Solomon and Mesfin are siblings. They are neither identical nor fraternal twins. So they arrived from different fertilized eggs at different times. Mesfin smoothly slipped through his mother’s birth canal without caesarian three years later than Solomon. Solomon had done the same. Lucky Mother!
They went to the same school. Understandably, Mesfin joined Solomon when the latter graduated to second grade after KG. In their chronologically successive grades, Solomon excelled in logic, mathematics, computer science and English language and, surprisingly, in philosophy whereas nobody could touch Mesfin in sociology, psychology and extracurricular activities. In short, Solomon was, for lack of a better term, ratiocinational while Mesfin seemed to be rather liberally endowed with emotional intelligence.
They both graduated from university with honors, Solomon in mathematics and computer science and Mesfin in sociology and psychology. Unsurprisingly, Mesfin got married and sired children and formed a happy nuclear family before Solomon even met his Ms. Right! When their now aging father asked Solomon why he did not get married, Solomon answered rather tersely: “’I sublimated my emotional energy into ratiocinational energy to scientifically prove the existence of God.” His father’s eyes nearly popped out of their sockets with surprise.
“What! Come on son, you only have to believe it. You don’t have to expend any kind of energy, ratio… what’s this word, mental or anything else!”
“Oh! Dad! I don’t have to explain anything to anyone just yet. I just want to prove it to myself first. You see dad, if space and time are infinite and matter evolved, as Darwin long ago said, in infinite time and space, the apex of that evolution cannot possible be the human brain. Remember, the future is also part of the space-time continuum.”
“You mean there must be something higher than the human brain?” asked his father.
“Exactly! Hegel called it the Absolute Idea. That must be it! That is God! Solomon replied excitedly.
“But what about Deep Blue? You’d better consult Kasparov.”
“That’s a great question, Dad, but I am talking about the possible creation of matter that has evolved in zillions of years of infinite time not just about fifteen billion years of time from the Big Bang, which does not include the future from our perspective.”
“Son, you’re racking your brain for nothing. With artificial intelligence, machine learning and all the rest of it, including the fusion hypothesis, man and woman are perhaps themselves morphing into God. Homo Sapiens is changing and transforming into Homo Deus, ”father said to son with tongue in cheek.
“Dad, Homo Sapiens is only technologically accelerating evolution, not doing away with it, Solomon said and left, wishing his dad a good night, but feeling rather depressed about not yet having even the faintest clue as to the real and authentic origin of the universe. Intelligent design, singularity and inflation theory are not readily accessible to the strictly rational intellect.
As he was walking to his car parked in his father’s spacious compound, he met his younger brother Mesfin with his beautiful wife, who were on vacation together on the French Riviera.
“Hi! Sele! How is everything?”
“Hi! Mes! Not bad. How are you two doing?”
“Don’t for a moment feel that you have missed out on anything. We just went yachting and surfing on the Riviera and had a bit of what they call there the elegant life. That’s all,” said Mesfin’s beautiful wife, Hirut, knowing that Solomon did not much care about life of luxury of any sort.
“I just want you two to be happy. That’s all. You know that I am also trying to be happy in a rather different way,” Solomon responded in a credibly sincere tone.
“Is there any other way to be happy than
to enjoy the pleasurable reality of the moment?!” queried Mesfin as if to re-start a long-standing argument with his elder brother.
“Yes, there is brother! The happiness derived from the discovery of the truth, the eureka moment!” said Solomon with a faint trace of irritation in his voice.
“There you go again! Bye, anyway,” said Mesfin and hurried with his wife to meet his father.
Solomon located his car with some difficulty, slumped into the driver’s seat, fumbled for the ignition key and drove back to his apartment. In bed his head dinned with chaotic thought. He started speaking to himself with his inner voice.
