Richard Pithouse, The Con
As the Israeli state
rains its murder on the people of Gaza we are confronted with a stark
demonstration of the ways in which there is, in so many quarters, official
sanction for according radically different values to human lives. Some of us
are taken as sacrosanct, others as disposable. It has often been suggested that
in the case of Israel and Palestine the inequality in the value ascribed to
human life can be rendered as a mathematical ratio. In this calculus there is
no such thing as a life for a life, or a prisoner for a prisoner, or a set
amount invested in the education of each child.
The Israeli state is in
the hands of a brutish nationalism that, in many respects, is certainly
illiberal even within its own borders and with regard to its own citizens. Yet
it seeks to legitimate itself via, among other strategies, a claim to be an
encircled outpost of liberal enlightenment on matters pertaining to gender,
sexuality and democracy. The similarities with arguments mobilised in support
of apartheid are striking. There is, as there was with apartheid, often an
implicit claim to civilizational superiority in the assertion that a plainly
and grossly oppressive state is, in fact, an island of enlightenment in an
ocean of darkness. It is this claim to civilizational superiority that has
often made Israel a proxy for other battles in South Africa, battles that are
not, not in polite society anyway, able to freely speak their names. Discourses
like feminism, human rights, the rule of law and civil society are all used to
the same effect on occasion.
When the BBC, or the
American state speak or act in a manner that implies that the life of a
Palestinian is not equal to that of an Israeli it is sometimes assumed that the
liberalism to which these organisations aspire is not genuine. It is sometimes
assumed that all that is required to correct this oversight is to point out
that the ratio in the value accorded to human life has deviated from the
liberal ideal of 1:1.
Last year Pallo Jordan,
always the most historically informed of our public intellectuals, argued that
given the distance between liberal principles, grounded in a respect for the
rights of each individual, and the way in which the practices of liberals have
been consistently inflected with racism, there simply is no genuine liberal
tradition in South Africa. The implication here is that a genuine liberalism
would respect the equality and autonomy of every person without regard to race
or other considerations. Similarly Steve Biko, in a 1970 essay that provides a
devastating critique of liberal paternalism, concluded that the ‘true liberal’
would act without this paternalism, ultimately grounded in an assumption of
civilizational superiority.
But if we go back to the
writings of the liberal philosophers it is immediately apparent that liberalism
never intended to include all human beings in its golden circle. John Locke’s
Two Treatise of Government, written in 1689, is a foundational liberal text. In
this text Locke, who was directly involved in slavery and colonialism, offered
explicit legitimation for the repression of the Irish and the dispossession of
Native Americans who he described as “not….joined with the rest of mankind”.
For Locke liberal equality could apply only to “creatures of the same species
and rank”.
John Stuart Mill’s On
Liberty, published in 1859, is, arguably, the second great text of the liberal
tradition. Here Mill, who spent most of his adult life, working for British
colonialism, wrote that “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in
dealing with barbarians.” The fact that this text continues to be taught
uncritically in some of our universities as if it were a universal defence of
freedom is a striking indication of just how colonial some of our institutions
still are.
The racism inherent to
liberalism is not just a matter of oversights in its founding texts. Liberalism
as a set of practices has always been intimately entwined with racism. As the
Italian philosopher Domenico Losurdo shows “Slavery is not something that persisted
despite the success of the three liberal revolutions [in Holland, England and
the United States]. On the contrary, it experienced its maximum development
following that success.” He also notes, in passing, that in South Africa,
liberal forms of government emerged precisely as racial exclusion and
subordination were entrenched. Losurdo concludes that liberalism only ever
sought to apply its commitment to equality within the limits of “a restricted
sacred space” and not in the realm of “profane space”, space that constituted
most of the world. He shows that as this sacred space expanded from Western
Europe into the rest of the world via colonialism it increasingly came to be
marked out by race rather solely by geography. Whereas England was once the sacred
space of freedom and, say, the Caribbean, a profane space where a different set
of social arrangements applied, white bodies came to be sacred and therefore
sacrosanct, and black bodies profane, and therefore disposable, where ever they
were.
When liberal ideas have
been taken up by elites in the formerly colonised world they have been shorn of
the crude racism with which they have so long been associated. But, as Partha
Chatterjee has shown with regard to India, liberal elites have continued to treat
the bulk of their citizens as outside of the domain of civil society, the
domain that liberalism assumes to constitute the only sphere of authorised
democratic politics. Civil society, Chatterjee, shows, assumes a moneyed
subject, one who can afford to live within the law. The reality, he notes, is
that in what he calls most of the world most people can’t afford to access
land, housing and services, as well as livelihoods, lawfully. The result is
that they have to make their lives in what Losurdo calls the profane space
outside of the realm where liberal values hold sway. This space, the space of
popular politics in most of the world, is routinely read as a priori
irrational, violent and criminal by orthodox liberal opinion.
Here in South Africa
Lindiwe Sisulu can write in defence of the right of ‘strong and confident black
women’ to full equality in civil society, our elite public sphere. Yet as
Minister of Housing she presided over a systemically unlawful and frequently
violent attempt to remove people, many of them strong and confident black
women, from their precarious place in our cities. In India or South Africa
liberalism wielded in the hands of national elites is no longer racism in the
way that it once was but it certainly functions to reinscribe central aspects
of the acutely racialised social relations inherited from colonialism.
This is equally true on
the global stage. When a life in Tel Aviv counts vastly more than a life in
Gaza, when a rocket, made from a road sign and powered by fertiliser, is taken
as a more urgent threat than one of the most sophisticated and well-funded
military apparatuses in the world, we remain locked into a moral paradigm that
is plainly colonial.
Many of the ideas and
practices that aspire to replace liberalism are, profoundly problematic. They
are often explicitly authoritarian. We need to take full measure of this. But
this does not mean that we should accept the idea, promoted with increasing
stridency in some quarters, such as, at home, the South African Institute of
Race Relations, that liberalism carries with it some sort of innate moral
superiority. Anyone who remains subject to that delusion need only look at how
the states, and many of the institutions that, like the BBC, seek to root
themselves in liberal values, continue to produce an unspeakably racist
calculus to weigh the relative value of life in Israel and Palestine.
