CHALLENGING CONVENTIONAL WISDOM

CHALLENGING CONVENTIONAL WISDOM

The cultural fanatic would ask, ‘what is there to challenge? Haven’t you heard of the saying, never discard tradition?’ Well, I have and thank heavens; I heard that which says culture is dynamic too.
It seems conservatism was deeply ingrained in the genetic make-up of the African.

                            four legs goooood, two legs baaaad!!

This statement is one of the recurring ones in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, particularly by sheepish flock.
This seems to have been their favourite commandment/law or probably the only one they remembered. However, this write up is not about my friends on the Animal Farm, or should I say Manor farm?? I just want to borrow the favourite commandment of the sheep, albeit in another context, a case of the agony of a southpaw born and raised in Ghana particularly before the twenty-first century, a classic case of, ‘right hand good, left hand bad’.

What triggered this article was an incident which happened at my church.
I had unconsciously dipped my left hand into the collection bowl and this unusual action caught the attention of a number of elderly people, because I felt their wrath through their gaze. So I resolved to ‘sin’ again during the second offering. After service, one woman called to reprimand me.
What is wrong with using my left hand, I asked. She answered, “It’s a sign of disrespect”. From the woman’s facial expression, I might as well insert the word ‘Gross’ just before the ‘disrespect’. Obviously, I had a follow up question, so I looked at her, shyly, and asked, ‘does God disapprove of it too?’
Since most Ghanaians are starting to believe, though unfounded, that God is, without any shade of doubt, a Ghanaian, she answered, albeit to my dismay, in the affirmative.
That, attracted yet another question- is it Biblical? She said she was yet to come across such a verse in the Bible. What then is the basis for her answer?

But this woman should not be blamed; she is just a victim of the same system that raised some of us. Don’t ask questions, just accept. What else, when the ‘Good Book’ seems to be a constant reminder of how noble and honourable the ‘right’ is.
We were told that Jesus Christ, after his heroic exploits on earth, gained a seat at the right hand side of his Father.
Again, in Genesis 48 we are told how Jacob deliberately switched his hands when he blessed the two sons of Joseph – his right hand on the youngest and claimed that he will be greater than the firstborn. The bible is a constant reminder of how demeaning the left is.

This woman, interestingly, asserted that it is our tradition, our culture and God ‘okays’ and sanction human legislation.
The logical implication of the answer is that when we find ourselves in countries where the ‘oldest profession’ (prostitution) is legal and ‘amoral’, God has no choice than to accept, endorse and authorize it. Then I remembered what Socrates asked Euthyphro in the Socratic dialogue, Euthyphro, “is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods.”
Another variation of this question is given as, “is the Good, good because God approves of it or the Good is good that is why God approves of it.”

The import of Socrates’ question was; is morality sanctioned by God or any Supreme Being or is it possible to elicit independent moral standards.
Well for this particular question, i will reluctantly embrace agnosticism, I simply don’t know, I cannot substantiate either. If God really sanctions morality, then morality will be based on the whim of the ’bearded Old Man’.
In effect, one thing can be good today and bad tomorrow depending on the situational disposition of God.
That explains why Abraham’s God sanctioned genocide during an epoch in the bible

… at midnight the Lord struck down all the firstborn in Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh, who sat on the throne, to the firstborn of the prisoner, who was in the dungeon, and the firstborn of all the livestock as well -Exodus 12:29

But, does that make mass killing okay or good simply because God ordered it?
Does God’s arbitrary decision to overlook his own commandment and sanction the killing or wiping out of a group of people according to the Old Testament, make their killing moral or right?? Interestingly, the Bible claims that the Lord had, deliberately, hardened the heart of the Pharaoh (Exodus 9:12) – so why take it out on him (Pharaoh) and the innocent people?

Unfortunately, some people tend to think that when they invoke the name of God in the weakest or the most absurd argument, it magically cures it of the absurdity.
I find it quite cynical that God, whom we (Christians) attribute creation and the existence of everything therein, will censure something He caused. If we decide to go by this thesis, then God, in his own wisdom, created some people southpaws (lefties). Furthermore, the biblical account of creation informs us that, everything that God created was perfect. By inference, there shouldn’t be anything wrong with being a lefty.
The simple implication of being a lefty is that your left hand or leg becomes your primary (first in sequence) hand/leg.
Why then should you subject a person to such cruelty? Some claim the left is unclean or evil as it Latin equivalent-sinister.
Again the correlation is non-existent, what is so evil about left hand? People don’t choose to be lefties, so why should we force them to act as though they are not?
Why should they learn to use their right hand? Some people treat the issue as though being left handed is an abnormality that needs to be corrected.

Well, I was cured of my abnormality when I was in primary school and of course it didn’t happen without a few lashes.
But as they say, ‘you can’t cheat nature’. I was not cured entirely because apart from writing, I practically still do every other thing with my left.
I have no intention of recounting in detail, my ‘wonderful’ experience but it was tortuous, notwithstanding the confusion and the agony of reminding myself, which hand I had to place the pencil in, each time I picked one to write.

But should we blame the various ethnies in Ghana who perpetuate such atrocity? Well the Akan do not immerse morality in religion. The Akan believes that it is possible for a deity to issue unethical commands.
Thus, the rightness or wrongness of an action should be located elsewhere, not necessarily to a deity, in this case God.
From this, it is possible to infer that the Akan believes that we can elicit independent moral standards. Thus the ‘good’ is intrinsically good that is why God approves of it.
On this basis we cannot blame the Akan for rigorously drilling the perceived uncleanliness of the left hand into its moral fibre. However, simply claiming that the left hand is unclean is pathetic, fallacious, ridiculous and above all lame.

Probably, we are operating on the assumption that ‘right’ is right, simply because it has the same spelling as ‘right’, and ‘left’ being the opposite of right will naturally inherit the opposite of ‘right’, thus ‘wrong’. It is imperative for Ghanaians to accept certain things as they are.
Being a lefty is in no way an abnormality or a deficiency. Thus, the use of the left hand is, in my opinion, not sinful. It is imperative, therefore to stop the culture of constantly apologizing for using the left hand.

I think Ghanaians especially Christians, should overlook such petty issues and tackle the more pertinent ones.

RIGHT HAND GOOOOOOD, LEFT HAND SAAAAME.

By Kweku sei Bonsu (ksB)