In a normative funk

Below is a reprint of a column written by Wilmot Perkins and published in The Daily Gleaner on Tuesday, April 14, 1981. 'Motty' died on Friday, February 10, 2012, aged 80.

The incident the other evening at the National Stadium in which two youngsters from two of Jamaica's leading secondary schools precipitated an occasion of sport into a brawl, in which several persons were injured and which led to the termination of the meet, raises again the question of the Calibanisation of Jamaican life.

I have been amazed to find, speaking to responsible persons at both institutions, that while it is admitted that the conduct of the boys was, in both cases, inexcusable, attempts were made on both sides to offer what in fact amounted to excuses. I was told, for example, about a "bias of officials fostering the interests in one school above the other", resulting in one boy being impelled to "take the law into his own hands".

I cannot imagine any of the matters at any school to which I went taking such a view of such a matter. Indeed, I can hardly imagine such a matter occurring in the days when I was in school. Those were the days when the secondary schools were, in the jargon of today's politics, elitist institutions. It happened a little before my time, but the memory of it was still fresh: an entire football team was caned by the headmaster of Jamaica College (JC) for having given their opponents in a Manning Cup match a 10-nil drubbing. That, he is reputed to have said, was not the act of gentlemen.

In those old days, one needn't have done anything nearly as gross as initiating a public riot at the National Stadium, transforming a field of sport into a field of blood0, to have found oneself instantly out on one's ear. Now, I am told by a headmaster, boys in his school involved in organised gambling tell him that that "is in their blood". It is what they see and engage in at home.

A fight in school these days is as likely as not to involve a knife. The owner says he is from a ghetto area, and needs it for protection, which doesn't explain his using it in a fight at school. He tells me that in such cases, the boy is usually suspended. Apparently, it is as difficult to expel a boy from school these days as it is to fire a civil servant.

easy pickings for politicians

The ghetto has invaded and conquered where elitism once reigned supreme: not because of the democratisation of opportunity, but because of the democratisation of standards. It is one thing to take the ghetto youth and put him into Wolmer's or JC, Kingston College or Calabar with the idea of making an educated gentleman of him: another entirely to put him there as a source of infection, a means of debasing the mores of society to a single common denominator.

The manners and habits of the ghetto are appropriate to the ghetto and to nowhere else. Ghetto people used themselves to be acutely sensitive to this, until the professional loudmouths discovered that there were easy pickings to be made 'mau-mau-ing' the trembling middle classes, at least the politicians.

One Mr Feathermop made a notable career of this until hubris betrayed him. He was a man of no discretion. Success made him overbearing. His too-vaulting ambition and want of caution led him to an early and violent end.

The ghetto, I believe, looked with disapproval on the whole affair. Stories circulated about Feather planting his hand in this one's face and heaving bricks through such and such a car window; and my impression is that while poor people retailed them with fascination, it was also with horrified disappointment. That was not the quotient they expected their political process to yield, nor the out-turn they looked for from the leadership in which they had invested.

Ask yourself this question: why is it that the ghetto has never settled political leadership on the likes of Feathermop, or come anywhere near to doing so? Why has it increasingly looked to the product of JC and Wolmer's and Munro and St Simon's of 40 years ago?

ghettoising society

The ghetto man wants to escape the ghetto; and he looks to the political process, and to a middle-class leadership, to point him the way out of it. One raft of clueless politicians thought that the answer to his problem was to ghettoise the entire society. In this they were even more powerfully prompted by Freud than by Marx.

Freudism is only now working its way through this society. We have at last discovered the unconscious and been moved to explore and implement in full its social and political implications. If man is but a bark, buffered by fearful storms raging out of the unconscious, how can he be held responsible for anything he does? How can he be justly punished for infraction of rules when he may have been driven to the infraction by unconscious forces over which he had no control?

A psychiatrist friend of mine tells me that his role is "to understand rather than to react or condemn". With the spread of Freudian ideas, this has in fact become the posture of society itself; except that society, unlike the psychiatrist, is constantly being persuaded of its own guilt. Freud has disfocused attention from the act itself and its consequences for society, to focus it upon the process by which the act was brought about.

Murder is no longer unquestionably the issue, but the convoluted psychological process which led from the baby being left alone in his crib at the age of two months to the man immolating his wife in the bath at the age of 40; or rather, our speculation about them. They are, in the nature of things, unprovable.

Similarly, the focus is not on the barbarously unsportsmanlike conduct at the National Stadium. That, admittedly, is inexcusable; said in the manner of a first trick conceded at the bridge table when the small slam is a lay-down. What we must understand is what led the lads to behave as they did.

Moreover, the ghetto man has plausibly been the victim of social circumstances. 'The system' has operated to his disadvantage; condemned him to poverty and to his experience of brutality. How can he, in general, be expected to achieve standards determined within the more privileged strata of society?

The law itself is an instrument of oppression, imposing upon the ghetto man constraints that are extraneous to his own culture. At which point cultural relativity rises to assert that value itself, being culturally determined, cannot be applied across cultural boundaries. Ghetto values are as valid as any other set of values. And the ghetto unconscious naturally swirls with different winds from those of Barbican. All of which leaves us in a normative funk.

But that is middle-class reasoning - an excuse for the failure of middle-class leadership. The ghetto man never heard of Freud. For him, a man is still responsible for what he does; and society still needs to be protected from some of the things men do. And given a chance, he would want to send his son to the JC of 40 years ago to become a gentleman.