Last week I argued that state policies which are aimed at poverty relief should be driven by respect for the agency of the poor. Poor people should not be seen as mere recipients of handouts. That would be both fiscally and ethically imprudent. The policy implication is that creative mechanisms must be found to develop self-sufficiency among the poor so as to end undignified dependency. Despite the obvious short-term political unattractiveness of this position it is surely the correct philosophical foundation from which to derive more specific practical solutions.
However, there are important structural realities that I had deliberately set aside so that the principled point could be stated baldly. A person’s agency cannot come alive if the structural impediments they face are insurmountable. Inequality represents the single most important structural injustice in SA today. If we do not address inequality then we can forget about a society in which self-sufficiency and self-actualisation are on glorious display next to glorious soccer stadiums. The more complete goal of our social policies must therefore be to activate the agency of the poor but to recognise that doing so also requires structural impediments to be dismantled. Our social policies should therefore include measures that address these structural obstacles effectively.
Don’t get me wrong. This is not a complicated way of contradicting my stated conviction that the poor should not be treated as subjects but as agents. We must resist framing debate on poverty alleviation as a choice between callous ‘tough love’ approaches (“Fend for yourself, wena!”) and disrespectful ‘hand out’ approaches (“If you need anything, Mavis, I’m right here!”)
The topic of entrepreneurship provides an excellent case in point. One obvious strategy for activating someone’s agency and in the process boosting their self-esteem is to provide them with a job. It is therefore deeply troubling that in the past year or so we have been showing signs of not just jobless growth but job-shedding growth according to recent Statistics SA data. Both the problem of dependency and the need for incentivising self-sufficiency, however, are intimately connected to these economic developments.
South Africans go into instant panic mode if they are unable to secure a job from some private company or a state department. Why? Because the confidence it takes to be an entrepreneur is lacking in the psyche of a people who internalised the apartheid state’s propaganda that blacks are useless creatures. It is little wonder that our most successful self-made business persons are mostly white. Whites are less self-deprecating about their capabilities. A culture of dependency reinforces such low self-esteem. Low self-esteem, in turn, means that creative solutions to job creation such as encouraging a much needed culture of entrepreneurship get overlooked. This lack of focus on how to activate our people’s agency clearly goes beyond welfare matters and even seeps into our related macro economic thinking. Respect for agency and self-sufficiency could serve as a catalyst for fresh debate on job creation solutions. Entrepreneurship would then stand a better chance.
Still, if the state recognised that it must incentivise economic self-sufficiency through encouraging entrepreneurship, such a policy would fail if structural obstacles faced by the poor are not addressed. Even if some kid from rural KwaZulu-Natal had the most unexpected levels of Verwoerd defying self-confidence as well as an enviable natural knack for business, she would stand a great chance of failing without access to social capital, financial capital and business mentoring. Things like social capital, financial capital and business mentoring are goodies that do not compete with uncollected litter for space in the streets of our townships. You therefore cannot blame someone for being poor in circumstances where the fundamental explanation for their poverty is the absence of these goods. And therein lies the complicated reality of agency struggling to emerge in the face of crippling structural obstacles.
The government is not totally unaware of these truths. But it fails to put concepts such as agency, self-sufficiency and entrepreneurship at the heart of policy design. Sure, government does use this kind of language from time to time, but that hardly counts as progress. Failure is both the result of these viewpoints not being fore grounded and the result of failed implementation where these ideas are tried out.
For example, institutions like the Industrial Development Corporation, the Development Bank of Southern Africa and the National Youth Development Agency exist in part to help the poor overcome structural impediments to business success. But often these institutions simply hand out cash without realising that psychology is as important as money in determining business success. Mentoring young businesspersons to be in the right headspace, helping them negotiate institutional norms in corporate SA that are often career cripplingly alien, offering them practical help in respect of operational and organisational design challenges, etc. are all overlooked in practise. Equally, we could write a treatise on private sector impediments such as the difficult of accessing commercial bank loans. The existence of these structural impediments is not the fault of the poor. And the poor cannot be expected to singlehandedly dismantle these impediments. Government must take the lead.
It remains correct to insist that welfare policies should not breed dependency but aim to activate the agency of the poor. That, however, requires the removal of structural impediments. Time is no longer on our side.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Friday, June 25, 2010
Fight poverty while promoting sense of agency
A COUPLE of weeks ago I was interviewed by a French journalist interested in white poverty. She is making a documentary about poor whites, who are not, in her view, given enough airplay. I had to spoil some of her fun by pointing out that President Jacob Zuma ’s surprise at white
poverty’s existence does not mean the rest of us never knew that some whites are also poor. But focusing on this aesthetically interesting fact misses the bigger debate on poverty.
Poverty has simply become democratised since 1994. It is an equal-opportunity bastard. And so to impute to a black government a deliberate attempt to impoverish whites or to ignore poor whites is hasty. All poor folk in SA, black and white, are failed subjects of poverty relief. We should instead review existing strategies for poverty relief and ask why current policies have not yet dealt the scourge a fatal blow. To that end, one initial thought has been simmering in my head. It is this: the package of welfare policies that has evolved over the past 16 years wrongly treats the poor as subjects rather than as agents.
Take the child support grant. There is no doubt that the intention behind the system is noble. It is aimed at alleviating the material conditions that prevent many kids from poor families from growing up healthily. It can be particularly useful in helping an unemployed single mother ensure that a child attends school and is not deprived of the social capital that an education represents simply because a school uniform, for example, is beyond the household budget. The money can also be used to buy food for the entire family. It is not just the child who becomes dependant on the R250 a month. It is often the entire family.
Many members of my extended family, for example, make use of this grant as a crucial buffer against abject poverty. I’m therefore personally familiar with the importance of a welfare system that helps stave off utter destitution within families. Furthermore, I would not want to generalise in the absence of facts so am happy, for the sake of argument, to imagine that a majority of grant recipients use the money honestly. The bigger evaluative question then jumps out at us: does this grant system enable families to become self-sufficient? Does it, in other words, act as a catalyst to activate the agency of poor people? I am sceptical.
For one thing, there is no built-in incentive for families to become independent of the state. Whereas the dependency of the aged is understandable on account of their frailty, thereby justifying the old age pension system, there is something about the dependency of a healthy teenage mom that is far less forgiving. Many of these dependent individuals also abuse the system.
In my hometown of Grahamstown, for example, it is well known within the poor coloured township that many single parents ignore their children’s needs by spending the money on overdue alcohol accounts in the many taverns designed to offer antisocial escapism from the boredom of sitting around, unemployed. Again, there is nothing in the grant system that catches out those who abuse the system. Monitoring is poor to nonexistent. All the system does is to breed a culture of dependency.
This is disastrous for the individuals implicated and for society at large. From the perspective of grant recipients, it means a permanent underdevelopment of their agency, a permanent sense of victimhood. From society’s perspective, it means we will continue to have one of the largest welfare states in the world. That is fiscally and ethically unsustainable. The question is where it is all going wrong on the welfare front?
The starting point is to review the principle underlying our package of welfare interventions.
Our welfare policies have to stop being built on the idea of the poor as mere objects of social policy. This habit extends to essential services more generally. The phrase “service delivery”, for example, is one of the most unfortunate bureaucratic inventions. It legitimises the expectation, on the part of the poor, that some dude from the state has to rock up at your door in a debonair outfit with a bag of goodies in hand. This mistake is going to haunt the state because such vertical relationships between government and citizens is not sustainable nor desirable.
