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Cancerous Life Styles: Between Dogmatism and Fatalism
GUEST COLUMNIST WOLE SOYINKA
Cancer researchers can take our
gratitude for granted, but the ones among them who deserve extra
acknowledgement are the pioneers in the uphill, often thankless task of
public awareness – which applies to virtually every form of public
hazard, the most personal being of course – human health. Even today,
the battle has not been won. There is something fatalistic in human
nature, which is not a bad thing. To cling desperately to life, to be
governed in every detail of one’s existence by an obsession with
prolonging one’s life, can sometimes appear as ludicrous and
undignified as the irresponsible conduct of thoughtlessly throwing it
away.
When I look back on the entire career
of anti-smoking campaigns for instance, the campaigners often strike me
as the unsung heroes of the battle against cancer. Why, I sometimes ask
myself, has the battle been so rocky? We may as well acknowledge the
commercial aspect – and here, I begin with the tobacco industry whose
products till now, appear to be the frontrunner among the various
contenders for cancerous provocation. The history of tobacco extends
backwards probably into pre-history, which means that, today, a
formidable global industry, now calculated in mega-millions, has
evolved over centuries, providing a livelihood for billions – from
plantation to crummy retail kiosks and glitzy supermarkets with
enticing humidors.
That is the Number One obstacle. I
find myself however far more intrigued by the obstacle that comes from
human nature itself – indeed this is of greater interest generally,
since it speaks to the innate contradictions that characterize that
very nature, called human. This, I’m afraid, also speaks to strategies
of attempting to wean people out of a habit that is considered
detrimental to their well- being, the choice of techniques for
imparting a message, as the consumer world knows only too well. Avoid
this, eat this, don’t eat this – often tailored to commercial
exploitation, creating a new consumerist craving, especially in rabidly
capitalist societies. This can turn one in extreme opposite direction.
When you keep screaming at me that
something is not good for me, especially when this is tied to selling
me an alternative – it ends up as resistance to what amounts to vested
interests, or simply overkill, thus alienating the badgered individual.
The very sight of anorexic women who look as if they are at the
terminal stages of cancer, for instance, but are held up in some
countries as the ideal of beauty can lead to a total rejection that
manifests itself through gravitation towards the contrasting ideal of
beauty – such as the voluptuous graduates of Calabar fattening houses,
products of three square meals of pounded yam with edi kia’ikong,
interspersed with starch and banga soup.
This psychology of human response to
any kind of stimulus - which lies at the basis of aversion therapy -
requires more careful study. Sometimes, the opposite of the expected
result is what takes place, owing to a failure to factor in such
psychological ambiguities. In other words, the wrong approach to get
people not to smoke may actually drive them to smoke, and we are not
speaking here only of juvenile mentality, that peer craving alone among
youths, a desire to be accepted by a macho in-group that makes the
fourteen, thirteen, even as young as seven-year old take to smoking in
schools. Or indeed early adoption of a role model who looks ‘cool’ with
a cigarette in the hand, perhaps a film star. That same mentality is
also manifested in adults whose supposedly mature minds actually find
the forbidden intensely attractive. It is all part of the psychological
quirks that underline human nature. Our earliest recorded instance –
just to remind you - is the case of Adam and Eve. Consider the conduct
of those two adults, alleged primogenitors of humanity. The tempting
serpent should be read as a metaphor – there was no actual serpent as
such in the Garden of Eden – if ever such a garden itself did exist.
The serpent merely symbolized the hidden desire.
Among such extreme advocacy you may
count some truly weird methodologies of totalitarian prohibition – such
as the case of cities which simply declare their entire spaces of human
habitation and non-habitation smoke-free zones. My recollection is that
is was some obscure village called Davis, in the state of California,
US, which took the lead in that direction, and declared itself a
totally smoke free town as far back as two score or more years ago. If
you were caught smoking within the City Limits, including within the
walls of your own home, you could be run out of town, frontier style,
tarred and feathered, tied backwards to a horse with the Mayor and
councilors escorting you to the nearest border while the citizens
pelted you with hoots and rotten eggs. It had to be the United States,
the land of extremes and the original home of prohibitionism.
Diseases. In relation to cancer, long
time direct exposure can be associated with the processes that lead to
changes in cells, especially of the lungs and upper respiratory tract
that van result in cancer. Now do we see how and why it is possible for
the smoker to sometimes develop a carefree, indeed fatalistic attitude
towards smoking hazards? Half the urban population of Nigeria – at a
modest estimate – survive on generators. The expression ‘using fire to
fight’ fire comes to mind.
