Ethical Relations to the Past: Individual, Institutional, International

Ethical relations to the past – whether to ancestors, the dead, historical injustices, events with contested interpretations – are complex and often elusive. The representations of history are, as Edward Said put it, not ‘ontologically given’ but rather ‘historically constituted’ (Said 1989, 225). Rather than preserved as a ‘thing’ by this or that established account, ‘the past’ is something with which we are in an ongoing state of negotiation. At points, this process seems especially highly charged. Our call for contributions to this special issue followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in June 2020, and a global response calling for an end to racism and colonialisation, an acknowledgement of the presence of past injustices in the here and now. The need for such acknowledgement has been at the heart of other recent high-profile cases and movements, from historic child abuse by high-profile celebrities to #MeToo, and from the moral skirmishes in the UK and US around the removal of statues of those involved in the slave trade, to the October 2021 ruling that the Canadian government must compensate Indigenous children taken from their homes and placed for the sake of ‘assimilation’ in residential homes where many went on to be abused.

Distinct ethical questions arise when we are dealing with the past, and with transition. Can people of the past be wronged in the present? With events long in the past, how does responsibility carry over to current agencies not directly involved – to present governments, businesses or institutions? Does ethics sometimes require a revision of how past events and people are commemorated? To what extent is it legitimate to judge beliefs and actions taken as ‘normal’ in previous eras and contexts by standards arising in our own time? In post-colonial contexts, what is the rightful role of ‘allyship’ in resolving past conflict, trauma and oppression – and giving due prominence to the agency and authority of those who have offered resistance? Meanwhile other factors are crucial to how these ethical questions are negotiated. Whose knowledge counts, in getting to grips with historical events? What role can, or should, survivors’ testimony play? What (if anything) constitutes an authoritative account?

Our commitment in this special issue has been to address how the harms of the past live in current welfare policy and practices. Terms such as ‘post-coloniality’ and ‘historical abuse’ may suggest that somehow the harms at stake exist only in the past, rather than being carried among those currently living. A willingness by governments to take steps to redress those harms may seem to be partial, and non-inclusive of the insights of those affected. Our intention is to foreground both the need for care and criticality in our understanding of ethical relations to the past, and the need to hear the plurality of voices and insights among those affected then and now.

Shona Hunter’s paper addresses the question of decolonising the white self as an action of anti-racism in institutional settings, in response to the call for change sitting with people of colour rather than people who benefit from white privilege. Hunter’s graceful choreographic interplay of responsibilities for change calls for a contextualised understanding of situations, giving depth through listening to the voices of experience.

Jorma Heier challenges tokenistic rhetoric present in government promises and policies that are directly contradicted when mining companies or other for-profit initiatives are given access to indigenous lands. The treaties that state a commitment to the protection of indigenous lands are quickly forgotten when infrastructure projects trump the recognition of indigenous rights. This raises the question of the responsibilities that governments and states have to indigenous peoples given that the UN rights and their own treaties are ignored. While decolonisation is the focus of many state institutions, drawing attention to the recolonising acts of state institutions is a righteous concern. The question of responsibility for the repairs of the harms of the past is directly troubled by the failure to be responsive in the present.

By their nature, archives play a pivotal role in what Said refers to as the historical constitution of the past. Access matters. Karl Landstrom’s article focuses on the case of archives in Kenya destroyed or ‘migrated’ to the UK in the twilight of British colonial rule, in an attempt to censor history, particularly of the Mau Mau massacre. Because the legacies of harm in such cases of denial of past wrongdoing are distinctively epistemic in form, making amends for them is itself an epistemic practice, involving a particular kind of ‘backwards-looking’ responsibility. For Landstrom, making effective epistemic amends can play a key – if partial – role in addressing the specific kinds of injustice which arise when incriminating archives are hidden, manipulated or destroyed.

Heidrun Wulfekühler and Angela Moré also call for a deep and contextual understanding when they tackle the contemporaneous question of the lasting legacy of the implications of the Nazi genocide on the citizens of Germany. The authors acknowledge the conscious confrontation that this legacy urges, and consider how a contextual approach helps an engagement in a moral judgement about the past. The aim of the intergenerational responsibility and response is to humanise the relations for the future.

Tom Bunyard’s article turns again to genocide, and the challenge of arriving at a conceptual definition of the term itself which captures the full scale of its moral significance. It focuses on Claudia Card’s account of genocide as ‘social death’, eradicating inter-generational relations vital to the articulation of shared norms and individual identities over time. In looking to supplement Card’s account, Bunyard looks to the resources offered by two readings of Hegel – by Gillian Rose and Robert Pippin. Hegel may be familiarly positioned as a kind of spokesperson-in-chief of a supremely Eurocentric version of historical triumphalism. But Bunyard argues that through these subsequent readings, we find a way of treating historical acts of genocide not as distant atrocities, somehow radically distinct from our own habits and way of life, but as something with which we are in a state of ‘difficult engagement’. This tells us something about Hegel, but just as importantly, a way of connecting the failures of the present to the disasters of the past.

The issue closes with two pieces speaking to practices of engagement with the past, each of a distinctive kind. Jason Bone suggests that a key element to our ethical relations to the past lies in maintaining that relationship as a contemporary and ongoing entity. Indeed, the role in this unending and circular relationship with the past is an important teaching from Indigenous cultures. Bone’s article is a salient entry point for the importance of our ‘relationship’ with the past while reflecting on how that relationship is brought to the present, treated delicately while also firmly. It is also important to think Ron’s words as told through Bone in the manner that artist and author Terry Tempest Williams cautions, ‘their traditional stories don’t work for us. It’s like drinking another man’s medicine. Their stories hold meaning for us only as examples. They can teach us what is possible’ (1984, 5).

In our final piece, Tumi Mpofu, Siphelele Chirwa and Martina Dahlmanns critically reflect on philanthropic positions toward financial giving in an attempt to ‘give back’ to African communities what was taken by force through slavery and exploitation without disrupting the wealth of the philanthropists. The authors reflect on trying to meet the basic needs of people affected by poverty in light of the inequalities highlighted by the Covid19 pandemic. As we go to press in 2021, these inequalities continue through a lack vaccine availability caused by hoarding by richer nations and causing unnecessary harms. As the links between ill gotten gains and the individuals who continue to profit from them become more visible, what responsibility will this raise for reparation and in what form may this come? With harms more visible and easily linked to gains, what actions will be seen in repairing the world in which we live together with the aim of solidarity.

We hoped to do some justice to a wide range of ethical dimensions at stake in this area, and their entanglement with other kinds of question: epistemic, historiographical, and political. Our original call for papers took the form of a broad stroke of a brush rather than the precise cut of a pen: the theme of our ethical relations to the past journeys through many contexts. We are grateful to their authors for drawing out responsibilities and challenges in such a diverse array of such contexts, for the different ways in which they open up the re-thinking of current narratives in relation to those of the past, and for pointing to ways forward for critical engagement, allyship and repair.