{"id":377,"date":"2012-02-29T21:40:11","date_gmt":"2012-03-01T02:40:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=377"},"modified":"2012-02-29T21:40:11","modified_gmt":"2012-03-01T02:40:11","slug":"ilana-mercers-into-the-cannibals-pot-lessons-for-america-from-post-apartheid-south-africa-a-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2012\/02\/ilana-mercers-into-the-cannibals-pot-lessons-for-america-from-post-apartheid-south-africa-a-review.html","title":{"rendered":"Ilana Mercer’s “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”: A Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ilana Mercer\u2019s, Into the Cannibal\u2019s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, <\/em>is an unusual book.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yet it is unusual in the best sense of the word.<\/p>\n

At once autobiographical and political; philosophical, historical, and practical; controversial and commonsensical, Cannibal <\/em>succeeds in weaving into a seamless whole a number of distinct modes of thought.\u00a0 This is no mean feat.\u00a0 In fact, its author richly deserves to be congratulated for scoring an achievement of the highest order, for in the hands of less adept thinkers this ensemble of voices would have fast degenerated into a cacophony.\u00a0 By the grace of Mercer\u2019s pen, in stark contrast, it is transformed into a symphony.<\/p>\n

Mercer is a former resident ofSouth Africa.\u00a0 She is intimately familiar with her native homeland in both its apartheid and post-apartheid manifestations.\u00a0 Yet it is precisely because she is all too well aware of the latter that she is now one of its legions of emigrants.<\/p>\n

It would be a mistake, however, to conclude from Mercer\u2019s flight from South Africa to the United States that she had ever been any sort of champion of apartheid.\u00a0 Not only has she never supported these (or, for that matter, any) racially-themed institutional arrangements; with its affirmation of \u201cnatural rights\u201d and \u201cindividualism,\u201d Mercer\u2019s \u201cpaleo-libertarianism\u201d\u2014a variant of the classical liberal tradition\u2014positively precludes any such sympathy.<\/p>\n

Still, as she amply demonstrates, not by any social indicia does \u201cthe New South Africa\u201d even remotely approximate the old as far as quality of life is concerned.\u00a0 As is more often than not the case with revolutionary-like innovations, the transition from apartheid to democracy has visited upon the residents of South Africa\u2014especially its white residents, the Afrikaners\u2014all manner of evil that, ostensibly, were not envisioned by those legions of Westerners for whom \u201cchange\u201d of any kind can only be a benefit.<\/p>\n

For one, far from being \u201cthe post-racial\u201d idyll to which the abolition of apartheid was supposed to lead, the ruling African National Congress\u2014the party of Nelson Mandella\u2014is no less \u201ccommitted\u201d to \u201crestructuring society around race\u201d than was their \u201capartheid-era Afrikaners.\u201d\u00a0 There is, however, one critical difference between South Africa under majority black rule and South Africaunder minority-white rule: \u201cmore people,\u201d Mercer informs us, \u201care murdered in one week <\/em>under African rule than died under the detention of the Afrikaner government over the course of roughly four decades<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mercer\u2019s verdict upon the New South Africa is blunt and decisive: \u201cDubbed the \u2018Rainbow Nation,\u2019 for its multiculturalism, South Africais now, more than before, a \u2018Rambo Nation<\/em>\u2019\u201d (emphases added).<\/p>\n

Indeed.\u00a0 The first chapter of Cannibal <\/em>is a gripping\u2014and grisly\u2014account of the scourge that crime has become in post-apartheid South Africa.\u00a0 While her discussion is not utterly devoid of numbers, Mercer refuses to reduce the victims of barbarism to statistics. Her eschewal of abstractions in favor of concrete details, however ghastly they may be, is both admirable and effective. Mercer\u2019s treatment of this subject compels the reader to reckon with the stone cold fact that the thousands of white farmers who have been brutalized since the end of apartheid, like those who have mercilessly preyed upon them, are flesh-and-blood human beings.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mercer relays the heart wrenching episode of the Williams family. After the Williams lost their twelve-year-old daughter Emily as she stumbled upon an armed robbery in progress at a friend\u2019s house while traveling to school, her parents decided that their country had become an intolerable place to remain.\u00a0 They have since relocated to the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n

The reader is also introduced to people like Rene Burger, a young and promising medical student who was kidnapped and gang-raped at knife-point by three degenerates at a \u201cwell-patrolled\u201d hospital where she was taking classes, and Sheldon Cohen, who died in front of his young son after being gunned down by three predators.<\/p>\n

Mercer identifies others\u2014including a not inconsiderable number of her own relatives\u2014who have suffered unspeakable violence at the hands of South African thugs.\u00a0 She also definitively establishes that to no slight measure, this crime epidemic is motivated by an animus toward whites, a deep seated racial hatred that is both encouraged and, particularly in the case of the legions of white Afrikaner farmers who have been forced from their lands, sanctioned by the African National Congress.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

