Published since September 1843 to take part in “a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress" The Economist

Politics is the emperor of Complex Systems and the terrain on which grand theories go to be tested to destruction. Politics is in our DNA and we are the only species that, in theory at least, is capable of foresight and goal-directed behaviour.

As I pointed out in my previous post on the demise of simple determinism and the rise of complexity there is no-one in control. The best we can do as individuals or as collectives is to nudge South Africa towards a workable politics.

Small nudges generally work the best and allow for course correction and more accurate steering. They also work better if you have a relatively sound picture of the (constantly changing) terrain and some consensus on broad strategy and direction. Of course, there lies the rub.

Agreement is difficult to come by even in well-designed and managed political systems. In historically shaky societies like South Africa, finger pointing, mud-slinging and moral posturing become the coin of the political realm.

Along with this, there is a tendency for South Africans to see their predicament as unique and exceptional. In detail that's true of every society (maybe especially South Africa) but in broad terms we not special, either in the degree of suffering or the incompetence and moral failure of our government.

Neither South Africans as a collective or anyone else can afford innocence, ignorance or self-serving cynicism any longer. The world is changing too fast and too dramatically for humanity to hope things will just pan out for the best.

These metaphorical generalities need to be fleshed out. Individuals may decide the deck is too stacked against a Southern African revival and depart for better prospects. That process is on-going, and has been for at least 75 years, contributing to our loss of human and economic capital. Certainly in the short-term this is concerning, though the long-term consequences are not as clear.

This column is not about assigning blame but about the human predicament generally and, more specifically, about Southern Africa. A brief reminder: South Africa as a nation-state is a human construct dating back a little more than a century.

The South Africa Act, 1909, enacted by the British Parliament, created the Union of South Africa (formally proclaimed on 31 May 1910) to accommodate the interests of the major regional political actors, notably of course, those of the United Kingdom.

In terms of the times it was not particularly unenlightened but contained two provisions which together have been the source of serious political discord and dysfunction to the present.

Firstly, it created far greater state centralisation than, for example, pertaining in Canada and Australia, fellow members of the British Commo9nwealth. And, secondly, it ignored the legitimate political needs of the black African inhabitants of the Union. In the course of decades the short-term, the parochial vision and ethnic affiliations of South African whites eventually stripped away even the attenuated political rights of the Cape (and Natal) Coloured and Black voters and South Africa.

Thus the limited democracy retained in the South African Republic created in 1961 was discredited and subverted by the machinations of the ruling National Party and by its fellow travellers and enablers. South Africa retreated into its laager and substituted force and political gerrymandering for vision and enlightened pragmatism.

Statism and the failure of a realistic liberalism to gain real power in South Africa set the stage for the moral and economic disaster of the present. An honest politics cannot arise from a foundation of denial.

This is a philosophic and historical minefield which I do not want to enter here except to note that moral judgements applied to one must be applied to all equally. Without that no possible progress can be made. We cannot hold the ANC and its allies to account without confronting our own past as individuals and collectives. Nor can we mine the goods that colonialism delivered without acknowledging its failures of imagination and moral vision.

The question that South Africa faces is how to shape its future? Or to put it more precisely: how do we improve the future prospects of the peoples occupying the Southern tip of Africa? Past decisions and constructs act as constraints on current actions but they should not be treated as straitjackets.

The road to redemption in South Africa is unusually tortuous and potholed. In my view a list of the most important obstacles include:

1. A weak, highly factionalised, insecure political elite trapped in the self-reinforcing dynamics of obsolete dogmas and self-serving historical narratives. Lacking a coherent sense of national identity or destiny the ANC elite desperately pursue wealth and power. Unable to govern South Africa effectively they nurse the status of victimhood for political advantage internally and externally. Together the power of fear and patronage maintains the ANC 's tenuous grip on power.

2. As a result of weak and corrupt leadership the ANC Cartel has enabled the spread of organised crime which has become a political as well as a social reality in this country. Organised crime constrains the actions of the politicians rather than the reverse. They cannot reply on the loyalty or the competence of the police, the military or the security apparatus and have systematically undermined the institutions of democratic governance for reasons of short-term expediency.

3. A highly unequal society in which the majority live under the constant threat of violence, food and housing insecurity and a sense of personal powerlessness and collective grievance, breeds anger, low-trust and short-termism. It's a fertile soil for corruption, criminality and extortion as the only means of bargaining with authority.

4. The single real achievement of the ANC era has been the creation of a black middle class. This was a vital step towards the liberation of South African potential. Unfortunately ANC political strategy has tied this positive development to the politics of patronage, ethnic chauvinism and corruption as the path to success. For this purpose the woke ideology of victimhood and grievance has been a useful mobilisation tool.

5. The outcome is a failing state in which political mafias compete for power and access to rents. However, this process has stopped short of full authoritarianism. This offers opportunities for incremental but significant progress. The window of opportunity is narrow and needs to be exploited before it's too late.

I want to end this essay by drawing the threads together in a call for Liberalism as a guiding philosophy, but not as an ideology.

The besetting sin of political debate is the crystallization of fluid ideas into ideological doctrines imposed on the messy complexity of reality. These serve as signals and sacred values for tribal mobilisation in the arena of political conflict - see References and Notes below (and of course many other places) for some details.

What would a Philosophy of Liberalism look like in actual political practice? To cut a long   story short, it would rest upon the necessity for diverse human collectives to coordinate sufficiently in order to survive and thrive without descent into violent conflict and chaos (outright state failure) or into authoritarianism.

In even more abstract terms it aims to maximise human freedom and potential while sustaining sufficiently social cohesion to solve the recurrent problems of the human ecological niche. This is the core challenge of human existence as a social species of a special kind.

It is a philosophy, not an ideology because the specific solutions will vary with context and contingent factors. There isn't one liberalism. It's a family of political solutions around a central workable philosophic core.

In further essays this idea will be unpacked more fully in the South African context. But I cannot end without adding this postscript.

We can't turn the South African ship around without cleaning up the detritus from our past. We can only do that by acknowledging openly and frankly the sins and errors of our history and also the good that we have done. South African history, like all human history, is a mosaic of good and bad and no class or race or religion is exempt. I would make this deep housecleaning an annual event in which the whole South African population is invited to contribute in one way or another. This is NOT my last word on this essential issue.

References and Notes

1. The marketplace of rationalizations by Dan Williams https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266267121000389

2. Interventions to reduce partisan animosity by Rachel Hartman et al https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01442-3

3. Strange bedfellows: the Alliance Theory of political belief systems by David Pinsof et al https://psyarxiv.com/scmhe

Mark Berger