Nelson Mandela’s political legacy is too great, too various, to summarise in a single post. But for me he represents a core insight.
For a revolutionary political idea to thrive, it must not be consumed by the very zeal it ignites.
This is not to underestimate the importance of Mandela’s cause. And it is sobering to think that, two hundred years after the Enlightenment’s high watermark, the rightness of that cause was not at all self-evident to the greater part of white South African opinion, any more than Rosa Parks’s validity as a person with rights was self-evident to George Wallace.
Rather, it is to appreciate the enormity of what Mandela did.
Conflicts between interests, nations and individuals have a dialectical tendency that can perpetuate them. Our appetite for justice makes us log and itemise the wrongs done to us. The very metaphors of balance, scales, blindness, can lead us to seek an exact retribution, commensurate with harms endured. When there are rooted perceptions of right on both sides then the dynamics of “you did that, so we will do this” can seem never-ending. When the forces opposed are asymmetric, then horrors ensue. The sense of grievance is used as a basis for disproportionate aggression, even tyranny. The Russian invasion of South Ossetia had as its immediate occasion a Georgia-supported skirmish into North Ossetia. Imperialist violence masqueraded as righteous indignation.
Yet even where right sits clearly on one side, the appetite for justice can lead to just causes being derailed by their own momentum. The history of revolutions is too often the history of freedom-fighters turned tyrants.
Few – not even those who styled Mandela “a terrorist” as late as the 1980s – would now wish to be associated with the hateful apparatus of legalised inequality, Bantustans, and armed, trigger-happy police. Many indeed would have seen immediate acts of legalised vengeance by a majority ANC regime in the 1990s as understandable. But such a retribution would have risked becoming the thing it hated. Mandela might have become Mugabe.
Mandela’s greatness was not only to uphold his ideals tenaciously. It was to incarnate the principle that unites all truly great ethical systems and philosophies: that justice is counterbalanced with mercy. Mercy: that capacity to suspend in an eternal moment the accountancy of wrongs that should be righted, and to perceive and serve interests far greater than one’s immediate sense of affront.
To understand how hard this is, think about our daily complaints about poor service, petty slights, workplace grievances, and how aggressively we seek immediate and complete redress. Then imagine what revenge most us would want exacted after losing 27 years of life on indefensible grounds.
Mandela’s insight – that his just cause was at once served and transcended by mercy – has been shared by too few in history. Whether his successors understand his legacy fully is a debate for another day. Today, we should marvel at his example of how to live by the most exalted standards.
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3 Comments
Couldn’t agree more about the greatness of Mandela bu. what a pity to spoil the effect of your message by misusing the word ‘enormity’, which means a great crime or sin.
*Sighs at misplaced pedantry*
There are three reasons why the point you make is not as valid (from validus, Latin, meaning having force) as you might think. The first is the evolution of the word enormity in vulgar, where great expanse is suggested. This connects directly to the second. The moral connotation – of offence – has little etymological basis. The Latin root enormitas is a mostly neutral abstraction, though capable, especially in later usage, of the specific moral resonance, into which, having at first evolved, it has now, for some, been frozen.
Of course, the distancing of usage meanings from root meanings is reasonably common in Latinate words – see horrid and horridus for a considerable decoupling. But the moral appropriation here is particularly egregious, more so even than that of egregious (from Latin grex, where being merely outside of commonality has been given a sheep/goats religiosity).
So the meaning has remained unstable in common usage, partly through the self-evidence of the pure root meaning and the questionable received dominance of the ethical register.
But my third reason constitutes a partial concession to your point. The moral resonance of enormity as you would have it derived from attempts to specify an act beyond conventional boundaries. To those hidebound by the standards of a nineteenth century moralist (or grammarian) that could only mean immoral. But in the meaning (admittedly rarer) I am striving for something of the Kierkegaardian sense of a moral category beyond ordinary calculation is conveyed.
It is always – I find – worth pausing, before questioning someone’s use of a word, to consider whether they might not have thought it through themselves already.
Suppose Robert Mugabe were to die tomorrow …
Ok, once you’ve thought about that a bit, that’s enough to make you see that, yes, Nelson Mandela was a great man, unlike so many others of his generation who too could have been honoured heroes of liberation if it were not for what they did once they achieved power.