tt.humanist :: forum :: articles :: baldeosingh :: philosophytt.humanist :: forum :: articles :: baldeosingh :: philosophyKevin Baldeosingh • 14 January 1999 • 872 words
People don't always think that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, but they are almost always convinced that lawns were much lusher thirty, a hundred or a thousand years ago. Regularly, you will hear or read paeans about the "good old days" or "the golden age" or "ancient wisdom". Trouble is, the good old days weren't all that good, the golden age was golden only for a select few, and ancient wisdom was in many ways ancient dotishness.
The fact is, modern humans are far more enlightened, have more freedoms, possess more goods, enjoy better health and - given the preceding - are probably a lot happier than human beings in any age before this one. Save for the privilged few, what was life in the so-called good old days except nasty, brutish and short? Up to a hundred years ago, the average life expectancy in even the most technologically advanced societies was forty years. Now it is 70-plus and rising. Women, children and even animals receive far better treatment in Western democracies than they did in any society of the past, especially those which people praise for their "ancient wisdom".
The1997 UNDP Development Report notes that poverty has fallen more in past 50 years than in last 500. Since 1960, child death rates more than halved, malnutrition is down by one-third, the number of children out of primary school has dropped from more than half to less than a quarter. By 2001, if these trends continue, three to four billion people will have a substantial improvemment in their standard of living and four to five billion will have access to basic education and health care.
Now I'm not trying to suggest that the picture is all rosy. There are still1.3 billion people on the planet living on less than US$1 a day and one billion who are illiterate. The expected improvements may be delayed or even derailed by the world economic contraction. But it is significant that, except for China, the countries where these problems are most severe are those most often hailed for their ancient wisdom. It is easy, and not entirely wrong, to blame this on colonialism. But it is also true that there were traditions in these ancient societies which account for the effects of modern colonialism. Consider that flower of African culture, ancient Egypt, whose pyramids the Emancipation Suppport Committee likes to adopt for its annual celebration. Those entirely useless monuments to the pharoahs' egos were built entirely on the broken bodies of slaves - something you'd think the ESC would be totally against. Tribalism and slavery existed in Africa long before the Europeans came and accounts for many of the African countries' problems today.
Similarly, India's ranking at 138th of 175 countries in the UNDP development index is rooted knee-deep in its ancient wisdom, which local Hindus crow so loudly about. The anthropologist Donald Brown was puzzled that India had absolutely no histories, while its more massive neighbour China had libraries full. Brown studied 25 civilizations and compared the ones organized by hereditary castes with the others. None of the caste scocieties had developed a tradition of writing accurate depictions of the past. Instead, they had myth and legend. There was also no political science, no social science, no natural science, no biography, no realistic portraiture and no unform education. In other words, ancient India's ruling class suppressed any scholarship or art which might have threatened its power. I don't know if that was ancient wisdom, but it was certainly quite cunning.
To suggest, therefore, that these ancient values would create a better world is to deny the lessons of history (something the majority of ethnocentric activists, most of them historians, are oddly good at.) It is not ancient wisdom, but Western liberalism that has helped create a better world for more people. We have now reached a stage where it would take less than one percent of global income and 2-3 percent of the national incomes of all save the poorest countries to completely eliminate poverty in less than one generation. But liberalism, constitutional democracy and rule of law are crucial for this to happen. These systems empower the poor and gives them a voice. Without liberalism and constitutional democracy, the economically powerful have a vested interest in maintaining poverty, because the poor provide cheap labour and a scapegoat for political problems.
Without the rule of law, corruption becomes rampant, and corruption in government increases poverty by diverting resources to rich people (need I call names or just sneeze?), skews investment decisions to capital-intensive rather than labour intensive projects (what achievements does the UNC regime boast most loudly about, as did the PNM before it?) and undermines socio-political stability.
So all these calls for a return to "ancient wisdom" and "traditional values" and "obeah" are nothing more than badly-disguised primitivism, which will only re-create all the ills that humanity has fought so long to conquer. Our problem in T&T is not that we have abandoned traditional values, but that we haven't abandoned them fast enough. And the sooner we do so, and the sooner we stop hankering after a past that never existed, the better off we will all be.
