Since the advent of Trumpism and the “Make America Great Again” movement, greatness associated with nationhood has become a notion increasingly absorbed by popular culture across the globe. Ordinary citizens in America and beyond are more openly expressing a desire for their countries to achieve “greatness”, or for them to return to such a state, as this was (in their view) historically achieved.

At the same time, governments are reviewing what it means to be a global power, where perceptions of outward-looking statecraft as rapaciously hawkish, may finally be confounded, and pride amongst increasingly despondent citizens restored. Over recent years this has been epitomised by the UK Government’s “Global Britain” policy, whereby, under this sobriquet, a sovereign, independent and prosperous Britain was envisioned as emerging from the fallout of the UK’s Exit from the European Union. As former Prime Minister Boris Johnson stated in his February 2020 Greenwich speech, “this is the moment for us to think of our past and go up a gear again, to recapture the spirit of those seafaring ancestors immortalised above us whose exploits brought not just riches but something even more important than that – and that was a global perspective.” (Johnson, 2020).

Indeed, in Britain and America, the term ‘greatness’ is often deployed retrospectively. For many, Britain’s historic era of might and magnificence was countervailed by a precipitous downfall (Intelligence Squared, 2020), rendering “Great Britain” nothing but a lazy anachronism; whilst in America, MAGA proponents maintain that the country’s once supreme footing in the world has now been supplanted by a supercilious moralism which ostracises much of its working class. It is with these narratives that leaders seek to restore ‘greatness’ in the statecraft of their nations.

However, despite such restorative efforts, the term remains nebulous, elusive and largely undefined. One might gather from above such sentiments that greatness is a term employed by the nostalgic – those who seek to celebrate or even restore the repressive, expansionist and white supremacist politics of the past. However, is greatness always a bad thing?

In the modern age where imperialism and jingoism are increasingly looked down upon, some may wish to explore more acceptable means of achieving greatness. For example, economic measures such as GDP and unemployment rates are generally used to measure how well a country is doing. However, it is incredulous to use economic success or even ‘good governance’ indicators (such as the Social Progress Index (Ruggeri, 2018)) as measures of ‘greatness’ of a nation. This is because nationalism is generally more egoic and sentimental in its manifestations, than for its proponents to feel fulfilled by such hard statistics. In fact, the greatness of a nation is becoming so fundamental to the identity-formation of individuals and body politics worldwide, that bellicose populism is proliferating and counter-movements floundering in their own dogmatisation. It is therefore unrealistic to expect GDP and social progress figures, however strong, to quell such brute desires.

With countries increasingly divided, and demagogic speech emboldened, it may be necessary to take a more emotionally intelligent approach to greatness – one which conciliates such angst and heals social division. Ultimately, by recognising the tendencies behind each of these identity-rooted narratives as fundamentally human, the illusion of stark difference may be transcended and a more balanced approach to greatness achieved. For peace and prosperity to prevail, this must combine the outward-looking hopes of the nostalgic and the introspection of the socially conscious.

Perhaps the most edifying way of achieving this would be through, in the first instance, perusing the philosophical archives to find a deeper understanding of this type of adversarial debate. After all, greatness is a concept not unique to the modern age – human populations have explored it extensively in the past.

As an age-old concept, greatness has been delineated and typified in various ways, by thinkers and civilisations dating back to antiquity. Arguably the most developed typification of greatness is what new-age spiritualists term ‘the divine feminine and masculine principles’. The divine feminine and masculine principles, as present in popular culture, represent a balance which finds its origin in ancient schools of spirituality and myth, including African traditional philosophy. Observed as a universal truth, the divine feminine and masculine are interdependent principles, which together form a primeval balance that allows everything to exist in teleological coherence. Perceived as a fundamental characteristic of universal harmony, the divine feminine and masculine are not only integral to the laws of nature, but to the order of human society itself.

Whilst nuance between varying cultures makes it difficult to expound this polarity definitively, we may attempt to elucidate each principle based on common threads in popular new-age spiritualism (see e.g. Khemetic Centered Living, 2017; Sadhguru, 2014; Chopra, 2021; Tolle, 2023). The feminine principle is generally identified as inner-directed, devotional, intuitive/creative and receptive, whilst the masculine is outward-directed, visible, logical/utilitarian and action-oriented.

