TOWARDS AN UTOPIC COMMUNITY: A DECONSTRUCTION OF UDOIDEM’S VALUES AND NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

The question of the significance of values to national development has gained traction in research and policy works since the last century. Several scholars have highlighted different imports and dimensions of the interrelationship, which have sparked further analyses and hermeneutics, giving rise to new understandings. It is on this ground that this study intends to deconstruct Sylvanus Udoidem’s text: Values and National Development. This study acknowledges some of the vagaries in the concepts which Udoidem elucidates in the text, and regards as disingenuous every attempt at discounting the variants of community for their lack of organic structure. It attempts to deconstruct the view which regards high level altruism as the only source and prime determinant of community, likening it to hanging humanity’s hopes on the precipice of an ‘impossible possibility.’ In the end, the study, in one swoop, acknowledges the invaluable contributions of ethics to national development as well as identifies the insistence of creating a community solely on high moral grounds, as an utopic venture reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s magical dreams in Alice in Wonderland. This study employs hermeneutic method.