Group think

I have never in my working life had to face traffic. My first job was as a teacher at Moruga Composite. I lived in Claxton Bay at the time so the trip was a little over an hour each way. But it was along the highway and against the traffic flow on the major roads through Princes Town or Penal. When I first became a journalist, my official hours were from nine to five. The morning time was after the heavy traffic, and in the evening I either finished before four or after six. And now, as a freelance writer, I don’t work in an office at all. Partly because of this, I find it difficult to conceive how drivers face the daily jam to and from Port-of-Spain. I recently started driving south twice a week, at around seven am. The traffic on the northbound lane of the highway flabbergasts me. It usually stretches from the Uriah Butler intersection right down to the Endeavour flyover in Chaguanas.

This is perhaps a prime example of our politicians’ inability to think ahead. When, some years ago, legislation was passed to allow the importation of new and used foreign cars, it didn’t require the bogus psychic powers of a Yesenia Gonzalves to anticipate the present traffic congestion. In an efficient society, the government would have at once started widening roads or building overpasses or buying a monorail or hovercrafts or more buses or what-have-you. But the road hell isn’t entirely the government’s fault. Citizens must share equally in the blame. I say this because, as I’m driving down south, a cursory survey of the cars crawling along the highway on the opposite side reveals a significant pattern: most of the vehicles have only one person in them.

Now this is absolutely ridiculous. I find it highly unlikely that, with so many people all going into town, so few of them can find other persons to car pool with. The arithmetic isn’t hard, even for a maths dunce like me. If every person found one other person to pool with, the number of vehicles on any given day would be instantly cut by half. If everybody found two persons, the number is cut by two-thirds. And you don’t even have to have everyone pooling: if only quarter of the drivers got two other persons, the reduction would still be significant (sorry, that calculation is beyond my underdeveloped angular gyrus). I do not know why people who live in south and central Trinidad don’t do this. But I do know that group cooperation is a significant attribute of developed societies, just as it is a missing factor in underdeveloped ones. Indeed, I suspect that an island-nation like Britain was able to create most of the modern world at least partly because of this cultural habit of grouping.

In The Making of the King James Bible, author Adam Nicolson notes, “Jointness was the acknowledged virtue of the age…Lack of jointness, either through an overweening individuality or through simple dissolution, a falling apart, was considered an overriding error and a sin… Everything in the modern frame of mind, trained up in centuries of individualism, rebels against the idea. Joint committees know nothing of genius…Committees thrive on compromise and compromise produces fudge and muddle…How can a joint enterprise of this sort produce anything valuable?” The answer to Nicolson’s query can be found in a brilliant little book called The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki. Surowiecki’s thesis is that “under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.” The “right circumstances”, he asserts, involve four factors: “diversity of opinion (each person should have some private information, even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts); independence (people’s opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them); decentralisation (people are able to specialise and draw on local knowledge); and aggregation (some mechanism exists for turning private judgements into collective decisions).”

And, in fact, Nicolson notes that the King James Translators were set up so that “Each member of each company, alone – ‘severally by himself’ – was to translate or amend all the chapters in his allotted section. Only then were they to meet together, to discuss the text and decide on their final submission.” This may well explain why the King James Bible is the greatest single work of prose ever written (and I suspect that the questions about who wrote Shakespeare’s plays may also have a germ of truth: that there may have been several authors contributing to what was already a collaborative enterprise. “Most of the plays performed in Jacobean England were written by more than one writer,” Nicolson remarks.) This cultural trait of ‘jointness’, which was at the heart not only of theatre companies but also economic enterprises like the East India Company, seems to have been carried to the United States on the Mayflower. One of the outstanding habits noted by the 19th-century French writer Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America was how eagerly Americans formed themselves into civic groups.

And, to this day, America has one of the highest rates of volunteerism in the world: on par with the UK at just below 20 percent and just behind the Netherlands, which is just over 20 percent). This kind of predilection among ordinary citizens is important in many ways, but a primary one, even if it is not the groups’ purpose, is that it helps keep political leaders in check. In her book Bad Leadership, Barbara Kellerman suggests, “The easiest way for the powerless to become powerful is to find other like-minded people with whom to work. There is strength in numbers…Collective action can be taken on small scale, such as getting a small group together to talk to the boss [or] it can be taken on a much larger scale…In 2004 public fury resulted in the sudden ouster of Eduard Shevardnadze, president of Georgia. Shevardnadze was forced from office after three weeks of nonstop street demonstrations against him.” My perception is that our society has begun moving in this direction, with group activism (that is not ethnic- or religion-based) becoming more prevalent. But I’ll know for sure the day I see several people to a car on the highway at peak hours.

E-mail: kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com
Website:www.caribscape.com/baldeosingh