“If matter evolved and is evolving in infinite time and space, the probability that some sort of super-brain must exist somewhere in the humanly unimaginable vastness of the universe is extremely high, but because of the margin of error, we cannot be one hundred percent certain. Uncertainty, however small, causes doubt, fear, anxiety and diffidence, which in ever subtle ways eat away at human happiness. It is the same with everyday life. The probability in Addis Ababa that I could die in a road accident is not infinitesimal, because 5,000 people do so die ever year! So, why live with doubt, fear and anxiety if I am going to die anyway?!”
In his somnolescence, he could barely recognize the light knock on his bedroom door. It was his maid whom he admired and respected for her industriousness.
“Ato Solomon, it is your favorite breakfast, Firfir from pure teff injera and butter.”
Pure teff injera and butter have become a rarity in Addis Ababa and elsewhere in Ethiopia because of their astronomically high prices. In days gone by, Ethiopians used to say, “Don’t stint on your generosity for a dead injera (yemot injera),” upon offering alms in kind to mendicants. That meant giving a full injera with sauce (wet). Not so today. You have to fork out a cool 8 Birr for a single injera of dubious purity! As for butter, dozens of traders here in Addis have been arrested for adulteration. How times have changed!
Solomon enjoyed eating his favorite breakfast. He savored the moment, the joy of being alive to enjoy the joy of consuming his much-loved food. With his hunger drive satisfactorily satisfied, he began feeling the faint stirrings of some other drive pulling on his heartstrings and squirming in his groin.
“Libido in action! I’ll never let you free, you demon!” He almost shouted at himself.
Well, it was quite natural. His maid was an excellent cook. She was clean, healthy, and industrious by his own admission. She was not a Mona Lisa but fairly pretty, with her customary winsome smiles. There was one big hurdle, though. He had never made any kind of sexual advances to her, which meant they had not tried each other on (as Abeshas would say) for sexual compatibility.
Some three days after this emotional turmoil, he had a heated argument with his boss over the applicability of quantitative techniques to identity-based politics. He had told his boss thus:
“The moniker is political science, but I doubt if there is any science in politics other than the mathematical concepts of majority and minority!”
“How do you mean?” asked the boss.
“In the sense that a simple majority is a numerical 50 percent plus one and a two-thirds majority and a three-fourths majority are 66.7 percent and 75 percent, respectively.”
“Well, how is that relevant to identity politics?”
“Chief, you are not going to like what I am about to tell you. Identity groups with large populations are likely to dominate in any political or economic decisions by their sheer numbers and not by the quality and validity of their ideas.”
“That is bad! How come I never thought of it?!”
“You’d better now!”
Solomon drove back to his apartment. His knock on the door was, as usual, answered by his maid who slowly pulled the door to let him in, but she soon limped into his arms as he planted a ferocious kiss smack on her lips. When she came to (she had almost passed out!), she could hardly differentiate between reality and fantasy. She thought she was in some kind of wonderland where the only concepts that existed were those of happiness, bliss, joy and love, and the only book that lay on the table was a four-word dictionary.
A few months later Solomon and his father met at the latter’s residence, more akin to a mansion than to a villa. The father spoke first.
“Welcome to the school of hard knocks and the world of reality! By the way, how did you manage to convert part of your ratio…, what was the word again, ratiocinational energy into romantic energy?”
“Oh! Dad, it is a pretty long story and journey. I first found the Aristotelian happy medium between reason and emotion. Then I did a bit of subtle blending of my own and came up with ratiocination overlaid with the right amount of emotion. Believe me Dad. It is just delectable!”
The word “delectable” barely escaped his lips when Solomon’s cell phone rang. The screen displayed “Mes” in block letters.
“Hi, Mes! How are you doing?”
“Sele, I’ll tell you what. How about a vacation on the French Riviera? All four of us. The kids are away somewhere. You deserve a bit of the elegant life!”
The Ethiopian Herald Sunday Edition 9 February 2020
BY TEKLEBIRHAN GEBREMICHAEL
