Denis gets put off his breakfast by a bit of passing people-clubbing, a la seal-clubbing, and turns his mind to how D2 might impact on this quadrant of human affairs.

Dawn is rising over Wanderers Street and my OWJ lobe is in nostalgia mode. Nostalgia is the birthright of we Old White Joburgers; we’re world captains. Other cities have changed, I do not begrudge, but none like ours. Especially round Wanderers Street.

On Rapallo Corner I get déjà vu. 1960s, half-term dinner on pass-out from boarding house. Artificial grapes over artificial beams gave a Riviera flavour. The violinist did his best with Elvis and Lonesome Tonight, spoiling a boy on a special occasion. Afterwards we ambled quiet streets, mom in a hat, dad and I whoops-a-daisying my sister. Nostalgifest.

But the today lobe is in shock-and-awe mode. No violins around here now, nor whoops-a-daisies.

The day is still breaking and litter hill is already on the rise. Road and pavement are crammed alike, shoes and tyres filling each. Revving engines vie for the airwaves, against shouting voices and busy hooters. At any moment a dozen ankles, knees, wrists and hips are within centimetres of my inching car. Until I meet a whole new phenomenon: industrial-strength nuclear-powered road channels. We are not here talking of wimpy Rea Vaya lane-dividers, that any driver can cross at the price of some ravaging of tyres and some jack-hammering of chassis. These channels are vertical concrete, the height of a spaniel. You’d need tank tracks to cross them. I get stuck in one, which takes me on a two-block detour over sump-crushing speedhumps while indignant taxis register disapproval of my presence.

Wanderers Street is as historic as any street in town; from 116 years ago it had cricket at the north end (see photograph of the pitch, left, circa 1938, and more of the same in the Image Gallery on the Wanderers Club website), until Wanderers Club moved to Illovo half a century later. It still has the cathedral at the south. It deserves blue plaques but they’d have to be in unstealable plastic. And few tour guides will bring customers here.

Finally we find our terminus. My passengers Regina and her brother Thebe go to check in. I stay at the car, watching the passing show and conducting a half-comprehended conversation with two scruffy guys who have a big thing to tell me. What this thing is, remains obstinate. Trying to explain it, they usher me a few metres along the road to where a throng is gathered. I think it’s some sort of card-game, or an acrobat. My guides push space open for me. I see a young woman with an iron bar clubbing a bloodied youth lying on the ground.

“Clubbing” is word that instantly comes up. This must be what seal clubbing is. The people up front are egging her on. I don’t think this youth is ever going to be the same again. At best he’ll be crippled. You needn’t tell me that that word should be “disabled” now. “Disabled” is prudery in the face of ruinous injury being systematically done by human to human. They’re crippling him. I want to be sick. I know that I should/ ought/ could take a stand. I’d sure want someone to take a stand if, ugh, I ever wound up in an analogous position. Plus, it may be the next blow that will wreck the brain, or the one after. I should be responsible, I should help.

But I’m going to throw up. I am not responsible! Fuck you, Responsibility! Go somewhere else, leave me alone! I retreat hastily. The nausea vanishes, suddenly. A small corner of my mind wants to go back before they turn the guy into a vegetable. The small corner is overruled -- rapidly, as seems to be the order of the day.

My half-comprehended guides are unmistakably disappointed. I learn that the youth stole a cellphone. I do not learn why they were so keen that I see the punishment. Were they showing off locpop crime-busting techniques? The disappointment seems to smack of “isn’t that what you whiteys want?” Or they may have hoped I’d pay a tip for seeing the clubbing. Is that why my recoil is disappointing? There’s a sense of sport, blood sport.

Questions arise.

How do these guys think they’re deterring crime? They’re breeding crime. Never mind that clubbing people is criminal, not so say barbaric, here is a man whose chances of earning an income diminish as each new blow breaks some further piece of him. When he recovers, with reduced mind and reduced body, will he obligingly curl up and die? Forget it; he’ll steal. More recklessly, with sharper weaponry. Why do the law-’n-order brigade cheer for vigilantes? They should help society reduce barbarism and increase civilisation. In their own interest, too; if one dark night they have a flat on the wrong side of town, they don’t want locals to be thinking “hooray, a chance to club someone to pulp”. Why is it fun clubbing people to pulp, and for which people is it fun? I’m a bit scared of those questions. Why is it no fun for me? Macho ous would say I should be scared of that question, but I’m not. Sissy, wuss, chicken, girly... you can load those terms all over me, no pain. Blood sports give me pain.

