COVID-19: PHILOSOPHICAL INPUT (THREE)

THE MALE FIGURES AND QUARANTINE: ANDROSOPHICAL CONCEPTION.

A.OPERATIONAL DEFINITIONS

Androsophy: Herein used as a philosophical conception of the mindset of the male humans.

Men: Used here to refer to male humans, otherwise its Greek cognate, Anthropos, refers to both male and female humans.

Quarantine- From Latin and later French meaning 40.Referring to 40 days of seclusion to give time for healing, spiritual nourishment or to minimise transmission of pathogens.

B. BACKGROUND

The male world is a world that may seem very strange to women and even to the males themselves. When the boy-child is born, many parents ask whether they will reach 5yrs and when they go beyond 5 we ask whether they will be safe wherever they are. During wars the people who kill the most, are men, and those who are killed the most are men.  When there is an epidemic men folks seem to be hit faster and harder than female folks. The death rates among males are higher generally speaking. Of course the female folks become the bearers of the burden men leave behind but fatalities are the portion of men.  Covid-19 has also posed a challenge to men all over the world. In Kenya when we talk about quarantine, some socio-philosophical problems related to male socialisation arise.

C. THE PROBLEM

Can any male figure-especially Kenyan males successfully stay indoors for 40 days as a preventive measure against covid-19?

D. PURPOSE

To rationally explore the mindset of the Kenyan male and how it is crucial in the mitigation against the spread covid-19

E. OBJECTIVES

1. To analyse the ontology that guides mature male figures

2. To explore the dominant epistemological and Logical view point that governs male thinking

3. To rationally assess the plausibility of quarantine among Kenyan males as a means to mitigating covid19

F. METHOD

Analytic, Speculative, phenomenology

G. DISCUSSION

1. MALE ONTOLOGY

Ontology is the general, fundamental and rational investigation of all reality that exists. Simply put, it is a world view. Some of the ontological questions proper to this discourse include:  So how do the men-folk see the world? and what kind of worlds exists for a man? What is a man as part of the cosmos? From a very general perspective, we can infer first of all that a man is an impossible possibility, man is a mystery and   man is a restless being chained on the ground.

a. Impossible possibility 

Again by man we imply the male figure, a brother, a father, an uncle, a grandfather, a husband, a boy friend, a son... It has been said elsewhere that it's bad manners to understand a man because when you start entertaining the possibility of understanding a man the impossibility of having not understood him arises. This is because the male world is supposed to be a mystery not just to the female folks but to fellow men. This means that there is nothing like a definitive male word view, each male has a world view that is self contained and that is only fully understood by him and occasionally revealed to second parties in piecemeal. Ipso facto, a man is a universe unto himself. When young ladies look for suitors to marry them they delude themselves with conventional marking scheme of what a good man is, only to realise that each man has his own marking scheme of what a good man is. Superficiality presented to womenfolk is only accidents devoid of substances. The substance that defines a man remains with the man till death.

b. Man is a mysterious man (to be developed)

 Human beings are generally a mystery to be believed that a content to be known. The secretive nature of males and changes reveals the fact that men cannot be pinpointed as this or that.

c. Restless being (to be developed)

: Men are essentially ambitious beings and because of their ambitions it is difficult to locate them in one realm.

    

2. MALE EPISTEMOLOGY AND LOGIC

Epistemology is rational investigation of knowledge; its meaning and nature. Male epistemology is generally tied to the relativistic nature of his ontology. As such he adheres to relative knowledge except when he is a scientist or well educated. It is easier to have women agree on something than to have men agreeing even on some simple issues. Besides, the man is an independent Knower, independent thinker. His logic is customised to his being.  When the Rwandese were killing each other, some men in New York UN offices were still defining the meaning of Genocide and by the time they were leaving the UN board room Rwanda had decimated itself. Reason?, Relative epistemology . Covid-19 was detected way back in November 2019 in Wuhan China but it was only made public by communist males in China after it had killed scores. The males had to sit down first to define the virus. In Kenya quarantine is supposed to slow transmission and today we are talking of real lockdown in Nairobi and some parts of the coast region. But as it is the case, quarantine is still disturbing some men's heads. You need police for instance to OBJECTIVELY reinforce curfew among men's RELATIVISTIC EPISTEMOLOGIOGY. Are there women who are victims and out there? Yes. Why? They have to fend for family. Where are their husbands? Male counterparts? Who is supposed to hunt for the family according to African culture? The point is, until a man knows and by knowing we mean knowing according to his epistemology, all else is not knowledge. This excludes truly learned men.

