#BTColumn – The Barbadian culture war

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author(s) do not represent the official position of Barbados TODAY.

By Ralph Jemmott

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) Survey has revealed an emerging cultural dichotomy in Barbadian life. We live in an age of tremendous change much of it driven by technological innovations that move at a rapid rate. The move from an analogue to a digital template has meant not only the globalisation of the world economy but a globalisation of culture. Everything is immediate and connected. I can sit in my living room and see atrocities committed in Ukraine only a few hours previously. Some of these acts involve the suffering and death of children. After a while it all becomes too much and one has to look away.

Culturally the decade of the 1970’s was a watershed period in Barbadian development. Before that, Barbados was still very much a back-water country. After 1970 the drawbridge was lowered as we became exposed to the full effects of cultural penetration from North Atlantic influences. These came by way of frequent travel by Barbadians and the influx of tourists, but more specifically with the advent of satellite communications and cable television. We were progressing. Or were we?

Somehow I hold to the unproven and perhaps unprovable thesis that the Barbados in which I grew up was the product of an Anglicized Protestant culture that was internalised in varying degrees by a broad cross section of society. There had developed something of what appeared to be a societal consensus. Most persons seemed to agree on what was right, what was true and what was of good report, even though we often did not respond adequately to the call to moral rectitude.

This ethos was inculcated by the Church and its Church-Schools and more specific by the Sunday-Schools. In many respects it was a goodly heritage that served us reasonably well. By Ethos or Culture one is referring to the dominant values, attitudes and sensibilities that characterised the better angels of our collective zeitgeist.  It is not coterminous with cheap entertainment, with what Lenny St Hill once called “the idols and antics of escapism”.  We glorify the past, the “good old days” because its pain is no longer with us. They were some bad things in those days too. Extreme poverty, rampant domestic abuse, child abuse, sexual profligacy galore, large scale stealing or small scale ‘tiefing,’ gambling and fighting and don’t talk bout ‘cussing’, like the two women fighting over a man in Water Hall Land near Eagle Hall.

However there does seem to have been greater evidence of social empathy and connectivity where people shared and looked after each other, values associated with the villages that raised the child, where children respected adults and the home supported the school and the values of the small Christian Mission Churches of a Sister Mings and Sister Hawkins.

External influences and internal change dissolved much of that ethos as our values, attitudes and sensibilities dissipated. There is a line from the 1970’s Jethro Tull album, “Thick as a Brick” which states: “And your sand-castle values are all swept away, in the tidal destruction, the moral melee.” It was akin to a cultural tsunami, drugs, rising crime, rampant hedonism, materialism and acquisitiveness, social envy and a consequent lack of empathy in an increasingly dog eat dog world. Some became richer, but we were feeling a growing sense of the societal ill-health that Red Plastic Bag (RPB) sang about. For all the hackneyed chatter about “we are all in this together” (LOL), Barbados was becoming more anomic and atomised. It appears that Barbadians do not know what kind of people they are or want to become. At the first Town Hall meeting on the proposed new Constitution, a Mr. Maxi Baldeo declared Barbados “a secular society” and questioned why the meeting began with a religious invocation. Meanwhile in the same publication a car company celebrated its apparent commercial successes with a church service at The Peoples’ Cathedral.  Maybe the incoming 80,000 immigrants will decide for us who we truly are, as we sell our heritage for a tin-pot of pottage. Maybe Barbados will cease to be a majority Christian community even as the Muslims build more mosques and the Hindus more temples, one for each of their gods. Errol Barrow was so insightful…One day coming soon.   

Some aspects of the IDB survey indicated how our nascent values may be coming under threat from ultra-liberal exogenous institutions and we may have to make a choice. Do we stand aside and watch our supposedly ‘sand-castle’ values swept away in the rising tide of relativism, materialism and modernism and diversity? Do we reaffirm our traditional values which some so-called ‘progressives’ would see as provincial and outdated? In an increasingly globalised world will we buckle to the pressure to ditch our traditional mores to suit outsiders who have no respect for us or our small-island sensibilities?  In the great global scheme of things, does what we think matter at all? They say the piper called the tune. Does our economic and financial dependency compel our values subordination and with what consequences for us? Why for example would Barbadians want to raise their children according to the dictates of American culture? On the day before this article was penned, a 15-year-old male in an up-scale neighbourhood, shot seven persons, killing five in Raleigh, North Carolina and the young shooter in the Parkland School massacre was sentenced to life imprisonment. Is this the new template for the socialisation of Barbadian children? As Felicia Dujon has pointed out, many of the questions given to eleven-year-olds related to ethics and character at an age when character is still in the early stage of formation. Is this an attempt to manipulate very malleable minds and to what ends? Dr. Veronica Evelyn warned about children losing their innocence at too early an age when as physiologists note the frontal lobes of the brain are not developed enough to make fully informed moral judgments.

Decades of cultural relativism and deconstructionism pushed by western academic and other liberal elites have eroded cultural certitude. Now one can determine one’s own reality and one’s own sexual identity using either the male or female restrooms or both depending how you feel at the particular moment.     

For all the pretentious talk about Bajan creativity, Barbadians are more imitators and borrowers than creators. It is amazing how we have unashamedly adopted some of the worst facets of American and Jamaican ghetto cultures. The Jamaican House of Representatives is now trying to reduce the influence of that culture on children of school age. Barbadians are under external pressures to give up on ‘the people that we are’ and to adopt an imported ultra-liberal orthodoxy that says the rights of the child supersedes those of the parent, the rights of the student comes before the authority of the teacher and the immature foolishness of youth before the acquired wisdom of the elderly.     

Rightly or wrongly capital punishment has to all intents and purposes been abolished, even for the most cruel and inhumane acts of criminality. Corporal punishment is virtually non-existent in our schools with little thought of a workable deterrent to increasingly deviant behaviour. We may not be able to cull our monkey population for fear of outraging the international animal rights lobby. Truth be told, apart from our financial and economic national indebtedness, the sovereignty of our infant Republic may be seeping away. The World is a colossal mess. It might be better for us to try to hold on to the tried and tested values that once constituted our main asset, our social capital.    

Ralph Jemmott is a retired educator and regular contributor on social issues.