Saturday November 6, 2010

Of Books, Inquiring Uncles and the Dead End of Dogmatism and Dictatorship

Sometime in 1980 my comrade and political mentor Roosevelt “Rosie” Douglas visited North Korea. On his return he claimed he had seen paradise and nowhere was there a more perfect socialist state.

Then a young teacher at the Dominica Grammar School and of left-wing socialist sentiments myself, I took that statement with a grain of salt. Unwittingly, Rosie’s own exuberance had sowed those seeds of doubt in my mind.

A few months prior to his trip he had placed my name and address in the hands of the North Korean Department of Friendship with the Peoples as one of the founders of a proposed Dominica North Korea Friendship Society and as a promoter of Jute: The North Korean philosophy of self reliance.

As one who grew up on a British colony with a low level of science, technology and industry I was keen to promote any principle which gave Dominicans the tools to build a more just and technologically competent society.

However, once my name and address was given to the North Koreans, they started sending me a magazine on North Korean society every month. Initially fascinated by the glossy reportage of pink-cheeked, well fed and well dressed children at work and play, my interest soon wore off.

How so? Well every article or page began with the same old refrain: The Great and Mighty leader Kim IL Sung; The Shining Star on Some Mountain (can’t remember the name); the General of all the Victorious Armies; etc. etc.

Then the pictures looked painted over and the Great Leader was always at the center of the adoring crowd. The Great Leader spoke to all other issues and knew best.

His other ministers could not be named as they were all non-entities who existed simply to line up and dutifully give praise. Anyone who spoke against the Great Heroic Leader was to be destroyed as an “enemy of the people.”

And then there was always a smiling peasant with some big sheaf of wheat in hand; it all looked too heavenly. Simply put, it seemed all too perfect an arrangement and society for the critical thinking which I already possessed. But how was I inoculated from such dogmatism and adoration of what was a dictatorship?

At the Roseau Mixed Infant School of 1966 where Aunty Floss was the headmistress is where I developed a leftist orientation. I was only five, and did not – could not – know what being left wing was, but my parents were pious Christians and I had an earnest desire for fairness.

Why? My sister and I had shoes and many of my friends did not. With unshod feet, and walking some distance to school, many would often have sores from where prickles or discarded nails made contact with their bare flesh.

We had band aids for our scrapes as our mother was a Red Cross volunteer and our friends did not. Many of our friends would come to class with open sores, attended by buzzing flies.

Those disparities tore at my mind at an early age, and I dearly wished that my classmates could have what I had. I wished that life would be fair to all.

I grew up in a home led by free thinking parents which was filled with the works of world (mostly Western) literature. Shakespeare, Hemingway, Dickens and the Bible were common fare at our home. In 1971 my brother Lawson brought home a copy of Dr. W.E.B. Dubois’ The Soul of Black Folk and we were introduced dramatically to the story of the African American fight for social justice.

Down our lane the Linton’s, – with their teacher parents – had a good library and the oldest boy Coleridge had a copy of Karl Marx’sDas Kapital. Across on LeBlanc Lane, was the home of Police Chief Oliver N. Phillip, a man of impeccable intellect; it was in his little study I first read of the Great Emancipator Abraham Lincoln and in his assassination in the epic work Twenty Days.

And on our wall hung a tapestry with the embroidered images of the John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, with Dr. Martin Luther King in the middle, on a backdrop of the American flag.

Thrown in for good measure, we read some Khalil Gibran and a bit of Lobsang Rampa, a Tibetan monk.

My father had served in the British Army in World War and was a regular reader of Times, Newsweek and the London Illustrated News. Sometimes, we also got to read Ebony and Jet, which spoke to the African American striving for freedom of which we felt part.

We were all keen listeners to BBC news on our old Grundig radio given to my Dad in exchange by local upper class populist politician and radio repair man Jacquer Boyd, who could not fixed his Pye radio.

My mother started off in St. Joseph as an assistant school teacher, and leader of the 4H Club movement in that village. She made a blackboard out of plywood and taught us Arithmetic, English and General Knowledge herself, after school was over in the afternoon.

We also devoured local newspapers such as The Chronicle, Star and the Herald – my father often writing letters to the editor on issues of the day.

My father’s older brother who raised him after his mother had passed when he was just five years old, Lemuel McPherson Christian, had a Music and Commercial Class.

