Hail the Nobel Laureates - apostles of human curiosity!

Over the last few weeks, all humanity has united to celebrate the individuals and institutions awarded Nobel Prizes for various achievements, covering important areas of human endeavour. We too have been privileged to have the possibility to salute those who were selected as recipients of these prestigious awards.

For all of us during this age of the information society, time and circumstance dictate that we must, at each moment, absorb, reflect and act on the immediate. Modern information and communication technologies facilitate this by feeding us with new news with every passing minute. This is dramatically represented by the category of news beloved of the global television networks, described as "Breaking News".

Thus objective reality defines news as being old or "stale" by what is communicated during the next edition of "News on the Hour". In these conditions, considered reflection of what the news means and portends for our future becomes difficult.

The flood of new news communicates the message that known reality is changing too rapidly to allow for the possibility intellectually to freeze the movement even of past time, space and actuality, to create the epistemological space for us to draw meaningful conclusions from the totality of what has been, and thus enable us, to the best of our ability, to foretell what will be.

The modern conveyance of actuality provides all of us with the possibility both to know and be unknowing. It creates the quantitative possibility to access an immense volume of current facts and thus, simultaneously, qualitatively become blinded to the contextual reality and fundamental meaning of the facts by the richness and variety of the factual data - to see the trees very clearly, and altogether miss the forest.

This creates the situation akin to what William Shakespeare sought to convey when he wrote in "Twelfth Night":

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.

Thus do we embrace the daily surfeit of the supposed music of facts, treating it as the necessary food of knowledge and consciousness that defines our humanness, which, because of that, leads us to demand more facts.

In the end, surfeiting, the appetite for more facts will indeed sicken and so die. With the death of the virtually pathological desire to know all the most immediately available facts will also perish the human thirst to understand objective reality, which, ineluctably, cannot but be based on the facts that reach us daily. With regard to politics and other spheres of human endeavour, this would signify the death of principle and the triumph of pragmatism.

Fortunately, all communities throughout the world, consistent with the vision that inspires the Norwegian and Swedish Nobel Committees, have accepted the need for them to celebrate such outstanding performance and achievements as their compatriots and others might realise.

For this same reason, all countries have instituted formal processes, entailing the conferment of awards, to recognise and acclaim such excellence in various areas of human activity as any of their citizens might demonstrate.

As technological and other developments have narrowed the distances among nations, countries and continents, this has also led to the conferment of international awards, including the Nobel Prizes, confirming the universality of the human condition and experience, and the interdependence of the human family.

Fundamental to what the honourees do to merit such awards, whether national or international, is, as we have said, the intellectual freezing of the movement of past time, space and actuality, to create the epistemological space that enables humanity to draw meaningful conclusions from what has been.

Without this it would be impossible to measure the progress in human endeavour that all award systems seek to celebrate. Distinguished people are given awards for what they achieved in the past, regardless of what the present and the future may disclose.

Substantively, this also means that all those concerned - the adjudication committees, the recipients of the awards, and the people - must be able to stand still and insulate themselves from the plethora of the daily facts they absorb, which communicate the message that everything is relative, and nothing is definite, and therefore that only what will be, and not what has been, is worthy of celebration.

About three weeks before the Nobel prizes were announced, we held our own biannual national awards ceremony, to honour 24 eminent South Africans and foreigners. These included two South African Nobel Laureates. These are the chemist, Aaron Klug, and the novelist, JM Coetzee, both of whom are now Esteemed Members of the Order of Mapungubwe, which celebrates true excellence.

An Associated Press report, published when he won the Nobel Prize, said that Aaron Klug had been described as a "biological map maker", a Magellan "charting the infinitely complex structures of the body's largest molecules", the "geographer of molecular biology".

In his Nobel acceptance speech, Aaron Klug said: "There should always be left room for apparently unguided research on problems that seem to have no practical application to the time. One cannot plan for the unexpected. Human curiosity, the urge to know, is a powerful force and is perhaps the best secret weapon of all in the struggle to unravel the workings of the natural world."

