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| #HistoryMustFall |
The turmoil at South
African universities over the last few months has raised so many areas of
concern it’s hard to get one’s head around any of it. So many sub-issues splintered off the initial
drive for better funding, and so many external party-political opportunists
weighed in, that central issues rapidly got obscured. So much angry over-simplification was aired,
as always happens at the barricades, that it’s hard to know where to begin a
response. Since I’m an ageing white male
academic, anything I say is likely to
be dismissed immediately as irrelevant and defensive, if not intrinsically racist.
One is tempted to
follow the suggestion of my lovely philosophical colleague Samantha Vice, a
couple of years ago, that whites no longer have the moral right to do much
other than subside into “humility and silence”.
After a storm of protest and misreading, she explained that she didn’t mean
that whites should withdraw entirely from public life, but that they should no
longer regard themselves as automatically speaking from a position of authority
and control.
I agree – so
anything I might add is offered from a desire not to harden the lines of
debate, but to transcend them; not to negate the critique of academia, but to
see what positives might be drawn from the situation. I certainly have no solutions – only perspectives
and ruminations on one or two aspects.
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| #ComplexityMustFall |
Trouble is, of
course, that any one aspect instantly feeds into a gazillion others. It’s neither easy nor entirely satisfactory
to tease them apart – but developing a more holistic response to the whole
crisis is complex and takes time.
Revolutionaries by definition don’t have time to take their time – so their
temptation is to try to make quick, spectacular gains on the back of stark
dichotomies: black/white, young/old, colonial/indigenous. Whole institutions, even governments, are
pressured to follow suit.
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| #OversimplificationMustFall |
We academic
scholars, on the other hand, suffer the opposite impulse, which is to say, “Hang
on a bit, it’s more complex than
that.” This is almost always true, but
it can also be a defence mechanism. We
have a natty way of taking real issues and wrapping them up in so much
discussion, theorising and qualification that nothing gets done at all. This can be seen as a way of preserving the institutional
status quo. The resort to “complexity”
and “reasoned debate”, as Ra’eesa Pather has suggested in a recent Mail & Guardian piece, can even be
experienced as part of a “chilling”, oppressive and exclusive “white”, “colonialist”
machinery.
I witnessed an
example of this among responses to a recent talk at Rhodes University. The talk was delivered by William Beinart, a
hugely respected historian of Southern Africa, two decades at Oxford University. He was reporting on a debate held at Oxford’s
Oriel College about the proposed removal of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes
from the college façade. Beinart both supported
the removal and applauded the activists’ win at the debate (though the college
itself elected not to remove the statue).
One of Beinart’s
respondents in question-time argued both furiously and eloquently that the form
of the debate itself was the problem. In
such debates, she was not recognised in “my black female body”; the British
parliamentary rules of such debates, she stated over and over, “are so
reasonable that they are unreasonable”. They made no space for her emotions, seemed
to be the issue. I was reminded of a
scene, televised during last year’s protests, in which a large black female
student faced up two bemused-looking white-haired professors, literally
shrieking and shaking, “You tell me to put down my emotions, but how do you
ignore my emotions, I am my emotions, I can’t study here because of my
emotions, I can’t breathe in this
place!” (An oft-used phrase borrowed
from that poor man killed by US police a year ago.) As a rather bemused white-haired professor
myself, I’m not sure how one might even begin to respond to such outbursts;
they open no doors to conversation.
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| #EurocentrismMustFall |
So here’s the
interesting thing: the perceived conflict between “reason” and “emotion”. Is “reason” itself a
“colonial” imposition? Is the opposite
or antidote to reason or rationality unfettered emotionalism?
It’s understandable
that “the West” is seen as governed by rationality – it’s the image it has often
projected of itself. The Enlightenment
of the eighteenth century – the “Age of Reason” – gave birth to both a
scientific revolution and to modern democracy.
These things are closely tied by ideals of objectivity, reasonable
debate, persuasion by evidence rather than prejudice, laws forged by impeccable
logic. And it’s understandable that the
university is seen as governed by those principles, and therefore as the
flagship of an imported “Western” world-view which is fundamentally un-African. Yet as I write, our Vice-Chancellor in his
Graduation Address urges our graduates to be – amongst other unimpeachably
virtuous things – “the voice of reason”.
Poor old René
Descartes is often blamed for the Western mindset, since he wrote the following
in 1640:
The true function of reason, then, in the conduct of life is to examine
and consider without passion the value of all perfections of body and soul that
can be acquired by our conduct, so that since we are commonly obliged to
deprive ourselves of some goods in order to acquire others, we shall always
choose the better ... It is enough to subject one’s passions to reason ...
Emotions are not quite
banished, but are reduced to mere instruments of reason. Descartes’ goal of the “mastery of nature” and “better goods” also translated into
mastery of other peoples, with some appalling consequences. It’s not popular to point out that the legacy
is nevertheless mixed. The scientific rationalism that produced the cellphone
and the heart transplant also produced the Gatling gun and the atom bomb. The capitalistic profit-motive that operates
hand-in-hand with democracy is responsible both for fantastic advances in human
well-being and for irreversible damage to our global environment.
Descartes
wasn’t the only philosopher on the block.
The wrestle between reason and the “passions” or emotions goes back at
least as far the Stoics of Ancient Greece.
And it has never stopped. “The
West”, it might be more accurate to say, is characterised by that very struggle. There have always been voices
disputing the primacy of rationalism.
The poet William Blake thought that an over-dependence on reason would
just lead to “the Ratio of all things ... the same dull round over and over”. And
in last week’s Sunday Times, the
novelist Yann Martel (The Life of Pi)
is reported as saying:
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| #RationalityMustFall |
I realised that reason and
rationality had become a disease. It
scours and scrapes away at things and I felt that I was drying up. I was equating truth with factual truth.... Magical
thinking is shared not only by religion but by art; both are preoccupied with a
greater truth that goes beyond factual truth.
In between, there
have been countless thousands of other writers, artists, musicians, and
philosophers who have made it their business to valorise the spontaneous over
the arithmetical, imagination over logic, quality over quantity, beauty over
utility, the feeling over the cerebral.
Whoever thought Western society is ruled by reason alone, anyway? Been to church lately? Read a horoscope? Fallen
in love? Watched Donald Trump?
In short, there is
no single “The West”, rather a bundle of conflicting views, some of which are
notably compatible with certain “African” ideas and ideals. (Nor a single “Africa”.) And perhaps the reason-emotion conflict is
illusory anyway: neurologist Antonio Damasio, in his fascinating books Descartes’ Error, Looking for Spinoza and The
Feeling of What Happens, discusses research that shows how reason and
emotion almost always function together inseparably at the neural level. These ideas might lead us to some
ground-breaking and magical thinking.
Finally, what about
the place of emotions in the work of the academy? As a scholar of literature, my subject-matter
is almost wholly the emotional life.
Poetry is largely about beauty
and the immeasurable inner life; stories are about individualised feelings of love and hatred and fear. Literature and the arts are humanity’s way of
exploring our emotional lives, lives that even the most rationalistic of scientists
or accountants can’t escape. Yet even in
this discipline we examine our students’ responses through the essay,
formalised into coherent and rational argumentation (“Your claims must be
supported by evidence from the text”); and finally our assessment is collapsed
into a simple number (“You got 68%”).
In this sense, the university and its structure is still profoundly Cartesian, scraping and scouring away. And yet, such liberation of thought occurs,
too ...
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| #EmotionalismMustFall |
My feelings about it all are, well, complex. Damn, there’s that
word again.
(This is just me thinking; it in no way reflects opinions of
my colleagues or my institution.)
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