During the last decade-and-a-half of the PPP’s regime, there was a vigorous intellectual debate in the press from individuals who held that the Government was ignoring the views of “the other side”. Some of these intellectuals did not locate themselves within the ranks of the major opposition party – the PNC – but rather in the ranks of the latter’ constituency, the masses of African Guyanese. Some persons took umbrage at this perspective and insisted that “intellectuals” should be untethered from “ethnic” or particularistic identifications.
This view harks back to the old Platonic notion that there is some standard of social, political and even moral “good” that somehow exists outside of our particulars. This “universality” has been rejected through the millennia but it crops up every so often when some people do not concede that whatever “universal” they posit, it had to have been extended from someone’s particulars. And those universalised particulars are inevitably those of the group with power in the society.
The problematic was posed from another angle by the political philosopher, John Stuart Mill, two thousand years later in his foundational “On Liberty”:
“Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.”
The “protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion” can only come if the individuals and groups in the society, who differ with the accepted wisdom, can have their opinions enter the public sphere for discussion and debate. And this is where the public intellectuals from the various groups – as they define themselves – have to play their role of interrogating the dominant paradigm and articulating alternative answers to questions posed to the nation towards the creation of a more just society.
In Guyana, it would appear that after a long period of public denial, most persons now accept that in the realm of politics our voting cleaves, more or less, along ethnic lines. This implies, for whatever reasons, people of this country believe that their political interests are secured by particular parties that then inevitably become identified as “ethnic parties”. But it is precisely this identification and articulation of interests that scare some. They fear that such a discussion would intensify our divisions.
But there is a strong opposing view that proposes that when societies have deep divisions, there is a need for the different views to be shared in the public sphere to both “air” grievances that may spill over into dysfunctional behaviour and to perchance lead to compromise and even consensus. This practice can create what the theorist Juergen Habermas call a “deliberative” democracy.
Sadly, the actions of the public intellectuals who castigated the PPP for excluding “the other” from the power relations of the society, have now become apologists – or at best been struck silent when the same behaviour is being practiced by the incumbent APNU/AFC coalition Government. Take for instance the seemingly compulsive action of the government to interfere with the workings of constitutional bodies that were established specifically to curb Executive excesses. Very few of the formerly vociferous critics of the former government have condemned such actions.
What this does is reinforce the perceptions of partisanship by public intellectuals in the minds of the public and regarding the possibilities of us developing a “deliberative democracy” that can transcend our ethnic divisions.
