SynapsesWhat’s the right thing to do, and is that even a question that we can answer?
Originally published in Daily Maverick
There are at least two ways of maintaining or enhancing the significance of death. First, you could attend to death, in the manner that many of us have – sharing the final days, months or years with someone you love. Second, you could remember to take life seriously. So seriously, that when it’s time for the life to end, we can make that decision carry all the significance typically found in protracted, often painful dying.
As regular readers would know, I’ve written quite a few columns regarding TopTV (and previously, Multichoice’s) attempts to be given permission to screen adult content on their subscription channels. TopTV have finally succeeded, on their second attempt, and as one of those who presented at the public hearings in support of their application, I’m pleased to hear it.
Not because I think porn is necessarily good, or always unproblematic – but because it’s not my (or Icasa’s) decision as to whether you should be allowed to watch it or not.
For those new to the story, here is a list of my contributions to the debate, also the Icasa press release (pdf) announcing their decision to allow TopTV to go ahead. Icasa’s full explanation of the reasons behind its decision will be released on or before June 28.
The most recent columns are listed first:
The naked truth about porn in television
Not even Madiba can turn anecdotes into data
Pornography is coming to eat your children!
Icasa’s poor reason for TopTV decision
TopTV plans to “release a flood of filth into our communities”
Freedom of (Multi)choice
Originally published in Daily Maverick
Despite the many columns I’ve written on the dangers of jumping to easy conclusions, the UCT student survey ranking how attractive various “races” are provided a reminder of how difficult it can be to follow one’s own advice. Especially with regard to emotive topics, the moral outrage machine can be quite seductive.
So, this peculiar thing appeared in the UCT student newspaper, Varsity, earlier in the week:
A couple of people have asked whether I’d be writing about it. To one, I replied that it was “too silly”. Which it is. But even sillier than this is the news that the Young Communist League are apparently going to report Varsity to the Human Rights Commission (they are “shocked and disgusted“, you see).
For context, a couple of details: To repeat, this is a student newspaper, and it is not edited or subject to any pre-publication controls by any official agents of the University administration or staff. Second, it was published in the opinion pages, and third, it was an accompaniment to this article – in fact, it’s a graphical representation of the results of Qamran Tabo’s straw poll of 60 students.
Yes, 60 students. So, Varsity chose a stupid headline for the graphic, in that “UCT” haven’t voted on anything. Varsity no doubt chose the headline to attract attention, seeing as that is what headlines are for. But an attention-grabbing headline on such a sensitive topic should perhaps be chosen with more care.
As, of course, should be what you choose to publish in the first place, or how much you edit what’s been submitted. Presenting this as quasi-scientific was an error, as the editor concedes. It’s not just the sample size, it’s also the peculiar way in which the sample was drawn. Tabo chose to survey 10 individuals from each of the following “racial groups”: “white, coloured (culturally), Indian, East Asian, biracial and African”. Now, Tabo doesn’t define how she knew who was who here, and whether they are all self-identified (as “culturally coloured” surely must be). Anyway – let’s leave it at that, agreeing that the pie-chart is a reflection of what these students reported, and nothing to do with UCT as a whole.
But even if it was about UCT as a whole, it’s still possible that – for whatever reason, but mostly for a reason Tabo cites (the preponderance of white people presented as attractive in popular media) – a larger group of people would report this same preference. And this would be a reflection of racism in popular culture, yes, where certain appearances are normalised as attractive, and others not. Furthermore, it’s a great shame that this is so prevalent, and so persuasive, that it’s probably the case that a large number of students (and others) have “fallen for it”, as it were.
It wouldn’t necessarily be racist to point this out, though. Saying “students report that they find race x more attractive than race y” (and please, throughout this blog post, assume the quotation marks around “race”) can simply be reporting a fact. The idea that humans might “rank” races on any characteristic is of course offensive, particularly in South Africa or anywhere (okay, everywhere then) where people have been oppressed as a result of their race. But the author knows this, and starts by reports the fact (for the 60 students) of these preferences, before going on to conclude:
Of course everyone has the right to choose who they want as a romantic partner, but it is interesting to observe how race, which is really just a collection of arbitrary physical features, acts as a barrier when it comes to who we choose to love.
