Disunited in fear and bonded by binaries
In’April it s commies. it was The Nazis. roast-chicken-denying Now Gestapo has faded from the headlines, replaced by the hammer and sickle — finally available at hardware shops — of full-blown Stalinism. SA, I read most days, has become the Soviet Union.
I must say I find this hard to believe, not least because the Soviet Union built power stations that worked and most Soviet kiddies could read by the time they reached their teens. Where the comparison really falls apart, however, is when it comes to dissent. In the USSR, criticising the ruling Politburo made you a target. Here, it makes you the administrator of a Facebook group. In the USSR, members of the bourgeoisie who questioned the state were killed or sent to Siberia. In SA it’s only the poor who get beaten to death by soldiers.
No, in SA outraged criticism of the state isn’t just legal; in the past few weeks it’s become our largest industry. But we’re not just shouting at the government. Everyone is sniping at everyone else, from the “do your own research” crowd (translation: “gorge on confirmation bias”) to those who are legitimately overwhelmed by the complexity and volume of the information coming at us. Inevitably, the lure of finding relief in easy binaries has become almost irresistible.
During a television interview on Thursday the DA’s John Steenhuisen suggested South Africans are “fed-up” with the lockdown. SABC anchor Flo Letoaba took issue with his generalisation and asked him to define which South Africans he was speaking on behalf of, and, somewhat bizarrely, where they were.
The next morning, #JohnSpeaksForMe was trending on Twitter. A few hours later #JohnDoesn’tSpeakForMe trended. Unsurprisingly, #JohnSpeaksToMyCurrent CircumstancesButIConcedeThat ThisIsAllVeryComplicatedAnd IHaveSomeMajorReservations didn’t trend. Nor did #John’sCareerDependsOn CreatingTheImpressionThatHe SpeaksForAllSouthAfricans WhileFlo’sDependsOnAsking SpikyQuestionsThatWill Generate Buzz.
In its final moments the interview boiled down to its emotional essence.
“If I look at social media,” said Letoaba, “a lot of people are saying that there should be lockdown regulations to protect South Africans.”
“Well,” replied Steenhuisen, “a lot of people are not.”
It was dismal, but supremely illustrative of our current moment. Because beneath the performance of leadership and interrogation, the scene was one that is playing out everywhere: two South Africans, each sure of their own position, getting irritated with each other about a virus and a government neither of them has any control over whatsoever.
In the absence of information — or information we trust, or understand, or which adequately explains what we’re seeing — many of us are resorting to the thin-skinned, brittle self-righteousness that so often tries and fails to cover up fear. But even in our fear we are disunited as many dread financial ruin more than the virus while some fear the state more than either.
We can’t even agree on what to worry about most.
Perhaps that’s because SA was such a brutal place before the virus even arrived and has warped our perception of what an “acceptable” Covid-19 death toll looks like. When 20,000 South Africans are murdered and 14,000 die on the roads, we call that a normal year. So how do we wrap our psyches around unprecedented social change and economic destruction for a figure that will, at least on the current evidence, be substantially smaller than those 34,000 deaths that happen each year without triggering the deployment of the entire army?
I don’t know, but I do know these times require us to do more than to adopt dogmatic positions. This is very difficult. I find it almost physically uncomfortable to believe, as I do, that the government’s decision to lock down hard and fast has saved many lives and was in the best interests of the poor, and that it has ruined many lives and has done massive damage to the poor, and that business needs to be restarted as soon as possible to save SA’s workers, and that business has a long history of seeing those same workers as entirely disposable and therefore its motives for restarting as soon as possible should be treated with some suspicion, and that scientists need to be listened to, except the scientists who are getting it wrong, who are indistinguishable from the ones who are getting it right, because I simply don’t know enough.
Still, perhaps that’ sa necessary discomfort. Because, as the saying goes, it ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
THE SCENE WAS ONE THAT IS PLAYING OUT EVERYWHERE: TWO SOUTH AFRICANS, EACH SURE OF THEIR OWN POSITION