SPEECH AT THE NATIONAL ANTI-CORRUPTION SUMMIT
Cape Town, 14 April 1999
Chairperson
Distinguished delegates
Sometime during the 1960's, an English judge sat in his court to decide
the complex question whether it was possible to corrupt a corrupt person.
The hearing was occasioned by the fact, uncontested in the case, that a
vendor of pornographic material had sold such literature to a young man who
had not yet reached the legally defined age of maturity.
The law having defined pornographic material as corrupt, it further
prescribed that it was illegal to sell this material to minors because this
would result in corrupting the young.
The shop-keeper argued that it was clear to him that by the time the
young man visited his shop, he was already familiar with pornography and was
therefore, and in the meaning of the law, already corrupt.
Hence the question - can you corrupt a corrupt person!
The judge found the vendor guilty. Nevertheless because of the
complexity of the question, he ruled that his own finding should be reviewed
by a superior court.
He had found that the law had been broken, but was uncertain as to
whether the social morality of the English generations of the 1960's had
been violated.
If we follow the English judge, as I believe we should, we too should
make the determiantion that the issue of corruption about which we have
convened, is about two distinct matters, one being the matter of the law and
the other being a matter of social morality.
Between these two, clearly what must come first is the matter of social
morality.
This would suggest that we who are gathered here are faced with the
challenge to draw up a moral schedule of rights and wrongs.
This done, we could then proceed to agree on what we need to do to
prevent and punish what is morally wrong and to encourage and reward all
that is morally right.
Obviously none of us would agree to proceed in this manner as though we
were a judicial court of ethics.
Nevertheless we are still called upon to make a judgement about what is
right and wrong about our behaviour as a society.
We will still need to make an attempt to understand what it is that
happened during the course of the evolution of our society which created the
conditions for such behaviour as we might consider morally unacceptable.
Having taken these two steps, clearly, we will have to make an attempt
to answer the question -what is to be done!
If the religious leaders present among us will pardon me, I would like
to cite a number of verses from the King James Version of the Biblical Book
of Ecclesiastes in the effort to answer the question - what went wrong?
"I sought in mine heart to give myself unto wine, yet acquainted
mine heart with wisdom;
"I made me great works; I builded me houses; I planted me vineyards;
"I made me gardens and orchards, and I planted trees in them of all
kind of fruits;
"I got me servants and maidens, and had servants born in my house;
also I had great possessions of great and small cattle above all that were
in Jerusalem before me;
"I gathered me also silver and gold, and the peculiar treasure of
kings and of the provinces; I gat me men singers and women singers, and the
delights of the sons of men, as musical instruments, and that of all sorts.
"So I was great, and increased more than all that were before me in
Jerusalem: also my wisdom remained with me.
"And whatsoever mine eyes desired I kept not from them, I withheld
not my heart from any joy; for my heart rejoiced in all my labour."
Obviously, this text gives a vivid description of a very successful
resident of Jerusalem who, through his labour, has all the material things
that anyone of us would like to have - from wine to silver and gold, from
an army of servants to in-house musicians, from an abundance of food to what
is described as "the delights of the sons of men".
And yet the text goes on:
"Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on
the labour that I had laboured to do: and, behold, all was vanity and
vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun."
It seems to me that this text correctly raises what is perhaps at the
heart of the problem of corruption which we have to confront, the
relationship within each human being and each society between the material
and the spiritual.
All philosophy recognises the fact that what distinguishes us, human
beings, from other forms of animal existence is that we have both material
and spiritual needs.
Thus the normal human beings we would like to see and to be are people
who succeed to maintain the necessary balance between these needs, between
what is materially necessary and what is morally good.
This is to say that the exclusive pursuit of one of these, ignoring the
other, is to invite disaster.
And yet it would seem to me that many in our society are inspired by a
system of values which begins and ends with the pursuit of what is
materially beneficial to themselves, with no sense of what is morally
correct.
In many instances, our society itself describes as successful and people
to be emulated those who are like the resident of Jerusalem described in
Ecclesiastes, who have accumulated more wealth than any other who ever lived
in that city.
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