Hissy fit over artwork shows SA is still in the Dark Ages

It’s been a great week for science.

We had a joint breakthrough by Harvard and MIT scientists in Massachusetts, using a new form of CRISPR gene editing, bringing us one step closer to being able to eliminate genetic abnormalities in humans through precise targeted editing. In California, Google’s Sycamore quantum computer officially laid claim to quantum supremacy, performing calculations which no existing supercomputer could do.

Meanwhile, researchers from the University of Cambridge announced they’ve created an artificial leaf, which safely converts sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water into an alternative fuel source consisting of hydrogen and carbon monoxide.

The world is truly moving forward at a mind-boggling pace. Not SA, though.

Nope. None of that futuristic stuff for us!

Just give us a deputy president whose most recent parliamentary appearance exposed that he has no idea whether our country has reached the Second Industrial Revolution (industrialisation and mass production) or if we’ve managed to move into the third (digitisation and the technology age).

Kudos to us for inspiring our kids by showing that even a total dunce can ascend to the second highest office in the country.

But it wasn’t just our political clowns making us proud. The public discourse further demonstrated just how stuck South Africans still are in the Dark Ages.

A viral video of a pastor having a hissy fit over a matric pupil’s art exhibition had the country’s religious mobs baying for blood.

The artworks, though technically well executed, were somewhat derivative of the work of artist Jani Leinonen. Both use images of Ronald McDonald as symbols to explore the commercialisation of religion and exploitation of the poor.

The pastor, of course, didn’t bother reading the rationale for the artworks, because reading is hard and even more so when you’re filled with the holy spirit of righteous indignation.

He was simply too eager to get his video out there and get people to act against a matric pupil who now has to go into his final examinations with this storm surrounding him.

Similarly outraged were those claiming that the school would not have allowed similar artwork involving the Muslim faith, basically saying that Christians weren’t violent and threatening enough in the defence of their religion, because that is a perfectly logical way to get people to love your peaceful, loving fairy-tale character.

What they all failed to understand is that neither the pupil, nor the school owed them or their religion any fealty. If they didn’t like it, they were free to simply not look at it. That is, after all, how most of us navigate the religious TV channels and billboards we often encounter.

In asking for the school to censor the student’s work, they have asked for censorship of his freedom of expression, and they have shown that they care more about criticism of religious exploitation than they do about the actual exploitation.

They have exposed their need to stifle all free thought and exceptionalism, if it doesn’t conform to their primitive belief systems, which would explain our apparent satisfaction with mediocrity in all spheres of society.

And ironically, through the pastor’s misplaced insistence that his god is not a clown, he has proven that he and his supporters definitely have some red noses and oversized shoes in their closets.

Earl Coetzee.

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