There’s a theorem that did my head in several years ago, during those foolish months and years when I audited classes in physics to escape from fear.
It took too much time and effort to think about the theorem seriously. I should add, though, that it makes sense only if you want it to make sense, and even if you believe it holds water it could take eternity for it to come true.
The infinite monkey theorem suggests that if you sat a monkey down at a keyboard, and the animal hit the keys randomly an infinite number of times, our simian friend would eventually type out the entire works of William Shakespeare. The theorem works best as a kind of a metaphor.
This, anyway, was the conclusion I reached on Christmas Day, when I read through (almost) all the statements made by US president-elect Donald Trump over the preceding months and years. He has been banging away at the metaphorical keyboard, and some day might produce something that is clear and coherent, and not what Jean Genet described in his 1948 autobiography as quite imbecilic and in need of a new language. In the Trumpian world, reality and illusion have become indistinguishable.
Switching play, intellectuals — most notably those who are organically tied to transnational liberal capitalism (a sliver of my slip is probably visible) — have the onerous task of making sense of Trump’s ineptiae. The words “nonsense”, “ridiculousness”, “absurdities” or “lies” would be impolite.
We are obliged to speak of these intellectuals in only general terms. I should probably raise my hand as one of those public intellectuals who are connected to this transnational class I refer to, but with heavy caveats. I apologise for restating this, but I don’t believe we have, after five centuries, (finally) reached the best world possible — humanity’s ultimate achievement. Many among us bang this drum of eternal validity overtly, but mainly surreptitiously, hoping nobody notices.
There is nothing unique about the current transnational class of intellectuals, who are now in a fight to save humanity’s ultimate achievement from decline or collapse. For instance, intellectuals were tasked with shoring up the orthodoxy that kept Europe’s Middle Ages in place (between 1000 and 1300 CE); the Abbasid era (750—1260 CE); the Han era (between 206 BCE and 220 CE), and the Majapahit era across the Nusantara (1200-1550 CE). Those eras ended.
If we follow the work of intellectuals, in the North American era the biggest conflict seems to be as much about making sense of Trump, as leader of the US, as it is about truth. He did, after all, establish the social media platform he called “Truth Social”.
One of the lessons from the Middle Ages was the importance intellectuals and leaders placed on keeping the peasantry illiterate, ignorant and making sure they remained in their stations, so to speak. Intellectuals would have the poor believe they have a monopoly on “the truth”. And so there is an apparent onrush to “secure the truth”. The irony is that statements of truth often rest on vested interests, on rigid solidarities, and especially on who has the power to amplify selected truths. All you have to do is pay the piper, and you will hear whatever tune you paid for.
Here, more seriously, enters perniciousness, those awful for/against binaries, exceptionalisms, morality claims and framing. Trump has reproduced the “savagery” (so described by Theodore Roosevelt) of non-Anglo-Saxon people in “shithole” countries and places south of the US border. The slick spins, fractured facts and cultural myths of contemporary intellectuals — all of us, but notably those who flirt with “end of history” claims, that sorry belief that the world we live in is the best world possible — with “civilisation-missions” and “civilisational conflicts”, make for troubling reading.
For example, decades-long beliefs in “Asian miracles” (miracles are by definition supernatural and irrational) are compared to Western diligence and hard work, and trade places with Asian production based on “sweat”, and not innovation. It’s hard to keep up with the newfound ways of othering Africans and Asians. In the shades of Johannesburg’s jacarandas and on the slopes of Table Mountain there is a constant framing of Africans or Asians as either woefully on the wrong path, or just dangerous for the world.
The “solution”, as the Wall Street Journal (April 2022) and The New York Times (August 2013, March 2015, April 2013 and October 2024) headlined, is to bomb places like Iran or North Korea and Syria, “even if it’s illegal”. One recent slick spin, apparently building a case for bombing Iran, was to find a Muslim who is “hated by Iran”, presumably to make the point that Iran hates even Muslims.
Trump may get it right, some day, and like the infinite monkey produce something vaguely intelligent as well as truthful. In the meantime, we are obliged to take the word of intellectuals. Mixing up lines by Kahlil Gibran: pity a world whose sages are dumb, and whose strongman is a fox.
• 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.
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