THE CONCEPT OF GROWTH in economic language has always bemused me. Even after spending the last two decades of my 40 years in the Barbadian workplace among some of the most competent specialists I retired at the end of 1999 no wiser.
My bemusement is rooted in the reality that while Mother Nature imposes direct and incontestable limits to growth, we humans think otherwise. Can you imagine, if there were no limits to growth, how big and tall the late revered James Sisnett would have become? By the time he passed away a few months ago, his head would have touched the sky.
So while Mother Nature sets a cut-off point after, say, late puberty, we expect our countries’ economies to grow and grow and grow. And if growth doesn’t happen in two consecutive three-month periods – just six months – we begin to worry. In fact, we are now in a recession and growth must return. If it doesn’t, we then sink into depression.
Even when we stop growing, we call that condition “negative growth”. In other words, it never levels off.
So although I spent so many years close to the brilliant minds of Sir Courtney Blackman, Dr DeLisle Worrell and Clyde Mascoll, and excellent teachers like Harold Codrington, Ronald Prescod and Carlos Holder, the concept of “growth” continues to elude me.
Before my fellow columnist Caswell Franklyn pulls me up again and says: “You’ve already wasted 222 words. Come to the point, Carl!”, I would only remind him – with further “wastage” of 107 words – that there is a gulf between an essayist and a trade unionist. The unionist must decide to strike or not to strike; to apologize or not to apologize; the essayist can go wherever his thoughts take him.
Phillip Lopate explains it much better: “Through sharing thoughts, memories, desires, complaints and whimsies, the essayist sets up a relationship with the reader, a dialogue – a friendship, if you will, based on identification, understanding, testiness and companionship.”
It’s against this backdrop that I compliment The NATION newspaper for serializing the 29th annual Elsa Goveia Memorial Lecture delivered by Dr Nicholas Draper of the University College of London.
It’s also why I recommend a new book, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. At a time when digital technology is urging us to speed up the pace of every transaction, churning ourselves into a frenzied state of now, Dr Douglas Rushkoff reminds us that we are only human and our capacity to keep up cannot be compared with that of the machine.
You might recall Alvin Toffler’s 1970 tour de force Future Shock, where he predicted the impact of globalism, global markets and global superpowers on our lives and cultures.
The Elsa Goveia Lecture is long – eight instalments – so if your attention span can take you no further than a tweet, I am not talking to you. If on the other hand, over this Christmas season you can find the time, do get hold of those issues and read Dr Draper’s lecture. It may well, among other things, as it did for me, give you a better appreciation of what the reparations folks are talking about, although the lecturer was clear to point out that his talk, Compensation For Barbados’s Slave Owners, was not in support of reparations.
Space allows for only a few excerpts from both Draper’s and Rushkoff’s writings.
DRAPER: “There was no provision for the enslaved people themselves. This is the first and obvious fact that needs to be reiterated. Nothing financial was done for the enslaved people in the transition to freedom – no land, no financial support, no livestock or seed, no agricultural equipment.”
RUSHKOFF: “We are so good at making stuff and providing all the services that we no longer require all of us to do it. As we are confronted by bounty, our main reason to create jobs is merely to have some justification for distributing all the stuff that is actually in abundance.”
DRAPER: “The (1833) Abolition Act provided for 4 to 6 years apprenticeship, planned originally for 12 years, and for £20million cash to the slave owners . . . the £20million would be worth a little under £2billion today.”
RUSHKOFF: “ . . . 34 per cent of the 12 million bloggers in America consider their online ‘work’ to be a form of journalism. That adds up to millions of unskilled, untrained, unpaid, unknown ‘journalists’ spewing their (mis)information into the cyberworld.”
DRAPER: “For many years, Britain’s history has privileged abolition over slavery: the 200 years of slavery and slave ownership have largely disappeared from Britain’s view of itself.”
RUSHKOFF: “Many young people are more than comfortable losing their privacy to social networks, seeing it as preparation for an even less private future in which people know one another’s thoughts.”
DRAPER: “Sir Charles Lucas, the 19th century colonial official and writer said of Barbados: ‘Englishmen came there to live, not to trade merely or to rule’.”
RUSHKOFF: “The creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund gave western powers a new way to expand their economies without actually taking over countries . . . they would lend large sums to so-called developing nations, at interest.”
DRAPER: “It was estimated that in the 1820s on average an enslaved person in Barbados had been ‘worth’ £47 1s 3d and in Jamaica £44 15s 1d. For children in Barbados, valued at £10, compensation of £3 17s 8d each was paid.”
As we approach the end of another year, anxiety and fear about loss of jobs and growth in 2014 are gripping many citizens of this country, while our international overseers hover like humming birds ready to help inject us with the medicine that our political leaders took so long to dispense.
As the International Monetary Fund knocks at our door, it’s beginning to look a lot like 1991 all over again.
Take care at Christmas and in the new year.
• Carl Moore was the first Editor of THE NATION and is a social commentator. Email: carlmoore@caribsurf.com