Having been at UCT and in South Africa long enough, I have come to realise that we would have better luck creating a research wing at Med School dedicated to cloning white people to feed the demand than trying to understand the origins of some our supposed “preferences”. Hopefully one day, when the world’s entire population becomes creolised, characters will be the only deciding factor for who we want to date.
And that’s just right, surely? The author decries the fact that these students use an arbitrary characteristic, rather than someone’s character, to determine who they would like to date. There’s nothing racist about the conclusion, and it can’t be racist to report that people do have these (potentially racist) preferences. This really does seem a storm in a tea-cup, caused by little more than a poor headline and social media hysteria.
Furthermore, as I’ve previously argued with regard to the dos Santos and Tshidi cases, even real racist speech should perhaps not be reported to the HRC, and we certainly shouldn’t feed the pitchfork-wielding mobs of outraged folk on social media, because they’ll simply start feeling more entitled to bully us into silence the more they succeed in doing so. I confess I fell for it too, yesterday, when I described this as “embarrassing” for UCT on Twitter.
Embarrassing, UCT @Varsitynews. RT @JoziGoddess How did this poll at UCT go all the way to print? Is it not 2013? pic.twitter.com/CS6MvdBw4M
— Jacques Rousseau (@JacquesR) April 3, 2013
It is embarrassing, sure – but it’s also embarrassing that our knees jerk so quickly, and so violently, when anyone mentions the fact that people do still think in racial terms, regardless of the fact that we wish they wouldn’t. Outrage won’t make the problem go away, and neither will pretending that people don’t have attitudes we wish they didn’t.
[Edit]Related: I thought it was a mistake for UCT (the Vice-Chancellor, in fact) to apologise for the “blasphemous” Sax Appeal in 2009. They certainly shouldn’t apologise for this.[/edit]
Originally published in the Mail & Guardian, 22 March 2013
When TopTV announced that they were planning to launch a fresh bid to screen adult content, a number of the self-appointed guardians of South Africa’s moral fibre rushed to our aid. The usual suspects (like African Christian Action or the Family Policy Institute) spoke of the “flood of filth” that would destroy our families, corrupt our children, and in general violate more rights than I was aware we even had.
The Icasa hearings on these adult content channels took place on March 14, and I was one of only two people who presented in favour of TopTV’s application (besides the applicants themselves, of course). The written submissions received by Icasa were overwhelmingly disapproving (440 against, with only 16 in favour), while at the hearings the ratio shifted to a more balanced two in favour and six against.
That’s where the impression of greater balance began and ended, for the most part. If you were keen on getting examples of how to marshall anecdotes, logical fallacies and statistical innumeracy in favour of a moralistic conclusion, the Icasa offices were the place to be on that day. As I said in my submission, porn seems to reliably increase only two things: arousal and religious outrage, but perhaps negative causality in relation to common sense needs to be added to that list.
It is not true, as some might think, that you need to think pornography entirely unproblematic to defend the right of a broadcaster to screen it, or viewers to watch it. Personally, I’m quite convinced that pornography can alter expectations in the bedroom, or in relationships more generally. But so can just about any entertainment product you can imagine, and pornography only becomes particularly interesting if it causes harms by necessity, or harms that are more severe or of a distinct type.
For some, pornography does seem to be particularly interesting by virtue of simply being pornography. It’s about sex, and sex is about families, and families involve children and healthy societies. We don’t like to talk about sex, or watch it – especially not the kind of sex they show in pornography. Ergo, porn harms children and families.
Except, we don’t have any compelling reasons to believe that it does, in ways attributable to the pornography rather than to other variables such as poverty, communication breakdowns, or the pressures of fulfilling Calvinist, heteronormative, nuclear family-related social expectations that are increasingly ill-suited to the various interests and desires of the 21st-century human.
Introducing one or more pieces of research here will mostly only serve to stoke up a cherry-picking contest in the comments and letters, so I’ll say only this: the past few decades have allowed for a global social science experiment involving being able to compare class, income, race, gender, religion and whatever else you like with porn and sexual violence. And when you look at that data, it requires a fair amount of contortion to avoid the conclusion that people who are educated and living in a functioning and responsive state commit fewer crimes of all sorts, regardless of porn access.