African spiritual philosophy makes very clear that feminine and masculine divinities or principles are interdependent, in that one cannot exist without the other. Together they form a balanced whole which permeates all parts of the universe – human, plant and animal kingdoms alike. In the Yoruba sacred texts, for instance, known as the Odu or Odu Ifa (Lewis, 2018), the relationships between the forces of nature (including water, mountains, trees etc as well as divinities known as Irunmole or Orisha) are explored as a model for human beings and civilisations to function optimally (Lewis, 2018), or with ‘greatness’. In fact, the Yoruba sacred texts provide exhaustive examples of this divine feminine-masculine balance being enacted, whereby the message of equal weighting being applied to both as crucial to the creation process, is promulgated. In the Odu, Eji Ogbe, for instance, the relationship between Odu (as the feminine/ container of sacred teachings) and Orunmila (as the masculine/ master diviner and prophet) is expounded, and this epitomises the commitment to a divine feminine-masculine balance, inherent within the Ifa corpus (Lewis, 2018).

Another typification in African philosophy of the divine feminine-masculine balance is found within ancient Egyptian religion. The Egyptian goddess, Seshat, is ruler of books and goddess of measurement and writing. She is consort of the god, Thoth, and both share a connected function as divine scribes (sesb) (Cannon-Brown, 2020). In World History Encyclopedia, former part-time Professor of Philosophy at Marist College (in New York), Joshua J. Mark, quotes Egyptology Author Dr Geraldine Pinch as follows: “Thoth, the “excellent of understanding”, observed and wrote down everything that happened and reported it to Ra every morning. As the record keeper of the gods he was paired with the librarian Seshat. Thoth and Seshat knew the future as well as the past. They inscribed a person’s fate on the bricks on which their mother gave birth and the length of a king’s reign on the leaves of the ished tree” (Mark, 2016, p.2).

To conclude this section, it must be emphasised that these themes of the divine feminine and masculine principles have suffused African mythos and spirituality so inalienably, that they are inherently valued not merely as a vector of religious dogmatism, but as a balance pervading all aspects of life and the human experience. This endorsement reflects a tendency so primordial within spiritual cultures (to view creed as fundamental to the completeness of life), that the feminine and masculine aspects thus ineluctably reside in all sectors of the human experience and social intercourse, to fulfil all natural wants for greatness. It must therefore be recapitulated that, in the words of Mbiti, “through the ages, …, religion has been for Africans the normal way of looking at the world and experiencing it” (Mbiti, 1991, p14), as opposed to an independent, organised system of beliefs, as per the Western conception (Ebere, 2011).

With this approach, equity of the feminine and masculine principles (typifying the dual nature of creation) must therefore be accepted as congruent with the very nature of the universe (Lewis, 2018). Both human and divine expansion and operation depend upon this critical feminine-masculine balance, and we are thus, “encouraged to integrate this ideal into our very consciousness, [and] to make it our way of life” (Lewis, 2018, p142).

In African traditional religion, human life is perceived as holistic, incorporating a number of components, rather than dichotomous. No one component is more valuable or integral to human individuation than the other and neither the feminine nor masculine components complete themselves or constitute a whole (Ebere, 2011). This belief is exemplified in the Akan religion, as Sackey (2006) identifies, where men and women are equitable and interconnected – each constitutes one vital half of the human whole (Ebere, 2011).

Another clear surmising in African philosophy, of the vicissitudes of these principles working in confluence, is represented through the prevalence of androgynous deities. In Togo, for instance, Kuiye of the Batammaliba is represented with both female and male genitals and is called “The Sun, Our Father and Our Mother” (Ebere, 2011, p486); in Zimbabwe, the god of fertility, Mwari, is also androgynous (Mukonyora, 1999); and in Ghana, some Ashanti speak of God as having a duality of sex (Ebere, 2011). In this Ashanti duality, the feminine principle is associated with the moon and is said to have created human beings with water, whilst the masculine is identified with the sun, and (as the active principle) is believed to have “shot life-giving fire into human veins to make humans come alive” (Ebere, 2011, p486). The Ewe people across Ghana and Benin adopt a similar symbolisation through the feminine-masculine combination of the Mawu-Lisa deities, whereby Mawu, as the feminine principle, is typified by the moon and Lisa (as the masculine), by the sun (Ebere, 2011).

