Accepting one anotherJanuary 3, 2012Dear Sir,In the wake of Mr Kim Swan’s appeal to white people, the commentary has often been that black people should buck up, put the past behind them and stop blaming others. There is a strong feeling in the white community that the facts of history are unshakeable and one can always return to the well for a new draft of spite, blame or excuses for one’s own bad behaviour. White people’s frustration is understandable. What is this thing, “race”, whose long arms seem to reach from behind and pull one back into the past no matter how far one runs? Is there not some recognition that something has been done to correct the situation? The acts of white people in the past are not those of the present, in fact white people would find those acts not just reprehensible but pathological. Many whites point out that in fact their ancestors’ pasts have not been easy either. The history of the Irish under British domination is rich with bloody suppression and debilitating humiliation. Yet many of them have overcome their past and live as equal partners in an Anglo-Saxon environment. The cry often goes up: When do we all get to accept each other and begin to move forward together, without recrimination?At what historical point does the flood recede and those who had to swim become equal with those who had boats and denied the swimmers a berth? From my reading of history, the answer is: not for a very long time. We are confident that civilisation is a good thing. We derive great benefit for the sophisticated ways we have developed for organising ourselves. However it can not be denied that, for good or bad, the great civilising gestures made by human beings have often been motivated and executed with acts of intense well organised violence. These acts occur in wars, of course, but also in times of peace in periods of oppression and utilisation. The benefits of these are great and long lasting which causes a chronic and unresolvable moral conflict. The benefits are not spread equally and often the violated class of people don’t get a share in the good for a long time after their ancestors’ humiliation, if they ever do at all.For everyone, these acts of “civilising” violence have a price. Once a group has been violated, there are two results. In the first, the group simply ceases to exist. It is dispersed, killed off, worked to death or abolished. Its remnants are simply absorbed into the crowd. There is the haunting memory of the Tasmanians. There simply aren’t any more them. The same would go for the Caribs. The second result is that the group retains its composition and identity. It is however utterly degraded. Just as violence has played a part in the form of civilisation, so the victims of violence are held in contempt by civilised people; including the newly civilised victims. For a civilised person, there is no humiliation greater and more corrosive than the realisation that all the good of social organisation stems from your own suppression. This has been true from the dawn of cities to last night. A hunter gatherer village lives for all its parts. Civilisation lives for its winners. That’s why there are so few hunter gatherers in these times. The winners won.In a world of pure efficiency, why should this be a problem, when progress is its result? Because the winners cannot actually take credit for their win. They arrive at their elevated position by luck as much as by effort. People really aren’t all that different from each other. Given the same history and a fair start, they will work just as hard as each other to gain their particular desires. The irony of civilisation is that though it uses violence against people to gain its advancements, it can not maintain its advantages or even commit its acts of violence, without vast numbers of people cooperating. The winners tend to have fleeting minuscule advantages over their opponents and do everything to leverage that advantage. But they are not that much greater than their opponents. So when the dust settles and people can reflect, the victims realise that they suffer in many ways for an infinitesimal real difference. The winners begin to realise they have broken the compact of cooperation which makes any activity in human society possible. Reflective people on both sides realise that the society that they have both built, (the victims by being coerced and the winners by wilful ignorance) is based on bad faith. For generations the winners and often the victims will attempt to justify this outrageous moral failing. Then, one day it all comes crashing down. Russian, Haiti, and many other examples show what usually happens afterwards; decades or centuries of violent readjustment.And that’s not the end. Once it has coerced its people into their places, it holds them for generations. Their children will be templates of the required form. At some point the form becomes obsolete, but civilisation does not change the mould. And the children keep coming in whatever form the mould made them, long after the revolutions are over, the social contracts are written and the heroes have died. This is the long shadow of social violence. This is the problem. When the winners see their mistake, they want to change the mould. But you cannot switch the mould from victim to winner. In fact it is the victims, the moulded, who do the changing. When and if they change, they change themselves but also the society around them. If the winners cooperate, they, who have worked so hard to form the society of their group, must now change it irrevocably. Of civilisation’s two tools, violence and cooperation, the second is the hardest to use. If two groups decide that being victims and winners is no longer acceptable, as most Bermudians have now decided, their problems have only begun. Not only must they embrace the other side, in many ways they have to become the other side. Both sides change beyond the recognition of their ancestors. And they become a new group as alien to their now reviled past as ... another race of people.How long does such a transformation take? A very long time.JOHN ZUILLPaget