Hope and the Meaning of Life in Sauti Sol - Part 2
Hope and the Meaning of Life in Sauti Sol - Part 2
We can only be sure that we have worth, that our existence is meaningful, if we are loved into being.
(Reading time: about 10 minutes)
(In case you missed it, here’s a link to Part 1 of this article.)
At first sight, Sauti Sol’s Relax (Live and Die in Afrika (2015)) may appear to be a somewhat superficial celebration of the band’s success. The members of Sauti Sol, it would seem, want to “relax” in their achievements and “take it easy” after six years of hard work – a sort of complement to their commitment to constant and demanding effort in Wera (Mwanzo (2009)) at the beginning of their career. However, a closer reflection on the song’s lyrics encourages the listener to take a different view.
Two lines stand out. In both, the band acknowledges the origin of their achievements. The first line is addressed to the singer’s mother: “I’m here because you pray for me”. Two verses later, the second line of interest is directed to the singer’s father: “Abundantly, umenibariki baba, umenibariki baba” (“Abundantly you have blessed me, father, you have blessed me, father”). When taken together with what seems to be Sauti Sol’s view – that success is the basis of one’s worth – these lines acquire a profound significance: the success that is the basis of our worth, according to Sauti Sol, is possible only because of the love that we have received from others. In other words, we achieve the worth that follows from success because others have first seen and treated us as being worthwhile. Consciously or not, Sauti Sol seems to be implying that our worth is not primarily achieved but, rather, perceived as something inherent to us. Our worth would precede our achievements which, regardless of whether they add to this worth or not, could not be the foundation of this worth. What, then, makes us worthwhile? Before answering this question, it would be helpful to first direct ourselves to a prior, more important concern: what is worth, anyway?
Worth and the shape of true love
When we speak of something being “worth” our money, our time, or our attention, we usually mean that we should direct that money, that time, or that attention towards this “something”. The same applies to people: when we say that someone is “worth” speaking with, listening to, being with, or living for, we usually mean that we should direct our words, our attention, our time, our life – ourselves – towards that person, because it is good to do so, because he or she has value.
The value that we see in others can be at levels of increasing profundity. We can reduce others to the carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium, and other chemical substances that comprise their body, as do many who take a so-called scientific view of life. In such a viewpoint, morality and freedom are nothing but the products of biochemical reactions. Neither is superior. Why, then, should we subject our (arbitrary) liberty to the arbitrary forces of blind nature? Yet, as soon as we realize that, on such premises, there is no answer to this question, our lives become meaningless, with all the consequences that this entailed as we saw at the end of Part 1 of this article.
We can go a step higher and recognize that there is a difference between living organisms and inanimate matter, a mysterious something that differentiates a living body from the corpse of someone recently deceased, something that isn’t reducible to matter. After all, a body’s physical and chemical composition immediately before and after death are identical. We call this something life.
Unfortunately, we can reduce other people (and ourselves) to merely animal forms of life, viewing them as destined to be ordered by their instincts towards the survival of the individual for the survival of the species – in other words, to reproduction – or to pleasure. Erotic pleasure particularly has been elevated in the previous two centuries to the status of an ultimate goal or purpose, under the name of “love”, leading to chaos on a massive scale, as recognized even by some of its strongest proponents during the Bolshevik Revolution in the early 20th century, for instance.
Beyond this level, we can acknowledge a further characteristic of human beings: their capacity for transcendence. Human beings have the capacity (whether potentially or actually) to move beyond the specific features of any one reality they face and come to know what that reality, and every reality like it, is. Human beings can form concepts: water, tree, dog, human. Indeed, human beings can stand above even themselves and comprehend that they are human beings! And with this comes a capacity to love things and people for what they are, rather than for their specific material characteristics, a love that sees deeper into the beloved and proceeds from deeper within the lover. This is part of (but not the whole) difference between pure love and lust. To the extent that an attraction is lustful, that attraction is directed towards the other as a material object, and sexual intercourse is merely mutual masturbation. The problem with lust is that is doesn’t go deep enough.
That said, it isn’t sufficient to love another person solely as a generic human being, a mere member of collective “humanity”. Generally, people don’t want to be the object of such an impersonal love, a love that would easily dispense with them if the needs of “humanity” required it, the love that some people associate with the word “philanthropy”: a love of all people, but of no person in particular. Such a love is incapable of seeing any value in the individual person except as a statistic representing some portion of “humanity”. This “love” (if indeed it merits the name) aims purely for numerical, quantifiable results, taking little or no account of the happiness of the individuals that fall within its scope.
