A solution to the ethnic conflict :

From the past or from the future?

The P-toms or the joint mechanism between the Govt. and the LTTE for the administration/ disbursement of tsunami aid gave cause to acrimonious debate and street violence in the recent past.

This is, at bottom, symptomatic of a clash of ideologies which go even beyond ideology to a Weltanschauung (vision of the world) of the human condition as a whole. It has to do with an unarticulated reading of national/ social history against the larger canvas of the evolutionary history of humankind.

It is taken for granted that the future of a nation cannot be meaningful without a strong connection to the past; that the road ahead must be in line with the road behind. In that continuity however the nexus among the past, present and the future is not as simple as it appears at first sight.

The flow of history is replete with twists and turns, rapids and falls, calms and currents. Even where the flow of history has been relatively smooth, large scale changes have taken place in relatively short periods, particularly in recent times.

A good example is the unexpected collapse of the Berlin wall in 1988. Hence the interpretation of history, the attempt to understand the present in terms of the past is "risky business", fraught with many pitfalls.

Invariably, the complexities of historical processes, filtered through the tints of ideological "glasses", and often compounded by inaccuracies of data and incursions of legend, admit of multiple interpretations, none of which can claim to be the only true one. The philosopher Berkeley's dictum, esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived) seems specially applicable to history.

The two main parties to the ethnic conflict, the Sinhalese and the Tamils, specially the more fundamentalist groups within them, have attempted to justify their political standpoints, particularly in respect of territorial claims, by appeals to history. But it will be evident from the above that the debate is bound to remain inconclusive.

Neither will be convinced by the arguments of the other. As such, if both parties remain locked in an unbreakable bind, the result will be a debilitating costly stalemate without issue which is exactly the present state of the question.

But history itself specially in its modern vicissitudes, offers a way out of the dilemma (if we are willing to take it) by signalling its declining relevance vis a vis the present.

It is now possible to conceive of an aging of history which permits of a release of the present from the tight embrace of the past, like aging parents letting go of their children come of age, and permitting them to be different. Or to change the metaphor, the Doppler effect of increasing distance between accelerating forward-moving waves of socio-cultural change to wards the future. In other words, the accelerating pace of change, both local and global, is loosening more and more the links with the past.

The resemblances between the future and the past become less and less as the connections between them become more and more tenuous. Strangely the future is closer to us than the past.

A conclusion of far-reaching consequence from this phenomenon is that history will be less and less useful in understanding the present, and still less in divining the future. In days gone by, when the pace of change was slow, past experience provided useful clues to future decision-making, because the future would not be very different from the past. But not so today, when a period as short as ten years could bring about a very new scenario in any particular field, de-valuing the usefulness of past experience. In other words contemporary problems can be dealt with effectively only on their own terms, with tools and mechanisms which match their current nature in scope and complexity.

Given the fast moving flow of history this requires, not so much a return to the past as an imaginative leap into the future. It is strange but true that decision-making today will be effective and fruitful in proportion to our ability to took at the present from the vantage point of the future. This situation is unique to our day and age.

It is an exercise as difficult as it is unfamiliar. Hence, understandably we still have recourse to the familiar in dealing with contemporary problems but at the cost of positive result, or worse, complicating the problem further, making it more intractable.In this light it is clear why we have been muddling through the ethnic problem making no headway towards a solution.

The peace process is at a standstill. Both the Govt. (specially the more narrowly nationalistic components of the coalition), and the LTTE, are looking back to the past going even beyond colonial times to the Anuradhapura period and further back to the pre-history of the country, to deal with a very contemporary problem in which a host of new factors are at play.

There is no evidence at all of fresh thinking which takes into account all the complexities of modern Sri Lankan society in its unique mix of social, cultural and religious elements, in various proportions, impacted strongly by influences from the West, colonial and contemporary, in a population geography which defies clear demarcations.

No evidence of an imaginative leap into the future in an attempt to discern the lineaments of a modern and post-modern Sri Lanka of the early 21st century-a Sri Lanka as a polity in which all the races and religions feel equally at home, in any locality of the country; a Sri Lanka anchored in democracy, human rights and the fundamental freedoms, all of which are in the forefront of modern social consciousness; a Sri Lanka which has taken, with discernment, the best of the West in the Arts and Sciences, without losing her cultural identity.

In other words, Sri Lanka must liberate herself from an unrealistic enslavement to history and rigid traditional mind-sets, in a strong, vigorous movement of modernisation, in the best sense of the term, not only to solve her ethnic problem but also to do justice to her enormous potential to be a vibrant modern society rooted in, but not enslaved by, a rich and ancient past.

The emergent butterfly is unimaginably different from its cocoon/chrysallis past. Alas! we have had no national leaders capable of that kind of grand futuristic vision which would have motivated and galvanised the people into a full blossoming of their potential. Where there is no vision the people perish.

(Courtesy - 'The Enlightened Life' - a publication of the Subodhi Institute for Integral Education, Piliyandala.)