The definition of ‘value’

In Abidjan, the Lebanese who sold out of clean, well-lit blue kiosks weighted du riz perfumé in stainless plates on blue scales. The same way some people sell turkey and fish here in Nigeria. The value of the tiny, tiny parboiled rice the Lebanese sold was tied to its weight; that weight had to be determined by an equipment. In other words, the price of the thing (determined by seller, agreed to by buyer) was tied to its value as objectively determined by those weighing scales.

Nigerians do not understand the concept of “value” as an objectively determined thing. We do not say that a thing is valuable, or we do not care so much whether a thing is valuable, or we mean something else when we say that a thing is valuable. What we care about is what we can get out of things; what immediate profits or benefits will accrue to us from using the thing. Things are valuable in so far as they coincide with our interests.

This is the case in our politics, it is the case in the civil service, it is the case in giving out contracts, in recruiting, and it is the case in our literature. We are incapable of looking at things and recognizing their worth independent of us and our needs and biases and independent of where they fit in postcolonial discourse, in some war we are waging against some fatuously-conceived thing. We are the wretched of the earth, we say, and because “you” are the wretched of the earth, everything “you” value has to be something that advances your cause.

That idea may have been stated too broadly, but it manifests in different ways in our literature. It is not peculiar to Nigeria; it is African. And since the nineties (it reached its climax and has maintained a stable place since the first decade of this century) it has been a very American thing. Indeed, a Western thing. This incapacity to recognize value as a thing in itself, as a thing that has nothing to do with your interests or the interests of a group (see “minorities”); as value—pure value. We live in an age that has lost the sense that “pure value” exists or can exist.

Nigerians do not understand the concept of “value” as an objectively determined thing. Things are valuable in so far as they coincide with our interests.

A book that has been getting referenced a lot these days is a book from 1928, translated by Richard Adlington as The Treason of the Intellectuals. It came to my attention again recently through a lecture given by the British-American historian Niall Ferguson: “How the Nazis Conquered German Universities” (a lecture I recommend). I found the epigraph to Julien Benda’s book arresting. It reads: “The world is suffering from a lack of faith in a transcendental truth.”

I cannot explicate what Benda meant by “a transcendental truth,” because I have not read the book. But the argument that Benda makes, as drawn out by Ferguson, is that the intellectuals (those who deal with ideas rather than with “things”: professors and not carpenters) have left the pursuit of truth and have instead turned the academy to a sphere for propagating their ideology.

I am taking that Benda epigraph in a context removed but not utterly distinct from Benda’s, however. The “transcendent” is the excellent, that which surpasses, that which is beyond and above the ordinary sphere, or more accurately the baser sphere. The transcendent sphere is the sphere of values-as-values. The sphere of that which rises over my or your interests. I do not conceive of it as necessarily the sphere of God, or of spiritual things, though I believe that the transcendent values takes their vitality from the spiritual. It is the sphere of the true, the beautiful, and the just. In some way, I have to confess that it is synonymous with the spiritual.

If you are a serious poet or creative in this century, one of the things you find yourself at odds with is “relevance.”

“Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.” (Phil 4: 8)

The things which Paul lists in the quoted passage are all “transcendent things.” They are transcendent because their measure and their value is in themselves, not in how we feel about them. A thing is not true because you or I feel that it is true. Neither are things honest or just because we think that they are: a thing is just because it is equal to the requirement of justice, and a thing is honest because it has shown a consistency over time, a consistency of just action.

The domain of the lovely is the domain of the beautiful and it is inseparable (in Paul’s mind, at least) from the pure. What do we mean by the pure? “Not mixed or adulterated with any other substance or material.” The thing is itself, it has not been tampered with. “Without any extraneous and unnecessary elements.” Both definitions are from the OED.

A people who lack faith in transcendental things cannot rise in any measure spiritually. And I mean “spirit” in the sense that Robert Frost meant it—as a certain magnanimity of the will, a certain resourcefulness of mental and cultural life. Nigerians have no idea what transcendental things are, not to talk of having faith in such things. We have no actual concept of true values.

If you are a serious poet or creative in this century, one of the things you find yourself at odds with is “relevance.” In a lecture on the translations of the Bible into English, Geoffrey Hill made this point: “In the climate that we now inhabit, attempts to render old things contemporary is to subject them to degradation.” Like turning “dinner and feast” in a Biblical passage to “luncheon.” In our bid to make things relevant (and, that other word, accessible) we cheapen them. And the culture wants you to be relevant: to talk and write about topical things; things that the bulk of people are interested in; things that the unthinking mass of people can relate to.

You have to be “relevant” because people cannot recognize values that have nothing to do with their interests. Prizes, prize judges, book publishers are driven by “vested interests” (Hill’s phrase). The works that they applaud are works with those interests. These interests are shared by the mass of unthinking people. That coinciding interest is at the core of “the relevant” in our age.

James Russell Lowell’s essay on Abraham Lincoln is one of my favorites. He argues in that essay that Lincoln knew and believed in the intelligence of the people. He never condescended to or romanticized the general populace. He spoke to the common stock of Americans as though they were his equals, because they were. He recognized what the OED calls “the intrinsic nobility” of the American people. It is how democracy works (or ought to): by the intelligence of the people.

