Morality vs economics

Ian Boyne, Contributor

It was an equal-opportunity week of sorts for the country's two main political parties as far as the corruption focus was concerned. Bruce Golding is either born lucky, has God on his side or some good obeah man somewhere. For just when The Sunday Gleaner made a miserable start to his week, no less a Messianic figure than the contractor general resurrected the Trafigura corpse.

And near the end of the week, with Golding's information minister, Daryl Vaz displaying Damascus-Road type humility and contrition at his post-Cabinet press briefing, Crusader Christie again highlighted other high-profile political opponents of Golding's, raising that alleged sweetheart deal between Omar Davies and Dehring, Bunting and Golding, under the previous People's National Party (PNP) government. It was a well-timed - or providential - deflection for the beleaguered Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) which, gladly, shared headlines with Colin Campbell and Peter Bunting.

But beyond the political theatrics and balancing acts of last week lie some substantial issues for the Jamaican people. 'An issue of trust', blared The Gleaner headline of last Tuesday, focusing on the church's strong questioning of Golding's role in the Manatt, Phelps and Phillips saga. But right below that was, 'Charge him - CG,' with a photo of former PNP minister, Colin Campbell, whose attempt to re-enter politics blew up in his face last week. It's not a good time for politicians overall. And without even drawing any moral equivalence between Trafigura and Manatt, there is undoubtedly an issue of trust affecting the entire political class in Jamaica.

I have frequently chastised our intelligentsia, particularly those most vocal in the media, for crude economic determinism and an economistic focus. We are generally contemptuous of ideology, or any explicit focus on values and mores. Our motto is, "seek first the economic kingdom and all things shall be added." We have not spent time in developing what the father of modern capitalism, philosopher-economist Adam Smith, called the moral sentiments, without which capitalism has no foundation. (The Wall Street crash and other irrational exuberances of turbo-charged capitalism should be enough to vindicate Smith).

Overshadowing everything

Yet, ironically, with the appreciable containment of the effects of the global crisis - the success of the debt exchange; the 32-year record low interest rates; halt to the runaway slide of the Jamaican dollar; successful divestment of Air Jamaica and the sugar factories; the slow rebounding of the bauxite industry etc, the Government has to be trying to get our attention to note the progress being made. Even the welcome decline in murders is not getting the kind of traction it might have because this issue of trust and morality in political life has overshadowed everything else.

We want to know whether we have a prime minister we can trust, a prime minister who won't lie to us. In other words, we want a moral prime minister, not just one who is taking care of the economy and our security. So morality matters, after all. It is interesting that sophisticated, avant-garde, non-fundamentalist people are so uptight about whether a prime minister lies or not. I thought it was only naive people who believed that their political leaders don't lie expediently.

But it turns out that there is an expectation, after all, that political leaders must come clean, even when it can cost them their careers. And it turns out that even sophisticated secularists and deists like Wilmot Perkins and full atheists like Mark Wignall really hold to the notion we can find people committed to absolute truth-telling and absolute, flawless integrity. Without any reference at all to the PM's role in this Manatt issue, perhaps I am too cynical or pessimistic about human nature, but I don't believe the average politician anywhere in any country is committed inexorably to absolute truth-telling. If I were to wager, I would bet that most politicians are situation ethicists rather than absolutists when it comes to truth-telling.

Important lecture

On the same weekend that The Sunday Gleaner published its dramatic 'Caught!' front-page story, political scientist Professor Obika Gray delivered an important inaugural Kingston 360 Lecture, organised by the Spanish Court Hotel in association with the Mona School of Business. In attendance were some of the country's leading members of the power elite, including the managing director of this powerful newspaper, Oliver Clarke. In his 49-page paper, the author of the engrossing book, Demeaned but Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor in Jamaica fascinatingly laid out his thesis.

In nearly 70 years of Jamaican attempts at self-government and independence, we have failed to develop the conscience or moral sentiments of the people and have instead wrongly focused on economic planning.

It was a counter-intuitive thesis, certainly one which crashes with the prevailing consensus that our primary failure has been economic underdevelopment. Wrong, says Gray. He demonstrated that since the 1940s, and especially since Independence, we have focused on economic planning, economic forecasting, industrialisation and development at the expense of building a set of values and attitudes conducive to balanced development and equity.

