Curiosities/Observations

• The mad rush for duty-free as the sardines exited customs at the airport was a certain clue that you don’t want to buy booze or cigarettes in the city, unless you can help it. The queue there involved a far longer wait than customs itself, and the rationality of spending time in this queue was confirmed while browsing a wine shop. Not just a wine shop, mind you, but a “Wine Monopoly”. That is in fact its name. All wine and spirits are sold exclusively by the state, with prices partly determined by alcohol content, in a clear attempt to legislate morality. Which is of course fine if you’re a rich banker or lawyer, but not so good for the average geezer sunning himself in the park at 8pm. (These long summer nights are rather pleasant.)
• Chatting to a local on the night I arrived, I was told something odd about schooling here. Basically, children are not evaluated in any substantive way before the age of 14 (or maybe 16 – he was plying me with drink). This is of course in service of their manic egalitarianism, which dictates that kids shouldn’t be made to feel special, or inferior, before adults believe they can deal with it. So instead of exams, tests and report cards, teachers can only offer nebulous advice such as “maybe you should take a look at that maths textbook sometime? I hear it has lots of cool pictures.” Or something – I haven’t spoken to a teacher to see how this plays out.
• You need to be an active member of a church to become a gravedigger.
• The most commonly-found food is the polser, which is a hot dog, and raisin buns (whose Scandiwegian name I cannot recall). The polser will set you back around R35, as will the buns, with 3 of them in a portion. But if it’s polser you’re after, rather go to Denmark, where they serve them with crispy fried onions and rémoulade. These Norwegian ones (at least the ones I’ve found), have neither, and are thus crap. Denmark wins, and I have no biases to disclose.

• They are into peace, especially in the vicinity of the Nobel Center. I’m here for a humanist conference, and – recent events in Norway notwithstanding – it’s quite striking how the content and tone of dialogue with locals converges on trying to reconcile misunderstandings and resolve tensions. There is far less ego, or at least a different sort of ego. This congress of the International Humanist and Ethical Union is being hosted at a reception by the Crown Prince tomorrow night, and the Mayor is also making an appearance at the conference dinner on Saturday. There are flags advertising our conference in the streets. Basically, they take this stuff seriously.

And then, outside of observations on Norway, there’s an embarrassing and (hopefully) humorous anecdote, which involved the Irish. But before I get to that: South African readers, if you think you have a drinking problem, you probably don’t. Because you’re not Irish. The one Irish delegate (implicated in the story I’m getting to) told me about how she and her friends drank vodka all day at school at the age of 16, from their ‘water’ bottles. And this was a head girl, from a middle-upper class background.

Anyway, I was chatting to Annie and her partner Aaron about God, Roy Keane (is that tautologous?) and assorted matters. Aaron wandered off to scrounge for coins to buy another beer. And then, while talking to Annie, I’m pretty darn sure I saw her raise her hand to the side of her face, wiggle her fingers and say “I’m up here”. That sequence of gestures is difficult to interpret as something else, one would think, and also difficult to misinterpret – it usually means “stop objectifying me by staring at my cleavage, you sexist boor”. Except I wasn’t, and hadn’t been.

This freaked me out. If you’ve watched Curb your Enthusiasm (the new series is great, by the way), you might have a sense of how utterly strange, and socially awkward, the next half-hour or so was. Because Aaron had returned, and it was another half-hour before he left, and I finally had the opportunity to resolve whether I was going to live with this misunderstanding, or “put it out there”.

I chose the latter path, and asked her whether she had wiggled her fingers, saying “I’m up here”. She looked at me as if I was alien, insane or both. I repeated the question, mimicking the gesture. Now she seemed convinced I was insane, which I might have exacerbated by saying “look, I realise I probably sound creepy now, but this is quite awkward and needs clarifying”. But she had no idea what I was talking about. And now there was this enormous elephant in the room, and I felt compelled to explain, again, what I thought I had seen – and of course what I perceived it to mean (the thing I may or may not have seen).

But bless the Irish – her quite straightforward response was “Ah, no. If you’d been doing that, I would just have slapped you or stormed off.” So then we got on with talking about Roy Keane, potatoes and so forth, with the discomfort slowly dissipating.

And now it’s Thursday, and the first phase of the visit (leadership training for secular humanist groups, at the IHEU) is over, with the conference proper starting tomorrow. I’ll be sending occasional updates on proceedings through the FSI Twitter account, and the usual motley collection of links and provocations via my account. Be careful out there.

