Ian Boyne, Contributor
THERE WAS a lot of discussion last week about the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) Church's decision to review its policy on funerals in light of increasing concerns about the behaviour of certain persons, particularly from the inner cities, on these occasions.
The wearing of outrageous dancehall fashion - a tautology - the smoking of ganja, drinking of liquor on church premises and general unruly behaviour at what is traditionally a solemn occasion where the dead is honoured, has been proving too much for the conservative Christian denomination. The latest dancehall gyrations taken to the staid SDA church at the Bogle funeral, as well as the thunderous 'shout-out' which greeted the arrival to the dancehall heroes, plus the shooting incident at the church when inner-city MP Omar Davies had to be spirited away, have all highlighted the erosion of traditional values taking place right before our eyes.
BREAKDOWN IN NORMS
These incidents can't be discussed in isolation. It is all part of what the late Professor Carl Stone in 1992 called the breakdown of traditional norms and values without a new set to replace them. Stone, in fact, even before Don Robotham, in a seminal paper in 1992 ('Values, Norms and Personality development in Jamaica') had identified this rejection of the traditional values as a serious social issue facing us, in light of the society's not finding a set of values which could find support among all classes.
The anthropologist M.G. Smith had been talking long before about 'the two Jamaicas' and was later joined by Edward Seaga. The inner-city women who dress like prostitutes at funeral services, smug in the shock value of their nakedness and daring (usually the only notice they get from middle class society) are flaunting their rejection of the society's norms and standards. It is a bold cultural assertion of the right of the subculture to define its own space and values.
As Jamaican political scientist Obika Gray says in his excellent book Demeaned But Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor in Jamaica, the Power "of the disadvantaged groups who seem able to dictate the cultural direction of the society, all highlight a decisive shift in the social balance of power from the respectable middle class to the culturally defiant and irrepressible urban poor."
What the Adventist parsons and others from the middle classes, as well as conservative working class people are wringing their hands over what is being celebrated by university intellectuals like Carolyn Cooper, Cecil Gutsmore and Kingsley Stewart. (The positions of Donna Hope and Annie Paul are more nuanced). These vociferous defenders of dancehall culture fail to see the grave sociological and political implications of the subculture's nihilistic norms and values.
But as the highly astute Professor Gray says in his book Demeaned but Empowered: "Worrisome from the standpoint of social renewal is the urban poor's rejection of the norm of civility." This socially powerful group's withdrawal in favour of self-enclosure inside a nihilistically oriented counter-society opposed to
public law and conventions of social morality raises serious
questions for all reformers. All of this, of course, would be lost on Cooper, Gutsmore and Stewart.
VIOLENCE NOW COMMONPLACE
It is futile to urge people to have respect for the dead when they have no respect for the living! Violent, brutal death is so commonplace to these residents of the inner-city, where small children can play scrimmage around the dead, and where so many die young, that for them death is not as tragic and unusual as it is in middle class society. That some people can be busy selling on church premises while funerals are going on is yet another display of the predominance of the 'Money Oh' culture of the inner city, as reinforced by the dancehall.
Ordinary Jamaicans don't realise the extent to which there is major clash of values in Jamaica. Sometimes when I hear middle class Jamaicans making pious pleas to criminals to 'respect the sanctity of human life' and not to 'take the life of a youth who could be the next prime minister or the doctor who could find the solution to AIDS', I cringe at the naivety. We live in the same country, but we don't inhabit the same cultural and philosophical world.
I heard Omar Davies recently telling some talk-show hosts that he was amazed when talking to some residents in his garrison constituency to hear them speak so casually and matter-of-factly about some guys who just had to die at a worksite because they were holding back progress. Davies said the guys, without any emotion, were explaining clinically and analytically why the guys who had been murdered just had to be eliminated. These guys' values system is radically different from Omar Davies'.
The champions of the lumpen proletariat and the ghetto youth who spurn 'middle class values' and ask indignantly, "Who gives the middle class the right to determine what the values should be; who made them the moral arbiters?" of course, don't want to go all the way with the subculture's display of liberation from middle class values. Why hold to the middle class values of the sanctity of each individual life? Why not make a few duppies?
TIME FOR REFLECTION
How do you know that each individual life is sacrosanct? How do you as a secular humanist ground the belief that each and every human life is inviolable and has intrinsic value? At Easter time, the most sacred period for traditional Christians, it is appropriate that we do some reflections on Christianity as it relates to the values crisis in Jamaica.
I have stated that one does not have to be a Christian or religious to hold to the view that there are objective values, and to have a high view of morality. There are highly moral atheists and agnostics, but religious ethics provides a stronger philosophical base for morality. In fact, it is a curious thing that many agnostics and atheists who loudly disavow religion and are even hostile to it are intellectual parasites in so far as the religious traditions are concerned.
"The point is not that morality cannot survive the death of God. Indeed, there are many moralities. The serious question is whether the morality constituted by the claim that each and every human being is inviolable which includes any morality constituted by the morality of human rights can survive the death (or deconstruction) of God," says Professor Michael Perry in his major paper, 'The Morality of Human Rights: A Nonreligious Grounding' in a recent Emory Law Journal (vol. 54). In the tightly reasoned paper, part of a book project titled, 'Human Rights as Morality, Human Rights as Politics', Perry says, "The claim that all human beings have inherent dignity needs to be defended. Why do human beings have inherent dignity? In virtue of what do all human beings have it?" Excellent question.
As the country loses its grip on traditional Christian values and as more and more youth are outside the pale of the Sunday and Sabbath school movement, and are instead being socialised by the dancehall and American pop and hedonistic culture, money becomes the greatest value. Human beings are expendable in the process. The 'shottas' reason that the big man is himself immoral, corrupt and just a bigger criminal so 'a nuh nutten' if they should 'dust a bwoy' to get ahead. They are doing nothing different from the big man they reason. The fact that politicians and 'other big people in society' have hired killers has also created a serious credibility problem.
Christianity and Rastafari no longer have the hold it used to have on many persons - though I strongly welcome the return of the Rastaman to dancehall prominence - and therefore the inner cities are being turned over to outlawry, anarchy and nihilism. At Easter, traditional Christians would do well to seriously think about their role in the society today. The materialistic health and wealth gospel is no help to a society already drunk on false values.
MATERIALISTIC CULTURE
Our people are being fooled by the cultural imperialists and by consumerist propaganda that a man's life consists of the abundance of the things which he possesses when Jesus said the very opposite.
The great existentialist and atheistic philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche predicted the dire consequences which would overtake society after what he called the death of God. Said Nietzsche: "The masses blink and say: 'We are all equal before God - we are all equal. But now this God has died'." (Thus spoke Zarathustra). So who decides whose values will carry the greater weight? Who decides that it is these conservative Adventist people and others who should dictate how people should dress, behave around the dead and send off their loved ones? Whose values will rule?
"We cannot give up the Christian God and go on as before," opines Glenn Tinder in his book, The Political Meaning of Christianity: An Interpretation "Many would like to think there are no consequences that we can continue treasuring the life and welfare, the civil rights and political authority of every person without believing in God who renders such attitudes and conduct compelling. Nietzsche shows that we cannot. Thus the spiritual centre of Western politics fades and vanishes."
The crisis of values in Jamaica is a part of an overall crisis of values in the post-modernist West, which has rejected all mata-narratives, religious and secular, is in an end-of-ideology phase, rudderless philosophically. As I asked last year, can Christianity be resurrected?
Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist. You can send your comments to ianboyne1@yahoo.com or infocus@gleanerjm.com