The statement issued by the Nobel Committee announcing its award to JM Coetzee, said: "Passivity (as represented by Coetzee's characters), is not merely the dark haze that devours personality, it is also the last resort open to human beings as they defy an oppressive order by rendering themselves inaccessible to its intentions. It is in exploring weakness and defeat that Coetzee captures the divine spark in man."

Thus does JM Coetzee open our eyes to understand that seemingly passive surrender to oppression can in fact be a dynamic act of rebellion against injustice. As South Africans we know enough about what happened in the past in our country to know that thus does JMCoetzee bare to us important elements of the soul of our nation.

Because of what he has done to help liberate our minds, we cannot plead that the state of unknowing has made it impossible for us to recognise the meaning of the signs and symptoms, should anyone among our people respond to the democratic order by adopting a stance of passivity to change, to render themselves inaccessible to the intentions of the democratic, non-racial and non-sexist project.

In his very brief but poignant Nobel acceptance speech, affirming the relevance of original thought to the ordinary people, JM Coetzee asked: "And for whom, anyway, do we do the things that lead to Nobel Prizes if not for our mothers?...Why must our mothers be ninety-nine and long in the grave before we can come running home with the prize that will make up for the trouble we have been to them?"

Among the winners of the 2005 Nobel Prizes, and thus companions to Aaron Klug and JM Coetzee, we find the names of the English playwright, Harold Pinter, and the Australian medical scientists, Robin Warren and Barry Marshall.

We do not know whether these Nobel Laureates asked themselves the question that JM Coetzee posed - and for whom, anyway, do we do the things that lead to Nobel Prizes if not for our mothers? Neither do we know whether, like Aaron Klug, they have spoken out in defence of human curiosity and the urge to know, promoting these as the best secret weapon in the struggle to unravel the workings of the natural and social worlds, not destabilised by the cacophony of daily events.

What we know is that what they have done, which has now been rightly celebrated by the Nobel Committees, has expanded the epistemological space that empowers all humanity to draw meaningful conclusions from what has been, and thus enhance its collective possibility to foretell what will be.

Harold Pinter occupies a special place in our hearts as a militant and principled fighter for our liberation from racist apartheid tyranny. The sustained engagement in our struggle of this outstanding creative mind of the 20th century reassured us that to know could only mean that our victory over apartheid racism was certain, regardless of the then daily facts to which our people and the world might have been exposed, encouraging despondency.

Merely by surveying the list of the 143 outstanding creative minds who joined Harold Pinter in signing the 1964 petition submitted to the United Nations, demanding the release of the Rivonia Trialists, we drew the unequivocal conclusion that the racist tyrants would not prevail for much longer.

Indeed, what other conclusion could one reach after reading a petition jointly signed by such human giants as Harold Pinter, WH Auden, Simone de Beauvoir, Julian Huxley, Sean O'Faolain, Doris Lessing, Satyajit Ray, Paul Robeson, Bertrand Russell, Upton Sinclair and Ilya Ehrenburg!

As students in Pinter's England of the 1960s, drawn to his creative works such as the film "The Servant", we thought we understood that Harold Pinter' s was a message of rebellion against an unacceptable old order that had to be changed - a vibrant message with which we identified, fully and passionately.

We must assume that when the Swedish Nobel Committee decided to accept Harold Pinter as a Nobel Laureate, it sought to communicate the message that doubt about established truths, and acceptance of Aaron Klug's plea about "human curiosity, the urge to know", must necessarily mark the beginning of the birth of a new and better world.

In a programme note for a production at the Royal Court theatre in 1960, Harold Pinter expressed this sentiment in the following words: "The desire for verification is understandable, but cannot always be satisfied. There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false." During times of rapid change, the instances will increase when 'one man's meat is another man's poison'!

But for us, who have known Harold Pinter as a steadfast fighter against apartheid and racism over many decades, we understand that his words about the dialectical relationship between the real and unreal are but the summation of human experience which teaches that change is the only constant in the evolution of human society. In this context and quite correctly, one of his biographers described him as "a permanent public nuisance, a questioner of accepted truths, both in life and art".

