A milkman and his terrier pose at the back of a milk truck, May 1948.
Photograph by Melville B. Grosvenor, National Geographic
For many — so, so many — of my Twitter friends.
Into the city they go, Yeshua and the nucleus of twenty or so men and women who have been following him about. The narrow stone streets are packed with visitors who’ve come in from the province for the biggest festival of the year, a festival of death averted, in which the people of the one God remember how he saved them by smiting the rest; and the visitors see, well, something like a parade, with Yeshua riding on a borrowed donkey, and the friends around him shouting make way, make way. Who’s this? It’s another bloody prophet. It’s that crazy preacher who says we don’t need the law. It’s the rabbi from up north who heals people. What, the river-dipping one? No, he’s dead, this is another one. It’s a king! Rubbish, kings ride on horses, not donkeys. But there are prophecies about donkeys. Maybe he’s the one. Oh come on. This fellow? Where’s his sword? It’s the king, it’s the king! Keep your voice down, idiot. Better get the children indoors, just in case.
Is it a king? The scene is hard to read. It’s like a royal progress and a parody of a royal progress, all at once. Yeshua is doing exactly what a christos would do if he were making a momentum play, gambling on snowballing crowd support. Yet the details are off-script somehow, from the donkey, to the way that only some of the friends seem to be shouting the slogans you’d expect, to the way that the man himself doesn’t have his face set in the shining megawatt mask of charisma. It isn’t clear what’s happening. But something is, and though only a portion of the crowd are young enough, or hopeful enough, or desperate enough, or unwary enough, to give Yeshua their acclaim, quite a lot of them are curious enough to follow and see what comes next: for the parade, or procession, or whatever it is, is clearly heading for the temple, up the twisting alleyways to the top of the city, and the narrow gateway where the press of yellow housewalls and tile roofs opens out all at once into the wide forecourt of the one God’s most sacred place.
Palm Sunday, from Sue Symon’s Bath Diptychs, a mixed media life of Christ on permanent exhibition in the nave of Bath Abbey. The left panel of each pair is calligraphy, the right panel embroidery. In the embroidered panels Christ is represented by a white circle.
If you have the biggest computer and the biggest data, you can calculate how to target people with a political message, and have almost a guaranteed deterministic level of success. Politics then becomes about who has the biggest computer instead of what the agenda is. The way Obama won the last US election was by having the best computer strategy. That method of winning an election works, but if that is to be the future of politics, it will no longer have meaning. The path we are on is not compatible with democracy.
When Norenzayan became a student of psychology in 1994, four years after his family had moved from Lebanon to America, he was excited to study the effect of religion on human psychology. “I remember opening textbook after textbook and turning to the index and looking for the word ‘religion,’ ” he told me, “Again and again the very word wouldn’t be listed. This was shocking. How could psychology be the science of human behavior and have nothing to say about religion? Where I grew up you’d have to be in a coma not to notice the importance of religion on how people perceive themselves and the world around them.”Norenzayan became interested in how certain religious beliefs, handed down through generations, may have shaped human psychology to make possible the creation of large-scale societies. He has suggested that there may be a connection between the growth of religions that believe in “morally concerned deities”—that is, a god or gods who care if people are good or bad—and the evolution of large cities and nations. To be cooperative in large groups of relative strangers, in other words, might have required the shared belief that an all-powerful being was forever watching over your shoulder.
On every campus we need large, highly visible vegetable gardens that are tended by everyone who likes to eat; cafeterias that provide, insofar as they can, only local foods; compost heaps steaming next to these cafeterias to remind us to pay our debt to the soil. We need administrators committed to dismantling, not enlarging, our vast system of technological dependencies, and professors committed to living defensibly and responsibly and competently before their students. Our foreign studies programs must become local studies programs. Our new buildings must be made to run on energy sources that will still be available when the buildings turn fifty or a hundred. We can’t ignore the problem of ecological illiteracy any longer. It must become a prominent curricular concern all across higher education. And no one should graduate who doesn’t know what oil has done for us—and especially what it has done to us: made us fat, lazy, stupid, and incompetent. This won’t cut it.
Achebe can only fulfill his cultural responsibility by recounting as faithfully as he can the collapse of Igbo tradition — and, as a part of that recounting, the multiple causes which brought about the collapse. He too could have told a story in which his people are merely victims who contribute nothing to their own destruction; but that was not, as he understood it, wie es eigentlich gewesen, though it contains most of the truth. The mores of academic post-colonial discourse, which (for good reason) focus our attention on the cruelties of the colonial powers, do not encourage us to note the complexity of Achebe’s responses to the colonial situation. Achebe’s attacks on Western cultural imperialism, especially when he is speaking to a Western audience, can be righteously indignant and appropriately scathing; but it is only by honestly detailing the internal contradictions that beset Igbo culture that he can point to the possible future re-integration of that culture.And one of the ways that he seeks to prompt that re-integration is by reminding his people that it must be a collective task. They must share in the work of interpretation and discernment that Ezeulu heroically took on all by himself: they cannot merely rely upon a griot or priest to tell them how they should interpret their cultural situation. And in insisting upon this point, Achebe is following an old storyteller’s path. In his collection African Folktales, Roger Abrahams includes a section of “Stories to Discuss and Even Argue About.” These stories are divided into two groups. In one group, says Abrahams, are “profound moral examples, stories that explicate a lesson, or answer a central question.” Stories of this type, Abrahams goes on, are typically recounted “in those situations in which a purportedly wiser person speaks to those less knowledgeable in the ways of the world.” But in the other group are “dilemma tales, tales without an end” — by which Abrahams means tales that do not offer answers or resolutions. Many of them in fact end with questions. These stories, Abrahams explains, are told “among cohorts of equal experience and power.” So the wisdom which Achebe offers in Arrow of God is not the wisdom of answer and explication: it is the wisdom of knowing what task confronts his people — coupled with the determination to proclaim this most difficult kind of knowledge. Achebe refuses the easy virtue of one-sided readings, instead presenting the Igbo people with the challenge of interpretation: “This is what has befallen us; now what do we make of it?”
The sounding of the battle-drum is important; the fierce waging of the war itself is important; and the telling of the story afterwards — each is important in its own way. I tell you there is not one of them we could do without. But if you ask me which of them takes the eagle-feather I will say boldly: the story. Do you hear me? …So why do I say the story is chief among his fellow? The same reason I think that our people sometimes will give the name Nkolika to their daughters — Recalling-is-Greatest. Why? Because it is only the story that can continue beyond the war and the warrior. It is the story that outlives the sound of war-drums and the exploits of brave fighters. It is the story, not the others, that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus-fence. The story is our escort; without it, we are blind. Does the blind man own his escort? No, neither do we the story; rather it is the story that owns us and directs us. It is the thing that makes us different from cattle; it is the mark on the face that sets one people apart from their neighbours.