Howard Mitchell | What price are we paying for progress? – Part 1

I am not an expert on the subject of ethics nor a student of the great philosophers; I propose to set context by describing the elements of a functional society because it is human nature and practice to live in social or communal groupings – that is, in societies of some sort.

Societies of humans to be efficiently functional must rest on three pillars according to Professor Raghuram Rajan of The University of Chicago. These pillars are the state, the market (or commerce, or in Jamaica, the private sector) and the community sometimes described as civil society. If any of those three pillars are absent then you don’t have a society, you have a loose aggregation of humans whose association will be temporary and chaotic. Further, the failure of any of those pillars or the overwhelming strength of any of them compared to the others will result in dysfunctional activities and behaviours and if it continues – state failure.

Let us contemplate our neighbour to the north, where commerce in the form of the financial oligarchs now dominate the other two pillars of state. The community (civil society) is divided and fragmented by partisan politics, racial and cultural tensions. The state has become vulnerable to takeover and this is so important, because the ethical framework by which that country prospered and achieved great things – the calvinist/capitalist/Judeo Christian set of ethics of work hard, equality before God (at least for a certain colour). Make money fairly and honestly and get your reward in heaven has been fractured and destroyed by self-indulgence and pride.

Both the state and civil society did not have the strong belief systems and the awareness that would have allowed them to see what was coming, (although it was masked by the fraudulent carnival bait and switch tactics), and the federal judicial system and their much-vaunted constitution appear to be unable to preserve stability and freedom in the face of a radical movement for drastic change.

If you apply the same three pillar template to Haiti, where centuries of conflict destroyed any initial ethical framework and to the extent that these three pillars were ever established, interference by exploitative outside agencies ruined them, resulting in a failed state.

The logic is inescapable, successful societies derive from cooperation within a framework of positive shared beliefs and values that must originate from the people in that society, from the community of humans not imposed top down by the state or by commercial interests and those beliefs and values must be lived and acted upon by commerce and must be supported and enforced by the laws and regulations.

That is why strong local government and strong community development councils are so important. This thesis is historically supported by Norman Manley who confirmed that his generation had set in place the political framework of a functional state, but charged the next generation to “reconstruct the social and economic life of Jamaica.”

It was Edward Seaga who recognised the need to create equality of access and opportunity to our people and to explore the fullness of our culture. That process continued through the P.J. Patterson who highlighted the need for the state to play its role of distilling our values and beliefs into the framework that would protect and preserve society on its path of progress and development. But sadly, we have lost the plot, strayed from the path and are beginning to pay the price of progress without a moral compass, because a society without values and beliefs, without an ethical framework will easily spin out of control, will lose the validity of consensus of shared ambition and mutuality of purpose.

The “two Jamaicas” that Mr Seaga described and was determined to change, and the reconstructed society that Mr Manley charged us to build will become a dangerous place of primitive and individualistic behaviour and our lives will be nasty, brutish and short.

Successful societies have ethical standards that derive from shared values and beliefs that spring from the core of their people, not values that are imported or imposed from above and as Mr Seaga recognised, mutuality of beliefs and values can scarcely develop in circumstances of economic inequality.

We have achieved great things, overcome obstacles and there is the potential for development lying before us. But, unless Jamaicans act strongly and with purpose to immediately motivate our leadership to participate in the restructuring of our social relationships and the equalization of access to progress. Unless we act to engage in identifying and using, in the words of the governor general, ”That which is right amongst us to fix that which is wrong amongst us,” true and lasting progress as Bob Marley sang “will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained.”

Jamaica has a strong state, a relatively strong private sector that usually acts in concert with the state and a civil society made up of a small top, a large base and nothing much in the middle. The middle which traditionally leads the way setting ethical standards in other countries; but in Jamaica our behavioural standards tend to come from the mass.

It is they who, in the struggle to survive develop the modalities of that survival, often to the concern and anger of the rest of the society. Perhaps they have no choice but to develop these modalities, these sometimes-negative standards because that’s the only way that they can get access to participate in the benefits that flow from establishing a society.

Many of the behaviours that we deplore are the outcomes of the denial of access that flow from the way that we have allowed the society to be structured over time and that it is not that our people have abandoned morality and humanity. Instead, it is that they chose alternate behaviours out of a perceived necessity – which is a dangerous strategy as when these become established the responses of the state are often harsh and violent.

Next week: Role of communities in shaping ethics and development

Howard Mitchell is an attorney -at-law. This two part series is an abridged version of his speech delivered at the 12 th annual Joan Duncan Lecture held on May 18. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com