‘He, which hath no stomach to this fight / Let him depart, his passport shall be made / And crowns for convoy put into his purse: / We would not die in that man’s company / That fears his fellowship to die with us” -Henry V’s Crispian Day speech at Agincourt, by William Shakespeare
There can be few people on the face of the Earth as privileged in terms of opportunity as we South Africans, as the clock pitches us into the 21st century. Not, perhaps, the opportunity which is represented by the prospect of imminent wealth, but the opportunity of creation and achievement which offer far greater reputations than those born of mere monetary riches.
In one fertile passage of history in the closing decade of the 20th century, we have been transformed from a nation of some five million empowered by opportunity to one of more than 40- million. It is an enrichment not only of numbers but of diversity, for we are self-evidently a nation also of many cultures.
It is a diversity which some fear and might seek to obliterate by imposing the politics of consensus on the country. We would not share that view, or support that intention, preferring to see in our differences, and even the quarrels arising out of them, the stuff of progress – the very combustion which energises our society.
The contemporary philosopher Stuart Hampshire has expressed that view particularly well. “The assumption has been that, from the moral point of view, the bedrock of human nature is to be found in self-evident and unavoidable beliefs,” he wrote in Innocence and Experience (Harvard University Press, 1991).
“But after every attempt the alleged unavoidable beliefs are shown to be either vacuous or, if substantial, dubious, and at least very far from being unavoidable.
“We should look in society not for consensus, but for ineliminable and acceptable conflicts, and for rationally controlled hostilities, as the normal condition of mankind; not only normal, but also the best condition of mankind from the moral point of view, both between states and within states.
“This was Heraclitus’s vision: that life, and liveliness, within the soul and within society, consists in perpetual conflicts between rival impulses and ideals, and that justice presides over the hostilities and finds sufficient compromises to prevent madness in the soul, and civil war or war between peoples. Harmony and inner consensus come with death, when human faces no longer express conflicts but are immobile, composed, and at rest.”
It is, we believe, in recognition of the competitive impulse in society that we South Africans have chosen as the best kind of Constitution one which entrenches such conflict as is inherent in the separation of powers.
In that respect it is not only a Constitution which governs the relationship between the legislature, the executive and the judiciary, but one which also serves as a model for relations between lesser institutions of society, whether it be between unions and employers, the charitable and the commercial, or even the presidency and the press.
There is, of course, another level and kind of conflict which is intolerable and yet exists in our society, such as that arising from crime, racism and the hostilities born of an unacceptable chasm between the rich and the poor.
In those struggles – against poverty, the criminallyminded and those who would exacerbate racial differences out of personal inclination or hope of material advantage – there can be no ambivalence.
They are the horsemen of our apocalypse whom we must engage and defeat, or be destroyed ourselves. Only in that victory lies any hope of the realisation of our enormous promise as a society.
The staff of the Mail & Guardian enters the 21st century committed to these principles and full of pride that we should enjoy a small role in this great struggle to forge out of our differences a society fit to inspire the world and to cradle our future generations.
We wish well to all who stand with us in that cause.