Technology has only helped us to see the monster within us more clearly

We live in a shockingly hostile world. The magical age of information and technological revolution has failed the test of humanness. If Neanderthal man butchered his neighbours, we could put that to his primitive times and limited world. That cannot be said of the present global generation.

Industrial technology and the revolutions in cybernation and aeronautics have made us one complex world. In the words of Dr Martin Luther King Jr., we have shrunk space and frozen time. You depart Tokyo on Saturday and get to Washington on Friday of the same week. Once in Washington, you could rightly tell them, “I left Tokyo tomorrow.” Yet the benefits of science and technology have not made us better human beings.

Civilisation is the ability to live together peacefully. People observe common norms and are governed by a shared code of social conduct. Our generation has failed this test. We have not developed a better and safer world, for all our scientific miracles. In effect, our technological advancement has only helped us see the monster within us more clearly. We watch the extremes of man’s inhumanity against man in real time. Murder and mayhem comes to us live on TV and online round the clock. This does not leave us aghast at all. It perhaps only hones our appetite for more violence.

Perverted murderers claim to act for their gods. They slay individuals who have no quarrel with them in broad daylight. They capture their savagery on video records. They go on to triumphantly circulate their barbarism online. This is just how low humankind could sink – tragically even when it claims to speak and act for God! This way, too, the murderers keep permanent records for future generations. There should be no doubt just how so low we sank in our times.

Away from religious fundamentalism, the politics of identity have turned the planet earth to a killer’s paradise. We kill for our gods, our races, tribes and villages. In the streets of the United States, the self-styled global headquarters of “liberty and pursuit of happiness” the custodians of law and order slay African youth without any provocation. Irate schoolboys and sundry gunmen spray free bullets at social gatherings, unprovoked. Everywhere on the globe, young men who don’t know how to put a good word across to a good lady think they have a right to murder her. Sometimes they set her on fire in Nakuru, or knife her in Kericho and Kakamega.

In India and in the Congo, men delight in gang raping of women as others cheerfully look on. Some capture everything on video for repeat future relish. In Nairobi, masseurs rape young girls in beauty spas. When you report to police stations, startled officers are jolted by your presence. They stare and ask you, “Unataka nini?” This is to say, “What do you want?” From the malignant extremes of the religious throat slitters in the Arab world and the gun totters of Baltimore, USA, you move on to the impatient and road-raged motorists of Africa. It is a hostile world.

As the world has shrunk into Marshall McLuhan’s global village so, too, has the ability of humankind to muster the humanness of fellow feeling. Hence, motorists in Nairobi step harder on the accelerator when they behold a pedestrian crossing ahead. Cars drive us, on the roads of Africa. Cars have taken away our brains and replaced them with cold porridge. We have lost the ability to remember, when we see another motorist or a pedestrian, that we retain control over the brake pedal and the steering wheel. The man behind the wheel is a zombie who only knows the hoot and the accelerator.

Were it that we were proper machines, maybe someone could programme into us some measure of humanness? For now, we must remain uncaring hostile automatons on the roads. Even in the Church parking lot, the same unbridled and impatient hostility drives us. Never mind that we have just walked from the house of God, after a whole hour of pretentious piety and godliness.

Then there is the innovative African incongruity called boda boda. With unrestrained lawlessness, it marauds the tracks that we call roads. Should you have the mischance of crossing the path of one, the magic of the cellphone rattles the rest. In the spirit of wild dogs and safari ants, the ruffians materialise from nowhere. They come over-speeding, panting, blasting their honks. They arrive literally barking at you, frothing at the mouth and baying for your blood. Never mind that they have not the slightest idea of what happened. Together with their friends, the Kenya Police, they will eat you alive – unless you buy your way out. Never mind, too, that they have no insurance for their killer machines, or motorbike certificates of competence.

The hospital – the traditional home of hospitality – penalises you for parking in their compound when you take there your sick loved ones. The supermarket behaves the same way and the church too. Bellicosity is the order of the day. The political class takes it to fresh heights. Leaders raid funerals for free captive audiences. They gambol in like the wildebeest in the season of migration. They grate mourners’ ears with irrelevant insolence, planting poisonous thoughts about “some tribe” into the mourners’ psyche. Far away in Europe and America, the angst is directed as “some race.”

The “villagisation” of the globe has made us the victims of a universal “miseducation” that is devoid of the milk of human kindness. Humanness is absent in religion as in politics and in the professions. Today we go to the academy to prepare ourselves to occupy some lucrative position and not to serve. We go to the shrine to pray for wealth and to think bad thoughts about our neighbours, colleagues at work and about our relatives. We thrive on the energy of American self-focused economic ruthlessness, China’s practical and cold global neo realism, unquestioning African copycat, Asian wannabe and Arabic animalised bigotry. Nobody listens anymore. Multilateral gatherings are about hardening of positions.

Humankind’s greatest want today is a rediscovery of its humanness. In the words of Amy Chua, the world is on fire. Once long ago, UNESCO was striving for a value based global community. Selfish US and Israeli agenda in the 1980s and ‘90s veritably neutered UNESCO. The need for a revived UNESCO agenda was never greater than now. The world needs to rediscover its lost values.