Pornography is a red herring in this argument, particularly with regard to the anecdotes regarding the effects of porn that the Icasa commissioners got to hear about. There’s no question that South Africa is experiencing obscenely high levels of rape (not that any level is not obscene), but it’s not possible to blame pornography for this, given that the sexual violence clusters in areas that are poor, and have less access to pornography than the average reader of this column does. The middle and upper classes should be doing most of the raping, and they are not.
Yes, of course there may be a correlation between pornography and sexual violence – just as they may be a correlation between hours spent on church pews and lower-back ache. But correlation does not imply causation. It’s easy to use correlation and “science-y” language to contribute to a moral panic – but less easy (although far more useful) to demonstrate a clear causal link.
It adds no evidence of causation to wheel out a young man to testify that his cousin’s consumption of Etv pornography led to his rape, at age 13. For every example of this type, we could find thousands of South Africans who watched Emmanuelle without resorting to sexual violence. Note also the apparent contradiction between the “rape is about power, not sex” narrative and the “porn on your TV screen causes rape” narratives.
Then, asserting that porn is as addictive as heroin or cocaine, and that it takes only 5 minutes exposure for a child to be irreparably harmed, doesn’t make it so. The editors of the DSM-V chose not to include pornography as an addition – evidence that it’s at least a contested claim, rather than something to be bandied about as fact.
The real, and honest, narrative here is simply one of a contest between various moral preferences, where pornography, sex worker trafficking and rape start being treated as inter-related just because people say they are so. But the facts of the matter can never be settled by shouting, by our (legitimate) fears for our safety, or by anecdotes involving claims like Ted Bundy “got started in porn” – as if porn should now be understood as likely to turn all kids into Ted Bundy’s.
The joy (albeit one experienced all too rarely) of living in a constitutional democracy that is mostly secular is that you don’t have to watch consume porn if you don’t want to. There are risks in allowing people choice, yes: it’s difficult to predict or control what choices people make, and therefore what you – or your children – might be exposed to.
This means that the task of parenting, or of providing moral guidance in other contexts, is a difficult one. This is as it has always been, and as it should be. But none of us has the right to prescribe morality for others, especially not on the basis of cherry-picked data and moral hysteria.
Originally published in the Daily Maverick
One of the documents that awaited my return from the Icasa headings on TopTV’s application to screen adult content channels was a medical certificate, in support of a student’s application for an extension on a deadline. The certificate bore the logo of a naturopath-slash-homeopath, though, and made no reference to the student’s ailment, or her date of her expected return to full health. (Edit: I’ve subsequently submitted a complaint to the Allied Health Professions Registrar about this.)
The subject material in the previous week of the course was pseudoscience, making the submission of this particular certificate all the more ironic. Needless to say, the extension was not granted. But the fact that a student could submit it at all – to me, who makes no secret of my lack of respect for imaginary medicines – was another reminder of how strongly the will to believe can make us immune to changing our minds, or to seeing things from perspectives other than the one we’re currently committed to.
The hearings on TopTV’s channels were certainly interesting. They were also somewhat disappointing, in that any of the stronger cases that could be made against granting permission to screen these channels were entirely absent. To put it plainly, some of those who commented on my column last week would have done a better job than those who made submissions and presented to Icasa.
However, even stronger cases – perhaps from a gender rights perspective, but without the religious moralising and paternalistic bias – should fail to persuade Icasa, because the legal case for being allowed to screen the channels is to my mind irrefutable. But the cases that were presented testified mostly to hysteria’s dominion over reason.
And testimony there was, of the sort that those of you who have been to certain sorts of churches would remember. At one point, the commissioners gave permission for the one of the presenters to introduce another speaker, a 23 year-old man who shared his story of having been raped by his cousin at the age of 13, after said cousin had developed an “addiction” to E-Tv’s adult programming.
This happened after the speaker in question had reminded us that she herself “knows” that pornography causes rape, because of evidence including the piles of pornographic magazines found at rape scenes x and y. This speaker was an authority, she reminded us, because she herself had been raped.
Other authorities we heard from included Nelson Mandela, because quotes from the Long Walk to Freedom are somehow relevant, and also Jesus, because Icasa should heed the words of one particular religion in interpreting laws and a Constitution that are premised on freedom of religion, and freedom from religion as a defining characteristic of the law.
