Brexit: the end of the beginning

 

Brexit has not been 'done': anyone who has followed the plot at all will know January 31 2020 is only the date when negotiations between the UK and the EU start at last. But at least the date marks a new situation, the release Britain's democracy reportedly longed for, so let us pause and look at events so far.

 

In the end it was as simple as Boris Johnson has always striven to make it appear. What was necessary was a hand-picked cabinet of right wingers, Mr Dominic Cummings' hard-faced control and power to dismiss or ruin anyone who did not stay on message, and Mr Johnson's ability to reduce any serious matter to a laugh.

 

His 'oven-ready' Brexit recipe ('Gas Mark Four in the Microwave' was Mr Johnson's populist pleasantry on the campaign trail to spice up a more indigestible hash than the one he had earlier turned his nose up at and replace his original appetiser of your-cake-and-eat-it - but why not another culinary trope if it works?) was then swallowed gratefully in the general election.

 

There is no arguing with an election; that is liberal democracy even if a dated, simple-majority, advisory referendum presented as a mandate is arguably not. So what went wrong, if indeed anything went wrong? Again, it is simpler than both sides will now make out.

 

The record does not show Jeremy Corbyn supporting Europe; socialism in one country perhaps better describes his position. But whatever his personal views or those of the wing of the Labour Party that supports him, Mr Corbyn could not declare for Remain or Leave. His party, mirroring Labour voters throughout the country, was divided top to bottom on it.

The Tories, still in government following Theresa May's resignation, had to decide on a new leader and they had decided on Mr Johnson. When he said Leave was do or die, he was for once serious: that is exactly what it was for them all politically. Mr Corbyn in Opposition, lacking the conviction and leadership qualities to make a bold stand, sat on the fence to the end.

 

And a bitter end it is. Mr Corbyn is being blamed for something any political analyst could have told him: that 'the workers' can vote Labour all their lives but still be social conservatives (note the small 'c'). When to get Brexit done they were even ready to join the Conservatives with a capital 'C', how could a radical programme of tax and spend, earnest pledges to accommodate the many in a new, kinder world, win the day?

Yet no form of Brexit can make those questions disappear; for now that must be Labour's consolation. Democracy is the best form of government, not a guarantee of the best outcome. 

 

 

 

 

 

The British General Election: The Money Is Mine

One-Nation Conservatism under the Boris Johnson government?

Can the liberal vision of one world ever work?

One of the most elusive and disputed mysteries of life, if not the fundamental mystery, is how homo sapiens has a sense of identity and what its nature is.

We understand that a medieval European peasant - or nobleman - did not think as the new middle and mercantile classes began to think in the 17th and 18th Centuries and that none of them could have seen things as we 'moderns' see things today.

But the explanation for such differences is open to any interest and agenda. It is Religion - no, it's Science. It is Capitalism at work - no, Marxism. It is Society, Culture, IQ, Race. It is Progress. No, it's not - there's no such thing as Progress.

Or could it simply be we live as and with different types of people?

The conservative view today that technocratic governance is stifling individual freedom, and the claim that a common humanity is the fabrication of a left wing elite for its own purposes, need  to  be interrogated, not taken for granted. As should the nativist idea that a man or woman cannot be German or Afrikaans and also feel Austrian and South African, wider still European and African, and beyond that, a member of the human race.

People have more identities, more ideas of themselves on offer now, than the medieval peasant or educated nobleman could ever dream of. Is it possible, in the way of things, some have moved further than others since the 12th, 18th or 20th Century and haven't stopped yet?

Why do South Africans go on voting for the African National Congress?

Why would anyone vote ANC, given the party's record of corruption followed now, under President Cyril Ramaphosa, by division, bitter in-fighting and deadlock? It is more a mystery than a question, considering the negative coverage the ANC gets in the media.

Most regular journalists seem to avoid exploring it. They may feel it somehow undemocratic, even running a risk, to argue there is no real option. Or they know perhaps they can rely on the social media these days to come up with an answer.

On Twitter and in the comment columns of news and political websites, explanations are never lacking: people who vote ANC either have their noses in the trough or are looking to have their noses in the trough. Alternatively, they have been bought or are unintelligent. There are many learned exchanges on the proof furnished by IQ tests.

There’s no doubt some truth in it all, as in politics everywhere. But like all generalities, it also makes one wonder. Is there really no hope, not an honest ANC man or woman anywhere? Not in the Revenue, for instance? Not speaking out at the Zondo Commission? And can’t the people - the voters - vote ANC simply because they want to or choose to? Is that really the same as being stupid?

Another popular explanation is people vote ANC because of identity politics, sometimes termed identitarian politics to make the matter weigh more significantly. Liberals tend to bridle at this, seeing it as a threat if not racist, and they may have a point. All politics is identity politics because there has to be a sense of mutual identity to identify with anything. There is the consideration too, since the population of SA is 80% black, that the majority can hardly avoid colouring the party they vote for.  

That leaves the President Cyril Ramaphosa factor, the New Dawn that he promised South Africans, but which, the ubiquitous doomsayers insist, is a False Dawn.

This piece, however, is not to get into that debate yet again, to claim that Mr Ramaphosa may or may not be trusted, or that he is weak and not moving fast enough. It is to put another view entirely.

There appear to be three reasons people vote - or don’t vote - as they do: habit, loyalty and reason.

Habit, a very powerful human instinct/motivator, is clearly at work in people who vote for the same party all their lives - because their parents did, or the local community does, or because they just can't ever be bothered.  These include those who 'don't trust politicians' and it also explains those who don't vote at all, and why they often are the ones that grumble most at the terrible state of affairs.

It's like putting the cap back on the toothpaste: you either do or you don't.

