From our overstocked archives
Sam Smith, 2009 - In the movie Invictus, Nelson Mandela proposes the
outrageous notion that one of the best ways to deal with ethnic
conflict is to get both sides doing something they mutually find
more important than disliking each other. This is not a popular
idea among liberals, black or white, too many of whom prefer to
scold, outlaw or regulate, as if all respect, decency and friendship
required was enough frowns or the proper legal terminology.
Nelson Mandela knew better and
used rugby, rather than rules, as an early tool for remaking South
Africa. In doing so, he had to overcome not only the resistance
of whites but of blacks who saw rugby as an evil symbol of the
land under apartheid. Mandela managed, nonetheless, to turn the
game into pride that was mutually shared.
Although we seldom notice it, we have more than
a little evidence in this country that Mandela's approach works.
Consider that sports teams are among the most integrated institutions
in the land or that a shared search for goods at a shopping mall
does a better job of bringing ethnicities together than many law
firms or the US Senate have managed. Or how we take cross cultural
experience for granted when eating at an ethnic restaurant.
But as with so many things these
days, when we think about such matters we tend to impose institutional
and regulatory solutions even though the conflict is based on
beliefs and assumptions as personal as one can find.
Mandela's approach was subversive of prevailing
values but not unique. After all, Saul Alinsky's organizing efforts
were based in part on bringing normally separated or antagonistic
groups together to take on the establishment. Earl Long's power
in Louisiana was based in part on his success in getting blacks
registered in one of the most segregated states in the union.
And Martin Luther King Jr. said that "Something must happen
so as to touch the hearts and souls of men that they will come
together, not because the law says it, but because it is natural
and right." He told his colleagues that among their dreams
should be that someday their enemies would be their friends.
Two years after the riots
in DC, when the gap between blacks and whites in the city was
enormous, a small biracial group of us formed the DC Statehood
Party. It was years before I realized how strange that was because,
at the time, we thought nothing of it. Political equality just
seemed far more important than ethnic divisions. Besides, our
leader had shown us how. Julius Hobson lived a life beyond such
divisions. As a Marxist he knew he knew money was the driving
cultural force. And he was a black man married to a white woman
who was also a mentor to black nationalist Stokley Carmichael.
Like Mandela, he refused to live by the cliches.
Mandela was subversive in another way. He was an
existentialist. While even intellectuals tend to trivialize existentialism
as simply an obsession with angst and despair, that is gross misreading.
Existentialism is the idea,
as Sartre put it, that one's existence precedes and defines one's
essence. We are what we do. This is the obverse of predestination
and original sin with their presumption of an innate essence.
It is also at greatly at odds with the assumption of ethnic or
cultural impermeability.
In
fact, some existentialists argue that we are not fully us until
we die because until that moment we are still making decisions
and taking actions that define ourselves. Even the condemned person,
one said, has a choice of how to approach the gallows.
Wrote Sartre: "Man is nothing
else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle
of existentialism . . . Man is condemned to be free. . . From
the moment he is thrown into this world he is responsible for
everything he does."
In
a world dominated by dichotomies, debate, definition and deconstruction,
existentialism suggests not a result but a way, not a solution
but an approach, not goal but a far and misty horizon. It is,
says Robert Solomon, "a sensibility . . . an attitude towards
oneself, an attitude towards one's world, an attitude towards
one's behavior."
Mississippi
writer Tom Lowe put it this way, "The truth lies neither
in the left or the right or in some middle-of-the-road position
that borrows from both sides. The truth is that we are responsible
for everything we do and for everyone and everything our behavior
affects, and that responsibility extends to our collective, as
well as our individual, behavior. Responsibility is like a seamless
web -- we are all connected with each other and ultimately with
the entire world. It encompasses the choices we make in our capacity
as spouses, as parents, as voters, as stockholders, as corporate
officers, as employers, as public officials, and as purchasers
of goods, but it extends to the entire planet."
This sense of being individually responsible yet
part of a seamless web of others produces neither certainty nor
excuses. One can, one must, be responsible without the comfort
of being sure. Camus once admitted that he would be unwilling
to die for his beliefs. He was asked why. "What if I'm wrong?"
And when he spoke of rebellion, like Mandela, he also spoke of
moderation:
"There does
exist for man, therefore, a way of acting and thinking which is
possible on the level of moderation which he belongs. Every undertaking
that is more ambitious than this proves to be contradictory. The
absolute is not attained nor, above all, created through history
. . . Finally, it is those who know how to rebel, at the appropriate
moment, against history who really advance its interests. . .
The words that reverberate for us at the confines of this long
adventure of rebellion are not formulas of optimism, for which
we have no possible use in the extremities of our unhappiness,
but words of courage and intelligence which, on the shores of
the eternal seas, even have the qualities of virtue."
This existential combination of
what Alfie Rohl described as "both affirmation and rebellion"
goes to the heart what Mandela was about.
As the poem Invictus by William Ernest Henley was being recited in the film,
I found myself mouthing the words to myself. I was suddenly taken
back to the table where, as a young boy, my father used to make
us recite poems at Sunday lunch. Invictus had been one of my favorites.
Out of the night that covers
me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For
my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under
the bludgeonings of chance
My head is
bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds
and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I
am the captain of my soul.
The
same poem Mandela gave to rugby team captain Francois Pienaar,
my father had given me. And I suddenly realized why I had always
liked Mandela. It was not just for what he had done but because
of a poem we had both read that had helped us grasp the still
subversive idea that the best way to overcome overbearing negative
cultural forces is by the personal witness of individuals demonstrating
another way.
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