One of the great comic skits in modern English humour concerns the value of argument – predictably, it appeared on Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
A man (the actor and travel writer Michael Palin) walks into a reception area and pays for an argument. He is referred to a room, knocks on the door and, on entering, is verbally abused by a complete stranger sitting behind a regulation office desk (this part was played by Graham Chapman of the Monty Python cast, who died in 1989).
On discovering that Palin is in the wrong room – he has paid for an “argument”, not for “verbal abuse”, which is Chapman’s speciality – he is referred next door. Palin knocks and enters, to find a room with John Cleese sitting behind a desk: it’s the correct room because the latter immediately begins to argue with the newcomer.
It is initially a fierce back-and-forth, until Palin realises that this isn’t argumentation at all: Cleese is simply contradicting everything he says. He tries to put Cleese to rights on what “argument” is (an “intellectual process … intended to establish a proposition”) but, alas, his allotted time runs out.
Cleese refuses to engage further until Palin pays for another round of argumentation. Initially, Palin bickers over the length of time they initially argued. But Cleese holds fast – no money, no argument!
Finally (and very reluctantly) Palin hands over some more cash in the hope that the argument will continue; and he immediately goes back to his complaint about the length of the previous engagement.
“That wasn’t really five minutes just now,” he says.
Cleese: “I told you I’m not allowed to argue unless you’ve paid.”
Palin protests: “I just paid!”
But Cleese is up to his old contradictory tricks: “No you didn’t.”
“I did!” cries the exasperated Palin.
This wacky exchange, which can be found these days on YouTube, goes on for another five ripping minutes.
A gap left by the humanities
Hilarious, it certainly is. But it is for me also a reminder that the absence of sound and sensible argument is one of the great gaps that has been left in intellectual life by the neglect of the humanities.
One reason for this is that nowadays disputes are all too readily settled by technical proof or, in the case of politics – not only in South Africa but across the world – by recourse to courts of law.
There are many explanations for this drift towards the easy way out: in our country, following the end of apartheid, the metric of money has been used to naturalise the social ills bequeathed by our tortured history. Ironically, this has proven the truth of an old Afrikaans proverb: “Geld, wat stom is, maak reg wat krom is (Money which is mute, fixes what is crooked).”
The result is that deep-seated moral questions that might be settled by fierce quarrelling – and which, in earlier times, were driven by church, union and political party – have been dissolved by solutions such as Black Economic Empowerment.
The quality of our democracy
These narrow approaches to the resolution of complex social issues have weakened the quality of our democracy and the quality of argument that is needed to sustain it.
This absence of sustained argumentation points to the uncomfortable cohabitation between the Nkandla controversy and the choice of president in last month’s general election.
If authentic political disputation was an integral of our politics, instead of the celebrity-driven hype that passes for electioneering, Nkandla would have cast a moral argument over corruption – a test, certainly, of President Jacob Zuma’s suitability for office.
It emerged, however, as a wafer-thin difference between the politics of “real people” and the kind of argument that was only of interest to “clever people”, as the president brazenly put it after the election.
An uncomfortable experience
But inserting serious argumentation into our national life promises to be an uncomfortable experience because it will involve grasping the idea that controversy matters to this society – even more than growing the economy! It matters because it will open the national mind to the likelihood that the way we currently do things needs to be changed.
Let this one example stand for many others. The assumptions around the economic discourse that govern our lives are seldom subjected to any kind of scrutiny, let alone controversy: if they were, the world of universal commerce, which determines our political options, would reveal fatally flawed assumptions and endless coincidence rather than secure truths.
So the idea that “the market” always seeks equilibrium in order to set a price is thought of as a natural phenomenon. But a close inspection of the history of economic thought reveals that the idea of equilibrium arose, not because it was natural, but because it was amenable to easy manipulation in early forms of mathematical modelling.
In other words, the turn towards technology as a way to understand the social world helped to cast one of the founding principles of modern economics. This suggests that, although we live in a multilayered world, everyday prescriptions about the social world reflect very shallow understandings of it. It was the polymath economist Kenneth Boulding who established the link between the ideal of equilibrium, which governs so much economic theory, and mathematical modelling.
The dustbin of history
But it took an economist of an earlier generation, Joseph Schumpeter, who was both practitioner and theorist, to observe that the study of history suggested that market economies were destined for the dustbin of history. This was because they had existed for less than 0.5% of the time humans had lived on the planet: like 99% of all species (and the impetuses that drive them), they were certain to be replaced.
Subtle understandings of the deep complexity and contingency of everyday life and events are the daily work of the humanities. But, as most who read these pages will know, the humanities have been stripped of the authority that they once enjoyed in the academy by a strain of utilitarian thinking that allowed Henry Ford, in 1916, to claim that “history is more or less bunk!”
And yet, history as a proxy for the humanities (which for the present purposes include the social sciences) reveals a world in which argumentation and controversy not only survive but also thrive because of confusion, complexity and controversy.
It is the insights the humanities offer, not the homo economicus of contemporary thinking, that present humankind with the possibility of understanding the mounting dilemmas associated with subjects such as climate change, intercultural conflict and the ever-receding power of the state – to mention only three of the challenges facing these early decades of the 21st century.
Sad corners of academe
In South Africa, two enquiries in 2011 reported on why it is that the humanities lost their sure footing in the university. Both argued that much muddled thinking, manipulation of data and the reckless maligning of established forms of knowledge by a generation of policymakers helped to drive the humanities into the corners of academe.
In this neglected place immense destruction was wrought to fields such as indigenous languages – a subject in which this country should command the world. It is certainly true that not all in the humanities are united behind both the 2011 reports – the “consensus report” issued by the Academy of Science of South Africa, or the report issued by the “charter group”, which was established by Higher Education and Training Minister Blade Nzimande.
But these reports, and some excellent recent initiatives in several South African universities – Fort Hare, Cape Town, Free State, Rhodes, Wits, Pretoria and Johannesburg – have strengthened confidence in the importance of the humanities across the country over the past five years.
In most places, interest in the humanities is on the increase and important fields of study such as classics – thoughtlessly seen as without any value – are alive at Rhodes and the universities of Johannesburg, Cape Town and KwaZulu-Natal.
Enormous challenges
This said, enormous challenges face the humanities in South Africa. And of these, epistemology – the nature, sources, scope and justification of our sources of knowledge – is far and away the most important.
It is unlikely that consensus around this issue will be ever be reached, but without an impassioned argument around what is at stake, the bureaucratic and political twitches towards the technical solution might prove to be too tempting.
The simple reality is that, in spite of the strides that have been made in defending the humanities in recent years, many remain convinced that they should be consigned to the dustbin. So the time has come to celebrate both argument and controversy. Only this, it seems to me, will confirm the sagacity, for the humanities in South Africa, of the late Angelou Maya’s lines:
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
Peter Vale is professor of humanities at the University of Johannesburg and chair of the organising committee of the Academy of Science of South Africa conference on the humanities, which will take place on June 26 and 27 under the theme of Being Controversial: The Humanities Reach Out