Many policy gurus will claim that our policies do aim to activate the agency of the poor. But if so, the policies have failed and we need new ones at any rate. I am more sceptical. I think our government never approached this debate with a view to incentivising self-development on the part of the poor. That route to poverty relief often seems callous and right wing. Hence it is politically unattractive.
But it need not be. A sensitive balance between handing out fish to those in distress and compelling the healthy to learn to fish for themselves is crucial. Anything less is actually an expression of condescension towards the poor because it disrespects them as fully capable beings just needing a break with the help of both carrots and sticks. Ke Nako!
http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=112945
poverty’s existence does not mean the rest of us never knew that some whites are also poor. But focusing on this aesthetically interesting fact misses the bigger debate on poverty.
Poverty has simply become democratised since 1994. It is an equal-opportunity bastard. And so to impute to a black government a deliberate attempt to impoverish whites or to ignore poor whites is hasty. All poor folk in SA, black and white, are failed subjects of poverty relief. We should instead review existing strategies for poverty relief and ask why current policies have not yet dealt the scourge a fatal blow. To that end, one initial thought has been simmering in my head. It is this: the package of welfare policies that has evolved over the past 16 years wrongly treats the poor as subjects rather than as agents.
Take the child support grant. There is no doubt that the intention behind the system is noble. It is aimed at alleviating the material conditions that prevent many kids from poor families from growing up healthily. It can be particularly useful in helping an unemployed single mother ensure that a child attends school and is not deprived of the social capital that an education represents simply because a school uniform, for example, is beyond the household budget. The money can also be used to buy food for the entire family. It is not just the child who becomes dependant on the R250 a month. It is often the entire family.
Many members of my extended family, for example, make use of this grant as a crucial buffer against abject poverty. I’m therefore personally familiar with the importance of a welfare system that helps stave off utter destitution within families. Furthermore, I would not want to generalise in the absence of facts so am happy, for the sake of argument, to imagine that a majority of grant recipients use the money honestly. The bigger evaluative question then jumps out at us: does this grant system enable families to become self-sufficient? Does it, in other words, act as a catalyst to activate the agency of poor people? I am sceptical.
For one thing, there is no built-in incentive for families to become independent of the state. Whereas the dependency of the aged is understandable on account of their frailty, thereby justifying the old age pension system, there is something about the dependency of a healthy teenage mom that is far less forgiving. Many of these dependent individuals also abuse the system.
In my hometown of Grahamstown, for example, it is well known within the poor coloured township that many single parents ignore their children’s needs by spending the money on overdue alcohol accounts in the many taverns designed to offer antisocial escapism from the boredom of sitting around, unemployed. Again, there is nothing in the grant system that catches out those who abuse the system. Monitoring is poor to nonexistent. All the system does is to breed a culture of dependency.
This is disastrous for the individuals implicated and for society at large. From the perspective of grant recipients, it means a permanent underdevelopment of their agency, a permanent sense of victimhood. From society’s perspective, it means we will continue to have one of the largest welfare states in the world. That is fiscally and ethically unsustainable. The question is where it is all going wrong on the welfare front?
The starting point is to review the principle underlying our package of welfare interventions.
Our welfare policies have to stop being built on the idea of the poor as mere objects of social policy. This habit extends to essential services more generally. The phrase “service delivery”, for example, is one of the most unfortunate bureaucratic inventions. It legitimises the expectation, on the part of the poor, that some dude from the state has to rock up at your door in a debonair outfit with a bag of goodies in hand. This mistake is going to haunt the state because such vertical relationships between government and citizens is not sustainable nor desirable.
Many policy gurus will claim that our policies do aim to activate the agency of the poor. But if so, the policies have failed and we need new ones at any rate. I am more sceptical. I think our government never approached this debate with a view to incentivising self-development on the part of the poor. That route to poverty relief often seems callous and right wing. Hence it is politically unattractive.
But it need not be. A sensitive balance between handing out fish to those in distress and compelling the healthy to learn to fish for themselves is crucial. Anything less is actually an expression of condescension towards the poor because it disrespects them as fully capable beings just needing a break with the help of both carrots and sticks. Ke Nako!
http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=112945
Friday, June 18, 2010
We need to talk the 'white consciousness' blues
"BUT, Eusebius, we’re not all like that! Did you know that I don’t even think of myself as white?!” This plea-cum- rebuttal to my recent essay on white consciousness has been giving me food for thought. In the essay, which was carried in last weekend’s Sunday Times, I argued that white South Africans are not helped by an unhealthy dichotomy of views about white life in democratic SA.
Some, such as Rian Malan, bemoan a false sense of loss of citizenship power. Others, such as Antjie Krog, berate the Malan-like crew with the injunction that they rather join Krog in expressions of eternal gratitude for being well-treated by magnanimous blacks.
I concluded that whiteness comes out trapped somewhere between Malan’s victimhood motif and Krog’s cringe-worthy self- flagellation. A healthy “third way” out of this mess is for white folk to stop the Malan-like moaning festival and to participate fully within the democratic space but with their agencies fully intact, sans Krog.
While most responses to this essay have been unexpectedly complimentary, I am mindful of the fact that identity debates are not momentary events but continuing dialectical projects. For that reason, it is important to engage all critical responses fully.
I have been struck by one particular criticism. It is the plea-cum-rebuttal by especially some younger white South Africans that my very use of the concept of “white consciousness” is misplaced. The concept is jarring because it equates white skin with white identity. In pop-academic parlance, I am accused of essentialising whiteness.
This is problematic, so the objection goes, for at least two reasons. The white community is not homogenous. A Karen Zoid Afrikaner is a different beast from a Freedom Front Plus radical, and an English-speaking liberal white South African who helped with the Free Nelson Mandela campaign is different from both kinds of Afrikaner. In turn, a 15-year-old white South African, whether Afrikaans or English, has more in common with her black classmates than with these older white folks. In fact, her middle name might even be Winnie. Whiteness, it would appear, is therefore not susceptible to fair generalisation.
There is also a normative gripe with my analysis. Even if some generalisations are true, the tone of my argument suggests that we ought to see ourselves as raced individuals. But why can’t I just be Antjie from the block? Why must I be white Antjie from the block?
I genuinely feel the power of this objection. It speaks to the emotional complexity that identity stuff is about; a social fact that analytic philosophy wrongly tries to obliterate at times in its misplaced pursuit of conceptual perfection. It would therefore be callous, and not only intellectually sloppy, to dismiss this objection as a mere attempt by some whites to wish that race would just leave us all alone.
Yet, even so, I’d be lying if I said that these objections give me sleepless nights about the overall cogency of my analysis. Here is why.
As an important aside, first, it struck me how much more comfortable we are talking about black consciousness than about white consciousness. Somehow essentialising blackness is less egregious than essentialising whiteness. Why? Is it because “they are all the same” but “we” are not? I have not settled on a final explanation yet. But my heart and mind still grapple with why tropes in black behaviour the world over are a more legitimate target of sociological reflection than tropes in white behaviour. Black groups exist. But only white individuals exist. Why?
Much more importantly, identifying trends and tropes are not the same thing as essentialising. It is insane to have such a deep- seated fear of group categorisation. It is certainly understandable. After all, the institutional success of apartheid rested on socially constructed, biologically suspect, yet legally sanctioned group identities.
