Faith in the People

Sep 13, 2009 Editorial

There is a rising tide of exasperation from some social commentators, and some politicians, on the refusal by ordinary folks to “see” matters as they do and more to the point, act in the manner that they prescribe. This is nothing new.
Coterminous with the development of the “Enlightenment” in Europe, has been the rise of a class of individuals that believe because they have been to “school” and perchance to the University, the knowledge that they picked up from books and late night argumentation is superior to that of the rest of the folks that acquired their knowledge from experience and the “school of hard knocks”. These supercilious souls would like to be regarded as “intellectuals”.
We in the West Indies have gone along with the fiction. One iconoclast broke with his class and spoke of the tragedy of “Doctor Politics” in the West Indies. Freshly armed with their degrees from the “Mother Country” the early batch of politicians that “fought” for independence – on our behalf, they assured us fervidly – convinced us that they knew exactly what was needed to create our Promised Land. In our case, one putative “father of our nation” had his speeches on the nation collated as “A Destiny to Mould”.
The irony of any one man seeking to “mould” the destiny of an entire nation – one comprised of “six races” to boot – evidently never struck that leader.
He was firmly convinced that he was an “intellectual” and of course, he knew better. Most of his Marxist contemporaries shared his orientation about a “vanguard party”, filled with intellectuals, of course, whose mission was to lead the backward ‘working class” out of bondage. The said working class obviously could not think for themselves.
Today we witness the same arrogance in the pontifications of those that are filled with righteous indignation because the actions of the ordinary citizens do not fit in with the theories from books that fill their heads. Very few of them have ever thought to engage themselves in attempting to put their theories to the test of action – with they themselves getting into the trenches with the ordinary folks that they would have throw their bodies into the fray.
But the common folk – who these so-called intellectuals deride as “the great unwashed”- have something going for them – common sense. They have experienced the failures of the “great ideas” so many times in the past half-a-century, that they simply snicker and move placidly along as the latest “emancipator” mounts onto his/her soapbox.
“Common sense” implies practical and real capabilities and ways of organising one’s life based on actual and inherited experiences. It is always in tension with the abstractions of the “great minds”: it is the nearest thing to “democratic reason”. But this, not surprisingly, is scoffed at by those that “know better” – not least because there is very little power and prestige accreting to them from such a point of view.
Then also there is the common folk’s possession of tradition as a frame of reference to evaluate the claims of the new snake-oil salesmen. While tradition and convention are almost always derided by the latter group, as “fetters” to the new dispensation that would usher in the brave new world, it is these selfsame traditions that uphold and give meaning to the social life of the community.
Very often it is these traditions that generate the seeds of their own transformation – but at a pace that does not destroy the social capital accumulated so laboriously over time.
Finally there is the faith of the ordinary man, which the “intellectual will never know because his entire training has unfortunately been geared to subvert and undermine this rock on which mankind ultimately rests. Faith trains the common folk to appreciate that ultimately morality, justice and the good life can never be based solely on theories on bootstrapping from other ideas.
There has to be ideas consummated in action: and this is where the “intellectuals” have absolutely no experience. Let us keep faith with the people.

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