Always space for firm courage

Xolela Mangcu

Just as I was about to knock off from work on Friday, I received an e-mail from David Bullard. What struck me about it was not the torrent of openly racist abuse – the language is unprintable in a family newspaper. But that’s par for the course for Bullard.

What should be of public concern for the future of race relations in this country is that Bullard was not shy to sign the letter as “unreconstructed w.t.f. racist”, and to urge me to report it to the police as crimen injuria.

What he was saying is that racists can get away with their words and actions without any prospect of going to jail for it. This speaks not only to the condition of black powerlessness in this country, but to what I have previously described as racist recidivism or psychosis. But it also shows who is aligning with whom at UCT.

This all requires a new vision based on a collective response from all decent black and white people who want their children to enjoy a peaceful future in this country. To be sure, there is nothing we can do about racists without falling into the violence they provoke. The best we can do is give them what the distinguished social theorist Michael Walzer called “a sectarian existence”, in an essay titled Civil Society Argument.

The term “civil” is a double entendre in this case. There is the commonplace reference to civil society as that body of institutions that exist outside the state and business, albeit always in some relation to them. But there is civility in the sense described by my good friend and co-teacher at the New School for Social Research Jeremy Goldfarb. Civility means we can disagree with each other, and do so vehemently, without having to throw racist epithets and insults at each other.

Anyone who believes that argumentation is not possible without degrading other people does not belong in a university. Civility behooves those of us at the university to take heed of Max Weber’s distinction between the “ethics of ends” and the “ethics of responsibility”, and perhaps make that Weber article required reading for all our students.

In Politics As A Vocation, Weber noted that the “ethics of ends” refers to our passions, which means no individual is without deeply held beliefs. But what distinguishes the astute politician and intellectual is the ability to subject those selfsame beliefs to discipline, always bearing in mind what Weber called “the average deficiencies of people”. Or as Kwame Anthony Appiah put it in Ethics of Identity: “We do well to pay obeisance to fallibilism.”

The failure to find a balance between “passion, a feeling of responsibility and a sense of proportion” does not bode well for building a political community, let alone an intellectual community.

Compromise may be the only thing that stands between the truth of our convictions and an unyielding fundamentalism. But human societies have evolved enough to know that there are certain points when compromise becomes impossible. Or as Robert Weissberg better put it: “Unadulterated tolerance is a dangerous illusion. To embrace all fanciful notions as worthy of political protection can be as subversive of democratic life as permitting zero deviation.”

There are good reasons why democratic societies impose limitations on toleration, and outlaw hate speech. Terrible things happen when individuals cross the line to degrade each other’s dignities. The Germans presented themselves as victims of the Jews, and that produced the Holocaust. The Hutus saw themselves as victims of the Tutsi, and that led to the deaths of a million. The black South Africans saw themselves as victims of African migrants, and it led to unspeakable violence. A young man woke up one day, dressed himself in a hateful symbol and mowed down nine people in cold blood. And it all starts with the prejudice of seeing the other as inferior and undeserving in every way – including of life.

Those of us who have lived the consequences of hate have a responsibility to call out those who threaten to take us back to that past with their words. Those who fill the letters pages of newspapers with racist venom cannot be expected to subject themselves to the discipline that Weber counselled, nor do they know what it means to lose friends to what the legendary US television broadcaster Mike Wallace called “the hate that hate produced”. They have come to take for granted the peace we enjoy. Like daredevils, they keep calling violence’s bluff. Why they do this beggars the mind.

Those of us at UCT have a choice in this matter. We can go with the daredevils or we can go along with the observation that “the arch of the moral universe bends towards justice”. It has been like that and it will always be like that. Evil never wins, and racism saps the political and intellectual energies of a people. It steals the future of our children from them. To overcome its hold will require courage and imagination. Courage to break out of our inherited ways of thinking about the world; on race, class, gender, sexual orientation and migrants. That is the meaning of modernity in its most altruistic and richest sense.

Our country took a long time to come to that realisation because of the vision of people like Nelson Mandela, Robert Sobukwe, Steve Biko and others. Because of their sacrifices, we became part of the community of nations again and we luxuriate in the relationships we have built with the best universities in the world. Why would we allow racists among us to take us back to a time when no one would not touch us with a barge pole?

But why would we want to take our children into such a dark past when a cosmopolitan future is calling with all its possibilities? I see that future every day among the best of my classrooms – black and white. They show more intellectual creativity and courage than the professors. But then again, that has been the historical role of youth. Please don’t hold them back with your fears. Let them free themelves to become citizens of the world. As Martin Luther King jr would say, “Let freedom reign”.

In the document “Pope Francis’ Encyclical”, Francis urges us to cross the useless distinctions between disciplines such as the arts and sciences. He cautions against a “romantic individualism” that places reason above human emotion: “This paradigm exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object. This subject makes every effort to establish the scientific and experimental method, which in itself is already a technique of possession, mastery and transformation.”

Francis urges us to find a more humanistic way of thinking about higher education and about each other. This is what Biko called the quest for true humanity. But to hear it coming from the words of the most influential religious leader in the world is not only a vindication of Biko’s insights, but all of those who, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, have always helped us find “the better angels of our nature”.

But then, as he laments, “Each age tends to have only a meagre awareness of its own limitations. It is possible that we do not grasp the gravity of the challenges now before us”. To bring us into that consciousness will require leadership, courage, imagination and generosity in equal measure. Daredevils of a nobler kind.

l Mangcu is Associate Professor of Sociology at UCT