QA 31. Dec 2011. Class system is off the rails

This was published in the Cape Times as “Time to make one class fit everyone on Metrorail and get rid of snobbery between coaches”, 5 December 2011. (Apologies to non-South Africans for local content. Will return to more universal matters in the new year. Promise!)

I’m glad I can use the train for my daily traveling. I enjoy not being in a car and all the hassles that go with that. I enjoy feeling so greenly virtuous.

I’ve almost always travelled third class on the train – sorry, I mean Metro class. It feels safer. In fact, the only time I’ve felt really nervous I was alone in a first class (oops, Metro Plus) carriage with one very edgy man. There are always more people in Metro class, more women, more mothers with children. It’s also half the price and – as I heard one man joke, watching people run up the platform – we all get to the station at the same time.

I also enjoy messing with the expectations of ticket agents. “Return to Cape Town, Metro class, please.” The eyebrows go up: “Metro?” “Yes, please,” I say, three fingers raised in confirmation. I like the atmosphere in third class. If there are first class people in the world, I’m pretty sure I’m not one of them. I’m also glad to spend time in mixed company. I live in a mostly white, English-speaking world and, in Africa, I think that’s just weird. I like to greet and be greeted. I like the currents of language swirling around me – Afrikaans, isiXhosa and others. I don’t understand the words but I start to feel my way into rhythms and tones, the musicality of speech. It feels surprisingly intimate.

In fact the only thing I hate about Metro class is the ranting preachers.

But a few months ago, I upgraded. The overcrowding had become inhuman, intolerable. All the carriages are full by Steenberg and packed from Retreat. People manage somehow – with shoving, screams and laughter. It’s part carnival, part hell realm. I figured getting out of there was the least I could do.

So now I’m riding Metro Plus. Conditions are better, especially with those nice padded seats that face forward instead of sideways. But how quickly I caught myself scrutinising fellow passengers for those who didn’t belong! Conductors pass through regularly, looking for chancers who haven’t paid the right fare. They generally do so with a light touch, but I have seen people pulled off the southbound train and penned in at Rondebosch station, presumably to be fined.

And it’s not right. People shouldn’t be made to feel like criminals for trying to get home from work in one piece. It isn’t right that some of us travel in a half-full carriage while the next one is packed to the rafters. (Metro Plus also gets very crowded, but it is never as bad and often markedly better.)

So I’m glad to see [trade union federation] Cosatu putting some pressure on Metrorail. The solution has to include more train sets and creative ways to lighten the peak-time loads. But shouldn’t we also talk about getting rid of this double standard in what is, after all, a public transit system?

Helen Douglas is a philosopher with a counselling practice in Kalk Bay

QA 30. Philosophy Café: Community in conversation

It’s Tuesday night, and I’m just home from a philosophy café. I have hosted these monthly gatherings since I started my philosophical counselling practice in 2002. This year, we’ve been generously offered space in the lovely village bookshop, after hours – a perfect setting for conversation.

We were thirteen this evening: some regulars, a couple of people who have been scarce for a while, and a few first-timers. Someone started by saying how appalled he was at Hillary Clinton’s televised reaction to the death of Muammar Gadaffi. Celebrating like a vindictive child who’s won a game of tiddlywinks! What have we come to?

Where did we go from there?

QA 29. The national question, or We we we all the way home?

(This is the original of an opinion piece published as “Identity does not depend on race” in the Cape Times on 11 October 2011)

Who are we? is the question posed in a timely series presented by the Cape Times and the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation. Really, it’s incredible. If “I am because we are”, and we are not the “we” we thought we were – then who am I? If “a person is a person through other people”, and we’re not getting through to each other – then what am I?

Rather than reach immediately for an answer to this terribly urgent question, perhaps we should slow down enough to reconsider it. Or, as Njabulo Ndebele beautifully suggested recently, to “wake up and re-dream” ourselves. It does stir us up. Whoever and whatever else we may be, we are the ones in question. We are called to account for ourselves, as if everything depends on this, our moment in history. It’s the new Senzenina. It’s terrifying and exhilarating.

Who are we? It’s an open question. You can walk right in. (Just leave the door open behind you, thanks.) It’s already crowded and noisy here, heated with opinions, ideas, critiques and proposals for “the way going forward”.

QA 28. The freedoms of choice

* My first blog post in a couple of months – been busy launching my book. Thanks to all involved and those who sent good wishes. It was a jol!
This is the original of an article for Psychologies magazine, published as “What are you waiting for?”

Choice has always been an important topic in philosophy, usually framed in terms of free will versus determinism. Are we free to choose our course in life? Or is our fate already sealed, whether by God or some chain of events we didn’t create that leads us inevitably to a future we cannot influence?
For most of us, the truth lies somewhere in between, although we may personally lean more to one side than the other. (My husband once landed in jail for political activity and was put in a holding cell with a young man who was in on a criminal charge. My husband commented that he was surprised to find himself there. The young man replied, “For me, it was inevitable.”)

