Ian Boyne, Contributor
THE MORAL and cultural issues are more decisive than the economic in addressing Jamaica's social crises, including crime and violence. Curtailing crime in the inner cities will call for more than Andrew Holness' $1 billion social intervention programmes.
But let's get some things out of the way first, before strawmen are created to be heroically destroyed. There is an obvious, undeniable connection between poverty, unemployment, social deprivation and crime and violence. If the connection were not obvious, why is it that most of the perpetrators of violence are from the inner cities? If the inner-city conditions of poverty and joblessness don't breed crime and violence, then why are Jamaicans in those conditions prone to crime to a greater extent than those in Cherry Gardens, Norbrook, Beverly Hills, Jacks Hill or Havendale and Meadowbrook? Are the people in the inner cities genetically different from those in middle-class communities?
Clearly, economic deprivation breeds crime. There are inner-city youth who, if they had the opportunity to get an education, a job and the dignity and respect which come from that, would choose that over working with dons or doing illegal hustling.
So Holness' suggestion is necessary - but not sufficient. The problem with the political elite is that its vision is not comprehensive. Its vision is largely economistic. The elite only thinks in terms of throwing money at problems. It sees economics as the answer to almost every problem. It does not understand that historically capitalism has been built on a solid moral foundation.
Many disciples of Adam Smith have heard about Smith's seminal work, The Wealth of Nations, the capitalist bible, but few know of his work called The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Adam Smith was a moral philosopher.
HEDONISTIC CAPITALISM
The early capitalists, as the sociologist Max Weber pointed out, were Christians, largely Calvinists, who believed that work was worship and that the way to honour God was to use resources judiciously, to save and to reinvest. That built capitalism. Max Weber developed his now famous Protestant Ethic theory of the origins of capitalism, pointing to the importance which the early capitalist put on the postponement of gratification which created the surplus to build capitalism.
Contemporary American capitalism has now taken a 180-degree turn and is largely narcissistic and hedonistic with catastrophic consequences. The decline of the American dollar and that government's worrying budget and current account deficits and growing debt are related to the low savings rate in the American economy and its cultural turn to hedonism. (Contrast that with the Chinese high savings rate).
Is it coincidental that it is the Asian nations with their strong Confucian ethic of hard work, postponement of gratification, personal savings and future-orientation which are the fastest growing nations in the world? And that Singapore is the most globalised nation in the world?
The late left-wing social critic Christopher Lasch in his famous book The Culture of Narcissism wrote that, "The pursuit of self-interest, formerly identified with the rational pursuit of gain and the accumulation of wealth, has become a search for pleasure and psychic's survival ... To live for the moment is the prevailing passion ... to live for yourself, not for your posterity." It is that same culture of narcissism and this-generation-only focus which is largely responsible for rape of the environment. Whenever societies lose their moral or ideological vision and begin to be consumed by pleasure or economistic concern, decline and collapse are on the way.
An excellent book which grippingly describes the problems of American narcissistic society, which is the dominant cultural influence in Jamaica, is Jeremy Rifkin's 450-page, The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream.
THE MYTH OF WEALTH CREATION
Professor Don Robotham in his 1998 Grace Kennedy Foundation lecture, 'Vision and Voluntarism', dismisses the myopic view of "sincere business leaders" that merely focusing on wealth creation as a national goal is the way to go. As Robotham insightfully puts it, "The economic goals, therefore, presuppose that the moral goals have been articulated and have taken root at least among a substantial minority of the leaders in the society. There is thus no escaping the challenge of trying to formulate this positive vision for Jamaica in moral terms." And here I have to make another disclaimer.
In talking about positing a moral vision for the nation, one is not necessarily talking about religion. While many Christians might not be aware of this, morality is not necessarily coterminous with Christianity or even religion. There can be a viable secular morality, though it might be more tenuous philosophically than a religiously-based moral vision. There are atheists and agnostics who believe in objective moral standards and who are firmly against corruption, promiscuity and hedonism. I am not one of those naïve Christians who deny that. I recommend two recent publications by atheistic philosophy professors, Tara Smith's Viable Values and Erik Wallenberg's Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe as excellent examples of atheistic works which espouse a strong atheistic moral vision.
