By: Obilo Kobilo
[wpsocialite]
The Critique of Pure Reason, a book by Immanuel Kant is a literature discourse that was basically tailored and intended for this age of active coding and decoding of messages.
In this book, Kant argues that this is the age of subjecting everything to criticism through critical introspection and evaluation.
Two areas that are still being considered to be protected against critical introspection and evaluation are the religion discourse and judicial processes’ pronouncements. Some attributes this protection to their sensitivity and sacredness more so of the former.
However, this protection denies them the much yearned for public respect and trust which can only be laid claim at through vigorous open, free and secured public introspection and dissection.
This in essence means that the public can only pay respect to a determination and conclusion to a particular process in which they have been accorded the free will to question and debate over its contest without unnecessary restraints and coercion.
In judicial parlance, the public feel more secure and contented with a process in which justice is not only done but also felt and seen to be done. The non-verbal behaviors and cues of the preceding judges must support the final pronouncements of the judges to the effect that justice has actually been seen to be done although otherwise might be the case.
The jogging of our minds with various information and bombardment of free flow of information have laid claim to Kant’s assertion of the need for critical evaluations on daily basis.
The multiplicity of interpretations especially in cases of judicial processes has taken the need for criticism a notch higher.
We have come within a whisker of allowing ourselves a blind obsession with political scripts written by Mount Kenya elites to turn us into an intellectually sterile, vendor-led population with sheep mentality of blindly allowing to be led.
We have allowed others especially the media to do the thinking for us and have come to rely on judgments written and edited under the whims of political chiefdoms as our intellectual crutch and avenue to get real solace.
As much as judicial process are religiously sacred and their decisions being final world over, they are not the monopoly of truth and institutions of unearthing the ills committed by those in powerful positions especially in a country where rapacity transcends all ethnic and racial boundaries like Kenya.
The rationing of our thinking system which is gradually and tactfully being advanced by the current leadership is a case study for the need of everybody not only the members of CORD to engage in critical evaluation of the daily happenings.
This trend is being orchestrated through the media and some government institution.
Take our media for instance, the act of hero worshiping has taken toll in almost all media houses. The news script starts and ends with the president or deputy president.
They have even coined a new canon in journalism that which we were never taught in class: PEACE. Truth more often has been sacrificed at the altar of PEACE. When did we forget that the absence of war does not necessarily symbolize peace?
This to me is just a display glimpse of enthusiastic media and impatient government that are yet to concrete their thought processes on the true meaning of peace.
To them, when one questions and subjects the Supreme Court judgment to criticism, you are reminded that Kenya is bigger than all of us and we need to move on. Mind you they don’t tell us where we are moving to or coming from.
They take solace in the public usual attraction to simple, mundane and usual ways of doing things.
They know we are chronically vulnerable to deception through political myths and stories written by the usual suspects who are renowned in spewing nothing but repetitive verbiage.
If they are being honest, why not allow public dissection of the content of the Supreme Court ruling without being dragged to court on accounts of incitement, contempt of the court and other unmerited charges like hate speech?
It is time for liberal intellectuals to offer other schemata in subjecting everything to critical reasoning that differs from the conventional hardcore idealists who lack insights into the changing political trends world over, pay little attention to responses from the public and above all rarely listen.https://www.kenya-today.com/opinion/media-and-liberal-intellectuals-in-kenya