THE MEANING OF BEING HUMAN

We would do well to ask “wha’ happenin’ to our country?” At the end of 2006, whoever or whoevers control kidnapping, upped the ante. The kidnapping of Naipaul just before Christmas seemed timed to replace the Angels’ Good News of “Fear not” with the fear of the unknowable and the uncontrollable. That she was well known and well loved added to the feeling of fragility; nothing, neither faith in others nor good works seemed to appeal to the faceless evil which threatened to destroy the Good News.

And they were the cars. They raced, screeched, scrambled across red lights and threatened to run into doorways when they weren’t caged into traffic.

Bertram Allette

Then the affair of the councillors. As I write, the Port-of-Spain councillor Bertram Allette is being buried. Few countries view lightly threats to their representatives at any level of representation whether national or local. Democracy after all supposes that representatives of the People are freely elected and can as freely perform their duties and make decisions. If decisions are made under the shadow of the barrel of a gun it is not democracy.

Ah and the poor man with the christophenes.

Crime, law and order

We would be wrong to think that we are the only country plagued with the problem of crime or the only country — after that political icebreaker Compton’s St Lucia — where crime will be a factor in the elections. France will hold its presidential elections in five months. If before this crime, law and order as part of an election campaign were associated with the far right, this year they have entered Nicolas Sarkozy’s campaign. Analysts looking at the extent to which the ideas of the far right have become respectable have placed the issue of crime as one of the major areas in which this has happened. True with Sarkozy’s own party, the UMP, no less a person than Prime Minister de Villepin has linked crime not to the repression demanded of the far right, but to the “social fracture” in a France where social marginalisation has increased over the past three decades. It is not only France.

A feature of underdeveloped

countries?

Only a decade ago crime was rare in Ireland. Today Irish newspapers are beginning to look very much like our own. In spite of having one of the lowest crime rates in Europe, nevertheless murder, banditry, drug gangs dominate the headlines. But much of Irish newspapers is increasingly to do with real estate advertisements, the latest in glamour, exotic recipes and expensive holidays: just like newspapers in New York, London, Madrid or Paris.

It does not have to be Paris or Dublin. The threat of run-away crime is there in every “modern” city. And yet only half a century ago it was believed that this level of crime was a feature of underdeveloped countries or of the over-urbanisation of a Lagos, a Calcutta, or a Mexico City. That young teenagers would be guilty of serious crime was so un believable that France struck off any law which would permit early teenagers to be arrested and prosecuted. “France,” Sarkozy was reminded when he suggested changing the law to permit stricter measures against law-breaking teenagers, “does not put children in prison.” It was the years of optimism.

If Europe was mentioned it was brushed off as the Victorian era of Dickens and Oliver Twist.

Credit cards, banks and

Enron

It is not only at the level of kidnappers and murderers that crime has increased. Fifty years ago we would have trusted our banks, chequebook fraud was rare and as far as it got-no one thought of credit card and e-mail fraud — and Enron’s scandals would be the ingredient of science fiction. Yes it is true that with less than a million and a half people living on a handkerchief of a State few of us haven’t had a friend, family, acquaintance, colleague kidnapped or murdered. This is different to Ireland with 48 gun murders a year and four million people. In spite of this we may well be facing the same social phenomenon.

Exclusion

It is not only the increase in the incidence of crime which is common to most — if not all — modern societies. So is the profile — to use a much abused word — of those who kidnap, murder, are recruited by gangs are likely to be the authors of gun crimes. They are likely to be young, to come from a family with a history of unemployment and poverty, to have dropped out of school — not to be confused with actual IQ — and belong to a group which is already socially excluded from the dominant society. This exclusion is marked by settlement — in ghettos or in council housing where this carries a stigma — by educational institutions, by ethnicity, eg certain immigrant and second generation groups in Europe, Afros here, Gypsies in Central Europe. It is the perception that immigrants equals crime which accounts for the accent on crime in programmes of the neo-fascists. Exclusion therefore is an important factor in the manufacture of crime in today’s society. But it is also an important factor in the relegation of action against crime, to only more and more secure jails, more sophisticated crime-fighting hardware, more effective police and above all neighbourhoods mobilised against “the criminals.” This dependence on techniques, technology, management, mobilisation illustrates one of the problems of modern society. It is supposed that there are no complex problems where “blame” can neither be easily discerned nor easily distributed and where there are therefore no easy answers. Indeed “answers” may sometimes themselves be both efficient and at the same time counterproductive. This is so within the very fear which chases out the Good News and there within the mobilisation “against criminals” which we are assured, is needed for the fight against crime.

A reversal of rights

I have noted that it is increasingly the European right which provides what seems to be the answer to rising crime. This reply of the far right is in fact the reversal of the gains in rights and sensitivities fought for over decades and to a large extent obtained after the Second World War. These rights had been the subject of intellectual debate over centuries. This debate begun within theology as the question of natural law, was continued during that remarkable 18th century upsurge of a search for freedom within the Enlightenment, which marked modern philosophy and continued through to the 1948 Declaration that all men were born equal in dignity and rights. This is not a scientific explanation of what is a human being. It takes its value from the meaning of being human and the final goal of the societies human beings construct. In other words it is a question that is in the domain of philosophy and theology. But the 1948 Declaration goes farther: it is because all human beings are endowed with reason that we can speak of rights and of peace. We are back to St Augustine, Aquinas and the Enlightenment.

Philosophy and science

If this debate was about reason, it nevertheless consecrated the difference between philosophy and science already there in the division between the local and empirically proved by observation (science) on the one hand and on the other global principles of explanation which go beyond what may be empirically proved by observation (philosophy, theology).

Jean-Fran?ois Robredo, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris IV Sorbonne and author of From The Cosmos to the Big Bang, the Philosophical Revolution, argues that a series of advances in theory and in observation in the 20th century made it again necessary for scientists to have recourse to global principles of explanation. “But,” Robredo adds, “it does not mean a return to Greek thought...there remains a wall that science by its nature cannot penetrate...Astronomy seeks laws and not principles. Thus the questions of the reason behind the Universe, of ‘finality’ cannot be posed or answered by science. They belong to the domain of philosophy or religion.”

A technocratic reply

There is in modern society an increasing supposition that there is a scientific and therefore technocratic reply to problems of society and that therefore the debate on society itself and on the meaning of being human is closed. In few countries is this as firmly believed in as here. It has been argued that in “developed” countries a secular society has driven religion into private domain. Well it hasn’t here. In few countries are there so many public prayers, rosaries hanging in cars to protect against accidents while you speed, crucifixes, Shiva, Lakshmi, Gospel pages in newspapers, name it. But this religiosity achieves the division between the techno-management on the one hand and religion carefully kept away from reason, history or philosophy on the other hand. It is this which has left the definition of what is human and what is a just society to the managers and technocrats of a society by definition vowed to injustice. And it is this acceptance of injustice which permits the illusion that defeating crime is only a matter of more jails, more repression and more policing.