I often think the four most important words in any rational conversation are the ones least likely to be heard.
The pressure to be right, to be persuasive and to deliver a clinching argument – to win, in other words – invariably means we are disinclined to allow even the smallest measure of doubt and rarely take the risk of saying: ‘I might be mistaken’.
The result is a world, a country, a society that looks like a chequerboard rather than the jigsaw puzzle that it really is.
Ironically, even if the chequerboard view is worrying, discomforting or even threatening, it can and often does offer us the satisfaction of being certain that we are right, a perverse satisfaction considering that we may be wrong, and have less reason for the anxiety that is the source of such distress.
A few weeks ago, I began writing a piece about University of Cape Town lecturer Dr Lwazi Lushaba and his referring to Hitler, the Holocaust and whites in what quickly became, or was portrayed as, a controversial online lecture about the history of political science and the influence of racialist thinking on its development.
From the word go, doubt hovered at the edge of my thinking. This much is obvious from the unpublished beginnings of the draft in which I had begun to try to work out what I thought. I began by confessing that, try as I might, I could not muster much in the way of genuine outrage; if the implications of what he was trying to say seemed outrageous, it wasn’t very clear that that is what he meant. I certainly thought he appeared to be making the irrecoverable error of viewing human conduct as racial conduct. (And I wondered if he had considered the roles of Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin in the mid-20th century formulation of the concepts of genocide and ‘crimes against humanity’, so brilliantly set out in Philippe Sands’s East West Street.)
Censorious impulses
But the one thing I was surest of was that the real problem was the censorious impulses stimulated against him by, variously, outrage and disagreement.
(I was surprised by, among other things, Chris Roper’s assertion – in a piece arguing, creditably enough, for an intelligent appraisal of the context of Lushaba’s remarks – that: ‘If Lushaba was denying the existence of the Holocaust, he would deserve to be censured in no uncertain terms.’ It’s an odd thing, the impulse to punish ignorance.)
I eventually dropped the piece and wrote something else instead – partly, in fact, because a great deal of what I wanted to say was written before my own deadline by UCT philosopher David Benatar.
[Though Benatar notes that ‘I do not underestimate the power of words’, warning that ‘(even) words that neither defame nor constitute incitement to imminent violence or harm can be part of a longer causal chain that can lead to future violence and harm’, his laudable approach to free speech is contained in this excerpt:
‘What should our response to Dr Lushaba’s comments be? It should not be to seek his removal from his teaching post or his subjection to an official sanction. This is because he has a right to freedom of expression. Many people will say that while they endorse a right to freedom of expression, it must be limited, and that Dr Lushaba’s comments fall outside the bounds of protected speech.
‘Understandable though that view is, it is a mistake. The limits on freedom of expression are themselves limited. It is not enough that views are “offensive” or ignorant or stupid or even malicious. They must constitute defamation or incitement to imminent violence or harm. Harm and offence, it needs to be emphasized, are not equivalent. (The South African Constitution adds a further explicit exception to the right to freedom of expression – namely “propaganda for war”). Dr Lushaba’s comments, awful though they are, do not meet these conditions.’]
Less certain
For my part, what’s also true is that the more I thought about Lwazi Lushaba, the less certain I was of how much I really knew … about his intentions, about his ideas, or about the man himself.
Only this week, I did learn a bit more. It was anecdotal, admittedly, but telling nevertheless. I happened meet a former student of his to chat about something else entirely, but at some point in the conversation the Lushaba saga came up.
‘He was actually one of my lecturers,’ she said.
And what she had to say about him revealed an academic quite different from the figure we all think we know from what we’ve read in the media.
Lushaba, she recalled, was far more engaging than most lecturers, eschewing the apparently all too common reliance on PowerPoint notes and unadventurous (not to say, inoffensive) lecture-room formality, and challenging his classes to grapple vigorously with clashing ideas.
But he was also far more demanding, she said. Lushaba would not tolerate sloppy references, or sloppy, ungrammatical and poorly thought-through writing. More than that, his marking was unforgiving – the toughest of all the lecturers whose tests she sat.
Test results
And, for all the racial animus brushed into his public portrait, test results in Lushaba’s class were not remotely predicated on skin colour or the dictates of racial transformation, the top scorer in my informant’s class being a white student.
Of course, other students might have a different view or have had a different experience. My informant’s observations are just a point of view – but another point of view, which is what matters.
Things are not always what they seem. Which is why an alarm bell ought to go off in our heads whenever we hear ourselves saying: ‘Exactly! That’s just what I thought.’
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