In keeping with the subtitle of her book, Mercer is at pains to spare her adopted country\u2014America\u2014from the destructive folly that engulfed her native homeland.\u00a0 The judgment of one reviewer to the contrary aside, I do not <\/em>believe that it is essentially the perils of \u201cdiversity\u201d against which Mercer warns her American compatriots.\u00a0 It is true that in drawing parallels between the New South Africa and trends in the United States, the author goes to great lengths to signal to the citizens of the latter that from the union of massive Third World immigration and a system of racial preferences as comprehensive as ours, nothing short of self-destruction will spring.\u00a0<\/p>\n

However, as I read her, Mercer is more concerned with reminding us that such \u201cpolitical abstractions\u201d as \u201cdemocracy\u201d are nothing more or less than conceptual devices, ideals that we have distilled from our own culturally and historically-specific traditions.\u00a0 In other words, political institutions are not inanimate objects that can be moved about at will; rather, they are long-settled, if never perfected, habits or customs that have been centuries in the making.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Thus, it isn\u2019t just so-called \u201caffirmative action\u201d and Third World immigration at home over which Mercer sounds the alarm.\u00a0 She is at least as concerned over the doctrine of \u201cAmerican exceptionalism\u201d that is now the reigning orthodoxy that informsAmerica\u2019s view, not just of herself, but of her role vis-\u00e0-vis the world.\u00a0 Actually, it is with a remarkable degree of clarity and concision that Mercer reveals the inextricable intellectual link between America\u2019s domestic prescriptions and her foreign policy.\u00a0 This link, she convincingly argues, is the fiction\u2014\u201cnonsense on stilts,\u201d as Jeremy Bentham would have said\u2014that America is a \u201cproposition nation,\u201d the only country in all of human history to have been founded upon a bloodless, lifeless, abstraction.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It is hard not to be impressed with Mercer\u2019s skill at preserving the integrity of the thread that unites her analysis of the flawed metaphysical underpinnings of contemporary American orthodoxy with the nit and grit of the everyday reality of South Africa.\u00a0 Not only is a discussion of \u201cAmerican exceptionalism\u201d germane to any critique of democratic South Africa; considering that the United States figured prominently among the nations of the world in agitating for a shift from apartheid to democracy in South Africa, no critique of the New South Africa would be complete without an examination of the prevailing ideology of \u201cAmerican exceptionalism.\u201d<\/p>\n

With its view of America as the one and only country on all of the planet to have been erected upon a \u201cprinciple\u201d or \u201cideal\u201d\u2014a proposition\u2014<\/em>the logic of the doctrine of \u201cAmerican exceptionalism\u201d leads inexorably to the conclusion that other countries too can be made, with sufficient time and pressure, to transcend the contingencies of time and place from which they have derived their identities. In other words, since America, the \u201cproposition nation,\u201d is supposed to be a \u201cdemocracy,\u201d it is America that is supposed to remake the rest of the world <\/em>in the image of Democracy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mercer astutely, and forcefully, identifies this not just as a fiction, but a particularly invidious fiction at that, for \u201cAmerican exceptionalism\u201d has had disastrous effects for Americans, South Africans, Middle Easterners, and, for that matter, anyone else upon whom it has been imposed.<\/p>\n

This book is immensely important.\u00a0 It is just as engaging.\u00a0 However, for all of its virtues, it is not immune to criticism.<\/p>\n

Throughout the pages of Cannibal, <\/em>there is a discernible tension between, on the one hand, the thrust of Mercer\u2019s main argument and, on the other, some not insignificant nods that she makes in the opposite direction.\u00a0 This tension never finds resolution.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mercer meticulously, even flawlessly, substantiates her thesis that the New South Africa is as corrupt as it is oppressive.\u00a0 Yet her relentless critique of the innumerable ways in which the ruling African National Congress has ruined her beloved country is underwritten by an equally scathing critique of the philosophy that informs these ruinous policies.\u00a0 Although she never calls it by name, this philosophy is what others have called \u201cRationalism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rationalism is an intellectual disposition with a pedigree stretching back at least as far as Plato. But beginning in the modern era, during the Enlightenment especially, it assumed a robustness that its ancient and medieval counterparts never could have anticipated.\u00a0 Although it admits of variations, what unites most expressions of modern Rationalism is the conviction that Reason<\/em> supplies moral<\/em> \u201cprinciples\u201d or \u201cideals\u201d to which all people <\/em>at all times <\/em>have access.\u00a0 From this perspective, the morality that Reason establishes is as comprehensive and universal as is Reason itself.<\/p>\n

Wherever and whenever one utopian scheme or another has been tried, this rationalistic conception of Reason and morality, whether overtly or covertly, to some degree or another, has attended it.\u00a0 Of this, Mercer shows a keen awareness, for her critique pivots upon the West\u2019s folly of supposing that non-Western peoples can, at will, organize their societies around the same \u201cpolitical abstractions\u201d to which the West has grown accustomed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At the same time, however, Mercer\u2019s commitment to \u201cpaleo-libertarianism\u201d leads her to invoke \u201cnatural rights.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