Samantha Vice argues (pdf) that whites should feel guilt over apartheid, and also that “blacks must be left to remake the country in their own way”, while whites should live as “quietly and decently as possible”, refraining from offering our views on the racial fractures in the South African experience. Her arguments merit a fuller discussion than I’ll offer here, but those readers who are sympathetic to my views on racism and identity politics will most likely agree that some intuitive opposition to these conclusions can be expected.

First, because framing a complicated situation in terms of clumsy (and in my view, uninformative nearly to the point of meaninglessness) categories such as “white” and “black” encourages an association between people who have nothing in common besides the arbitrary concentration of melanin in their skin. And second, because even if Vice is right that white people should feel guilt, how will anyone know that we feel this guilt, and how can we move past this guilt, unless we express it – thereby violating her preference for us to be silent?

Guilt, shame and regret are certainly part of a spectrum of appropriate responses to having done wrong, and it’s undeniable that a political and economic ruling class – exclusively white – treated black South Africans as a resource to be exploited, rather than as fellow human beings. But even during the worst days of apartheid, some people who were white in appearance were not white in beliefs or behaviour, and I can see little reason to insist that a person like Joe Slovo, for example, should be (or have been) required to feel guilty about his whiteness.

He could feel regret at being associated with other whites, of course. And more to the point, he could feel regret at the ease with which we fall into these binary oppositions of white shame and black anger, whereby the reality of individuals living in a system of economic asymmetry – with class divisions defined by race – is obscured via treating the proxy for class (here, race) as being the route to resolving inequality.

People are angry because they are poor and marginalised. They are not angry because they are black. And those who should feel shame are those who contribute to that inequality and oppression. Many of those people – most of those people – were white, but that’s no longer obviously the case, in that people like Julius Malema are currently doing a fine job of opportunistically exploiting the poor for personal gain.

This is not to say that an awareness of privilege is unimportant. But an awareness of the benefits one might have had (and perhaps in some sectors, continues to have) as a white person, or a male, does not have to invoke shame. What it can do is to inform your outlook and judgements, in that you can be more or less aware of how your assumptions are coloured by that privilege. Someone who is unaware of these biases could, for example, think that it’s (somehow) blackness that causes crime or lower pass-rates at school, rather than poverty or a legacy of unequal education.

Racial nationalism is not a route to eliminating racism. It perpetuates the notion that we are defined by arbitrary characteristics, and imprisons us in worldviews that prop up that notion. And of course, a rise in black nationalism will correlate with a rise in white nationalism, as evidenced by the lionisation of General de la Rey, the prominence of Afriforum, and last week, the assault on Professor Anton van Niekerk in his office at Stellenbosch University.

Prof. van Niekerk wrote an op-ed (in Afrikaans) discussing the musical “Tree Aan!”, which revolves around the lives of soldiers in the South African Border War of 1966 to 1989. His concern related to the Afrikaner nationalism expressed by the musical, and in particular, the way in which the Border War itself is being re-cast as a heroic battle against a communist onslaught rather than a battle to perpetuate white supremacy.

Abel Malan, a member of the Volksraad Selection Committee (VVK), an organisation that hopes to establish an Afrikaner homeland, arranged a meeting with van Niekerk on Tuesday morning. The meeting was ostensibly to discuss the article, but what ensued seems to have been less of a discussion, and more a violent reminder to van Niekerk of the consequences of betraying “his people”. Van Niekerk ended up with several bruises to his face, broken spectacles, and a fair amount of unsolicited interior decorating in his office.

The VVK and other sympathetic groups interpret the events differently. A spokesperson for the Verkenner (Pathfinder) movement claims that Malan was provoked by van Niekerk’s “patronising and insulting words about the Afrikaner”, and the VVK’s Ben Geldenhuys also suspects that van Niekerk “started yelling” at Malan, described as a “reasonable man”. But seeing as Malan apparently told SAPS officers that he “did the job” and an unnamed VVK member apparently said that “Stellenbosch doesn’t have enough security to protect Anton van Niekerk”, it doesn’t seem implausible that Malan was somewhat eager to consider himself provoked.

In one of the more peculiar responses, the website Praag tells us that the “fistfight … can be directly attributed to the division and intolerance which the Naspers monopoly has sown among Afrikaners”. It seems more likely that the assault is the result of Malan and his sympathisers being unwilling to live in a world in which – at least by their lights – their interests and culture are under threat. But this assault exposes the problem with racial nationalism and the politics of identity in general, in that it inclines toward intolerance and extremism.

