2 November 2000, 800 words
In Margaret Atwood's latest novel, The Blind Assassin, the narrator writes, "...she went in for Culture, which gave her a certain moral authority. It wouldn't now; but people believed, then, that Culture could make you better a better person. They believed it could uplift you...They hadn't yet seen Hitler at the opera house."
In Trinidad and Tobago in the year 2000, however, there are still people who believe (or pretend to believe) that Culture embodies some inherent and absolute good. That belief, insofar as it rests on lack of knowledge, is possible only for persons ignorant of history, aesthetic theory, and psychology. But I suspect the real root is deeper, and more pernicious: a complete rejection of democratic values.
With almost no exceptions, our cultural spokespersons always embrace a fascistic ideology when demanding support for the arts, whether it is pan or theatre or literature. Entertainment journalist Peter Ray Blood writes in the Guardian, "Radio stations should never be allowed not to play pan music. If they refuse to play the music voluntary [sic], the state should step in and use a heavy hand, instituting legislation that pan be played [sic]...by every radio frequency."
And a group of arts activists will be marching tomorrow with even wider demands: legislation for radio and TV stations to have 50 percent local programming.
In similar vein, artist Rubadiri Victor in a letter to the editor argues that there should be laws forcing companies to spend least one percent of their profits on art. "In nearly all civilized countries there is legislation to this effect," he writes, and with jaw-breaking irony goes on to name Haiti, Jamaica "and of course Cuba" as examples of such "civilized" societies. Victor apparently considers poverty, violent crime and totalitarian rule to be irrelevant indicators of civilization, once one has statues, paintings and nice buildings to look at.
The intellectual - or, more precisely, pseudo-intellectual - belief behind this mindset was recently expressed by Independent columnist Wayne Brown, writing about the very literary arts supplement he edits in in the Jamaica Observer newspaper: "It's through art and literature that our species possesses itself. For some mysterious, transcendent reason, we have been so constituted that we only really possess our lives when they're reflected back at us by the transforming mirrors of literature, art. Without such mirrors, we 'go blind' through life. So the civilising effect [of] the fiction and poems appearing weekly in The Arts is incalculable."
Here is articulated the twin pillars of fascism: the inferiority of the average man and the necessary role of the Superman to guide him.
Democracy, however, is based on a belief in the rights of the individual, which is summed up very nicely by Steven Pinker in How the Mind Works: "The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are."
For our Culture commentators, it does not matter that the two radio stations which tried the local programming format quickly failed. Insofar as they make an argument, they say that people don't listen to pan or calypso because they aren't sufficiently exposed to it. Ergo, all you have to do is enforce the airing of local music and people's tastes will change.
The idea here is that the average person's mind is a tabula rasa which can be readily inscribed by Culture's nib. Of the more sophisticated forms of this argument, Pinker writes, "If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable description or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified. Thus it is ironic that fashionable 'liberation' ideologies like those of Michel Foucault and some academic feminists invoke a socially conditioned 'interiorized authority', 'false consciousness', or 'inauthentic preference' to explain away the inconvenient fact that people enjoy the things that are alleged to oppress them."
Naturally, such commentators all argue that their demands are made in the name of the silent masses. But, as in politics where totalitarian regimes always have the labels "Democratic" and "People's" in their country titles, you can be sure that those who speak most loudly about "the people" are those who are most elitist in their outlook.
The ideas of these commentators are entirely out of touch with reality. It is also a general truth that, whenever you hear an artist calling for official support for their work, you are hearing someone whose talents are too limited to survive on merit. This is why the politicians can afford to ignore these persons; and perhaps that is a good thing. Because, given the methods the activists would like to use, it seems to me that all their talk about promoting Culture is really motivated by the usual suspects: money and power.
Copyright ©2000 Kevin Baldeosingh