I don’t suppose many readers could imagine anything written about linguistics being at once amusing and intelligibly insightful, but a brief passage from some of my holiday reading achieves the feat – on an unlikely topic.
It appears in cognitive psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct, and is borrowed from the work of logician W V O Quine.
Quine, Pinker says, ‘invites us to imagine a linguist studying a newly discovered tribe’.
‘A rabbit scurries by, and a native shouts, “Gavagai!” What does gavagai mean? Logically speaking, it needn’t be “rabbit”. It could refer to that particular rabbit. (Flopsy, for example.) It could mean any furry thing, any mammal, or any member of that species of rabbit (say, Oryctolagus cuniculus), or any member of that variety of that species (say, chinchilla rabbit). It could mean scurrying rabbit, scurrying thing, rabbit plus the ground it scurries upon, or scurrying in general. It could mean footprint-maker, or habitat for rabbit-fleas. It could mean the top half of a rabbit, or rabbit-meat-on-the-hoof, or possessor of at least one rabbit’s foot. It could mean anything that is either a rabbit or a Buick. It could mean a collection of undetached rabbit parts, or “Lo! Rabbithood again!,” or “It Rabbiteth,” analogous to “It raineth”.’
In his book, Pinker offers this puzzle about rabbit – or non-rabbit – meanings to advance a discussion about human sense-making.
On its own, it’s a wonderful illustration of the scope for error when we are misled into thinking that the certainty of our assumptions can withstand enquiry and reflection.
Such blind conviction is what defines unreason, which is always weaned on insecurity – and always thrives on it.
We confront it constantly – in our politics, in the public debate, even in our private conversations – in the bald clarity of thinking about race, about history, about Covid-19, about science and religion, about this or that category of people, or this or that country.
Uncomplicated assumption
We hear it in the cynicism levelled at democracy, the uncomplicated assumption, for instance, that South Africa’s 1994 preordained the country’s decline and ruin. We hear it in the crazed propositions about satanic insertions in Covid vaccines, or the elaborate stratagems of this or that sinister global cabal manifest in compulsory mask-wearing or the promotion of some or other new technology.
Access to knowledge has perhaps never been greater than it is today, yet superstition of this kind is defended with bewildering ferocity.
To the extent that such categories of unreason can be discounted as the follies of an uneducable fringe, they are, for now, less of a worry.
There is reason to be much less insouciant about the scale of unreason where it exists at the very centre of power.
The danger is that it often looks rational, it sounds reasonable, it seems sensible. It is mantled by the authority of the establishment, and is worked into words of polite persuasion.
There was no great outrage this week – the IRR alone lost no time in immediately registering a counter-argument – when President Cyril Ramaphosa silkily referred to the ‘game changer’ of 2021 being a renewed drive to ‘move the needle of economic empowerment for women, young people and black people broadly’.
‘We need to be able to say in a few years’ time,’ he went on, ‘that the empowerment of our people is now becoming a reality.’
Critical need
The critical need for ‘empowerment’ – depressingly evident in high, and climbing, rates of poverty and unemployment, in poor education outcomes, declining municipal and other services and the creeping pessimism that comes with dashed hopes – is exactly what the IRR argues for.
But the unreason at the heart of Ramaphosa’s proposition – and of the Employment Equity Amendment Bill now in the works, which aims to accelerate the rate of ‘transformation’ – is that you can draw a line through South African society and say that on one side are the interests of whites and on the other the interests of blacks.
This is clearly an unexceptional idea for African National Congress ideologues for whom it is possible only to look at a person to decide on which side of the divide he or she belongs, and treat each accordingly (in other words, differently).
It might have been possible in the 1990s to cleave to the supposed logic of racial engineering – and overlook its contradicting the founding non-racialism of the newly crafted democracy. But, after 26 years of its dogged application, to concede that it has brought next to nothing (‘We need to be able to say in a few years’ time that the empowerment of our people is now becoming a reality’) exposes a failure of reason.
It is a failure that comes at great cost, chiefly – as the president himself as much as admitted – to the still-unempowered, whose interests are not divisible from anyone else’s, and have not been, and cannot be, served by divisive policy.
Cynics misperceive this kind of thinking as sentimental or wishful; ideologues fear it because it nullifies their ambition for power. Both are blinded by their unwillingness to reflect or see their certainties tested.
Muscle of moderation
In contrast, the force of reason, which is the muscle of moderation, wells from the countless accommodations, the habits and lessons of familiarity, and the long inter-dependence of people who live and work together because geography and history determine that they must.
In the introduction to his magisterial work of 1996, The Seed Is Mine, The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper 1894-1985, historian Charles van Onselen wrote insightfully: ‘Currents of anger, betrayal, hatred and humiliation surge through many accounts of modern South Africa’s race relations, but what analysts sometimes fail to understand is that without prior compassion, dignity, love or a feeling of trust – no matter how small, poorly, or unevenly developed – there could have been no anger, betrayal, hatred or humiliation. The troubled relationship between black and white South Africans cannot be fully understood by focusing on what tore them apart and ignoring what held them together.’
Most South Africans understand this complex, not unchallenging proposition, because, being receptive to the voice of reason and being willing to consider all people as people like themselves, they are by and large insured against the febrile anxieties of the insecure who cannot tolerate seeing the world as it is but only how they imagine it must be.
And if you want to understand how it is South Africa endures, despite its titanic problems and deficiencies, you need look no further than the temperate majority and its reasonable habits of mind.
[Picture: Alexandr Ivanov from Pixabay]
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