by Mahmud Tim Kargbo
Monday, 20 January, 2025
“We won’t get far in addressing our major challenges unless there is a parallel, ongoing transformation in values and culture.”
Let’s face it, it is going to be damn hard to protect the human and natural communities we love. Big changes in Sierra Leone public policy are needed as well as big changes in individual and social behaviour, moves that are difficult and far-reaching by today’s standards. It is important to ask what might make them ?
Strong social and political movements come to mind, but I believe the changes needed will also require the rise of what we will call a new consciousness. For some, a new consciousness can arrive as a spiritual awakening—a transformation of the human heart. For others, it is a more intellectual process of learning to see the Sierra Leone world anew. From a society-wide perspective, it involves major cultural change and a reorientation of what society values and prizes most highly.
Some have came to believe that, “that there is a basic antagonism between the philosophy of the selected few occupying social positions of trust and the philosophy of the suffering majority.” Remarkably, they are saying to friends that they doubted anything could be done about Sierra Leone’s deplorable standard of living “without creating a new kind of people.”
President Maada Bio and his New Direction government have outlined various scenarios of national economic, social, and environmental conditions, including situations where no fundamental changes in values or consciousness occur. However, without a change in values, all their scenarios run into big trouble. So they favour the “New Sustainability” worldview where society turns “to nonmaterial dimensions of fulfilment…the quality of life, the quality of human solidarity and the quality of the earth…. Sustainability is the imperative that pushes the new agenda. Desire for a rich quality of life, strong human ties and a resonant connection is the lure that pulls it toward the future.”
I would never say that no progress can be made until Sierra Leone’s dominant culture has been transformed. However, I do believe that we won’t get far in addressing our major challenges unless there is a parallel, ongoing transformation in values and culture. Einstein said that today’s problems cannot be solved with today’s mind. That is a difficult conclusion but one with which we must contend.
So, two important questions emerge:
First, what are the social values required by today’s circumstances?
And second, what forces can drive cultural and consciousness change of the type and on the scale needed?
The Culture Shifts We Need
The most serious and sustained effort to date to state a compelling ethical vision for the future is the looting of our state resources by our political elites to gain neocolonialist and imperialist favour, which has gained wide endorsement and support around the world. The protection of our state resources for the general good is an eloquent statement of the ethical principles needed to “bring forth a sustainable Sierra Leone society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace.
After a lot of reading on this subject, here are the value transformations I believe we need. We want our dominant culture to have shifted, from today to tomorrow, in the following ways:
Instead of viewing humanity as something apart from nature, and nature as something “other” to be dominated, we will see ourselves as part of nature, as offspring of its evolutionary process, as close kin to wild things, and as wholly dependent on its vitality and the services it provides.
Rather than seeing nature as humanity’s resource to exploit as it sees fit for economic and other purposes, we will see the natural world as holding intrinsic value and having rights that create for us the duty of ecological stewardship.
We will no longer discount the future by focusing so intently on the short term, but instead take the long view and recognise our duties to human and natural communities well into the future.
Instead of today’s corrosive individualism, we will foster a powerful sense of community and social solidarity, in all venues from local to cosmopolitan (from me to we).
Violence will no longer be glorified either at home or national level, nor the actions to illegally amassed wealth at the expense of the suffering majority will be easily accepted, and peace will be a priority.
The spreading of hate and invidious divisions will be rejected. We will move from tribalism, favouritism, and regionalism to tolerance, an embrace of cultural diversity, and protection of the rights of all.
Materialism, consumerism, and the primacy of ever-more possessions will give way to a culture that grants priority to family and personal relationships, learning, experiencing nature, service, spirituality, music and dance, sports, the arts, and play.
Rather than tolerate gross incompetence in governance in the guise of political patronage, promote abortion and later lesbianism, and political inequality, we will prize and demand a high measure of pro-life, equality and social justice in all these spheres.
I agree, that’s a mind-full! The good news is that we don’t need to wait on these changes but can help bring them about. This jewel was from Moynihan: “The central conservative truth is that culture, not politics, determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”
As Moynihan suggests, we actually know important things about how values and culture can be changed. Here is a partial inventory to consider.
One sure path to cultural change is, unfortunately, the cataclysmic event—the crisis—that profoundly challenges prevailing values and delegitimises the status quo. The Great Economic hardship we are currently experiencing in Sierra Leone is the classic example. I think we can be confident that we haven’t seen the end of major crises that will shake things up.
Milton Friedman was an accomplished economist and a fierce advocate. I did not often agree with his positions on policy, but he was right to point to the way crises can bring ideas to the fore: “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change,” he wrote. “When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”
I think the ongoing Economic Hardship in Sierra Leone is a crisis of sufficient potential to be transformative. The reality of neocolonialist and imperialist looting of our resources is already hard upon us, and it will worsen. My guess is that Sierra Leone will soon be consumed with the consequences of neocolonialist and imperialist looting of our resources. The neocolonialist and imperialist looting of our natural resource crisis is the strongest possible argument for transformation of today’s dominant social values.