Loyalty is hard to tell apart from habit and no doubt often overlaps with it, but it may be a more elevated form of behaviour, or more stupid, depending, ironically, on your loyalties.

Loyalty seems straightforward enough: we naturally take sides and, having taken them, we stick with them come what may; it may be related to not wanting to be proved wrong. It generally has little to do with logic and nothing whatever to do with right and wrong and it is therefore puzzling why people sneer at others who stick with a particular political party or politician, when they themselves never desert their favourite soccer or rugby team however often it disappoints.

Then there's reason. Now that's the hard one. We all have Reason; that stands to reason. We think that anyone capable of reason would never vote ANC. In the same way, we reason no one would ever vote DA and anyone who votes for Donald Trump has taken leave of their senses. Yet there are people who do it, who would vote Hitler or Stalin still, or Barak Obama, or Emmanuel Macron and give you reasons for it. After all, people even vote for Nigel Farage.

Reason, the organising principle of democracy, is as deceptive a guide as any other. It does not lead us all to do the right thing or the best thing. And it definitely doesn't make us all do the same thing.

 

Yellowhammer - the British Government's Brexit assessment, not the bird

The leaked Tory government report Yellowhammer, setting out the risks of fuel, food and medicine shortages following Britain leaving the EU without a deal on October 31, is causing yet more outrage and denial in a gravely divided country. However, it is conclusive on at least four issues:

 

It shows Brexit is little or nothing to do with 'trade', but is ideological. No rational government aware of these risks would otherwise persist in running them.

 

It shows talk of fulfilling 'the will of the people' is a sham. A government that respected 'the people' would give the people a chance to review the situation in the light of Yellowhammer, its own and latest assessment. That would mean, at the very least, holding another referendum on Brexit.

 

It shows the claim voters would lose faith in democracy if cheated of Brexit by politicians is also a sham. If the people are 'not stupid', as politicians always like to say, the people will be intelligent enough to understand the need for them to re-consider and reaffirm their earlier opinion of June 23 2016. Indeed an intelligent 'people' would now insist on the opportunity to do so.

 

It proves Brexit is and always has been about the Tory government and party's interest, not the national interest. The fact that Labour and other opposition MPs and voters support Brexit does not alter this. It shows that opposing the Conservatives does not necessarily rule out being politically and socially conservative.

 

On Covid, global warming and other heated arguments

Every scientific hypothesis and theory attracts debate and dissent and people often think that is 'proof' the science is 'wrong', or even some kind of conspiracy or swindle.

 

That is a misunderstanding of science, which is not in the business of 'proving' or 'disproving' things, but rather of pointing to tendencies and causalities that may be taken to exist until they are shown by further testing and evidence not to exist.

 

In other words, all scientific knowledge is provisional and the opposite of dogma and belief.

 

People who doubt science on Covid and global warming often cannot see that to anyone thinking scientifically, the dissenting view may also turn out to be unreliable. The heated disagreements that follow settle nothing because they are the result of a difference in people's thinking and understanding.

So what is the answer then? How do you know which side is right?

The question is wrong. Outcomes in a scientific debate rest strictly on testing and evaluation that may take many years and, in the case of Covid, global warming and our own natures and origins, may never arrive at a complete answer.

On many subjects we have no alternative but to apply to people who specialise in them. The scientific question to ask scientists is: What is the weight of scientific opinion on this, not Who is right or wrong. There will always be dissidents.

 

Will Brexit be the end of liberal democracy?

Someone asked me in the Comment section of a political website, What is liberal and democratic about this type of politics?
 

He was referring to the poisonous stalemate, the 'circus' as some call it, the divisions to the point of madness that Brexit has brought to Great Britain. I replied:

 

I think the answer to your question is that what you see happening, with all its twists and turns, backstabbing, backsliding and blatant hypocrisies, is liberal democracy. This is how it works, this is it in action. What you get is what you see. But you have to cast off illusions and wishful thinking and look straight at realities.

 

Someone else asks in a comment addressed to me, What was the purpose of the referendum? To me, it was quite clearly to solve the Tory party's internal and electoral problems: its intractable Euro-sceptic wing that existed before Britain even joined the Common Market, coupled with the alarming rise for the Tory party of the far right UKIP.

 

We can argue about this, all of us, about the meaning of 'right' and 'left', about how the other side is wrong on each and every issue as it crops up and continue arguing as long as we like. But if there's any such thing as the truth, that is the truth: the referendum was called to solve the Tory party's problems as the leadership of that party saw them in governing under the British party system. 

 

The ramifications of that decision are proving enormous, splitting the parties and country and threatening the traditional workings of the constitution, one of the oldest representative democracies.

 

That is liberal democracy, or at least liberal democracy going through one of its crises. It isn't the first and won't be the last.

 

Those who don't like it need to consider the alternatives.

So if Boris Johnson takes the UK out of the EU on 31 October 2019, you will endorse the decision as liberal and democratic?

If Mr Johnson manages to take the UK out, I will never endorse that decision, but I do not think we should overthrow the system or start a war. And because there are millions like me, the argument will continue.

 

 



First Love

Dear Elizabeth

Please read this with all your care.

There's nothing unpleasant in it, only two questions at the end only you in all the world can answer. They come from a time when your life had not really begun. Or mine.

 

I took you to the opera at Sadler's Wells. Carmen.

 

It was in 19--, in February, I'm sure it was.

 

I remember scattered fragments from the evening, five or six moments like old black and white photographs kept in a drawer over a lifetime.

 

Can you remember? Do you remember me, Paul Whelan? If you do, you must remember we never met or ever talked again.

 

I've always wondered. Was I of any interest to you at all? And if I wasn't then, could you perhaps have become interested if I'd tried?

 

Forever those questions. Please don't think you have to be polite or tactful. Take your time.

 

If you are able to say and don't mind my asking, please tell me now.

