The great divide

This is the third instalment of Edward Seaga's contribution to the recent Prime Ministerial Reflections series.

The gap in the interdigitated structure of the two Jamaicas is closing on all fronts, but too slowly. In systems of governance, populism continues to show strength because the economy continues to show weakness. System and order are creeping into haphazard management, but indiscipline is broader and deeper. Corruption continues to spread from strength to strength in financial schemes and other operational modes. Every man, it seems, has his price, because it is every man for himself in a society of greed. The frills of the society indicate progress, but the fundamentals do not. 'Politics' reigns supreme with self-interest at the core. Youth are polarising: entrenching the worst and intensifying the best. Women are Jamaica's stars. Their future is Jamaica's future. How things have changed, but not always for the better!

I can see clearly now the reasons for a no-growth, low-growth, stagnant economy. The economic gains were never given a chance to be consolidated and accumulated. They were wiped away, sometimes for ideological reasons, at other times by the intense desire to deny paternity for progress to others, or to claim innovation for self. This is the political culture. Twice the economy reached robust levels (in the late 1960s and 1980s), and twice it was ambushed by the reckless policies of an alien ideology and the bungling of repentant socialists, reluctant capitalists. But most damaging of all was the failure to maintain the policy of a pegged exchange rate, adopted in all the more successful economies of the region, preferring to follow the few who were riding the slippery slope of an erratic, plunging exchange rate. This helped to create a prolonged, stagnant, failed economy unknown anywhere else among the English-speaking countries of the region and most other economies elsewhere.

Days of greater glory

Meanwhile, regional and global schemes that would fail any cost-benefit test on the protection of Jamaica's interests are gullibly swallowed and forcefully promoted. Even if the body is now independent, the mind, it seems, is not. Every misconceived change is a starting-over in which the loser is the Jamaican economy with bigger sacrifices to try to catch up. It has not returned to the days of greater glory.

These demotivational disruptions were in good part a product of some virulent sources of instability. In the 1970s, racialism was introduced as a driving force for seismic change by equating wealth and race so that those who were receptive to the urgings to blame the wealth of others for their poverty would blame race too. The powerful underlying force of racial discrimination was not based on entirely false assumptions. The truth was deeply rooted in the centuries of slavery in which layers of inhumanity overlaid each other. Marcus Garvey had uncovered the false wrappings and laid bare the intolerances that kept different racial groups apart, frustrating the social strivings for betterment, shortening the ladder to climb over the walls of discrimination. The intolerance of justice was at fault, but so, too, were threats and demands for simultaneous radical social action on all options. Festina lente (make haste slowly) was the surest way to success.

The problem was in the means to the end. The solution was not in pulling down, but pulling up. Pulling apart the layers of racialism was not a matter of peeling, and unwrapping layer by layer. The layers were interdigitated with antisocial rejections. Separating the layers was a complex and delicate process. Inevitably, this would uncover the social embitterment of disrespect that aggravates the complex problems of the social order. Pulling up avoided this disintegration.

The process of pulling up to earn more is best driven by systems to learn more. All societies thrive on educational training to create a productive labour force, from which some technology and some entrepreneurship can emerge to promote growth. A society with a failed education system cannot generate products of merit with a claim to economic value, social respect and national pride. There is no educated country that is poor, and no poor country that is educated. That is the key.

In a dysfunctional education system in which more than 70 per cent of graduates are failures, frustration and anger are the outcomes if the oppressive social system cannot be pulled down and the education system cannot be pulled up; if the economy is shackled by limited opportunities for producing legitimate wealth and the disrespected masses have ladders that are too short to scale the walls of deprivation, the inevitable recourse is the illegal routes of illegitimate pursuits: crime and drugs. Check the corners in inner-city communities and the shop steps in rural areas and the 'wutless boys' and 'careless gals' will be found.

Malfunctioning education system

Far more disillusioned young people are being produced annually by a malfunctioning education system than the limited means of economic betterment can absorb. While most fit into the manpower needs uncomfortably, one way or the other, a good many are misfits ready for solutions that are an easy way out.

One way to circumvent this conundrum, in part, is migration. Jamaicans have always been a migrating people determined never to be held down by shortcomings at home. But the process of migration selects from the middle and the top, not from the bottom. So the misfits will still remain. What then will be the outcome?

From my own work expressed in my inaugural lecture at the UWI in May 2005, on the 'Folk Roots of Jamaican Cultural Identity', I can depict the conclusion:

... There is a counterculture of growing depth and strength. It is composed of those who have strayed from the stabilisation of their families and have abandoned the faith of their fathers. They have become rootless and, therefore, ruthless, relying only on their upbringing to guide them in the use of might to secure right at any cost, because in their isolation, they see themselves as 'done dead a'ready'.

