Hot on the heels of reintroducing the Tobacco Products and Electronic Delivery Systems Control Bill, government has set its sights on liquor. The Liquor Amendment Bill, first introduced by the Department of Trade and Industry in 2016, seeks to raise the legal drinking age from 18 to 21. It would further impose a 100-metre radius restriction on the sale of alcohol around educational and religious institutions.
As for advertising and selling alcohol, this would be banned on social and small media. In these ways, the bill seeks to reduce South Africans’ consumption of alcohol.
As with the Tobacco Products and Electronic Delivery Systems Control Bill, this bill is being justified in terms of the public good. And considering South Africa’s rates of alcoholism, there is certainly a debate to be had in this regard. However, the liquor bill – like the tobacco bill – is arguably part of a broader trend and it needs to be considered as such.
In isolation (and lacking invasive means of enforcement), such bills typically succeed only in promoting illicit trade. They can (and will) be disregarded by most citizens. However, considered as part of a broader move towards paternalism, they can have alarming effects. Simply put, laws which try to protect citizens from their own freedom of choice can be infantilising. And when citizens are infantilised, they cannot be full, free citizens.
To quote John Locke, “The end of the law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of law, where there is no law, there is no freedom.”
In other words: law exists to facilitate freedom, by creating conditions conducive to it. Law is, for this reason, necessary to freedom. However, law can also act against freedom when immoderately and excessively applied. When this happens, law goes against its own rationale. It will therefore end by becoming corrupt.
Different conceptions
Of course, different conceptions of the law’s role (and that of the state) exist. So, why regard the law as a basis for freedom, which must be kept in line with the aim of liberty? Why not rather see the law as a tool of social engineering, a means of enforcing certain values, beliefs and behaviours? Why not see the law as a means to make people happy, healthy, and substantively equal, things which, for some, are worth so much more than being “free” (a relative, abstract term, it might be argued)?
Of course, this assumes that the law can make people happy, healthy, and substantively equal. But even if it could (and I dispute that), we should still keep the law in line with the aim of liberty. When we don’t, and use it instead as an instrument of engineering, we end by diminishing the human faculties of will, agency, and endeavour. And in doing so, we impoverish the whole society – both materially and ethically. Let me explain why.
Ethical entropy
Every ethical system necessarily begins with the assumption of agency. We can’t expect people to act in certain ways unless they are able to choose how they act. When people’s choices are limited, so, too, is their ethical capacity. It is instructive that, in one of the West’s foundational myths, the story of the Garden of Eden, man attains knowledge of good and evil through the choice to disobey. Prior to this act of choice, he is a mere amoral automaton.
It is the ability to disobey (and the realisation of this ability) which gives him moral status. And it is the moral status thus attained which allows the choice to obey. In other words: you can’t actively choose to do something unless you can freely choose not to. All ethical accountability rests on possessing agency, and therefore, on freedom.
This understanding is reflected in the Bill of Rights. I remember being taught at school that, for every right, there is a corresponding responsibility. Clearly, the two are intertwined; the obligation to fulfill one depends on and derives from the freedom ensured by the other, and vice versa. This, arguably, is why the right to liberty must be inalienable; without liberty, there is no basis for citizens to have ethical expectations of one another (or themselves – resulting in an “I was only following orders” morality).
What takes the place of liberty is either coercion or paternalism (or both, as each tends to imply the other in one form or another). The result is a loss of trust, usually accompanied by a significant degree of fear. If the state does not trust its citizens, why should they trust one another? Stringent limitations on liberty create secretive, suspicious societies.
In his 1983 book Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams, David Shipler, a correspondent, then bureau chief, for the The New York Times in Moscow for four years in the 1970s, describes the customs of vranyo (“You know I’m lying, and I know that you know, and you know that I know that you know, but I go ahead with a straight face, and you nod seriously and take notes”), and of pokazukha (“a phony show or a snow job usually put on for people of high standing”). At one point, Shipler recalls:
“In 1977 a Moscow police lieutenant stopped a newsman from filming the giant Rossiya Hotel after a bad fire in which at least twenty people had been killed (though no official figures were ever released) and told the offending correspondent, Fritz Pleitgen of German television, “We do not want to let foreigners laugh at our misfortune.”
Such opacity and paranoia are inevitable functions of high-control societies.
The end of innovation
Stringent limitations on liberty also create apathetic citizens. When behaviour is heavily dictated and controlled, people cease to see themselves as agents. They allow themselves to become puppets of the state’s agenda. This can become entrenched over generations, as most people will go along with the status quo until and unless it becomes as or more uncomfortable as resisting. This makes for a stagnant, unself-aware society, a society in which innovation is stifled by the fatalism of enervated citizens, and in which the powerful are left unchecked. Given the scale of its problems, this is the last thing South Africa needs.
Arguably, the trend towards apathy is already pervasive in South Africa, encouraged by activists and politicians for whom citizens are hapless subjects awaiting a redemptive intervention. People accept this framing of themselves because it absolves them of responsibility – which is, after all, a heavy burden to bear.
However, when people are absolved of responsibility for their lives, they are simultaneously relieved of their dignity. They become vessels for the aims of the state and are, in this sense, objectified, instrumentalised, and dehumanised, since the scope of their values and actions has been defined for (not by) them. Such a society will, moreover, by virtue of stifling innovation, creativity and enterprise, end by materially impoverishing itself. The only winners are those in power.
Rebels with a cause
In South Africa, a cluster of recent legislation – from the NHI to the Liquor Amendment Bill – has the practical effect of reducing citizens’ freedom of choice. All this is justified in terms of uplifting society and ensuring equality. Certainly, there are important conversations to be had about the issues touched on by this legislation. However, if we want to lift South Africa out of poverty, alcoholism or inequality, we must create a society in which the lack of dignity, options, innovation and hope underlying these ills is erased. And that means creating a society where freedom is honoured.
South Africans are not naughty teenagers in need of protection from their own whims. But, like the 18-year-olds who may soon be sneaking a dop, like the metaphorical first man and woman, we understand the importance of the capacity to disobey – as we showed during apartheid. We understand the importance of choice and of the ability to act freely (even when it may not be in our own best interest), up until the point where our freedom impinges on that of others. It is through the act of choice that the individual is born. And it is through a diversity of individuals that innovation is unleashed. This is what South Africa needs.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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