Here’s how history’s facts always come out

I HAD a strangely sobering thought this week, and it really was strange, considering the hours spent at the Mahogany Ridge, but what if we were all quite mistaken about our politicians? That they’re not the grubbing miscreants we so often take them for, but rather, inherently noble folk who, in their commitment to the public good, had unwittingly fallen victim to widespread self-delusion?

What brought about this odd notion was not the predictably unctuous speeches in defence of President Jacob Zuma’s feeble State of the Nation address (to which we shall return), but rather a fascinating new book by the Australian journalist Will Storr, The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science (Picador).

Researching the book, Storr spent time with a wide range of nutters.

There were, for example, yoga fundamentalists, UFO-spotters, those who babbled on about past life regression, and creationists who believed in Adam and Eve and that the Earth was a mere 6 000 years old. This is the fun part of The Heretics, running with those whose loopy beliefs, though demonstrably false, are, well, just loopy.

But then comes an altogether darker business. Storr travelled to Poland to join a group of racists and Adolf Hitler apologists on a tour of a Nazi death camp led by David Irving, disgraced academic and Holocaust denialist.

There Irving, a once-respected historian, led them to a gas chamber and said it was a fake, that it could not have been a place where Jews, homosexuals, communists and others were exterminated, because the door to the chamber had a handle on the inside and that anyone in that chamber could easily have opened the door. What kind of gas chamber was that?

Unfortunately – and this everyone in that strange group noticed, including Irving – that door also had two massive bolts on the outside which, once in place, meant that, handle or no handle, it stayed shut. Storr began to question why Irving had not mentioned this, and, more to the point, why it was that the simple facts of the matter – the bolts, in this case – just did not work with people like him.

Storr is amazed at Irving’s staggering ability to deceive himself and, exploring the psychology and neuroscience of belief, argues that we are all prone to confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance. Bottom line is that, according to Storr, it is the narratives we shape around us, the stories we tell ourselves about our world, that not only shape our beliefs but also selfdeception and a blanket denial of the facts.

But to the point. I suspect that, at the heart of the matter, this is what is “wrong” with Blade Nzimande, the minister of higher education. True, there are others like him, blinded to reason by toxic self-delusion, but Nzimande appears to have it really bad.

On Wednesday, during the State of the Nation debate, he spoke passionately ( and I suspect he sincerely believed in what he was saying) of how the president had “led from the front through leading concrete interventions”, such as the “stroke of genius” in splitting the former education department into two, to reverse the legacy of Verwoerdian apartheid and increase competency in mathematics among black children.

Yet nowhere is there a shred of evidence that this has in fact happened and, instead, the ranks of the unemployable grow larger still. Nzimande, like Irving, cannot bring himself to see the bolts in the door. There are no Einsteins out there. Period.

Nzimande ended his contribution to Wednesday’s business on an unintentionally ironic note: “As a student of historical materialism for the past 33 years, I now know that our struggle against, or collaboration with, apartheid will be told by history. History has got its own way of telling the truth, no matter how long it takes, about what roles our respective organisations played in the struggle against apartheid. History never forgets. History also tends to be very stubborn with its facts, and these facts will always in the end come out, no matter how long it may take.”

One has to agree. History is indeed very stubborn and the facts will always come out. They eventually emerged from Mao’s Great Leap Forward, just as they did from Stalin’s Soviet Union, and they will eventually emerge from Nkandla. And I am pleased that Nzimande is aware of this.

What I don’t get is that he still boasts of his devotion to historical materialism. Most students of historical materialism will tell you there’s nothing left of it – save the term itself.