ANALYSIS: awmakers ought to express social ideals in a clear language

Speaker of the National Assembly, Mr Job Ndugai, speaks during a session. PHOTO | FILE

The civil service personifies conservation as a social ideal and conservatism as a doctrine of rule.

Conservation is thus a two-pronged instrument. Although it can be an excellent idea to urge the people to conserve, the doctrine inevitably contains teachings that can also throw society dangerously backwards.

Take the civil service. It can be an excellent conservator of social ideals. All complete with an instrument called police, the civil service is the custodian-in-chief of what all social custodians call “law and order”.

Anarchy

Part of its ideal mission is to conserve all the good aspects of what a society inherits from its fore-parents. That is why the civil service is so important to any human society. It is the conservator and enforcer of all ideals of “law and order”.

For I need hardly remind you that the opposite of law-and-order is anarchy, a word of classical Greek origin which literally means “government-less-ness”. In short, anarchy is a condition in which no ordered production and no civility in conduct can take place.

Anarchy is a situation in which conservation and perpetuation of such ideals as the content of all human institutions of upbringing, education and government can never take place.

To be quite sure, there is a sense in which the word anarchy means “freedom”, a sense where it means absence of any official demand that you do or refrain from doing something.

To be quite sure, under anarchy, all of you are initially absolutely free from all social demands, all social restrictions, all laws. But I say “initially” because, under anarchy, a time soon arrives at which everything has been turned topsy-turvy so that nothing is any longer in the place where you have usually found or expected to find it.

As a rule, then – despite the existence of so many anarchistic movements throughout the modern human world – anarchy is not a condition in which any human society objectively desires to be.

Language

Orderliness is what every human society yearns for in order for it to produce an abundance of every one of its material and ideal needs.

In any case, if yours had degenerated into total unruliness and chaos, how could you legitimately call it a society any longer? That is why, among human beings, it is the definitive task of any true government to maintain social order so as to invigorate the production, reproduction and distribution of as many excellent social goods and social ideas as possible.

That, too, is why our lawmakers must express those ideals in a language that is clear to every member of the given human society.

That is why it would be a very good thing for the civil service to dedicate itself not only to correctness but also to simplicity of the language in which a self-governing country like ours has decided to conduct its national and international affairs.

The uniquely exploitable thing about English is the history and universality of experience – even where this be seen as colonial and negative – of the people whose mother tongue it now is.

For English is in a position to bring to the national table of any ambitious country like Kenya or Uganda or Tanzania not only the cultural but also the technological experience and wealth of societies like England, Scotland, the United States and Wales but also the overflowing wealth of culture in which all that universal experience is contained.

Yet that is also what makes the content and meaning of English words and idioms so difficult to tame.

However, that fact is completely in line with most other realities of the human world. It is that you must struggle extremely hard if you are to achieve any ideal.

Mr Ochieng writes for the Nation