People don't always think that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, but they are almost always convinced that lawns were much lusher thirty, a hundred or a thousand years ago. Regularly, you will hear or read paeans about the "good old days" or "the golden age" or "ancient wisdom". Trouble is, the good old days weren't all that good, the golden age was golden only for a select few, and ancient wisdom was in many ways ancient dotishness.
The fact is, modern humans are far more enlightened, have more freedoms, possess more goods, enjoy better health and - given the preceding - are probably a lot happier than human beings in any age before this one. Save for the privilged few, what was life in the so-called good old days except nasty, brutish and short? Up to a hundred years ago, the average life expectancy in even the most technologically advanced societies was forty years. Now it is 70-plus and rising. Women, children and even animals receive far better treatment in Western democracies than they did in any society of the past, especially those which people praise for their "ancient wisdom".
The1997 UNDP Development Report notes that poverty has fallen more in past 50 years than in last 500. Since 1960, child death rates more than halved, malnutrition is down by one-third, the number of children out of primary school has dropped from more than half to less than a quarter. By 2001, if these trends continue, three to four billion people will have a substantial improvemment in their standard of living and four to five billion will have access to basic education and health care.
Now I'm not trying to suggest that the picture is all rosy. There are still1.3 billion people on the planet living on less than US$1 a day and one billion who are illiterate. The expected improvements may be delayed or even derailed by the world economic contraction. But it is significant that, except for China, the countries where these problems are most severe are those most often hailed for their ancient wisdom. It is easy, and not entirely wrong, to blame this on colonialism. But it is also true that there were traditions in these ancient societies which account for the effects of modern colonialism. Consider that flower of African culture, ancient Egypt, whose pyramids the Emancipation Suppport Committee likes to adopt for its annual celebration. Those entirely useless monuments to the pharoahs' egos were built entirely on the broken bodies of slaves - something you'd think the ESC would be totally against. Tribalism and slavery existed in Africa long before the Europeans came and accounts for many of the African countries' problems today.
Similarly, India's ranking at 138th of 175 countries in the UNDP development index is rooted knee-deep in its ancient wisdom, which local Hindus crow so loudly about. The anthropologist Donald Brown was puzzled that India had absolutely no histories, while its more massive neighbour China had libraries full. Brown studied 25 civilizations and compared the ones organized by hereditary castes with the others. None of the caste scocieties had developed a tradition of writing accurate depictions of the past. Instead, they had myth and legend. There was also no political science, no social science, no natural science, no biography, no realistic portraiture and no unform education. In other words, ancient India's ruling class suppressed any scholarship or art which might have threatened its power. I don't know if that was ancient wisdom, but it was certainly quite cunning.
To suggest, therefore, that these ancient values would create a better world is to deny the lessons of history (something the majority of ethnocentric activists, most of them historians, are oddly good at.) It is not ancient wisdom, but Western liberalism that has helped create a better world for more people. We have now reached a stage where it would take less than one percent of global income and 2-3 percent of the national incomes of all save the poorest countries to completely eliminate poverty in less than one generation. But liberalism, constitutional democracy and rule of law are crucial for this to happen. These systems empower the poor and gives them a voice. Without liberalism and constitutional democracy, the economically powerful have a vested interest in maintaining poverty, because the poor provide cheap labour and a scapegoat for political problems.
Without the rule of law, corruption becomes rampant, and corruption in government increases poverty by diverting resources to rich people (need I call names or just sneeze?), skews investment decisions to capital-intensive rather than labour intensive projects (what achievements does the UNC regime boast most loudly about, as did the PNM before it?) and undermines socio-political stability.
So all these calls for a return to "ancient wisdom" and "traditional values" and "obeah" are nothing more than badly-disguised primitivism, which will only re-create all the ills that humanity has fought so long to conquer. Our problem in T&T is not that we have abandoned traditional values, but that we haven't abandoned them fast enough. And the sooner we do so, and the sooner we stop hankering after a past that never existed, the better off we will all be.
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• Kevin Baldeosingh • Trinidad and Tobago Humanist Association • www.humanist.org.tt/humanist/forum/baldeosingh • 