What with surfers wanting to surf, beachgoers wanting to swim, libertarians and contrarians refusing to wear masks during a pandemic, and nice people who can’t take their poodles to a parlour claiming oppression, I have been thinking again about the issue of the common good, of social cohesion, and how they ought to feed into social justice. Neither of these, as objectives, necessarily produce docile bodies.

I can’t wrap my head around why people would fight tooth and nail, invoke dictatorship, authoritarianism, and individual liberty, when it is in the interest of everyone – it is in the common good – that we adhere to basic requests, rules or regulations to curb the spread of Covid-19, and that prevention of the spread of the dreaded disease through collective action for the common good easily fits into the concept of social justice.

While I generally agree that drives for social cohesion tend to be abused by figures of authority, and can often create docile bodies, I disagree with Steven Friedman who believes that “social cohesion” opens a way to “make us all the same [when] we should be discussing ways in which we can respect difference, as long as it is not used to exploit or deny the rights of others. A healthy SA will be one that prizes respect for those who are different, not one that tries to make us all the same.”

It would be frighteningly naïve to imagine that the differences in South African society are purely political, or purely class-based, in a crude Marxist sense where only two classes compete for political economic power and dominance. I should not put words into Friedman’s mouth, but our differences are our greatest strength – now there’s a cliché if ever there was one. Promoting excessive individualism, especially at a time of Covid-19, may be our greatest weakness – at the moment.

In a circuitous way, Friedman echoes the rather odious Hayekian concession that the effects of the individual choices and open processes of a free society are not distributed according to a recognisable principle of justice. 

In Hayekian terms, diversity can lead to “letting meritocracy” prevail, and should evil rise while the good dissolves into propositions like “it’s our turn to eat,” or the idea of “a chosen people” (tough shit, as “chosen people” we can do as we wish because God said we’re special) – then so be it. 

In terms of policy making and popular discourses, it can also be a crippling force that retards the equal (durable and inter-generational) distribution of social justice.

This crippling effect is being made worse in the current climate of searches for purity, ethno-nationalism and racial exclusivity. It is actors and agents of these phenomena who have the power and ability to decide what makes a society “cohesive”. In this way, spreading the unCritical (Capitalised “C” is intentional and a reference to Critical Theory) notions of social cohesion, can, in fact, lead to the creation of docile bodies across a spectrum of contexts – from factory floors to educational institutions.

One stand-out example of docile bodies is the debt burden with which university graduates in the United States are yoked; they have to conform, find a job, pay their bills (especially) tuition fees, and thereby lose the incentive or the motivation to protest against injustices. 

This is more a problem with capitalism, but social democracies have made it easier for graduates, without surrendering stability, cohesion or the distribution of social justice.

Indeed, orthodox capitalist economics may insist that humans are naturally endowed with a biological capacity to work for long hours on soul-destroying assembly lines, and because they have become docile bodies, readily submit to inhumane or extreme conditions of employment almost without complaint. 

Only ossified Stalinists would have us believe that assembly lines and industrial or mining toil did not exist in the former Eastern Bloc.

It does not help that we have, for instance, a ruling alliance/party/liberation movement (it’s no longer clear what precisely to call the ANC and its partners) that imagines one set of rules, conduct or behaviours for members of “the movement”, another for non-members, and a sort of sliding scale of justice for whites, Indians, coloureds and African foreigners.

There are also individuals, organised voluntarily or involuntarily into groups or complacently enjoying membership of imagined communities. All of these distract from one of the main objectives of social justice. 

One outcome is precisely the manipulation or misrepresentation of social cohesion as some kind of Stalinist uniformity aimed at domination, when its downstream aims are, actually, about stability, equality, community safety, non-violence and the provision of public goods and services as part of a distributional social justice. 

How then would this interpretation explain the surfers, anti-vaxxers, the poodle persecuted and those who (exercising their ill-conceived “rights”, in my view) refuse to wear masks.

Docile bodies and the false freedom of individualism

The idea of social cohesion as an element of distributional social justice cannot be dismissed out of hand. It can, however, be used to understand the need to pool efforts towards the common good, and thereby stopping the spread of Covid-19. 

Instead of producing docile bodies or reproducing the conditions that produce and sustain docile bodies, dismissing social cohesion as a dimension of the distribution of social justice feeds into the Hayekian idea (above) that individual freedoms (in specific instances) trump a national, state-initiated effort to curb the spread of communicable disease (and roll back injustices, in general), without brute force.

In this latter sense, with respect to brute force, there is merit in Friedman’s claim that social cohesion “is a deeply undemocratic idea that gives a licence to the powerful to dominate others”. This echoes the difference between a “law and order” approach to public policing, and “to serve and protect”.

We get to a point, then, with a pandemic sweeping the land – quite literally – the central government (I deliberately use this term), has set in motion regulations and laws, some of which can, and are being questioned (we’re a democracy), but there are people who simply refuse to accept any of the government’s recommendations – simply because it’s “a violation of their individual freedom”. 

Surely there has to be a time when the common good (which may include cohesion around the cruelty of a particular issue, say racism or anti-semitism), trumps individual freedom? This does not mean limitations on the freedom to think, or to speak. 

For what it’s worth, if I intended to build a triple-storied house (if only) on my plot of land, I would have to ask the permission of neighbours – because they have the right to enjoy sunlight and sea views. I should locate some of this in the area of education, of which I have some experience.

For generations South Africa’s institutions have represented the country’s society. It was a fractured and iniquitous education system that reproduced the fractures and iniquities of South Africa. There can be no disagreement that this was a fundamentally unjust system that represented the era, although some people continue to believe nothing happened before 1994. It is with this in mind that higher learning, from the institution to curricula, ought to address social justice.

Surely this requires, at least, a measure of social cohesion in the sense that it may be necessary to have maximal agreement that things ought to change? If not, “change agents” are simply worked out of the system and the status quo ex ante reproduces itself mutatis mutandis. 

An example of this would be, say, the old white faculty members who claim that they have “transformed” universities, and point to the legions of black students – but they are still teaching them in the same ways, and using the same curricula of the past.

In other words,  the powerful old guard, who have made themselves indispensable, do what they can while the weak (black students) suffer what they must.

Some measure of social cohesion becomes necessary, then, to give effect to the belief that public education is necessary for engaged and active students and teachers by deliberatively engaging groups and individuals (teachers unions, student unions) as drivers of social change and transformation in a participatory democracy while reserving room for dissent – but without losing sight of the social justice ends. DM