Prologue

WHEN the noted French philosopher Rene Descartes declared "I think, therefore I am", he was proving his existence. That's what philosophers do; they try to answer and to explain and to analyse fundamental questions and issues that ordinary everyday people simply take for granted or, more accurately, don't or can't even think about.

Whether or not the philosopher serves any useful purpose is ultimately in the eye of the beholder. The history of mankind suggests that thinkers are a vital element of society, even if they are often much misunderstood and, more often than that, vulnerable to assassination of either their person or their character, or ridicule in their time or isolation or jealousy or worse.

Someone once said (I cannot remember who it was, and it may well have been me) that human society is ultimately made up of four types of people: leaders, followers, thinkers. The biggest category, by far, is the fourth: those who get in the way.

Thinkers are the smallest group. Just about everybody wants to be a leader, but few ultimately get there and even after they do, it is apparently increasingly essential to the human condition that we should keep our leaders on their toes and knock them off their pedestals almost immediately after they get there. And nobody these days seems to admit to being a follower.

The vast majority of us are simply too busy just trying to get on with life and its entire vicissitudes to bother wasting our time trying to solve useless ethereal philosophical conundrums like "how do I know that I actually exist?"

That notwithstanding, philosophers and thinkers have their place; particularly in history and particularly in the annals of human social and political development. There was a time when people were hired by kings queens and emperors simply to think. Nowadays we call them either lawyers or consultants.

How well I remember the teachings of Victor F. Scott at the then Central School and the principles passed on to me by the likes of the late F.S. Furbert and Dr. Kenneth Robinson, to name the two who most profoundly shaped my intellectual development as a Bermudian youngster.

Later, in my university years, I was privileged (at the expense of the Bermudian taxpayer, I will add for reasons which may ultimately become clear) to develop an even deeper understanding and appreciation of the value of thinking. If people are taught to think, if they are provided with real horizons, there is, theoretically at least, no limit to what they can accomplish. In addition to being able to train and retrain in different positions, they can develop flexibility, they can adapt and transport developed mental skills from one occupation or job to another.

Ultimately they can provide their employers and indeed their country with the advantage of being not merely trained, but a truly educated workforce. So whether it is Aristotle or Immanuel Kant or John Stuart Mill or Nietzsche or Marx or indeed any of the lesser-known philosophers and thinkers who have come, thought, pronounced and gone, thinkers have had a valuable place in our history and our development.

Dr. E.F. Gordon was a Bermudian thinker. Sir Henry Tucker was a Bermudian thinker. The late Mr. Justice Walter Robinson was a Bermudian thinker. I will add the name of Walton St. George Brown to my list and will, next week, tell you why.

In any event, for some of us, thinking is ultimately all we do; or at least what we do most, if not best. For some of us thinking is, as the French would say, our raison d'etre, the very reason we are here.

Now I do not pretend to know for sure whether my ultimate purpose in life is to think. When I look back on my adult years, I seem to have spent a lot of time doing little more than that; and I say this with not a little embarrassment.

I have a keen eye for, and an appreciation of, history. I really care less, for example, about what you or anybody else thinks of me today than I care about what history will say about me.

Forgive me, but I want a place in history; I make no bones about that. And I want it to be a good place. I want history to record that with all my faults and mistakes and errors and limitations, I had at least some positive impact on the history of my time.

Call it a delusion of grandeur if you wish, but I really do prefer to imagine that some day a scholar of Bermudian history, some Bermudian university student or future Berkeleyite or CedarBridge student will navigate the archives of Bermudian newspapers and other media, asking himself all the while what (if anything) did Julian Hall contribute to his time in the land of his birth.

I will want that student to know that I developed my arguments with respect for my fellow human beings and for principle and that I did so without descending into personal attack or character assassination and also with absolutely no fear of either. I do like to think; I really respect thinkers and thinking.

And I find people who argue without rationale, who base their reasoning and arguments on personal attack and vicious assault rather than reason, not only extremely tiresome and intellectually lazy, but also ultimately downright destructive. He (or she) that hath ears to hear, let him (or her) hear.

A Play in Three Acts

NOW I know that in the past few months I have been publicly stirring up something of a hornet's nest. To certain zealots in Alaska Hall, I have committed the unforgivable and virtually unpardonable double sin of criticising the Progressive Labour Party leadership and of doing so in public, no less.

Never mind my rejoinder that when I purchased several years ago my "life membership" in the PLP I neither intended to mortgage my fundamental right of freedom of expression nor did I plan to have my right of free speech permanently lodged in a safety deposit box.

Never mind also my conscientious belief that the PLP Government and its current leadership have either lost or thrown away the "ideological compass" of the Bermuda Labour Movement and that instead of leading Bermuda with a clear vision, they are in danger of drifting both aimlessly and perilously in a rudderless ship.

Mine is, whether my critics believe it or not, a genuine and heartfelt concern for the future of Bermuda and my people, all my people. I don't require overwhelming political or social ambition to care.

For me, merely having three daughters who are Bermudian and for whom there exists something which I call their birthright is enough.

In next week's column, I plan to be as specific as I can regarding what I consider to be the ways in which the PLP and the Bermudian Labour Movement have lost their way, if not each other.

And in the following week, I shall set out my "thinking", and I shall do so through this medium (which I believe is a real newspaper) regarding what the Labour Movement and Bermuda might need to do to prevent our precious island home from sinking into oblivion, or worse, and to safeguard the future for all of us, lest we perish.

It will be just my thinking, and nothing more.