Ignorance presents an opportunity to see the world through the eyes of others, writes Eusebius McKaiser.
Our public discourse is seldom of an exemplary intellectual standard, but it is also rarely poisonous unless you were to trawl the online comment sections. Recently, however, there has been the virtual equivalent of deadly fight club exhibitions, especially on debates about race.
What explains some of our mutual attempts to draw virtual blood? One possible answer, for me, surfaced during the course of last week.
I sat through a stunning set of public lectures on Pan-African Woman Intellectuals given by Dr Vashna Jagarnath, a senior history lecturer from Rhodes University. I absorbed every detail like a dry carpet furiously sucking up spilt beer.
I was introduced to women I knew nothing about who have done amazing things, like Sojourner Truth and Phillis Wheatley. They were both slaves who became incredibly interesting intellectuals. Truth was an abolitionist and a women’s rights activist. Wheatley wrote the most amazing poetry.
I also learnt more about the granularity of the violence of slavery, including that Phillis Wheatley’s first name was that of the ship that took her to America and her surname was her slave owner’s. But this surname was not a sign of familial love; it was simply the declaration of property ownership.
Black women’s bodies continue to be a site of oppression and violence, and these slave owners were just despicably honest about showing off their belief that they owned black women.
And this I learnt from just one section of one of five public lectures that Dr Jaganarth came to give in Joburg.
But one of many conversations that unravelled beyond the biography of the women was a discussion about the deeply divisive nature of South African public discourse at times.
Debate about race, at the moment, is particularly brutal, tonally. You have some Marxists lecturing the rest of us to stop writing in the first person, to only use structural analysis and to foreground class over race. You have white liberals getting angry, thinking they are being set up to be lynched publicly. You have younger black South Africans refusing to have the terms of a debate prescribed to them, seeing such strictures as themselves an aspect of violent oppression and pandering to white sensibilities. And so the strands of competing discontent go. And all of it delivered in various tropes of linguistic violence.
Why is debate so heated that personal attacks on one another cut deep? They also seem intended to cut deep. At times, it is as if there’s a battle to see whose reputation will be the last one standing? Or, the last reputation recovering in an intellectual ICU while an interlocutor’s reputation is dead and buried with fans of your ICU-self twerking by the graveside – or Facebook page, as the case might be – of the dead? What might be going on here?
At the heart of it, I reckon, is a deadly fear of admitting one’s own ignorance.
Here’s why I say so. When a belief is central to one’s belief system, you cherish it. It becomes an important part of your sense of self, even. There is, therefore, a cost that comes to giving up a core belief, such as, say, a belief in the existence of God. It is emotionally, socially and intellectually very hard for someone to even imagine giving up such a belief if that belief is a core belief.
This is true of all humans regardless of your competency in logic.
The result is that we try very hard to hold on to that belief, including by warding off epistemic challenges to it, by attacking the challenger, so that the content of the challenger’s arguments might be ignored.
This is what is going on in our public discourse – a fear of letting go of cherished beliefs we have always held.
People trained in Anglo-American analytic philosophy do not want to hear about post-colonial studies and challenges to their methods. Marxists do not want to see the intellectual value of identity politics steeped in deeply personal narrative.
Besides the existential fear of letting go of a cherished belief, there is also a fear of admitting gaps in your knowledge.
Now, I’m not saying celebrate ignorance. But ignorance, like my ignorance about Pan-African woman intellectuals, presents an opportunity. It is an opportunity to learn new things, to see the world in new ways, and to travel through the world in new ways, enriched by new knowledge.
When we want to impose our academic discipline’s methods on the world as universal truth, we thereby refuse to see the world through the eyes of others and confuse this fear with intellectual prowess.
Debate on topics like racism must be heated. Because the stakes are high. But we can keep the heat, knowing this stuff is personal, while not allowing ourselves to fry in ignorance. No one has a monopoly on truth.
* Eusebius McKaiser is the best-selling author of A Bantu In My Bathroom and Could I Vote DA? A Voter’s Dilemma.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
THE STAR