Follow The Gleam

What is this thing called man?

In features so elegant

In intelligence so amazing...................., but never with a definition of man.

Not even Chinua Achebe, the master quill-driver, with all of his powerful, masterful penmanship could in his book - Hopes and Impediments - attempt a definition of man any different from that of Aristotle. He still went along with ‘animal endowed with reason,’ and if Achebe has problem defining something, that thing must be a mystery. An overstatement perhaps, but the message is clear. It is impossible to define man because man is a mystery.

If the correct image of man was painted right from the beginning, and if the erroneous impression of human evolution had not been given, perhaps Stalin or Mao or Hitler etc, would have had more respect for the dignity of man, and not embarked on whole sale massacre of human beings. Perhaps the rape of Nankin and other similarly horrendous holocausts and ritual sacrifices of humans would not have taken place, nor would slave trade. But man was defined as animal, and man treated man like animal.

Aristotle’s rough and ready definition, deriving from his personality type, a pragmatist, who must provide a definition there and then and move on to other things, is only for the convenience of biological taxonomy. It was logical to classify man with animals who he looks the most akin to. And that definition has dominated the skyline of educational paradigms across the globe for better than two millennia since Aristotle died in 322 BC. And that definition must be held responsible for the mistakes that psychometry has made in the attempt to measure and stratify human intelligence by allocating I.Qs. Educational Curricula are drawn to the contour lines described in Intelligence Quotient. Curricula content drawn up for Grammar Schools were for the so called high IQs, with ‘enough intelligence’ to cope with "intellectual" faculties. Those drawn up for Technical and Commercial Schools were for the rest according to their level on the evaluation ladder. With time, however, true experiential teaching and learning was seen not to be kind to segregated disciplines. So the situation was later mollified in the High School curriculum that included all three arms and even more, like Occupational Therapy, and in tertiary education, the interdisciplinary majors.

Human intelligence cannot be measured because it is a spiritual attribute. You cannot ascribe quantity, or quality or density, or consistency, or levity, or brilliance, or dullness to it. Only reflection, meditation, analysis, synthesis, creativity, moral judgment of what is good and what is evil, can apply. The adjective intellectual is not from intelligence, but from intellect which is a faculty concerned, not with analysis and synthesis, but with apprehension of information and with the mechanics of thinking. This we do share with animals. But then, human intellect is buoyed up to a higher level of acuity and vivacity, and reach, by its corporate relationship with intelligence. Intelligence is that attribute which makes man that only earthly being who can synthesize information from an individual personal perspective. The intellect, on its part, apprehends information in a nondiscriminatory manner. It takes in everything. Then it shakes hands with intelligence which takes over this unmannerly maze of information, and collates, and arranges, and classifies, and selects, according to prevailing moral and legal and economic and social ethos, what to treasure and what to discard. Intelligence enables man make value judgments, enables him appraise the merits of one reality against the merits of another, renders him capable of liability for wrong decisions and evil actions, enables him make a commitment and accept a vocation, none of which applies to any animal. You do not hold an animal to a promise or to an expectation. An animal can never run the risk of not fulfilling his vocation, nor be liable for dereliction of duty. You do not send a goat to jail for stealing your cocoyam. Animals do the same things that constitute sin in humans: steal, kill, rape, etc, and they do not commit sin and cannot be held to moral standards because they do not have intelligence. An animal cannot commit to any type of relationship even as some animals, like dogs, are programmed to fidelity in their relationship with their owner. This is not commitment. It happens by some kind of internal automatism which is part of the laws of the canine nature. Pigeons - turtle doves,- keep the company of the same partners by instinct, not out of sense of fidelity or commitment. They are programmed that way.

Animals can learn and recognize and react to certain lexical items when they are taught to do so because they have a certain level of intellectual capability. But they cannot rise to the concatenations and connotations of verbiage as used in society, in the academy, in science and technology, in medicine, in the arts, in business etc. Animals can associate certain sounds and pictures and gests with certain actions or things, or people, or places by rote memory. They are intellectually capable of doing that but are not capable of creating language. If animals had intelligence, their brains would, among other things, be able to handle the complex vocalization repertoire of language, and they would be able to use organized language for communication. If animals had intelligence, the Almighty creator would not have given man dominion over them, and to take care of them. But animals are part of that mysterious mixture of cosmic realities that became the physical and emotional sides of man, the creation of the sixth day.

This final stage of creation, the creation of man, brought the evolution of the cosmos, to a close. This is the true meaning of cosmic evolution. Just as it is described in the bible, in whatever the order, from light and air to land and water, to fish, to plants, to birds, to animals, creation evolved, the creature of each stage containing the ontological properties of all creation before. And so to man.