There was no stage, but we were seeing theatre. Not only in the powerful anecdotes from sympathetic figures, but in the rhetorical force of emotive language, the blown-up pictures of brain regions and science-y language (polydrugerototoxins are a thing, according to Doctors for Life) but also in the reaction of the crowd, who were lapping this up. They were receptive to hearing that pornography was as addictive as cocaine and heroin (with the fact that the DSM-V doesn’t list it as one being less important, I guess).
Any mention of “the children” seemed to draw a whoop, and there were sympathetic sighs and murmurs at every mention of moral degeneration of South Africa. The evidence against a moral panic around pornography was pre-emptively discredited with a wealth of statements along the lines of “just yesterday, I spoke to a policeman who told me that pornography is the cause of these problems”.
The people “on the ground” know the truth, we were told, and the “so-called research” indicating that pornography isn’t the cause could not be trusted. It was in fact “rubbish”, which I imagine must be a technical term of some sort. Just four minutes of exposure to pornography can irreparably alter a child, so no safeguards are sufficient – any increase in the availability of pornography is impermissible.
Of course I’m laying it on thick in the text above. This is, after all, part of a competing piece of theatre. But the gravity of a situation (namely the number of incidents of sexual violence, and the struggles of support groups like Rape Crises to even exist, never mind provide support for all) is no excuse for ignoring evidence and basic principles of critical reasoning.
Innumeracy is also a problem. Widespread inability to express and analyse ideas cogently is a problem, not only in that it allows for authorities like Ministers and naturopaths to deceive us, but also in that it prevents them from being able to themselves make sense, even if they cared to do so.
And, if we do want to address the high incidence of rape and other forms of sexual violence, the hysteria gets in the way of our finding the best ways of doing that. For every example of someone who was raped by someone who consumed porn, I can find you thousands of men who consume porn, and don’t rape. But I wouldn’t bother doing so, because these are anecdotes, and good arguments can’t be made from them.
Yes, you might find pornography degrading. And if people who likewise found it degrading were being forced to participate in it, we would have a violation of their consent or their will, which is a legal matter. If the police or the courts are being insufficiently attentive to that, there is an additional problem. But the problem is not the pornography itself, unless that by necessity is degrading.
Some, like the Christian Action Network, think it is and want the entire industry criminalised. But when significant numbers of women search out pornography themselves, it can’t be degrading by necessity – it’s degrading to you, because of your moral standards.
Your moral standards cannot be imposed on others, especially not by the state. It’s a contingent fact only that the state – in South Africa at least – tends to side with the Christian viewpoint in matters such as liquor sales and public holidays.
But let’s imagine the (for example) Christian response if the state was an Islamic one. Then, the same Christian who told me at the hearings “you have no future in this country” would likely be on my side, saying that the evidence alone should dictate policy, and that quotes from the Quran or personal anecdote were no grounds for making decisions.
In other words, they would see the value of a secular state, in which those who are repulsed by pornography shouldn’t have it forced upon them, and where those who wish to consume pornography are free to do so, assuming that it doesn’t cause necessary harms to others. The case for it causing necessary harms to others is far weaker than the case that it does so, as I’ve argued in last week’s and other columns.
As I point out in one of those columns, I’m even of the view that pornography can contribute to social dysfunctions. But I don’t get to choose what sorts of relationships people have with each other, and neither do you – except for those relationships you’re actually in. Meddle with those all you like. But if you want to meddle in mine, you need to motivate doing so with better reasons than your subjective preferences, or the strength of your conviction in them.
Originally published in the Daily Maverick.
At some point on the day after this column is published, I’ll be presenting at ICASA’s public hearings, arguing in favour of On Digital Media’s (ODM) application for a licence to screen three pornography channels on TopTV. Besides myself and a colleague, ODM themselves might well be the only people speaking in favour – the submissions received before the January deadline numbered only 16 for, compared to 440 against.
Their previous application was denied, for what I’ve previously described as very poor reasons, but they’ve decided to try again – this time dropping the most hardcore channel (Playboy’s AdultXXX) from the application, and also pledging to appear at the hearings themselves, by contrast to their conspicuous absence at the time of the previous application.
