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Howard Barrell
Over a Barrel
While in exile with the African National Congress in Zimbabwe in the mid-1980s, I had a simple test to decide who I felt comfortable with. It was: can this person appreciate a good anti-ANC joke? If yes, the likelihood was we could work together. If not, co-operation was doubtful.
My reasoning went like this: someone who could not see the absurdity of many of our efforts to bring about revolution in South Africa had to be an apartheid agent trying over-hard to appear loyal to the ANC, or an utterly ignorant outsider, or a faithful member of the ANC with no sense of irony.
It seemed particularly important then to have a sense of self-irony – to understand that our behaviour, in politics no less than elsewhere, stems from a mish-mash of paradoxical, often absurd motivations. As much as anything else, that insight seemed necessary to remain sane.
It may be just as important in South Africa now. Why? Because some moderate degree of personal disbelief is probably one of the best guarantees of democratic behaviour. If you can see how ridiculous some of your own motives and actions are, you are likely to be more tolerant of others and their ridiculousness.
On the other hand, fully believing what you say you believe can be extremely dangerous for others. The 2 000-odd people who were killed and wounded in bomb blasts in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam last week found that out. Whoever built and detonated those bombs can have had no sense of their own ridiculousness and of the absurdity of their claims to have solutions for this world or, for that matter, for the next.
It is fairly certain that Adolf Hitler had no sense of his own ridiculousness. Nor did Joseph Stalin or Benito Mussolini, let alone our own Hendrik Verwoerd. These were people who banished from their inner debates any doubt about their motivations and aims.
Hitler, Stalin and their kind were no more tolerant of doubt in others. Doubt in others was often a capital offence. For these dictators saw themselves in heroic terms as agents of providence or of history. In their eyes, a few million deaths were a small price to pay to secure the uninterrupted march of providence or history. So six million Jews, in Hitler’s case, or 11-million rich peasants, in Stalin’s, were readily expendable.
These leaders were, if you like, “psychopaths of a special type”. They were “successful” psychopaths, as some psychologists term it. Like all psychopaths, they were incapable of learning at an emotional or moral level. But they were able to learn in an instrumental sort of way. Using previous experience and acquired cunning, they could reason out how to take their aims forward. And, unfortunately, they did that very well.
You and I do not, however, have to be Hitler or Stalin to make South Africa or the world a more miserable place. We can achieve the same result by being overweeningly earnest. We can, for example, demand that everyone treat politicians and the political process with reverence. We can cede our critical independence to our leaders, cauterise our sense of irony, button up our smiles and require others to do the same.
This is the kind of compliance upon which dictators of both left and right have depended for their rise and for their grip on power. They have known very well that satire, humour, irony and a sense of absurdity are their enemy.
This prompts a further question: if irony is the enemy of dictators, is it also the enemy of any great purpose?
For example, how would millions of us have maintained our resistance to apartheid if we had been sure that some of our leaders would come to see the struggle as primarily a way to get us to give them a hand-up on to the gravy train?
Some people argue that irony can only ever be an entertaining pastime for critical intellectuals; that we can never use it to mobilise millions of people around their needs. But is this really so? In the case of some Eastern European countries in the late 1980s – former Czechoslovakia springs to mind – ironical humour came close to being the flag around which millions of people, workers and peasants no less than intellectuals, mounted a revolution against communism’s boorish bureaucratic state.
In those former dictatorships in Eastern Europe, irony usually met unsophisticated hostility. The disbeliever often lost his or her job, freedom or life. But subtler defences have been developed against irony. Here in South Africa, for example, an ironical approach to our politics is now often called cynicism. The intention in doing so is to caricature scepticism and so to neutralise it.
It is quite permissible to say that “scepticism” and “cynicism” are one and the same thing. In this post- modern age it is now apparently respectable to use words to mean whatever we wish. But if our intention is to communicate, then it is probably just as well to make reasonably clear how we are using particular words.
For me, scepticism and cynicism are radically different. Whereas scepticism is an honest expression of doubt, cynicism conveys something altogether different. It describes an attitude of contempt for honest and moral behaviour.
So the self-irony I am celebrating is an enemy of cynicism.
This is all a rather long-winded way of suggesting that our political class needs to lighten up a little. They don’t have all the answers.
We don’t believe they have all the answers. And we don’t expect them to have all the answers. Instead, we can all afford to hold our beliefs lightly, rather than zealously, and to be moderate in our altruism – an approach to life which goes by the exalted label “Laodiceanism”, according to a psychologist friend. It is not a sufficient condition for our democracy to flourish, but it is probably a necessary one.