The Virtue of Simplicity

 

The Virtue of Simplicity

Peter Schultz

 

                  Adam Hochschild has written an excellent book, King Leopold’s Ghost, which has one flaw. He wants to blame what happened in the Congo under King Leopold of Belgium on a particular kind of politics. At one point, he says “The Congo offers a striking example of the politics of forgetting. Leopold … went to extraordinary lengths to try to erase potentially incriminating evidence for the historical record.” [p. 294] At another point, he wrote that “One reason I wrote this book was to show how profoundly European colonialism has shaped the world we live in.” [318]

 

                  Hochschild is aware he is simplifying history: “it is wrong to blame the problems of today’s Africa entirely on colonialism.” [318] Other phenomena have been important, for example, the status of women, “the deep-seated cultural tolerance and even hero-worship of strongmen like Mobutu,” as well as “the long history of indigenous slavery [that’s] still deeply and disastrously woven into the African social fabric.” [318]

 

                  But while Hochschild criticizes simplicity, it may be that more simplicity, not less, would be illuminating. It is not particular kinds of politics, either a politics of forgetting or the politics of colonialism, that are to blame. Rather, it is politics simply. Focusing on particular kinds of politics as root causes of inhuman consequences in Africa obscures or “disappears” the political itself as the root cause. And just as it is incorrect to think that any particular kind of politics has caused Africa’s problems, so too it is incorrect to think that there is a particular kind of politics that can solve those problems. The political is inseparable from imperialism, slavery, and war, which is reflected by the facts that “The rebel militias, the Congo’s African neighbors, and many of their corporate allies have little interest in ending the country’s Balkanization.” [317] Nor should we be surprised insofar as “For western Europe to move from the Holy Roman Empire … to its current patchwork of nations took centuries of bloodshed, including the Thirty Years War, whose anarchic multisidedness and array of plundering outsiders remind one of the Congo today.” [318] Centuries of bloodshed which, of course, continue today and not only in the Congo or in Africa but that occur among the “current patchwork of nations” world-wide.

 

                  That we readily speak of “political problems” does not mean that we should assume there are “political solutions” for those problems, any more than because we speak of “moral problems” we should assume there are “moral solutions.” Centuries of bloodshed should alert us to the naivete of such thinking.