Commonsense Claims

By: Stephen K. Ainsah-Mensah

1. The appeal of developed societies is in the splendor of their science and technology, not in moral and social decorum. Social and moral decorum guard against excesses in the doing of things.

2. Nature gets enraged when its elements are raided to please humankind’s material cravings. One can see this anomaly in reckless production and consumption of goods. Here, production needs the service of nature in terms of resources; consumption needs the unfailing overindulgence of humans. Either way, humanity is losing its grip on the logic of moderation and the principles of social and economic planning.

3. In so far as the principles of morality, of social ethics are relegated while science and technology are constantly elevated, the pulses of the society function without the desired cultural prudence.

4. Two principles tend to give silent instructions to humans in their pursuit of hodgepodge or specified goals: attain intellectual excellence or attain the highest level of wealth. As both principles are extremes, it may be asked: which is better? The former may be a better option if it does not invade the conscience of others and manipulate the engines of growth and development to suit personal whim.

5. Ask yourself: how do you fulfill your defined goals when new goals enter into the cycle of your life as soon as previously defined goals are met? The infinitude of goals is proof of the ambiguity of the human character.

6. The nature of humans is given a new twist once a standard estimation of human nature is abandoned and replaced with that of the appetitive human. But modern appetitive humans usually prefer to remain overambitious in their bid to do or get what the conscience and passion dictate. This marks the ascent of an unsteady soul.

7. The mistake in the judgement of crass supporters of individualism can be seen in their missteps whenever they need to address the issue of moral and social order. They are caught on the ropes when they are made to understand – or see for themselves – that the individualism they espouse is particularly inconsistent with how to please nature and get egalitarianism strengthened. Time and again, we need the unbroken service of moral and social order to direct the tempo of economic progress.

8. The point that the wealthy should help to raise an economy that is drowning in the sea of inequity does not strike a chord to those who believe personal wealth ought to retain its immunity from public interference because such wealth comes from hard work. Their argument could be countered by stating that some people have worked so hard but have very little to show. Here, one must battle with the issue as to why hard work gets rewarded with punishment, so to speak. Those who hold the view that a person is responsible for his/her poverty despite his/her hard work do not recognize they are being mean-spirited. This kind of closed mentality, if it should capture the spirit of a civilization, eventually generates a culture of despair by supplanting a previous culture of hope.

9. The mystery in modern civilizations has been nurtured largely by the wonders of science and technology. Yet, such civilizations tend to yield a large portion of their vitality to the calculations of enviable machines, in that area of human life that insists: let machines and technical computations determine the mode of development! Thus, one can find terms such as “balance of trade”, “balance of payment”, “budget surplus”, “budget deficit”, and so on used to measure the value of human life. Then is applied the indices of money to buttress the results of computations. Computations fulfill the needs of generalities and may not be able to account for the rate of success or failure of, say, peasant farmers in the remotest parts of the society or how wealth is distributed – evenly or unevenly.

10. The Liberal may say: show me the changes in the structures of the society and I shall change ideas and ways of doing things accordingly. The Conservative may say: show me the changes in the structures of the society and I shall retain traditional ideas, values and the essential ways of doing things accordingly. The Conservative’s position embraces a tacit contradiction; for if there are structural changes, then the retention of the said things do not follow the principle of correspondence.

11. A mean-spirited man gets himself trapped in a narrow vision of a society. He thinks stinginess is a new version of virtue derived from an ignorance of a neighbour's plight. But what the mean-spirited man does not understand is that a society, by its definition and application, is born and bred from the concatenation of group activities and support systems.

12. The road to a great civilization ought to include the indispensable service of moral codes and the enforceable tenets of egalitarianism.

13. The overcrowding that is generated by the profusion of automobiles on streets is the work of blossoming technologies. We derive comfort, luxury from this marvel. The downside is the pollution from automobile fumes that continue to fight with nature and, thereby, erode the concatenation of the elements of nature. The outcome is the propagation of chemicals to humanity’s niches and the evolution of weird catastrophes. By working this way, nature hopes to win back the links in its elements as well as its original liveliness.

14. The great error of a modern civilization is to promote its insularity even as the civilization undertakes a massive role in international relations. The risk here is that a large class of the citizenry get misinformed or are trapped in some kind of wrong cognition when international relations goes the incorrect direction. Insularity, in any case, breeds needless patriotism and ignorance, and it tends to submit the conscience and willpower to the paradoxical claim that “might is right”.

15. Those who claim that there is no meaning to life may be right on one point: that it is just not feasible to define life in terms of the totality of its elements; but take a specific element of life, then narrate and analyze it. After that, it may be feasible to define life through some kind of a summary of the narration and analysis. This definition, as one can see, is not exhaustive but a narrow one.