The 2005 Nobel Prize Winners for Medicine, Robin Warren and Barry Marshall, were forced to re-learn the message that to be a questioner of accepted truths, was to expose oneself to denunciation as a permanent public nuisance. Their own curiosity, expressive of the human urge to know, led them to engage in a labour of love to unravel the workings of the natural world.

As long ago as 1982, their efforts enabled them to prove that peptic ulcer was caused by a bacterial infection (the bacterium Helicobacter pylori). This contradicted the established "truth" that this medical condition was caused mainly by stress and lifestyle. Professor Terry Bolin described the Warren-Marshall discovery as "the most revolutionary discovery in gastroenterology in the last quarter of a century".

It was only in 1994, 12 years after the Warren-Marshall discovery, that the globally eminent US National Institutes of Health accepted the bacterial causation of ulcer and recommended that patients infected by H. pylori should be treated with antibiotics. Two years later, in 1996, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the first antibiotic for the treatment of ulcer.

The Nobel Prize only came 23 years later - perhaps long after it was possible for the children of ninety-nine years old mothers to come running home with the prize that would make up for the trouble the now famous offspring had been to their mothers!

In an Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) interview broadcast on 4 October 2005, Warren, Marshall and other Australian scientists explained some of the obstacles to the speedy acceptance of the new life-saving knowledge they had created.

The ABC broadcast reported that at the time of the Warren-Marshall discovery, the major pharmaceutical companies had introduced acid reducing drugs into the global market, which did nothing to cure ulcer. However, Marshall and Warren showed that a simple course of antibiotics could cure up to 90 percent of these ulcers.

Barry Marshall said: "A pharmaceutical company wants to sell you a drug that you take every day for the rest of your life, a cholesterol drug, a diabetes drug, they are great sellers. If they sell you a drug which cures you, you only need to take it once or for one week. So how can you make it generate as much profit?" Robin Warren agreed that, "the drugs went out of business because we stopped the bacteria, so they weren't needed anymore."

To win the struggle for the victory of life-giving scientific truth over the powerful combination of the force of inertia and the pursuit of profit, Warren and Marshall went so far as to infect themselves with the H. pylori bacterium, and curing themselves with antibiotics. The desperate global resistance to the truth required bold measures to ensure the acceptance of new knowledge that had served to "unravel the workings of the natural world".

We salute and celebrate the Nobel Laureates because of what they have done to help all humanity the better to understand the social and natural worlds, and thus enhance humanity's freedom from necessity. What revolutionary thought and action do to deepen human understanding and improve the human condition was acclaimed by the British poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, in his famous poem, "Ode to the West Wind." Using the "wild west wind" to symbolise revolutionary thought and action, he wrote:

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,.
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

We are confronted by the strategic transformation challenge to build a non-racial, non-sexist and prosperous South Africa. To achieve this goal requires that, among other things, we emulate and draw inspiration from the Nobel Laureates, to create the new ideas that might question accepted truths, but without which it would not be possible to change our world.

Like Shelley, we must continuously appeal to the West Wind, to:

Drive (our) dead thoughts over the universe
Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth!

Media in a democratic South Africa faces new challenges

As the country marks Media Freedom Day on 19 October, commemorating the banning in 1977 of The World and Weekend World by the apartheid government, it is faced with the challenge of building a robust, free and diverse media at a time when the market, not the state, is posing the greatest threat to media freedom.

Thanks to the struggles of the many journalists and media workers who stood up to the apartheid government, and to those many South Africans who understood a free media to be an integral part of a new democratic society, no newspaper today need worry that it might share the same fate as The World and Weekend World.

The constitution guarantees the right of every South African to freedom of expression, which explicitly includes the freedom of the press and other media. As democratic institutions have been built and democratic practice deepened, this principle has informed the legal position of the media. The dark days of state censorship, bannings, harassment and imprisonment have been emphatically and unequivocally consigned to the past.

