Liberalism is not good for SA

Since the bankruptcy of state socialism, liberalism and social democracy — respectively the products of the bourgeois emancipation movements and the European labour movement — are the remaining serious contenders for political ideology in our contemporary times. Democracy, liberal or social, is their political by-product.

South Africa’s post-1994 government presents itself as a social democratic product whereas the platform of its operations is undoubtedly that of liberal democracy, guided by a very liberal Constitution.

Liberal political culture is supposed to promote tolerance, protect the freedoms of conscience, religion, speech, assembly, and so on. At its best it represents a universal human aspiration for individual freedom and self-expression.

But liberalism itself, as the 20th-century American philosopher John Dewey argued, is the expression of a distinct moral faith and way of life.

Contrary to popular belief, liberalism is not a possible meeting ground for all cultures, but is the political expression of one range of cultures, and quite incompatible with other cultures.

Western liberalism is not so much an expression of the secular, post-religious outlook of a more organic outgrowth of Christianity. It is, rather, a reflection of one hegemonic culture, Anglo-American with Franco republicanism and economic free marketism. Its identity, like the fate of all conquering ideologies, has been put to the service of exploitation and even oppression.

Hence the outrage when Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng suggested that “we can only become a better people if religion could be allowed to influence the laws that govern our daily lives, starting with the Constitution of any country”.

The loudest protests came from liberals. This is because the predominant version of South African liberalism is inhospitable to difference. It is suspicious of collective goals, which is why it detests religion and social democracy.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that our liberalism seeks to abolish religious, cultural or ideological differences. What it does is to use its hegemony, liberal in the case of our Constitution, to downgrade the excluded and rob them of a voice in public space.

 

Implicit in the liberal hegemony and assumption is that what is right or civilised or excellent has to take forms familiar to liberalism. It assumes that religion is the major source of conflict and therefore must not be allowed breathing space in public matters — such as espoused in the “We don’t do God” policy of Tony Blair’s spin doctors.

It promotes a misconception that major catastrophic conflicts of the past were solely about religion, disregarding reasons rooted in the tribal, ethnic, social, economic or scientific. They forget that the division of church and state goes back to the earliest days of Christianity, even to Jesus (Jn 18:36), as a form of defying the Roman empire.

The early forms of the separation, as delineated by the likes of St Augustine, were very different from ours, but the basis was laid for modern developments. The very term secular itself was originally part of the Christian vocabulary.

Frantz Fanon, in his seminal  psychological analysis of colonialism, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), argued that the major weapon of the colonisers was the imposition of how they saw the colonised onto the subjugated people. This is also how the liberal hegemony operates: it paints as absurd everything unfamiliar to it.

The South African version of liberalism says it is committed to the ideals of freedom and equality, but is always caught out when the demands for inclusivity arise.

It shies away from sustaining social environments that respect all peoples in their cultural diversity. It is predominantly exclusive and biased towards the privileged, whether by education or material wealth.

From court judgments on labour issues to how our economy is structured and continues to resist real transformation, it is becoming clear that our laws and constitution are slightly out of synch with the general feeling of the people on the ground.

If the liberal hegemony is subverting the ideals of universal freedom and inclusive community, then I see nothing wrong in calling for change, or at least reviewing how we do things.

The moral meaning of democracy is found in reconstructing all institutions so that they become instruments of human freedom, growth, liberation and a sense of belonging.

Currently our ethos is failing to achieve that. So let the wisdom of religions — Islam, Judaism, traditional practices, Hindu, Christian and so on — come in, if they are able to help.

Who knows, we might even come up with something authentic and suited for our circumstances.