Best and Innovative Thinking
With one week to go before the people decide which of PNM and UNC should hold the reins of power, with the parties going through the motions of holding meetings and extolling themselves, and with the major issues for the electorate long established as ethnicity (aka race), corruption, and ability to provide efficient government, I shall, this column, focus on a man who has interpreted Caribbean government and politics better than most of us and has helped us all to a better sense of ourselves in the universe of socio-political experience. His name is Lloyd Best and he was honoured by UWI the other day with a conference that sought to review his contribution to social, economic, and political thought and knowledge.
For me, Lloyd is not merely what most commentators summarise him as: a (former) university lecturer in economics; a co-originator (with Kari Levitt) of the plantation model of Caribbean economies; a founder of Tapia and associated review papers; a commentator on Caribbean, especially Trinidadian, government and politics; a columnist whose discourse is dense and inaccessible to the average man; a failure at taking government through conventional political methods and procedures.
This characterisation is true, but it hides the true essence of the man. Essentially, Lloyd has been the Caribbean's social scientist par excellence and Trinidad and Tobago's, if not the Caribbean's, main teacher in social self-knowledge and self-understanding. He has been teaching with great perseverance and loyalty and, if you have the patience, exemplary clarity.
He was trained as an economist, but most of his time and thinking has been spent, not in examining financial and economic variables in our space for deriving our economic character therefrom, but on analysing and making sense of our institutional and political framework. In the process, he has gone outside of economics to any number of disciplines for insight and explanatory power, and it is this extra-disciplinary recourse and his long practice in weaving a wide variety of strands of knowledge and thought into a coherent model of Trinbagonian and Caribbean behaviour that makes him the great social teacher and towering intellectual that he is.
He it is, more than any other, including our premier historian and politician Eric Williams, that has made us see that reliance on imported models of formal (as distinct from naturally occurring and informal) structures and models of self-regulation is self-defeating and unavailing. He it is that has taught us that our biggest economic problem is not active non-diversification of the economy but an under-representation, in both politics and government, of the different ethnic and other kinds of interest groups in the social fabric that is subservient to imported, outer-directed structures rather than accommodating of local, homegrown social templates.
He it is that has shown us that government is not politics or politics government, that office does not mean meaningful change. He it is that has given us interpretive notions like 'doctor politics', 'the politics of one', 'maximum leadership', 'executive/prime ministerial dictatorship', 'prime minister as neo-colonial governor', 'control of the legislature by the executive' to help us better understand our socio-political reality.
And more. Lloyd has proposed that, contrary to ethnicised thinking, our politicians are not wicked or evil (yes, not Williams, not Manning, not Panday), but trapped in ethnic narcissism and insularity, and woefully unexercised in thinking about the viability and potential international competitiveness of local ideas, innovations, and solutions. He has pointed us to the slow pace of sociological evolution for the changes he has long seen as necessary, and has isolated the role of 'accident' - a development created by a constellation of forces that is not specifically predictable on the basis of known factors - in the advancement of our politics.
For example, the accident of the 18-18 election score is for him, in general terms, the inescapable result of years of under-representation, increasing public enlightenment about politics, and a growing douglarisation of ethnic consciousness.
The most striking aspect of his teaching, for me, is the anti-outside iconoclasm in his insistence that we have the creativity in Trinidad and Tobago in particular and the Caribbean in general to build our own social, economic, and political models; that we must value, with a deeply reflective focus, our own inventions and inventiveness. So we must value our pan, our music, our dance, our language in this way. Such a reflection would lead to a notion such as 'schools in pan', not merely 'pan in schools'. And it would lead to an overhaul of research and teaching focus in the education and innovation system, especially the university, from which he retired, would you believe it?, without a professorship.
Given the slow pace of sociological advancement, the insistence of ethnic opportunism in our politics, the silent screech in the general citizenry for cross-ethnic political maturity, does another Bestian accident await us on October 7?
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