On Populism (5 February 2004)

There's a joke I once heard about the Bahamas government. If you ever find a good institution within it, don't tell anybody. As long as it's secret, it'll be fine. But if it ever becomes public knowledge, run. Somebody with power will come along and redeploy the equipment and the personnel and share all that goodness around.

You see, we live in a society that believes in populism. Baldly put, populism is the practice of supporting the rights of the common person against the privileged elite. It's a political philosophy that has governed the Bahamas since 1967. There's no need to wonder where it came from; for almost three hundred years the needs and desires of the majority of the people were systematically ignored, to the benefit of a few. In reaction, the Bahamian governments that followed majority rule made it their responsibility to meet the needs of the people. And so we have eschewed elitism, making it a cardinal sin. We have all embraced populism.

And embraced it to the point of absurdity.

We've embraced it to the point of discouraging all activity that set minimum standards for qualification. Nothing must be exclusive, the theory went. Everything must be available to all people.

The kind of populism we employ today in the Bahamas goes something like this: Never put a whole bunch of extremely competent people in the same place. Competence must be spread thin like jam on toast. Excellence must be shared, not concentrated. At all costs, avoid creating anything good in a single spot. Spread it out! Else everyone won't get a chance to taste it.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm a populist myself. But there's ways and ways of protecting people's rights, and some of them make more sense to me than others.

Take the following example: the decision to dismantle the "old" Government High School. The reasoning behind this decision was sound populism. If I'd been a lawmaker back in those days, I might have supported it myself. It went something like this. Education should be available to all Bahamians equally. To get into the "old" GHS one had to sit an entrance examination, and only those who passed it could be considered for a place in the Government High School. Later, this entrance examination was extended to all Bahamian schoolchildren, and those children who preferred not to go to GHS for one reason or another could be awarded a scholarship to any one of the private schools. An elitist system, to be sure. Better to dismantle the system, spread the goodness around, and open the doors of GHS (and all government schools) to all Bahamian children.

There's only one problem with the idea. In order to give all ordinary Bahamian children the benefit of the same quality of education that some ordinary Bahamian children got at the "old" GHS, you need to make every high school as good as the old GHS. In a newly-independent Bahamas where only a handful of people had the kind of education that allowed them to reproduce that kind of quality, it was an impossibility.

Human excellence is not like the gumelemi tree. When you cut it up and scatter it, it doesn't all take root and grow. Rather, it's like the words of the writer of Proverbs: Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend. Excellence works best when it's supported, when it's localized and focussed, especially in a populist society. It tends to fade into mediocrity when it's isolated.

And so today we have a public school system where educators struggle to raise the national average grade above a "D". It's open to every Bahamian child, but very few parents who can afford an alternative choose to send their children to a government school. Instead, they invest thousands of dollars on private school educations. On the other hand, if you're is poor, the chances of your child receiving the best education the country can offer are slim to nothing; if you want quality, you must pay for it. Quite a difference from the days when the brains you were born with and the effort you made in school could determine your future. Today's society sports an elitism where money and family connections make the difference. And it's an elitism that is the by-product of a populist decision.

No. I don't believe that the populist answer to elitist power is always to dismantle the institutions that create that power. That's a short-cut, not a solution, a reaction, not a policy. And it runs the risk of short-circuiting itself and creating a society that is both largely mediocre and far more rigidly elitist than the one it tried to correct.

You see, there's elitism and elitism. There's the elitism that excludes other people on the basis of their backgrounds, their bank accounts, their connections, their skin colour, their last names, their nationality, their language.

But there's another kind. This kind excludes other people on the basis of their ability to do things: to jump higher, say, or to sing better or think quicker than other people. These are gifts from God, and they don't depend on your family or your background or the amount of money you have. People are not equal; people are unique. The strengths of my neighbour are not my strengths, and my weaknesses are my own.

I don't believe in a populism that hands out mediocre services indiscriminately to all. I don't believe in the idea that if one is Bahamian (or PLP, or FNM, or "grass-roots", or whatever) that is all one needs to secure a job. That is the kind of populism that disrespects, that caters to the lowest common denominator in society, and that ultimately serves to spread mediocrity and dissatisfaction all around.

I believe in a populism that works hand in hand to develop this kind of uniqueness. I believe in a populism that sets the highest standards possible for everyone, that looks for the signs of talent among all people and provides places and funding that helps those people develop those talents. Where elitist institutions like choirs, athletic federations, theatre companies, Junkanoo groups and dance troupes exist, it builds them up, makes them stronger; where they don't, it establishes them. It recognizes merit. It gathers excellence together, rather than scattering it, ensures that it grows instead of fades. The kind of populism I believe in works hard to provide an outlet for everyone's talent, from ballet to the beating of the goombay drum, and it strives to make sure that everyone gets the chance to dream her own dream.

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