However, fear of a return to that past will prevent us from dealing with that past, once and for all. I say this because we need group categories for the instrumental purpose of eradicating the effect of our ugly past on our ugly present. In order to get to a future SA where we can do away with group categories, we need such categories in the meantime in order to design policies that can get us to a just society in which such categories will naturally have outstayed their welcome. Our past was constructed in group terms. It can only be undone in group terms. There is no nonracial route to a nonracial future.
To that end, it is useful to ask questions about how phenotypical whites are getting on in the new SA. This, in turn, occasions and justifies reflections on white consciousness. But it does not mean that I am reducing you to your whiteness or blackness. I am merely acknowledging the subtle interplay between group identities, even where these were imposed on us, and our individual agencies which fight to resist those categories in pursuit of autonomous self-definition. Talk about white consciousness is therefore a necessary evil. Even if “you are not all like that!” it remains true that many of you and us are like that. So let’s be painfully real about these things; the future demands that we do.
http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=112215
Some, such as Rian Malan, bemoan a false sense of loss of citizenship power. Others, such as Antjie Krog, berate the Malan-like crew with the injunction that they rather join Krog in expressions of eternal gratitude for being well-treated by magnanimous blacks.
I concluded that whiteness comes out trapped somewhere between Malan’s victimhood motif and Krog’s cringe-worthy self- flagellation. A healthy “third way” out of this mess is for white folk to stop the Malan-like moaning festival and to participate fully within the democratic space but with their agencies fully intact, sans Krog.
While most responses to this essay have been unexpectedly complimentary, I am mindful of the fact that identity debates are not momentary events but continuing dialectical projects. For that reason, it is important to engage all critical responses fully.
I have been struck by one particular criticism. It is the plea-cum-rebuttal by especially some younger white South Africans that my very use of the concept of “white consciousness” is misplaced. The concept is jarring because it equates white skin with white identity. In pop-academic parlance, I am accused of essentialising whiteness.
This is problematic, so the objection goes, for at least two reasons. The white community is not homogenous. A Karen Zoid Afrikaner is a different beast from a Freedom Front Plus radical, and an English-speaking liberal white South African who helped with the Free Nelson Mandela campaign is different from both kinds of Afrikaner. In turn, a 15-year-old white South African, whether Afrikaans or English, has more in common with her black classmates than with these older white folks. In fact, her middle name might even be Winnie. Whiteness, it would appear, is therefore not susceptible to fair generalisation.
There is also a normative gripe with my analysis. Even if some generalisations are true, the tone of my argument suggests that we ought to see ourselves as raced individuals. But why can’t I just be Antjie from the block? Why must I be white Antjie from the block?
I genuinely feel the power of this objection. It speaks to the emotional complexity that identity stuff is about; a social fact that analytic philosophy wrongly tries to obliterate at times in its misplaced pursuit of conceptual perfection. It would therefore be callous, and not only intellectually sloppy, to dismiss this objection as a mere attempt by some whites to wish that race would just leave us all alone.
Yet, even so, I’d be lying if I said that these objections give me sleepless nights about the overall cogency of my analysis. Here is why.
As an important aside, first, it struck me how much more comfortable we are talking about black consciousness than about white consciousness. Somehow essentialising blackness is less egregious than essentialising whiteness. Why? Is it because “they are all the same” but “we” are not? I have not settled on a final explanation yet. But my heart and mind still grapple with why tropes in black behaviour the world over are a more legitimate target of sociological reflection than tropes in white behaviour. Black groups exist. But only white individuals exist. Why?
Much more importantly, identifying trends and tropes are not the same thing as essentialising. It is insane to have such a deep- seated fear of group categorisation. It is certainly understandable. After all, the institutional success of apartheid rested on socially constructed, biologically suspect, yet legally sanctioned group identities.
However, fear of a return to that past will prevent us from dealing with that past, once and for all. I say this because we need group categories for the instrumental purpose of eradicating the effect of our ugly past on our ugly present. In order to get to a future SA where we can do away with group categories, we need such categories in the meantime in order to design policies that can get us to a just society in which such categories will naturally have outstayed their welcome. Our past was constructed in group terms. It can only be undone in group terms. There is no nonracial route to a nonracial future.
To that end, it is useful to ask questions about how phenotypical whites are getting on in the new SA. This, in turn, occasions and justifies reflections on white consciousness. But it does not mean that I am reducing you to your whiteness or blackness. I am merely acknowledging the subtle interplay between group identities, even where these were imposed on us, and our individual agencies which fight to resist those categories in pursuit of autonomous self-definition. Talk about white consciousness is therefore a necessary evil. Even if “you are not all like that!” it remains true that many of you and us are like that. So let’s be painfully real about these things; the future demands that we do.
http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=112215
Friday, June 11, 2010
World Cup delusions will come back to bite us
TODAY marks the beginning of compulsory national happiness and collective amnesia for four weeks. The race war is temporarily called off. Beggars have been swept off the streets even in cities run by self-declared liberals. I suppose we would not want the Germans to notice our drunken uncles, lest they (the Germans, I mean) forget to return for the Christmas break. Not that we will succeed. At least one Daily Mail reporter will stumble upon our ugly Blikkiesdorp truths. Many of us are holding thumbs that even criminals will impose a four-week moratorium on themselves. All of this belatedly raises the question of whether the World Cup is worth it. I don’t think so.
One of two major benefits is that this event is one huge , positive public relations stunt. It is a chance to defeat Afro-pessimism. The rest of the world thinks we cannot stage an event of this magnitude successfully. Well, let’s disprove them.
Furthermore, SA have had some nasty international press coverage in recent times. Themes have ranged from the politically late Thabo Mbeki ’s irrational AIDS denialism to President Jacob Zuma ’s colourful carnal shenanigans, and in between all of that our various social scourges, such as violent crime, as well as economic and political scourges, such as tenderpreneurship and puzzling voting patterns on the international stage. The narrative about SA has not been cool. This is an opportunity to have a more positive story projected into the wide world. This constitutes the rebuilding of much needed social and political capital.
The second major benefit is that we seemingly have another shot at rainbow nation myth creation. Recall we were on the brink of a race war a few weeks ago, when a famous farmer was killed somewhere in the North West province? At least, that was the reality constructed by sections of both the print and broadcast media, who were hell bent on rehearsing and confirming their own fears.
I digress. Whether myth or reality, many see the World Cup as a chance to bring about genuine and lasting social cohesion and permanent postracial nirvana in the wake of overpowering racialism and racism. From now on, we will live in a colour-blind society, where white Afrikaans peeps from Pretoria will routinely hang out in Soweto and blacks, including members of the Black Management Forum, will shred their race cards as a gesture of goodwill.
Well, sorry fellow citizens, but all of this is one big self-delusional, self-inflicted half- truth, to put it mildly so that I do not spoil your excitement too much.
Of course one cannot deny that the public relations benefits are important. For better or worse, yes, Africa needs to defeat false beliefs about her capacity to make a positive contribution to life in the global village. I will grant the fact that the World Cup, if we pull it off over the next four weeks, yields that outcome.
