In journalism, the dangers of axiomatic reportage cannot have come into a sharper focus than in the days after the US led invasion of Iraq, and subsequently, the crisis the BBC went through towards the close of last year after the Lord Hutton Inquiry into the circumstances that led to the suicide by a respected defence scientist, Dr David Kelly, over his “reported” statement that the British government “sexed up” its dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, WMD, so as to justify Britain joining the invasion of that country. The spate of resignations in the BBC’s top hierarchy following the controversial conclusion of the Inquiry is now history. Axiomatic writing then is about a reporter forming a preconceived abstract pattern of what events might have been and then going about investigating to prove the pattern. The dangers is, the axiom may have been the result of the reporter’s personal biases, as obviously Lord Hutton thought the BBC reporter in the dock in the case, Andrew Gilligan’s was. The probe was a controversy because, as many knowledgeable commentators pointed out, Lord Hutton, did not look into whether Dr Kelly’s suicide was solely the result of Gilligan’s report or the treatment he received from his employer, the British defence ministry. Moreover the probe did not study the problem against the background of the larger issue: the justness of the British government taking Britain to war.

The allegation of axiomatic writing Gilligan faced would however be the guilt of so many others writing on axioms of the opposite kind on the same issue. A great section of the American media would indeed be guilty of working up a war hysteria before the invasion, with extremely dangerous axioms on Iraq’s WMD capabilities and even possible links with Osama bin Laden. More than a year after the war, there is still no sign of WMD or an Osama bin Laden links in Iraq. It is another matter there has not been the like of a Lord Hutton inquisition into these reportage of the war that has brought death and misery to hundreds of thousands.

But if axiomatic writing has been a danger the journalistic profession is always exposed to, it has not been the only profession prone to this approach to a problem. The world of academics in particular has not been spared. We do not need to go very far to have a glimpse either, for our own academia is replete with it. Particularly in the humanistic studies, axioms have always had primacy over empiricism. Be it in the study of the sensitive question of ethnic formation, history writing or an analysis of inter-community relationship, abstract intellectual constructs have preceded digging for archival data. We do believe there have been brilliant axiomatic thinkers, the most outstanding of whom the world agree is none other than Prof Albert Einstein, the man who just by thinking formulated the shape of the universe, which empiricists later to their amazement discovered were accurate. But the feats of geniuses are exceptions. We do feel, in academics as much as in journalism, there needs to be a strong bridge between axiomatic thinking and empiricism. The want of this bridge has left so many grey areas in historiography of the place. Hence there is still a debate on the date of such a historic day as the Khongjom Battle; the heroism, or the lack of it, of many historical characters of the time is also in dispute; again, much of the pre-colonial history of most, if not all, of the communities in the state are also not much more than myths and legends. In our kind of environment, we do feel it is still not the ripe time to divest the primacy of empiricism in journalism as much in academics. An outstanding example of a confluence between the mind of a theoretical thinker and the work of an empiricist, is the classic “Origin of Family, Private Property and the State” by Federich Engel based on the painstaking field studies of pre-modern societies by anthropologist H Morgan. Works such as this can be important cues in the regard.