As any of us who were around during all or some of the decades when the Border War was fought can attest, there was certainly no shortage of hysterical rhetoric regarding the “rooi gevaar”, and the possibility of their being a Communist behind every bush. However, this can’t be allowed to obscure the fact that legislated apartheid began two decades before the war in question, and that the war was precipitated by South Africa’s refusal to withdraw from South-West Africa (Namibia) as well as their implementation of apartheid legislation in that country.

So regardless of the good intentions of some soldiers in this conflict, it cannot easily – or perhaps even plausibly – be characterised as a noble battle to defend democracy and constitutionality from a Communist threat. This is because South Africa was no democracy at the time, and because it was fighting to keep imposing something equally undemocratic on South-West Africa. The fact that Cuba and the Soviets were involved in opposition to South Africa’s goals doesn’t transform those goals into noble ones. This is the message that van Niekerk was trying to convey, and the message that resulted in his attack.

Reading some of the responses to this incident leaves one quite despondent regarding the willingness of some South Africans to even attempt admission of past wrongdoings, or to participate in building a non-racial democratic country. Van Niekerk is a “Lippy Liberal” who has “met his match”, and “hopefully many more will follow”. The Pathfinder movement is “proud of the valour shown by its leaders”. The implausibly named Jéan-Paul Jéan-Jacques Louis-Pierre (which does turn out to be a pseudonym for Mattheus Lötter) asks whether any steps are going to be taken against van Niekerk, seeing as his letter is an “attack on the history of white students”.

Well, sure, it’s is an attack on your history, but that’s only because it’s “your” history rather than simply “history”. And while the actual history can be told in various ways, any honest retelling will expose shameful details regarding the actions of all the nations and political bodies involved. These honest retellings and the conversations that might ensue cannot be silenced, for doing so leaves us unable to move beyond racial nationalism. If anything, it moves us closer to dividing the country into various categories of “us” and “them”, each of those categories no more principled than the last.

So I think white people like Malan certainly should feel shame. Not because of anything to do with their being white, but because they feel compelled to shut their ears to civilised disagreement, and because they are willing to do harm to others upon hearing competing narratives regarding South Africa’s history. It is of course unlikely that he or his sympathisers are capable of shame in this regard, at least for the moment, and there’s little that I – a lippy liberal, no doubt, with Afrikaans heritage to boot – can say to make this point to them.

Except perhaps to say that I understand their fear of black nationalism, but only because I fear racial nationalism in all its forms. We are in the end only – and all – mere people, afraid that our futures might not meet our expectations. But any attempt to secure a prosperous and healthy future that begins with forcing others into silence is likely to fail, and to make us see enemies where they might not exist. There’s no shortage of real enemies, after all – and we find out who they are by talking to each other.

But being away from the Internet – and perhaps especially from Twitter – can be a good thing. Now that I’m catching up on a few day’s worth of timeline in a few hours, I can see that I might have become involved in various wars, in ways that might later be regretted. The forced remove conduces to slower consideration.

It also starkly reveals how little there is worth paying attention to – among the gems of insightful links and stimulating conversations, there is still so much wasted time, and so many pointless moments of narcissism on a platform like Twitter. And of course, we can all be guilty of those, and I know I sometimes am – but we should try to make those funny, at least, so that some value can be extracted from them.

The one thing I regret having missed is the conversation around Business Day’s publishing the 2008 Sunday Times report, which occupied many SA Twitter timelines on June 15. If you know nothing about this story, read this (see links to earlier articles at the bottom), this and this (especially this last one, where the editor of Business Day, Peter Bruce, summarises why BD published the report, and his views on the controversy that resulted from doing so).

Sure, I can read all the virtual column-inches now, but the conversation has now slowed – the real-time exchanging of views between interested parties has concluded, and opinions are most likely entrenched. You get a chance to influence what people think, and have them influence what you think, on a platform such as Twitter, and this often happens before the columns, op-eds and articles are written. And we don’t often go back to revise our views, especially once we have committed them to ‘paper’. So these conversations are a pity to miss, and one clear advantage that the social web has over books and paper.

But despite having missed a few such conversations, it has been wonderful to get a chance to do some serious reading. If you’re interested in the conversation around what effects social media and the Internet are having on us, read Jaron Lanier’s wonderfully contrarian You are not a gadget. If you are interested in debates around personhood – what makes you you, and are you the same you as you were 20 years ago – Julian Baggini’s The Ego Trick is very good.

Both sorts of interacting (ie. the immediate and the traditional) with words, and with ideas, are valuable. We shouldn’t neglect or demonize either of them – but rather make sure we take full advantage of both. But having said that, until our small boating crew gets back to terra firma next weekend, I quite look forward to reading a few more books.

