Moral Relativism can't defeat Moral Bankruptcy (on Political Corruption)
The Daily Maverick has managed, once more, to promote unthinking dogma. This time, in the form of an article by a former classmate of mine, Tove van Lennep. While ticking every box the University of Cape Town has taught young whites to tick in order to escape the blade of Fallism, it doesn't go much further than the undergrad curriculum. The fact that I have shared classes with this exceptionally beautiful and, to all intents and purposes, very good-natured young woman, has done little but amplify the sense of disappointment I felt when I saw her post come up in my facebook feed.
Framed in cautious devotion to Fallist dogma, and repetitive quotes from black left-wing Westerners like Fanon and Achebe, an unmistakable bigotry of low expectations turns what ought to be an investigation of a chronic national malaise, into a pale imitation of a dark philosophy, with all the willowy supplication of white guilt at the feet of black fascism. Her desperate white-guilt signalling with the use of black revolutionary philosophers betrays her racially coded viewpoint. By talking about Africans as being of a "collectivist culture", she is engaging in borderline racism herself. Talking about colonialism doesn't disguise that her perspective is ultimately equivalent to "they're black, so they can't help but steal".
It ignores the role of institutions, political leaders, and different sectors of society. Take, for example, this excerpt from Gerald Curtis's history of modern Japan:
Consider the following quote that reads as a rather typical assessment of Japan at the outset of its high-growth era in the late 1950s:
“What is absolutely new about this society which is accomplishing such marvels is that in all its many aspects—even including idealism and religion—it is working toward the single goal of production.. . . Hence a growing tendency to reduce all virtues to the primordial ideal of conformity....The nation is not individualistic in mentality....[T]he enthusiasm of collective action in accomplishing stupendous tasks [is] so overwhelming, that in almost mystical abandon, other considerations are neither heeded nor missed.”
The above quotation might read as a rather mainstream view of how culture has helped shape the modern Japanese economy, but it is not. It was written by a French author commenting not about Japan at all, but describing what he thought were the cultural features of the United States in the “roaring twenties".
Curtis's point (and indeed my own) is that leaders and managers of institutions have extraordinary power to transform society, and that "culture" is a bullshit heuristic. The government is corrupt, because the ANC is corrupt. The ANC is corrupt, because it tortured and murdered those who protested their corruption during operation in exile, Zuma being a prime culprit. Stalinist adherence to the party line, weeding out of "agents", and excusing everything as contributing to the greater struggle is why we are here. They absorbed the weapons of domination from the Leninist superpower bankrolling and training them, to the chagrin of many idealistic young followers. It is why Mandela and the old generation failed to make perfect common cause with the radicals returning from exile. The party in exile and the party at home were different, in ways that persisted in the split between Ramaphosa and Zuma in the present day. But once you make graft the rule rather than the exception, and death threats and demotions follow critics around, success depends on abandoning principle. The rest is recent history.
The defence in the public sphere from the past 30 years against any accusation of racism has been that the accusers were either white racist fictioneers, or else "kleva blacks" (can we just take a moment to appreciate the insidious genius of Zuma's spiteful, cynical group-signalling in that phrase? A kleva, in case you are too white to know, is a crook, a criminal. By calling black critics of ANC corruption "kleva", Zuma managed to combine education, criminality and housenegritude into a single epithet). Old white liberals, too trusting of the institutions their ancestors and peers built, kept calling out the vicious and corrosive corruption of these institutions, only to be told the same bullshit Tove is now repeating:
That it's all in service of racial justice, that white people stole through colonialism and, what is right and wrong, really? History, in this case, is no more than a vocabulary for communicating instructions in morality. When Tove tells us that the historical oppression of black people is the leading cause of corruption, that morality is flexible, and that peer pressure made them do it, she is utilising history to wave away moral judgment. Is there a penny of the profits of white corruption that she would forgive? No, of course not, because white people are held to a far higher standard. She doesn't believe black people are up to the task of being moral, unless a miracle, a revolution, happens.
Morality may vary, but it does not vary infinitely. Any ordinary person whose head has not entirely been rotted away by the prosperity gospel or new black fascism can tell Zuma, Malema, and so on, are corrupt. Intellectual reasoning allows you to repackage the immoral as the expedient, but any ordinary person can tell the difference between right and wrong. Others will excuse wrong actions as "acceptable" in service of some greater good, or attempt to ameliorate judgment by pointing to co-offenders. There is a fair point to made about normalisation, but in using it as a reason to reduce responsibility for their crimes, van Lennep further robs black politicians of their agency.
In my opinion, the short answer is that when people vote by ethnicity, they don't care about ethics or competence. When ethnic pride is valorised, ordinary people lose the capacity to defeat this effect. See Trump, Modi and Mugabe for examples, plus this quantitative study from Uttar Pradesh. In South Africa, the media, the politicians and the universities have been encouraging a maximisation of the racialisation of politics at every turn, the very currency of Zuma's zombie political career. Race-based redistribution, if it trumps all laws, norms and moral considerations, results in Zimbabwean-, Afrikaner-nationalist-, and Rwandan-style destruction of the nation and the community.
But Tove has no time to stop and think about consequences like that. It might make her look like a racist. So she tells us what she thinks we want to hear. Further than simple racial generalisation and oversimplification, which is par for the course with UCT graduates, incapable of loving both their own and another's culture at the same time, and consequently falling into oikophobic genuflection or black power fantasies. Worst of all, she seems to think, as the opening line in her article suggests, that without pursuing the indulgent angle she is, corruption will never be solved. But the EFF already believes everything she does, and more. And their corruption is even more blatant and vicious and self-entitled than the pustulating scars of the Zuma infection which still ooze the foul odour of graft from Cape Town to Thohoyandou.
All of this sophistry is not only wrong, it is completely unnecessary. The solution is dead simple. Uphold standards, expect more from black people, tolerate no crime, vote for someone else.