Steven Friedman
WORM’S EYE VIEW
There is nothing like the fall of a national figure to bring on an orgy of moral hand-wringing. So it is with the Hansie Cronje saga.
Public commentators have rushed to bemoan how the apparent fall of a pious, clean-living sportsman shows how debased we have become. The usual suspects have been blamed, depending on the point of view of the blamer – apartheid, materialism and our lack of old-fashioned values.
But the moral rot seems even greater than most of the Jeremiads assume.
After a brief period of shock, public opinion – or that part of it which matters to cricket heroes – is overwhelming in brushing off Cronje’s behaviour as a peccadillo. Polls by newspapers and TV stations return thumping majorities in favour of reinstating him.
So who is right, the commentators or the public? Both. The Cronje story might well say something about the state of the nation. But, while those who identify a national problem are right, the message may be more complicated than they assume. And, in a perverse way, the public who want Cronje back on the playing field may be more in tune with the temper of the times than those who draw sweeping moral conclusions from the conduct of a white, middle-class sportsman.
First, those who hanker after old- fashioned sporting morality seem to forget that it has never operated when there was money to be made from gambling on sport.
We might have produced scores of squeaky clean cricket captains when no one was betting on the outcome of Test matches; but, even in the days of old fashioned morality, there were plenty of crooked boxers when there were fortunes to be had for gambling on fights.
Cronje fell to temptation because it was worth someone’s while to tempt him. That is a symbol for some of the challenges which face many of our new elite: they can now succumb to the allure of money because they have opportunities for succumbing, which were once absent.
So some may find the elite’s materialism disturbing. But a couple of decades ago consumer culture was available only to whites (who proceeded to indulge in it with an abandon at least as great as that of any upwardly mobile black person). Puritanism is a lot easier for those who are forced to remain pure, and there is little value in comparing the wholesome values of those who had no opportunities for alternatives with the lapses of those who now do.
But that does not make the problem less real. The argument that Cronje, albeit in very different circumstances, is only one of many in our society who have opportunities for error unavailable to their forebears, does not make materialism without morality any more appealing.
So why do we not have the moral capital to prevent (more) sports stars or business people or public officials from succumbing to temptation? Or, since Cronje is, after all, only one person, to dissuade hundreds of presumably sober citizens from concluding that he is guilty of at most a moral traffic violation?
It may not be fanciful to suggest that the answer lies in the mixed message which our society sends to all who live in it.
On the one hand, we are told that material success and all its trappings are the prime measure of worth.
The message is pervasive and no one actor can be blamed for it. But, given a history in which we were, far more than most other societies, forced to be obsessed with non-material issues such as race and justice and equity, perhaps the most remarkable development is the degree to which government and politics have, in a very short time, been reduced to a matter of delivering material goods.
This does not mean, contrary to a by now clichd criticism, that the new elite has necessarily turned its back on those for whom it speaks to seek personal wealth. (Although some individuals, by no means all of them in politics, have.) But it does mean, as this column has remarked before, that our priorities have often been narrowed to how much can be “delivered” to how many.
Nor has political change reversed the consumer culture which dominated white society in the last years of apartheid – if anything, it has accentuated it by making wealth the standard by which all are judged.
Before we denounce this, it may well have saved us from catastrophe by blurring the differences between the white and black elites, thereby softening conflict. But, like the rest of us, the elite knows that material goods are not enough: without moral glue, society comes apart. And so, we receive mixed signals. We are encouraged, by deed and sometimes word, to admire the getting of wealth, but are also expected to retain our moral bearings.
For many, the task is too much. While Cronje, who is hardly starved of the status which material goods have come to bring, may have little excuse, the same may not be said for, say, township youngsters who rob, not because the alternative is starvation but because, by doing so, they can “become someone” in a society which values big consumers more than big thinkers.
And Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry Ronnie Kasrils, who not long ago sanctimoniously bemoaned the venality of those in Mpumalanga who charged flood victims R2 a trip to escape the devastation, might reflect whether their behaviour is really all that out of line with the messages sent by the elite of which he is a part.
Perhaps these mixed messages explain why Cronje’s many admirers apparently cannot see the difference between an error of judgment and a moral lapse.
While much of the hand-wringing is, therefore, out of place, the Cronje saga is, after all, a warning.
We can survive a cricket icon who succumbs to spread betting. We will find it far harder to become what we should be as long as we reduce our future to our ability to get wealth without devoting at least as much attention both to the values we should hold as we seek it and the messages we send to those outside the elite – sporting as well as political – who cannot get it without breaking the moral rules.
A return to a fictitious moral paradise in the world of the TV advertisement, lottery and share option is a delusion. But, when middle-class religious revivalists begin putting their pocket before principle, we need to recall that societies cannot even progress materially without a moral lodestone. And that, in politics and society, we need to supplement our understandable desire for economic advance with similar concern for what else we value.