However, the social cohesion stuff is silly. We just do not learn from history. The 1995 Rugby World Cup is falsely remembered as proof of sport’s ability to be a catalyst for bringing out lasting social cohesion. Films such as Invictus perpetuate such lies. The 1995 Rugby World Cup is, in fact, proof that sporting events can at best offer a temporary reprieve from disunity, not unlike the joyous feeling of slipping into a warm bath in the middle of winter. After a while, of course, the water gets cold and you are yanked back into reality, especially when Eskom has made it too costly for you to add more hot water.
The only way to ensure genuine social cohesion and a lasting reduction in inter- group anxieties is to tackle the real drivers of disunity, which are of course our immoral levels of income inequality and criminal levels of poverty. After the last German has left, these drivers will remain untouched. Consequently, any sense of national cohesion is temporary at best and fake at worst. It is irresponsible to imagine otherwise.
Besides these exaggerated advantages, there are also economic and sovereignty costs. One is the economic lie that we will see positive returns on the R32bn or so spent on the World Cup. With the global recession still affecting everyone, tourism is unlikely to get a boost. Furthermore, even if the gross domestic product improves, only some folk, such as the owners of big construction companies, will eat most of the additional pie.
Second, the loss of bits of our sovereignty to Fifa is both disgusting and, had civil society challenged it, surely also unconstitutional. Think, for example, of patients whose operations are postponed by four weeks. Add to that exemption for Fifa from tax laws, municipal bylaws restricting trade, and other questionable parts of the deal.
In the end, our deep insecurity about being incompetent Africans drove our excitement to take on this project. The opportunity cost will come back to bite us, however. I suggest you keep your vuvuzelas safe. You may need to donate them to folks in Blikkiesdorp to distract themselves from poverty that forgot to leave SA on an aircraft with the last football fan. The opiate that is mass sport is cruel fun.
One of two major benefits is that this event is one huge , positive public relations stunt. It is a chance to defeat Afro-pessimism. The rest of the world thinks we cannot stage an event of this magnitude successfully. Well, let’s disprove them.
Furthermore, SA have had some nasty international press coverage in recent times. Themes have ranged from the politically late Thabo Mbeki ’s irrational AIDS denialism to President Jacob Zuma ’s colourful carnal shenanigans, and in between all of that our various social scourges, such as violent crime, as well as economic and political scourges, such as tenderpreneurship and puzzling voting patterns on the international stage. The narrative about SA has not been cool. This is an opportunity to have a more positive story projected into the wide world. This constitutes the rebuilding of much needed social and political capital.
The second major benefit is that we seemingly have another shot at rainbow nation myth creation. Recall we were on the brink of a race war a few weeks ago, when a famous farmer was killed somewhere in the North West province? At least, that was the reality constructed by sections of both the print and broadcast media, who were hell bent on rehearsing and confirming their own fears.
I digress. Whether myth or reality, many see the World Cup as a chance to bring about genuine and lasting social cohesion and permanent postracial nirvana in the wake of overpowering racialism and racism. From now on, we will live in a colour-blind society, where white Afrikaans peeps from Pretoria will routinely hang out in Soweto and blacks, including members of the Black Management Forum, will shred their race cards as a gesture of goodwill.
Well, sorry fellow citizens, but all of this is one big self-delusional, self-inflicted half- truth, to put it mildly so that I do not spoil your excitement too much.
Of course one cannot deny that the public relations benefits are important. For better or worse, yes, Africa needs to defeat false beliefs about her capacity to make a positive contribution to life in the global village. I will grant the fact that the World Cup, if we pull it off over the next four weeks, yields that outcome.
However, the social cohesion stuff is silly. We just do not learn from history. The 1995 Rugby World Cup is falsely remembered as proof of sport’s ability to be a catalyst for bringing out lasting social cohesion. Films such as Invictus perpetuate such lies. The 1995 Rugby World Cup is, in fact, proof that sporting events can at best offer a temporary reprieve from disunity, not unlike the joyous feeling of slipping into a warm bath in the middle of winter. After a while, of course, the water gets cold and you are yanked back into reality, especially when Eskom has made it too costly for you to add more hot water.
The only way to ensure genuine social cohesion and a lasting reduction in inter- group anxieties is to tackle the real drivers of disunity, which are of course our immoral levels of income inequality and criminal levels of poverty. After the last German has left, these drivers will remain untouched. Consequently, any sense of national cohesion is temporary at best and fake at worst. It is irresponsible to imagine otherwise.
Besides these exaggerated advantages, there are also economic and sovereignty costs. One is the economic lie that we will see positive returns on the R32bn or so spent on the World Cup. With the global recession still affecting everyone, tourism is unlikely to get a boost. Furthermore, even if the gross domestic product improves, only some folk, such as the owners of big construction companies, will eat most of the additional pie.
Second, the loss of bits of our sovereignty to Fifa is both disgusting and, had civil society challenged it, surely also unconstitutional. Think, for example, of patients whose operations are postponed by four weeks. Add to that exemption for Fifa from tax laws, municipal bylaws restricting trade, and other questionable parts of the deal.
In the end, our deep insecurity about being incompetent Africans drove our excitement to take on this project. The opportunity cost will come back to bite us, however. I suggest you keep your vuvuzelas safe. You may need to donate them to folks in Blikkiesdorp to distract themselves from poverty that forgot to leave SA on an aircraft with the last football fan. The opiate that is mass sport is cruel fun.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
On respect, Mr Malema and other classy matters
I HAVE the deepest respect for Mr Peter Bruce, the editor of SA’s best daily, Business Day. And not only because he allows Eusebius McKaiser to write what he wants. Also because he is willing to say what’s on his mind.
One interesting surprise from this Monday’s column, for example, is Bruce’s suggestion that all people be shown respect in Business Day by having them referred to by their full titles. This is why I wash down breakfast on Mondays with The Thick End of the Wedge. Bruce has decided that from now on, even an artist formerly known as Juli-ass is to be referred to as Mr Malema, sir!
I think the idea is a fine one, actually. Respect, as many have claimed, goes a long way. Just ask joggers who pull middle fingers at presidential motorcades.
In essence, Bruce has my support on this one. It has, however, made me revisit some simmering thoughts about matters of class.
In one sense, Bruce is simply developing or resurrecting professional codes within the media. But it is also, I think, a class issue. There is something, isn’t there, about good old middle-class respect that requires titles to be, well, respected. Not just within the workplace but even domestically.
“Peter, go to your room at once, you naughty young man!”
“Yes, sir!”
My working-class dad would have frozen at that kind of upper middle-class linguistic marker of respect. Wish I had thought of calling him “Sir!” before I sneaked across class brackets.
I should, of course, acknowledge that respect itself is not class-specific, before I get lynched for implying that the poor unwashed masses lack it.
My gran, who was not unwashed, regularly told me: “Respect, my child, goes a looooong way!” But by that she did not mean I should call old Juli-ass Mr Malema. Although, she might have insisted that I call him Oom Juli-ass. His beer boep, after all, demands the respect of a big Oom, not unlike Oom Benni McCarthy’s.
In general, though, what my gran meant by respect was that I should not be blowing my nose at the lunch table and that I must never serve her church friends tea in cups that were not placed, so far as possible, on matching saucers. That was working-class respect, coloured with streaks of religiosity.
The more serious point I want to make is that class and income diverge sharply. In SA, we wrongly think of class and income as the same thing. This is why talk about the so- called black middle class, for example, drips with conceptual confusion.
Having a massive salary does not make you middle or upper class. It does not even, for that matter, indicate wealth.
