Parris' Wager PDF Print E-mail
Written by Daniel Waweru   
Monday, 05 January 2009

Conservatives, careless Christians and Blaise Pascal have offered instrumental reasons for Christian belief. Parris' wager is the most recent contribution to this distinguished tradition. Familiarity having bred boredom, the plot is varied by the atheism of our author and his choice of Africans for the wager's bettors.

 

Parris' thesis, caricatured only slightly:  The problem with Africa is that Africans are incorrigibly tribal; the incorrigible tribalism of African explains Africa's present dire state;  Christianity, or at least Protestant Christianity, offers man a direct relationship with God, so constituting man as an individual; constituting Africans as individuals will break the hold of the tribe and and lead them into the broad sunlit uplands;  Protestantism, therefore, is our best hope. You don't believe me, do you? Here are the key paras:

...tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the "big man" and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.

 Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.

How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds - at the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? "Because it's there," he said.

To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation - that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.

 Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

Flicking through a moderately-priced one-volume history of Africa might have spared him distress: state-building in Africa, he might have learnt, has generally been a difficult business. That's because the terrain is inhospitable, but also because the land/population ratio was large enough that if you were a crap chief, your subjects could simply walk away. (See Iliffe 2007: 71, 108.) In these circumstances - people in short supply, land abundant - it was self-defeating to insist on strong ethnic identities. Accordingly, ethnic identities were lightly-worn, the better to absorb newcomers who were willing to work. (For some Kenyan context, see John Lonsdale (2008). Soil, Work and Civilization. Journal of Eastern African Studies 2 (2): 305-314.) 

Two consequences . First, African ethnic identity is responsive to facts, and therefore reasons. Second, the stupid and violent forms of African ethnic identity most recently witnessed in Kenya in 2008 are just that - recent; indeed, modern African ethnicity is the precipitate of the colonial state (Berman). These conclusions matter because the central motivating premisses of Parris' wager are that (i) Africans are incorrigibly given to the usual forms of stupid and exclusionary ethnic identity, and (ii) Africans lack the resources to escape; radical external intervention is necessary. If the stupid ethnic identifications are recent, they can't be incorrigible; if African ethnic identity was responsive to reasons, then it is unobvious why we should believe Parris's second premiss. The disease for which Parrisian Protestantism is the cure is only apparently a disease. 

But suppose the disease were as Dr. Parris describes it. Is the cure, you know, the cure?

The portents are unpromising. First, Protestantism is fissile. As in early modern Europe, so in Africa - it tends to drive exclusive nationalism. Why should we think it would any different this time round? Especially when, as John Lonsdale suggests, the translation of Scripture into the various Kenyan languages actually strengthened the very ethnic identities Parris so loudly deprecates? Second, the political theology which actually guides action is too often too-closely supportive of the state: throughout our history, to stick to the Kenyan example, the Churches, and especially the Protestant Churches, have thought themselves the state's flying - or at least heavenly - buttresses: they've traded distance from the state for local control and public money (Lonsdale again). That same state is the major sustaining cause of the ethnic divisions which the churches are called to cure; the churches are of the devil's party without (we must hope) knowing it. Finally, it's worth asking whether the radical individualism promised by Parrisian Protestantism is what's wanted. That form of individualism explains stuff by reducing it to individual sin: the poor are poor because they have sinned, or otherwise lack virtue. I once heard Bruce Berman say that Gikuyu and Americans shared the deep belief that wealth was a sign of personal virtue, and poverty of vice. This is a genuinely disastrous belief, because it gets in the way of poor people spotting that their being systematically screwed over is not, in fact, their fault.

________________

 

 


Daniel Waweru
About the author:

Daniel Waweru likes Thomases Mboya and Gray, and Johns Kenyatta and Lonsdale.






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tosh
written by trr , January 05, 2009
Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.


The merits or otherwise of the argument beside, this really is nonsense. Switch on your television and pay heed to an evangelical concert or prayer session and you really are transported back into a time when the wildly irrational, the enervating, the fatalistic, the superstitious, the slavish is the glory.

Perhaps Paris was speaking of an earlier Protestantism, the kind that set up Alliance High School and freed countless Kenyans from the darkness. Certainly not JIAM, or any such.

Accordingly, ethnic identities were lightly-worn, the better to absorb newcomers who were willing to work. (For some Kenyan context, see John Lonsdale (200smilies/cool.gif. Soil, Work and Civilization. Journal of Eastern African Studies 2 (2): 305-314.)

Interesting story in this week's East African on the history of the Maasai and the Gikuyu, their integration, their multilingual natures and the easy migration btwn identities.

Still, I feel as though we read different articles. Parris writes,
Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

Care to contest this?
The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.


Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.


There is a lot of truth in this. Like Parris, I am an atheist, but for sure Christianity teaching that all men are equal, and especially the role of evangelicals in the US civil rights movement has played some part in taking away the belief that whitey is better.

The second quote rings true also, except that I do not find that there is too big a difference between Christianity and animism.

Overall, I think your response, even after two readings of Parris, goes of on a tangent. Whence the proof for this claim?

the very ethnic identities Parris so loudly deprecates?

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Hmmm
written by Daniel.Waweru , January 05, 2009
Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

This is mildly tangential to the thrust of Parris' piece, which is that (Protestant) Christianity (the adoption of)is necessary and sufficient to sort out Africa.

The claim about Christinaity bringing rationality to Africa is laughable on its face. Presumably, if Christianity is true, and Africans have free will, those Africans who chose to believe in the Christian God chose to do so rationally, so it looks like African rationality preceded Christianity. And then look at the actual reasoning of those who are Christians: Emmanuel Eni, and the bishops who demanded the closure of the hominid exhibit at the Museum of Kenya are two of the more amusing examples of Christian irrationality.

I'm happy to concede the point about the equality of man and all that, but for Parris argument to succeed, he'd have to show that that conviction couldn't have been gained in another way. Seems unlikely.
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