In case you haven’t see The Wire, I’ll say no more. Except that you should see watch the series, which I came to very late for some reason. But now that I have watched it, there’s no question that it fits into the category of the best television shows ever, at least in my estimation (even though I might not be able to help this – it’s listed on Stuff White People Like, after all). To further expose myself to potential ridicule or potential accusations of a deficit in aesthetic judgement, here’s my list, rank-ordered for bestest-ever TV:

1. The Wire
2. Deadwood
3. The West Wing
4. Battlestar Galactica (the 2004 version)

While I was intending to tell you why, there are lectures to be written, and a Sunday to enjoy. But if there are any of these four that you haven’t watched, they are all worth checking out. And seeing as it’s soon to be Winter, you surely need to think about what to do on those days and nights where leaving the house is unthinkable. Unlike today.

Curricular revisions in the area of religious instruction in South African schools have been the subject of a previous column, in which I argued that political expediency could compromise Constitutional freedoms, as well as handicap the development of a citizenry which is capable of significant intellectual engagement with policy. A related trend, with the same negative consequences, can also be observed in our universities. More recently, the teaching of the most basic foundation of language – grammar – is being threatened. And so, another potential blow is landed against clarity of thought and expression.

I speak of the recent leak of the National Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement for Grades 10 to 12 for English Home Language, wherein it is revealed that grammar will no longer be examined in a separate paper. While the basic education ministry has been quick to reassure us that this does not mean grammar will not be taught, this claim is difficult to reconcile with the available facts. Furthermore, the mere decision to not give grammar focused attention could be said to be problematic, in that the subject is perhaps both too technical, and too important, to be integrated into language teaching more generally.

According to Granville Whittle, a spokesperson for the ministry of basic education, eliminating the separate examination paper focusing on grammar does not mean that the subject will not be taught. Instead, grammar will be taught through integration into the reading and writing components of language instruction and examination, allowing for grammar to be taught “in context”.

The Star has seen a copy of the Policy Statement, and tells us “No teaching time is being allocated to the language component, and while the document gives a list of grammar items in an appendix, it states: ‘Teachers do not have to teach all or any of it. It is a reference list only, and the needs of the class must dictate what is being taught.’

On page 31 it gives the rationale for this by saying that by Grade 10, pupils should be familiar with the basics of grammar, parts of speech, rules of concord, use of tense, auxiliaries and modals, and sentence structures. ‘Discreet, isolated lessons of grammar should not now be part of the teaching time’”.

And while it may be true, as Whittle claims, that eliminating separate grammar instruction is the international trend, the fact remains that South Africa is hardly typical of international norms in having eleven official languages. This raises the question of whether this trend is appropriate to our context, where a significant proportion of schoolchildren will learn a home language that won’t often be encountered in their eventual workplaces. So, while linguistic competence in one’s home language can perhaps be achieved without separate grammar instruction, it’s less clear that this is possible when learning a second (or even third) language.

Furthermore, linguistic competence might not be what we should be aiming for. For us to have any chance of being more than average or competent – as individuals as well as a nation – we need to increase the number of people who are able to critically engage with the world around them. More to the point, we need people who are able to express their critical opinions in ways that are compelling and persuasive. This requires a significant command of language, not simply the ability to communicate effectively.

Wittgenstein pointed out that there is a logical structure to language, and that this structure constrains what can be said meaningfully. What can be said influences what can be thought, leading to his well-known claim that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world”. Besides the obvious and (sometimes) easy to comprehend features of our environments, there is much that is subtle, and which requires an equally subtle understanding – and then an equally subtle language with which to communicate what one understands, and fails to understand.

Grammar is then part of the process of learning mastery of language, expression, and thought. It is the logic that underpins the effectiveness or absence thereof of the noises we make at each other, and the characters we draw on a page. One simple case in which this is clear is in rhetoric, and the impression made on the audience through the linguistic choices we make.

Consider the active versus the passive voice, and the difference between sentences like “President Thabo Mbeki yesterday fired his deputy president, Jacob Zuma, who was implicated in a corruption scandal” and “deputy president Jacob Zuma, who was implicated in a corruption scandal, was yesterday fired by President Thabo Mbeki”. The former example foregrounds Mbeki, which aids in creating the impression that he is somehow more responsible than in the latter example, which highlights Zuma’s alleged corruption.

These sorts of choices are the ones made not only by journalists and editors, but by all of us in describing the world around us. Not only that – we also brand ourselves through how we speak and write. We give other people information as to our thoughts and abilities, and thus shape what they think we are capable of, and how they should interpret our words and actions.

