Morality and Politics

May 21, 2010 Editorial

It has been said that a people usually get the leaders they deserve. If we are to go by the seemingly daily reports in the newspapers of the seamy doings of the populace and the politicians, the truth of that observation cannot be contradicted. Morality, it would appear, has gone to the dogs.
It used to be that the complained moral lapse of politicians used to be in the realm of the acquisition of power. “Machiavelli” was the name invoked to describe the notion that one should be prepared to walk over one’s grandmother to achieve (and keep) office. Some justified this sort of behaviour by saying that the followers of “The Prince” were actually “amoral” and not “immoral”.
Politics, in this view, was beyond the sphere to which moral judgement applied. It was not the path or the means by which one achieved power that mattered: it was to which end that the power, once obtained, was used. By this measure, it was presumed that the politician in office was supposed to act for the good or betterment of the people. The means justified the ends.
Our long era of colonial rule was of this ilk. The indigenous peoples and those that were thrown into the colony were to be ruled with a “firm” hand because they were not actually conversant with what was in their best interests.
While the everyday practices of colonial rule might violate some of the norms of morality back in the “mother” country, it was okay since in the end, the benighted populace were being brought into the orb of civilisation. Ruling with an iron fist was a dirty job – it was outside the moral order – but someone had to do it. It was part of the white man’s burden.
But if the truth be told, we know to our cost that means can never be separated from ends. We were, after all, dealing with human beings and the fine distinctions between “amoral” and “immoral” did not in the end prevent the insidious effects of the violation of moral rules from taking their toll in all strata of the society.
Colonial society was always a very hypocritical society and the neuroses fostered by that hypocrisy became a feature of colonial life.
The critique of that hypocrisy and its distortions became a rallying point for the politicians that apposed the colonial order. But it has been our great tragedy in the post-colonial era that those distortions and those neuroses continue unabated.
But if we think about it, how could it be otherwise? Our politicians continue to operate from the same “amoral” premises in their pursuit of power as did the colonialists. Slander opponents, frame them up, accuse them of every sort of depravity: take no prisoners.
Under this scenario, however, the impact on the people is even more insidious and invidious: the leaders, after all, are “our own people” – they are supposed to follow our common moral rules. We are not barbarians to be run roughshod over, for our “own good”. The fig leaf of “amorality” is exposed for what it always was: immorality of the highest order.
And if the big ones can be immoral so the little ones will follow.
We do not need any fancy theory of “mimetic desire” to understand the phenomenon. It is not a coincidence that sex features quite prominently in the syndrome of power-induced ‘distortions”: sex has always been linked to power. As the immorality could not be contained to just “politics” during colonial times when the overseer could and did bed any female in his charge on the plantations, so it is in the present when it appears that every nubile teenager is fair game to politicians in and out of office. And the sickness spills out and sinks deeper and deeper into the national psyche. Even babies are not spared from the ravages of the cancer of immorality.
We have to bring back morality into politics. If we do not, the pathology will consume us all. We know it can be done: not all post-colonial societies are sick. But change must begin with our political elite.

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