Class is a function of many things, including language, accent, spending habits, tastes in food, clothing, education, what furniture you have or buy, drinks choices, what you read (if anything), table manners and so forth. Income is, at best, one marker.
But income is certainly not the sole or even the most important determinant of class.
Let’s take Juli-ass. Sorry, I meant to say Mr Malema. It does not matter how many tenders the man wins or how many Burberry bags he buys, he will remain working class.
No, I am not judging. I am just classifying. Upper-class toffs, for example, are not cute creatures. So it is not necessarily an insult to be working class.
And Malema is in good company. David Beckham, for example, will always be a chav — the English colloquialism for working-class folk of a particularly rough bent — regardless of what football bosses pay him.
Conversely, many journalists, academics and commentators are stuck in embarrassingly unimpressive living standards measure (LSM) brackets but could wear the tag “middle class” because they meet enough of the non-income aspects of the definition: education, language, accent, old furniture, book choices and so forth.
This is why even the term LSM is useless. It confuses income with living standard. I do not desire Malema’s “living standard” at all.
Does any of this matter?
In one sense, I guess not. Labels are just part of the language game that we play as sociolinguistic creatures.
In another sense, it does matter. We design social policies with measurable aims.
If we aim to increase the size of the middle class, we had better be clear whether we mean more folk with private bank accounts or more folk who prefer Business Day to dailies with smaller vocabularies, folk who resent wrestling shows on e.tv, folk who address people by their full titles.
Malema, funnily enough, knows all this. That is why he insists on remaining the son of a domestic worker.
Malema, unlike some of us, does not confuse class and income.
And he knows that class mobility, like elitism, is not for everyone
One interesting surprise from this Monday’s column, for example, is Bruce’s suggestion that all people be shown respect in Business Day by having them referred to by their full titles. This is why I wash down breakfast on Mondays with The Thick End of the Wedge. Bruce has decided that from now on, even an artist formerly known as Juli-ass is to be referred to as Mr Malema, sir!
I think the idea is a fine one, actually. Respect, as many have claimed, goes a long way. Just ask joggers who pull middle fingers at presidential motorcades.
In essence, Bruce has my support on this one. It has, however, made me revisit some simmering thoughts about matters of class.
In one sense, Bruce is simply developing or resurrecting professional codes within the media. But it is also, I think, a class issue. There is something, isn’t there, about good old middle-class respect that requires titles to be, well, respected. Not just within the workplace but even domestically.
“Peter, go to your room at once, you naughty young man!”
“Yes, sir!”
My working-class dad would have frozen at that kind of upper middle-class linguistic marker of respect. Wish I had thought of calling him “Sir!” before I sneaked across class brackets.
I should, of course, acknowledge that respect itself is not class-specific, before I get lynched for implying that the poor unwashed masses lack it.
My gran, who was not unwashed, regularly told me: “Respect, my child, goes a looooong way!” But by that she did not mean I should call old Juli-ass Mr Malema. Although, she might have insisted that I call him Oom Juli-ass. His beer boep, after all, demands the respect of a big Oom, not unlike Oom Benni McCarthy’s.
In general, though, what my gran meant by respect was that I should not be blowing my nose at the lunch table and that I must never serve her church friends tea in cups that were not placed, so far as possible, on matching saucers. That was working-class respect, coloured with streaks of religiosity.
The more serious point I want to make is that class and income diverge sharply. In SA, we wrongly think of class and income as the same thing. This is why talk about the so- called black middle class, for example, drips with conceptual confusion.
Having a massive salary does not make you middle or upper class. It does not even, for that matter, indicate wealth.
Class is a function of many things, including language, accent, spending habits, tastes in food, clothing, education, what furniture you have or buy, drinks choices, what you read (if anything), table manners and so forth. Income is, at best, one marker.
But income is certainly not the sole or even the most important determinant of class.
Let’s take Juli-ass. Sorry, I meant to say Mr Malema. It does not matter how many tenders the man wins or how many Burberry bags he buys, he will remain working class.
No, I am not judging. I am just classifying. Upper-class toffs, for example, are not cute creatures. So it is not necessarily an insult to be working class.
And Malema is in good company. David Beckham, for example, will always be a chav — the English colloquialism for working-class folk of a particularly rough bent — regardless of what football bosses pay him.
Conversely, many journalists, academics and commentators are stuck in embarrassingly unimpressive living standards measure (LSM) brackets but could wear the tag “middle class” because they meet enough of the non-income aspects of the definition: education, language, accent, old furniture, book choices and so forth.
This is why even the term LSM is useless. It confuses income with living standard. I do not desire Malema’s “living standard” at all.
Does any of this matter?
In one sense, I guess not. Labels are just part of the language game that we play as sociolinguistic creatures.
In another sense, it does matter. We design social policies with measurable aims.
If we aim to increase the size of the middle class, we had better be clear whether we mean more folk with private bank accounts or more folk who prefer Business Day to dailies with smaller vocabularies, folk who resent wrestling shows on e.tv, folk who address people by their full titles.
Malema, funnily enough, knows all this. That is why he insists on remaining the son of a domestic worker.
Malema, unlike some of us, does not confuse class and income.
And he knows that class mobility, like elitism, is not for everyone
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Congress of the People: a political obituary
I NEED to collect my black suit from the dry cleaners today because I am attending a funeral service tomorrow. I am still feeling a bit tender, however, so I am not sure I’ll have the strength to attend. But it is going to be a huge funeral service and as someone who was not very close to the deceased, I might, at the risk of sounding macabre, get away with not being missed.
The 18 -month-old toddler, who passed away recently due, officially, to spontaneous combustion, was known as the Congress of the People (COPE).
His birth was a popular affair in December 2008, so you too might have known a little bit about him through occasional press coverage. It is only fitting to write my own political obituary of this unexpected passing, considering I may not be able to attend tomorrow. But before I do so, I sadly have to berate the various family members for their unnecessary squabbling, at the time of writing this column entry, about the funeral arrangements. It seems that COPE’s family cannot even find dignity in death.
Usually, one would expect family members to set aside differences during a time that should be devoted to mourning. If necessary, you should fake family unity for the sake of giving the loved one a dignified send-off. Not so with COPE’s parents.
COPE was very much a New SA black boy. He was a would-be coconut complete with two middle-class fathers, Mosiuoa Lekota and Mbhazima Shilowa , proud to be in a same-sex political union with joint custody over their son. This rainbow, and rainbow nation, story went south very quickly, however.
The family is now split into two camps. Some support daddy one (the angry one), while others support daddy two (the calm one). Things have turned so nasty that they are even disputing when to bury little COPE’s lifeless body. There are three different family views on how long to wait before releasing COPE to the ancestors.
Some think they should keep the corpse until December. Others think it should happen tomorrow. Others, in their turn, are in such denial they think that COPE has not actually died but will live to see through both the 2011 and 2014 national political festivities that are called our local and national elections. This last group includes, as you might have expected, people who also remain convinced that rumours of Elvis Presley’s death are grossly exaggerated. They are in denial. But something like AIDS denialism is one thing, but to imagine that death itself is a social construct ... that’s so not ayoba.
My advice to the family is that they ask an ancestor to help them confirm, first , whether COPE really is dead and, second , when an appropriate date for burial will be: tomorrow, December 2010, some time in 2011 or maybe even in 2014. The family would do well to put these questions to one of their most learned ancestors, the politically late Thabo Mbeki .
