The Perspective
Atlanta, Georgia
July 24, 2021

Murv L. Kandakai Gardiner, Ph.D

In this article we seek to urgently awaken the reader to actively engage in envisaging a qualitative future of Liberia by comprehending the soul of the Liberian State.  We begin with one of the greatest canons of civilizations, The Republic as Plato articulates Socrates' descent into the depths of Piraeus, that economically flourishing port city with a politically redemptive possibility in order to excavate the truth. In the initial stage of the archeology of his soul, he descended with his friend Glaucon to meet the Greek gods in futility because they could not do anything for him. He argued, "I went down to the Piraeus" (kateben zthis eis peiraeus). In his upward trajectory via the depths, at his eschatological (final) trial Socrates succinctly said, "The unexamined life is the life not worth living. For unrighteousness runs deeper than death." (Apology, 38a5-6).

In the same canon, in Book 1 of The Republic Plato defines the soul as justice. He goes a step further in implicitly stating that we are not our own. For in order to attain individual harmony of the soul (eudaimonia), socio-economic/political justice, which is the soul of the State must be in place. In this light, Plato posits that the soul of the individual and that of the larger society can never attain happiness without the truth. Commensurately, centuries later, Saul of Tarsus accentuated that we must all examine ourselves. "Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith...Do you not know that Jesus Christ is in you?" (2 Corinthians 13:5).

And within the setting of a realized, political eschatology where God is the Sovereign, Jean Calvin in 16th century Geneva asserted that we are not our own. We belong to a larger and greater structure. Like Socrates, Calvin felt that in the study of righteousness via self-examination, one will come to understand that "man must abandon his own will, and devote himself entirely to the service of God" (The Institutes, chapter 7). Thus, in the wake of austere, counter-cyclical fiscal policies and monetary policies that were understandably superimposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) upon the Liberian people plus the very strange modus operandi of the rich and poor alike, which heightened the vulnerability of Liberia to the invading Coronavirus and its Delta Variant, we are impelled to retrospectively and introspectively look at the soul of Liberia and collectively seek a way forward.

In his debate with Socrates, as The Republic informs us, Thrasymachus tells him that injustice is more powerful than justice. Socrates makes a counter-argument in accentuating that justice is "the excellence of the soul and to live well, the soul must use this excellence" (Plato, 199,338c). In Greek and Hebraic antiquity, justice meant laws governing the State and economic parity and charity. Historically, with economic justice (Tsedekah) shaping the meaning of justice, the soul of the Liberian State has been about the economic life-jacket of the nation.

Thus, amidst the growing economic malaise, the decadence that is attributable to the disproportionate level of poor cognitive, moral, and social development of a significant number of Liberian youths incommensurate with the youths of Cote D'Ivoire, Senegal, Ethiopia, Kenya, Namibia, and South Africa, and the nihilistic threat due to global climate change and other exogenous factors of ecological destruction that hurt Liberia, we are impelled to look at the soul of Liberia in hopes of alleviating the problem and making a complete detour on Liberia's economic death highway. In this light, we must ask ourselves, Has the soul of Liberia been cursed?  No one person or administration can be held responsible for the abyss upon which the soul of Liberia is sitting. The apparent curse, which is the direct consequence of the nation's aberration from the will of God began in slavery when the tribal chiefs right at the Grain Coast (present day Liberia) sold their own people to Portuguese merchants.

This downward trajectory of the soul of Liberia continued way after the foundation of the country by repatriated Africans and the emancipation of African slaves in America as it culminated in the tragic Fernando Po slave event of the 1920's. Also, its continuing downward slope today is attributable to idolatrous dependence on witchcraft, materialism, and tribalism to the point where the latter becomes a mask of ethnicity for perpetuating injustice. Here our understanding of the American situation helps us to understand our own situation. As America was losing some of its battles during her Revolutionary War with Great Britain, Thomas Paine said, the soul of America was being tried and tested. When he averred in The American Crisis, "These are the times that try men's souls...Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered " (Paine, 1776), was he acknowledging that America's soul was being tried for its participation in slavery? Paine stopped short of a complete individual and collective self-examination when he focused only on Britain's intent to keep America fettered not only in taxation but in all cases.  

But it was one man, Abe Lincoln who saw the need for a complete examination and atonement of America's soul. During the Civil War, Lincoln felt the need for self-humiliation because of America's sin of slavery. He declared a Day of National Humiliation that was tantamount to Plato's emphasis on collective/national self-examination and the Hebrew prophets' participation in the archeology of the soul. For Lincoln, such self-humiliation was monumental for the survival of America's soul. And in The Death of Adam, Marilynne Robinson shows us how Jean Calvin's extrapolation of insights from Marguerite de Navarre's poem, Mirror of the Sinful Soul ultimately rescued the souls of France, Switzerland, England and Scotland, and America. As Liberians glance at Ms Robinson's The Death of Humanity(Adam), they cannot help but see an echo of the psalmist anthropologically psychological question, "What is man that thou are mindful of him?" (8:1a).

