There are more people in SA who are liberal than they would admit. It does not help that liberalism is infrequently discussed in detail, at least not publicly, but mostly it is because liberalism is associated with “those liberals”, a group concept interchangeably used with “those whites” of the apartheid era.
This does not mean liberalism in practice is inconsistent in time and place. Nonetheless, when it is convenient many of us slip back and forth in and out of liberalism’s safe spaces and behind masks.
I should repeat a position I stated in an earlier column: it’s unfortunate that those who profess to have “superior logic” tend to argue from personal incredulity. Let me make it clear, then. I have serious misgivings about excessive individualism, atomism and the insistence on the primacy of “the market” to resolve conflict and injustices in society. I also find social utilitarianism offensive.
The discussion here is not so much about facts as it is about beliefs and values, about delusion and self-deceit, and how these are often concealed. It is bound to be controversial.
The heaviest ideologues among us, the revolutionaries and fundamentalists deserving special mention, would demand to be granted the liberal freedoms of speech, of association, of movement and, as it goes, “economic freedom”. The latter has a good ring, but when religion or conventional beliefs on economics, and especially identity politics, enter the discussion, liberals prescribe and proscribe freedom, as most of us do. The example that readily comes to mind is the World Trade Organisation (WTO), specifically the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).
The agreement is the legal basis for liberal free trade among companies and countries. This reference to private corporations was specific as late as 2007, but the WTO website seems to have been changed. While “state-trading” disappeared completely from GATT, the WTO helps “producers of goods and services, exporters and importers conduct their business”. In other words to promote free trade between private entities, states have the responsibility and privilege to place restrictions on liberal trade. Enter morality.
The morality dimension is relatively easy, though not everyone believes states are “moral entities”. We may presume, nonetheless, that all political groups gathered within and across borders or boundaries want to exercise their rights, a fundamental principle of liberal democracy. Groups want their inherent rights respected, but that is no guarantee that they would extend that right to others. In other words, when someone speaks of “economic freedom”, we have come to understand that it applies only to a specifically identified group with divine rights — which means their legitimacy can never be questioned.
This extends to the business world. If as a business person you want to pursue as much profit as you wish (important for the function of liberal capitalism), you will resist all policies that impede your rights. It’s not always clear. I recall a reference somewhere in the literature covering five decades of trade negotiations that there was a time when introducing a “labour” or “environment” clause — it may have been called a “social clause” — was silently viewed as some kind of a communist plot. Some imagination liberals have.
Individual liberties are also saved for the in-group. There would be insistence, for example, that because we live in a liberal democratic society everyone has the right to practise their religion freely, but we would have no qualms about telling others what they may or may not do with their bodies or in their bedroom. It is perfectly in order, then, for an ethnic, religious or racial group to demand their own freedom, because that is what liberalism is meant to be, but deny it to others, which makes it all rather illiberal and undemocratic.
As explained above, my personal disagreement with liberal economics takes nothing away from the belief that liberalism provides us with the core basic freedoms on which we rest our day-to-day political activities. We gloss over the inherent contradiction in the liberal dictum “liberty, equality and fraternity”. If you are allowed to be free, you have the right to become “more free” than others and thereby reproduce social inequality. What, then, is the problem?
South Africans are almost unique in the world. This has to do with notions of exceptionalism and claims to eternal innocence. We tend to imagine ourselves as the most persecuted people in history, and anything that questions our role as “divine emissaries” of justice is necessarily wrong — until, of course, we decide otherwise. Then there is the doozy. We associate liberalism with “those liberals” (code-speak for “those whites”) of the apartheid era. This is not an absolution.
Amid all the confusion and manipulation of liberalisms, and with “those liberals” as a convenient target, which just confuses things further, it’s easy to conceal our liberalism. Along the way we exploit the bewildering liberalisms that are apparent globally, among sovereign states and in individual behaviour. This bewilderment probably influenced the structure of this brief essay. It’s hard to remember what liberalism is and what it is not. The only thing that is clear is that we can make up liberalism as we go along.
• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