3. PLAUSIBILITY OF QUARANTINE -KENYAN MALES

Kenya is one of the most progressive countries in Africa with appreciable degree of tolerance in as far ideas and opinions are concerned. Being a Patriarchal society it is understandable that most custodians of morals, politics, education, science and culture are men. While we appreciate the role women are playing of late, male ontologies and epistemologies are realities we may not wish away soon. There are philosophical and practical mistakes that men at the top and at the lower stratum commit such as alleged hiding of hard facts about Covid19, the tendency to shroud in mystery every sensitive issues that might affect the wider society, late response to risks ... Specific interest here is the average and hoipoloi Kenyan male reacting to quarantine. First the fact that a Kenyan man is an ontologically , epistemologically and a logically  relativistic being, makes it difficult for them to internalise the concept of quarantine -in which case we have to use force to help them quarantine. A people who are only convinced by force will always misbehave at the slightest absence of that force. So we have men sniping to go to chang'aa dens, visiting brothels during quarantine and coming back to infect their families after of course beating up their wives physically or with some warped logic. This mysterious impossible Kenyan man aka head of the family aka hubby will at the same time be at loggerheads with his wife who insists that he must wash hands, or buy sanitizer or help control children movements. At the end of it all the man will attempt solution to this stalemate by going into the cave and eventually breaking the quarantine rule.

H. CONCLUSION

P1: Hypocrisy and quarantine are immiscible

P2: Proper and thorough media civic education should be part of our disaster response team

P3: Relativism and egos of the male world should be addressed by all concerned parties

P4: Alongside social behaviour of men, nutritional guidance should be enhanced especially among older men. Face mask without proper immunity might be a farce.

COVID-19: PHILOSOPHICAL INPUT(TWO)

COVID-19:  PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVE II

SUSPENSION OF EDUCATION

A. THE BACKGROUND

Whenever there is a disaster, war or pandemic as it is the case with Covid 19, different social institutions get their share of the havoc. There is no doubt that religious institutions across the world have been affected. Education as a social has also been affected going by the number of closure of schools and higher institutions of learning. When covid19 became a reality in Kenya, among the first educational institutions to be closed include. African Nazarene and Daystar universities which could not wait for order from the government on the same; their closure was followed by government directive of the immediate closure of schools and higher institutions learning. There has been a rumour through social media of the possibility of re-opening of Educational institutions and a likelihood of the postponement of national exams. At the same time a good number of schools and other Educational institutions have been converted into quarantine canters, and when the students report back they will be required to use the same facilities that have been used for quarantine. One wonders how this will psychologically affect the educational process in these institutions 

B. THE PURPOSE

This perspective piece purposes to determine whether closure of Educational institutions and subsequent conversion of some of them into quarantine centres has occasioned suspension of Education in general and learning in particular.

C. THE METHOD

Analysis

D. THE QUESTION

Has Covid-19 occasioned the suspension of Education in Kenya?

D. THE DISCUSSION

I. 'EDUCATION' HAS BEEN SUSPENDED

I infer that to the extent that education is partially formal, yes it is suspended. In common parlance Education is 'Synonymous'   with a set of buildings, with professionals known as Teachers carrying out methodically  a  process known as teaching,  based on some pool known as curriculum and whose output can be assessed through a standardised tests. This means that when teachers stop teaching there is no education, when there is no learning space known as classroom or lecture hall there is no education. We cannot talk of Education when we are not sure whether our students are following the syllabus of their respective classes and subjects. So practically speaking, Education has ceased.

II. BRIDGING THE GAP: THE CONCEPT OF SCHOOLING

While Education in its Latin etymology -Educare, Educere-refers to the general process of bringing up and leading a learner out of the undesired state of ignorance, Schooling connotes passage through a system. A schooled person is one who has passed through a system and has been certified to have gone through it. Education however is a wide world that may include but not limited to schooling. Education is formal, informal and non formal. It takes place anywhere and it is akin to what we call spirituality in religion. Back to schooling, the distinguishing mark of schooling is standardised testing. Heavy premium is laid on doing formative and summative tests. After the test we grade the schooling   products (almost the same way we grade tea packs at Ketepa factory) into grade A, Second Class, Grade E. Much emphasis is laid on grading such that the mark of education has been the grade a learner was awarded. If for instance a schooled person got A -plain they are then socially labelled as most educated, if he/she got an E, the society sees not just as a failure but also as a mis-educated brute, a paria and a social misfit not good for market consumption.  What this means is that the aim of Education is reduced to serving the market. Most markets are served by factories in the similar manner schools are fashioned to produce human automatons and machines. These machines cannot think on their own. They are fashioned according to the demands of the market owner who in turn gives form to the factory that the school is, and calls it Formal education when actually it's supposed to be called Market schooling. In formal education, once the school stops, production stops-education stops. COVID 19 has forced the schooling factory to stop, so no more education till Covid goes away. No more production. The clamour for so called market driven courses is not anything strange in Kenya and by market driven we mostly mean blind STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths). At the end of the day we produce Scientists without labs and incapable of new inventions, Technologists who are copy cats, Engineers who can draw good designs for roads but cannot actualise what they draw, Mathematicians who cannot survive outside a classroom. This implies that schools were closed way before covid19. We are now operating from quasi educational   time zone yet real Education is a cura personalis- a holistic process entailing not only the cognitive dimension but also dialogical, normative and creative dimensions with impossibility of any practical suspension 

III. EDUCATION HAS NOT BEEN SUSPENDED

One of the philosophical anthropological definitions of man is Homo Cognoscendi (The knowing man) or homo educandus (The educable man). These definitions point to the fact the being X if X is human being then X is intrinsically and necessarily an epistemological being. In ontology when we say that man is necessarily epistemological we mean that all factors held constant it is not possible to even imagine a human being who cannot   not know without landing into contradictions.  This being the case, formal education and schooling can only be counted as a small portion of education, and that to suspend education is to suspend the being of a homo cognescendi- which is impossibility.  The desire to know and to be educated in man is innate. For instance, while schools have closed, many learners at the moment are doing everything and anything about to understand Covid 19 through Social media updates, mainstream media and Google search. This is education going on outside the school factory building and happening in what we would metaphysically call the real school, the real life outside the walls of a schooling factory.