 

Best wishes.

 

 

Brexit: after parliament says No to everything

As Britain displays every symptom of an advanced stage of madness, the key symptom being political paralysis, can anything be done?

 

Assuming Theresa May’s deal does not pass in the next week, Brexit should be extended sine die, a diplomatic ‘revocation’ of Article 50 that all sides except the diehard right might find acceptable now if only to gain a breather.

 

This should go hand in hand with a General Election. Only a new government and parliament have a chance of renegotiating with the EU. The task is somehow to start again. It sounds awful, but what option is there?

 

A general election throws all the cards up in the air, which is what is needed. May would go, Corbyn might well go. Maybe Duncan Smith and Jacob Rees-Mogg would go. Who can tell? If MPs of all parties and especially the government are terrified of a GE, you can be sure that’s what the country needs. Democracy must be allowed to work.

 

On no account should there be another referendum, a People’s Vote, or any plebiscite called by any other name you care to call it. Have done with referendums forever from here on, until and unless their use is carefully prescribed in law. They are nothing to do with the British way of government.

 

It is not that it is hard to discover the ‘will of the people’: there is no such thing as ‘the will of the people’. And even if there were, 'the people' do not pass laws or run a country. If we have not learned that at least, everything has indeed been in vain.

 

Meanwhile we seem to be looking at a fair chunk of the rest of our lives. A sort of Twenty First Century Thirty Years War.

 

We live and learn or are nothing.

Is a referendum 'real' democracy, like people say?

No government, it may confidently be said, would hold a referendum it expected to lose.

And, of course, that is how referendums have been used historically and up to the present: as instruments of the executive. Napoleon III of France - sometimes seen as the originator of this style of 'democracy'  - used them to get his way, Mussolini and Hitler to get theirs.

So the first point to grasp about the Brexit referendum is that British prime minister David Cameron lost it. It happens sometimes. It happened, for instance, in February 2000 when Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's referendum produced a No for his new constitution. 'The people's decision' did not suit the autocratic President Mugabe, who ignored it and seized the farms anyway.

However, Cameron's failure and the ensuing calamity are of a different kind altogether, as not only democratic Britain but Europe and the wider world now bear witness. Why has it gone so wrong? Referendums are democracy in action, the people getting the chance to express their will directly. That is proper democracy. Isn't it?

In fact, democracy in practice means representative democracy, not direct democracy, a popular term for a form that does not exist and is never defined or critically examined beyond claims for it being 'real' or 'true' democracy. Like they had in Ancient Greece.

But what institutions can direct democracy draw on today? Referendums on everything? If referendums are not held on everything, who would select what they are held on?

Workers councils or soviets? Demands by petitions, demonstrations, street marches? These are democratic already and, in any event, must still be organised by some leader, party or committee acting as executive on behalf of others. By representatives. 

Underneath it all, 'the will of the people', the idea on which direct democracy relies, is a deception. It is a metaphysical concept impossible to prove or disprove and open to co-option by any interest rich enough to push a facile message across broadcast, press and social media. Social media have not only liberated people and opinion. They have recruited them more effectively than ever.

What we are really talking about when we speak of the will of the people is the current majority for or against something. And we forget majorities change over time. There was a time when the majority was against votes for women. Before that, it was for votes for propertied men. There was a time the majority favoured laws criminalising gays. We are living through that changing right now.

The populists' reply to these objections is essentially rhetorical: an entrenched elite are accused of having contempt for 'the people', of pursuing their own agenda and power through institutions that are broken and media that have been bought. Populists love to say the elite treat ordinary people as stupid.

It's a familiar get out, skipping the question of how direct democracy would or could work institutionally to improve on representative democracy. It's the standby of the left and right in suggesting there's an easy solution to everything, without ever saying what it is.

Today we seem content to leave it there, not to address the obvious objection that if the present 'elite' were replaced it could only be by another one - not to question what that new elite represents and whether its values are democratic at all.

Such contradictions reflect the political divisions of our time rather than contribute to an understanding of how human government does or could work for a better future for all.

 

 

 

Brexit: the best way out for Britain now

The received wisdom at present is that a Brexit ‘deal’ will be scrambled together between Britain and the EU at the last moment because that is how it has always worked in the past.

I still believe that myself - just - on the basis that such a ‘deal’, in reality another face-saving fudge, can be carried over into the transition period to buy time for the desperately placed British prime minister following the rejection of her Chequers plan in Salzburg.

But, after Salzburg, there is an alternative. 
 

If Theresa May goes now or soon, and if Jeremy Corbyn narrowly won an ensuing election, a radical left Labour programme mistrusted by many voters would struggle to remain the priority. The new government would be as bogged down in Brexit as the hopelessly divided Tories. More likely worse.

However, Brexit on the failed Tory lines, and on any of the currently disputed options, would be buried or wide open to review. The new Labour government or, failing that, an ad hoc coalition of some kind, would have to go back to the drawing board.

A fresh start. Not another futile referendum, but a new realism, with 'the will of the people', the mantra that sanctified the 2016 referendum despite its obvious shortcomings, silenced as past its time and unrealisable.

Is it a possibility? Is the leadership there for it?

Back to time-honoured representative government, the bubble of populism popped?

THE LAND ISSUE IN SOUTH AFRICA - SO FAR

Perhaps it is superfluous to point this out, but all the articles, commentaries and inflammatory issues they raise are part of the 'national debate' that was long promised about 'land' in South Africa. How far this national debate is proving useful rather than divisive is debatable, but the fact is a crucial debate is now on.

