Must we hit rock bottom before change can

Can we change only by first being ruined? That’s the question philosopher Roberto Unger addresses in his book False Necessity.

He writes that in modern history the crises of war and depression have served as midwives of change.

“However, the dependence of change upon calamity is not an invariant feature of history,” Unger observes. “We can rearrange our institutions and our practices to diminish the dependence of transformation upon ruin.”

Unger says by doing away with the reliance on disaster as midwives of change, we will not only serve our interests in practical progress and individual emancipation. “We also change our relations to our social circumstance.”

South Africa is facing many crises. Unemployment is on the rise. So is crippling poverty and hopelessness.

Unethical and spineless leadership is, ironically, the standard-bearer of excellence. The theft of public money has found moral and political legitimacy at the pinnacle of the state.

Dishonesty is the most sought-after and indispensable political capital. Without it you are doomed.

The contours of racial and income inequalities are stubborn.

Near-stagnant economic growth is rationalised and justified.

The threat of corporate-sanctioned recolonisation from across the Indian Ocean looms large. With this threat came the rise of post-1994 askaris who are disembowelling the governing party. Violence – real and rhetorical – is gaining currency.

The wheels of innovation in the private sector are too slow to fuel the necessary dynamism in the economy.

Ignorance is celebrated as politicians beat themselves on the chest whenever blacks demonstrate incapacity in asking critical questions to hold those in power to account.

And, most devastatingly, the constitution is being shredded to smithereens by its supposed guardians.

At the heart of all these problems is the biggest crisis of all: a lack of imagination. Imagination could have helped us avert many of these crises and propelled us to create a new, decent reality.

But the lack of it has blinded us to the ruin well represented by the likes of President Jacob Zuma.

And the failure to acknowledge the ruin means that no matter how gruesome its effects – as we are currently witnessing in various manifestations – the calamity cannot instigate change. It cannot, to borrow Unger ’s phrase, be the midwife of transformation.

Could it be that we are waiting for the ruin to finish its work before we seek to “rearrange our institutions and our practices”? By that time we probably will not have a habitable country.

The current constitutional order, which is being destroyed piecemeal, ironically by people who hail it in public speeches, is a product of the imagination of visionaries who fought for freedom.

They had an idea well summarised by Pixley ka Isaka Seme when he imagined a new, unique, thoroughly humanistic civilisation that Africa, in its regeneration, would add to the world.

In our country this new civilisation found expression in the founding values of the constitution. Through the constitution, now being trampled on, we have enjoyed the benefits of the imagination of the likes of Seme and other founders of the ANC.

But there is no evidence from the current crop of leadership of any capacity for new imaginings that would either help to fully implement our founding values or take us to even greater heights.

Rather, there is evidence of a thorough regression. The imagination that helped establish the values of selflessness, or what the philosopher Thomas Paine called the “public spirit”, has disappeared.

In short, we have stopped dreaming big about creating a new, decent reality. But we are big in thinking small, about short-term accumulation.

The thinking class of old, which dared to imagine a prosperous constitutional order even when such was unthinkable for many, has been replaced by what Thorstein Veblen calls the “leisure class” whose sole purpose is conspicuous consumption. Indeed, as inequalities divide society without any imaginative solution to mitigate against this, the few who have deep pockets brazenly flash their wealth.

In his book, The Crisis of Global Capitalism, George Soros writes, “thinking has the power to create reality”. But, it is clear our failure to think beyond the moment means we are not able to create a new, decent reality.

Steve Biko and the adherents of Black Consciousness understood the power of the mind very well when they sought to inculcate a sense of pride among black people by changing their consciousness. They wanted to create a new reality for blacks. And it had to start in the mind.

Alas, for many in leadership positions today, their reality starts not from the brain, but from the belly. Yet, if we want to create a new, decent reality without further ruin, we must imagine anew.

This applies to all of us in the public and private sectors. In our individual and collective capacities, we must wage a new struggle to rediscover our imaginative capacities.

As Unger puts it: “We must seek to demonstrate the power of imagination to anticipate some subversive work of crisis, until we succeed in making society to more closely resemble the imagination.”

In many sectors, including the media, the biggest challenge, as foreseen by Peter Drucker in his book Post-Capitalist Society, is the divide between values and aesthetic perceptions.

“The dichotomy,” he wrote, “will be between intellectuals and managers – the former concerned with words and ideas, the latter with people and work.”

The resolution of this tension through imagination will advance society to greater heights.

That’s my parting shot as editor of the great publication, Sowetan. In the nearly five years I have been editor after my seven-month stint at the Daily Dispatch, I have tried to develop a line of political thinking that started when I first walked into the newsroom in 1999.

I hope my successors will ensure that my humble contribution pales into insignificance by unleashing their own power of imagination.

The idea of leaving the newsroom reminds me of a letter US justice Benjamin Cardozo once wrote to Dean Roscoe Pound of the Harvard Law School. Pleading with Pound to keep him in contact with academia, Cardozo wrote: “I do not know where else to look for so extraordinary a fusion of learning at the service of wisdom, and of wisdom illuminated by learning.”

For me, the “extraordinary fusion” has been newspaper journalism.

Mpumelelo Mkhabela is the outgoing editor of Sowetan