So where did it all go wrong? I, for one, am not convinced that COPE died of spontaneous combustion. That’s a family cover-up. But, of course, we all resort to little lies once someone is no more. Brutus, you will recall, was an honourable man. If I was forced to offer a pithy but, despite social convention, brutally honest obituary tomorrow , I would perform the following soliloquy:
On November 1 2008, surrounded by the promise of upward mobility in Johannesburg’s posh northern suburb of Sandton, COPE’s imminent birth was announced. The birth itself only happened weeks later in Bloemfontein. Bloemfontein was chosen by COPE’s parents in an attempt to cover up the elite family’s Living Standards Measures bracket. Everyone was excited. While some believed that the seeds of one Thabo Mbeki would be evident in the newborn’s face and mannerisms, this was not the case.
For one thing, the new kid was very friendly to all and sundry; even Mbeki-averse white aunties gave up their business careers to help raise the new Messiah. There was much promise of a bright future with an instant personality thrust upon the youngster: progressive, nonracial, social democrat, liberal, a force for good....
The early days were that of a happy childhood. But soon the kid fell ill. Problem? He was not allowed to grow into a personality of his own. Far from spontaneously combusting, the vivacious little youngster was secretly dying a slow death due to getting an overdose of this and that medicine, all of which made him sick. One dad wanted nonracialism to the point of scrapping affirmative action. Another wanted to retain the feeding trough for black tenderpreneurs. Some wanted a left-of-centre state that does not tell Nozipho in Diepsloot to pull herself up by her white madam’s old bootstraps. Others wanted a smaller state that gives Nozipho the incentives to make her own bootstraps.
Simply put, the youngster died because everyone forced themselves on to him. And so things went. In the end, asphyxiation did him in.
COPE is survived by two feuding daddies and 1,3-million orphaned voters
The 18 -month-old toddler, who passed away recently due, officially, to spontaneous combustion, was known as the Congress of the People (COPE).
His birth was a popular affair in December 2008, so you too might have known a little bit about him through occasional press coverage. It is only fitting to write my own political obituary of this unexpected passing, considering I may not be able to attend tomorrow. But before I do so, I sadly have to berate the various family members for their unnecessary squabbling, at the time of writing this column entry, about the funeral arrangements. It seems that COPE’s family cannot even find dignity in death.
Usually, one would expect family members to set aside differences during a time that should be devoted to mourning. If necessary, you should fake family unity for the sake of giving the loved one a dignified send-off. Not so with COPE’s parents.
COPE was very much a New SA black boy. He was a would-be coconut complete with two middle-class fathers, Mosiuoa Lekota and Mbhazima Shilowa , proud to be in a same-sex political union with joint custody over their son. This rainbow, and rainbow nation, story went south very quickly, however.
The family is now split into two camps. Some support daddy one (the angry one), while others support daddy two (the calm one). Things have turned so nasty that they are even disputing when to bury little COPE’s lifeless body. There are three different family views on how long to wait before releasing COPE to the ancestors.
Some think they should keep the corpse until December. Others think it should happen tomorrow. Others, in their turn, are in such denial they think that COPE has not actually died but will live to see through both the 2011 and 2014 national political festivities that are called our local and national elections. This last group includes, as you might have expected, people who also remain convinced that rumours of Elvis Presley’s death are grossly exaggerated. They are in denial. But something like AIDS denialism is one thing, but to imagine that death itself is a social construct ... that’s so not ayoba.
My advice to the family is that they ask an ancestor to help them confirm, first , whether COPE really is dead and, second , when an appropriate date for burial will be: tomorrow, December 2010, some time in 2011 or maybe even in 2014. The family would do well to put these questions to one of their most learned ancestors, the politically late Thabo Mbeki .
So where did it all go wrong? I, for one, am not convinced that COPE died of spontaneous combustion. That’s a family cover-up. But, of course, we all resort to little lies once someone is no more. Brutus, you will recall, was an honourable man. If I was forced to offer a pithy but, despite social convention, brutally honest obituary tomorrow , I would perform the following soliloquy:
On November 1 2008, surrounded by the promise of upward mobility in Johannesburg’s posh northern suburb of Sandton, COPE’s imminent birth was announced. The birth itself only happened weeks later in Bloemfontein. Bloemfontein was chosen by COPE’s parents in an attempt to cover up the elite family’s Living Standards Measures bracket. Everyone was excited. While some believed that the seeds of one Thabo Mbeki would be evident in the newborn’s face and mannerisms, this was not the case.
For one thing, the new kid was very friendly to all and sundry; even Mbeki-averse white aunties gave up their business careers to help raise the new Messiah. There was much promise of a bright future with an instant personality thrust upon the youngster: progressive, nonracial, social democrat, liberal, a force for good....
The early days were that of a happy childhood. But soon the kid fell ill. Problem? He was not allowed to grow into a personality of his own. Far from spontaneously combusting, the vivacious little youngster was secretly dying a slow death due to getting an overdose of this and that medicine, all of which made him sick. One dad wanted nonracialism to the point of scrapping affirmative action. Another wanted to retain the feeding trough for black tenderpreneurs. Some wanted a left-of-centre state that does not tell Nozipho in Diepsloot to pull herself up by her white madam’s old bootstraps. Others wanted a smaller state that gives Nozipho the incentives to make her own bootstraps.
Simply put, the youngster died because everyone forced themselves on to him. And so things went. In the end, asphyxiation did him in.
COPE is survived by two feuding daddies and 1,3-million orphaned voters
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Nic Dawes was right to publish but Zapiro was wrong to ask him to
We all know by now, of course, that Zapiro has caused another minor storm in a cartoon teacup. There has been a lot of conversation over the past few days reflecting on the thorny question of whether or not the Mail and Guardian should have published the offensive cartoon. Opinions, even among editors, differ widely.
Ferial Haffajee from City Press opined that she may have resigned in the face of a seemingly intractable moral dilemma: her intuitions pull in two different directions; on the one hand, the free speech champion in her demands that she should publish, but a sense of respect and awareness of religious sensitivities that are not unimportant, in her view, pull in a different direction.
Ray Hartley from the Sunday Times expressed a more firm conviction that he would not have published. Peter Bruce from Business Day and Sunday Independent's Makhudu Sefara declined my tjatjarag sms-attempts to solicit their views.
Nic Dawes, from the M&G, justified publication in part on the basis that he would not have published the Danish cartoons which were more clearly Islamophobic, in his view; this cartoon, however, did not have such overtones....translation: Zapiro did not plant bombs in Muhammad's turban, and that's the critical and relevant moral line for Mr Dawes.
Who is right? Well, ethical debates are not logical puzzles. One sad fact about the divisive nature of this debate is a lack of understanding by all who hold strong views - on both sides of the issue - that ethical debate is inherently murky. Yes, some arguments are stronger than others. I have yet to see a compelling moral argument for racism, for example. But these clear cases obscure the majority of inherently difficult cases.
Sometimes (and this cartoon debacle is one such case, contrary to the convictions of BOTH libertarians and religious fundamentalists) ethical debate must end, however unsatisfying, in rock-bottom intuition differences about how to balance competing ethical considerations. I can therefore only put and explain my own view. You may or not agree with it.
