One of the main political responses by the Government of Barbados in the face of significant economic challenges, is to condition the national psyche into the acceptance of significantly reduced expectations of the Independence project. This is now reflecting itself in the pervasiveness of a “politics of ordinariness” or the “politics of the mundane and unspectacular” in the wider body politic.
Fellow columnist Shantal Munroe-Knight has sought to locate this tendency as a failure of leadership, in which grand projects of transformation have disappeared and have been replaced by timidity and the celebration of banality as high achievements. She mourns the death of the visionary Caribbean leader with a clear plan of moving from here to there.
Indeed, the quality of our leaders is a true reflection of ourselves. To identify the problem as merely a problem of leadership would be to miss the extent to which a process of generational slippage has taken place and in which we have too opportunistically and speedily facilitated the lowered expectations, and to accept failure as success and mediocrity as excellence.
This path of least resistance has been adopted since the more deeply philosophical and economically challenging route of demanding more has been ruled out.
Thus, zero growth in Barbados is celebrated on the grounds that Barbados is a more developed economy than Guyana; comparatively weak tourism arrivals in Barbados are justified on the basis that the other countries are playing catch-up; the aspiration for a university education is dismissed on the grounds that the polytechnic is a better option; the demand for sounder economic performance is rejected on the basis of a world recession.
Local economists who provide critique and analysis have been dismissed on prime ministerial platforms on the grounds that “if they are so good, why aren’t they offering advice to Barack Obama, and why aren’t they recipients of the Nobel Prize”? This was not only meant to justify inaction, but also to solidify in the public mind a sense of helplessness.
After several years of such conditioning, and suffering under the shock of a prolonged crisis, the unions, churches, civil society, the private sector, have accepted this ideology of state helplessness. This is reflected most clearly in a discourse of self-interest and “me first” as the main basis for the public positions adopted by the various civil bodies.
The problem with ideology and PR however is that they can only provide temporary psychic relief. Eventually, the objective condition of human suffering and human need insist upon direct action as a solution to real suffering.
In other words, no abstract discussion of “global recession” can relieve an unemployed man of his unemployment.
It is these concrete material conditions which sooner or later determine our political outcomes. Our civic leaders must accept that the technique of lowered expectations cannot be sustained indefinitely.
• Tennyson Joseph is a political scientist at the University of the West Indies Cave Hill Campus, specialising in regional affairs.