In Politics Aristotle advised that in order to preserve an established constitutional order one has to be on the guard against the beginnings of evils. A system can be overturned by "small degrees; I mean that a great change may sometimes slip into the constitution through neglect of a small matter."
Thus, a key role of political writers and intellectuals in a modern constitutional democracy is - in Aristotle's evocative words - to "bring distant dangers near, in order that the citizens may be on their guard, and, like sentinels in a night-watch, never relax their attention."
Unfortunately, in the early years of ANC rule the English universities and press largely abrogated this responsibility. There was a general submission across the established and most powerful institutions of civil society to the ‘will of the majority' as embodied in the ANC.
To give but one example of this: The ANC's programme of deploying party loyalists to all key positions in the state attracted minimal critical comment - despite the obvious threat this posed to constitutional government (let alone good governance) in this country. Indeed, many newspapers welcomed this policy and did their best to ease its implementation by dampening down concern about its implications.
In an editorial in July 1998 Business Day took the optimistic view "Because they cannot be accused of subverting the new order or serving minority interests, ANC appointees may, in fact, be less vulnerable to political pressure."
A high level ANC document released in October that year should have dispelled any doubts about the party's real intentions. It stated that, "Transformation of the state entails, first and foremost, extending the power of the National Liberation Movement over all levers of power: the army, the police, the bureaucracy, intelligence structures, the judiciary, parastatals, and agencies such as regulatory bodies, the public broadcaster, the central bank and so on.
"This could", Business Day conceded in a further editorial, "indicate plans to weaken the constitutionally guaranteed independence several of these institutions enjoy. But it is more likely to be a code for accelerated affirmative action in strategically important state posts." The appointment of a certain Mbeki loyalist named Jackie Selebi to the position of chief of police in October 1999 was hailed by almost every single English-language newspaper in the country.
This country is now paying the price for that earlier complacency. The consequences of that particular policy of conflating party and state is now recognised to have been disastrous. More generally, post-Polokwane, South Africa is being deluged by the effects of bad policies waved through in the last few years of the twentieth century.
In the late 1990s there was a topsy-turvy moral atmosphere in South Africa which has, thankfully, largely dissipated. But there were structural problems as well. There were critical voices around at that time but the problem they had was in gaining a hearing. The two main English language newspaper groups - which had been shifted to a pro-ANC stance by that time - were able to set themselves up as gatekeepers against unwelcome news and unwanted opinion. Those who disturbed the ‘national consensus' by raising the alarm about certain government policies were accused of ‘scare-mongering' and ostracised.
The press is today far more critical and outspoken than it was then. However, it still suffers from a tendency to 'hunt as a pack' and an inability to look forward to the likely consequences of present day policies and actions. Its current independent-mindedness has as much to do with the current divisions within the ANC as any newfound inner strength.
The expansion of internet access in this country is important politically then, for it has the potential to provide South Africa with two additional defences against encroachments on our liberty. From ancient times to modern tyrants - or those aspiring to be classed as such - have sought to suppress free debate and discussion, to atomise their societies, deny dissenters the support and camaraderie of others, and reduce individuals to "moral loneliness and isolation." Equally, countering the threat of tyranny has required measures that run in the opposite direction to those necessary for its realisation.
The first additional defence the internet (or electronic communication more generally) can provide is that is that it makes it much more difficult for rulers to isolate their subjects. In the nineteenth century Alexis de Tocqueville noted the crucial role newspapers played in democratic countries. In such polities, he wrote, "it frequently happens that a great number of men who wish or who want to combine cannot accomplish it because as they are very insignificant and lost amid the crowd, they cannot see and do not know where to find another. A newspaper then takes up the notion or the feeling that had occurred simultaneously, but singly, to each of them. All are then immediately guided towards this beacon; and these wandering minds, which had long sought each other in darkness, at length meet and unite. The newspaper brought them together, and the newspaper is still necessary to keep them united."
However, by the second half of the twentieth century the cost of physically producing written material had created huge barriers to entry. For instance, print and distribution costs for a newspaper like the Los Angeles Times account for just under 90 percent of overheads. This created a trend towards monopoly or duopoly. It put newspaper groups in the position where - if they so wished - they could limit the flow of news and opinion, as much as facilitate it.
Thus, after Ireland's Independent Group bought the old Argus group the new owners were able, in the space of a few years, to shift the bulk of South Africa's English-language press from an independent to a pro-government stance. Liberal-minded editors, columnists and journalists were squeezed out and there was nowhere really for their disaffected readers to go. (It was marginal institutions such as the Democratic Party, the Mail & Guardian, the Treatment Action Campaign, the SACP, and Solidarity which took the lead in mobilising, in different ways, against the Mbeki-ite agenda.)
By largely removing the costs of publication and distribution the internet offers a return to a more pluralistic media - less dependent on the bona fides of the owners of a few big media conglomerates or the government. For instance, those campaigning to have Jacob Zuma elected as ANC president came together, not through a newspaper, but at the Friends of Jacob Zuma website. Meanwhile, at the centre of all efforts to dig out the full truth about the arms-deal has been Richard Young's Arms Deal Virtual Press Office. The ANC itself recently revealed that its weekly online journal ANC Today, launched in January 2001 by Thabo Mbeki, now "has over 16,000 subscribers who receive it by e-mail every Friday."
The second additional defence the internet provides is that it allows for information to be communicated instantaneously across the world. Edmund Burke famously wrote that "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." In the same passage from which that quote originates Burke argued that: "Whilst men are linked together, they easily and speedily communicate the alarm of an evil design. They are enabled to fathom it with common counsel, and to oppose it with united strength. Whereas, when they lie dispersed, without concert, order, or discipline, communication is uncertain, counsel difficult, and resistance impracticable."
Thus, to conclude, the internet offers South Africa a return to a more varied media - one more difficult to coerce or control. Just as newspapers did in the nineteenth century, websites can light new beacons around which the lost but like-minded can at last meet and unite. At its best the web allows for the news of "evil designs" to be exposed and speedily communicated. It also provides the means through which the good can rapidly organise against them. This is the great promise of the internet in a country such as our own, which remains so vulnerable to tyranny and the combinations of bad men.
To subscribe to the Politicsweb newsletter click here.