A people who lack faith in transcendental things cannot rise in any measure spiritually.

We live in a political age referred to by William Morris as “an anarchical plutocracy”—it is the case in the US, for sure. The intelligence of the mass of people is being ruined by the elites, so that they can tell the mass of people what to do, so that they can control that mass. Watch the lecture by Niall Ferguson, or check out this essay in Tablet—“Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment.”

This essay is titled “The definition of ‘value.’” I have said that value is the worth of something objectively observed. It is not about my interests or my needs. It is about the thing as it appears in itself. It is pure: I don’t adulterate it with my own biases (which are the “vested interests” that Hill spoke of). To be able to assess the value of things in themselves, the intelligence as to be “elevated.” It has to be called up to a level of power by effort or “the steady force of will” (a phrase I take from William E. Channing’s lecture “On the Elevation of the Laboring Class”).

Intelligence working at a certain level of power is able to assess and come to terms with value. If, as I have suggested (as Thomas Sowell, Hill, Niall Ferguson, and many others have), the goal of the anarchical plutocrats that sit in places of power in our age (and by places of power I mean the editorial post at a magazine like POETRY) is to ruin the intelligence, to cheapen it, making it see interests rather than worth and estimates, robbing it of its capacity for just analysis and conclusions—it is hard to measure the value of anything by how the mass feels about it. In fact, one should be very wary of what the mass considers valuable.

But let me come back home. There is a phrase from F. R. Leavis that has stuck with me for a while: “an intelligent public.” I think it’s in Lowell, too. But if Lowell meant it as the bulk of the people who constituted the American populace at the end of the nineteenth century, Leavis dared not think of it in that sense. He meant by “an intelligent public” a select group of people with taste, who can discriminate between this and that, who have a just sense of value.

The desire to reread old books, to spend money buying them, is one measure of a true culture of the mind.

In Nigeria today: I am not sure that we have up to five hundred people who constitute that public. Thousands of Nigerians read literature (maybe twenty thousand in a population of 300 million people). If we go by the kind of books they read, though, we see that they have no sense of discrimination. And we have a list to go by: courtesy of Open Country Mag.

On “The Rovingheights Bestsellers List 2024,” the third and second books in the top hundred category are by Damilare Kuku. (They would be the two leading books if not for the fact that Dele Farotimi was in the news last year.) Nearly All the Men in Lagos Are Mad and Only Big Bumbum Matters Tomorrow are in second and first places, respectively, in the fiction category.

Nothing wrong with people enjoying what they want to. But poetry readers should be “elitist” (in the sense that they are people concerned with value as a thing independent of base taste). Nineteen books made the list in the poetry category: some familiar names (Raymond Antrobus, Khalil Gibran, Kola Tubosun, Wole Soyinka). However, Rupi Kaur is represented twice, and she is the only person with two books on the list: in eighth and twelfth place respectively.

In the nonfiction categories, the books are self-help / motivational / business (i.e., Atomic Habits) and political. I did not spot one cultural book (in the sense of the life of transcendent thought) on the nonfiction list; it did not even crawl into it. We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele are not books of transcendent thought; they are polemical (they are wars waged from a narrow ideological standpoint).

Nigerians seem to read fiction a good deal. But, as I said, one does not learn to pursue transcendent truths by reading fiction—not the kind that I have highlighted anyhow. Considering the kind of fiction we make and consume en masse, it is more problematic that we are reading Rupi Kaur in much the same way. Not one Teju Cole. If only people read Gbenga Adeoba’s Exodus and older things like Casualties. In a full year, one Achebe does not show up, nor does a Soyinka memoir, nor does Adewale Maja-Pearce. The desire to reread old books, to spend money buying them, is one measure of a true culture of the mind. We don’t have that. We have no cultural base.

The list by Rovingheights can’t be considered comprehensive, you say. I agree. I have been to Ouida a couple of times. The only good book of poetry I have found (there are usually very few poetry books) is Shakespeare’s Sonnets. It is not the bookshop’s fault: it is more likely that nobody goes asking for a Seamus Heaney (the most popular poet of the past three decades).

You could argue that our intelligent public is overseas. I mean, hundreds of Nigerian writers are in the US. My response would be: my contemporaries are more obsessed with interests than they are about literature. I read what they write (when I can bear it). I joke to myself that in the whole country (diaspora, Nigeria), there are only about four or five people under thirty or thirty-five who know what poetry is. It may seem insane, I must be crazy. But I am dead serious. This is not to say there are no talented poets. We play an instrument we know close-to-nothing about.

“Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.”

How many people in this country have seen Eyimofe? How many of those who have seen it (of the writers and critics, the intelligentsia) understood what they saw? The danger of living in this age is similar to that which happened to Israel: “The Lord whom ye seek will suddenly appear in His temple,” wrote Malachi; but “He came to His own and His own received Him not.” It is an age where, because the bulk of the people are blind—lacking in critical sight—great things go unattended. But let us trust that the tide will change, that a few of us will labor for sight. 🔹

The physical poetry workshop will be coming up next month (the third Saturday in the month). I will be putting up the proper details soon. I trust you are well. Thank you for reading.