Most worryingly, perhaps, is our capacity for being misled once we no longer possess the ability to interrogate statements made by others, and where all language becomes vague or bland – and we simply stop paying attention. Spokesperson Whittle is also quoted as saying that “some teachers feel you still need to teach grammar separately and we will look at this”. Also, even though the document in question is marked as a final draft, it’s not yet clear that this decision is finalised.

Before it is – assuming that it’s not too late – one can only hope that someone points the relevant decision-makers to George Orwell’s essay on “Politics and the English Language”. In that essay from 1946, Orwell argues that bad prose and oppressive ideology are frequent companions. In the context of a political discourse where it seems to matter less and less what people say (Manyi), but instead who is allowed to speak (as in Mantashe’s scolding of Manuel for acting like a “free agent”), perhaps others should read it too. One paragraph reads as follows:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

This is the end point of not paying attention to language – we name things, and construct sentences around those names, without calling up those mental pictures. And unless we conjure up those mental images and evaluate alternatives to them, it might well end up being the case that we lose the ability to do so.

So, as to how people can take themselves far too seriously: Yesterday, after having pledged to make dinner for myself and The Doctor, a trip to Gardens Centre was required in order to procure ingredients. Walking past the MTN store, I remembered that I had had difficulty with roaming while in London, and I therefore walked in to make enquiries. While chatting to the clerk, a woman came in, and started addressing the customer in line behind me (the only one). She asked him how long he’d been waiting, emphasising that she was short on time.

Not long, he said, but this was insufficiently reassuring. “I don’t have time to twiddle my thumbs”, she said. She then asserted that she would get on with other business, and that this customer should ensure that her place in the queue was preserved. In a somewhat bemused fashion, he offered an ambiguous mumble, and she departed. Upon returning, and finding herself next in line, she forcefully dropped her phone on the counter, and started loudly complaining that it was misbehaving.

The staff tinkered, at one point plugging it in to check that it was charged. Big mistake. “I charged it this morning! Do you think I’m stupid?”, she yelled. But the problem had something to do with turning off/on, and they were unable to diagnose the fault right there. So they offered to take it in for repairs. No – “it’s not worth repairing. It only cost me R100″, she said. “Well, is it under guarantee? We can take it in for repairs, and offer you a loan phone in the meanwhile”, the staff offered.

“No! You must replace it”. She pointed to the MTN branding on the phone, and said, waving her arms around to gesture at the store walls, “all of this here made this phone, and is responsible for it!”. They then dared to ask if she had bought it there. But she had not – she had bought it at the Waterfront CNA. Well then, ma’am, we can’t help you – you must take it there, and I imagine if you have your receipt, they will be able to help. “Who keeps receipts!”, she yelled. “And do you mean I have to traipse all the way to the Waterfront? I don’t have time for that!”. “We can’t help you, ma’am – you didn’t buy it here, and even if you did, we’d need your receipt to be able to help”.

So she storms out. About ten minutes later (I was having a long geeky conversation with a clerk), she appeared in the doorway and announced: “I have bought a phone from Vodacom!”. Then, she steps in, throws the phone on the floor, and starts stomping on it and crushing it with her heel, shrieking things like “this is what I think of MTN!”. She kicks pieces of phone in the direction of the helpdesk, and storms out again. But – she had forgotten something. Seconds later, she re-appears, throws the charger into the store, and yells “and you can hang yourselves on THIS!”.

We all had a good laugh, and one store clerk had some good fortune, as it appears the phone, once reassembled, was now in better working order.

The other frivolity involved my friend, the occasional celebrity “After-dinner mint” (at least according to a P4 radio billboard that once bore his mugshot), calling me last Sunday to suggest the audacious plan of flying to London to watch football. So we did, because the game was at Old Trafford, home of the best football team (and the ugliest footballer). And seeing as he is an Arsenal fan, and they were “our” opposition, I could look forward to plenty of gloating at his expense once we secured our inevitable victory (2-0 to Manchester United was the eventual score. As the crowd kept reminding the MintMan, his team “is just a shit Barcelona”).

And London was fun. We went to pubs, ate at fat-lip Jamie’s Italian (and, with another friend, at Heston Blumenthal’s Hinds Head, where I enjoyed a 52-hour cooked pork belly). We hung with Simon Pegg at a bar in Covent Garden (no, not really, but he was there), and took lots of Tube rides and a train to Manchester. We learnt that orang-utans use tree bark for sexual pleasure (so the poster said – not empirically verified by us), and that strange fox-like creatures in London steal stuff from your car, if you’re not sufficiently watchful. We saw a famous (I imagine) mouldy wall outside our hotel room. It became known to us that the disabled have access to an “ability suite” at Old Trafford. And also, I discovered that Eton has a “Porny School”, which might be useful information to some of you.

