TESSA DOOMS | Rise in echo chambers and cancel culture threatens ideas in our politics

Societies in crisis are identified by the poor outcomes affecting people’s lives but are also the product of the poor-quality ideas and weaker character of the people holding those ideas. Ideas matter. In the making, unmaking and remaking of societies, it is not only the tangible realities, the nuts and bolts, that matter but the underlying ideas too. In contemporary South African politics we face a crisis of ideas.

On the one hand we have parties and politicians who rehearse the same ideas and ideologies. Big and historically rooted parties like the ANC, DA and the EFF have clear ideological traditions that dictate the narratives they develop, even if the reality of their governance fails to reflect their ideas or worse yet their ideas do not reflect their society.

We have new parties and politicians emerging who seem allergic to ideas. Leaders like Mmusi Maimane and Herman Mashaba have built their post-DA reputations by suggesting South Africans no longer care about ideology.

By their estimation people in SA only care about practical outcomes such as having water running out of their taps and food in their stomachs. Both kinds of politician seem increasingly removed from the experiences of many people — the material conditions of their lives produce ideas that take hold of and transform society.

The rise of Afrophobia, ethnonationalism and distorted nationalism that manifest as attacks on particular foreign nationals has formed a wave of ideologies that grow void of a battle of ideas because the ideologues are dismissive and the post-idea politicians overlook the weight of the ideas for the expedience of political point scoring.

While the ideologues and the post-ideas politicians fight, the battle of ideas suffers. The space for a battle of ideas in SA is closing. It is being squeezed between a growing number of voices who have no use for ideas and an even larger rise in insular echo chambers of people only willing to engage in debate with those they already agree with. Instead of creating healthy environments for the bona fide contestation of ideas in public spaces, we limit contestation of ideas to private spaces with limited audiences of like-minded people.

Our public contestations are reduced to discrediting those we disagree with rather than challenging their ideas. The state of SA’s battle of ideas is comparable to a mixture of TikTok and Twitter politics.

A person on TikTok is seduced by the comfort and familiarity of a platform that is designed to learn what already know and repeat it in loops with slight variations.

TikTok politics is no different. Political parties and even civil society in SA are unwittingly curating worlds of information where they only engage with ideas they know and agree with, one seemingly unique and varied engagement at a time.

Like TikTok users they feel busy and occupied but are rarely accessing enough new information to challenge their own perspectives or equip them to change the perspectives of those they disagree with. Twitter politics takes echo chambering to new heights.

We cannot even share virtual space with people we disagree with, never mind confront their ideas. We declare certain people and views unworthy of debate while failing to realise that our avoidance does not eliminate the impact of their ideas, regardless of how defective those ideas are. We have become a country of right-fighters. Fighting more to be right than for what is right.

In fact, once a person holds a disagreeable view, we make no efforts to convince them. We further reject them even if they come to share our view. Our commitment to being right far outweighs our desire for a better society. Avoiding disagreement and dissent is not how strong democracies are built. Democracies thrive on more ideas, debate and disagreement provided the goal on all sides is progress.

It was Hegel who posited that new and better ideas result from being open to the emergence of an anti-thesis. Ideas that unsettle the status quo, challenge what we think is true and nudge us all toward a synthesis of divergent ideas that respond best to immediate challenges. A renewed commitment to a true battle of ideas requires courage over comfort and a pursuit of productivity over performative political contestation.