So far several things should at least be clearer if not completely clear:

1] Mr Cyril Ramaphosa spoke on tv on July 31 as president of the African National Congress, not state president, hence the ANC flags behind him; 2] a number of statements have come from the ANC as a party, not formally from parliament or the SA government;

3] these various statements and resolutions are different, even contradictory, reflecting serious differences of approach in the governing party and efforts to accommodate them; 4] more broadly across political parties and society, there is general agreement that Expropriation Without Compensation - the shorthand for the current debate - would be disastrous for SA's economy;

5] the Economic Freedom Fighters have a 'policy' to nationalise all land and the ANC do not; 6] no land is presently being expropriated, excepting illegal occupations that may be politically organised;

7] any final legislation on EWC faces very complex and on-going constitutional and legislative obstacles.

It is reasonable to argue that the way the land question is finally settled will also settle the kind of dispensation the Republic of South Africa is: a democracy or something else. But what is happening so far is what happens in a democracy, not in an authoritarian state.


 

 

 

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A beautiful evening at Macbeth?

 

You cannot describe an evening at Macbeth as entertaining, as lovely; rather I must say I have never found the play so absorbing an evening as at the National Theatre last night, with Rory Kinnear in the nightmarish title role.

 

In this world of unrelieved horror, what can be the appeal? We know it is about vaulting ambition, Macbeth's and his wife's, about the destruction it wreaks, the cruelty and murder it can drive human beings to, the dire consequences of underestimating our imagination and conscience. Why sit through that darkness when you could simply stay away?

 

It is because the dark too, I decided as I listened, takes on an incandescent beauty: not some sick beauty of horror and death: not, for once, because of Shakespeare's profound insights into character and motivation: but from the matchless use of words, the sublime language that elevates and absolves all action.

Whether for Oberon scheming about a bank where the wild thyme blows, for the exiled Duke serenely accepting the uses of adversity in As You Like It, for the monstrous Macbeth shrieking at his terrors, Shakespeare makes empyrean music.

He gives the lie to the tale told signifying nothing, heard even in Hell the harmony of the spheres.

 

 

 

"It is raining, but I don't believe it"

 

Moore's Paradox, in the headline, is an effort to remind us how 'the truth' is not simple.

 

Pontius Pilate long ago asked, What is truth? and washed his hands of the whole thing. Professor G E Moore, early last century, proposed his Paradox to get people thinking.

 

First, the Paradox shows there are facts [It is raining ..] and there are opinions [but I don't believe it ..].

 

It shows that facts and opinions exist together. And, crucially, that they can contradict each other. A very important reminder for us, considering how often we find them doing so these days.

 

But it gets more complicated. The sentence, 'It is raining, but I don't believe it', is not nonsense or madness. Not like saying, 'It is raining, but I don't believe it because there is no big tap in the sky.' That would be only silly or insane.

 

Nor is it illogical or untrue. Opinions are routinely in disagreement, not only with other opinions but also with what we call 'the facts'. The Flat Earth Society argues their case on 'the facts', I understand.

 

Because the sentence is not illogical, you cannot falsify it with our normal logic. That is an even more important discovery. There is a contradiction in the sentence, but it is not illogical and not untrue. How to explain that?

 

We can point out the person would know it is raining because s/he would sense it: see it, hear it or get wet. But the question then is, are our senses the only way we know things? What about when our reason shows us they aren't? Like we know there's no oasis in the desert, no puddles up ahead on the road in front of the car on a boiling hot day?

 

What if the person learned it was raining by report? If s/he was told it is raining and said s/he did not believe it, does that alter everything?

 

Also, if s/he was told it was raining yesterday, but did not believe it, is that a different case again? A bit like History: 'There was a Second World War, but I don't believe it.'

 

Look at all these problems with the truth. And a professional philosopher would tell me I have hardly started on the subject.

Why on earth should we teach History?

Except for asking how wide the universe is and what we are doing here, there is no more difficult question than why and how to teach History. Presumably there is a purpose to it. What could that be? You can see why you teach language, or adding up, or geography. But why History?

Well, first 1] to educate the individual in it, just like any other subject, which may be seen as an end in itself. But is it 2] also to build a sense of citizenship, of belonging to a particular nation?

2] is the hard part because it affects what you do whether you decide the purpose is to build citizens or definitely not to build citizens - if citizens are people who will collectively accept the status quo, that the way things are done is 'right'.

Inevitably a politician will see 2] as essential, if not the priority. It is the nature of the job. Isn't the idea of a Minister of Education itself suspect? Won't the Minister just have History taught the way s/he sees the world and wants it to be seen? But then you can't teach revolution. That's indoctrination too. Not to say unwise.

A good way round the question is to consult Historians, ask them why they write History. The explanation I tend to prefer is the one that simply says it is to understand why people did what they did in the past. But can you keep it even that honest without bias seeping in? Was King Shaka or Henry VIII or Herod the Great not so much great as a bit of a rotter actually?

Problems, problems. It's make your mind up time again, I'm afraid.

 

WHO ARE WE?

Consciousness is itself explaining itself.
There is no answer.
It is the piece of string asking how long it is, our questioning what came before the Big Bang.
The dog chasing its own tail.
Forever.

Addition, November 25 2020: "The discovery of the self can never be complete, because the 'I' who asks 'Who am I?' is both the seeker and the sought. The only way this .. can be managed is by the hermeneutical approach [which] makes us see that as embodied beings whose selfhood cannot be grasped by a Cartesian act of introspection, we have to recognize ourselves as linguistic, social and bodily unities." - The History of Philosophy, A.C. Grayling 

Explaining my approach to politics to a critic

 

You and I agree that race is a divisive issue in South Africa; I assume you would agree that is not surprising in view of the country's history. I also assume we would agree that some, maybe most, of the 'racial conflict' today is false, to be laid at the door of politicians who stir it up for their own purposes.

 

I would never join a political party of any colour; I am not able to believe the things politicians say or their promises to carry out certain policies and I could not conform to party discipline and whips.