But instead, abuse and ridicule of police is now a sport played by thousands of motorists, who are aggrieved that someone has the impunity to try and prevent them from endangering themselves and others on the roads. Sure, some police may be corrupt, and if too few of them are exposed, we end up being exploited. I’ve seen no reason to suspect that this is the norm, though – instead, this appears to be a case of people actively – and publicly – trying to find ways to evade their legal responsibilities. Why should this activity be praised, or protected?

Having said that, of course it shouldn’t be criminal to call cops “pigs”, and it should remain criminal to harass motorists and search their cellphones, as police are reportedly now doing. But being allowed to call cops pigs doesn’t necessarily mean we should do it. If you do believe it appropriate to spread word of road blocks & speed traps, that same information can be passed on via Twitter or whatever other channel, sans the abuse. Which might be more in our interests, seeing as the abuse might simply make the cops more inclined to do whatever it is @pigspotter and his supporters accuse them of doing.

Simply put, we’d have far less trouble with the law if we simply obeyed it. I’m of course making a general point, rather than addressing complications such as those involved where the law is wrong, and where we might have a moral or political duty to oppose it. Likewise, we’d make far less trouble for ourselves if we obeyed the common sense notion of doing our homework before investing in something, whether it be a product or a relationship. Sites like Hellopeter are replete with whines from people who bought something, or engaged with some firm or other, where the vendor or the product could be known to be unsatisfactory in advance – if the buyer had bothered to investigate the matter.

As any geek would attest, discussion forums dealing with complex electronic devices like smartphones are littered with this sort of victim mentality, where it’s always someone else fault that “my phone can’t do X” (if it’s an iPhone). Again, if something is that important to you, do your homework beforehand (as @6000 recently pointed out in typically diplomatic style). As with the Darwin awards, sometimes you entirely deserve what you get.

I speak from experience here, in that I recently sold a new laptop to a buyer I found via Gumtree. Except it turned out that the SMS’ed proof of payment he sent me was a fake, as I suggested it might be to the friend I was sitting with, waiting for the buyer. “It would be entirely my fault”, I said (or something like that), “because I’m too impatient to get rid of it, and can’t be asked to engage with any more emails or calls from random strangers. And so it proved to be my fault, and a guy going by the name of Mark Shoul has a free laptop (sorry, Larry, I could have just given it to you in the end), and a case number with “his name” on it at SAPS. But I don’t deserve to get anything back – I deserve exactly what I got, which is nothing, besides being taught a lesson.

Waiting until you are married to have sex seems, in our sexually saturated culture, a rather old-fashioned, even idealistic, concept. In Western culture, moral standards seem to have slackened as more and more people are engaging in acts of copulation for recreation as opposed to procreation. Every sperm is no longer sacred! As people embrace their sexuality and desires, the practicality of our moral code is called into question. Why wait until marriage to discover the joys of sex?

The principal reasons for pledging purity are religious – to a sworn atheist, this seems absurd. There is no one biblical verse condemning sex before marriage; Christians suggest instead that this message can be inferred.

In Deuteronomy 22:13-22, for example, it is clear virginity when getting married is expected and sex before marriage is termed “a disgraceful act”. This is just one of many examples and the message is pretty clear. What the Bible fails to do, for me however, is provide adequate reasoning.
The only legitimate reason I can see for keeping sexual partners to a minimum is the risk of AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases. STDs are almost a symbol of promiscuity – the price of pleasure. And there is a belief that if everyone behaved responsibly the epidemic would end. So the church has made it its mission to ensure that everybody behaves.

In 1495, a new disease started appearing all over Europe and its symptoms were terrifying. A doctor at the time described it as “Boils that stood out like Acorns, from whence issued such filthy stinking Matter, that whosoever came within the Scent, believed himself infected. The Colour of these was of a dark Green and the very Aspect as shocking as the pain itself, which yet was as if the Sick had laid upon a fire.” Such was the explosive birth of syphilis.

Christopher Columbus and his crew have been accused of bringing the disease back with them from the Americas to Europe where it raged its way through the population, killing millions of people. During this period people’s attitudes towards sex changed radically. The church pushed its no-sex-before-marriage agenda hard and it to started win its battle.

Telling people they will die from disease if they have too much sex doesn’t work. We all need to believe that we will never die; that it can never happen to us, otherwise we would never be able to leave our houses.

However, if you make something deplorable, you attach stigma to it, and ensure that those who indulge in it will be ostracised; in this way people feel as though they can lose something tangible, something real. I am suggesting that the church has transformed pre-marital sex into a sin in order to protect its flock from real diseases, not hell. Once this disease was syphilis, now it is AIDS.

