Pete’s blog

Going to start my weekly emails with a small rant.

My rant is about how de-politicised everyone is. Having studied this stuff for a while, it is scary how ignorant I used to be about what was going on in my country, and why it was happening. The thing is, I can now see this in other people and my friends… What can I do about this? One of my favourite sociologists that we did this year was C Wright Mills – he said that society has created a de-politicised mass that is happily marching into sociological hell. We accept everything that government does as long as it doesn’t impact on our ability to consume. As long as we can own our flashy car, our nice house and have a well paid job, we don’t care what they do. Why bother about politics? It is something that happens in the background. It makes good dinner table conversation – the popular one at the moment being why doesn’t South Africa do something about Zimbabwe? How many of us actually bother to think our way through this, to analysis possible alternatives and predict their outcome. Do you have an alternate strategy that government could follow? Have you even thought about one? Or is it far easier just to complain and say what a terrible job Mbeki is doing? Why even bother about Zimbabwe – because Mugabe can’t jump across the border and redistribute you car in South Africa? This is de-politicisation. People no longer worry about government and politics because it has no immediate, direct effect on their lives. It is simpler to rely on newspapers and mass media to define our beliefs and opinions.

I struggle about what to do about this. C Wright Mills felt that it was the duty of public sociologists to inform and politicise the masses – to make them care – because this stuff is important to our lives. But I know how complicated all this stuff can be – the variables are many and the people involved complicated. To be political takes time and energy … time and energy that people would rather spend elsewhere.

I was originally intending to write about Mbeki’s apparent shift away from neo-liberal economics in this email, but then I started thinking about all the explanations and history that I would have to provide first… I will try and write this email next week, but will have to get all the facts together first. Even an explanation of what our policy for Zimbabwe is all about takes a fair amount of explanation – everything from Ken Sarowiwa and Sani Abacha, to Lesotho, to African culture, to the resistance movement, to South Africa land distribution problems, and not to mention Mbeki’s own personality. Everyone can tell you what the problems are, but few people can give you solutions – one of the reasons I have very little time or patience for the anti-globalisation movement.

The question I am asking myself is, do I try and inform people and change people, or does no-one really care? It is amazing how many people have made it onto my “do not discuss politics with” list – these are people that I like in most ways, but politically they are very naïve, yet very opinionated and are just impossible to have a decent discussion with. So I keep conversation away from politics and everyone is happier. Ok, maybe I don’t give people enough credit, maybe people do actually care, but have no source to draw from… Still trying to decide how much politics I should put into these emails – I am thinking that I might put a lot (since this is something that I think about a lot), but it won’t be exclusively politics. So in future emails, maybe I will give you a bit of history about Zimbabwe, a bit about the ANC’s economic policy and other stuff.