Shanty-town Law
by
John Maxwell
This article originally appeared in Jamaica Observer.
"It
is no accident that the areas of violence in Jamaica are sharply defined."
Truisms and clichés become truisms and clichés because
they express rules of experience - the probability that certain behaviours are
almost bound to have certain predictable effects. "Marry in haste," one says,
"repent at leisure."
Recently in Hartley Neita's collection of stories from old
Gleaners [newspapers], there was the tale of a man in St. Mary who was
so bothered by the plaster-cast on his broken ankle that he decided to cut the
damned thing off. You know what's coming, don't you?
At the end of the process he found he'd amputated his
foot.
According to Carl Stone's polls at the time, most
Jamaicans enthusiastically supported the Suppression of Crimes Act and the Gun
Court, (1974) and the State of Emergency (1976). Before we were very much
older, most of us were appealing piteously to be rid of these magic bullets,
which had been guaranteed to make us all safer and happier and would probably
cure teenage sex, bad breath and incontinence to boot.
Will we never learn?
We
disregard common sense warnings - from the Bible to John Stuart Mill and Mark
Twain to Louise Bennett, to go whoring after instant solutions that sound good
if we don't think about them too hard.
For
instance, the call for indefinite detention is an echo of the legislation for
the Gun Court declared unconstitutional not too long ago. Removal of Judges'
discretion reflects the so-called ‘Rape Act' provisions of 1964, found not too
long after to be oppressive and counter-productive.
I could go
on, but why?
Id over Superego
Sigmund
Freud may have been wrong about many things, but his theory of Id, Ego and
Superego seems destined to have validity for a little while yet, in describing
the areas of the psychic apparatus that govern our human behavior. The ID or "It" is the instinctive bundle
of reflexes at the base of our psyches (or minds).
IT/ID "is the
dark, inaccessible part of our personality... a chaos, a cauldron full of
seething excitations ... It is filled with energy reaching it from the
instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a
striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to
the observance of the pleasure principle."
It is the
place where our lusts hide, along with other primitive emotions like revenge
and greed but also all our basic drives for food, sex and our instinctive
altruism, sympathy and tender instincts. ID is not bad, simply untaught and
unorganized. Babies' minds are all id, according to Freud, amoral, egocentric,
satisfaction directed.
According
to Freud, "...The Ego is that
part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external
world ... The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in
contrast to the id, which contains the passions ... in its relation to the id
it is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength
of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own
strength, while the ego uses borrowed forces".
The Superego is a form of referee, the
public face of the mind, a kind of diplomatic representation of all the
conflicting urges mediated by external experience - a conscious construct from
the cultures we inhabit.
Part of the
charm of ordinary life lies in the innocence of much of human behavior,
moderated by what we have learned as we grow up, driven by our need for
acceptance, love, respect and so on. All these things become more
sophisticated, more subtle, more rounded and less clumsy as we mature.
Some
authorities now believe that it isn't until about age 24 that physical development
of the brain is more or less complete. That suggests that psychic maturity is
an even longer process than we thought. I myself believe that maturity is a continuing process and that we don't
stop learning/growing until we die.
If all or
even most of this is true, it seems clear to me that becoming truly human is a
very long-term process and that our educational systems, culminating in
University, are really all part of kindergarten. When we speak of people
mellowing we are in fact describing psychic maturation.
This in my
view logically leads to the need for a radical re-evaluation and transformation
of our educational systems, because, it seems to me, we are aborting the real
possibilities of civilization by neglecting the basic needs of human development.
Masters and Slaves
I have for
a very long time had a problem with Lord Acton's aphorism that "Power tends to corrupt, and
absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."
It seems to
me that absolute powerlessness is a much greater corrupter than absolute power.
In the first place, outside of slave societies, absolute power is not very
common.
However,
both inside and outside of slave societies, absolute powerlessness is the rule
for most of humanity who find themselves overwhelmed by forces natural and
artificial against whom it is almost impossible to exert any influence.
As
inheritors of a former slave society
today's Jamaica suffers from a long indoctrination in submission to superior
forces which can generally only be challenged by violence. The ruling classes
(an amalgam of the heirs of slave-owners and a motley aggregation of recruits
of all colors) and most of the rest of the population continue to behave as if
it is still 1837, during the so-called apprenticeship period before
Emancipation. A very large number of people still are unaware of their human
rights or at least, unaware that they can claim these rights. And many
among the ruling classes and just below
still behave as if they do not have to take the interests and feelings of the
majority into consideration.
These
attitudes are the products of a pervasive culture in which, from time to time,
the interests and passions of one class boil over, scorching the interests of
the others.
In the last
30 years, starting before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the forces of
finance capital launched a hostile takeover bid for the world, and, in places
like Jamaica, recruited a substantial quota of middle class people who bought
into the idea that if their lusts were attended to, health, wealth and
happiness would naturally follow for the "less fortunate."
That phrase
- "the less fortunate" - both conceals and exposes the real truth: that life in
a world ruled by finance capital is a lottery, a matter of chance, fortune, of
luck rather than ability or work.
So, people
like [former Jamaican Prime Ministers] P.J. Patterson and Edward Seaga were
able to believe, no doubt sincerely, that separating thousands of people from
their jobs was in their own best interests, and that somehow the people who had
worked to build Jamaica over 500 years were parasites who had to be taught to
work.
This
attitude went with a total disregard and disrespect for any development which
was not what I call, "Heavy Metal" and poured scorn on Pearnell Charles when he
suggested that in the interest of fair play and fair shares, those who were
capable only of manual labor should b given the chance to perform it.
Development
in this perspective is rather like General McArthur's campaign against the
Japanese: he simply skipped over islands of resistance if they didn't seem
significant, leaving unpacified,
Japanese soldiers who were still in a state of war decades after both
their Emperor, Hirohito, and McArthur had departed the scene.
The globalized development of Jamaica similarly simply
skipped islands of poverty and need within the society, abandoning them to the
elements, as it were.
Without
government and its services these places developed their own cultures, their
own rules and authorities - their own governance. It is no accident that the
areas of violence in Jamaica are sharply defined. Described as garrison
constituencies they have little to do with partisan politics but everything to
do with underdevelopment.
In these
places, the children are educated according to rules which are bizarre and
outlandish to some of us, just as some of the rules developed four millennia
ago by wandering nomads in the Egyptian desert seem bizarre and outlandish to
us. From this governance and from these rules, come the violence and antisocial
behavior we fear.
Indefinite
detention and mandatory sentences will not cure them. If we want to rescue
ourselves we first need to rescue those who are most at risk.
John
Maxwell a veteran Jamaican journalist. He has covered Caribbean affairs for
more than 40 years and is currently a columnist for The Jamaica Observer. He
can be contacted at jankunnu@gmail.com.
Copyright©2008
John Maxwell
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