Tobacco at least gives off a seductive
aroma, unlike the fumes from a generator. One can imagine the addicted
smoker shrugging, ‘What the hell’, when I urge him to ‘Kick the Habit
or Kick the Bucket’. Those in whose hands the affairs of this nation
have been placed – military and civilian – especially during the past
four decades that oversaw the complete collapse of our electricity
supply system, deserve to be dragged to court and charged with gross
negligence leading to homicide, involuntary manslaughter, conspiracy to
murder and, at the very least - being accessories to silent genocide.
Mind you, they have undoubtedly created a special class of the affluent
– the generator millionaires – and so I expect that instead of prison
sentences, they will only receive national honours. May I propose for
them a special category: Meritorious Order of National Population
Control.
As with the human body, there are
indeed many forms of behavioural cancer. To begin on a universal scale,
I would certain describe racism as such, with South African apartheid
being a spectacularly malignant form that was just as spectacularly
placed in remission by that remarkable medical team, led by Nelson
Mandela. Next, if you regard the entire African continent as a
political body, dictatorship definitely qualifies for such a diagnostic
classification – cancerous. Africa was once described by an
African-American legislator, in a moment of frustration, as a beautiful
lady that had been gang-raped by a succession of sex maniacs. Admitted,
that analogy is not inappropriate. However, I am more inclined to see
the continent as a victim of serial cancerous attacks that acts true to
type, leaping from one part of the body to the other. No sooner is it
stabilized in the liver than it erupts in the spleen, next we hear of
it ravaging the testes, next the lungs, only to find suspicious lumps
appearing in the breasts. They turn out to be malignant tumours that,
in recent times, required the mobilization of a relay of traditional
healers from Egypt, Libya, Morocco etc to flush them out with shock
therapy, massed incantations in the streets and town centres, sometimes
accompanied, alas, by blood transfusion from septic surgeries. But the
disease has lurked in the bone marrow for nearly half a century and all
we have been engaged upon is curing this part or the other – Liberia
one day, Nigeria the next - instead of embarking on that most painful,
most elaborate and invasive of all cancer treatments – a complete
marrow transplant. It is that procedure that makes the cancerous
analogy so appropriate, since we are able to monitor the process of the
healthy marrow fighting back, pushing out the diseased cells, until the
entire continental body is, some day, declared totally cancer free.
Then there is, in my estimation the
most notorious cancerous growth that can afflict a body – I leave you
for now to guess what that might be. Different societies tackle the
affliction in different ways – in the communist days of the Republic of
China for instance, the ‘magic bullet’, taken literally, was the most
favoured form of treatment. It made its way through the body and homed
in on the malignant formation in one direct hit. Cancerous cells, we
know, have learnt to lie low, then burst out with renewed vigour,
capturing territory, attacking other organs and finally overwhelming
the rest of the body. Even the sturdiest organs eventually succumb.
This social affliction that is patterned on cancerous advance is one
that this nation knows to its cost. It is not unique to the nation, but
in our case, only one technical word fully captures its
remorselessness: metastasis. By now of course, you have already
discerned what that cancer is called: Corruption!
Regarding our mystery, slow but
guaranteed Silent Killer, I do not know of any branch of medical
science that is devoted to it. Perhaps a branch of psychiatry. Maybe we
should just assign it to the theologians. Certainly there is a vacuum
in assumption of responsibilities, since the state does not yet accept
that combating this hidden scourge is a legitimate preoccupation, and
this is perfectly understandable. You can budget – as we hope will
happen – for the kind of initiative that has brought us here today –
cancer of the body - but how do you justify budgeting for cancerous
souls? It borders on the metaphysical, and yet its corrosive powers
are quite palpable and may affect the very destiny of a people, of a
nation, enfeebling both to a point of inability to function rationally
or with dignity. With cigarette addiction, you can label cigarette
packets, tax delinquent companies, impose huge fines on those who have
been caught forging statistics on nicotine content of cigarettes.
Slogans come easy: SMOKING IS BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH. PREGNANCY AND
SMOKING DO NO GO TOGEHER. SMOKING KILLS. Or my own concoction – KICK
THE HABIT OR KICK THE BUCKET, that last being under patent. If I see
it on any anti-tobacco billboard, cigarette pack, television screen or
whatever, I shall sue! You are all witnesses.
