25 January 2001, 813 words
History is the most intellectually demanding of all the humanities. That is why there are so few competent historians. The superior historian must be detective, anthropologist, politician, psychologist, linguist, biologist, archaeologist, philosopher and journalist.
Unless historians are expert in one or more of these areas and reasonably knowledgeable about the others, they will always give skewed interpretations of the past and the effects of the past on the present.
This skewing often depends on where the historian's self-interest lies: if the present favours him, he will see the past through rose-coloured glasses. If it doesn't, he will interpret the past through black-coloured ones. In either case, he offers ignorance as scholarship.
In his Sunday Express column this week, Kamal Persad gave a good demonstration of such ignorance. Responding to recent comments by Hazel Brown, Selwyn Cudjoe and Selwyn Ryan had made about Indo-Trinidadians having different moral values as compared to Afro-Trinidadians, Persad said: "Indians are being stereotyped and being subjected to a most vile and vicious racial attack...That the Indians in Trinidad are quite heterogeneous, that there are Christian Indians, Muslim Indians, Indo-Saxons, etc., is not taken into account."
Either because of hypocrisy or stupidity - I never know which with these people - Persad ignores the fact that Hindu spokespersons have spared no effort in creating the public image that all 'Indians' think alike. Not only do the Hindu columnists all spout the same rhetoric, opinions, beliefs - many of which are anti-democratic, unprincipled and bigoted - but they have habitually accused those Trinindians who promote liberal, ethical views of not being "true Indians" (whatever that is).
Persad also fails to realize that Brown and Cudjoe are his true ideological siblings And, though I wouldn't rate Dr. Ryan so low, he too adopts an ethnic paradigm that is essentially the same as Persad's. Speaking of political value systems, Ryan writes in the Sunday Express of January 14, "...the current crisis...is really a long-postponed collision of visions, of epistemologies, of political cultures, indeed of worlds...
Ryan's perspective, I suspect, is influenced by Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations. Huntington's thesis is that the world's future conflicts will not be between nations, but between "civilizations", which he defines as Western, Islamic, Confucian and so on. It is not coincidental that Persad and his cohorts have all referred approvingly to this book.
Huntington has been criticized on several grounds: empirically, for overlooking the fact that the world is beset not by civilizational battles, but by petty clashes of sects within weak nation-states; and theoretically, for the way he draws cultural boundaries around very large units like "the West" or "Islam" when civilizations have nowhere replaced nation-states as the primary actors in world politics.
Ryan, buying into some version of the Huntington thesis, ends up writing: "The Afro-Creole model punishes leaders if they are politically deviant. The [Indo-creole model] tolerates them in the name of the tribe and sees virtues in their excesses."
This is nonsense. The political systems of many African nations before and after colonial rule exactly matches what Ryan describes as the "Indo-creole system". So did the political cultures of Caribbean countries after Independence and, more specifically, that of the PNM under Williams. It would be more accurate, I think, to say that the UNC is now at the stage where the PNM was in the1960s.
That Panday may be cruder in his authoritarianism, and his supporters more overtly racial in their loyalty, does not negate the fundamental similarities. And this pattern is not unique to Third World peoples, let alone Trinidad.
Steven Pinker in How the Mind Works notes that "people in all cultures feel that they are members of a group (a band, tribe, clan or nation) and feel animosity towards other groups...Jingoism is alarmingly easy to invoke, even without a scarce resource to fight over. In numerous experiments by Henri Tajfel and other social psychologists, people are divided into two groups, actually at random but ostensibly by some trivial criterion, such as whether they underestimate or overestimate the number of dots on a screen...The people in each group instantly dislike and think worse of the people in the other group, and act to withhold rewards from them even if doing so is costly to their own group."
These innate tendencies are why a modern society needs a cadre of responsible, knowledgeable elites, as well as a political system of checks and balances. But, in this place, most of our intellectuals reflect the same prejudices, limitations and sloth of the wider society. And, when the experts are incompetent, the average citizen inevitably remains ignorant: of our history, our psychology, our politics. Thus, real self-knowledge, which is essential in creating a truly civilized society, continues to elude us.
Copyright ©2001 Kevin Baldeosingh