31 January 2002, 839 words
In one of my columns (titled "Wonderful World") I wrote that the sea squirt starts life as an animal and ends it as a plant. Professor Julian Kenny, who recently joined the thin ranks of rationalist newspaper columnists (if the four of us qualify as a rank), pointed out to me that the sea squirt does enter a plant-like cycle in which it consumes its own brain, but its genus doesn't actually change.
In a more recent column ("A Gospelypso for Patrick") I said that no calypsonian had sung an anti-PNM calypso in 2002. Errol "Bally" Ballantyne passed by the Express office to tell me that Heather Macintosh in "You Ent Think" had done exactly that.
I appreciated these corrections, because I abhor getting facts wrong. I realise that my errors are trivial but, when you respect the facts, it is psychologically difficult to pick and choose which facts to respect and which to ignore. This is why, unlike Anand Ramlogan, I could never be a good lawyer.
Unfortunately, many commentators and even some supposed experts make little or no effort to research the facts before making pronouncements on social issues and policies. The nation's calypsonians, for the most part, accurately reflect such intellectual carelessness.
The most egregious example I heard in this year's Carnival was a song by Composer called 'Douglarisation' saying that it was against the laws of God and evolution for the races to mix: an assertion that reveals an ignorance of both theology and biology.
Less egregious, but typically ignorant, was Sugar Aloes singing that parents should be locked up when their children commit crimes. One can hardly expect Aloes to know that juvenile delinquents are not made by poor parenting but by a materialistic, ignorant and violent adult culture - of which Aloes himself is a prime symbol.
But I don't blame Aloes for his mistaken recommendation: after all, exactly the same solution has been proposed by social psychologist Ramesh Deosaran, the man most likely to inform social policy to battle crime in Trinidad and Tobago and who, given his field, one would expect to be up-to-date on the latest socialisation theories.
I do, however, blame Chalkdust for his calypso suggesting that banning corporal punishment for school children would result in more crime. When you remember that it is persons like him and former primary school principal Roy Augustus, his partner that he laments he lost, who are educating our young people, the reasons for the sorry state of our nation become rather clearer.
This lack of respect for facts is bolstered by our religious and superstitious mentality (not that I think there's any real distinction between the two). Religion promotes irrational attitudes which make it difficult or impossible for us to institute policies likely to improve our society. The baleful influence of the Catholic Church can be seen in Archbishop Edward Gilbert's irresponsible statement against safe sex in a country with an HIV infection rate of two persons per day.
Significantly, Gilbert's statement was given full editorial support by Newsday, but the paper's editors saw no contradiction to their Catholic beliefs in writing another editorial mere days later calling for the resumption of hanging. Since campaigns to promote condom use have been shown to reduce HIV infection rates, and since hanging has been shown to be quite ineffectual in reducing crime, that pair of Newsday editorials is another example of our society's indifference to fact (and bear in mind that Newsday is the country's most-read daily).
Now I'm sure that all these individuals would argue that they have the good of the country at heart. And this may even be true. But sincerity is no excuse for being wrong. Indeed, anyone who's truly sincere about doing good must, as part of their sincerity, be willing to do the research and the work that leads to the desired results. And it often happens that the conclusions good information leads to will contradict one's cherished beliefs: in which case the truly sincere person abandons his cherished beliefs.
(This happened to me in relation to marijuana, for example. I think taking narcotics is a really stupid thing to do and I get quite upset with any of my friends who smoke weed, but all the research shows that marijuana is not especially harmful and that the social costs paid for it being illegal are far higher than decriminalisation would be.)
This is why so many people eschew the rational approach to social issues. It requires work. You have to train yourself to think clearly and then you have to train yourself to wade through often dull data in order to make rational conclusions. Most difficult of all, you then have to be willing to suspend your own ego and ideology when the facts contradict them.
But it's much, much easier to quote the Bible, Bhagavad Gita and Qu'ran or, in a similarly superstitious vein, to quote Marx or Freud or Foucault. After all, what do facts matter when you have holy texts?
Copyright ©2002 Kevin Baldeosingh