Scorched-earth democratic South Africa: Governance utopianisms as derivatives of scientific dogma

Abstract

This article explores theorisation that identifies the locus of South Africa’s scorched-earth lived experiences in the fixation on scientific dogma and conceptual binaries as well as governance utopianisms, wherein the latter are derivatives of the former. It explores South African’s lived experiences over the past 28 years in order to demonstrate that politicians’ reverence for governance utopianism has failed to appreciate the unity of realities, facts, values, objectivities, subjectivities, permanences, fluxes and changes, which consist of complex intricacies that are not amenable to dogmatic “incontrovertibly true” sets of authoritative principles and catchy governance utopianisms, because humanity’s imagination and creative thought are experimental in nature given the diversity of spatialities and “geography differences.” From desktop-based research literature survey and theorisation, the article advances a theoretical argument that if “science is one,” and if reality is unitary, then fragmentary theories and models are creatures of humanity’s world of imperfections. Additionally, the article analyses statistical evidence drawn from Statistics South Africa (StatsSA) in order to demonstrate that the scorched-earth metaphor is real for South Africa’s 28-year democratic governance. It finds that in South Africa’s twenty-eight years of democratic experiment, lived experiences resemble scorched-earth metaphor with no silver lining in sight. Philosophically, the paper concludes that if what resides on God’s left is on humanity’s right, then the “rightness” and/or “leftness” of people consists of intractable complexities of particularity, individuality and incommunicability that have led to fragmentary science, fixation on dogma and binaries as well as politicians’ reverence for governance utopianisms, simultaneously as society’s lived experiences resemble normalised scorched-earth.