An actual real review of Themba's Head, from all the way across the big pond. Historic, and damn welcome, even if it's not altogether won-over.
David’s Rapier
Foreword by Denis. David Thomas, PhD (Sydney), was an SA journo, one-time parliamentary candidate (Progs – ancient days), and political science teacher. He’s now in the army of brainy Seffricans helping to boost Austrylia’s national IQ. He is also far advanced writing up a true story that in my (sometimes allegedly fervid) imagination might just end up as a hit in the same mould as Breaker Morant.
Here follows David’s critique of Themba’s Head. He scores many excellent points, including several that advance my understanding of what I’m talking about. I believe I have real replies to him. I’m putting him up here solus in the meantime. I hope you might see things you’d like to reply to.
“And with one bound he was free!”
by
David Thomas
Two slim, well-produced booklets accompanied me on a recent trip through South Africa. One was a Quaker publication called Living Adventurously, the other Dennis Beckett’s Themba’s Head. The Quaker’s Living Adventurously, sets out “Quaker Faith and Practice” – in other words, it provides a set of guidelines on a wide range of topics for Quakers to follow both as individuals and in their groups or “Meetings”. To my surprise, I found as I went through it, that this booklet and Themba’s Head had a major commonality – they both dealt with subject of democracy. Although Beckett’s entire work is devoted to that topic and Living Adventurously is not, it none the less contains one whole chapter on the topic of “Quaker Testimony on Democracy in Africa.”
Being a Quaker myself, I read the chapter on democracy with great interest. However perhaps because I was reading Themba’s Head at the same time, I immediately saw what I felt was a fundamental flaw in the Quaker discussion: while that chapter set out many preconditions and yardsticks for the establishment of democracy in Africa, nowhere was there any mention the role of local government. Themba’s Head provided a much needed counterweight because of the stress laid by Beckett on the establishment of democracy at local, community level.
On this point I am very much in agreement with him, and although there are other points at which I am critical of his approaches, I too believe that democracy at the national level must be founded on, rooted in, democratic practice in the local, community level. If the latter is lacking, the former will always be fragile. I believe it was the uneasy, unspoken realization of that which impelled the Quakers make their pronouncements in an attempt to bolster and defend the practice of democracy in Africa.
It must be said that on this score of placing local, community government at the centre of wider systems of political governance, Beckett and I are very much in a minority. The “dominant paradigm” both in those societies that claim to be democratic and those which don’t (e.g. China) is that central government is the most important component of any state, and all else is mickey mouse. This also applies to federal and demi-federal states such as South Africa, where the states or provinces are generally seen as having much less status and importance than central government. Nowhere is this belief more strongly held than in central governments themselves, which very often try to suck out whatever powers governments at lower levels possess, while no one holds local government in more contempt or views it with more irritation than those in the seats of power in central government. The mickey mouse status accorded to local government is usually reflected in the voter turnout for local government elections; even in Australia where voting is compulsory, seldom do more than 45% of constituents bother to vote in local government elections. The centrality accorded by popular thinking to central government was also reflected in the thinking of the reviewer of Themba’s Head who in advising his readers, “Don’t buy this book”, was demonstrating the same kind of purblind incapacity to think beyond current paradigms as that displayed by the accusers of Galileo. Unfortunately I would have to say that the Quakers too, are trapped in the current paradigms.
The low esteem in which local government is generally held is despite the fact that many of the closest encounters ordinary citizens have with government in general is at the local level. And yet local government is often the most impenetrable and seemingly heedless of the ideas the pleas of ordinary citizens. That was starkly illustrated by the front page of the Johannesburg Star on September 29 of this year, which under the 72pt headline “The Untouchables”, was entirely taken up with a story about potholes in Johannesburg roads. Perhaps that’s because it was “slow news day” and there was nothing else which justified even 48pt headlines that day; but equally possibly it was a desperate attempt to bully the Johannesburg City Council into fulfilling longstanding and long unfulfilled promises to fix the fearsome looking potholes in road surfaces depicted in large, glorious technicolour pics around the edge of the page.
That kind perception of all-too-common inertia on the part of local authorities arises in part, I believe, from their own perception that nobody really gives a shit about what they do or don’t do, and therefore it’s OK to do nothing when citizens complain. Of course a lot of people in more rural areas of South Africa who have no sympathetic news media to carry their complaints resort to much more powerful protests against their local authorities, using very different means other than the pencils and crosses Beckett seems to believe will fix problems. Perhaps it is because of the mayhem used by residents in areas such as Balfour and Tembisa that prompted the recent ANC General National Council to proclaim that much more attention needs to be devoted to local government and governance in South Africa. The ANC is increasingly averse to violent protest and so should everyone be; the realization seems to be dawning in the upper echelons of the ANC the best way to keep the lid on that sort of thing is to ensure that local governments become responsive to their local communities. Who knows? that could be a first small step towards making local government more central to peoples’ thinking about government as a whole. A pity however, only after fire and general mayhem are such small steps taken.
Why parliamentary democracies are so undemocratic
While democracy had become the form of government claimed by most states in the 21st century, even in the oldest and most ostensibly democratic societies in which legislatures are elected by popular vote, there is in fact very little democracy. In these parliamentary “democracies” the old adage vox populi vox Dei (“the voice of the people is the voice of God”) necessarily becomes vox majoritorum vox Dei (“the voice of the majority is the voice of God”); in order to function effectively parliaments have to rely on the principle of party discipline, in terms of which the members of a particular party are bound to vote for their party on every issue, whether they agree with the party on that issue or not. W.S. Gilbert jocularly recorded that underlying reality as far back as 1882 in the G&S opera Iolanthe in which a scarlet-coated guardsman standing outside the British Houses of Parliament sings:
When in that House MPs divide
If they’ve a brain and cerebellum too
They’ve got to leave that brain outside
And vote just as their leaders tell ‘em to.