Late last year, ODM applied for business rescue under the Companies Act, and perhaps hope that being allowed to screen the pornography channels will help with their financial survival. I’m sceptical that there’s enough of a market for pornography distributed in this fashion, and therefore whether being given permission to screen these channels can help TopTV to survive.
Whether they survive or not might be thought mostly of concern to their stakeholders, of which I’m not one. They should however be allowed to try any legal and morally defensible strategies available for survival, of which giving paying subscribers access to pornography of a legally permissible sort should surely be included.
Furthermore, we should stand behind them while they try to survive, and especially in this particular matter, because Icasa is not a moral authority, and should not be allowed to take on the authority of one. Their own response to the previous application demonstrated their desire to take on that role, though. Despite explicitly acknowledging that the data don’t demonstrate this to be true, Icasa’s “reasons” document reported that they regard the “consumption of pornography as one contributing factor, amongst others, to the normalisation of violence against women in South Africa”.
Unfortunately, when we stack what appears to be a hunch up against our constitutional freedoms, it’s the hunch that should give way – at least up until the point where there is hard data to turn the hunch into something that should be regarded as fact. But these hearings are of course taking place in a context of extreme – and justified – sensitivity with regard to sexual violence, and Icasa will perhaps be understandably wary of the public response if they were to grant ODM’s application.
They shouldn’t be. Just as it’s condescending to tell every woman that she’s demeaned by pornography – regardless of whether she herself procures, participates in or produces pornography – the South African population at large should be insulted by being told that all it takes is a little airbrushed televised sex to turn them into rapists.
I won’t rehash the practical arguments of my previous column on this topic, linked above, here. In short, though, the children are safe. TopTV’s PIN code protection is robust enough that any child who is able to crack it would most likely be at MIT – or at least surfing the Internet for porn – instead of becoming the putative victim of TopTV’s relatively softcore offerings. So, thinking that allowing this license will somehow increase the availability of porn to the average child is implausible at best, and adults already have access to all the porn they want.
This won’t be perceived as any obstacle to many of the presenters, though, who all (save one) have some version of “Christian”, “God” or some cognate term in their title or description. I point this out not to say that this isn’t a legitimate interest group, but rather to point out that it is a group with particular interests – which is to defend a Christian version of morality regardless of what empirical evidence might say – or not say – about pornography’s effects on society.
They want Icasa, and the Government more generally, to plant their flag in the territory of Christian morality. This is understandable, but for Icasa to do so would be a dereliction of their duties as an independent communications watchdog in a state that bills itself as secular. The data – not the hysteria – needs to support pornography as being a cause of increased sexual violence for TopTV’s opposition to persuade them.
The data do not support that view. As mentioned above, even Icasa are prepared to say that the data are agnostic. I’d go further, and suggest that the USA, Germany and Japan are only a few examples of countries that legalised pornography and saw no resultant increase in sexual violence. As with most social ills, the problem of sexual violence probably involves a nexus of poverty and resultant powerlessness more than anything else.
In South Africa, it is looking increasingly clear that we need to add tik to that causal nexus, thanks to how methamphetamine results in increased sexual arousal and aggression. But perhaps above everything except economic empowerment, I’d argue that what we need to focus on is fostering respect for the choices of others, whether in serious matters such as saying no to sex, or in trivial matters such as watching pornography. Compelling citizens in a secular state to obey the prescriptions of (your interpretation of) Biblical morality does nothing to respect autonomy, but instead treats us as permanent infants.
There’s no question that rape and other forms of violence are a problem, no – but there’s no reason to think that porn has contributed to causing that problem. Without such reason or reasons, all that Icasa would be doing in denying this application would be to award another victory to religious moralisers, and to chalk up another loss to our freedom.
Read a City Press report on the hearings, and listen to my conversation with John Maytham towards the end of the day’s proceedings.
Originally published on SkepticInk, and mostly of interest to people who follow the skeptic/atheist debates closely.
One of the things I’m struggling with this year is the transformation of a course I teach into an online version. Not a MOOC – a full, for credit course at the University of Cape Town, offered to around 1000 students this semester. In the first 3 weeks, I teach critical thinking, including some work on cognitive biases. The struggle is in getting students to see that things aren’t always easily divisible, because a particular example might share attributes of both the availability heuristic and representativeness, for example. Or, we might be dealing with a post hoc argument that also includes a smattering of something else.