 

That does not make me 'objective'; no one is objective. But it enables me to look at, say, President Zuma, or Cyril Ramaphosa, or Helen Zille, unburdened by loyalties. As you and I have discussed before, I believe Jacob Zuma was an appalling president; I believe Cyril Ramaphosa is saying - and doing - good things, but has a long way to go to prove himself; I believe that Helen Zille, a highly professional politician, who has fought the good fight for liberal values and her party, is now past her sell-by date.

 

I am neither pleased nor saddened by that. Politicians have a privileged life while on stage and make their own choices in public.

Thoughts on a lifetime love of opera

21 March 2018 at 12:20:30 AM

Life is full of surprises and I have just had such a lovely one: seeing L'elisir d'amore for the first time in my life from The Met with Pretty Yende, South Africa's own.

 

It is such a happy, funny story, an absolute delight, and I enjoyed myself so much at an opera I would never have thought of going to see, but for this chance, in two or three lifetimes. It is because of Una Furtiva Lagrima, one of two arias I cannot stand, the other being E Lucevan Le Stelle. A purely personal thing - or two things, I suppose, strictly speaking.
 

The Met Live in HD is on again and it is La Boheme on Saturday; I saw Tosca a week or so back with Sonya Yoncheva and she is singing Mimi. It seems to me that Act I of Tosca is Puccini composing at his peak, with Act III being really seriously deficient - out of inspiration. Boheme, though, is such a perfect masterpiece from start to finish, flawless. I can't wait to see it again.

Silly now how in our teens we would argue these things. One group of my friends were terrible Germanics - Bach, Beethoven and Brahms were the Gods and silly old Puccini was not worthy of discussion. I had to sit there sometimes quiet, feeling totally wrong-footed, if not just wrong, because I loved Tosca and Boheme and Butterfly. Now I see it was rather their loss in youth.

Yet I find it harder than ever to keep control of myself in these operas nowadays. They are so saturated in memories of times and friends and places and joy. The wonderful gift Puccini has for melody, one after another pouring effortlessly out of him, lays hold of me and wrings my eyes and heart.

 

South Africa's African National Congress resolves to expropriate land without compensation

With politicians you have to distinguish between what they say and what they mean and between what they promise and what they do.

It is rash to assume that because the ANC conference this week passed a resolution about expropriating land without compensation, the politicians are now going to do it - even though Mr Cyril Ramaphosa, the new ANC president elected at the conference, appeared to endorse it in his speech.

 

A general policy of this kind, as Mr Ramaphosa will know, would ruin South Africa as it did neighbouring Zimbabwe. Why say it then?

We are dealing with politicians. If it all sounds contrary, look at it contrariwise.

In this case, you may be led to believe the ANC are going to do something bad that they 'promised'. But think of the times they did not do something good that they promised. Over the years they never did stop corruption and Jacob Zuma never did have his day in court.

It is a mistake to believe what politicians say. But that applies to everything they say.

CHANT DU CYGNE

My farewell to school at 18 before going on to university

text of the original on 'A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Dreamer'



 

It had been a long, hard climb but he was nearly at the top. Now, as he sat resting on the ledge with his companions, he could see more clearly than before - than ever before, perhaps.

 

The worst of the climb was over. That last difficulty which had seemed so insurmountable as he approached had been safely negotiated and not only he, but all his party had come through safely. After that final exertion he had earned these few moments' respite. The wild exhilaration and triumph which comes in the moment of achievement had passed and he sat calmly contemplating the climb he had made.

 

How many eager young people had set out at the start and rushed on blindly with the rest, very few - if any - knowing where or why they were going! The climb had been so easy at first that no one had bothered very much - indeed it was not necessary - but later it became more difficult and many had given up. He realised, looking round him, that not one of his original party was still with him. His four present companions he had met on the way, one of them not so long ago even now. He also realised that many of those original starters should never have attempted the climb in the first place.

 

The great difficulty his own party had so lately overcome had proved too much for them at their first attempt and only one out of their six had been successful. Now, it seemed, they were all to be successful in the end, although he, at least, had often despaired.

 

So many had started that long climb - so many had shared the early fun and reckless irresponsibility - but not so many had shared the later pleasure and pain, and very few had shared the final dangers and triumphs. Too many of his good friends were gone now and even some of the guides had dropped out. There had been one or two fatal accidents.

 

But he had almost reached the top; he and his four friends together. Had it been worth it, or had all that time and energy been wasted? No! - it had not been wasted - every second had been worth it! Here, almost at the top, he felt that his way was clear at last. The murky past with its hidden dangers and doubts was gone and the future lay before him. The final ascent to the very pinnacle was still beset with dangers, but now, at least, he could see the pinnacle and the dangers which lay between. He was relieved and contented at last. But it was not a smug contentment and he burned for the knowledge of what was really at the top and he meant to reach it.

 

He felt much older than when he had first begun the climb; it had seemed to take a life-time. The earlier part of the climb had been undertaken in the timelessness of youth, but of late he had suddenly grown up.

 

"There's plenty of everything in Life except Time," he thought.

 

"Coming on?" said one of his companions. "We've got to reach the top before nightfall. There's no going back now and there's not much time left."

 

"No, there never is," he said, half to himself and half aloud, as he got to his feet.

 

                                                                     P. W. WHELAN, 6A Arts

A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Dreamer

My farewell to school at 18 before going on to university

(tap and enlarge to read or see a legible text published as 'Chant du Cygne')

If democracy is doomed, where are we headed?

 

The world appears to be in more than its usual disorder. Religion is dividing societies and nations and, where religion is not doing it, poverty and inequality are. Ask Isis and M. Thomas Piketty.

Homeless millions are migrating. The globe is over-populated as well as overheated. Plastic is choking our oceans, antibiotics hardly work anymore and robots are about to steal everyone's jobs.