Yet for all the achievements of the past decade, the struggle for a free media continues. While it may have been freed from the shackles of apartheid control, the media in South Africa still faces an uphill struggle in achieving any real measure of diversity.

The ability of the media to collectively represent the broad range of views and interests present in society is limited by, among other things, the pressure of the market. While all South Africans have the right to freedom of expression, the capacity of the vast majority to exercise that right through the media is extremely limited.

While this problem is most pronounced in the print media, it also affects broadcast media. Because the broadcast media consists of a mix of commercial and public stations, the collective impact of the market on this sector is lessened.

The public broadcaster - the SABC - is the single most significant operator in television and radio. While it operates independently of government, it is required by law to fulfil a public service mandate. Among other things, this means that it is obliged to reflect in its news and programming a diverse range of views and interests. It is also expected to represent the diversity of cultures, languages and values of South African society. Over the past decade it has managed to do so with varying degrees of success. The fulfilment of its public service mandate, and particularly its ability to give voice to a wide range of ordinary South Africans, will remain an ongoing challenge.

Another important feature of the broadcasting sector is the existence of a large number of community radio stations, catering to a wide variety of communities. While facing challenges of capacity, resources and sustainability, these stations do provide an alternative to the purely commercial stations, and give voice to a broader spectrum of people.

By contrast, the print media sector is almost entirely commercial. This poses significant challenges for the principle of freedom of expression, particularly in the context of the economic inequalities present in South African society.

Though often not acknowledged in public discourse on media freedom, diversity is as much an integral component of a free media as is the absence of state censorship and control. It is meaningless to free the media from control by the state only to have it overwhelmingly controlled by some other social force. The only difference is that the state, at least in South Africa, has a democratic mandate.

The objective then is to ensure that the media in collective terms is owned and controlled by the broad range of interests and forces that comprise society. The more diverse the media, the greater its capacity to provide space for all South Africans to exercise their constitutional right to freedom of expression.

But there are a number of factors that pose significant challenges to the achievement of this objective. One of these is concentration of ownership in the print media. While there are a wide range of newspaper and magazine titles produced in the country, many of these are owned or controlled by just a few companies. The three largest media groups together account for over 90% of the total number of newspapers sold each week.

This concentration of ownership and control is then aggravated by a tendency within many of these groups to share copy between different titles. Add to this the reliance by many newspapers on wire services like the South African Press Association (SAPA), and there is very little, in terms of news content, to tell the country's main newspapers apart.

Another factor militating against diversity in the press is the commercial nature of this sector. Driven by a need to gain market share in those sections of society to whom advertisers are more readily drawn, newspapers are under pressure to shape their content to meet a particular commercial goal.

While editors may profess their independence - from both owners and advertisers - and their commitment first and foremost to comprehensive, accurate and fair coverage, there is significant pressure on newspapers to deliver a product that sells, and sells to the right portion of the market.

One only has to observe how some major broadsheet dailies have changed their front pages over the last few years to compete with the growth of the tabloids to get a sense of the role of commercial concerns in determining what is news and how it should be packaged.

In a country with such great disparities of wealth and income, there is relentless pressure on the commercial media to gain a share of the more affluent section of the market. Few newspapers seek out a readership among the poor, because there is very little advertising revenue to be had there. And those newspapers who target the more affluent sections of society tend to reflect the views and interests of those sections. Consequently, across the whole range of newspaper titles, there are very few newspapers that reflect the interests, needs and views of the poor.

It is one of the greatest ironies of South Africa's democratic transition that the achievement of media freedom was accompanied by the disappearance of those newspapers that had been most vocal in its defence. The closure of alternative titles like the Vrye Weekblad, New Nation, New African and others contributed to a media environment less diverse, and less able to give expression to the full range of ideological, political and economic interests present in this country.

South Africa has much to celebrate on Media Freedom Day in 2005. Many of the battles of the past have been fought and successfully won. However, it is clear that many battles lie ahead if the objective of a truly robust, diverse and free media is to be achieved.

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