A thorough look at this issue is Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down. Homer-Dixon believes that foreshocks and breakdowns can lead to positive change if the ground is prepared. “We need to prepare to turn breakdown to our advantage when it happens—because it will,” he says. Breakdowns, of course, do not necessarily lead to positive outcomes; authoritarian outcomes are also possibilities. Turning a breakdown to advantage will require being crisis-ready.
Two other key factors in cultural change are leadership and social narrative. Harvard’s Howard Gardner has written, “Whether they are heads of a nation or senior officials of the United Nations, leaders . . . have enormous potential to change minds . . . and in the process they can change the course of history.
“I have suggested one way [for leaders] to capture the attention of a disparate population: by creating a compelling story, embodying that story in one’s own life, and presenting the story in many different formats so that it can eventually topple the counter-stories in one’s culture. … The story must be simple, easy to identify with, emotionally resonant, and evocative of positive experiences.”
New story, new consciousness, new models
Hon. Paul Kamara, one of the powerful force for good in our country, wrote that “Sierra Leone needs a different story. … The leaders and thinkers and activists who honestly tell that story and speak passionately of the moral and religious values it puts in play will be the first political generation since the New Deal to win power back for the people.”
Others have also written about the need for a new story. Those who recognise the need said. “It’s the very structures of the oppressive world that need to be challenged if we are to live into a new story.”
There is some evidence that Sierra Leoneans are ready for another story. Large numbers of Sierra Leoneans express disenchantment with today’s lifestyles and offer support for values similar to those discussed here. But these values are held along with other strongly felt and often conflicting values, and we are all pinned down by old habits, fears, insecurities, social pressures and in other ways. A new story that helps people find their way out of this confusion and dissonance could help lead to real change. I was once part of an organisation with the fetching name “National Youth Coalition”..
Another source of value change is social movements. Social movements are all about consciousness-raising. In my lifetime, I have seen hard-fought change in civil rights, women’s rights, and other ethnic issues,
Another way forward to a new consciousness lies in the national’s religions. An authority on religions, has noted that “no other group of institutions can wield the particular moral authority of the religions.” Faith communities played key roles in ending our civil war, and in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Recommendations, and in overcoming hatred after our bloody civil war. Led by the remarkable Sierra Leone Inter-religious Council.
An awakening to new values and new consciousness can also derive from the arts, literature, philosophy, and science.
My essential message to Sierra Leoneans is a basic call to consciousness. The looting of our natural resources by neocolonialist and imperialist institutions with the support of their local agents in our politics; is the same process which has destroyed and is destroying the lives of Sierra Leoneans on this planet. The oppressive neocolonialist and imperialist social systems which have destroyed voices of reasoning in Sierra Leone before independence are also destroying voices of reasoning today…. It is the people of Sierra Leone, ultimately, who are the most oppressed and exploited. They are burdened by the weight of more than half a century of neocolonialist and imperialist looting of their resources which is stoutly supported by their local agents in various governments, and ignorance which has rendered the people insensitive to the true nature of their lives…. The suffering majority in Sierra Leoneans need to break with the narrow concept of neocolonialist and imperialist human liberation, and begin to see liberation as something which needs to be extended to their lives too.
Another major and hopeful path is seeding the landscape with innovative, instructive models. A remarkable but under-appreciated trend in Sierra Leone today is the proliferation of innovative models of community action and business enterprise, many promoted by social media groups.
Self help projects, co-ops of several types, community wellbeing indicators, community supported agriculture, downshifting and living simply, community wealth building, community-owned power and solar net, and on and on—these are bringing a positive future into the present in very concrete ways. These actual models will grow in importance as communities search for answers on how the future should look, and they can change minds. Seeing is believing.
Finally, there is the great importance of sustained efforts at education. Here one should include education in the largest sense as embracing not only formal education but also day-to-day and experiential education. It includes the education we get from personally experiencing nature in all its richness and diversity. Some stressed that such exposure to the natural world, especially for children, is important to wellbeing and human development.
Education in this broad sense also includes social marketing. Social marketing has had notable successes elsewhere in moving people away from bad behaviours such as smoking and drunk driving, and its approaches could be applied to larger themes as well.
These are all things within the power of citizens to make happen! The psychologist Tim Kasser has provided good advice about two factors that can improve receptivity to messages conveying new values. One is to turn down the incessant triggering of our materialistic impulses, e.g. escape from advertising! The other is to improve people’s sense of economic security, personal safety, and social connectedness—good advice for many ailments.