Bluntly put, I think that the M&G, qua newspaper, and Nic Dawes as editor, were spot-on in their decision to publish the cartoon. In an ethical twist, however - which may or may not satisfy those who agree with my endorsement of Dawes' judgment - I think that the cartoonist, Zapiro, should have exercised self-censorship by NOT submitting the cartoon in the first place. Let me explain this seeming paradox and argue for it.
Let's describe the cartoon in case you've not seen it. In the cartoon, the prophet is seen lying on a reclining chair in a shrink's office with a speech bubble that exclaims, "Other prophets have followers with a sense of humour!" Next to him is a newspaper with a headline that states ‘"Everybody draw Muhammad"' Day. A sub-header reads, ‘Fatwa on cartoonists'. This raises an obvious question: should the newspaper have published the cartoon?
First, there can be no doubt that freedom of expression, and media freedom more generally, are critically important cornerstones of our democracy. It is easy to rehearse the general moral arguments in favour of these freedoms and so justify and understand their place in our constitutional edifice. In essence, an open, deliberative society, which is what we are striving towards as part of the normative vision for this country, requires all of us to have relatively thick argumentative skin so that we could thoroughly and honestly debate issues that are critical to the growth and development of our nation.
Questions that centre on religion and religious identity are no exception. The point of the media, in turn, is to act as one important vehicle through which these freedoms can be enjoyed. The media's role is not to close down debate but to facilitate it. And, barring legal limitations on free speech, the media should, in general, err on the side of avoiding pre-publication censorship and deferring instead to the marketplace of ideas for sensible speech to be distinguished from senseless speech. Decisions about what counts as speech worth publishing are fraught with personal and institutional biases and that is why, in borderline cases, one should err on the side of publication.
With this general principle in hand, it seems to me that the M&G was justified in publishing the cartoon. The cartoon potentially occasions a number of substantive debates, such as the difficult question of what those of us who do not subscribe to a particular denomination should make of injunctions that stem from that denomination.
On a meta-level, the cartoon also raises the classic debate of what moral limits there should be on free speech. These limits are often context-specific so it is worth raising the question afresh, periodically, rather than assigning the debate to history as if one timeless moral truth had been established for all contexts henceforth.
An editor then needs to balance the benefits of potentially healthy conversations that might arise from the cartoon's publication with the less desirable possibility that some people might take offense that their prophet is depicted at all. The paper regarded the principle of freedom of expression, in this particular instance, to be overriding.
This is not to suggest that there should be no limits on free speech. There are legal limitations already. These legal limitations, such as prohibitions on hate speech or private law that prohibits speech that injures one's reputation, are good. They are also justified on independent ethical considerations.
But the mere fact that someone takes offense does not count as a reason to limit freedom of expression in a particular instance. There has to be a more demonstrable harm suffered by someone or a group or the likelihood of, say, imminent violence. These are difficult determinations. But it seems to me that too many devout religious followers assert a non-existing right to not be offended. No one has a right to not be offended by someone else's speech acts.
It is therefore bizarre that so much value is being attached to the offensiveness or blasphemous nature of the cartoon by some of the critics of the M&G's decision to publish. Why should the offensive nature count as a reason to limit a cartoonist's right to lampoon? And, in the absence of a right not to be offended, it seems that there is little further legal ground on which religious followers might rest their case for why the newspaper ought to have censured its cartoonist short of proving hate speech.
My view, of course, is an articulation of free speech and media freedom that rest on a very wide interpretation of what ought to be legally permitted in a liberal society. No doubt argument might yet be put for why, even in an open, deliberative society, greater moral and legal weight should be placed on the offensive or blasphemous speech acts. I have not, however, come across such an argument over the past few days.
Yet, despite this defence of the newspaper's decision to publish the cartoon, we could still ask whether Zapiro himself made the right judgment call. The answer is not an obvious yes. We have to distinguish the cartoonist's right to lampoon and offend from his decision to do so.
Artistic and intellectual freedom, in my view, justify the implicit decision by the editor to defer to the cartoonist's personal judgment on what cartoon to publish. This is not to say an editor should never intervene. But, as Dawes pointed out, he would have stepped in as editor if this cartoon resembled those published in Denmark, which were more demonstrably Islamophobic, such as the one which depicted Muhammad as wearing a turban made of bombs. But Dawes rightly decided that in the absence of outright hate speech, he will defer to the cartoonist.
This leaves us open to ask whether the cartoonist needed to exercise his right to offend. And it seems to me that he could have opted for self-censorship without thereby losing sleep in a fit of bother about whether he is becoming meek. He would not be losing his general power as a provocative commentator. Instead, self-censorship would be justified by the contextual fact that the politico-religious sentiment of the day requires sensitivity on the part of artists, writers, commentators. This is context-specific and need not translate as a slippery slope towards a permanent erosion of substantive media freedom.
The reality is that many, even if not all, Muslims do feel deeply about the question of whether or not their spiritual head is depicted at all - with or without a buffet of bombs and heavenly virgins. The question is why us non-believers are hell-bent on showing off our legal right to piss off these particular segments within the Muslim world? Why get tjatjarag just because you can?!
We need to distinguish not only between legal and moral norms, as I often insist, but in fact also add to that distinction by recognising (at the risk of making hard-ass libertarians laugh out loud), considerations of etiquette. The SOLE set of norms that defenders of Zapiro have relied on have been the legal ones; shades of moral argument (not fully cashed out) sometimes lurk in the background.
But, no one has meditated on the personal judgment call that the artist himself can and does make about how to respond to a range of considerations, including an etiquette of decency, when there is no major moral, epistemic or other gain to be had from producing a particular artwork. I refuse to believe that Zapiro's cartoon has added an iota of value to our general understanding of, or debate about, religion or free speech.
We learnt nothing we did not know on Thursday morning. It was therefore dispensable, not least in the face of these ethical pressures and considerations of etiquette, which are not morally eliminable. This is NOT - I repeat - to suggest that his legal right should be clipped (and hence my support of Dawes); but it is to offer a critique of his personal judgment about submitting the cartoon to Dawes in the first place. He should have probed his own motivations much more deeply.
The greater moral here is that cherishing our freedoms in a new democracy need not imply a boisterous assertion of each right on every available occasion. Why offend just because you are entitled to?
In the end, therefore, the newspaper was right to not mess with the cartoonist's legal entitlement to express himself freely. But our beloved cartoonist, in his turn, was ethically hasty in choosing to exercise his right to lampoon just because he can. Or because the brute, masculine demonstration of a right seems to have become his sole mark of exhibiting artistic and intellectual freedom.
Self-censorship is boring but sometimes appropriate and certainly not necessarily a sign of the erosion of our freedoms. Even John Stuart Mill would have agreed with me.
Ferial Haffajee from City Press opined that she may have resigned in the face of a seemingly intractable moral dilemma: her intuitions pull in two different directions; on the one hand, the free speech champion in her demands that she should publish, but a sense of respect and awareness of religious sensitivities that are not unimportant, in her view, pull in a different direction.
Ray Hartley from the Sunday Times expressed a more firm conviction that he would not have published. Peter Bruce from Business Day and Sunday Independent's Makhudu Sefara declined my tjatjarag sms-attempts to solicit their views.
Nic Dawes, from the M&G, justified publication in part on the basis that he would not have published the Danish cartoons which were more clearly Islamophobic, in his view; this cartoon, however, did not have such overtones....translation: Zapiro did not plant bombs in Muhammad's turban, and that's the critical and relevant moral line for Mr Dawes.