Have the senseless, violent protests and insurrections that have resulted in destroying Liberia's infrastructures and institutions while assaulting and killing many people aided the spreading and mutation of the Coronavirus? Is this the beginning of the death of humanity not only in Maryland, Montserrado, and other counties in Liberia but also the rest of the world? Or will this existential threat and anxiety propel Liberia to see her abyss with eagle's eyes and grasp it with eagle's talons in the attainment of hope for a qualitative future?  (Nietzschean) In response to our current situation, in his CWA Class of 70_50th Anniversary Speech, CLLR Seward Cooper shares some critical insights as he raises the following  pivotal questions:

What do we know about our country and our people? How did Liberia become a beacon
of hope for the black race and a threat to colonialism and white racial domination? Why
did we implode? Why do we still agitate in ways that could lead to further destruction?
Why are we not yet reconciled? What can we do to uplift ourselves?  

To find some vital answers to our questions, we go back to President Lincoln's Proclamation 85 in 1861, wherein he proclaimed:
Whereas it is fit and becoming in all people at all times to acknowledge and revere
the supreme government of God, to bow in humble submission to his chastisements,
to confess and deplore their sins in the full conviction that the fear of the Lord is the
beginning of wisdom...

Whereas our beloved country is now afflicted with faction and civil war, it is peculiarly
fit for us to recognize the hand of God in this terrible visitation, and in sorrowful
remembrance of our own crimes as a nation and as individuals to humble ourselves
before Him and to pray for His mercy-to pray that we may be spared further punishment,
though most justly deserved; ...and that the inestimable boon of civil and religious liberty,
earned under His guidance and blessing by the labors and sufferings of our fathers, may
be restored in all its original excellence:

Therefore I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, do appoint the last
Thursday in September next as a day of humiliation, prayer, and fasting for all the
people of the nation...to the end that the united prayer of the nation may ascend to
the throne of Grace and bring down plentiful blessings upon our country.    

As Liberia is steeped in ignorance, in the process of self-examination, those who "know book" for which they are many times despised and rejected, must illustrate and transmit to the very least of their sisters and brothers, a Socratic-type personality, "I know and yet I do not know" (ginosko kai den xe`ro). This will mark the beginning of a reversal, a complete detour of the nation's soul, as Liberia will then be joining her American father, Abe Lincoln who not only affirmed her in 1862, which was 15 years after her independence, but fervently believed that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Such realization via collective self-humiliation and collective self-abnegation in response to the will of God, will arouse the country to engage in a complete overhauling.

Also, such humiliation would hopefully lead to radical changes in the criminal justice system, an amalgamative extrapolation and appreciation of Keynesian, Schumpeterian, and Sachian economics in order to effect economic justice, the feminization of Liberia in respecting the beauty and rights of women and nature, and the implementation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's (TRC's) report. This will invariably heal the soul of Liberia and develop the country in its totality. For in our search for reconciliation and healing, descendants of tribal chiefs who sold our ancestors into slavery and the rest of us who continue to defile God our Maker and His natural creation must join Arthur Symons in saying:

O river! voice of my soul, crying in the sand,
All night long crying with a mournful cry.
As I lie and listen, and cannot understand
The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea,  
O water of my soul, crying for rest, Is it I? Is it I?
All night long the water is crying to me.

References
Calvin, John.  (1536 & 1975).  The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Philadelphia: Pa.
Westminster Press. Edited by John T. McNeil and
translated by Fords Lewis Battle
Cooper, Seward. (2020). CWA Class of 70_50th Anniversary Speech. Atlanta: Georgia
The Perspective
Lincoln, Abraham. (1861). Proclamation 85- Proclaiming A Day of National Humiliation,
                        Prayer, and Fasting. Washington: District of Columbia
Paine, Thomas. (1776 - 1783). The American Crisis/Common Sense. Philadelphia: Pa
The Pennsylvania Journal
Plato. (375 BC, 1809, & 1968). The Republic. Greece & Paris. Basic Books. Edited
and Translated by Allan Bloom  
Robertson, Marilynne. (1998). The Death of Adam.  New York: NY. Houghton Mifflin
Company
Symons, Arthur. (1914). Poems of Arthur Symons, Volume 2 - in The Looms of Dreams.
London: England.