With Donald Trump elected as President for the next four years, the United States of America is thought by liberals to be doomed.

With Brexit scheduled for March 2019, Great Britain is thought by liberals to be doomed. 

The European Union is thought to be doomed by conservatives.

With North Korea's Kim Jong-un defiantly building his nuclear arsenal, people think the world is doomed.

And here in South Africa, with President Zuma's African National Congress promising to rule till Jesus comes, the opposition know the country is doomed already. Everyone always said it would be once Nelson Mandela went.

The menace behind all these events is that something fundamental is doomed, not just the politicians and governments of the day. Democracy was supposed to take over and get things right when the USSR collapsed and that has not happened. The word nowadays is democracy has failed. The people are up in arms. Democracy itself is doomed.

If only by way of relief, we should ask ourselves if that is true.  If it is true, where is South Africa - where are all of us - in all of this?  What are the alternatives? Where are we heading?

At the end of the 1980s, as the Soviet empire dissolved in a matter of months before the world's astonished eyes, Francis Fukuyama published The End of History.

Briefly, the thesis of this much misrepresented book is that if there is such a thing as progress, society must be progressing somewhere, to a final stage of political and economic organisation. Following the thinking of the German philosopher Friedrich Hegel, Fukuyama argued persuasively that the final stage is liberal democracy.

Let us deal with the obvious objection straightaway. The book is not just another instance of Eurocentrism, although that charge has inevitably been brought against it. The larger questions of whether there is a direction in History and where that might be leading are there whether you consider the future of Asia, Africa or Europe, especially in a world where ideas cross frontiers as fast as thought.

All the alternatives to liberal democracy are on offer throughout the world today: monarchy, autocracy, theocracy, imperialism. To the communist, the end is still the proletarian paradise; to the fascist, world dominion. If liberal democracy is not the predetermined end of History, which of these is? And if none is, where does that leave us?

China, India, maybe Brazil, are seen as the coming powers of the twenty first century. Assuming India is, as generally billed, the world’s biggest democracy, is the option the Chinese model? What is that model anyway? Soviet Russia, its originator, is no more, and post-communist Russia is looking more and more a second class power. However painfully and cautiously it may have moved, the vast country of China is slowly but surely leaving behind the original dream of its founders.

These questions are insistent because South Africa cannot avoid them in our globalised world. Apartheid South Africa tried to cut itself off and eventually failed because of the sheer impossibility of isolation. On a much smaller scale and more grotesquely, Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe attempted the same thing and has gone the same way. You cannot get off the modern world.

Perhaps it is not History but our thinking that has temporarily come to an end. Even if in this century or the next, or the one after that, democracy should turn out to be the final organisation of the world’s affairs, it will not make a perfect world.

Democracy is not a destination in that sense, nor a panacea. It must be seen as a culture, a permanent work-in-progress whose values and institutions can only be appreciated when set against other forms and philosophies of government. You only see its worth by comparison.

If South Africa’s democracy falls far short at the moment, there is only one solution. “The cure for the evils of democracy,” wrote the American journalist and scholar H L Mencken, “is more democracy.”

Is that right? And will it be proved right again?

 

 

This article first appeared in Business Day, September 4 2017

 

 

 

Helen Zille, Mmusi Maimane and the DA: a matter of judgment

Politics is about power, about the pursuit of power, the contest for power, about maintaining and losing power. That does not mean ethics plays no role and principle is always ignored.

 

But how and when they are ignored or followed is, inescapably, a matter of judgment for politicians, not one of obligation. Judgment of the situation is the essence of the politician's job; the successful politician is the one who gets it right more often than wrong.

 

The same might be said about business. Business is by no means a smash-and-grab affair, a game for 'a pack of crooks'. But neither is it a game for the naïve or the saintly. To succeed, you have to know the 'rules' - or the lack of them. That is why successful business people are said to have a natural 'instinct' for business while others simply cannot get it right. Judgment, not ethics, not intelligence, nor even diligence, rules.

 

In the present case, Ms Zille, widely seen as a highly professional and principled politician, committed an error of judgment with her initial tweet. There was nothing extraordinary about that; we all make mistakes and very many of them are made in a careless moment on the internet.

 

But in her response she has probably made it a terminal mistake. She has set herself against the party she has played a leading role in building, which is to say she has divided it, and plunged its black leader into a terrible dilemma that was none of his making but which he must now address because it is his job.

 

As the bitter reaction of many Democratic Alliance members and supporters shows, Mmusi Maimane cannot win: he must disappoint or outrage some as he gives others the satisfaction of saying he has done the right thing. Motives are suspect and challenged, loyalties on raw display.

 

These arguments will continue, of course, and so they should. I am interested above all in how politics shapes things, not in declaring who is in the right. All of us will see in time the one if not the other.

 

 

An email to my friend about opera

I haven't seen or possibly even heard anything of I Puritani and I don't think I've seen a Bellini opera. Can't think of one right now. The superb films of The Met productions have given me wonderful evenings of entertainment at Donizetti and Rossini operas that I wouldn't have got to all my life either, with phenomenal singers like Juan Diego Florez, Natalie Dessay and JoyceDiDonato.

 

But my musical tastes, as you know, are for later and the orchestra, not the voice, and in opera, for all the music, not just the arias. I'll give you two exact instances how this came about for me. 

 

The first opera of which I ever heard anything (I know this for sure) was Boheme: my mum had bought at some time Heddle Nash singing Your tiny hand is frozen - yes, in English - and I must have known it by heart by the time I was 6 or 7. Boheme was also -  I am forever grateful for it - the first opera I saw on stage, age 17.