He was the composer of the musical score to our island’s national anthem: Isle of Beauty. That brother had been made a Member of the British Empire (MBE) by Queen Elizabeth II for his work as curator at the Botanic Gardens.

Aside from an office lined with portraits of the great composers such as Beethoven, Mozart and Tchaikovsky, Uncle L.M. maintained a small museum in his studio of butterflies, beetles and aphids beneath well varnished wooden boxes with glass viewing windows ; alongside those cases were logs of pressed leaves with tags noting their scientific names.

His library included works on Darwin, evolution, modern history and the geological history of earth. After Anglican service on Sunday, my father would often take us to visit Uncle Lemuel (or Steward as close family called him) where they would banter about history, philosophy, the state of our race, science and the need for one to exhibit industry so as to guarantee success.

As it would be the weekend, music and commercials classes would be out and so we would sit on a piano bench, next to one of his Steinway’s, and surrounded by about a dozen Underwood typewriters under their dust covers.

Uncle Steward’s wife, Aunty Arab – a full blooded Carib Indian - would feed us Coke, Fanta and Ritz crackers. If it was Christmas time, we would also have some peanuts or black cake, spiced with rum and thickly sown with raisins, prunes and mixed peel.

One Sunday, while speaking of evolution and the origins of man, Uncle Steward made a devastating statement which sent my young mind reeling.

He said: Wendell McKenzie Christian (my Dad –and he called you by your full name if he was deadly serious) Christ is dead! Tell him to rise before us now! The man is dead, I tell you! Now, we are Anglicans, and good Christians, just like our Antiguan parents, but the church is a social thing.

We work together; we learn social graces and we yearn to do good now, so our divine reward is assured in the hereafter. It makes sense to do so Wendell Mckenzie, or else man would cause havoc where he thought there were no consequences from a higher source for his actions.

We need God. The music is good. We play the piano and we all love the hymn: Oh Lord our help in Ages Past! But this is for society’s sake. We need a God to keep us straight.

But make no mistake, why we are doing this. We must have order here on earth and that requires a God. And we make it up as we go along!”

“What is that???” I could not believe my ears. I was dumbfounded. I could not believe what I had heard. Dad, said: “But Steward, you cannot say that. We just came from church, you know.

You must be careful you know. You cannot be saying those things in front of the children. What you think they will start to say, eh? I mean you and me, we are big people, we can talk of such things; but you mustn’t say that with the children around.”

That Sunday Uncle Steward just smiled, lowered his eyes, and merely muttered something about the fact that Mozart was mad, but a brilliant musician.

He gave no riposte to my Dad’s statement about such potentially damaging attacks on the prevailing wisdom about our rock-solid Christian faith. My father was a prayerful man and I know he was as stunned as we were by Uncle Steward’s comment.

My father’s oldest brother Henckell Lochinvar Christian would also often visit home and add to that intellectual ferment and spirit of critical inquiry.

A graduate in sociology from London University and a former headmaster, he worked as Government’s Director of Social Welfare in his later years and ended as Minister of Education in the government of Edward LeBlanc and later Patrick John.

At independence in 1978, he was the most senior and respected member of cabinet and served as Deputy Prime Minister. Though his Labour Party was social democratic, he spoke harshly of Stalin’s purges of the wealthy farmers or Kulaks which had precipitated a devastating famine in the Soviet Union during the 1930s.

Twirling his Volkswagen car keys vigorously, he would stride about our parlor warning my older brothers about falling in with the “in crowd.”

They were now reading books on The Black Panthers such as “Seize the Time”, Frantz Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth” and Dr. W.E.B. Dubois’ “The Souls of Black Folk.”

He urged us to be mindful of the dangers of too deep an indulgence in black radicalism. While deeply respectful of Uncle H.L., we had our own – often skeptical – views.

To us he was part of a fossilized Britannia Rules the Waves generation. He also had been awarded an MBE by Queen Elizabeth II for his work in education and social welfare and so it was easy to often dismiss his sentiments as that of a pro-colonial conservative.

However, Uncle Henckell allowed us to speak our minds and was able to parry our blows in an amicable atmosphere of intellectual jousting where no one was subjected to group think; nor were insulted and debased for disagreeing.

So here I was amidst ideas aplenty and a whole world unveiled through books, ideas and a free culture of inquiry.

