Ian on Sunday
Why should flesh and blood men and women, with feet of clay like anyone else, presume to think for us and act for us and push us around and mollycoddle us and punish and reward us as if they were inherently superior beings?
It has been an honour to have contributed a regular column to Sunday Stabroek for twenty years. It has been an interesting challenge and a pleasant occupation.A special concern has run through these pieces. I have wanted to place the joys and cares, the sorrows and delights, of Guyanese in a wider context than Guyana. In Guyana I think we stifle our lives too much in local worries. Guyana, for instance, is caught in the same trap as scores of other poor and vulnerable countries. Struggling in this trap, we are certainly not uniquely wounded. We should try to see ourselves in a universal context. It has happened before, and it will happen again, that men suffer from the pains of maladministration and the frustrations of bureaucracy. It is true elsewhere and in other times that people lie and cheat and scavenge for money and that others are brave and open-hearted and talented. Love and hate exist beyond the seawall. Tears are salt the world over. In other lands brightness also falls from the air.
I have a suspicion that people like to have writers they read confine their work to a particular subject. But I have not been a columnist of anything in particular – not economics, not sport, not business, not religion, not social commentary, not literature nor art nor drama, not international affairs. And not politics, though how men govern and misgovern other men must always be a topic of interest.
When one thinks about it, the concept of ‘government’ is a strange one, for it assumes as its fundamental premise that certain men and women – human like you and me – can and should be allowed to take upon themselves the right (duty?) to direct the rest of us what to do, presumably for our own good. On the face of it that is a very unreasonable premise and a remarkably arrogant presumption.
Why should flesh and blood men and women, with feet of clay like anyone else, presume to think for us and act for us and push us around and mollycoddle us and punish and reward us as if they were inherently superior beings? It doesn’t make sense does it? Yet unless there is government with strong executive power the lives of men in general soon become, as Thomas Hobbes pointed out long ago, “Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The fear of anarchy is deeply ingrained in every society. All countries from time to time experience events which heighten their people’s yearning for stability at any cost. In our own case the civil war of the early 1960s, out of which independent Guyana was born, had I believe a far more profound and longer-lasting traumatic effect than is generally realized. It seems to me, then, that the following passage from Nadezda Mandelstam’s great book Hope Against Hope has a deep relevance for countries, including ours, that have known bitter turmoil.
“There has been a time when, terrified of chaos, we had all prayed for a strong system, for a powerful hand that would stem the angry human river overflowing its banks. This fear of chaos is perhaps the most permanent of our feelings – we have still not recovered from it, and it is passed on from one generation to another.
There is not one of us – either among the old who saw the Revolution or the young and innocent – who does not believe that he would be the first victim if ever the mob got out of hand. ‘We should be the first to be hanged from a lamp-post’ – whenever I hear this constantly repeated phrase, I remember Herzen’s words about the intelligentsia which so much fears its own people that it prefers to go in chains itself, provided the people, too, remain fettered.”
How do men sail safely between the Scylla of limitless dictation and the Charybdis of back to the jungle anarchy? It is a riddle that mankind has spent thousands of years trying to solve. It is a riddle that from time to time needs to be addressed.
However, I do not feel compelled to write much about politics or government. There is a good poem by Louis MacNeice called a ‘A Fanfare for the Makers.’ These lines from that poem sum up a little of what I like to write about:
A cloud of witnesses. To whom? To what?
To the small fire that never leaves the sky.
To the great fire that boils the daily pot.
To all the things we are not remembered by,
Which we remember and bless. To all the things
That will not even notice when we die.
Yet lend the passing moment words and wings.