 

But when I started to read and find out about opera, it was the rest of the story, the bits around the arias, I wanted to know more about, not just the beautiful arias themselves that your husband introduced me to when we were at school. I can remember very distinctly reading the plot of Boheme and wondering what the music would be like when the friends are just talking to each other in the attic, not singing the aria I knew from childhood. Che fai ..? - those first words in Act I: how would the music go for that, after that? From the start that was the intriguing thing.

 

As for the role of the orchestra, the first time I heard the Liebestod was without the voice, when I was 18 and had already moved on to serious orchestral music. It changed the whole world.

Shortly afterwards, because I was following up everything Wagner composed, I was listening to some man talking on the radio about Die Meistersinger, which I didn't know at all. I can't remember now who it was talking or anything else about the programme, except for this. He was saying that a critic at the first performance had hated the opera and complained he'd never heard anything as terrible as 'the awful bellowing of that cobbler'.

 

'Bellowing indeed!' the speaker exclaimed in mock reproach, and he put on Sachs' Fliedermonolog to set the record straight. 

 

I can still remember as I type this how it seemed to me I had never heard anything more glorious and great, an orchestra weaving more wonderful music behind the human voice.

As I type this now, it is one of the very few moments to make me at least consider it, if some dark angel tempted me with the chance to live my life again.

Donald Trump elected in a democracy: is it the end of the world?

As the polls showed Donald Trump was likely to win the US elections, Gerard Araud, French ambassador to Washington and a career diplomat known for his outspokenness, tweeted:

After Brexit and this election everything is now possible. A world is collapsing before our eyes. It resonates eerily with Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary as war came in 1914: 'The lights are going out all over Europe,' he lamented.

While it would be idiotic to ignore the seriousness of all that has happened this year, it is important not to get carried away like M. Araud. In 2016, the world is not collapsing before our eyes; it is confronted with a challenge not seen in today's great liberal democracies since the 1920s and '30s: fascism.

Fascism - intolerance, bigotry, tribalism - is always present in society because these tendencies are always present in human nature. Two conditions above all are required for fascism to break out on a threatening scale: hardship for substantial numbers of people, and populist leaders who are prepared to cash in on their miseries. Other local grievances will feed the flames: defeat in the Great War in the case of Germany; a divided society resulting from apartheid in South Africa; foreigners coming and taking 'our' jobs in any number of countries.

In France, in Austria, in Holland, with frightening unexpectedness in the UK with the Brexit vote, now in the US, fascism threatens to break out. It threatens to break out, in the view of many, in SA too. The similarities between conditions and role players internationally are too obvious to require underlining.

However, the fight back by more enlightened leaders and ideas could only start once the threat was there, and the fight has duly started. Two leaders with unenviable jobs if they are to collapse the world are Theresa May and the demonised Donald Trump. The first is not a dictator, the second not the feared anti-Christ; they are voices amid loudly dissenting voices, in for a very challenging time.

Let us keep our feet on the ground. Democracy must plainly accept democratic decisions; it has no alternative. But it must always be on guard against the narrative that lingers from Marxist as well as fascist thinking: that the only way to put the world to rights is through radical 'change' or, more precisely, revolution, a sweeping away of the old 'broken' system and institutions and a 'cleansing' of society. The world has heard and suffered that story before from left and right. None of it had any more truth in it in the past than Trump's promise to make America great again today.

History - if the metaphor is not too trite - is a rolling river that is not to be dammed up nor run into the sands. For those who like a fight, there is a brave one on again, as what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature strive to turn the present current.

It does not look likely to - and certainly one hopes and prays it does not - take the lives it took in the old century, when a world really did collapse twice before their eyes.

South Africa under President Zuma: a call for pessimism, realism or optimism?

They say we live in a post-factual age where we decide things irrationally, purely on our emotional feel, and most of that is decided on line.

 

We don't study, read or think anymore, or even watch TV like we used to. Teenagers text endlessly - three times a night according to a recent report - and send each other selfies that can get them into trouble, while adults actually find themselves in trouble for what they Tweet or ReTweet. The luckless Penny Sparrow springs to mind.

 

You will have your own view how far that is a true picture of the times. On one reading of history, things stay pretty much the same the more they change, though in the middle of our global world's unremitting electronic and social media din, you can be forgiven for thinking things have never been worse. 

 

But could it all be just a case of temperament, of whether we as individuals are optimists or pessimists, see the glass as half full or half empty?

 

In a Business Day article titled Big Questions and a big day is upon us*, Peter Bruce editor-in-chief of BDFM writes: 'How does this all end? .. the war at the centre of our body politic?'

 

He presents the daunting list of so-called student protest that has burnt universities and their books; the alleged crimes and misdemeanours of President Jacob Zuma; the highly suspect case of fraud brought against finance minister Pravin Gordhan by SA's National Prosecuting Authority, which claims to be 'independent'. 

 

Bruce passes on too the disconcerting rumour that a Russian delegation is in South Africa to push ahead the even more suspect, astronomically expensive nuclear deal Zuma and President Putin are supposed to have signed and sealed between the two countries. He questions how SA's state-owned Eskom, designated to handle it, can be capable of handling it.

 

And the 'big day that is upon us' is the long-awaited day the Public Protector Thuli Madonsela publishes her interim report on state capture, with its putative 'damning evidence' of an improper relationship between SA's president and his wealthy friends, the Gupta family. At the last moment, Zuma and his faithful servant Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs Minister Des van Rooyen are both trying to interdict it.

 

No wonder Bruce's gloomy conclusion is: 'Things have gone too far. The damage is too much. Jacob Zuma has broken the state.'

 

Yet is this where realism, with its different perspective and line of questioning, must come in?

 

The conclusion goes too far. The present major crisis has been incubating for years, the wholly foreseeable outcome of more than two decades of one-party government in South Africa.