The people who push economics as the major factor influencing crime must answer the stubborn fact as to why the majority of poor people are not criminals. Any why the poorest countries in the world don't have the highest crime rates. These are facts which must be accounted for.
The people responsible for most of the violence in Jamaican inner-cities are not the most destitute people in those communities. Many clashes are gang and drug-related, some are related to politics and some involving self-esteem issues. Some idiots in East Kingston are warring because a dog was killed and they mistook the blood for human blood. The question more people must ask is, what is it that keeps most poor, educationally deprived people from violence and what can we do to help the others to be like them?
This is not to ignore the economic. Getting jobs and providing educational opportunities are critically important. The economy needs to have robust growth.We need to stress wealth creation. I accept these things unequivocally. It is the economistic people who are unbalanced and one-sided.
For more than 18 years on Profile I have done countless interviews with people who came from the most wretched of circumstances, with guns and anti-social behaviour all around them, and who managed to escape all of that to become wholesome, productive and highly accomplished citizens. Almost everyone pointed back to some moral vision, some moral training provided by parents, care-givers or the church. They believed in values and chose hunger and social deprivation over acquiring money and status through unethical means. We need to produce more people like that.
This Government--and no JLP Government will be radically different--will continue to follow fiscally conservative policies under the tutelage of the IMF and the World Bank, and under the glaring eyes of the rating agencies, the watchdogs of global capitalism. This Government and any incoming JLP Government will not be allocating any billions of dollars to the poor in the inner-cities. They might announce such projects but the money will not be forthcoming.
CULTIVATING A MORAL SOCIETY
This Government or any incoming JLP administration had better find ways to build a morally resilient people; people who can say no to corruption and illegality in the face of hunger, social exclusion and frustration; people who would prefer to go to bed hungry rather than shield a don; people who would prefer to make their grandmothers writhe in pain rather than take blood money for medicine.
We need people in customs who prefer to stay in Waltham Park or Jones Town rather than take bribes to live in Havendale or Swain Spring. We need young girls who prefer to stay in that exploitative fast-food outlet working for low wages rather than sleep around with Mr. Big Man to live in an apartment in the Golden Triangle.
We need people who, in the interest of the country, will "bust" on the drug pushers who are about to export millions of US dollars worth of drug despite the offer to to let off large sums on them. How many such "fools" do we have?
How many high-ranking expatriate police officers do we need to import to make the policeman struggling to send his girls to university not take the corrupt money from the don, the drug dealer or to cooperate with the dirty politician? Of course, we need better systems to catch the corrupt. But when you build a moral people; people committed to values which promote the community and the nation; values beyond narrow self-interests, you reinforce those systems and procedures.
Sometimes I chuckle to myself when I hear leading members of the secular elite speak passionately, without their realising how much the issues of values and morality are at the heart of their concerns.
Some weeks ago Wilmot Perkins was waxing eloquent about Janice Allen's mother who courageously stuck to the cause of justice despite the fact that she said police men offered her hundreds of thousands of dollars to drop the case. This poor, needy woman refused the money for the sake of justice for her dead daughter. Perkins adored her heroism.
But some other money-first Jamaicans would say she is a fool, for she could have some better gadgets in her house and money in the bank if she took the money, "for her daughter done dead already and can't come back". This woman believed there was something more important than money.
The woman who allegedly turned down the nurse's bribe of half a million dollars to drop the allegation of rape by the KPH doctor is another person who, if the story is true, put justice and morality before money. The same businessman who ridicules my morality-first view for his wealth-creation-first fixation does not want his underpaid workers to steal from him or stuff drugs in his export cargo to increase their "wealth creation". But if morality is expendable and not primary, why should that worker not use corrupt means to advance his wealth?
Why should the worker give a fair day's work rather than steal the boss' time to advance his "wealth creation" through hustling? There are youth in the inner-city who will continue to choose crime and violence over learning a trade, working for $3,000 a week, and young girls who will continue to prostitute themselves with uptown men, worsening our AIDS crisis, because they want to "Bling". It is not the economy. It is some form of ideology, some vision, some commitment to values and morality which lie at the heart of our struggle against crime, corruption and social decay.
The politicians - and the private sector - still don't get it.
Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist. You can send your comments to ianboyne1@yahoo.com or infocus@gleanerjm.com
