Culture of Wealth and Prosperity

04, Jan 1999
'No wonder, in our world, in our culture, "wealth and profits" literally became "bad words." We hated to see any of our kind amassing wealth, and put deliberate obstacles in the way of any of us projecting any such tendency...'

We did not grow up in a cultural world in which people prayed for money and wealth. In the culture we knew, people prayed for health, strength, knowledge and wisdom. In our cultural world, it was indeed believed that it was easier for a "camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven."

'Riches' and 'righteousness' were made to seem by nature contradictory. Profits, by extension of the same logic, seemed vulgar, negative and probably even unworthy of our best endeavours and creative energies.

In terms of careers for the young, business involvement, the enterprise of buying, manufacturing and selling were relegated to a kind of "poor brother," second class status. Preference was indeed given to the supposed lofty professions of medicine, law, teaching, engineering, accounting, etc, as well as certain areas of the fine arts.

In our time, and in our cultural world, most youths found themselves programmed to be teachers, clerks or clergymen. In fact, there is truth in the view that the grammar schools were designed to produce a society of clerks, who were programmed not to challenge anything but to accept the status quo and rubber stamp existing arrangements.

And as clerks in the public service, up to recent times, we were legally debarred from engaging in any business activities. We even had to get permission from senior officers and permanent secretaries to own land, the very basis of wealth generation and formation.

We, in this particular cultural world, were destined to have no independent means of existence. And even this may have been an original colonial imperative, geared to dampen our level of combativity and further reinforce, by the ethics of Roman Catholicism and Christianity.

No one sought to destroy it philosophically as part of our anti-colonial consciousness. If anything, we did the opposite and enhanced the social conventions that support that negative imperative.

When we left secondary school, we were told by concerned parents that we should apply for a job in the public service, because such jobs are "pensionable," take out a life insurance policy, and open a savings account.

Imagine outlining such a strategy for future existence for a youth of 18. It was tantamount to assigning a life of penury to our best and most energetic minds. We were inadvertently relegating ourselves to a legacy of poverty that has worsened to a most devastating extent in the late 1990s.

No wonder, in our world, in our culture, "wealth and profits" literally became "bad words." We hated to see any of our kind amassing wealth, and put deliberate obstacles in the way of any of us projecting any such tendency while, on the other hand, as clerks in the public service, we proved to be conduits through which others, unlike us, and with a different view of life, gained prosperity.

Most times we were the conduits in exchange for a "beach lime" or a "river lime" with Johnny Walker Black whisky, or in most cases in exchange for a pat on the back and mere accolades that we were "good fellahs."

In our world, we acquired skills which we taught well, passing on skills and accumulated knowledge freely to all and sundry and then retired into virtual poverty, leaving behind younger, educated clerks and professionals of similar temperament, hooked to a similar predetermined destiny.

But most of all, those in our world who dared to break away and establish a different path, embracing the parameters of business and wealth accumulation, were ignored and left to flounder without any rooted support mechanism or network.

There have been and are other cultural worlds within this twin island state. In Tobago of the past, every family owned plots of land, even if only a house plot, and every one knew about the industry of agriculture and the process of accumulating and building from generation to generation, independent of the dictates of officialdom. Even when Tobagonians chose the professions, there was support of a landed gentry or landed peasantry.

Clearly, from Tobago's history, in which Anglicans were always stronger numerically and otherwise, the inhabitants were imbued with the Protestant ethics that provided the underlying philosophical basis for ascendant capitalism. The same was also true in the European experience. The fact that nearly all of the black millionaires in Trinidad and Tobago are Tobagonians proves the point.

There was originally a different world view and a different strategy for existence and development in Tobago that stemmed directly from the ownership of land and the social organisation required to work that land. Today, that view and strategy are being gradually eroded by the flesh trade and the illusion of flashy glitter.

In the cultural world of the Chinese and Indian descendants, there are similar ethics based on ownership and there is also a strategic legacy for their development. Business networking has always been key to their independent development. Business is a way of life to them. They pray for their ancestors and to their gods to provide them with wealth and prosperity.

These are not bad words to them, but the very essence of their existence. Mrs Champa Baksh, in her statement on salaries to MPs, indicated that she and her husband "have been blessed long before he went into politics."

In other words, "wealth" is a blessing, while we in our world, were taught that "blessed are the poor," for they shall see God. To reinforce this, our grannies were wont to say over and over in patois "black bird never pray for pretty feather, he pray for long life."

In our culture, we are yet to learn how wealth transforms communities.