In essence, the intellectual freedom, the variety of ideas, and early immersion in the spirit of balancing alternative views was able to inoculate me against the ideological dogmatism and idolatry which seeped out from the pages of the glossy North Korean magazines.

In 1905 the Scottish-American steel magnate and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie donated $5,000 to the building of the Roseau Free Library.

His gift would assist the education of a whole nation and shall be eternally appreciated by those who grew to know the world through books at that library.

Starting with my first book on Farmer Slade of Arkansas who tried to plough his land with a wild buffalo, to the Encyclopedia Britannica Yearbooks, I travelled the globe through those pages.

It was there I read of Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago and Alelsandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. In time I was to consume whole shelves of books.

By the age of about twelve, I met another voracious reader on that knowledge acquisition mission, a Dominica Grammar School upper class student: Irving W. Andre.

We were to later to put what we learnt to good use, and at the service of our recording our people’s history via Pont Casse Press and its first epic work: In Search of Eden: Dominica – The travails of a Caribbean Mini State – and later In Search of Eden: Essays on Dominican History.

Today we are buffeted by global recession, environmental degradation and how best to develop our nation. It is a challenge which faces not just Dominica, but all humanity.

In my short time on earth I have come to realize that to win the victory over those challenges one must have an enabling environment rooted in rule of law, good governance, freedom of thought, freedom of religion, a preference for competence over nepotism; and a system geared toward innovation in learning which propels industry.

To that end one cannot dull individual enterprise by prattling falsehoods, or blaming our fate on long past historical wrongs inflicted on our ancestors.

Nor can one stifle creativity by enforcing group-think of a kind which dulls the integrity of humanity’s yearning to be free to create and enjoy the fruits of that creation.

We must infuse every individual with the belief systems which prizes individual freedom; systems which assures a respectful place for worship of one’ faith, and that fans the spirit of enterprise.

The freedom to learn anew; to inquire, and not be so burdened by dogma must form the character of our nation. We must respect intellectual achievement at the service of competence and good governance.

We must uphold a society based on rule of law and families who discipline their young in the spirit of learning, respect for the team spirit of the beloved community, perseverance in wise effort and contribution to the common good.

In so doing we must be careful never to elevate greedy pursuit of selfish enterprise to that of Gospel, nor the bury benefits of individual enterprise into some mental Gulag of cynical communalism. We have seen the failings of both the extremes of right and left.

Too often the principles of democracy are savaged by those who speak in the name of so-called socialism and or free enterprise. Socialist ideas have brought forth much beneficial social change where implemented within a democratic framework.

At the same time, those same ideas have been the disguise for some of the world’s most loathsome and tyrannical leaders. Capitalism ushered in the industrial revolution and opened up new vistas for mankind, but its vicious edge born of chattel slavery, class oppression and wars of colonial conquest had to be tempered by social reformers who appealed to the better angels of our nature.

The abyss awaits any society where it fall falls prey to dictatorial tendencies, the theft of foreign aid funds and their conversion to personal use, lack of due process of law, oppressive oligarchies, corruption in public and private sector dealings such as what bred Bernie Madoff and those who plundered retirement funds of millions on Wall Street via fraudulent schemes, diminution in rule of law, misrule and dishonesty in governance.

In the words of one modern day critique: “We also need to relate all this to many phenomena and tendencies we see daily in some of the movements which promise change. We see the systematic cult of leadership, the manipulation of information, the abdication of critical judgment, the substitution of rhetoric for argument and of slogans for the serious discussion of complex issues. We observe the belief in 'power' at any cost - with little questioning as to its content - the mythologizing… the intimidation of those who dare criticize the “Chief”, the almost universal application of double standards, the systematic generation of paranoia and the retreat, on a very wide front indeed, from integrity and rationality in general.”

And so that freedom of thought and freedom to innovate and create outside the strictures of some state imposed gospel is an antidote to tyranny.

It means that we do not abide societies where government uses public funds to spy on its own citizens and so stifle democracy It means that we must uphold the best of our tradition of being a lawful society where we do not give a free pass to misrule, because we belong to the party in power, or a connected to those who are.

To do so would be to empower a morally repugnant elite. It is where we guide our development processes by those principles of learning and freedom to engage alternate ideas, and freely exchange such ideas – while ensuring government serves the public interest not just that of a few – that we shall sustain development in accord with the best democratic traditions.