Nor do people want to be loved only for their qualities or characteristics, even if these qualities go beyond the merely material, because a love that is based on the other’s social status, intelligence, or even their character, is conditional upon the continued existence of these qualities. A love that lasts only as long as the other does not lose their beauty, wealth, or reputation, contract a degenerative mental disorder, or choose to change the course of their lives, is a love that must leave its recipient profoundly insecure. This is the fundamental problem with affirming success, or anything impermanent, as the basis of one’s worth: one’s worth then becomes conditional, his or her loss of the basis of this worth becomes incomprehensible, the very concept of God becomes untenable, and one’s entire being becomes utterly meaningless.
However, there is a yet deeper source of value within the human person: their ineradicable uniqueness, that which each person designates as “I” or “you”. A love that responds to this level of value loves an individual person not because of what they are, but because of who they are. A lover who loves with such a love, when asked by his beloved the reason for this love, can only answer, “I love you because you’re you.” He doesn’t say, “You’re good because you’re intelligent” or “You’re good because you’re kind.” Instead, he declares, “You’re good – full stop! It is good that you exist!”
Before we go any further, though, it would be wise to reflect on the experience of some, perhaps many, suicidal men and women. The persona in Sauti Sol’s Sober (Midnight Train (2020)), an alcoholic who has been driven by his vice to sever his ties to his mother, daughter, lover, and friends, and longs for their restoration, brings to mind another alcoholic, this time from 19th-century Russian literature: Marmeladov in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Marmeladov, seeing how his alcoholism has steered his wife to the verge of madness and his daughter to prostitution in an attempt to alleviate their utter destitution, shouts to the world, “There’s nothing to pity me for! I ought to be crucified, crucified on a cross, not pitied!” For those who become convinced that they are unlovable, irredeemable, guilty beyond repair, the intense anguish of merely existing is like a counter-proclamation from the depths of their being: “It would be better for me if I had never been born!”
When the cry of the lover is met with such a deafening counter, how can we know for sure whether his affirmation is true? Is the worth that we perceive in others a purely subjective phenomenon, even at the profound level of the “I”? This is no trivial question. If indeed this worth is purely subjective, then no person is worth loving, and it would be better that every person ceased to exist.
The love of one who knows me completely, and then chooses to love me, does not suffice, for they, too, can be mistaken about my value. Only if there is One whose love is itself truth, whose love for me, simply because it exists, causes my being, can it be certain that the worth that this One sees is true, for His very act of seeing it is what causes it to be. In other words, I can only be sure that I have worth, that my existence is meaningful, if I am loved into being. All love is true only insofar as it shares in the love of the One whose love is truth, whose love creates us, whose love is the love in which, in the words of Aratus, the ancient Greek poet, “we live and move and have our being.”
And coming full circle, this reveals a yet deeper significance in the two lines quoted from Relax at the beginning of this article: the love that his parents have for the song’s persona must be a sharing in the love of God for the persona if it is to be true. “I’m here because you pray for me” need not be a shallow platitude. It can be, instead, the expression of a profound truth: every person can be for every other a face of the love that creates them; each person can come to see, reflected in the eyes of his neighbour, his own value.
...the two lines quoted from "Relax" by @SautiSol can be ... the expression of a profound truth: every person can be for every other a face of the love that creates them; each person can come to see, reflected in the eyes of his neighbour, his own value.
The transformative encounter between true love and suffering
True and unconditional love would embrace the entirety of our existence, including our failures, our suffering, and our wretchedness. Our failures and our suffering, however incomprehensible they may seem to us, would not be absolutely incomprehensible in themselves, but would instead be given meaning by the One who permits them to happen, a meaning whose content can only be expressed in one word: love.
A love that includes our failures, suffering, and wretchedness within its scope frees us from the insecurity that haunts the life of one who has known no such love. A person who experiences himself as the object of true and unconditional love receives increased courage to face reality, to face the risk and responsibility entailed in existing in the world and in relating with others – the responsibility for their problems; the risk of failure, suffering, and rejection. Moreover, if everyone has been loved into being, then every person exists for every other person. Every person is worth suffering for. True and unconditional love would be a path to a social experience of fraternity, which could transform social structures completely.
It is just such a love that Christianity preaches: the love of a God who truly died for the sins of mankind and, in doing so, reconciled them with Himself and turned their suffering into a path of union with Him.
Yet, it seems that not only does love give meaning to suffering, but suffering also disposes a person to perceive true love. Only the person who knows he has sinned can genuinely ask for forgiveness, to be loved even though he does not deserve it – to be loved unconditionally. It is such clarity that we see in Sauti Sol’s Sober. Perhaps, then, it is precisely the suffering that young Kenyans experience as a result of their flight from God that will be their path to Him.