MICHAEL MORRIS: Citizens can make good choices without coercion - Business Day

Michael Morris

As the time for making winning arguments in the 2024 testing election campaign dwindles, it is inescapably tormenting that in the restless, jostling build-up people might not spend much time at all thinking about the scope for making choices or the impact choices might have in their own lives.

It would almost certainly be a mistake to think of this as a deficiency, but given the state of the country and the obvious need to choose a different way of doing things, it is a puzzle, nevertheless. And it goes without saying that this seemingly disengaged, habitual conduct is true of the vast majority of us. 

Just last week, reading the third book of novelist Cormac McCarthy’s acclaimed Border Trilogy, Cities of the Plain, I recognised something of this quality in a thoughtful character’s grappling with the limits of agency.

“Men speak of blind destiny, a thing without scheme or purpose,” he tells a younger listener. “But what sort of destiny is that? Each act in this world from which there can be no turning back has before it another and it another yet ... Men imagine that the choices before them are theirs to make. But we are free to act only upon what is given. Choice is lost in the maze of generations.”

This last phrasing, the idea that “choice is lost in the maze of generations”, set off a resonant ping. It is surely true for every society that history leans heavily into the present, but the import of this “maze of generations” is perhaps especially intense for South Africans.

I have been wondering recently why it is that so much of the debate in SA — it is probably as true of our private conversations as it is of that larger, noisier thing, the national conversation — very often proceeds from an unspoken assumption that people have to be coerced into doing things for the good of society, even when the rationale is (broadly speaking) that whatever is good for society is good for everyone in it.

Why can’t we just be trusted to choose what’s good for us and those around us, with this “us” — as I think is mostly the case — including everyone outside whatever enclave of familiarity leaps to mind ... suburb, city, province, language, religion, class, race, gender, ethnic group?

Barely a day goes without yet another illustration of the tension between coercion and choosing, with the choosing being casually discounted, or its efficacy doubted.

A typically uncomplicated example was the reported sentiments of Ntobeko Stampu of All Weather Capital, who was quoted in Business Times saying of offshore investment rules: “We have shot ourselves in the foot ... We need more savings invested in the country to fund infrastructure projects, to get our economy to grow at a faster pace so we can create real jobs. But we’ve taken our money [and] given it to foreigners where there’s actually no reciprocal benefit to us.” (“Godongwana’s big offshore boo-boo”, February 25).

Actually, the real question is: can we expect better public choices if our instinctive response is to punish good ones? It is depressingly true that choice is very often lost in the maze of generations, but the record also tells us that when circumstances are compelling enough, masses of people, acting in their own interests but knowing the benefits are not theirs alone, grasp the initiative and change direction.

This is surely no less a part of — as McCarthy’s character has it — acting “upon what is given”.

Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations.

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2024-03-04-michael-morris-citizens-can-make-good-choices-without-coercion/