Ian McDonald
WE ARE fortunate in Guyana that even in the worst times, though there were horrible individual atrocities, the full ruthlessness of power was never exercised wholesale. Then when Desmond Hoyte took office authority was increasingly opened to questioning and counter-views. And since then in our renewed democracy there is more ample scope for differences of opinion, variety of expression, and alternative approaches than in most countries anyone could expect to find - at least where the pressures of poverty and multi-ethnicity are such complicating factors.
Any government, as it settles into long term power, as it becomes accustomed to exercising authority and increasingly enjoys the feel of doing so, is subject to becoming more and more impatient over any questioning of that authority. A tendency to believe and declare "We know best" is likely to become more pronounced. It is a tendency which must be firmly resisted, not only by anyone with an independent mind but also by the government itself which in the end has much to lose by the stifling of contrary opinion.
There are great advantages in cooperating with power: to consent is to survive. Authority can summon up such a weight of inside knowledge, massed expertise, and accepted tradition that it readily overcomes doubt and intimidates difference - without even having to resort, for instance, to force or the threat of force.
These thoughts are prompted by two dramatic re-enactments of extraordinary historical events which I will now recall.
Thomas Keneally's book Schindler's List, is better, I think, than Steven Spielberg's film. Here is the story. Oskar Schindler was a German who loved the good life and who eagerly profited through the relationship which he cultivated with the Nazis. In other words he was as fallible and as ignoble as most of us are. Yet, somehow, who knows why, the fire of doubt was kindled in him and, at great risk, he became the saviour of 1,200 Jews who would otherwise have gone to their deaths in the killing-camp of Auschwitz. What impelled him to do what he did?
PRICE PAID FOR SURVIVAL
There is also the wonderful play by Bertolt Brecht, The Life of Galileo, which I saw years ago and which a review of a recent revival in London has recalled to me. It is a play about survival and also about the price paid for survival. Galileo steals the idea of the telescope from Dutch scientists, creates a much-improved version with which he can examine the heavens and becomes able to show that the moon revolves around the earth just as the four moons of Jupiter revolve around Jupiter and Jupiter and the earth revolve around the sun. The sun, not the earth, is the centre of God's design. This is not good news for the Church whose clout this new knowledge could well diminish. Galileo is forced to recant because he is afraid of torture.
In the play Galileo is shown as no staunch genius-hero-saint but as an ordinary, weak, sensual man intimidated by the prospect of pain and quite unwilling to risk very much for his intellectual convictions.
History tells us that Galileo wrote his last great book I Discorsi in secret, fully intending to smuggle a copy out of Italy so that while he might be silenced his thinking would triumph. In Brecht's play, however, Galileo is shown secretly copying I Discorsi because having a spare copy flatters his vanity: smuggling it out came about by mere accident. In this confrontation between authority and the inquiring mind Brecht is intent on showing that authority easily triumphs.
At the end of the play one is sad to think that subversive truth is no match for the power of the authoritarian church. There never came a time when Galileo was prepared to stand up and say "Enough."
Reading about Galileo, and Schindler - two men who in their different ways opposed authority - led me into thinking again how profoundly important it is to preserve in the face of all power an inquiring mind and a sceptical spirit. Sterility grows in the indoctrinated mind. Fruitfulness flows from doubting and questioning.
Ian McDonald is a freelance writer who lives and works in Georgetown, Guyana.
