Stephen Friedman
WORM’S EYE VIEW
Left-wing sects are not known for their sense of humour. So they may not find it amusing that much of their spirit now lives within liberals on Africa’s southern tip.
Graduates of student politics in the 1970s will be familiar with the key features of left-wing sects. They include an assumed monopoly on truth so unassailable that it justifies distorting facts if circumstances warrant; contempt for anyone who does not recognise the truth (for which read most people); a tendency to see the world in “them” and “us” terms; and a yawning gap between principle and practice.
Which is as good a way as any of describing the public advocates of South African liberalism today.
Liberalism, despite its many flaws, has something to contribute if we are to build a stable democracy. Its stress on the individual, while open to many objections, is a useful corrective in a society in which an understandable concern for the group often becomes an excuse for special privileges or a bludgeon to silence critics. And its concern for liberty and tolerance is vital at a time when freedoms and respect for difference seem, to some, a luxury next to the need to protect citizens’ safety and fight poverty.
Liberalism has always faced an uphill struggle here, given the importance of the group in our conflicts and the absence of a non-racial middle class with an interest in liberal ideas. But our Constitution, our debates and many values, which we have taken for granted since 1994, show it has wielded an influence disproportionate to the numbers of its adherents and the circumstances it has faced.
It remains fashionable to trash liberalism, sometimes with good reason. But many of those decent democrats who use “liberalism” as a swear word fail to realise how much of their thinking has been shaped by it.
This makes it stranger and sadder that the public face of liberalism is now presented by a sect whose actions and attitudes increasingly resemble those of the extreme left, with whom it would be horrified to be associated.
People sympathetic to liberal ideas play roles in all our important institutions – political parties across the spectrum, the judiciary, the media, the academy. But they rarely call themselves liberals: a look at those who do may explain why.
Despite liberalism’s partial triumph here, it is now associated with the professional liberals – a group of doctrinaire, inward-looking and intolerant ideologues who dominate liberal associations and have made inroads into the official opposition. They believe firmly in their lock on the truth, see the world very much in “them” and “us” terms, and increasingly prefer to converse only with those who share their prejudices.
One reason is their embrace of free market economics, now proclaimed as an essential ingredient of the liberal creed despite the fact that many liberals – including perhaps the most important liberal philosopher of our time, the American John Rawls – have found no fault with degrees of government action to address poverty or protect the weak.
Free market ideology is often highly illiberal because many of its exponents deny the possibility that any other approach may be valid, just as the left once dismissed any view other than Marxism- Leninism as superstition. This attitude is typified by that of one of our most celebrated free marketeers who proclaimed that a book by people sharing his views had ensured intelligent people would no longer debate the merits of markets because the issue had been settled by “science”.
But there is more to it than this.
Many professional liberals are also moved by deep hostility to, and suspicion of, the majority of the anti-apartheid movement which rejected liberalism, at least in its rhetoric.
To be fair, some of this is based on experience during the apartheid era in which leftwingers and African nationalists often set out to humiliate liberals for reasons which had more to do with intellectual fashion or a desire to impress their peers than with the substance of liberal ideas.
But as unforgivable as those denunciations were, most professional liberals reacted in kind, demonising those who did not share their view to the letter as totalitarians or “politically correct” (a favourite professional liberal curse) toady of the new elite.
And despite liberalism’s contribution to our history, much of its leadership was a comfortable suburban elite, a social club as much as a political philosophy. This partly fuels professional liberalism today.
There are countless examples, but my favourite occurred a couple of years back when some colleagues and I produced a report for an aid agency, one of whose findings was that money had sometimes been denied liberal groups because they were not favoured by those whom the donor hoped to impress.
A prominent professional liberal responded not by endorsing the report, but by castigating it for failing to denounce the new tyranny of “political correctness” which had made post-1994 democracy a sham, and him and his colleagues afraid to speak in public. (He failed to explain why he seemed perfectly able to speak in public at that moment – or why he, in the midst of the new Gulag, regularly wrote newspaper articles and was interviewed by the electronic media.)
Special indignation seems to be reserved for those who point out that racial inequality is a reality which professional liberals ought to take seriously but do not (“Why are we still talking about black and white?” one asked at a 1995 meeting). Which may explain why professional liberalism remains as white as it is.
In academic life, professional liberalism sometimes spawns distortions of which any left authoritarian would be proud. Publications which purport to respect scholarly principles such as open- mindedness are often unsubtle attempts to peddle particular agendas.
And if responses to invitations to meetings at which the full spectrum of views are taken seriously are a guide, professional liberals nowadays are reluctant to discuss their views with anyone outside the sect.
Given the very limited influence which professional liberals wield, this may not matter much, particularly since liberal ideas are kept alive by others. But the result is to needlessly tarnish ideas which deserve a hearing – even professional liberals have made useful contributions to public debate on issues such as bail laws and control over non- profit organisations.
It is for liberal associations to decide whether they want to reclaim a style more in keeping with their philosophy. But it would be a pity if important ideas came to be associated only with a sect – and if serious liberals did not make an effort to rescue their position from it.