Immigrants the world over, not excluding Guyana, demonstrate a remarkable penchant to practise deferred gratification, which allows them to improve their economic lot. As is occurring in the US today, this sometimes engenders hostility. This capacity to save, found in people who were at best grubbing out a day-to-day existence from cane cutting, farming or fishing, became part of their culture, and ensured that their children lived ‘better’.
Today, this willingness to imbibe self-control, plan for the future, and defer gratification to ensure that the plan gets accomplished in the face of humble circumstances is fast disappearing. We are now generally living and consuming for the moment, but still want to see our lives improve over time. We want to “suck cane and blow whistle at the same time.” It can’t be done, so we end up frustrated, sink into despair, or demand handouts.
Some, of course, use force and take what they want; and we see this reflected in the ever-rising rate of robberies.
From whence have we imbibed this new ‘don’t give a damn’ attitude? For one: in any group, there will be some who will go “against the grain”; but, generally, it’s as a result of outside pressures and influences – cultural and otherwise. In the Caribbean, there are aspects of the dominant Creole culture that present some of these pressures and influences. And this has to be part of our rejection of the assimilationist imperatives in the present dominant mode of ‘integration’, as we begin to interrogate the dysfunctional aspects of Creole Culture and practise true multiculturalism based on taking the positive aspects from all of our peoples’ cultures.
Back in 1984, there was an International Roundtable in Guyana to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery. Then Prime Minister, Desmond Hoyte, delivered an address: “Towards 2034: A Deeper View of the Horizon”, in which he made some pertinent remarks on the refusal of some of our people “to live for the future”. We quote below rather liberally from Mr Hoyte’s address:
“…one of the most pernicious consequences of slavery was that it bereft the slave of a vested interest in the future by imposing upon him the need to be constantly preoccupied with the exigencies of the moment. Indeed, the African slave on a WI plantation found himself in a world without horizons. His condition circumscribed within very narrow limits not only his physical, but also his spiritual, being. It deprived of the cohering and creative influences of his social organisation and his culture.
“Uprooted from his natural milieu, no longer able to fulfil his civic and religious duties, he was robbed of his spiritual points of reference. His personality disintegrated, and in a word, he suffered “social death”. It is not to be wondered at, then, that his outlook was little informed by any curiosity beyond the immediate, by any speculation about the distant future.
“And so, lacking a social motive, he developed no interest in, or aptitude for, making long-term arrangements. Moreover, the colonial polity which succeeded the era of slavery did not provide the former slave and his descendants with significantly greater incentive or opportunity for cultivating these pursuits. Thus there persists in our society, even to this day, a reluctance to focus too intently on the future.
“It is critically important, I believe, that we should analyse and understand this phenomenon of our lack of interest in the future and our failure, generally, to plan in a serious, methodical way with respect to it.”
While Mr Hoyte’s address focused on the need for planning at the country and international levels, it is important to note that he grounded the fundamental lacuna at the individual’s level, for all of us who followed the slaves on the plantations. And it is here I believe that, in the present, THIRTY-FOUR years after his warning, we must begin.
The question is: “Can we teach ourselves how to live for the future?” The research shows we can.
