29 March 2001, 814 words
In the public discourse in Trinidad and Tobago, I notice that there are certain wrong concepts, assertions and beliefs which crop up quite regularly. Whether it is in letters to the editor, newspaper columns and articles, or lectures by academics, the same set of nonsense is repeated time and time again. So I thought it might be useful to highlight some of these erroneous ideas in one column, explaining why they are wrong. (Not that I expect my explanations to eliminate them: I am, after all, vastly outnumbered by the ignorant.)
*Western values: The call to reject Western values almost invariably comes from our ethnocentrists, both Indo and Afro. Most of the time, what they mean by "Western values" is confined to consensual sex between adults who aren't married. But Western civilisation is based on three major concepts: democracy, rule of law, and individual rights. So when somebody calls for Western values to be rejected, they are invariably proposing a totalitarian alternative.*Ancestral identity: The above ties in with the ethnocentric argument that nobody can have a true identity unless they cleave to their ancestral ties. Trouble is, there never was any homogenous ancestral identity and, besides, cultural identity can be relevant only when formed in response to environmental demands. Obviously, the cultural identity of our ancestors of hundreds or thousands of years ago in lands far, far away are hardly relevant to us here and now.
This irrelevance explains why those who most cleave to ancestral identities are the most insecure, venal, irrational and bitter of people. In other words, cleaving to an ancestral identity actually seems to harm one's sense of self and self-worth.
*Rose-coloured past: This is a milder form of the ancestral illusion. One psychologist (a group, by the way, which is second only to religious fundamentalists in promoting ignorance) claims that "We are a society that has lost discipline, moral values, integrity and spirituality." She was talking about domestic violence, so you'd think that the abuse of women was actually worse in yesteryear. In fact, there is nothing in Trinidad's history to suggest that we were any more civilised 30 or 60 or 100 years ago.*Male resentment: Men beating and killing women is supposedly because men are angry over women getting jobs and becoming more independent. This has become a secular catechism among local feminists.
Has anyone done any research to prove this causal link? No. Do men go about grumbling about women getting all the jobs? No. The issue of violence against women has far more complex causes, rooted in biology (genetic strategies expressed in how men and women choose mates) and economics (education and employment) and culture (particularly religion, which teaches that women are inferior). But our feminists and psychologists are either too lazy or too incompetent to do the necessary research which would lead to effective solutions.
*Noble savage: Simpler human societies are supposedly more harmonious and peaceful than modern ones. Catholic fundamentalist Professor Courtenay Bartholomew, trying to prove how our society has degenerated, says that in 1945 this country had only 20 murders, 50 in 1950, and 118 in 2000. Of course, as Bartholomew well knows, this proves absolutely nothing: one has to look at percentages, not totals, in order to determine how much worse the murder rate is. That is why foraging societies seem to have so little violence: being so small, a rapid murder rate would quickly decimate them all. But, calculated over a proper period of time, one finds the murder rates of such bands to actually be the same, or higher, than that of metropolitan cities - e.g. the !Kung San, a relatively peaceful African tribe, have a murder rate only as high as Detroit's.*Media causes violence: Not only has no study demonstrated a conclusive link between media and violence, but a little common sense alone would show the fallacy: human beings were killing, torturing, raping and maiming one another many millennia before action movies, rap music and porn magazines. More pertinently, the most violent areas of the world today are <I>not<I> the ones with a TV set in every household.
*Evolutionary theory is flawed: The people who make this claim usually use the Big Lie: saying that evolutionary biologist themselves have confessed that there is no scientific basis for evolution. They also never quote any actual facts to support their assertion. If evolution were false, such facts would be quite easy to find - e.g. an organism not produced by natural selection; a species which evolved a trait that lends an advantage to some other species and none to itself; an advantageous trait that was the result of one huge mutation instead of many tiny ones over a long period of time.
No such counter-evidence has ever been discovered.
Copyright © 2001 Kevin Baldeosingh