Cover art of the novel, Cry, The Beloved Country
As a teenager, I once walked a hedgerow with a 16-gauge shotgun, frustrated because I hadn’t seen any quail. A songbird alighted among the hedge apples at that moment and sang to me.
My response was to raise the barrel of my weapon and blast a fusillade of pellets toward the little bird, which vanished except for a tiny feather that floated to the ground. I was never an enthusiastic hunter. My embarrassing performance that afternoon further reduced my desire.
Such behavior reminds me of people who destroy institutions and traditions just for the thrill of witnessing destruction. They don’t aspire to see something better rise in their place. It’s enough for them to lay waste.
Sometimes those destroyers are—or consider themselves to be—precursors of revolution. They blast apart and obliterate the here-and-now for the sake of a new tomorrow. Idealists, they claim to be. Beware of idealists.
Alan Paton spoke of this arrogant mindset in his 1948 novel about his native South Africa. Entitled Cry, The Beloved Country, the book was about “apartheid,” a word that may be the nation’s major contribution to contemporary language. Paton, of course, was against it, as was anyone of reasonable constitution.
In his story, Paton explained that the strict segregationist policy was an (obviously inept) attempt to push the country into a modern economic era. Good intentions running roughshod over people. Here’s an excerpt from the novel…
“It was permissible to allow the destruction of a tribal system that impeded the growth of the country. It was permissible to believe that its destruction was inevitable. But it is not permissible to watch its destruction, and to replace it by nothing, or by so little that a whole people deteriorates, physically and morally.
“The old tribal system was, for all its violence and savagery, for all its superstition and witchcraft, a moral system. Our natives today produce criminals and prostitutes and drunkards, not because it is their nature to do so, but because their simple system was destroyed by the impact of our own civilization. Our civilization has therefore an inescapable duty to set up another system of order and tradition and convention.”
Though South Africa has ash-canned apartheid, the nation still is in recovery from it. It was a dreadful clash of civilizations—not unlike this country’s pushback with native Americans, I suppose. In both cases, destructive policies were couched in constructive terms—defending, securing, advancing—that trivialized the upending of lives and moral systems.
Today’s politico-social revolution isn’t a civilizational clash, in any event. It’s a nihilistic attempt to erase what Paton might have termed America’s “system of order and tradition and convention” without thought of what will fill the void. It’s a selfish binge of societal hatred.
Most wannabe revolutionaries are intrinsically selfish. They marinate a cause in their feverish minds till it seems irresistibly righteous. They assume that everyone will find it equally appealing. When many instead find it appalling, they blast away in frustration, leaving feathers floating. Beware of revolutionaries.