'Follow the evidence', Grissom said, 'follow the evidence'

Three seemingly divergent articles found their ways on to my screen within the last 24 hours. I’m not sure if some supernatural puppeteer planned it that way or whether my innate penchant for irony simply sees connections where there aren’t really any.

The first was Time‘s Friday 13 article by John Cloud, “Is Genius Born or Can It Be Learned?” (sic – I detest the American media’s infatuation with capping almost every word in a headline) which, typically, concludes with one butt cheek neatly balanced either side of the nature-vs-nurture fence. For the record, I believe “genius” as we commonly understand the word, is something people are born with, but it is refined over time and experience, both by happy accident (as with Alexander Fleming and the discovery of penicillin) or hard work (as with Thomas Edison). But that’s just me …

The second was in Friday 20th’s online edition of Business Day. Being in the USA for the next few months, I depend exclusively on the web for SA news — mainly because the US media just don’t see South Africa as newsworthy enough to devote attention to. The article was by Thought Leader blogger and spin-doctor-at-large for SA’s International Marketing Council, Simon Barber, on US-based monitoring agency, Global Integrity’s latest report on corruption in SA. GI ranks us better than does Transparency International, and that’s clearly worth commenting on in an election year amid the economic crunch and ahead of the 2010 Soccer World Cup.

And the third was an email from a new friend who is an analyst at the Pentagon (as portrayed by Ben Affleck in The Sum Of All Fears) asking, quite seriously, why high-profile ANC members seem drawn to dodgy dealings like moths to flames. Though he was specifically referring to Carl Niehaus, his question was against the shady backdrop of Jacob Zuma, Jackie Selebi, Allan Boesak (now no longer ANC) and Tony Yengeni.

Can you see why my irony gene perked up?

Of course. If a positive trait such as genius may be inborn, may be genetically hot-wired into certain humans, could a predisposition to negative traits such as corruption also be built into the psyches of certain “types”?

Whoa! This is getting precariously close to racial stereotyping.

Or is it? Niehaus is a white ou, isn’t he? Besides look at all the other melanin-challenged miscreants whose moral wonkiness has led to antisocial deviance? Names such as John Stanton, Brett Kebble, Bernie Madoff and Nick Leason come to mind — irrespective of innocence or otherwise. I refuse to believe that race or ethnicity or nationality or tribe have anything whatsoever to do with criminal tendencies.

Then what could account for the fact that an unhealthy disrespect for social and legal taboos seems almost exclusively the pasture of high-ranking members of the ANC? Our headlines aren’t dominated by leaders of other parties taking their places in the dock with the same level of ritualistic alacrity. That does not mean they don’t exist in other party political folds. But there is a rather smelly synonymity between the ruling party and shady dealings. You can almost hear Jack Nicholson’s character in The Departed, Frank Costello, whispering about “rats, dirty, fucking rats” in the background, can’t you?

Well then, returning to Time‘s article — is corruption a “learnt behaviour”, as the psychologists would say? In this case another Frank Costello quote may be more telling. At the beginning of the movie he muses: “I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.” It resonates of mixing with the wrong crowd. Personally, I think there’s more to this than meets the eye when probing those who would control our destinies.

The ANC’s scandalous track record of spectacular disregard for even their own rules speaks volumes about the party’s inherently flawed attitude towards power and the kaleidoscopic miscellany of grime and crime it seems to attract. From ignoring laws requiring drivers to have licences to outright fraud, the party and its members seem to leap eyes wide shut into the malodorous wet stuff at every opportunity. It has frequently been noted that corruption is never merely the physical act of accepting payment for favour. That’s what the law prosecutes.

Corruption is an attitude that permits the powerful to exploit whatever power they have over others for personal benefit. In that sense, the ANC and its retinue of dubious deputies and oddball groupies is rotten to the core. And this is the point at which research projects such as those by Global Integrity and Transparency International putt short of the hole. Since they are circumscribed principally by measurable boundaries, they cannot quantify qualities — especially such perennially indefinable ones as moral behaviour.

The debate around nature or nurture remains wide open and fraught with anomalies and contradictions. Undoubtedly, both play greater and lesser roles. My own experience suggests that peer pressure and who you hang out with definitely does shape character. Scientific studies from Carl Gustav Jung through Stanley Milgram to Philip Zimbardo support this view.

Research studies, irrespective of methodology, are merely indicators of perception prevailing at a particular time and within a particular group of subjects. They are immensely useful, but nothing more than that. They also make great news stories because they are invariably, by their very nature, controversial.

And analysts have a similar job — to ask uncomfortable questions. Through asking enough questions, mining and interrogating the resultant data, again and again, they can better refine their conclusions. And better advise their employers or clients — hopefully.

At least you and I have a greater choice over who we believe. And we can readily change our minds if we think we’ve made the wrong choice. It cannot rule our lives. Ask most Zimbabweans.