Instead, we need to see things in context, I say to them, and try to justify our answers by reference to what is the most plausible interpretation. Also, we can justifiably be concerned with the politics of a situation, and be looking for a way to resolve an interpretive dilemma rather than being most concerned with defending our own point of view. One of the reasons I typically don’t get involved in what people here at the SkepticInk Network are calling “the drama” is because too much writing on it seems motivated by a desire to be right, rather than a desire to fix the problem. As I wrote a few months back,
when a debate gets heated, we should try to remember that no matter what’s come before, we’re constantly at a new decision-point, where we – and only we – are responsible for what we say in response to something we find provocative. Sure, someone else has committed a wrong, and we can be inflamed by that. But essentially juvenile questions of “who started it”, while diverting, seldom help illuminate the question of how it can be ended.
The détente involving Dr. Harriet Hall and Amy Roth (facilitated by Steven Novella, as described here) has given rise to the most recent deluge of posts on “the drama”, here and elsewhere. Many of these contributions are making the point that the principle of charity is an important element of productive debate. This is true, but it’s also true that it’s possible to squander the goodwill you’d normally be entitled to, thanks to a track record of causing some form of (unjustified) offense. Some offense is merited, and some is not – and I’m not going to make any pronouncements on that here. The point of the quote above is that we can – at least in principle – separate the matter of whether the offense is justified from how best to respond to it given the desire for a certain outcome.
My presumption is that the outcome we desire is to be able to debate issues of substance from within a common framework of skepticism, atheism and humanism. If we can’t talk about how best to improve the world from within that framework, we’re using the wrong framework. And, if you think that some other value trumps those three and their cognate ideas, then whether you’re right or wrong is less relevant than the fact that you’re addressing a different – even if overlapping – constituency.
So, within that framework, perhaps we can sometimes be reminded that the real world is messy, especially the emotive, political world that we’ve constructed for ourselves within the skeptical community. Intentions are certainly not magical, but they’re certainly not irrelevant either – and deciding how to respond to claims regarding what people intended might require subtle and sensitive judgement. For this reason, I’d have to disagree with Justin Vacula’s post on intentions. Not necessarily because he’s wrong on the facts regarding how we should interpret others – I think I mostly agree with him there – but because his post strikes me as another example of what you could call a tone-deaf response.
It’s wrong to impute negative intentions – that’s where the principle of charity comes in. And while an insistence on people setting aside any pre-existing perceptions regarding your motives might be logically coherent, it’s not sufficient in this world of real insults and (at least psychological) harms. Once again, whether you think the harms as severe as some claim, or whether you think particular examples overblown or not, is only part of the point – and perhaps sometimes a small part. A larger part of the point might be that you’re talking to people who believe they have been harmed – and might even have been harmed – and adopting the blameless view-from-nowhere demeanour is a signal that you aren’t willing to acknowledge that.
Instead, it’s perhaps a signal that you’re willing to talk, but only on your terms, and only once the opposition grows up (or somesuch). A similar sort of tone-deafness is present in Richard Carrier’s post on the Hall/Roth correspondence, where he asserts that Harriet Hall is now “redeemed”. It’s the smugness, and the entitlement (my concern with his atheism+ post, also), that gets to me. As if Carrier is the arbiter on this, as if it’s now axiomatic that Hall needed redemption in the first place.
Both these posts have this in common – they ask you to accept a version of things that’s self-serving. In Vacula’s post, we’re encouraged (albeit subtly) to regard people who use phrases like “intent is not magic” as folk who over-react to criticism. The fact that Vacula doesn’t mention who they are is part of the subtlety here, in that we all know who they are, but it’s now more difficult to call him on it. In Carrier’s post, a version of history is written wherein Harriet Hall was known to be a transgressor of certain norms or rules, but has now been redeemed – and so, a little more authority to be the judge, or arbiter, is assumed.
It’s obviously problematic if we’re all having to constantly second guess what we write or say, because we know it’s going to serve as fodder for the confirmation bias others have with respect to our views. So, ideally, I’d love it if we were all able to operate in the domain of pure logic, clarifying intentions and meaning without making assumptions about the other. But that’s not the world we live in. But while we’re figuring this stuff out, let’s be wary of the tendency to assume that “they” are the ones getting things wrong, and that the truth is always a simple matter.