QA 27. (Jan 11) The philosopher queen gets her gruntle back

(or A taste of my own medicine)

* A small taste for those who have wondered how philosophical counselling/practice works. You might notice the constant inter-play of feelings, words, images and ideas, and how different strategies are utilised.

Disgruntled, grumpy, ugh. A smuttering dissatisfaction, all the more annoying for its sheer pettiness. Objectless but fidgety, ennui with ants in its pants. Ugh. What to do?

QA 26. (Nov 10) To change our thinking

If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?  The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments. Clay Shirky

We have a duty to change our mode of thinking. David Harvey

There appears to be magic simply in the willingness to tackle life’s hardest problems from the humble position of simply being one among many in a circle of individuals caring for the common lot. Alice Walker

The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them. Albert Einstein (attributed)

Having these words slung my way from many directions recently, I have decided to shift the focus of my philosophy café. To change our mode of thinking. Could there be a more philosophical challenge? But how is this even possible, if the mind we use to think with is the thing we have to change? I don’t know, but I have a few clues.

QA 25. (Oct 10) How to raise better politicians

The Cape Times (Cape Town) published an edited version of this as “If we are cynical about our politicians, we will get the leaders we deserve”, 1 November 2010

Against the horizon of the media tribunal disputes here, I have been thinking about how we chatterers create the conditions for the political leadership we get, and wondering if we couldn’t do it better.

Politicians must be the last group of people that can be maligned in polite society with impunity, or even relish. A bunch of crooks, fat cats at the trough, only out for themselves, inept, corrupt. Right? You hear it on the train, in the coffee shop, at the golf course. You read it in the papers. It’s not uncommon. But it’s a big problem.

In fact, it’s misguided on every level. One: it’s bad logic, a flawed thought that assumes what it sets out to prove. Two: it’s toxic to democracy. This kind of cynicism tears down, but builds nothing. It offers us only the tools of suspicion, manipulation and regulation. That’s not freedom. Three: it’s a disservice. A good leader is just someone who hasn’t been caught yet and a great leader can only appear as an exception to the rule – incomprehensible, miraculous, messianic – which is neither helpful nor true. Four: it’s nasty. It’s unpleasant, ugly and mean.

The very worst thing about this politicophobia is that it promotes more and more corrupt politicians.

QA 24. (Aug 10) A word to the (would-be) wise

This is the original version of an article published as “A formula for wisdom” in Psychologies (South Africa), August–September 2010

Every society venerates the wisdom of its elders, at least in principle. Wisdom is seen as a consolation for the physical decline of age and the approach of death. And although not every old person is wise (and not every wise person is old), it is partly wisdom that distinguishes elders from those who are merely elderly.

It seems clear that wisdom is something we should want more of, particularly here and now. And not just for our own sakes. For better or worse, disease, violence and tumultuous social and technological change have ruptured the traditional passage of wisdom across generations. So how do we get it?

Confucius has a very concise and helpful answer: There are three methods to gaining wisdom. The first is reflection, which is the highest. The second is imitation, which is the easiest. The third is experience, which is the bitterest.

QA 23. (May 10) The man on the train

Friday afternoon I board a train at False Bay. The carriage is quite full and a man gestures me to the empty seat beside him. I smile and shake my head. I’m happy to stand. “Why? Tell me why?” It’s almost a demand. I shrug, “I’ve been sitting all day and my bum is sore.” He cocks his head like a small bird, taking my measure. I return the favour. A small coloured man in his 60s, stubbly, toothless, wearing a crumpled corduroy jacket and a knit cap. He could be a drunk, but his eyes are bright in a face as mobile and sly as a child’s.

He pulls half a peeled orange from his pocket, its pith ratty with lint, and holds it up to me.

QA 22 (Mar-Apr 10). Three book reviews (1)

Three recent reviews published in the Cape Times (Cape Town, South Africa)

1. Re-imagining the Social in South Africa: Critique, Theory and Post-apartheid Society (Jacklin and Vale, eds)
2. Nurtureshock: Why everything we think about raising our children is wrong (Bronson & Merryman)
3. Africa: The Politics of Suffering and Smiling (Chabal)

Re-imagining the Social in South Africa: Critique, Theory and Post-apartheid Society
Heather Jacklin and Peter Vale (editors)
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press
Reviewed by Helen Douglas (Cape Times, 1 April 2010)

Ten chapters, eleven academics, all theorising “the social” and the state of “social theory” in South Africa. The immediate question for a non-academic (but sociable) reader trying to make sense of our current muddle: is there something helpful here? Well yes, there is.

Imagine: to form an image in the mind. The many opinions South Africans hold about the state we’re in and where we’re going reflect our own varied states of mind, our dreams and prejudices, what we imagine this country is or has been or is supposed to be.

And there has been a change in the way we have imagined a democratic South Africa, from the experiences of apartheid and struggle though the years of transition from Mandela to Mbeki and now Zuma. It feels like our perhaps naive imaginings hit a wall along the way, and some fresh “re-imagining” is certainly in order.