With the Commemoration of the 100th Anniversary of the Arrival of Indians as Indentureds coming up next March, I’ve been re-looking at some of what I had written about history in general and our one-sided history in particular. We can start with my agreeing with Hayden White that all historical writings are narratives with one of four types of emplotment – romance, satire, comedy, and tragedy.
Then there’s the question, “What are the uses of history?” I concluded it all has to do with the present in which we are forced to make choices every second of every day. And every choice ultimately is a moral choice. We have to begin from our Foucauldian “history of the present”, in which we interrogate intensely our “problem space” – the threats and opportunities that confront us at a sociohistorical conjuncture – that defined the context of an issue in the past.
The concept of “problem space” is from the historical theorist Reinhart Koselleck. Histories, he insists, are always written within a particular “space of experience” – the ways that the past is remembered in the present and a “horizon of expectation” – the anticipation of the non-yet-known future beyond the horizon.
In the tradition of RG Collingwood’s “Q&A” methodology, we have to engage in a rigorous practice of inquiry that demands us to formulate and present questions, assemble, evaluate, analyze, and interpret evidence, and to articulate and defend an argument based upon the relationship between the questions posed and the evidence gathered. In a word, we problematise the past.
The questions, we have to remind ourselves constantly, are from our own present and framed within our horizon of expectations. The question for us is, what choices are we trying to make TODAY (out of the cornucopia of infinite possibilities) in our present problem space and what are we trying to achieve? What traces of the past questions and answers linger in our present? And most importantly, how relevant are they in today’s problem space? It is not that some of the answers to questions posed in the past might be “wrong” but they just might be “irrelevant” in the present? It is only in this manner that exemplary history can help us deal with current problems rather than just beating up on old leaders or foes.
What then should be our “horizon of expectation”? Criticism is always strategic. What is it we want as a consequence of our criticisms, narratives, actions and exhortations? What is the “Good”? While there will never be – for the simple reason that it just cannot be – a single horizon of ends for all of us, I am pretty sure that among the various possibly competing ends that of a more harmonious society would be there in common in all formulations. With the privilege of hindsight, we should connect the past with the present in a broader narrative that is healing rather than destructive. We cannot change the past but we can certainly change the future.
Our horizon of expectation must generate strategies that speak to those normative ends rather than further dividing Guyana. So in the evaluation of our historical narratives, I would first of all ask whether the particular narrative or any narrative that seeks to connect our past to the present and envision a more positive future, fits the bill. As Nietzsche’s noted historical truth is effectively defined by fitness of purpose.
Crucial to the formulation of a constructive historical narrative would be what Hayden White labelled the “content of the form” of the narrative – particularly its plot to link past, present and future. Hegel’s famous interpretation of Antigone as the paradigmatic Greek tragedy might be particularly apt to our situation. In this narrative both “sides” are morally right: the conflict is not between good and evil but between “goods” on which each is making exclusive claim. Isn’t this the situation that our mutually exclusive narratives of victimhood with its facile binary oppositions have delivered us into?
Such an emplotment within a narrative, I am suggesting, should suggest compromise rather than a battle of one side overcoming. That would be a constructive narrative for our time, place and circumstances.
