever determined by being in opposition? Is there any way out?

The importance of pettiness

I was recently observing a group of Ghanaian school children marching to their destination in regimented lines. It reminded me of an incident when I was at school. A hated teacher made the Sixth Formers rearrange their crash helmets so they all faced in the same direction. We were gob-smacked by his ridiculous pettiness.

These examples of pettiness are probably against all educational theory in the UK. We are supposed to remove restrictions and let the children be free in order to release their creativity. Yet it seems to me that these examples actually help create a sense of self-discipline and focus the mind - because of their pettiness.

The results speak for themselves. Ghanaian youth live in a chaotic, sprawling environment yet they are able to control their personal environments which are ordered, neat and tidy. Is it not the opposite in the UK? The machine-like, government controlled external environment contrasts with the hopelessly chaotic personal environment of the child, who feels totally lost.

Pastor Power?

I am currently reading the, now deceased, Catholic writer and monk, Thomas Merton, who makes some fascinating observations.

One of the things I’m trying to get to grips with in Ghana, is the way its people are prepared to dismiss scientific facts and to accept superstitious or biblical explanations.

In some senses the USA can afford not to give its youth a scientific education as it is already a technologically developed culture. But Ghana, which has given up its traditional way of life to become a modern economy, is now stuck in a halfway house. If it is to move to a modern economy it needs to develop scientific and critical thinking.

Merton (in his Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander) talks of a “sense of guilt over the church’s former resistance to science”. He believes the church was struggling to keep its power over secular society in which independent thinkers were developing new ideas outside of the influence of the Church.

I wonder how much of that applies in a country like Ghana, where individual pastors can hold great power and wealth. I also wonder whether fear of the truth is really a fear of a godless world?