I have approached today’s column in a rather circuitous way; the way that happens when ideas arrive unscripted, purely by the power of circumstance.
The short story is that I received a message from a friend last week that included reference to an invitation I turned down six or seven months ago. I felt at the time that the invitation (to give a talk on an island in Southeast Asia) was too conditional. I would have had to say what I was expected to say and not what I really thought.
I should add that if your voice and pen are the source of your income it’s really foolish to turn down opportunities to write or speak to put food on the table. However, this has to be weighed up against the fact that you have to actually like the person you see in the mirror.
And so we get to the idea of moral checkpoints. It has become commonplace that entry to a discussion is allowed only once the demand for a particular moral position is met. In some cases, if you’re not stopped at the gate and make it past the first checkpoint there is another one down the road.
Franz Kafka captured this in the following way: “Before the law there stands a gatekeeper. And to this gatekeeper comes a man from the country and asks for entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says he cannot grant him entry. The man thinks for a moment and then asks whether he will be able to enter later on.
“‘This much is possible’, says the gatekeeper, ‘but not now’. Since the door to the law stands open as ever, and the gatekeeper stands to one side of it, the man bends forward to see through it to what lies within.
“When the gatekeeper notices he laughs, saying: ‘If you’re so allured by what’s inside, why not try going through in spite of my forbidding it? Be warned though: I am mighty. And I am but the lowest of the gatekeepers. From each hall to the next there are gatekeepers, each one mightier than before’.”
British historian David Olusoga made the point that two truths that may appear to contradict each other can exist simultaneously to provide a more nuanced and a more complex understanding of the world around us. In such a complex and complicated world moral checkpoints decide what may be said, what may not be said, and whether a discussion may proceed without fear or favour. There has to be room for differing perspectives and deeper questioning.
When I taught photography I would insist that better pictures would emerge if you walked around the subject, over and again, to see how light falls on it as well as how light reflects off it. This is good advice, unless you have been instructed or paid to present a particular image to get you past the first checkpoint.
Ultimately, as Jean Paul Sartre said (with reference to resisting the Nazis) you may make a decision at the first moral checkpoint, but Kafka’s successive gatekeepers await, to trap and entangle you in inextricable laws and conditionalities that strip you of choices beyond the entrance.
If I had accepted that invitation several months ago I would have become what my hosts wanted me to be. Acceptance of the invitation would have been the first checkpoint — it would not have been the last.
• 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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