In this case however, how does one
even begin to diagnose this particular form of cancer, every bit as
lethal as the physiological disorder, much less address it openly, and
yet it is here. It has been inseminated and it is proliferating. One
feels it, reads it, smells it, one can almost touch it, so palpable is
it in its effects. It is especially present in governance, and we know
how readily this percolates down through the body politic which looks
up to governance for leadership and direction. Its malignant cells are
being injected into the blood stream of the nation.
Let me waste no more time on riddles,
especially as I suspect I have proffered sufficient clues. You would be
justified in thinking that my mind is on bigotry, especially of the
religious kind. Fanaticism. Intolerance. Hatred of all but whatever is
of your own conviction. Inability to see that there is more than one
route to the uncovering of life’s mysteries, or partaking of the
banquet of life, and that the regulation of differences, just as in the
human body, is the key to functioning society. That first-line enemy is
indeed Bigotry, but no, we have long by-passed Intolerance as a
contagion in its own right, and are left with the consequence, which is
even more efficacious in its ability to spread and paralyse a people’s
will. That leaves only one candidate – the fallout from intolerance,
especially of the fanatic, homicidal mind.
I am speaking therefore of - Fear. The
very morbidity of Fear. Fear as the product of terror, Fear as the
real permissive environment of the cancer of Intolerance. Fear as the
enervating prelude to the deterioration and total collapse of the body
politic. Fear as the determinant of social and political decisions.
Fear as the governing factor even in the choice of life-styles. Fear as
the regulating quotient in day to day calculations, bearing even upon
the most mundane activities, personal and collective. Fear as the
Silent Censor even in utterances, leading to lies, half-truths,
outright deceptions, rationalisations, double-talk. Fear as the wages
of injustice, leading to appeasement and humanity’s abject surrender.
I have dwelt on this theme before now,
in my series of BBC Reith lectures, under the title of CLIMATE OF FEAR.
Permit me to state clearly therefore that I distinguish between Fear
and Caution. As the very title of my address indicates, I place the
dogmatic mind and the fatalistic as two sides of the same cancerous
coin, both deleterious impingements on rationality. To cower before a
dogmatic, unproven prohibition is just as irrational as to act in
defiance of its validity through a carefree, dismissive attitude. The
former stems from fear, the latter from mere bluster, bravado, throwing
caution to the winds. Neither truly reflects man in the plenum of his
intelligence. In that same vein, I distinguish between the Strategies
of Peace and the Rites of Appeasement. When a nation is under attack,
it is the easier choice to diminish the rights of the innocent, the
victims, and concentrate near exclusively on the Vaseline approach, the
appeasement of killers, massaging the tumour of unconscionable,
arrogant, boastful, homicidal menace, easy to forget that victims are
entitled not only to protection but to compassion, collective
indignation, and restitution. In these times we live in, the primacy
of victims has been disproportionately, grossly, unconscionably
deficient on the scales of equity, almost to the condescending level of
tokenism, and the cause is the triumph of that cancerous growth
silently infiltrating the cells of the body politic – Fear, and its
main companion stalker – Impunity. It has manifested itself through a
number of acts, impudent demands, and in the very demoralizing language
of a number of official pronouncements. Fear can become a habit, an
addiction, and the nation, as a vital entity, had better understand
that, if it truly wishes to survive, it must also learn to kick the
habit, or else - kick the bucket.
Doctors, surgeons, psycho-therapists,
healers of varying traditions – all will agree that, under cancer, the
body is a war zone. The body politic is no different, and this national
body is pre-eminently so. But let there be no mistake - it is not
terror that is the cancer, but Fear. Terror is mere pustule, a noisome
excrescence. That it often results in human suffering does not change
its real nature. And there I find myself at one with our wave theorist
– we are indeed back to the territory of primordialism, since Fear is a
product of Nature. It is indeed Nature itself, and the battle against
Fear is equivalent to taking on Nature as adversary. Now, Nature –
that, as adversary, is truly worthy of our respect, not Noisy Killers,
and the noxiousw agencies of terror. So, let us take our cue from the
doctors who have chosen to confront the very origin of life by taking
on the ontology of cancer, and make the right and dignified existential
choices. A life lived under fear is the choice of a cancerous
life-style, oscillating between fatalism and dogmatic submissiveness.
If we must adopt a dogma at all, permit me to propose this over-arching
rendition: Just like cancer, the fear of Fear itself - is the beginning
of wisdom.
•This is an abridged version of paper delivered by Professor Wole Soyinka at the launch of the Cancer Centre last week
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