Destruction to Construction; Practice to Theory

This process of intellectual advancement via critical annihilation of obsolete ideas is not new to the physical sciences where established theories are superceded in physics, chemistry, and biology on a yearly basis without much fanfare.  The form must be annihilated through criticism, and the new content, which has been won through, has to be preserved, reinforced and elaborated with historical fact.  And so in the course of technological developments that which was previously acceptable becomes unacceptable, that which was labeled as bias-free is shown to be biased, that which was presented as factual is shown not to be factual, that which was thought to be real is shown to be unreal, that which was thought to be reasonable and rational is shown to be unreasonable and irrational.  In the place of a moribund reality stands to come a new, viable reality.  The Black arts movement, the Black studies movement, the Afrocentric Movement, the African-centered movement, and the emerging African Humanities movement is the "new" which is continuing to refine, rewrite, and revise fraudulent world history, and with it the worldviews, philosophies, theories, methods, and methodologies reflective of it.

In he face of such accelerated change, a system of thought and inquiry must be fashioned to reflect epochal changes in their fullness.   Here a new historiography, philosophy, theory, method or general approach to social development is an immensely valuable tool for both understanding and stimulating human history.  For starters, an approach suffused with the confidence of being rooted in he historical development of philosophical, theoretical, and methodological ideas is necessary.  

Second, an advanced approach must also be flexible and elastic in its collection, organization, analysis, and synthesis of ideas.  From existence we get to logic and not necessarily the other way around.  Human cognition can discover logical formations in reality only because the objects of cognition possess them in the first place.  Theory, therefore, is summarize practiced.  The material object of thought is, therefore, the object of some relative expression of reality.  Essentially ideas and real theoretical concepts categories are not more eternal than the unique historical conditions that they express.    In sum, the essence, the heart, the foundation of any concrete theory that is reflective of reality is practice.  Practical verification is the fundamental raw material of scientific theory, whereas theory is the fundamental guide to practice.    Therefore, social philosophy, theory, or method (whether Afrocentric, Asian, Indian or Eurocentric) is measurable based on its actual practical application to reality.  Doe it work?  How does it work?  How to streamline, condense, abbreviate, shorten, symbolize this practice into a scientific theory which can later be used to solve objective problems of human life and living?   What language is universal?  Why?  Ethnocentrisms aside, what is the greatest good?

Since every philosophy, theory, or method has its own material foundation in history, no matter how metaphysical the disguise in which they often masquerade, a truly liberating criticism has always involved improving the material conditions, which are at the very foundation of the social groups and the thoughts that they think.  Black people cannot merely copy what the whites and Arabs have done in black, with a few Swahili words/phrases. Nor can Blacks substitute arguing with whites over their fraudulent rendering of history for sound scientific research.  Science, or Kmt's Tehuti, is presented in the language of the population with the practical know-how (ancient African Kmt), or translating the practical know-how into their language (as with ancient Greece), but science is universal---look what the Asians are doing with it.  Increasingly that language is mathematical.  Whatever works one place in the world, should work any place in the world if it has been scientifically proven as a law of nature.  In this way Asian centered, European centered, African centered, Jew centered, or Arab centered are not useful terms where science is concerned.  The problem is how science, Tehuti, has been used---as a tool of Euro-centrism, Arab-centrism, and Jew-centrism. The new progressive humanist theories of the future will succeed not merely because they represents objective reality, are interculturally uplifting, morally sound, driven by justice, unrelenting in will, centered in historical intercultural values of mutual respect and commitment to human excellence, but also because they serve the needs of humanity and the social conditions which produce those needs.    

Liberating social philosophy, theory, and method becomes realized in a people only in so far as it is the realization of their real life needs.  In any society in which race, sex-sex/gender, class, and generation divisions give rise to conflicting needs, values, cultural forms and ideas, each race, sex-sex/gender, class, and generation sets itself up as a representative of the common interests of the entire society.  The ruling, race, sex/gender, class, culture and generation officially define what it means to be an American.  Therefore, each race, sex-sex/gender, class, generation develops a worldview and ideology, which it holds to be universally true and around which it seeks to impose as the view of the entire society.  Usually, the group with the force---the military, political, psychological, and intellectual might---rules.  Those who have power influence the gradual flow of history: they write the books, they make the videos, and they finance mass media versions of the reality as they see it. 

Each class has a view; each ethnic group has a view; each sex/gender has a view; each generation has a view; each culture has a view.   Possessing and being able to articulate historical or cultural information are not enough.  Debating intelligence is not enough.  The question is: What historical legacy and class, gender/sex, race, culture, and generation worldview does the idea represent?  If not scientific, it is not replicable, and thus merely an ideologically abstract means to a speculative end.  

African researchers must stay clear of speculation, mysticism, religion, and superstition.  The fundamental questions of human existence are moral, ethical, scientific, applied engineering, technological, and humanist.  What else are they?  Since the formation of humanity over 5.5 million years ago, and the subsequent development of settled class societies with sex/gender, class, cultural, ethnic, and generational divisions of labor, human societies have revolved around the production, distribution, exchange, consumption, and reproduction of the necessities of life and the power, which those possessions allowed.  Humans are continually improving the quality of the tools they use in earning their living.  The possession of the new productive technologies and the invention of the new methods give a natural advantage over those who still live by the old means.  The ethnicity, class, sex, or generation, which has control of the new forces of production, has power, economic/technological power, a power, however, which is hampered by the cultural, traditional, political, and legal property relations which express the earlier forms of material production.

To reduce theory and method to a list of examples, criticisms, definitions, concepts, and analogies is to reject the principle of objectivity and resort to speculative, eclecticism, and subjectivity.   For example, in some areas of the positivist social sciences, and in the reactionary aspect of the Afrocentric movement, the most widely used and fallacious method of research is to isolate and randomly tear out individual minor facts, dissect them independent of the social context that gave birth to them, string together some analogies, then juggle this biased concoction with examples and "expert" references (and in some cases if the researcher claims Afrocentricity, sprinkle in some Swahili terms). 

This way of thinking is based on eternal unalterable concepts and formulas regardless of the new data of practice and science and the specific conditions, ignoring the processes own unique creative development.   This is not proper research because isolated facts selectively presented as variables and torn out of context are merely subjective constructs for mental juggling.  Reducing objective social processes to arbitrary patchworks of culturally, racially, class, and sex/gender biased variables and testing them in an abstracted imaginary context may be published in mainstream presses, but such publications maybe of no objectively scientific value, because each fact, each conceptualization, each variable, each analogy, each example grows out of some historically evolved concrete situation that must be summarized in its entirety if one is to bring to life---mentally reflect/reconstruct---the process in one's mind that is taking place in reality. 

Therefore, a holistic approach to social research problems requires that one extract the process itself and then deduce from it its essence after logically summarizing the unfolding process.  Minor facts, subjectively transformed into variables, arbitrarily selected and tested out of context from the conditions that produced them, are amputated fragments of a total reality---a reality which must be painstakingly taken apart then pieced back together as to ascertain the object's laws of development.  Inferences can be drawn, but conclusions from such studies are never final; not can they be comprehensive in scope and content.