SA needs Zuma’s mess to toil for change
The history of mankind has inspiring stories of progress and wisdom just as it has chapters about villainous men
The thinking class today is gripped by a deep despondency. This is a result of the obvious and unsettling observation that our country is busy scoring own goals.
The expectation was that we would march forth in an orderly fashion down the road of progress. It seemed rational to move from Nelson Mandela the visionary reconciler to Thabo Mbeki the action man.
When Jacob Zuma ascended, he was also assumed to be part of a logical chain of progress. His halo as a freedom fighter made even the worst pessimists to say: “Let us give him a chance.”
The underlying idea is faith in the rationality of man – the idea that, armed with knowledge, we humans choose right over wrong. It is the same rationalist ideology that misled acclaimed political scientist Francis Fukuyama to declare “the end of history”.
The fall of the Berlin Wall conjured up images of man being awakened by the light of reason. His re-barbarisation was unimaginable since he was expected to cruise in the ether of rationalism.
What social theorists missed is precisely what our thinking class in South Africa missed: the fundamental paradox of man as an embodiment of both sanity and insanity.
We humans are at the same time sane and insane. At our best we make rational choices, and at times we are flummoxed by our very own acts of madness. Both wisdom and folly are constitutive of man.
Mandela embodied the shiner part of us, and Zuma has completed the picture of our true dark character. Man’s fundamental paradox – that is, his simultaneous sanity and insanity – defies knowledge.
Tomes in libraries testify to marvellous progress made by the human mind. Yet most of history is a tale of man slaughtering man, in wars that look truly insane to the rational eye.
It is the misreading of man’s essential nature that makes our thinking class in South Africa despondent. The promising start of 1994 had led them to embrace a delusional and self-comforting rationalist conception man, the idea of man as a traveller on the road towards progress.
Zuma has dramatically shattered Aristotle’s conception of man as a rational animal. Zuma, too, is a human being, not a beast. His brain looks more or less like yours.
Our souls will be tormented even further if we do not readjust our conception of man. A less romanticised view of man as a paradox of sanity and insanity would assist us to maintain mental balance in the face of faith-shattering political developments.
The point, however, is not to invent a lulling conception that will give us tranquillity in the face of turbulence; it is to prepare us for the good, the bad and the ugly as the necessary happenings of human life.
Most importantly, a realistic conception of man will both be a mental shatterproof and a constant alert to the ever-present possibility of trouble.
In his book, Straw Dogs, John Gray dramatises human nature. But his reading of modern political life is both sober and realistic. Political life, says Gray, “is an upshot of struggles in the murky realm where big business, organised crime, and the hidden parts of government view for control”.
Had we adopted this less euphoric conception of politics from the beginning, we would have celebrated the heroism of Mandela while anticipating the rogue element of the Guptas. That kind of attitude to politics would have made us welcome the contribution of the ANC to the liberation struggle. It would at the same time have enabled us to view the party with suspicious eyes, as a murky organisation that big business, organised crime and the hidden parts of government vie to control.
We are despondent, therefore, not because the weather is bad – to borrow Thabo Mbeki’s poetry – but because we lost ourselves in the triumphalism of our sunny day. Human beings by their nature don’t contemplate change when things are good; they behave as if the party will last forever. Only a crisis goads them to change course.
In a strange (and perhaps calamitous) sense, our current national crisis is a good thing, a shake up from the slumber of our quixotic conception of man. Such a thing is a myth.
We South Africans, like others in the world, are at the same time sane and insane. The possibility of fashioning a new politics after the Zuma mess lies precisely in this honest conception.