Harold Crooks, Contributor
There are numerous cases of absolute poverty in rural Jamaica where an increasingly large percentage of the population live below the poverty line.- CARLINGTON WILMOT/FREELANCE PHOTOGRAPHER
A DANGEROUS and discredited doctrine was recently given new life by the University of the West Indies. It was rehashed by the Most Honourable Edward Seaga, Distinguished Fellow of the School of Graduate Studies and Research, in his inaugural lecture on the Folk Roots of Jamaica Cultural identity.
There, he argues that overcrowding, lack of food, poor school attendance and an aggressive and hostile environment characterising Jamaican folk culture are the obstacles which "screen out those with capability by a process of survival of the fittest". This false doctrine proposed by the early English social anthropologists about human development is called Social Darwinism. It is the application of Darwin's Theory of natural selection to the historical development of human society, laying emphasis on struggle and 'survival of the fittest'. They ranked European cultures on top of all others and provided pseudo-biological justification for racism, anti-semitism and imperialism old and new.
Countries adopting Social Darwinism as policy became anti-democratic and trampled on human rights. Some of its proponents included Nietzsche, Spengler, Mussolini, Hitler and assorted dictators of Latin America's 'banana republics'.
Besides our 'fittest', who become Mr. Seaga's "upward mobile achievers", folk culture also produces other personality types. These are the submissives, whom he equates with failure (i.e. the weak) and who later in his oversimplified typology become the 'sufferers'. There are also the 'hyper aggressives'. These two groups are shaped by 'insecurity' in the maturing adult due to early parental overindulgence, lack of scheduled feeding during infancy; protein deficiency, inconsistent and harsh discipline including aggressive reaction and excessive corporal punishment. More like a magician than an anthropologist, Mr. Seaga merely adds the earlier list of life's disablers to transform either his submissive or some unmentioned group into the 'fittest'.
WHO ARE THE HYPER AGGRESSIVES?
It is uncertain if the hyper aggressives are a part of our 'qualified labour force', private sector moguls or in prison. In any case, these cultural patterns would more likely deform the best of us than as he claims cultivate the best in us. Clearly Mr. Seaga has in his cause-and-effect psychiatric typology, created his own images of the fittests and of one-dimensional man. The latter being a passive sponge, consuming, ageing and dying after being pushed and pulled along a straight line by destructive character traits while burdened by the tyrannies of family life of folk culture.
The choice of such men, if they exist, are inside a bird's cage, not within a moral nor material rubric moulded by present predicaments and constant reordering of alternatives, while relentlessly trying to cope with life's unresolved dilemmas. They have no cross-cutting influential networks of significant and different others over space and time. These can have only tangential relevance, as the casual patterns in our folk culture are to be found only in the long past history of one-dimensional man, devoid of freedom of action to change in his world or to change it; unaffected by thousands of other formative, or overriding practices, which intervene daily to extinguish earlier traits. This is what Currie calls the fallacy of autonomy the belief that what goes on inside the family can be usefully separated from the forces that affect it from the outside the larger social contexts in which families are embedded.
DEALING IN TAUTOLGY
Inherent in Mr. Seaga's criterion of the fittest is that they have survived to become artists, politicians, entertainers and entrepreneurs, etc. It doesn't appear to matter if many are unprincipled exploiters of power and privilege who cherish their private interest above their public obligations. They are the fittest because they survived through struggle. They survived through struggle because they are the fittest. Attractive, but nonetheless, a tautology.
Contrary to Mr. Seaga's false thesis, it has often been attested to, that high achievers from folk culture/deprived circumstances, more often then not, had an influential family member: mother, teacher, friend or others who stamped upon the young adult, an inner sense of direction; strong enduring motivations to achieve, cooperation and consideration; a deep sense of caring, personal responsibility and spirituality.
In Mr. Seaga's over-deterministic this-then-that and either or arguments, national culture is forged either by folk culture or 'metropolitan influences'. There is no space for curry goat, hallucigenic herbs, chop suey, shish kebab nor those who bought them here. His folk culture is the beginning and end of our history. This is insularity and reductionism at its worst since meaning and integration are wrenched from all, leaving one-dimensional man who, buffeted by
his folk culture, loses his freedom and consequential personal responsibility. That is except his group of 'fittest' who resembles Nietzsche's superman, surviving in a Hobbsean world where "life is nasty brutish and short" to be tempered only by the authoritarian state, religion, power and "nuff respect".
The irony of all this is that the patters of Mr. Seaga's folk culture are supposed to serve some useful function or die away, so he needed to explain if folk culture is still serving the plantation barracks, a corrupt robber baron state or 'nice, nice Jamaica'.
