Jamaica ripe for cultural revolution

Martin Henry, Contributor

With this instalment, this column opens its 25th year.  When a pump attendant at my regular gas station tells me, "I read you every Sunday" and then asks, "How yuh manage to write all a dem tings deh?" and when a university's department of philosophy invites me, untrained in the discipline, to a consultative luncheon to discuss its curriculum, I have more than adequate compensation for the downside of the business of writing a weekly newspaper column.

And I will be talking later about a growing downside which began as a useful spin-off upside.

I have written more on the 'soft issues' of morality, religion and culture than most in a field in which political and economic 'hard-hitting' commentary are reigning monarchs. So I am more than taken up with Prime Minister Holness' repeated stance on social responsibility and shedding cultural practices that hold us back. Andrew Holness would not be the first head of government to take such a stance. Bruce Golding spoke a lot about "taking responsibility". And there was P.J. Patterson's Values and Attitudes (non-)campaign.

Change attitudes

I offer Mr Holness the same word of advice I offered Mr Patterson: Preaching platitudes at the problem, setting up talk-shop committees, and then ambling away to build highways and to borrow more money won't solve the problem. The levers available to Government for changing negative cultural practices and building positive values and attitudes are legislation and policy.

Holness said about social responsibility in his swearing-in address, "Let us start with fathers taking responsibility for their children, and parents deciding only to have children they can afford. Let us take responsibility for how we dispose of our waste. Our artistes must take responsibility for their lyrics." And he implored parliamentarians to set an example of decorum. But then the leader of government switched from politician to parson with the cancelling declaration that "the pathway to responsibility is not one that can be legislated or enforced".

By the time the prime minister addressed the launch of Parent Month a dozen days later he had apparently come to his senses for a release from the Office of the Prime Minister said he told that audience that Government has a role in removing cultural practices that are holding back the country's development. "We must shed the traditional cultural practices that have held us down, if we are going to be a modern nation," he said. PM Holness cited legislative action being taken for having a father registered for each birth and the revision of the Programme of Advancement Through Health and Education to introduce more stringent conditionalities for benefits.

Mr Holness got his political history seriously out of kilter in his swearing-in speech. He should now note that the practice of politics, some laws (and the failure to enforce many others), and some public policies have encouraged the slackness that he is now speaking against and hopefully against which he will act in practical fashion by applying the available levers of the State.

Mr Holness' party is dropping Dr St Aubyn Bartlett as its candidate for Eastern St Andrew because constituents are now unhappy with his representation after two consecutive terms and his recent promotion from backbench to minister of state.

Almost certainly a big part of the (JLP) constituents' discontent is the lack of let-off. What the eminent political sociologist Carl Stone labelled 'clientelism', now lawfully aided and abetted by the Constituency Development Fund, has been a principal agent of dependency and the ruin of personal responsibility and of politicians who refuse to play that destructive game.

In passing, the highly public ditching of MP Bartlett for 'non-performance' seems a particularly brilliant way to throw away a marginal seat.

'Goods' vs 'bads'

But back to business. In my carefully considered view, a view which I have regularly expressed over the life of the column, the social, cultural and moral factors are far more important in the development and well-being of the nation than the economic ones which Government spends most of its time and effort wrestling with to little avail. As the late Warren T. Brookes, a United States economic columnist, was fond of observing, there is a reason why economic products are called 'goods' and not 'bads'.

My August 7 column, 'Penis size and the secret of nations', which understandably drew more responses than many others, returned to the matter of culture, attitude and values in the development of nations. What is the significant point of difference between poor and rich countries?

The difference is the attitude of the people, moulded for many years by education and culture. The majority of the population in rich countries, the 'Secret of Nations' document says, display: ethics as basic principles, integrity, responsibility, respect for laws and regulations and for the rights of others, love for work, effort to save and invest, the will to be productive, and punctuality. (These are cultural things.) In poor countries, less than the majority follow these basic principles in their daily life.

Negative conditions

I have long held that a handful of sociocultural conditions is determining our national prospects more than any macroeconomic factor, or all macroeconomic factors taken together.

These overarching negative sociocultural conditions include: family and child-rearing, and with these, the attitude to sex; the attitude to time, to work, and to property; Anancyism, broadly conceived as commitment to trickery, deception and underhandedness.

In another column (January 9), 'Some cultural obstacles to development', inspired by Kevin O'Brien Chang's nice vibes book, Jamaica Fi Real: Beauty, Vibes and Culture, I noted, we are fighting the Economy; and the Economy is fighting us back, because we do not have a moral and cultural base for producing more 'goods' than 'bads'.

Everywhere we look, including around our Caribbean neighbourhood, the development we envy is based on a kind of cultural discipline and self-control which are extraordinarily lacking in Jamaica but of which we are fully capable, as in sports and artistic performance - and when we work abroad.

Let us start with something simple (nothing big like the rammy sex culture which seems to be bothering the family-man prime minister), but something of the most profound consequence: Our 'soon-come' attitude towards time. What are we not late for in this country? We sort of just drift towards the start of things, exceptionally proud of our 'Jamaica time' as part of the culture.

Jamaica is the greatest excuse factory on the planet. And we have invented a cute cultural phrase for it: "We are working on it."

And related to the manufacture of excuses, which we have down to a precise science, is the failure to take responsibility which has its own cute cultural expressions. "The bus lef mi." "The plate mash." "Mi nuh get the subject." "Storm mash up mi gully bank house fi the third time and guvament haffi help mi." And from our leaders: "IMF: Is not My Fault."

The political and economic manoeuvres alone by political leaders, who won't even turn up on time for sittings of Parliament and at all for meetings of parliamentary committees, will not bring us the development to which we aspire without attending to these 'habits of the heart', as sociologist Robert Bellah has termed them.

Since starting this column in 1987, there has been an explosion of media, particularly on the broadcast side. With a wide range of possibilities open to it, Jamaican radio seems to be either spinning music or running a lengthening list of talk shows, and TV is heavily into the business of news analysis.