{"id":379,"date":"2012-03-10T10:14:53","date_gmt":"2012-03-10T15:14:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=379"},"modified":"2012-03-10T10:14:53","modified_gmt":"2012-03-10T15:14:53","slug":"reflections-on-ilana-mercers-into-the-cannibals-pot-lessons-for-america-from-post-apartheid-south-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2012\/03\/reflections-on-ilana-mercers-into-the-cannibals-pot-lessons-for-america-from-post-apartheid-south-africa.html","title":{"rendered":"Reflections on Ilana Mercer’s “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”"},"content":{"rendered":"
Although theory and practice are indeed mutually distinct domains, their distinctness should never be taken for exclusiveness.\u00a0Theory is as distinct from practice as is the spider from its web or the bird from its nest.\u00a0Moreover, just as the web arises from the spider and the nest from the bird, so too is theory born from reflection on practice.\u00a0This can be seen for the truth that it is whether we are attending to contemporary political works spun from more commonplace imaginations or the philosophical masterpieces of the Western tradition.\u00a0<\/div>\n
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Some of these latter, like Plato\u2019s Republic <\/em>and Hobbes\u2019 Leviathan, <\/em>labor hard to conceal their indebtedness to the contingencies of place and time.\u00a0They at least appear <\/em>to have more or less emancipated themselves from the circumstantial concerns that provoked them.\u00a0Others, like Burke\u2019s Reflections on the Revolution in France, <\/em>are much less reserved about revealing the impulse driving their pursuits.<\/div>\n
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It is within this later vein that Ilana Mercer\u2019s Into the Cannibal\u2019s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa <\/em>is squarely located.<\/div>\n
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The neglect with which this book has been treated is as sore as it is tragic.\u00a0<\/div>\n
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South Africa is the place that Mercer called home for a good part of her life (she has also lived in Israel).\u00a0She came of age under the rule of the white Afrikaner minority\u2014\u201capartheid\u201d\u2014and witnessed up close and quite personally its passage into the annals of history.\u00a0While there is no love loss between Mercer and apartheid\u2014at no time does she hesitate to convict it of injustice\u2014it isn\u2019t apartheid that drove her to leave many of her relatives and friends behind so that she could emigrate to America.<\/div>\n
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No, Mercer\u2019s flight from her old homeland is part and parcel of a virtual exodus of South Africans.\u00a0And for this abrupt turn of events the African National Congress deserves all of the thanks.<\/div>\n
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The question of identity is the question: what makes any given thing the same thing at one time as it is at another time?\u00a0In his Politics, <\/em>Aristotle seeks to secure the criterion by which the identity of a political association can be established.\u00a0Upon considering some proposals\u2014territorial limits, \u201cthe stock\u201d of the residents, etc.\u2014he concludes that a political association is the same association at one juncture as at another if and only if its constitution <\/em>remains the same.\u00a0The constitution of a political association refers to the kind<\/em> of government that defines it.\u00a0<\/div>\n
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By Aristotle\u2019s standard, then, post-apartheid South Africa is most definitely not <\/em>the same political association as its apartheid-era predecessor.\u00a0However, whether we accept Aristotle\u2019s definition or not, as Mercer makes abundantly\u2014painfully\u2014clear, whatever continuity may be said to have existed at one time between the Old South Africa and the New is no longer legible.<\/div>\n
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Cannibal <\/em>is a provocative account of the depths to which South Africa has degenerated under the rule of the African National Congress.\u00a0Like the gifted writer that she is, Mercer enlists every syllable in the service of catapulting the reader into the world of the New South Africa, a country within which, courtesy of the corruption that pervades the ANC, unimaginably barbaric criminality has become an intractable feature of everyday life.\u00a0The issue of crime has a particularly personal dimension for Mercer, for several members of her own family have been brutalized.\u00a0<\/div>\n
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South Africa\u2019s criminals act with a ruthlessness and an abandonment that would make even the most hardened residents of high crime areas in America blush.\u00a0Whether it is the gang raping of young girls, the torturing of home owners who had the misfortune of awaking in the middle of the night to discover intruders on their property, or the forcible confiscation of the farm lands that South Africa\u2019s most industrious and productive residents have spent their lives cultivating, crime in post-apartheid South Africa knows no bounds in either the frequency with which it occurs or the blood that it leaves in its wake.<\/div>\n
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Mercer spends an entire chapter identifying\u2014and dismantling\u2014the litany of conventional excuses that have been devised to explain away post-apartheid misery: \u201cracism,\u201d \u201cpost-colonialism,\u201d \u201cexploitation,\u201d and the like.\u00a0With the greatest of ease she obliterates them.\u00a0It is here that her pen becomes the machete with which she slashes away at the nonsense that passes for deep thought among the Western intelligentsia.<\/div>\n
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Neither, however, does Mercer countenance any reductionist biological accounts of black-white differences.\u00a0Such an approach is problematic for more than one reason, but especially because it would, ultimately, amount to but one more \u201croot-cause.\u201d\u00a0Mercer doesn\u2019t say this.\u00a0For that matter, I haven\u2019t heard any one else say it either.\u00a0But a biologically-centered theory of human conduct, like those emphatically non-biological approaches that Mercer effortlessly puts out to pasture, is a species of precisely that hegemonic power with which Mercer struggles throughout her captivating work.<\/div>\n
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This \u201cpower\u201d is what others have called \u201crationalism,\u201d by far and away the dominant intellectual disposition of the modern West.\u00a0\u00a0<\/div>\n
