MICHAEL MORRIS: SA and the US share a common challenge - Business Day

Michael Morris
Remarkably, given the deep historical cleavage that separates us, SA’s most testing challenge is very like America’s, and for not dissimilar reasons.

Between our lunatic aversion to crafting a straightforward pro-growth budget and Washington’s “catalogue of foolishness”, as The Economist described Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff gamble, our dramatic present logically claims attention as the thing that must matter the most. 

But, important or worrying as these things are, the more testing subject is almost certainly not of the moment but of the historical middle distance. Not just the next election — who wins? − or the next administration (who presides?) but the condition of our institutions, the endurance and integrity of our institutional tools, and the habits and impulses that are visible in how we use them.

We — America and SA — are young states that in our best moments have succeeded in offering our ancient societies the prospect of reinvention and renewal, and the scope for people to be their finest selves.

Yet evident on both sides of the Atlantic are the telltale signs of elected elites that have embarked on a chosen historical mission, exercising power in the service of their mesmerising ambition to realise an epochal goal.

Transformation is a word you could apply to both — to Trump’s Make-America-Great-Again romanticism no less than to the ANC’s national-democratic-revolution nostalgia — and both are held up as the ultimate solution, the self-evident imperative, the practical means of achieving a neglected dream. 

Yet, as the destination can only ever be the journey itself (the means always being the end), the measure of virtue is not whether certain steps succeed or not, but how they are taken.

Since no society or administration can guarantee success, what matters most is knowing that we can fail, and still endure. Our confidence in trying rests on the certainty that failing is never the final event, only an illustration of how things were done, and proof that doing things differently or better may still succeed in overcoming the challenges of modernity on the march. 

Expanding on Wyndham Lewis’s 1950 indictment of contemporary culture as “a moronic inferno of insipidity and decay”, novelist Saul Bellow offered in a 1986 discussion with fellow novelist Martin Amis and Michael Ignatieff that he thought that “[moronic inferno] … means a chaotic state in which no-one has sufficient internal organisation to resist, and in which one is overwhelmed by all kinds of powers — political, technological, military, economic and so on — that carry everything before them with a kind of heathen disorder in which we’re supposed to survive with all our human qualities”.

(As his biographer Jeffrey Meyers reminds us, Lewis “held a bleak view of modern life” and poet WH Auden “called the self-styled ‘enemy’ and conservative advocate of Western culture ‘[t]hat lonely old volcano of the right’.”)

The two things that have always struck me about Bellow’s perhaps somewhat disheartening definition are that the essentials are “[having] sufficient internal organisation to resist”, and “[surviving] with all our human qualities”. 

In these two things we glimpse what seems for a moment a noble ideal yet is actually the ordinary, everyday quality of a free, thriving society. Awkwardly, almost, it has to combine public confidence in the efficacy of the franchise with an unmistakable demonstration that the national interest always exceeds what voters want. 

For this to work our institutions must be able to withstand the burdens of ideology and of visionary enthusiasm, and, it follows, resist the moronic inferno. 

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

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2025-04-07-michael-morris-sa-and-the-us-share-a-common-challenge/