What is it with youngish whiteish progressives? What makes their politics so bitter and their prose so intemperate? Is it struggle envy maybe; the unconscious yearning for the simple (awful) verities of apartheid? Or could it be a backlash against Nineties rainbow optimism and its unrequited promises? Whatever the cause, it makes for questionable reasoning, and depressing, destructive writing.

Consider, for example, Nigel Branken’s take on last week’s bring-and-braai on Clifton beach.

There isn’t much wrong with his prose, or, indeed, with his basic premise: ours remains a deeply fractured and scarred society, with not much changed in terms of financial and spatial inequity. There’s a long way to go on the path to mass well-being – but how does it help anyone to pretend that we’re still living in the 1980s? Nearly 30 years after the formal abandonment of apartheid – and with the majority firmly in charge of every institution of state – what kind of agenda is served by such fatuous, unctuous bunk? Who but the author himself, and the worst populist blockheads, gains anything at all from saying that white people, en masse, care less for black people “than they do for animals like sheep”?

Exaggeration comes easily, to all of us; that’s a given. And what’s also obviously true is that real change requires real agitation. My quarrel with Mr Branken though – and with his fellow change-denialists like Dr Oscar van Heerden – is not that they draw attention to uncomfortable truths, robustly. Rather it’s that they do so in a way that, first, demeans the gains we’ve already made as a society and that, second, imperils the prospect of further such progress. Their kind of crude, reductionist analysis doesn’t just encourage anti-white hatred, it also has immediate practical consequences. It puts off tourists and depresses property prices – and, most significantly, it subverts investor confidence. To the detriment of all.

South Africa today is on a knife-edge, teetering between (vengeance driven) bonfire and (compromise focused) beacon. Forty-something, utopian crusaders like Branken see redemption in work programmes, protests and prayers, despite the cautionary lessons from the likes of Zimbabwe, Venezuela and North Korea. I have no absolute way of proving they’re wrong, but as ageing, leftish incrementalist, I’m more drawn to creative programming, steeper progressive taxation and curbs on population growth.

Leaving all that class stuff aside though, what’s so dispiriting about this kind of travail writing is its seeming blindness to the immensity of the problems we face and to the qualities needed to best them. We’re living in the most fractured country in history – the photo-negative of the prototypical nation-state – and if we’re going to keep it working (and improving) we’re going to need not just strong economic growth and inspired political leadership, but, above all, a compelling vision of a shared and successful future. By that measure, about the least useful thing imaginable is line after anguished line of guilt, shame, bile and indignation; all hallmarks of showy, second-hand penitence – and harbingers of sorrowful failure.

I grew up in Clifton as it happens when it was still a whites-only suburb. Today, though, our house belongs to a black man, who, I’m told, runs a big security company (presumably not PPA). If he has young children, there’s a fair chance that they go to Camps Bay school, which wouldn’t have been possible in my time there. He’s one of the lucky few, admittedly, but what’s also true is that our entire country is radically different from the way it was back then. Yes, there are still far too many people living in poverty, most of whom are black – but on most meaningful metrics there’s been a considerable collective improvement. Think of basic civil rights. Think of housing provision. Of higher education. Of work opportunities and welfare. And, critically, of dignity and respect.

It’s here, I suspect, that the explanation lies for the difference in attitude between those who cut their political teeth in the Seventies and Eighties (or before) and those who did so after 1990. The latter never experienced, or witnessed, or fought against, the Group Areas Act and the Pass Laws and the Mixed Marriages Act and all the other iniquities that marked the old Apartheid order. The fact that all South Africans enjoy full citizenship rights today is something they take entirely for granted – and so, impelled by a mixture of idealism, boredom and self-righteousness, they just raise the moral bar. As we (unenlightened) beings often do.

Often, but seldom thoughtfully. DM