Blurred vision

I’m thinking of submitting the Vision 2020 mission statement for the annual Bad English Prize. In case you didn’t see the full-page advertisement they ran in all the newspapers last week, it reads: “In the year 2020, Trinidad and Tobago will be a united, resilient, productive, innovative and prosperous nation; With a disciplined, caring, fun-loving society; Comprising healthy, happy, well-educated people and Built on the enduring attributes of self-reliance, respect, tolerance, equity and integrity, In which:” Anyway, let me not quote the whole thing, since my readers are all literate people and must already be cringing. But even if the statement doesn’t cop the prize, I’m pretty sure its sheer triteness will earn it a Dishonourable Mention. Apart from being badly written, the mission statement, in my view, accurately reflects the vacuous ethos underlying the Vision 2020 project.

If Vision 2020 is to become reality, it must have a clearly articulated philosophy of development, since that is what will direct what policies are chosen and how the implementation occurs. Without such a philosophy, despite the individual brilliance and competencies of the persons involved, the whole project will come to naught. But, from what I have read and heard so far, it does not appear that anyone has really formulated a theory, or been given a formulation, of socio-political development. This is not surprising. We live in a place where philosophical analysis, and indeed intellectual work in general, is viewed as irrelevant to the “real world.” Hence the 25-member planning committee consists of persons who know a lot about a little but, as far as I can tell, is completely lacking in members who know a little about a lot.

It is, of course, crucial for such a project to have input from experts, but it is perhaps even more crucial to have persons with a firm grounding in all the main areas of human knowledge: philosophy, psychology, history, economics, politics, science, law, the arts and culture. I know only five such persons in this country, and none of them is involved in Vision 2020. And, even if there are more persons I don’t know about, it doesn’t appear that their voices are being heard. It seems that the people in charge of Vision 2020 believe that, once they take care of the technical aspects, development — which includes the intangibles in the mission statement — will inevitably follow. In the first panel discussion on TV6 last Monday (a truly slick propaganda effort, lent veracity by a professional journalist, Andy Johnson, hosting the government-sponsored hour), chairman Arthur Lok Jack made the point that economic development is only a means to achieve social ends. But I do not have the impression that the planning committee understands that, in many ways, it is the intangibles — attitude, values, culture — which are the foundation of material development.

If they did grasp this, there would have at least been a hint about what socio-political concepts underlie the Vision 2020. Without such concepts to guide us, development will always be elusive. In his book, The Ideas that Conquered the World, American foreign-policy professor Michael Mandelbaum writes, “Great Britain and France invented the modern world. From France came popular sovereignty, the prevailing principle of political legitimacy… From Britain came almost everything else… the idea that limits should be placed on governmental power through the rule of law which is, along with popular sovereignty, the essence of political liberalism. The market economy first developed fully and was noted, codified, and supported in the British Isles.” Interestingly, Mandelbaum’s analysis also implies that a society like ours cannot achieve developed-nation status in the time frame of Vision 2020. 

“(A)n important step in building a market economy, as well as making a commitment to peace and democracy, is the acquisition of appropriate cultural underpinnings,” he writes. “…Such a change does not take place overnight. The pertinent unit of time is the generation, for a shift in a society’s prevailing values requires that people whose formative experiences equipped them with one set of norms be replaced by others who embraced, at later times and in other circumstances, different values.” Mandelbaum also asserts, “(Cultures) cannot readily be changed by acts of official policy.” This link between prosperity and culture is also made by historian David S. Landes, author of The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. Landes describes a “society theoretically best suited to pursue material progress and general enrichment.” Such a society, he says, would have five basic characteristics: (1) it would know how to operate and manage technology; (2) it would impart this knowledge to its young people; (3) it would choose people for jobs on merit, promoting and demoting according to performance; (4) it would afford opportunities to individual or collective enterprise and encourage initiative, competition and emulation; (5) and it would allow people to enjoy the fruits of their labour and enterprise.

But, notes Landes, “These standards imply corollaries: gender equality (thereby doubling the pool of talent); no discrimination on the basis of irrelevant criteria (race, sex, religion etc); also a preference for scientific (means-end) rationality over magic and superstition (irrationality).” These values all come from the Enlightenment, and it is the Enlightenment which catalysed modernity in Western nations. And what were Enlightenment values? In the main: an insistence on intellectual autonomy, a rejection of tradition and authority as infallible sources of truth, a loathing for bigotry and persecution, and a commitment to free inquiry. So is ours a society which believes in any of these values? Obviously not. It is impossible to claim that you stand for rationality and tolerance and ethical principles and oppose — just to choose the most contentious issues — reform of our abortion law, equal rights for homosexuals, and the elimination of capital punishment. And if we think we can become a developed nation without tackling these hard issues, we are only fooling ourselves. But that, of course, is one area in which we are already leading experts.

E-mail: kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com
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