 

As the local elections this year show and will turn out perhaps to prove, we are in fact in the throes of the most serious democratic challenge to ANC hegemony to date. It contains opportunities for better times as well as risks of worse. Democracy was and never will be a destination we reach. It is a way of life and, as with life, no one promised it was plain sailing.

 

US President Barak Obama said in his speech to the National Democratic Convention last month: 'It can be frustrating, this business of democracy. Democracy works, but we've got to want it. Democracy isn't a spectator sport.'

 

The state of South Africa is not broken. It is broken when the constitution is dumped and we have a Mugabe or Putin or a Julius Malema at the top of a new order.

 

You can argue what is going on is a widespread, enormously promising fight against such a development. So far at least, it is not the state but the ANC that is breaking. That was always certain to be a huge, noisy event.

 

Or is that not realism, but optimism?

 

*October 14 2016

 

Brexit: Prime Minister David Cameron's personal and public failure

Politics in the end is someone's personal responsibility as well as the impersonal art of the possible.

 

Challenged by his own party's rebellious Eurosceptic right and by the single-issue United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), prime minister David Cameron agreed to hold a referendum on Britain's membership of the EU: let the people decide whether to leave or stay.

It sounded plausible, a sensible compromise. Few chose to argue about it. After all, went the spin, asking the people would be real democracy in action, the truly democratic way to settle the Tory party's problems once and for all. And, as most of the political classes seemed willing to believe, also settle the country's problems.

It has not worked. Leavers and Remainers are sticking to their guns and both sides now know the simple majority vote for or against Brexit has settled nothing.

Both ran campaigns of threats, false promises and lies that grew increasingly bitter and divisive. The unelected populist Nigel Farage, the eccentric celebrity politician Boris Johnson, the opportunist Michael Gove among others, kept the media pack in full cry after personalities, not realities. Government and shadow cabinet ministers, caught up in an alarming neck-and-neck race, presented Brexit as either a wonder cure-all or an impending catastrophe.

Only after their apparent victory have Leavers realised they have no plan, no clear objective and no strategy to achieve one; debate about them has only started now.

The biggest argument is over how, when and - with supreme irony - even whether to leave the EU. Some  demand that it happens without delay; others insist government can only trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty after negotiating an entirely new set of terms with Europe. But what terms will satisfy all interests? The process seems certain to cause more division in a United Kingdom more divided on the issue than ever.

Remainers have not accepted the outcome of the referendum. To them 52%-48% was an unconvincing majority, or the referendum is not binding, or it is unconstitutional, or all three. Britain Stronger in Europe and Open Britain are campaigning as if it never happened.

Nothing to regret?

David Cameron's resignation on defeat was accepted calmly as inevitable and as the honourable, typically British thing to do, a replay of the playing fields of Eton. (Those, incidentally, had also been the stamping ground once of Cameron’s flamboyant adversary, the arguably less sportsmanlike Boris Johnson.)

 

Such acceptance contrasts sharply with the question that flummoxed the prime minister at a press conference shortly after his defeat. The journalist asked, 'Do you regret what you've done to your country?'

As a professional politician, Mr Cameron carried and understood all the heavy responsibilities of his office and all his duties to his party; one can sympathise that there were the greatest pressures on him.

 

But he should also have understood, as a professional politician, that a referendum could never be a solution, that it had only the potential to divide people in any number of damaging ways. Young and old. Employed and unemployed. Haves and have-nots. 'Us' and 'them'.

'The People', as the pure Democratic Will, exists only in the minds of philosophers and the speeches of radicals like Mr Farage. In the real world, the British, like any other people, are not a populist stereotype. They comprise a multitude of individual motivations, views and interests. They act in accordance with them, but do not and cannot govern the country, much less are able to secure a better future for it by answering a question that reduced a formidably complex issue to 'Should the UK remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?'

David Cameron no doubt excuses the imbroglio he presided over by saying he is a democrat and acted democratically. But he was aware he was prime minister in Britain's representative democracy and that his prime duty was to work through its parliamentary institutions.

The people did not make a mistake: the mistake was to hold the referendum. The right thing for Mr Cameron to have done as a Remainer was to resign rather than agree to it, not after it turned out to be a wholly avoidable diversion and failure.

The EFF: no coalitions, no promises ... no future?

 

There will be minority governments in South Africa's major metros, coalitions that are led by either the African National Congress or the Democratic Alliance, but count the Economic Freedom Fighters out.

That was the message from Commander-in-Chief Julius Malema in a press conference today. He made clear the EFF would not join forces with either major party, but instead constitute the opposition in hung municipalities resulting from the 2016 local elections.

 

The coming cooperative period in local government, whatever it turns out to be, marks a fundamental change from the past. It will test and develop the professionalism, administrative skills and staying power of South Africa's political parties as never before.

 

After some well publicised days in conference, the EFF could not join them. In spite of the media billing it as kingmakers, the EFF is not a negotiable democratic party so much as a loosely knit Marxist-Leninist or fascist grouping, the breakaway far left or right of the ANC, depending on how people see and label it.

As a result, its mediocre election results have left it in limbo. Under the leadership of Mr Malema, the EFF has alienated the majority party ANC and its president, but has nothing to offer a democratic opposition, the DA, besides serious problems. Its revolutionary programme threatens to wreck government at the local level in the same way it has threatened government at national level, through calculated disruptions of parliament and inflammatory talk of meeting violence with violence.

With President Zuma remaining in office, the scene is set for these methods to resume more widely.

These are admittedly early days. But if the EFF is ever to become a tsunami the signs would be there now. The party apparently does not enjoy the confidence of voters; its manifesto cannot work except through coercion; alone, it has no chance of demonstrating a sense of responsibility in government. The question going forward is how, and if, it can manage to hold together during a long period out in the cold.