19 December 2001, 847 words
If you accept the premise of the collective responsibility of the individual in his society, then anyone who voted for the UNC is an accessory to the murders of customs officer Carl de Souza and prison officer Atwell Sandy Jr. Of course, to accept that premise would require a sophisticated moral sensibility, and no UNC supporter could possibly have that.
It is impossible to prove empirically, but the year-end spate of violence, which includes the Cropper triple-murders, the beating to death of a one-year-old boy, and the rape and strangulation of an 81-year-old woman - I think that all these incidents are linked to the country's sociopolitical culture. The main characteristics of that culture have evolved over the past five decades, but its worse points have been exacerbated by the last six years of UNC governance.
My starting assumption for this argument is that the mores of a society are determined mainly by its elites - i.e. the groups which wield power and status. These groups are those with money and other material resources, political office, and/or social influence. Whatever values such groups adhere to will be mimiced and absorbed by the "masses", in the unconscious belief that such values are what leads to success.
My second assumption - which does have some empirical basis - is that most human beings have an innate sense of fair play. (I have dealt with this aspect of human nature in a column titled "Your cheating head", Express 8/11/01). But this sense of fair play is essentially selfish: it keeps tracks of benefits or deprivations for the individual and his group.
What this means, among other things, is that persons who feel deprived of a fair share of a country's pie would feel justified in resorting to crime and violence to get what they want. (The particular viciousness of the Cropper murders was almost surely underscored by the victims being upper-class.)
De Souza and Sandy were killed, it seems, because of their anti-corruption stance. In my view, the corruption of the governing UNC, supported by elites such as business persons and religious leaders, has given social justification to such acts. Criminal acts become easier when the criminal sees his acts as justified, because even violent criminals can have a sense of moral outrage: it is just that they express moral outrage by psychotic rage.
This is why the societies with the lowest levels of violent crime are those which have rule of law (which is best measured by how effectively the law applies to the rich and powerful) and which have the narrowest gaps between rich and poor (best measured, not in terms of percentages, but by how flagrantly or not the wealthy indulge in conspicuous consumption).
So criminal violence is essentially a cultural phenomenon, as distinct from a phenomenon which is purely economic or sociological. But this is just a tertiary explanation. We also have to ask what the links are between the individual and the collective that creates such a culture.
In a 1975 study, neuropsychologist James W. Prescott did a cross-cultural analysis of 400 pre-industrial societies and found that societies which punish infants as a matter of discipline, and which play a high value on virginity, tend to be more violent than societies where infants are caressed and which are not especially restrictive about adolescent sexuality.
"The percent likelihood of a society being physically violent if it is physically affectionate towards its infants <I>and<I> tolerant of premarital sexual behaviour is two percent," wrote Prescott. "Thus, we seem to have a firmy-based principle: Physically affectionate human societies are highly unlikely to be physically violent."
Prescott also noted that the most violent societies had a high degree of religious belief and activity, oppressed women, practised slavery, and killed and tortured enemies. It is worth noting that this is a pretty accurate description of traditional Islamic, West African, and Hindu cultures.
It is also worth noting that ours is a society where the vast majority of adults protested vehemently, and mostly on religious grounds, at the proposed ban on licks in schools; it is a society with widespread support, again on mostly religious grounds, for the death penalty; a society where the Employers Consultative Association kicked a fuss about raising the minimum wage to seven dollars an hour; and a society where an attractive woman can hardly walk the streets without running a gauntlet of obscene suggestions.
So what is to be done? In its editorial last Friday, the Express called for increased militarisation of the society by giving the Defence Force an additional policing role. This is a reaction of panic, and it is a measure which will either have no effect or even worsen the society's violent tendencies. No, the challenge we face is essentially a cultural one, and is therefore not amenable to short-term solutions. All we can do is follow Lloyd Best's political recommendation: "play for change". That is, take small initiatives which, in the fullness of time, may have large effects.
Copyright ©2002 Kevin Baldeosingh