DANGEROUS THEORY
This dangerous and internally inconsistent theory is, that by some mysterious process of super acceleration of Darwinian natural selection, which selects adaptive survival solutions for all living species over millennia, a 400-year-old folk culture is unnaturally creating social rejects of most of those who have been most acculturated and well habituated by its child rearing practices. Whatever the case, since man is never an empty slate, those who survive the inhumane practice enumerated by the astute Mr. Seaga seems to have either absorbed more 'useful' behaviour traits and attitudes outside folk culture, or there is much more consistent love and understanding during young adult life in folk culture than he would have us believe.
It is not surprising that the well-adjusted individual cannot be found anywhere on this stage. Is it not obvious that, if he's right, then the best of us who succeed do so, not because of such cultural practices and traits as he suggests, but more likely in spite of them?
In a society where men extol the virtues of wealth, power and status above all else, this incredible claim that those who successfully struggle to escape this "crucible of poverty" is to be explained by deformative child rearing practices, paves the way for individual poverty to become a vice but mass poverty a social good. That is, a machine to weed out the week and reproduce the fittest. Worse, it depends, if not deifies, current social, political and economic arrangements. As evidence that such doctrines still flourish, is a quote from J. Q. Wilson a Harvard University Professor and recent past Advisor to the U.S. Government: "Some combination of constitutional traits (i.e. Biological/genetic) and early family experiences account for more of the variations in the criminality of young persons than any other factor".
DISCRIMINATION
In equating human socio-economic and moral - political systems with that of all living species, this quite popular myth has led to widespread discrimination against the weak dispossessed, based upon arbitrary individualized and frequently gene based criteria associated with failure. This is an historical reality.
It's ideas like these, which make for so little sympathy for the weak, the unemployable, neurotics, psychotics and schiods: it's their fault. No wonder that we are failing to develop a caring, cooperative, inclusive and humane society; "Is saaf him saaf". No wonder that there is so much violence and that our first past the post, winner take all, dog eat dog politics have led us into this sorry state after 43 years. Let the fittest survive and the devil take the hindmost!
The bold explanations of how folk traits affect our identity offered by Mr. Seaga, poses an interesting contrast to his cautious/querulous euphemisms as he deconstructs our folk culture's exploitation by predatory politics (Grey) and its subsequent metamorphosis into inner-cities, garrisons and urban violence. The 'impulsive' and 'individualistic' traits of folk culture described by him earlier are the same traits of his now urbanized folk culture he later uses to describe 'ruthless people' "relying on their UPBRINGING to guide them in the use of might to secure respect and right at any cost because, in their isolation, they see themselves as "done de'd a'ready". These must be our dog-hearted criminals he is cautiously describing. Looking more like us than them, they exhibit many of our traits and that of folk culture, as they "rely on their upbringing as guide"; learned that "strength and power command respect" and the value of aggression; are frustrated by economic barriers"; "emphasize material wealth" and "honour, respect, power, money, sex and where necessary the retribution of violence". Who doesn't? They are however to be cast unto exilic space (Grey) of a 'counter-culture', because they have strayed, are a 'ruthless', 'rootless' people "who have abandoned the faith of their fathers".
Besides the now comfortable ensconced 'fittests', in the upper echelons of society, at long last there appears to be something normal about the people of our folk culture. But alas they are our criminals!
Now as Mr. Seaga defines culture as "the totality of beliefs, behaviour and values which shapes and is shaped by humanity" it does appear to strain logic, shatter his definition and shake anthropology to claim that such people "exist in a counter-culture". They have absorbed so much of the clearly criminogenic traits of folk culture and are exhibiting so much of our core values. It was not long ago that these descendants of our folk culture migrated in waves to Kingston and were transfigured into militant gunmen or corpses under the influence of organized political violence, and mass deprivation in unplanned squatter settlements. Since history is the sieve of culture, such defining matters are skirted around at great peril to scholarship, relevance and social utility.
Despite this critique Mr. Seaga has revealed many deep insights into our disparaged adaptive and kaleidoscopic folk culture. These revelations are however best understood as features of the more embracing culture of poverty. The structural features of which has provided solutions without which the poor could hardly survive. This has great explanatory force and relevance to our condition.
Less its civilising African retentions and its persistent linguistic adaptations almost every practice Mr. Seaga explained can be described by poverty. Emphasis on solidarity of the extended family is a safety devise; they demand respect and justice because they have so little; have a strong present time orientation because there is no future and pin their hopes on religion because its their only hope of better things to come.
Great grief and little good have come of mass poverty and the traits of folk culture enumerated by Mr. Seaga. To say otherwise is to romanticize suffering. It is surprising that not a voice in academia has refuted this disturbing and erroneous theory.