The moralistic preaching about sex before marriage has no place in our post-religious society. There is something profoundly wrong with telling people sex is dirty, therefore you must save it for marriage. Sex is not dirty.

For most of us, we have enough insecurities when it comes to the fuzzy tinkle times without having to worry about whether God is watching us and enjoying the show or not. This mindset imposed by the church had created guilt even when having sex with a steady partner.

This is wrong. Sex is about freedom, choice and exploration – and to be cheesy and romantic, love. And there is nothing wrong with that. Just use a condom.

Now, besides the apparent contradiction contained in the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs, this appears to be a reasonable opinion piece, and one that warms the cockles of my heart (no, I don’t have those either) in expressing a naturalistic outlook on the question of premarital sex. But for some, what Ms Mitchell says is completely beyond the bounds of decency and good sense. And no, I’m not talking about Taryn Hodgson or Errol Naidoo, but rather a soon-to-be graduate of one of the more demanding programmes at the University of Cape Town. Let’s call him “Gershwin”. Gershwin offers us some impassioned pleas, in an email that was addressed to 114 people (including some mailing lists, so probably many more). He feels so strongly about the matter that he even included the Vice-Chancellor in his entreaty. I did reply to tell him that this was spam, and in contravention of UCT email policies, but perhaps he thinks that those policies are evil too. Anyway, let’s see what he says:

I am writing too you out of serious concern because of what has been written in the 24 August 2010 Volume 69: Number 9 issue of the varsity newspaper. I have attached an electronic version of the article for you to read.

My concerns are :

1. This has serious damaging effect on the students who do not have an standpoint on the matter of sex before marriage and will be swayed into thinking that this article has any substance
2. UCT is a prestigious university and one does not expect writing and lack of depth of thought of this calibre.

This article is intellectually limited and carries too much harmful effects too be taken lightly.

So, besides the implicit claim in (1) that students who don’t yet have a standpoint on “this matter” should presumably adopt Gershwin’s standpoint (which we’ll hear about soon), we’re probably also entitled to ask for some defense of the claim that the article has no substance. Maybe Kathryn got some facts wrong? Gershwin will hopefully enlighten us. On point 2, no argument from me – just the observation that Gershwin might well be in the process of getting his own petard ready for some hoisting.

Please I urge to help me undo the damage that the author has Kathryn Mitchell has caused. Please give me your opinions on the matter so that we together may create a better and deeper understanding of this topic

Here is what my thoughts on the matter are:

1. I believe that sex should be preserved for marriage because it the most deepest connection you can have with your partner. if you are constantly having sex with many partners you have shared that deep connection with many people. This means that your deepest connection is worth less.
2. From a spiritual point of view, sharing your spirit with people constantly leads ones spirit to be torn up in the end and one would constantly feel empty.
3. From an empirical point of view their are psychological studies (I have looked them up) that prove that couples who engage in sex before marriage most times end up being divorced. Hence we have high divorce rates, dysfunctional homes and even abuse
4. From a moral point of view, it is simply wrong.

We need to paint a proper picture and not simply eradicate the author’s view. I have not even considered a moral argument as the author clearly, from the article, lacks this. It would seem she is using this article to hide from her own sexual immorality.

People do not need to make this mistake before they understand its immensity.
Pleading you understand

Well, he asks for opinions, so here are mine, addressing his points in order:

1. Why should we care what you believe, Gershwin? I, by contrast, think that wrestling escaped marmosets together is the deepest connection one can make with a partner. Sure, doing so often leads to sex, but that’s not why we do it. If you think that sex involves the deepest connection possible, that’s fine – go forth and live according to your chosen standard. But if you want it to be anyone else’s standard, you’ll need to tell them why.
2. Even if one believed in the idea of a “spirit” (and there’s no good reason to, Gershwin), we’d also need to know plenty about the nature of that spirit. Maybe it can handle being shared? Perhaps it’s robust enough to sleep around with some other spirits without getting torn up and all. And sure, meaningless sex can make you feel a bit shallow, some of the time. But we can get meaning from all sorts of places – and while one of those places might be marriage, marriage has no monopoly on interpersonal meaning.
3. Oooh, you’ve looked them up, have you? I’ve looked some stuff up too. One of my sources says you’re an idiot, but the data isn’t quite clear, so I’m happy to judge you on your words instead, which appear to come from a distinctly idiotic religious space. Other sources I’ve looked up tell me that divorce rates are highest amongst religious believers, that all so-called “happiness indexes” consistently rank secular nations above religious ones, etc. And I can actually offer my sources, and have often done so on previous posts here – instead of just asking you to take my word for it.
4. What does that mean? What moral theory or framework are you appealing to, Gershwin? Sure, people can be harmed in sexual interactions, but that can happen whether they are marital or pre-marital. You need to give us an argument here, rather than just tell us it’s “simply wrong”. It’s not simple at all – you are, for claiming that it is.

