Dear Editor,
Over the last few months, the letters pages of our newspapers have bared a heated debate on the role of ideology and Dr Cheddi Jagan during our independence era. Inevitably, these accounts invoke historical claims that are hotly contested because the interlocutors refuse to acknowledge they are speaking from personal perspectives or to use Kosellek’s phrase, “space of experience”. Meaning that historical accounts are always oriented from the writer’s present to the past and simultaneously to his future. In other words, the way the past is remembered in the present is coloured by the writer’s “horizon of expectation” – the anticipation of the non-yet-known future beyond the horizon. These, expectations project a future – as was the case with Dr Jagan – that is the product of the configuration of both individual and collective experiences. “No expectations without experience; no experience without expectation”, said Kosellek.
A history of our present, in the words of Caribbean anthropologist David Scott demands then that “histories of the past ought to be interventions in the present, strategic interrogations of the present’s norms as a way of helping us to glimpse the possibilities for an alternative future.” The present debate on Dr Jagan must be elevated out of the unfortunate name-calling. We must concede that Dr Jagan’s interventions in the 1950s and 1960s were coloured by his Marxist ideology, which he felt would address the incipient ethnic cleavages and simultaneously the contradictions of colonialism in his horizon of expectation. But most importantly for us we have to ask what can we learn from his experience that can assist us to deal with our horizon of expectations in 2024. We are once again confronted with a Cold War – this time between the US and China – in which we have to chart a course that is best for our nation.
To analyse and evaluate Dr Jagan’s experience should not in any way seek to either deify or demonize him since human systems are not ergodic – where we can know all the variables so as to predict absolutely future outcomes. But our “problem space” – the threats and opportunities that confront us in our present sociohistorical conjuncture – is
unfortunately not completely different. For one, while the “us” and “them” within the old narrative is not the unified 1953 “us” versus the British, who we hoped to kick out, the divisions in our “us” still exist. But the future can be significantly different if nothing else because of the possibilities opened up with oil. I am suggesting that with the privilege of hindsight, we should recognise that while we cannot change the past we can certainly change the future. Our horizon of expectation must generate strategies that simultaneously speak to our internal and external challenges.
Fortuitously, also our problem space is different from our post-independence era in that internally, our demographics now deny any built-in ethnic majority and so open up the possibilities of a working democracy. One in which either of the two major parties can win elections by running on platforms that reach across the ethnic divides. As such a constructive narrative in our problem space cannot freeze our opposing groups locked forever in mortal combat as exemplified in some narratives that set “us” against “them” into periodic frenzies of nihilistic Fanonian violence. On the other hand, we cannot teleologically promise futures that can never be delivered through utopian theories.
Externally, while the geopolitical system in moving from unipolarity to multipolarity we must consider the implications of our actions within the premises of the Monroe Doctrine that still motivates the US. We cannot equate our personal morality based on our notions of “good and bad” with the morality of states in which their interests are always paramount: There are no permanent friends or enemies – simply permanent interests.
What then should be our “horizon of expectation”? Criticism is always strategic. What is it that our interlocutors in the Jagan debate want as a consequence of their 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, one would hope that there is some consensus that with the simultaneous threat from Venezuela and the economic and strategic interests of the US, we cannot afford to antagonise the latter as we pursue our strategic interest to create a more prosperous, equitable and harmonious society.
Sincerely,
Ravi Dev