Originally published in the Daily Maverick.
Last week, an estimated 3000 members of the University of Cape Town community marched under the banner of #WeSayEnough. The march was a protest march, as these things typically are – in this case, a protest against the sexual and other violence against (particularly) women in South Africa. I joined the march, and I suppose this column is my attempt to explain why I did so.
Some of you might think this needs no explanation. Perhaps you routinely engage in the spectrum of activities that range from voting in online polls, signing petitions, putting plastic rhino noses on your cars, or donating time or money to some cause or other. But my starting point would be (or, perhaps “would have been”) to point out that the last two are different sorts of interventions than the first three. Giving time and money seems easier to categorise under “doing something”, rather than being simple liberal breast-beating.
Those who, like me, do think it needs an explanation might talk of slacktivism, desktop activism, or clicktivism. Even though this protest took place on foot instead of behind a desk, in academic garb or white t-shirts with protest slogans, one could ask what it might accomplish for all of us to assemble to say “enough”. Sure, we’ve all had enough, you might say, and everyone already knows it.
You might even say, as I did in my last column last week, that these actions aren’t likely to change the minds of the perpetrators of violence. But even if that’s true, I’m glad that we marched.
First, because the signal of solidarity that 3000 marchers with placards and songs send is a far stronger signal than a progress bar on a website, indicating that you want to save a rhino. I’d like to think that at least some victims of sexual violence participated in or were aware of the march, and saw that they aren’t forgotten.
This show of solidarity might comfort, which is only a trivial thing if you think our emotional states irrelevant. I remember thinking during the march that critics of these sorts of protests would most likely not also boycott funerals. Of course, funerals are not typically protests, but they are largely symbolic events, just as this march was. For someone to ask at a funeral “what’s the point? What is this going to change?” would not, I’d imagine, go down too well. We understand that the point it solidarity, and so it was with the march on February 20, 2013.
Second, as our Vice-Chancellor noted in his address to the marchers, we marched to insist that we’re not happy with this level of violence becoming expected or normalised. We marched to say that we won’t be silent as new (and ever lower) expectations of security are spoken of as if they were an acceptable consequences of living in South Africa. Or, more specifically, of living as a woman in South Africa.
We marched because it should concern us that the Oscar Pistorius media extravaganza has allowed us to forget Anene Booysen, and that during the four days of courtroom action in the Pistorius bail hearing last week, it’s likely that more than 400 women would have been raped (if the one-every-four-minutes statistic is accurate).
So much for our Delhi moment, then, as many South Africans seem to have moved on to having an O.J. Simpson moment – with the focus again on a compromised hero than on another dead woman. We marched, in other words, to remind each other that this is not normal, and should never be treated as if it is.
Third – again, as noted by Dr. Price, we marched to tell the government that they have betrayed the social contract. The criminal justice system can be improved, and NGO’s like Rape Crisis better supported. Funding could be made available to universities so as to train social workers, and also to support research in areas that could help us better understand and address this toxic masculinity and patriarchy that allows for the normalisation of sexual violence.
But mostly, and finally, I marched because of the energy that a crowd can generate. Columns, petitions and speeches can reach people, sure – but thousands of singing and chanting people, united in common purpose, generate a passion that might have a lasting effect on a larger number of people. And before anyone accuses me of an unreasonable level of idealism, I’m talking about the people who were there, rather than those who heard about it.
The people who were there were receptive to what Dr. Price and the other speakers had to say, and they were committed to doing what they could to minimise sexual violence, and to help the victims of it. And what they – especially the students – heard did offer strategies that will be effective, even if each of us can only make a small difference. Each of them, in this case, were the majority of the crowd, and these students were given some challenging assignments.
They were reminded that they need to criticise and ostracise their friends who commit even the slightest violence against their partners. They were reminded that sex is not the guaranteed outcome of a date, and that they should not let their friends believe it is, because that belief is likely to contribute to date rape. They were reminded that men of integrity need to be completely sure that their partner consents to sex, and that the language of boasting about “conquests” after the fact constitutes an unacceptable objectification of their sexual partners.
I think that solidarity is important, and that refusing to treat sexual violence as normal is important. The fact that the continent’s premier university takes this stand sends a message to government, and I think that’s important. Lastly, words like those above, in the context of a receptive audience such as the one we generated, can make a difference. And that is why I marched.
