Handling humans is probably the most tricky job as compared with handling any other living creature on the face of this earth. Having said this, it may not be difficult to comprehend why the human evolution has witnessed and will continue to witness new ways of governing humans and human societies.
Even the expression “human societies” is ambiguous, because not all individuals feel themselves comfortable in a society they are expected or forced to belong to. There are individuals who even resent having been born from their biological parents or having been born in a particular country. Fortunately, or unfortunately this is part of the “freedom” that characterises the “homo sapiens”, who tends to be at times a most stupid product of the natural evolution.
Seen positively, we may agree with Hegel, the German philosopher who grounded his insights upon dialectic, and explained to us why the evolutionary process is necessarily painful and new forms of life emerge from a spiralling process of thesis and antithesis into a new synthesis, which then becomes a new thesis to face new antithesis and so on. This is not entirely a new discovery, but as old as the biblical saying “unless a grain of wheat dies…” (John 12:24)
Excluding some freaks of nature, some of the individuals classified earlier in this column as “stupid” may have been wiser than all the rest of his or her fellow humans. Such is the breed of “prophets”, who stand out as different in their life-time and social context. Just very recently we have witnessed the case of Fr Bismarque, a fellow Goan who loved this earth, but was forced to eat dust, or shall we say “muck”? It took three years in morgue for him to meet again his dear earth, his soul mate.
I shall not repeat here my homage to Fr Bismarque, published by me on November 17, 2015. It can be read online at http://www.readwhere.com/read/c/7247041. It may have taken three years for some, and may take longer for others, to understand the deep significance of the dialectic process and how painful it is to convey a message of life to the living humans.
That is what makes some of the “religious” leaders, and many not religious ones to be considered as prophets. Let us not forget that Jesus was crucified following the instigation of the religious leaders of the society to which he belonged. Self-convinced religious leaders may continue to be anything but prophetic for their societies, and this is likely to continue to be true in our times.
It is the consciousness and the memory that defines human individuality, and likewise it is the collective memory that defines a prophet. The collective memory defies the present, but it takes time to overcome the prevailing religious and political noises of the time, all of them eager or anxious to protect their personal egos or institutional interests. However, the long-term interests of the common and silent people surface over time. It is a natural process as against the politically manipulated canonisations and benefit the society across the religious divisions.
I had first met Fr Bismarque in 1978 at the Xavier Centre of Historical Research starting its life at the Loyola Hall in Miramar, but after a long silence of many years he recovered me a year before he died, and that happened through the Facebook. I have referred to these details in my above mentioned homage to him, Fr Bismarque wanted my help to re-write Goan history that could have “wings to fly forward and was not caught in quagmire of the past”. He wanted a history of Goa without nostalgia or triumphalism. He wanted a history from below, a kind of history of the “subalterns”. This kind of language tends to generate suspicions and irritation of the ruling classes and their representatives in institutions that hold power in the society.
Obviously, the physical distance and Fr Bismarque’s routine of activities in Goa did not permit him to follow my own life struggle and my writings. My personal story of struggle can be traced through clues left in some of my books and articles, including an article that I had published in Goa Today, entitled “Fr José Vaz and Fr Agnelo de Sousa: The Struggle for Sainthood”, Goa Today, Panjim, June 1989: 10-14.
That article had led a priest, then chairing the archdiocesan committee for the Religious, to denounce me and demand an official condemnation. Unfortunately for him the process was stalled, but not before his imagined annoyance and my unpleasant surprise I was given access to the procedural file. It filled my cup of discontent with the institutional pettiness and inspired some of my life decisions that followed.
One of the major difficulties in writing history with warts and all, especially when it touches the recent past and the present, is the difficulty and consequences of the disclosures. One solution that many good historians have found for this problem is to end their career with a historical novel. It permits to entertain and denounce, while leaving everyone with clues to guess the truth without disclosing anything, a democratic response to democratic manhandling.
(The author is Founder-Director of the Xavier Centre of Historical Research (1979-1994).
