Culture and progress, By Uddin Ifeanyi

Culture is a beautiful thing. Just about everyone has a sense of what it is. I can tell examples of it when I encounter it. But few people can easily define it. Unsurprisingly. For outside of its swankier bits – paintings, music, dance, poetry, etc. – it is a portmanteau description of everything that we do. It gets more interesting. Different people have different ways of doing things – especially the same things. Is this one upshot of the nature versus nurture debate? Who knows. One thing is clear, from this, though. These differences invite culture warriors to try elevating their practices over those of others.

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This extensive aspect of the conversation around culture is made difficult by culture having an intensive aspect. In this latter reading, it breaks down into a beautiful and a useful part, none of which depends on the other for sustenance, and both completely separable from each other. And over the period of the evolution of our species, as cultures have come to agree on their more useful bits – strong entities (people and countries) do not wage war on weaker ones simply because they can, victors are no longer permitted to feast on the hearts and vital organs of their male opponents while enslaving their wives and children, etc. – the tendency has been to wage culture wars around the cinematic aspects of different people’s ways of life.

Western classical music versus Fuji? Well, I hear both differently. Woodwind musical instruments versus the percussive variety? Again, I feel them differently. The Venetian waltz versus Bàtá? Two radically different forms of expression of the same phenomenon. With this proviso: neither the phenomenon nor the form by which it is expressed were conceived in rivalrous nor emulous circumstances. And this is as it should be. Whether haute or kitsch, taste is taste, and each ought to be entitled to their enjoyment of cultural values, so long as such consumption does not entail externalities of a negative type for even one other person. This latter requirement is the lodestone around which much of the conversations around culture-as-function takes place. Well, again, at least in the liberal West. Predictably, given how nuanced this dialogue has been, there is an appropriation of the concept of culture-as-function that is at loggerheads with this conception.

Between Russia and China, consumption is not restrained by the requirement to do no harm to another. No. Harm to others is tolerable, indeed, mandated, so long as the goal aimed at is in the interest of the national zeitgeist as embodied in the person of the paramount ruler. Not just Russia and China, though. Most authoritarian societies define culture in these terms. Incidentally, much of what masquerades as culture in Nigeria, today, does. Here, individual rights are not paramount, especially when they come up against the preferences and peccadilloes of our elders, leaders, and their dealers. And it does not matter whether these potentates present as heads of faith-based organisations, political parties, or traditional institutions.

In fact, when in that cultural tit-for-tat with non-others, the focus on the beautiful side of our culture is a dead giveaway of this soft underbelly. “Nigerians are some of the most respectful people on earth”. This is our main cultural Brownie point. And the physical contortions that subordinates and younger people are expected to go through in the presence of their superiors and elders is regularly trotted out as all the evidence this claim needs. Yet, few are more fluent in the art of saying things behind others’ backs than the average Nigerian. If this speaks to a lack of collective maturity and explains the toxic nature of our public spaces, it is arguably why not much of what we do here is conviction- or conscience-driven. The acts of fealty that our cultural experiences are anchored on are performative, and both the nature of the rewards and their structures incentivise herd behaviour.

We tend only to think of economic growth and development when we consider the country’s long-term outcomes. But there is a question no less important: “How to build a society whose strength reflects the independence and moral conviction of every of its member?” I have no answers. But increasingly, I am in no doubt that culture is more than Bàtá, Mkpokiti, Igbabonelimhin, Asharuwa, or the contortions we put our bodies through to show fealty to our elders and leaders. It is about our attitude toward property (especially others’), and what happens when you acquire this illegally.