Which leads me [and you thought you were getting away without a D2 lecture!] to wonder how these things would work out in the real democracy, the Democracy Version Two that is surely the next step forward. In D2 these self-same people will be way more empowered than they are now with their pathetic little twenty-millionth of a say over which of three recognisable faces on their ballot form is to rule the nation for the next five years. Does that mean they’ll be wielding the selfsame clubs way more often, way more hard?

No. Why not? Here’s a clue: the death penalty. You notice that it’s tyrannies that maintain the death penalty, and democracies that end it. That’s despite the zillion surveys that show that the average citizen approves of the death penalty. How does this add up? Ah, it adds up to the moderating effect of the sound foundation.

The foundation we already have – D1 or prototype democracy – is sounder than the oligarchies or dictatorships that preceded it. So society’s leaders make “higher” decisions. They use higher layers of the cerebral cortex. They’re operating on a higher level of stability and legitimacy, amid higher levels of debate and scrutiny. They’re more attuned to ascent, less attuned to avenging, crippling, pulverising.

It’s standard that Joe, who in the bar loudly declaims “bring back the noose”, votes for a leader who has no thought of bringing back the noose. It’s standard that Joe’s elected leader, negotiating with other elected leaders, refines what Joe shouts about in the bar. In fact, if there was a candidate who would take Joe’s words and attitudes direct to the council chamber, Joe would vote for someone else. He’d be mortified to hear the ideas he propagates in his cocoon brought into the open, as his cocoon’s views in its dealings with other cocoons.

That’s in democracy’s core; it’s an automatic moderating machine.

But D1 is only halfway up the scale. It’s a sounder foundation than a king who could send a nation to war over his ego or his lusts, but it’s far from ultimate. Often the moderating machine gets no chance to kick in, and often the foundation misshapes reality. If there’d been a TV camera in Wanderers Street, madam in suburbia would see thirty excited faces whooping at the clubbing. She wouldn’t see the hundreds who hurried by or averted their eyes or kept selling tomatoes. And even those people themselves have nil idea of who among them is disgusted by the clubbing, or ashamed of it, or scared to act against it. D2 accelerates the moderating machine. The tone will be set not on the spot, with blood up while violence is happening and a mob is forming. It’ll be set in advance, in calm in a polling booth, by people alone with their pencils and filled with the sense of their world respecting them, inviting them to tell it where to go.

There’ll be known leaders at or near the scene – leaders who have been voted for, whose status is tangible. Among those leaders will be someone who owes a leadership role to the votes of the victim, the alleged phone-thief, or to his family or friends.

There’ll be less theft to start with, partly because of more order all round, partly because the phone-thief has a vote that someone in power is scared of -- the only truly effective weapon of social advance.

And there’ll be fewer ruined souls, psyches or craniums. Which, take note, do not stop with the youth on the ground. How does the woman feel, home after work and dishing up the spinach when little Refiloe asks “so how was your day, mom?” I don’t think she says “oh, fine, just a bit achy from having to pound someone into pulp.” I think we have a stuffed-up person here, with sticky extra baggage clogging her mind and her dealings with her world. And some of those front-row guys who looked so shining and eager, how do they sleep tonight? Nights to come?

D2’s chief job is to make decent interaction natural. A group of people behaving badly is not a group with bad genes. It’s a group whose routes to higher expression are remote or hidden or frightening. D2 brings thoughtfulness to the front row of all public decision-making all the time. That means growth of humans, not their wrecking.

Macho ous can still have blood-and-gore, if they want it bad enough. Just that it won’t be default; they’ll have to arrange it, War Parks and stuff. For the rest of us ... well, I like the prospect of Refiloe growing into a world that violence is evacuating. I like the idea that if she one day chooses to play a violin in Wanderers street, that’ll be an untroubled thing to do.

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