This dynamic is to be found among young people who have shallow religious roots, are detached from civil society, distanced from the traditions of the family, impatient with frustrating economic barriers and deprived of social space, creating their own order rooted in their own values and imperatives. They translate this into a way of life honouring respect, power, money, sex and, where necessary, the retribution of violence and death. They exist in a counterculture which has broad support without theology, ideology or even social commitment. It is individualistic and impulsive, deeply grounded in an expressive, creative self. As such, it carries a powerful base of cultural release which has solidly captured a generation of youth as a renegade route to respect. The indicators of success emphasise material wealth. This culture allows those with few resources to access the bling-bling indicators of material success, ensuring that they can never be ignored. Dancehall is the musical expression of these realities.

This counterculture is counterpoised to the culture of the traditional Jamaican society, setting in motion a tussle for containment or dominance.

Those who live in traditional Jamaica have never had the assertiveness of a free people able to redefine their identity. Indeed, since Emancipation, apart from the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 which tried to define new entitlements for the poor, the assertiveness of redefined concepts of race, colour, workers' rights and nationhood had to await the strident advocacy of the black consciousness of a Marcus Garvey more than 50 years later, followed by the islandwide protests for workers' rights led by Alexander Bustamante and the struggle for constitutional and political reforms championed by Norman Manley, to peel away some of the layers of self-denial and dependency.

Unwitting social statement

A further quote amplifies the dynamic role of culture in the maturing of Jamaican society:

The role of folk culture in defining the traditional society of Jamaica has been an unwitting social statement of being, a celebration of the African aesthetic in religion, medicinal practices, food and drink, in song and dance, gestated under slavery, which characterises downtown as different from uptown, differentiates urban and rural and defines the difference between a more Eurocentric culture and an African heritage, mirroring the split between the modern and traditional societies of the two Jamaicas.

The traditional society is a cultural well-spring of historic wisdom, a cradle of heritage, the crucible of an entrapment of poverty out of which have emerged artistic and athletic giants and the rewarding achievements of those who were forged by determination to overcome the hardships of life's experiences.

Others seek respect from learning and earning, despite the shortcomings of a society which has never succeeded in educating the poor. They commit themselves to achievement and self-pride through work. Their success has stamped the identity of Jamaicans as able to achieve, capable of rising with excellence to the top in the arts and entertainment, athletics, scholarship, enterprise, science, politics and almost a candidate for the presidency of the United States. The creativity and achievements of many have imprinted the face of Jamaica on the map of the world. To them, 'Every respect is due.'

Most Jamaicans in traditional society stamp their characteristics of cultural identity as a people of deep and abiding faith in the ancient wisdom of the roots of their heritage and the divine guidance of their God, securing a stable space in life where they live with respect and in respect. It is they who have planted the strongest, deepest roots of all in the stable culture of the society.

The wealth of religious denominations in Jamaica indicates the wish of folk society to have a religious experience that respects who they are, whether it be the black God of Rastafari, a personalised liturgy as in the 'spiritual' churches, or even as an indicator of high social status, as is demonstrated by membership in the 'established churches'.

In this characterisation, traditional Jamaicans continue to hope that there is a better life to come and that it will descend from above. It is testimony to the dominant base of stability in the pattern of life in Jamaican folk society in which believers will wait and wait for the promised day and entry into the Promised Land. There is no more powerful characterisation of Jamaican folk society than this expression of abiding faith.

Again I quote from 'The Folk Roots of Cultural Identity':

A sense of justice is also fundamental to the Jamaican psyche. There is good reason for this. Respect and justice go hand in hand. Justice is an unrequited need; respect is a badge of honour. 'Is injustice'; 'is disadvantage'; 'is disrespect' are familiar cries. There is a sense of natural law defining justice in Jamaican society which demands that 'respect due' always.

The strength of this pervasive sense of justice is one of the true stabilisers in Jamaican life as well as an effective dynamic which guarantees the democratic process, for though the crime be unjust, the penalty must be just. Extreme anger very often determines otherwise, but a deep sense of justice is more so the rule than the exception in the Jamaican psyche.

This natural law of justice incorporates a legal basis but also involves a wider concept of social justice which itself includes all manner of wrongs: bad roads, lack of water, poor schools, and uncaring medical attention are as much an injustice as an act of state terror, because it is an offence against those who have neither wealth nor privilege to protect themselves.

Through the eyes of folk society, the concept of injustice does not fully include the plight of the rich and powerful. It is felt that they must fend for themselves. In underprivileged Jamaica, where crossing over to a better life is an obstacle course of shackles, injustice is anything that makes life harder, while so many enjoy it. This sets the tone for the wide gap between the two Jamaicas.

Read the final instalment in next Sunday's In Focus section.

Edward Seaga is a former prime minister. He is now chancellor of the University of Technology and a distinguished Fellow at the University of the West Indies. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and odf@uwimona.com.