Making excuses for evil

At the risk of sounding pessimistic, I must admit that South African political elections depress me.

With every election that passes I get more convinced that South Africans are becoming increasingly alienated from each other, especially along race and ethnic lines.

Indeed voting patterns and political allegiances are becoming less fixed, increasingly based on issues—but still, a greater part of it is based on identity politics and nostalgia of the past. You find enlightened people holding multiple and overlapping political identities there and then, but the majority is not like that.

When we think deeper about it, our major failure is in finding or creating a collective meaning about the soul of our country, what is termed “nationhood”. We talk about “truth and reconciliation”, and then prefer to remain in our comfort zone where things are familiar, where we do not need to be challenged by the truth of reality.

Of course, most excuse themselves by saying it is not in their own power to change things, they can only do their beat. Well, it is exactly our best that is lacking. If we did our best, evil would not reign supreme.

We see the resurgence of xenophobia, but what do we do beyond being horrified in front of our TVs? Have you noticed the growth rate of infant mortality, children dying of malnutrition and controllable diseases like diarrhoea, and so on? And what did you do about it?

Silence amidst unfair conditions is a moral disease of the so-called decent people, who do not want to be involved or radical.

The thing I like about Jesus, the Christ, is that he didn’t fear to be radical. He whipped the money lenders in front of the house of prayer. He called Herod a fox. He would not be complicit in the hypocrisies of Pharisees, Sadducees and high priests, though he was aware it could spell his death. He even called one of his trusted friend, Peter, a devil.

It was the great Nazi camp survivor Primo Levi who said: “Every age has its own fascism and we see the warning signs wherever the concentration of power denies citizens the possibility and the means of expressing and acting on their own free will.

“There are many ways of reaching this point, and not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice, by paralysing the education system, and by spreading in a myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned, and where the security of a privileged few depends on the forced labour and the forced silence of the many.”

Levi went to say the practice of making excuses for evil—especially one that buys our own convenience—“is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign of complicity; above all, it is a precious service rendered (intentionally or not) to the negators of truth”.

We make excuses for evil when we keep quiet about something we know to be wrong just because we want positions of influence or wealth, or it would not be convenient to our sense of selves to admit and act on the truth. When we think the duty of reconciliation, and admitting to our complicity or gain from the operations of evil. When we do all of this we are rendering service to the negators of truth.

In my mind these are the reasons why we can’t find each other in South Africa; somehow we render service more to the negators of truth than to the truth.

As I see it, we are heading for the dismal prospect envisioned by psychologists, where the so-called advance of human civilisation brings not happiness but an ever mounting tide of anger and guilt.

We will only end up with the elusive forms of absolution, because we negate truth.

We want a situation where it must be others who conform to our ways and not us to theirs. We are hostile and suspicious of foreign ways. Faults we find aplenty, not in ourselves but in others, and we are ready to excuse ourselves and judge others harshly.

The way to the Kingdom of God, as preached by Jesus, the Christ, is not this. It is by removing the beam in our eye before seeing the mote in others.