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Rationalism comes in many degrees, but, at the very least, what all forms of modern rationalism seem to share in common is a penchant for the abstract and universal over the concrete and particular.\u00a0To put it differently, the concepts of tradition, culture, <\/em>and custom <\/em>figure minimally, if at all, in the thought of the rationalist.\u00a0Such concepts bespeak a provinciality that is anathema to the rationalist mind, a mind that prefers to dwell among ideas\u2014rational nature, human nature, natural rights, natural law, laws of history, human rights, Democracy, state of nature, principles, ideals<\/em>\u2014of another type altogether.\u00a0<\/div>\n
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Doctrines of innate inferiority no less than doctrines of \u201cracism\u201d and other fashionable \u201croot causes\u201d accounts of black rule in South Africa are alike functions of rationalism, for while they differ in degree, they are of one kind in relegating cultural considerations to the periphery (if there!).\u00a0<\/div>\n
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Mercer knows this.\u00a0That which we now know as modern <\/em>conservatism actually originated as a response to the rationalistic excesses of the Enlightenment. David Hume and, particularly, Edmund Burke, were among its most distinguished of representatives.\u00a0In reading Cannibal <\/em>it is hard not to see in its author the shades of her illustrious predecessors.\u00a0Like these theorists from times past, Mercer compels her readers to recognize that the dislodging of moral ideals from the complex of historically and culturally-specific traditions that give them color promises calamitous consequences for all involved.<\/div>\n
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At the same time, however, Mercer\u2014a self-identified \u201cpaleo-libertarian\u201d\u2014refuses to abandon rationalist talk of \u201cnatural rights.\u201d\u00a0<\/div>\n
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That there is conflict between, on the one hand, Mercer\u2019s affirmation of natural rights, and, on the other, the primacy that she ascribes to culture or tradition, is obvious.\u00a0It is even possible that this tension in her text between the universal and the particular may be insuperable.\u00a0But, ultimately, whatever criticism falls on Mercer for this must be qualified by the consideration that if there are tensions in Cannibal <\/em>between these themes\u2014and there undoubtedly are\u2014it is only because, from the inception of Western philosophy some 2600 years ago, the same tensions have constituted the Western Mind itself.\u00a0<\/em><\/div>\n
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Permanence and flux, nature and convention, the universal and the particular\u2014it was from a longing to discern the connection between the members of each of these dualisms that Western philosophy was born.\u00a0To this day, the inquiry continues.\u00a0<\/div>\n
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Mercer\u2019s commitment to natural rights reflects what the reader must recognize as a laudable attempt to preserve some sense of permanence undergirding the identity-extinguishing change that has engulfed her beloved South Africa since the abolition of apartheid.\u00a0Her insistence upon the culturally-centered (culturally constituted<\/em>?) nature of morality reconciles her\u2014and us\u2014to the fact that it is in vain, to say nothing of great agony, that we suppress or ignore the staggering variety of human customs in favor of a monolithic moral plan within the jurisdiction of which all human beings can be made to fall.<\/div>\n
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Mercer\u2019s thought is distended between universal natural rights and particular cultural traditions, it is true.\u00a0Yet as is the case with so many works of genius, this tension is as much one of Cannibal\u2019s <\/em>strengths as it is a weakness, for from it there springs an energy that is notable for its sense of urgency.\u00a0<\/div>\n
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Like Burke before her, Mercer, it is clear, is on a mission.\u00a0Burke was consumed with the conflagration of the French Revolution that he believed threatened to tear European civilization asunder.\u00a0Far from obscuring his ethical vision, I believe that much of the passion that informed it stemmed from a conflict in Burke\u2019s consciousness between a recognition of both <\/em>the universal demands of morality and<\/em> the partiality that we owe to \u201cthe little platoons\u201d\u2014our local attachments\u2014from which we derive our individual identities.\u00a0This, though, is precisely the same war that rages within Mercer, and as it aided Burke in his contest with the evil of the French radicals, so too does it aid Mercer in her <\/em>contest with the wickedness of the African National Congress and its supporters.<\/div>\n
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Cannibal <\/em>is a woefully underappreciated book. A not inconsiderable number of otherwise astute reviewers seemed to have missed its main significance.\u00a0This work is not<\/em> primarily about \u201cdiversity,\u201d\u00a0\u201cdemocracy,\u201d \u201cegalitarianism,\u201d or \u201ccollectivism.\u201d\u00a0And it is certainly not <\/em>about any conflicts within the Jewish community <\/em>(Mercer is herself a Jew who remarks upon the role that South African Jews, including her father, played as critics of apartheid, as well as the role that Israel assumed as a stalwart ally of the Old South Africa).\u00a0Cannibal <\/em>isn\u2019t even a book about inter-racial conflict.<\/div>\n
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Ultimately, as I read it, Cannibal <\/em>is a brilliantly executed reenactment of the<\/em> great Western drama, an epic contest between the universal and the particular, permanence and flux, nature, history, and convention.\u00a0To the roster of the most colorful cast of characters that have, at various times, assumed center stage in this grand pageant we can now add the name of Ilana Mercer.\u00a0<\/div>\n
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Into the Cannibal\u2019s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa <\/em>should be on the shelves of every thoughtful American. But conservatives especially need to attend to this book, for it is as intelligently, eloquently, and forcefully articulated a case against shaping political policy prescriptions according to universal abstractions as any that our generation has yet to produce.\u00a0\u00a0<\/div>\n
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