The Big Read: The widening gyre

South Africans bond. The television producer said it with a slightly sheepish smile, as if she was confessing some character flaw, but then she shrugged and said, "It's amazing. We just . bond."

We had been discussing reality TV, a format designed to turn strangers against each other so audiences can enjoy the unravelling of human bonds. American and European contestants had been eager to comply. Whether it was Big Brother or Survivor, they had splintered into cliques or simply remained resolutely individualistic. But we refuse to follow the script. Whatever the show, whatever the stakes, the camaraderie spreads like a warm contagion. Instead of a race for a prize it becomes a stroll with friends. The hugs are genuine, the tears at the end are real.

It was a reassuring thing to hear as the reality show of our public life grinds through another predictable season, the same cynical scripts recycled, the same conflicts contrived by the show-runners. It gave me hope that perhaps, as politicians and pundits and corporations once again separate us into green teams and blue teams and red teams and encourage us to despair and argue, that something in our nature might resist and go off script.

Of course, it is not always helpful for South Africans to feel too united. "We" is a comforting idea but it is also an anaesthetic, and sometimes pain needs to be felt and listened to. There are deep injuries in the flesh of this country, and to focus on "us", to celebrate an idealised togetherness, is to stick a rainbow-coloured band-aid on a wound that needs a long and painful series of operations.

But the fact remains that we are being tugged apart, and that powerful people are paying their mortgages by widening the distances between us. Perhaps more damagingly, we are being pulled away not only from each other but from ourselves.

As the noise grows louder it becomes harder and harder to speak to our inner selves, to hear ourselves over the racket. Eventually we stop trying to whisper through the hurricane, and, as in any relationship, once the talking stops things begin to drift apart. The still centre cannot hold and we become hollow things, a scrapbook of other people's ambitions, our conversations dominated by slogans, politicians, brands .

The trouble is, those responsible for standing up for humanity and humaneness aren't helping, mainly because they, too, have started yelling. For centuries a loud, male voice has boomed dogma at the world, announcing with supreme confidence that men are fantastic, women are less fantastic but are tolerable if they're attractive; that white is right and black is barbarous; that war is heroic; that conquest is God's will; that difference is dangerous. The defenders of humanity are talking back, telling the strident voice of the old world that entitlement and privilege have given it a warped view of the world. But the problem with arguing with a shouter is that you have to start shouting to be heard; and before long, both sides sound the same.

The new orthodoxy would strongly deny that it is as strident as the old. The old guard huffed and puffed in gentleman's clubs, boardrooms and locker rooms. The new high priests inhabit universities and newsrooms. But too often they share the same intolerance for dissent.

Gradually a new, prescriptive orthodoxy is taking hold, policed not by gunboats but by pundits and academics determined to root out anything that appears ideologically unsophisticated, messily human. Believe in love? You're naive. Believe in family? You're a Stepford wife. Believe in God? You're a superstitious idiot. Expressing a vague, unformed hope for the future? You're delusional. After all, we're all fashionably doomed, don't you know?

Under this kind of scrutiny we begin to reject parts of ourselves, and with every part we reject as inappropriate, unsophisticated, indefensible or just plain stupid, we reject our humanity.

If only we could draw ourselves back towards ourselves. If only we could acknowledge that what the pundits accuse us of is often true - that we are prejudiced, that we gravitate towards easy answers to superficial questions - but also acknowledge that we are so much more than a collection of inappropriate, unfit attitudes. We love. We forgive. We act with gentleness and kindness. We seek pleasure, blushingly. We might stagger off to bed after a long evening of condemning the world and its people, but we wake up and start the next day tinged with hope, as if the cold night in us has been warmed by a soft dawn.

We make mistakes. I suspect I'm making one right now: cynical columns tend to be more popular than exhortations to remember our better angels. But when the reality show The Winter of Our Discontent is the only show on, it is not a mistake to speak up for the softness, the weakness and the beauty of the human heart.