Said Gray in his lecture: "In the language of the day, development meant harnessing and managing economic forces and deploying economic resources. Of far-lesser interest to nation-builders in Jamaica and their successors was how to manage political power and how to manage culture and values ... managing values ... was largely neglected until it was too late."

Gray further explained to the business, academic and professional elite gathered at the Spanish Court Hotel : "Managing the culture of conscience in Jamaica means, among other things, addressing the question of social recognition, harnessing cultural capital, addressing the culture of rising expectations, mobilising heritage and patriotism, projecting a unifying vision that can resonate with broad cultural needs and, most importantly, responding creatively to the expanding culture of social defiance and its corresponding moral sentiments ..."

In Gray's opinion, "that seems to have been a missed opportunity. Economic planning then, as now, has hardly gotten us anywhere in nearly 70 years of strategising since the 1940s. Isn't it likely that we would be in a far better condition as a people today had we also devoted attention, resources, planning and imagination to matters of power and conscience?" Obika Gray has done a lot of significant social scientific work on the role of the lumpen proletariat on Jamaica's political culture.

The lumpen elements have not only been used but have used and strongly influenced the culture and operations of our two political parties. You have to read Gray's enlightening book if you want to under Jamaica's garrison politics, its origins and the dynamics of Jamaican political culture.

The lumpen elements are devoted to outlawry, 'bandooloism', intimidation, parasitism and crude clientelism. It is the lumpen which has spawned garrison politics, extortion and which has created the Duduses of Jamaican politics. There would be no Dudus without the active promotion of that substratum class by our political parties. The values of the lumpen have influenced both political parties and have corrupted our political system.

Values and moral

What Obika Gray has dubbed "the 2010 Movement" in Jamaica, which resulted in the pressure on the Golding administration to extradite Dudus and to smash the criminal network in Tivoli, is a protest against the values of the lumpen, values which had for too long defined or, at best, unduly influenced our two main political parties.

The failure of the political class to promote appropriate values and moral sentiments among the people allowed them to get away with a lot of slackness, crookery and corruption for all these decades. The moral outrage of the 2010 Movement has pushed back against the debilitating values of the lumpen which have been cynically promoted by the political class. "The cumulative effect of all this mismanagement of conscience was the emergence and hardening of dog-hearted sensibilities in the country's political life. It meant the strengthening of partisanship, the habituation of mendicancy and covetousness and the deepening of conflicts in the country and the production of arrested development", Gray told his audience.

Gray said it's no wonder that "public disgust with parties and politics has reached a new low" in Jamaica.

Political class failure

Gray, an ardent human-rights activist, but a progressive who believes that the human rights agenda must broaden to include economic and social rights, outlined the main consequences of the political class failure to manage conscience in Jamaica. These effects are "accommodation to the view that we can shoot our way out of the crime problem through physical elimination of the perpetrators; moral acceptance of vigilantism; moral indifference to rights abuses and numbness in the face of horrific barbarities; preference for hand-wringing, helplessness and immobilism; and hatred and antipathy toward social marginals and others for established order, public law and unyielding partisanship, at-all-costs, among the country's political class.

Interestingly, too, in his column in In Focus last week, former prime minister Edward Seaga lamented the fact that our young people are "detached from civil society ... distanced from family ... impatient with frustrating economic barriers", leading them to create their own values which "translate into a way of life honouring respect, power, money, sex and, where necessary, the retribution of violence. They exist in a counter-culture ... without theology, ideology or even social commitment. It is individualistic and impulsive. The indicators of success emphasise material wealth ... the 'bling bling' indicators of material wealth. Dancehall is the musical expression of these realities."

Perhaps if Seaga and other prime ministers had spent more time developing the moral sentiments of the people - moral conscience, in Gray's parlance - perhaps if PJ Patterson had stuck with his aborted values and attitudes campaign, and if Portia and Bruce had run with the baton, we would not be facing the moral decay which permeates Jamaican society today. We keep on making the same mistakes, thinking that throwing money at our problems will solve them. But a clear-thinking scholar came to town last week to pull us away from our narrow partisan squabbles.

The partisans in the PNP and the JLP could care less. Their political show must go on.

Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist who may be reached at ianboyne1@yahoo.com or columns@gleanerjm.com