Philip Ochieng'
27 April 2008
column
Nairobi — If I had to describe in one word the reason pornographic material has invaded our society, I would say: "Entertainment".
The Kenya Film Censorship Board this week raided certain Nairobi establishments accused of making (or importing) and selling such extremely perilous mental toxins. If what the CEO, Mr David Kosing, impounded is contraband, then our capital city is drowning in it.
It means two things. One is that our society is dying with thirst for entertainment. But that is where the puzzle lies. For entertainment is a natural requirement of the human mind. In modern parlance, it is a basic human right. So the question is stark: If pornography is entertainment, how can you support Mr Kosing?
The liberal's answer will be snappy: You cannot. The thought that dominates the capitalist intelligentsia's mind is that to ban any human right is to tamper unacceptably with the norms of freedom and democracy.
Rupert Murdoch, the Australian media nawab, is the epitome of this depraved thought-habit. Asked why all his possessions must wallow in women's tits and bums, he replied with total equanimity: "We are in the business of entertainment."
Clearly, when an old man with children and grandchildren talks like that, he has lost sense of decency. He no longer has even an ounce of concern for his society's mental health. He has succumbed fully to animal greed.
For him, "freedom" is absolute. Freedom is the licence for an individual to make money by whatever method, no matter what it may cost in human terms. But, for those who care to think about it, freedom is painfully relative. Freedom is what remains after society has removed certain liberties from every individual.
Society must do that so as to prevent individuals from stepping on the toes of other individuals as they pursue their own rights. This removal of certain liberties is what we call law. Without it, society would rapidly degenerate into what Thomas Hobbes called a war of all in which life is nasty, brutal and short.
In evolutionary law, a species can become social only by evolving some form of governance to ensure that the individual does not injure the interests of the collective and the collective does not injure the interests of the individual. I repeat that, among humans, it is called law and that, although it is deeply restrictive, it is vital.
The law on pornography stems from the recognition of two things. The first is that porn is likely to skew the minds of individuals - especially young and still impressive ones - in such a way as to attune against social order.
The upshot is that, like every human interest, entertainment is not an absolute good. Take water. If you take an overdose or a contaminated amount, you may drown or go down with typhoid.
The second is that, like every aspect of human intelligence, our sociability is double-edged. Individuals can and do learn to exploit our unquenchable human thirst for entertainment. Under the ideology of liberty, individuals can make money by selling to other individuals something which subjectively entertains the mind, objectively destroys it completely.
That is the other lesson from Mr Kosing. It is that the insidiousness of the liberal ideology can and does terribly bend our sense of what is entertaining . Our sense of what is good is daily shaped by false needs instilled in us from the living room through the classroom to the workroom.
All advertisement, all ethics, all aesthetics, all propaganda turn out to be little more than narcotics. The mind gets addicted to buying and accumulating manufactured things and services, most of which turn out to be, at best, nugatory, and, at worst, perilously toxic, but which are highly lucrative to the manufacturer.
In this way, in short, our sense of entertainment has gone completely haywire. Yours must be a thoroughly degraded mind if you find it entertaining to watch other people copulating (either in reality or through pictures). But yours is the kind of mind that the Western manufacturer and his propagandist seek to cultivate.
In the Third World, it destroys not only minds also bodies and economies. Thanks to adverts, many African women still destroy their skins by buying and liberally applying imported mercury-laden skin-lightening creams.
Our ministries of trade spend vast sums of our meagre forex importing extremely filthy material -that passes as literature, movie and comedy (all called entertainment), thus enriching Western manufacturers at the immense expense of our own people's minds, bodies and economies.
It is, thus rewarding to learn from minister Samuel Poghisio and permanent secretary Bitange Ndemo that the ministry of information is getting actively aware of these imported poisons. So if David Kosing's was a declaration of war, let it be waged with all vigour.
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