This is very much the position of South African President Jacob Zuma’s faction in the African National Congress (ANC) as the party celebrates its 100th anniversary. Once one of the great forces in the African liberation struggle, it is now competing with Orban in manipulating a constitution to enlarge the party’s discretionary power.
Like Orban, it has taken new powers to muzzle the press and constrain the power of South Africa’s courts. Chains of accountability are to be weakened as secrecy laws are strengthened and the anti-corruption agency abolished. The model is the anti-Enlightenment Chinese Communist Party championing Han Chinese. An anti-Enlightenment ANC will shamelessly champion its tribe, the Zulu. Reason, democracy, the rule of law and respect for dissent are values of the declining West.
Thus the ANC can cock a snook at the scientific evidence that HIV is linked to AIDS. If former South African president Thabo Mbeki, like his successor, believes differently, that is all that matters; everybody knows that science makes mistakes and is not objective. If senior US politicians such as Santorum can argue that the scientific evidence supporting climate change is “junk science” and “an excuse for more government control of your life,” then the ANC can dismiss scientific evidence on AIDS.
Nor is Britain immune from the same trends. We have our virulent pack of climate-change deniers who insist that what counts is what they believe — and that if science leads to collective state action to manage carbon emissions then necessarily it must be wrong. Euroskeptics come from the same tribal mold; progress is not to build an interdependent Europe. It is to freeze the clock and defend the nation state to the last.
The Enlightenment’s defenders are in part to blame for this global rejection of its ideals. Some welfare systems have been ill-designed. Press freedom, as we in Britain know to our cost, has been too easily abused by proprietors furthering their own agenda. Lawyers are paid fortunes to manipulate the letter of the law rather than respect its intent. Scientists too frequently dismiss their own uncertainties.
What’s more, progress can be portrayed as a reduction to an exercise in conforming to little more than politically correct protocols. It is why Liverpool Football Club so readily sided with its player Luis Suarez rather than recognize the legitimacy of the Football Association’s eight-match ban for his racist slur.
On issues big and small, we need to get better and cleverer at understanding our Enlightenment legacy and turning it into policies and institutions whose value is obvious to all. The Enlightenment is, with all its imperfections, what drove the rise of the West and will continue to do so if allowed. There is no long-run happiness nor well-being in organizing economies and societies around blood, ethnicity, blind faith and the tribe. The Enlightenment is under siege around the world. It is time to rally to its defense.
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