Gershwin then tells us that he has not even considered a moral argument, which is of course clear from his letter. He does apparently seem to think that he’s offered some sort of argument, but all I can see are assertions, backed by unshakable prejudice. It’s bloody sad that 4 years of expensive education sometimes add up to this sort of stupidity.

There’s a bunch of good stuff there to vote for, but also some very strange contenders. Some of the blogs haven’t been updated in ages, and some aren’t even blogs (for example, The Daily Maverick). Unfortunately for me, if one is going to (falsely) consider the Maverick to be a blog, then they (rather than me) should certainly get your vote. But they’re not a blog, so rather vote for me. (Update: see Chris’s comment below. The Daily Maverick have taken themselves out of the running.) You can vote until the 17th of September, and the process allows for one vote per day. Yes, I know, the methodology is completely screwy, but there you go.

Other people/blogs worth checking out:

Two of my competitors for best post: 6000 with his Dear Uruguay (clearly inspired by my post, The hand of god, revisited, but never mind that); and Michael Meadon’s post, On deference, which exhorts us to bear the limits of our knowledge in mind, and to understand what authority means in the context of scientific claims.

Two of the entrants for “Best Science and Technology blog”: Michael Meadon’s Ionian Enchantment and Angela Meadon’s The Skeptic Detective also merit your consideration.

And “the time” lasted for a good 15 years, long after I had desisted from making layered lattes, and had instead begun digging myself  into theoretical holes so deep you needed a heidegger^[1] to get out of them. But the time is now over, as I have gone and done one of the things that make real coffee snobs roll their eyes, and sometimes snort in disgust.

I have bought a Nespresso. A Le Cube, in fact, just like the one pictured on the right. Yes, it uses “pods”. But I can explain. You see, being a real coffee snob is not easy. If you intend to insulate yourself against accusations of being some sort of caffeine poseur (a short step from simply being a tosseur), then you really need:

• good beans, roasted no more than a month before
• a burr grinder
• and a really proper espresso machine – the sort that you don’t find at your local @Home, and which might even make strange mechanical noises.

Then, if you’re a fan of flat whites and the like, you need a steamer too (this is usually built-in, though), as well as a milk steaming jug. The point is that you need a fair amount of kit – and more importantly, you need to know how to use it.

Because it’s very easy to make crap espresso, but not so easy to make an espresso that’s significantly better-tasting than the one from your moka pot. Also, not so easy to make a coffee, more generally, that’s better than the one from your cafetière. And the cafetière has been what the Doctor and I have been relying on since we started drinking coffee together, so as to wake up and wash down our cigarettes in the morning.

On top of the difficulty of using this specialised equipment effectively, there’s the mess. And the noise of grinding. And the needing to have freshly-roasted beans about the house. All of this is easier if you have a rolling country estate, and a Jeeves or somesuch to look after all the bits save the drinking of the brew. But that’s not me, and it’s probably not you, either.

With the Nespresso, I have to swallow some pride – sure. But what I get in return is a good cup, every time, where the “time” in question is rather short, seeing as the thing boots up and dispenses in a minute or so. With absolutely no mess, and no need to worry about the freshness of the beans and other snobby details. You see, I know the beans aren’t fresh already.

But as I was saying to the Doctor on the way to purchasing the thing, while we occasionally drink a coffee at home which merits a 8 or so (on a 10-point scale), we only get that in the rare situations when I’ll grind some fresh beans, and take care to make the coffee in ways which maximise the bean’s potential. Usually, however, our coffee will be a 5 or so – still better than instant, but really just a vehicle for caffeine.

Now, I get a 7 every time, with the minimum of time, fuss and mess. Plus, the device looks pretty good in the kitchen. Even the Doctor says so. Come have a coffee sometime and see for yourself (no, not you).

P.S. I was not paid or offered any sort of inducement to write this positive account of a consumer product. If Nestle wish to rectify this, please get in touch, as I’d hate to be out of step with blogging trends in SA more generally.

1. ^[1] borrowed from the (absolutely tremendous) novel 36 Arguments for the existence of God: A work of fiction, by Rebecca Goldstein (partner to Steven Pinker) ↩