The most renowned example, however, of androgyny being present in African philosophy, is the Ancient Egyptian goddess, Maat. Maat was the personification of justice, truth and cosmic order (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2021), whose depiction combined feminine and masculine symbols. Illustrated as a woman donning an ostrich feather on her head, Maat was a formidable symbol of universal order, invoked in Kemetic society, which has indomitably permeated much of Kemet’s philosophical posterity, to become the stupendous symbol of spiritual and societal law, balance and order it is today, as visibly represented in Africa and African diasporic cultures throughout the globe. As the foundation for justice, truth and harmony, or oneness as opposed to dichotomy, in all universal fecundity and output, Maat anthropomorphises the ontological necessity of balance. This includes and in fact unyieldingly targets, human polities.

As a prodigy of African traditional iconography, Maat elevates the inexorability of feminine-masculine interdependence, as a crucial feature of completeness for all human domains. Therefore, to vie for greatness, whether as an individual or state, one must first perfect this balance unflinchingly – in thought, calculation and activity. As Lewis (2018) neatly puts it: “Maat operates in all aspects of life from the cosmological to the human/ social to the governmental. Maat is an energy force, a force of creation, and a force in our daily lives” (Lewis, 2018, p143). She must therefore be imbued in all facets of statecraft, if that statecraft is to be ‘great’.

This conception of Maat, or the divine feminine-masculine balance, as applicable directly to statecraft, was in fact commonplace in Ancient Egyptian society. As a key principle of governance, Maat was seen as the organising principle for all pharaonic activity, whereby justice, truth, cosmic regulation, divine balance and ethical sturdiness, could all be upheld through political probity (Obenga, 2004) (Lewis, 2018). As a concept which harmonises the intrepid outwardness of masculine drive, with the sagacious solemnity of feminine introspection, Maat challenges national leaders and statespersons alike to form policies with wisdom, moral uprightness and cerebral tenacity, for the eschewing of nefarious statecraft and the vindication of compassionate peace-building.

Scholars have identified several qualities from the principle of Maat which may direct such leadership, including righteousness, good, order, reciprocity and harmony, in addition to those already mentioned (justice, truth and compassion) (Lewis, 2018). In Ancient Egypt, texts were disseminated on how to govern by Maat and the principle of Maat, through being written on the walls of homes, temples and other buildings (Lewis, 2018). Leaders were committed to embodying and acting in accordance with Maat (Lewis, 2018) and Maat became a daily practice where ordinary citizens too would strive for such balance in their thought, speech and actions (Lewis, 2018). Ultimately, it was recognised ubiquitously that to live in accordance with Maat, was to cultivate a world of prosperity, peace and joy (Lewis, 2018).

It is clear then, that divisiveness, dichotomy and conflict within a nation can be assuaged by the radical introduction of balance to its statecraft. This is not to give way to either side of the debate, nor to act out of reticence or compromise in the face of bullish rhetoric. Rather, it is to lead with wisdom and magnanimity, to placate hostilities and to inspire empathy within the hearts of statespersons and citizens.

By grounding brutish quests for greatness in intuitive and introspective reasoning, and balancing moral fastidiousness with assertive policymaking, leaders and statespersons can cultivate a nationhood which embodies, in every sense of the word, the ‘greatness’ that so many vie for.

As we enter a moment of impasse, where the tempestuous vagaries of global society’s culture wars have created a world seething with tension, it is time to take account for our failings and to step into a more empowered leadership – one which recognises the insidiousness of national division and seeks to heal it by usurping populism. It is only by channeling a more emotionally intelligent statecraft, one which accounts for the cognitions and emotional temperaments of all, that separation may be overcome and true greatness attained. In this new world, political subterfuge may be defeated, citizens may unite, and national psyches may be fortified with wisdom. Statespersons must be the proponents to lead this change.

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