Anyone who fails to vote in as their leaders tell ‘em to, commits political suicide because it is very difficult, mostly impossible, for individual renegades to hold their seats when the power and resources of a major party are turned against them.
However absurd a device party discipline seems to be, the penalty for its absence was spelled out in the 1860s by the famous British constitutional pundit Sir Walter Bagehot, who pointed out that without party discipline in the 657-member British parliament, “there would be 657 amendments to every motion and none of them would pass, nor the motion either.” In other words, it is only through the application of strict party discipline which makes it possible for a government to get its program enacted; indeed, after an election in Westminster-style jurisdictions, no head of state will allow any party to form a government unless it can guarantee stable and consistent parliamentary majorities through the use party discipline. Vox majoritorum rules, OK? The obverse is of course, that a party without a majority is condemned to the dreary limbo of being in opposition, a situation of both powerlessness and contempt.
Moreover, the effect of party discipline is to make most MPs in government ranks and even some cabinet ministers mere voting fodder whose role is simply to legitimate decisions made behind closed doors by the ruling cabal of the ruling party. That in turn means that individual MPs and even cabinet members who are not part of the inner cabal, have very little or any say over what is happens in parliament. In fact, nothing is decided in a parliament; the outcome of every bill has been decided before it gets to the floor of the House, no matter how brilliant or compelling the speeches from the opposition benches. Parliamentary debates constitute the same kind of charade as that of the Speaker being forcibly compelled to take his/her place in the Speaker’s chair at the beginning of a parliamentary session.
Even in non-Westminster, Congressional legislatures such as that of the USA, where party discipline is much less powerfully enforced, members of the big parties mostly vote together and the actions of those who step out of line and fail to vote for what their leaders tell ‘em to, meet with deep disapproval from their party and face the possible loss of support from their party machine at the local level.
Which raises the question: how do ruling cabals decide which decisions will be rubber-stamped by parliaments? Much thought and ink have gone into that question, never easy to answer because ruling cabals operate behind closed doors and not only exclude whoever they please from their deliberations, but also invite those who seem to the cabal to be important and influential non-parliamentarians to enter those doors and say their say over what will passed on the floor of the House and thus become law. His observation of that process led K. Marx to remark 150 years ago that “parliament is but the executive committee of the bourgeoisie”. While Marx is anything but the flavor of month, on the basis of the way our “democratic” systems work today it seems that nothing much has changed since he made his last journey to London’s Highgate cemetery in 1881.
If individual parliamentarians have so little say over legislative processes, it follows that individual citizens outside have zilch say. As for the idea that they do after all have a say by casting a vote for the parliament every few years, it is too absurd even to be worth discussing. Parliamentary elections merely decide who will form the ruling cabal of parliament. Elections are important mainly because they make people believe they are living in a democracy and appearances are very important for the social stability of any society.
A democracy, as so pithily put by Abraham Lincoln In his Gettysburg address, is a state which embodies the ideal of “government of the people, for the people, by the people”. I would argue that on the grounds set out above, current systems of parliamentary democracy altogether cancel out the notion of government by the people, while also as argued above, government is generally not for the people but for the interests of a particular group of people, very often encapsulated in the name of a party, such as the Labour Party.
It cannot be denied of course, that there has been progress towards Lincolnian democracy over the last 300 or 400 years. Our systems of government are certainly very different to those autocratic or oligarchical systems of governance which still existed hardly more than 100 years ago and which still exist in what we “democrats” believe to be benighted parts of the world such as China. What needs to be admitted however, is that our current forms of “democratic government” which emerged from the great intellectual ferment and turbulent political developments of the last 350 years, are only a way station on the road to the full realization of Lincoln’s threefold ideal of democracy. On this score, I believe that one way to achieve that ideal is Beckett’s model of a multitude of local communities in which people, ordinary everyday people, folks, have the ability really to shape and participate in the way they are governed. If people got used to this at a local level, it is likely that they would expect it to happen, and ensure that it happens, at a national level as well. That in turn would ensure that at that level, things are run in the way that the Quakers have set out in Living Adventurously.
Critique
As Kuhn observed in his Structure of Scientific Paradigms (1962), dominant paradigms crumble under the weight of accumulating evidence which indicates that they are false; the Aristotelian paradigm which had the sun revolving around the earth, could not stand up to what increasing numbers of astronomers, starting with Copernicus and Galileo, observed when they peered into the heavens through their telescopes. So what will challenge the current paradigm of democracy which makes all issues of governance in a particular jurisdiction revolve around what central governments do? Themba’s Head may be a useful starting point in that it does point out that other paradigms may exist; unfortunately it is not much do more than raise the possibility. Lacking any reference to the work or thinking or the writings or the experience of anyone else but Beckett, this volume could very well be named Off the Top of Themba’s Head and the problem with off-the-top-of-the-head stuff is that it is all too easily dismissed as one man’s crackpot ideas.
As should be clear by now, I certainly don’t believe Beckett’s ideas, further developed in his latest book, The Radical Middle, are crackpot. But while I found that work in which he advances his ideas with renewed passion to be generally engaging, I would say that too much of what is set out in both Themba’s Head and The Radical Middle is in the “with-one-bound-he-was-free” category. Beckett’s undoubtedly sound ideas need to be more widely and deeply grounded before they begin to undermine the paradigm.
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