Via Jonathan Faull, I learn that if the next Pope were to be African, he’d in fact be the fourth African Pope, “following in the footsteps of Victor I (AD 189-199), Miltiades (311-314), and Gelasius (492-496)”. And it might make good marketing sense to elect an African Pope – religiosity is still very strong and rising, in many parts of the continent. Even in countries like South Africa, arguably more in tune with global trends than most other African countries, we’ve got 70% or more who claim religious faith (a recent poll showing a sharp decline is unfortunately, not at all convincing).
Of course, people who think the Pope an essential and useful figure are not only concerned about who their largest audience might be. They also care – perhaps even more than demographic representivity – about whether the next Pope can defend the traditions of this archaic system of belief. It takes a certain strong character to defend “traditional” marriage and oppose any other unions, or to oppose contraception, in the 21st century. But when you read some arguments for why the next Pope should be African, it becomes easier to see how Popes (and lesser religious authorities) get away with talking nonsense, decade after decade.
Here’s a prime example: Richard Dowden begins an article arguing for an African Pope with: “Over the decades that I have travelled in Africa I have met only four African atheists”. A claim like this is astonishing, for various reasons. First, because as a look at something like the IHEU member organisations will show, we have a growing number of secular humanist organisations on the continent. We have atheist conferences – in Malawi, Nigeria, South Africa and elsewhere, and some of us attend and speak at international conferences too. In other words, the myopia of Dowden’s claim is the first notable thing.
One suspects, though, that he’s not looking very hard. It’s implausible to imagine that he starts every conversation with “say, are you perchance an atheist?”. And because we are a religious continent, a lack of belief would not typically be the sort of thing you’d advertise. Then, Dowden – who appears to be religious himself – might well tend to congregate with other religious folk in any case, making his (tiny already, as why should “who I meet” be your criterion) sample one that has a strong self-selection bias.
Then there’s this “no true Scotsman” paragraph, in which he claims that:
African history is largely untroubled by religious wars. Wherever religious wars are reported in Africa the cause is usually a dispute over land rights involving two communities that happen to be of different faiths. Religion per se is rarely the cause. That traditional tolerance however is now under pressure – not from atheism – but from externally-funded, exclusive fundamentalist religions in the form of Wahabi Islam exported from Saudi Arabia and evangelical Christian fundamentalism funded from the United States.
I’m sympathetic to the idea that religion and religious practices aren’t equally dangerous. But the extreme forms – even if he identifies their influence accurately in that paragraph – feed off a base of people who are already sympathetic to strange metaphysical claims. The fundamentalist religions could not gain traction without people finding the idea of gods plausible in the first instance, and the evangelical churches would remain empty, despite the funding, if rescuing your soul from hellfire was never a plausible offer in the first place. Just like in any market, competition emerges and can become aggressive. This competition is certainly premised in religion more broadly, and Dowden needs to acknowledge the role of the “traditional tolerance” for religion as a factor.
Worst of all, for me, are these two sentences:
Would an African pope change the Church’s attitude to homosexuality? Highly unlikely but on social justice, both local and international, expect a far more forthright and vigorous voice.
“Highly unlikely, but on social justice…”? One must hope that the opposition set up here is entirely accidental, because in implying that homophobia is not a social justice issue, Dowden would be making it clear that he knows as little about religion in Africa as he apparently knows about atheism in Africa. It’s in Uganda, after all, that we’ve had years of debate around whether homosexuality should be subject to the death penalty (there’s no debate around whether it should be illegal – of cours it should, according to Ugandan lawmakers).
Speaking in 2009, Ethics and Integrity Minister Nsaba Buturo was by contrast a model of tolerance, saying that life imprisonment for homosexual men might be better, as “killing them would not be helpful“. In a context like this, with homophobia prevalent across the continent, one does not get to carve homosexuality out of any bundle of social justice issues. After patriarchy, and the consequent and frequent abuse of women, it might well be the largest social justice issue.
It’s thanks to columns and arguments like these that it becomes ever clearer that the debate should ideally not be around whether the next Pope should be African or other, but rather around how long the Papacy – and Catholicism in this form – can survive at all.
