Maybe it is a personal sense of “the tragedy of the human condition” or creeping old age, but one feels more and more that generally speaking the Caribbean region is not in a good place.
Apart from the obvious economic and political concerns, there are critical issues of psycho-social decay. The concept of human progress as an interrupted path of betterment was a product of the European Enlightenment where it was felt that rational thought and scientific discovery would be a sure path forward.
We exhibit a mindset which tells us that things should somehow get better in most, if not all, aspects of human endeavour. However, nothing in life is automatically sustainable far less ameliorative. As President Obama stated recently on the 50th anniversary of the 1964 Voting Rights Act, “History travels not only forward, but backward”. Gains can roll back or be rolled back. The affairs of men have to be managed. The character of society is always subject to construction or repair or adversely, to disrepair. As Mario Cuomo once said, “You can fashion either a shining city on a hill or you can create a dump.”
The awesome rapidity of change in the contemporary world means that challenge and unpredictability are now fundamental parts of modern society. While capitalist economies have always been subject to boom and bust, there is no polity, indeed no human agency that can outlaw material insecurity. Recent events have shown not only the limitations of our knowledge, but that the economic system is not as deterministic and predictable as we used to think.
A study of democratic polities worldwide revealed that the greatest concentration of liberal democratic states was in the post-colonial Anglophone Caribbean. It attributed this as one of the credits in the so-called balance sheet of colonialism. Totalitarianism has not emerged as a defining characteristic as it has elsewhere in the post-colonial era. However in the political sphere the Caribbean is characterised by an increasing distance between the governed and the governing. The result is a growing apathy and scepticism which means that the average citizen feels more and more disengaged, even alienated from the society in which he lives.
However, it is becoming increasingly evident that regionally, the decisive domestic issues of our time relate not primarily to economy or polity but to profoundly worrisome levels of psycho-social decay. So much in the socio-cultural ambience in the contemporary Caribbean reflects a poor quality, degraded environment that one would not have thought would characterise the Caribbean at this stage in its post-colonial development.
I keep recalling Lloyd Best’s notion that the problems in the Caribbean are not essentially technical but cultural. The question is; is the antagonistic weight of the past permanent and inescapable?
I was prompted to examine this topic after reading a couple of articles in the January 12 edition of Trinidad and Tobago’s Sunday Express which looked at the crime rate in that country. One by Lennox Grant stated, “It’s the story of our times when detection and correction typically remains beyond reach of human agency and when such is the mass of the narrative as to induce forgetfulness.” Four murders, three in one family, on the weekend of April 5-6 brought the Trinidad and Tobago murder rate to 123. From Jamaica in the north to Guyana in the south, the picture is one of rising predatory crime, disorder and social indiscipline.
Perhaps the most terrifying is the threatening and murder of witnesses before the law courts in Trinidad and Jamaica. We have not as a regional people exercised due diligence in regard to the psycho-social development. We have focused on economic growth which in spite of all our endeavours has not produced the outcomes expected.
Meanwhile, laissez-faire social policy has allowed the problems of drug trafficking, use and abuse of narcotics, predatory crime, gang violence, school breakdown and indiscipline on the roads to threaten our private and public spaces. Today we seem neither economically viable nor socially safe. We assumed that economic growth by itself would foster psychosocial well-being.
The evidence kept suggesting that capitalism by itself cannot lift all boats, indeed, as a few more yachts set sail, more and more dinghies kept washing up on the shoals of economic fragility and social decay. Today a significant number are marginalised within the formal economy and within the parameters of civil society. The situation was not helped by relaxed liberal thinking that emphasised rights over social obligation and individual responsibility.
The current cadre of regional leaders obsessed with gaining and holding power seem incapable of crafting a coherent and realisable narrative. What we have in election campaign after campaign, is the ubiquitous populist rhetoric promising a rose garden, each party promising a landscape rosier than the other, burdening themselves and a gullible populace with impossible expectations as the apples rot and the barrel smells to high heaven.
• Ralph Jemmott is a retired educator and social commentator.
