Rules alone won't stop the chaos

Some years ago, students at the University of Venda grappled with the problem of political disorder.

There were two main rival political organisations: the South African Students Organisation (Sasco) and the Azanian Student Convention (Azasco).

The constitution of the Student Representative Council (SRC) stipulated that the mass meeting was the highest decision-making body.

From time to time, the students would congregate in a big auditorium collectively to take decisions, like the rudimentary Athenian democracy of the ancient Greek City State, where the whole population convened to deliberate on the affairs of the state.

Mass meetings were chaotic. There was uncontrollable booing and whistling. Some students attended meetings dressed like clowns, to grab the attention of the excitable mass.

The two political organisations used distinct tactics.

Sasco styled themselves as intellectuals, always misquoting Karl Marx to score political points.

Azasco were radicals, having little time for the pseudo-intellectuals of Sasco. They would fuel the disruption of meetings to sow disorder.

In an attempt to restore order, Sasco pseudo-intellectuals convinced the university management of the necessity to adopt a new SRC constitution, taking away powers from mass meetings to a new student parliament. The university acquiesced.

The rules governing the business of parliament were very strict. The Speaker was given extraordinary powers, and no one was allowed to enter the house without wearing a suit.

The presumption was that parliamentarians would not howl with ties around their necks. Suddenly, legendary howlers were called honourable so and so.

Believe it or not, the howlers continued to howl - right in parliament. For them a tie was a mere scarf, irrelevant to human conduct. In the end, all the behaviourist tricks of Sasco pseudo-intellectuals came to nil.

The chief error committed by the pseudo-intellectuals was to assume that rules alone are capable of conditioning behaviour. This was a terrible mistake, born of ignorance.

Had they read The Spirit of Laws by Montesquieu, they would have learnt that rules - what Montesquieu calls "form" - work only when they are animated by what he calls "specific passion".

By 1748, more than two centuries before Sasco's clumsy experiments, Montesquieu had already pointed out that "virtue" is the specific passion that animates a republic as a form of government.

The principal lesson here is that a republic that is constituted by people whose collective character is devoid of virtue is bound to collapse.

The notion that rules alone are capable of safeguarding the integrity of a particular form of government derives from the mistaken conception of politics as a realm that operates according to laws similar to those that govern nature.

This conception is defective in that it places mankind at the same level as nonhuman natural beings. It does not take into cognisance the fundamentally distinguishing trait possessed uniquely by us human beings - consciousness.

We humans embody a paradox. To us, consciousness is at the same time a blessing and a curse.

It is a blessing in that, through consciousness, the Creator has endowed us with a powerful instrument, enabling us to exercise lordship over vast extents of nature.

What a wonder of life that a creature as tiny as a human being can conquer elephants and drill tunnels through prodigious mountains. Other beasts and beings of the universe have been denied this marvellous privilege.

In the realm of culture, consciousness can be a curse. The uniqueness with which the Creator has favoured mankind is bound up with the curse of man's strange ability to rise above himself, as if in a double existence.

Our uniqueness consists in the fact that we are able to formulate and break our own rules. This is why Montesquieu is correct in cautioning that rules alone are inadequate to sustain a particular form of government. There has to be unity in the form-passion totality.

This is precisely what the pseudo-intellectuals of Sasco did not understand in their half-baked attempts to tame the animal-like passion of Azasco radicals, by simply tightening rules.

The rules of the University of Venda's new student parliament may have been adequate, but a cow cannot become a human being simply because a clever strategist has imposed a suit on it.

They deserve to be called pseudo-intellectuals since the strategists of Sasco did not appreciate the impossibility of constructing a republic amidst people to whom virtue is foreign.

Rules can ban red overalls, but the more serious challenge is how to render human the minds of ANC members who punched each other at a branch meeting in Giyani, or how to re-humanise the EFF members who manhandled Andile Mngxitama at a press conference in Cape Town.

This is the question people grappling with political disorder must confront.

South Africans may need to act before punching and manhandling take the place of our nation's specific passion.