E. THE CONCLUSION: THE REAL AIM OF EDUCATION

Close school or leave them 'open' Education goes on. It's lifelong. It's heutagogical. It's androgogical. If education is a lifelong force then its Aim should be LEARNING TO LEARN or learning to live. Education should enable the graduate and non graduate to 'Know themselves'(Socrates) and to keep learning till death because for humans , to live is to learn and to learn is to live .And this is what constitutes EUDAIMONIA(True happiness). Market is an insufficient aim of education.

COVID-19: PHILOSOPHICAL INPUT(ONE)

COVID-19:  PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVE I

SOCIAL DISTANCING & MYOPIC ECCLESSIOLOGY

A. THE BACKGROUND

Ladies and gentlemen, following the footsteps of my learned friend Proff Olabo Olabo, may I also present my thoughts on COVID 19 from a philosophical perspective. I am a baptised and confirmed Christian. The Christian family is a home for over 6billion humans, not counting those who have gone before us for the last 2019 years. We have different brands of Christianity, but we also have different theologies governing different Christian groups. Some of these theologies (especially the earlier theologies) were established through blood and fire,. We also have theologies that are relatively young and somehow miss some deep philosophical foundations. Theology simply put is " Fides quaerens intellectum'" that is, Faith seeking reason. Without Reason Faith confines itself to superstition.  The God who is the author of Faith is also the author of reason. He is the one who during COVID 19 tells us, "my people stay at home to avoid infection". He is the same God who says indirectly to us, Wash your hands.  But since concepts such as 'sanitize', 'hand wash', 'quarantine', 'Covid', 'fumigate'....are not directly citable from the bible, some Christians feel that they must congregate because theirs is sola scriptura (only scripture) kind of Christianity. There are some Christians who believe that by governments not allowing them to congregate, their freedom of worship is being curtailed. We also have the Apocalipsists who believe that the world is ending and so the best place for them to end the world is inside a church building.

B. THE METHOD

Prescriptive method

C. THE QUESTIONS

1. Are the Covid-19 Christians rooted in spirituality?

2. Can Covid-19 Christians be said to have ecclesiastical history to help the cope today?

D. THE DISCUSSION

a.. Ecclesiology without Spirituality

When believers hold the view that the church is a building and forget that it's beyond what we see they subject themselves to cultism, to a partisan and non-holistic ecclesiastical epistemology and to religious 'irrationalism'. By doing this they are guilty of the sin of omission. The truth of the matter is that the church is spiritual and physical, empirical and rational. If the church is spiritual then its anthropological manifestation is also transcendental and mystic. As such worship can be done anywhere and anytime. I do not need to go my cathedral if situations like COVID 19 impede me. I can still worship in my closet. Doesn't Jesus say that when you pray, go into your private room? Well one might say, ' but he also says....where two or more are gathered in my name, I am in their midst'. The gathering here can also be a gathering between a believer and angels or saints. It doesn't have to be physical humans. While the church is communal, it is also eremitic. I look up to contemplative monks and nuns in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches as a symbol of the spiritual life style. These are men and women without going to the world reach out to the world through contemplative prayers. You don't see them in your parish but in absolute silence they fall day and night before God in worship and intercession. The question is, 'Why are some Christians so addicted to the building they call church? My answer is, narrow ecclesiology.

Note that am not saying that we should we stop going to church. I am indicating that where going to church poses a health risk or any other risk to our lives it's our moral obligation to THINK. And thinking is not hated by God.

b. Ecclesiology without history

When a church group has not read enough history of the church it tends to act by whatever it comes across. But remember that Christianity is not a religion of idiocy. It has enough historical records that we can use to solve our current covid19 quagmire. The early Christians used to worship in caves during the persecutions , the Christians in Rome during the persecutions of Emperor Nero Caesar(666) were ready to die for their faith but they took prudent  measures like secret worship, use of symbols to communicate and occasionally 'lying' to protect themselves.  The question of Pandemics is also not new to the church; COVID 19 is not the first Pandemic to ravage the church. Europe experienced worse plagues like the bubonic plagues, Spanish flue, Justinian plague, etc. The usual practice was always quarantine. Why would a church that started in 2018 expose its members to covid-19 in the name of faith? Because the faith it preaches lacks some basic history.

E. THE CONCLUSION

Covid-19 Christians need to embrace contemplative spirituality, refer back to history and stay home, because God has opened the new churches in the privacy of their homes.

WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY ?