Maid to order

One of the most beautiful women I know was raped when she was nine years old. The rapists were two teenaged boys, the sons of her mother’s housekeeper, and they continued raping her over a period of many months. The girl’s age, the multiple rapes, are shocking enough, but perhaps the most shocking aspect is this: the boys’ mother knew what was going on.

This beautiful woman, who’s also intelligent and very personable, makes no big deal of what happened so long ago. She is now a mother, has a good career, and stable friendships. But I have wondered about that woman, the housekeeper. Was she an especially callous, an especially evil, human being? I suspect not: I suspect that, in most respects, she was a perfectly ordinary Trinidadian woman. But I also suspect that she had a deep hatred for her employer, an upper-class brown woman of comfortably arrogant disposition, and that the rape of a child was a cruel revenge for wrongs real or perceived.

Hear a more trivial event: an older Afro-Saxon woman of Woodbrook complains that she has never been able to find a maid who doesn’t steal from her. She puts the blame on that nebulous quantity, Trinidadian culture: “Nothing in the country supposes an honest society,” she writes. She doesn’t see her own intellectual dishonesty as part of the problem. More pertinently, it doesn’t occur to her that her snobbish attitude may have made these maids feel justified in stealing from her, and that they may well not have stolen from the other people they worked for. But this third woman in her early 30s, mixed-white with leftist and feminist leanings, used to always tell me about how well she got along with her maid: a middle-aged woman who came to her apartment three times a week to clean and cook.

She and the maid used to ole-talk and she lent her books by Latin American writers, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende, and they had discussions about them. Then the woman decided she only needed the maid to come in once a week. “I’ll have to pay her less, because she’ll be doing less work,” she told me, with nary a thought that the older woman would suddenly be deprived of a substantial part of her income. Whiteness trumped ideology with consummate ease; and I’ve distrusted socialists and feminists ever since.

Now I don’t lime much with upper-class people, so I can’t say if the attitude reflected in these three stories is typical. But I believe so. Moreover, I believe that, in their contempt for the average person, we can find the root cause of our underdeveloped economy and the violent crime that is a natural feature of it. In every society more complex than hunter-forager bands, powerful minorities — usually warriors and priests — always exploit the average majority. But what allows some societies to become more developed than others is the elites seeing, or being forced to see, that their own interests are best served by grant-ing privileges and power to the common person.

This is why the link between democracy and prosperity is such a robust one. Of course, the East Asian economies, which are not democratic, seem to disprove this. But, as political analyst Kirk Meighoo has pointed out, the governments in these countries, while not democratic, are legitimate. That legitimacy comes partly from long tradition but, more importantly, it also comes from strict adherence to democratically-applied rule of law.

This is why using Hong Kong and Singapore as developmental models, as Patrick Manning and Basdeo Panday are wont to do, is a non-starter. Our political leaders are not legitimate by any tradition nor do they adhere to “the highest levels of integrity” (for, if this were true, Manning would not have made his wife Education Minister). And the fact that Manning and Panday cite these models reveals their own predilection toward authoritarianism rather than democracy. Indeed, as newspaper editorials have already pointed out, their new interest in Constitutional reform seems to be motivated by their need to increase Prime Ministerial power rather than deepen democracy.

But as long as we do not promote democratic attitudes or change our institutions so they are more democratic, our economy will not become developed nor will crime be contained. Adam Smith, the founding father of modern economics, foresaw this problem. It is not much emphasised in capitalist rhetoric, but a moral framework was a key part of Smith’s thesis. In The Wealth of Nations, he warned that the division of labour, although it brought great material benefits, also made many individuals “not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging.”

So in our society we face an immediate paradox: we look to religious leaders for moral guidance, but our most vocal religious spokesmen are staunch supporters of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and totalitarianism: and many of them drive expensive cars. Smith looked to the State to provide a level of education to ensure that each citizen would exercise intellectual and social ‘virtue.’ But Smith’s focus was on the poor, whereas ‘virtue,’ by which he meant social conscience, should be the primary responsibility of a society’s elites. One reason I hold this view is because of research conducted by American psychologists Margo Wilson and Martin Daly, who have found that crime rates are higher in regions with greater disparities of wealth, and that such disparity is a better predictor of crime than poverty itself.

So how do we reduce this disparity? Through CEPEP or URP? No. These merely exacerbate the problem, because they are centres of corruption and because they deepen cyclical poverty. We must instead begin with more fundamental issues. In The Middle Passage, VS Naipaul suggests, “Change must come from the top. Capital punishment and corporal punishment, incitements to brutality, must be abolished...and perhaps, gradually, there will be a lessening of the need now felt by everyone down the line to display his authority by aggression.”

But this is no easy task. Our politicians are hopeless. The Chamber of Commerce and all the media houses favour the death penalty. If they became rational and changed their position, that would be a good start. Or, maybe, people could start just by treating their maids better.

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