Anthony Holiday: OVER A BARREL
Two terms in our current political lexicon are in urgent need of clarification. They are, of course, racialism and liberalism.
The former refers to the gravest of matters, having to do with virtually everything the struggle for national liberation aimed to eliminate. However, it is now invariably an epithet, used with such irresponsible abandon by politicians to describe the real or imagined vices of their opponents, that it is in danger of losing its condemnatory power. If this continues, soon calling somebody a racist will be a charge roughly equivalent to suggesting that he is overfond of cream cakes.
Liberalism, on the other hand, is only sometimes used as an epithet. While nobody, outside of a tiny circle of cranks, would proudly describe themselves as racist, there are plenty of politicians in this country and elsewhere who eagerly embrace the label ”liberal”, because for them it denotes a proudly progressive tradition of political thought, capable of addressing the tangled practicalities of today’s economics and geopolitics.
When used pejoratively, however, the words ”liberal” and ”liberalism” carry connotations of privileged high- mindedness, patronage of the poor by the rich, legalism, moral laxity and laissez-faire economics.
But racialism and liberalism have one important feature in common: as the suffix at the end of each word indicates, both are ideologies, systems of thought, explanations of how things stand in society and of how they ought to stand.
It follows that to be either a racist or a liberal is to make a conscious commitment to a point of view. There can, therefore, be no such thing as unconscious liberalism or racialism, although there may, perhaps, be unconscious factors in the psychological make-up of all of us which predispose us to embrace one or other of these doctrines.
That is why the proposal by Human Rights Commission chair Barney Pityana that the commission investigate ”subliminal racialism” in the news media is nonsensical.
If Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung were right (and not everyone agrees that they were), then the chances are that most of us are subliminal racists, just as we are subliminal thieves, rapists and murderers. Neither our Constitution nor our courts of law recognise a category of ”subliminal crime” and do not waste public money on investigating instances of it.
Racialism is a doctrine to the effect that humankind is divided into superior and inferior races and that the former, by reason of their supposed superiority, are entitled to exercise dominion over the latter. The paradigmatic modern instance of this doctrine was provided by Nazi race theory which rested on the claim that it was a biological truth that Aryan peoples were superior to other peoples, notably Semites and Africans.
Not all forms of racialism are of this biological sort. Verwoerdian apartheid, for example, tended to define race in terms of culture and geographical origin, holding that races, thus defined, must be separated politically, socially and economically, whatever consequences in terms of human suffering might attend efforts to achieve this.
Liberalism is less easy to define. Its origins are in the political philosophies of John Locke, John Stuart Mill and Isaiah Berlin. All three thinkers stressed, in various ways, the importance of individual rights and liberties. Locke was particularly concerned with the individual’s rights to property. Mill and Berlin emphasised individual freedoms, particularly the right to freedom of opinion.
South African liberalism has its own pantheon, in which are housed such luminaries as Alan Paton, Helen Suzman and (in his own rather mundane way) Colin Eglin. This sort of liberalism shared its philosophical founders’ individualism, but was particularly concerned with the preservation of the rule of law. This concern meant that liberals generally refused to break the law, even in opposing apartheid -which is why certain members of the African National Congress suspect their bona fides.
Another reason for this suspicion is that the liberals of the Democratic Party, like their predecessors in the old Progressive Party, are associated (not altogether inaccurately) with a wealthy minority, with the mining houses, the merchant banks and the stock exchange. They are thought to be careless of the plight of the poor. The poor are the majority. And the majority are black.
This is how the accusation of racism comes to be levelled against South African liberals. Yet it is not a charge which, in strict logic, can be made to stick. For the liberal conception of the individual is too abstract, too ahistorical and too deracinated to allow for any degree of compatibility between liberalism and racism.
Liberals, when they are consistent, simply do not care about race. But that is not all a certain breed of free marketeering liberal refuses to care about. This species of liberal -whose chief philosophical spokesman is the American thinker, Robert Nozick – are opposed to trade union power, governmental intervention in society and all forms of wealth tax. They do not believe the wealthy are under much obligation, outside of what self- interest requires, to care about have- nots.
Liberals like this are to be found the whole world over, including South Africa. Recently, a reliable source told me they had seen a Rolls Royce in Pretoria, sporting a sticker which read: ”Fuck the poor”.
That slogan, in its blasphemy against every decent sentiment that miraculously survives on our poverty- racked continent, captures all some sections of the ANC and their sympathisers in bodies like Pityana’s commission loathe and fear about one dimension of liberalism and the press they think serves its interests.
Yet, it remains true that what they fear is not racialism – but something which may, in the end, prove to be an even greater evil than the ideological scourge that resulted in the apartheid regime’s ”resettlement” camps at Morsgat, Limehill and Dimbaza and the Nazi extermination centres at Buchenwald and Dachau.
Dr Anthony Holiday teaches philosophy in the University of the Western Cape’s School of Government