Who is right? Well, ethical debates are not logical puzzles. One sad fact about the divisive nature of this debate is a lack of understanding by all who hold strong views - on both sides of the issue - that ethical debate is inherently murky. Yes, some arguments are stronger than others. I have yet to see a compelling moral argument for racism, for example. But these clear cases obscure the majority of inherently difficult cases.
Sometimes (and this cartoon debacle is one such case, contrary to the convictions of BOTH libertarians and religious fundamentalists) ethical debate must end, however unsatisfying, in rock-bottom intuition differences about how to balance competing ethical considerations. I can therefore only put and explain my own view. You may or not agree with it.
Bluntly put, I think that the M&G, qua newspaper, and Nic Dawes as editor, were spot-on in their decision to publish the cartoon. In an ethical twist, however - which may or may not satisfy those who agree with my endorsement of Dawes' judgment - I think that the cartoonist, Zapiro, should have exercised self-censorship by NOT submitting the cartoon in the first place. Let me explain this seeming paradox and argue for it.
Let's describe the cartoon in case you've not seen it. In the cartoon, the prophet is seen lying on a reclining chair in a shrink's office with a speech bubble that exclaims, "Other prophets have followers with a sense of humour!" Next to him is a newspaper with a headline that states ‘"Everybody draw Muhammad"' Day. A sub-header reads, ‘Fatwa on cartoonists'. This raises an obvious question: should the newspaper have published the cartoon?
First, there can be no doubt that freedom of expression, and media freedom more generally, are critically important cornerstones of our democracy. It is easy to rehearse the general moral arguments in favour of these freedoms and so justify and understand their place in our constitutional edifice. In essence, an open, deliberative society, which is what we are striving towards as part of the normative vision for this country, requires all of us to have relatively thick argumentative skin so that we could thoroughly and honestly debate issues that are critical to the growth and development of our nation.
Questions that centre on religion and religious identity are no exception. The point of the media, in turn, is to act as one important vehicle through which these freedoms can be enjoyed. The media's role is not to close down debate but to facilitate it. And, barring legal limitations on free speech, the media should, in general, err on the side of avoiding pre-publication censorship and deferring instead to the marketplace of ideas for sensible speech to be distinguished from senseless speech. Decisions about what counts as speech worth publishing are fraught with personal and institutional biases and that is why, in borderline cases, one should err on the side of publication.
With this general principle in hand, it seems to me that the M&G was justified in publishing the cartoon. The cartoon potentially occasions a number of substantive debates, such as the difficult question of what those of us who do not subscribe to a particular denomination should make of injunctions that stem from that denomination.
On a meta-level, the cartoon also raises the classic debate of what moral limits there should be on free speech. These limits are often context-specific so it is worth raising the question afresh, periodically, rather than assigning the debate to history as if one timeless moral truth had been established for all contexts henceforth.
An editor then needs to balance the benefits of potentially healthy conversations that might arise from the cartoon's publication with the less desirable possibility that some people might take offense that their prophet is depicted at all. The paper regarded the principle of freedom of expression, in this particular instance, to be overriding.
This is not to suggest that there should be no limits on free speech. There are legal limitations already. These legal limitations, such as prohibitions on hate speech or private law that prohibits speech that injures one's reputation, are good. They are also justified on independent ethical considerations.
But the mere fact that someone takes offense does not count as a reason to limit freedom of expression in a particular instance. There has to be a more demonstrable harm suffered by someone or a group or the likelihood of, say, imminent violence. These are difficult determinations. But it seems to me that too many devout religious followers assert a non-existing right to not be offended. No one has a right to not be offended by someone else's speech acts.
It is therefore bizarre that so much value is being attached to the offensiveness or blasphemous nature of the cartoon by some of the critics of the M&G's decision to publish. Why should the offensive nature count as a reason to limit a cartoonist's right to lampoon? And, in the absence of a right not to be offended, it seems that there is little further legal ground on which religious followers might rest their case for why the newspaper ought to have censured its cartoonist short of proving hate speech.
My view, of course, is an articulation of free speech and media freedom that rest on a very wide interpretation of what ought to be legally permitted in a liberal society. No doubt argument might yet be put for why, even in an open, deliberative society, greater moral and legal weight should be placed on the offensive or blasphemous speech acts. I have not, however, come across such an argument over the past few days.
Yet, despite this defence of the newspaper's decision to publish the cartoon, we could still ask whether Zapiro himself made the right judgment call. The answer is not an obvious yes. We have to distinguish the cartoonist's right to lampoon and offend from his decision to do so.
Artistic and intellectual freedom, in my view, justify the implicit decision by the editor to defer to the cartoonist's personal judgment on what cartoon to publish. This is not to say an editor should never intervene. But, as Dawes pointed out, he would have stepped in as editor if this cartoon resembled those published in Denmark, which were more demonstrably Islamophobic, such as the one which depicted Muhammad as wearing a turban made of bombs. But Dawes rightly decided that in the absence of outright hate speech, he will defer to the cartoonist.
This leaves us open to ask whether the cartoonist needed to exercise his right to offend. And it seems to me that he could have opted for self-censorship without thereby losing sleep in a fit of bother about whether he is becoming meek. He would not be losing his general power as a provocative commentator. Instead, self-censorship would be justified by the contextual fact that the politico-religious sentiment of the day requires sensitivity on the part of artists, writers, commentators. This is context-specific and need not translate as a slippery slope towards a permanent erosion of substantive media freedom.
The reality is that many, even if not all, Muslims do feel deeply about the question of whether or not their spiritual head is depicted at all - with or without a buffet of bombs and heavenly virgins. The question is why us non-believers are hell-bent on showing off our legal right to piss off these particular segments within the Muslim world? Why get tjatjarag just because you can?!
We need to distinguish not only between legal and moral norms, as I often insist, but in fact also add to that distinction by recognising (at the risk of making hard-ass libertarians laugh out loud), considerations of etiquette. The SOLE set of norms that defenders of Zapiro have relied on have been the legal ones; shades of moral argument (not fully cashed out) sometimes lurk in the background.
But, no one has meditated on the personal judgment call that the artist himself can and does make about how to respond to a range of considerations, including an etiquette of decency, when there is no major moral, epistemic or other gain to be had from producing a particular artwork. I refuse to believe that Zapiro's cartoon has added an iota of value to our general understanding of, or debate about, religion or free speech.
We learnt nothing we did not know on Thursday morning. It was therefore dispensable, not least in the face of these ethical pressures and considerations of etiquette, which are not morally eliminable. This is NOT - I repeat - to suggest that his legal right should be clipped (and hence my support of Dawes); but it is to offer a critique of his personal judgment about submitting the cartoon to Dawes in the first place. He should have probed his own motivations much more deeply.
The greater moral here is that cherishing our freedoms in a new democracy need not imply a boisterous assertion of each right on every available occasion. Why offend just because you are entitled to?
In the end, therefore, the newspaper was right to not mess with the cartoonist's legal entitlement to express himself freely. But our beloved cartoonist, in his turn, was ethically hasty in choosing to exercise his right to lampoon just because he can. Or because the brute, masculine demonstration of a right seems to have become his sole mark of exhibiting artistic and intellectual freedom.
Self-censorship is boring but sometimes appropriate and certainly not necessarily a sign of the erosion of our freedoms. Even John Stuart Mill would have agreed with me.
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