It is between her denunciations of Rationalism and her affirmation of \u201cnatural rights\u201d that the conflict exists, for as conservative theorists from David Hume and Edmund Burke onward have noted, the popular doctrine of \u201cnatural rights\u201d is <\/em>the product of the Rationalist mind.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cNatural rights\u201d are supposed to be rights that all people have just by virtue of their humanity alone.\u00a0 What Mercer and other adherents of the classical liberal tradition refer to as \u201cnatural rights\u201d their contemporaries of other political persuasions\u2014and in some instances, libertarians themselves\u2014call \u201chuman rights,\u201d and their predecessors described as \u201cthe Rights of Man.\u201d\u00a0 Propositions affirming such \u201crights\u201d are invariably treated as if they were axiomatic, and \u201cthe rights\u201d themselves as if they were dispensations from either nature or God.<\/p>\n

I see at least two objections to Mercer\u2019s inclusion of \u201cnatural rights\u201d talk in Cannibal. <\/em><\/p>\n

First, the notion of \u201cnatural rights\u201d undergirds the fashionable\u2014and, as Mercer brilliantly demonstrates, fundamentally wrong-headed\u2014idea that democratically arranged institutions alone secure liberty and justice.\u00a0 It is, if you will, the Mother of all contemporary \u201cpolitical abstractions.\u201d\u00a0 As Burke said, against \u201cnatural rights\u201d or, as he put it, \u201cthe Rights of Man,\u201d \u201cthere can be no prescription; against these no agreement is binding; these admit no temperament, and no compromise: any thing withheld from their full demand is so much fraud and injustice.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Between abstract, universal <\/em>\u201cnatural rights\u201d and concrete, particular<\/em> cultural traditions there can only be an adversarial relationship.<\/p>\n

Secondly, Mercer needn\u2019t reject <\/em>\u201cnatural rights\u201d in order to see her argument through.\u00a0 But neither does she need <\/em>to affirm them.\u00a0 Her case in Cannibal <\/em>doesn\u2019t depend upon her saying anything at all about them.\u00a0 We would do ourselves a good turn here to turn once more to Burke.<\/p>\n

Burke did not<\/em> deny what he termed \u201cthe real <\/em>rights of man.\u201d\u00a0 Yet he believed that when attending to the arrangements of civil society, such talk of abstractions that are supposed to exist in advance of civilization are entirely superfluous.\u00a0 In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, <\/em>Burke wrote: \u201cGovernment is not made in virtue of natural rights, which may and do exist in total independence of it; and exist in much greater clearness, and in a much greater degree of abstract perfection: but their abstract perfection is their practical defect<\/em>\u201d (emphasis added).\u00a0 In politics, it is \u201cthe civil social man, and no other\u201d\u2014i.e. not man in some \u201cnatural state\u201d\u2014with whom we must concern ourselves. \u201cIf civil society be the offspring of convention, that convention,<\/em>\u201d\u2014and not something that is held to transcend all convention\u2014\u201cmust be its law\u201d (emphasis added).\u00a0<\/p>\n

These criticisms that I offer arise not from any distaste on my part with Cannibal.\u00a0 <\/em>To the contrary, they are the function of my affection for it.\u00a0 And the allusions to Burke\u2014\u201cthe patron saint of modern conservatism\u201d\u2014are apt for more than one reason. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Not only does Mercer, like Burke, emphasize the importance of the cultural pre-requisites of a flourishing political order over rationalistic, universalistic abstractions; like Burke, Mercer succeeds in intertwining the personal, the political, and the philosophical into one compelling argument.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yet there is one final reason to call on Burke while assessing Mercer\u2019s Cannibal.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

Burke had famously said that the only thing that was necessary for evil to triumph was for good men to do nothing.\u00a0 Though Mercer is not a man, sadly, she is in much greater supply of that \u201cmanly virtue\u201d that Burke prized than are many\u2014even most\u2014male writers today.\u00a0 Burke unabashedly identified the wickedness of the French Revolutionaries for what it was.\u00a0 Similarly, Mercer courageously, indignantly, exposes the evil that is the African National Congress and its collaborators.\u00a0 In fact, her book may perhaps have been more aptly entitled, Reflections on the Revolution in South Africa. <\/em><\/p>\n

It is tragic that Ilana Mercer was all but compelled to leave the country that for much of her life was her home.\u00a0 YetSouth Africa\u2019s loss isAmerica\u2019s gain.\u00a0 As her work makes obvious for all with eyes to see, the richness of Mercer\u2019s intellect is as impressive as the soundness of her character.<\/p>\n

Into the Cannibal\u2019s Pot <\/em>is mandatory reading for all who care about truth, justice, and liberty.<\/p>\n

Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.<\/p>\n

originally published at The New American\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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