Humane policy needed

I WRITE in response to Professor Rajendra Chetty’s article (“Flats schools failed by the system”, Weekend Argus, February 20) on how society failed and fails the schooling system on the Cape Flats as gangs flourish all over.

Prof Chetty rightly points to the social, political and economic reasons underlying the sad state of those areas.

Later in his article he describes the core of the origins of this ongoing tragedy as the capitalistic economic system which favours business entrepeneurs who are deemed successful human beings and are hailed as the yardstick of what is regarded as triumphantly human, with a balanced middle class as the cement of this societal canon.

The underlying psyche of this approach is that money, accrual of materialistic assets and the display of such one-dimensional success are what we want to encounter in society and that this should be the anchor of our existence.

The losers, the poor, physically and more so the psychologically damaged people are looked on as a nuisance, as reaping what they themselves have sowed and displaying a lack of breeding, spirit or values, and plain laziness. This view means simply overlooking the consequences of the historic structural violence of the past.

We should consider abandoning such easy perceptions of the status quo and looking deeper into this cancerous dogmatism and what it does to the human species.

I am not an agitator for a socialist approach as if that would eradicate the problem of the extreme disparities between the higher classes and the rest. It is more than likely that humans will simply use such a system, or the next one to come along, to shrewd advantage. People will bring their own subjectivity, egotism and base survival-at-all-costs approach – and just finding another way to play the game.

But I do wish such an approach may await us on some distant horizon when we really find it possible to become altruistically human.

I also cannot propagate the idea that the spiritual community or communities should show us the way to humaneness because, as things stand, millions of people adhere to Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and so on and yet keep on feathering their own beds, claiming this is an expression of a cultured society.

They talk about the “holy” duty to uplift the poor and the hopeless, they listen to sermons pleading such an approach and they have sentimental feelings to match this “spiritual” experience, but will go home and the very next day resume the fight for their own survival and bank the takings, while the plight of the discarded people is ignored.

What we need is an economic system that allows for a comfortable, meaningful social life, that allows entrepreneurs to excel, but which weds this to an intrinsically moral and practical approach to uplift people.

To be practical about the despairing people on the Cape Flats who live in fear of powerful gangs, we need also to acknowledge their ability to rise above their desolation and destitution.

They need jobs, so that a wife and children at home can await the breadwinner in proud joy at the end of the working day. They need to have homes that don’t succumb to rain or the fires that routinely sweep through their tin-and-cardboard settlements. They need their children to be able to attend quality schools, be taught by good teachers functioning within 21st century teaching systems. The children should not be hungry, or scared to cross streets where gangsters rule according to the law of the jungle. They need social workers and psychologists. They need to start hoping again that the future may be theirs too.

But without a concerted effort by political leaders, effective delivery of municipal services, the practical participation of religious and civil society entities on a daily programme of action, these people will be trapped in their existential jails and the decay will only increase.

Some might suggest I forget this desperate cry for a humane society and buy myself a new vehicle to pour yet more gas into the atmosphere, and revel in approval of the in-crowd for participating in what far too many regard as a meaningful existence.