So, that Integrity Commission business: resignations, an impending round of new appointments, to be followed by yet another Sisyphean boulder roll. Legal issues are not my area. (That this doesn't seem to stop others whose forte isn't legal matters from shooting from the mouth confirms my feelings about the media in general and columnists in particular.) But the latest split in the Integrity Commission over the Emailgate thing is also a cultural issue.
From the intrigue accompanying this latest event, considered as part of a pattern with the many preceding events, the problem seems to be misunderstanding of a locus of crucial connected concepts like integrity, tradition, good taste, moral reasoning and common decency.
The centrality of these concepts to the issue clarified as I read the text of The Hon Dame Linda Dobbs' distinguished lecture to the Judicial Education Institute two weeks ago titled "Who's Afraid of Human Rights?"
Dame Linda's preface, to explain her approach to human rights even though she was not a specialist in the field, is worth repeating: "The judge in carrying out his/her duty of fairness and impartiality need not fear upholding human rights, even where national legislation does not so provide...human rights should be part of a judge's DNA."
I'm snipping a bit out of a long, elaborate lecture, but the crux isn't misrepresented. Even where the formal rules do not exist, the judges' (cultural) DNA/worldview, formed by education, the ideas and mental atmosphere he/she lives in and breathes, should imbue the capacity for reasoning that leads to judgments which uphold human rights.
In this regard, civil servant, policeman, clerk, taxi-driver or doctor could be substituted for "judge;" and fairness and sentience for "human rights."
The idea is that society as an interconnected system (of education, art, law, pop culture, church, and civic organisations), should be producing people/mentalities who unthinkingly uphold its central values. It clearly is not, if the IC is an example.
It could be because Dame Linda, like many others, assumes Trinidad's central values are conventional Christian virtues and/or Enlightenment principles: honesty, compassion, fairness, equality and so on. That's a mistake. A survey was conducted to determine national values in Trinidad & Tobago in 2012 by the Barrett Values Centre in London.
A key finding was a disconnect between personal values and existing and desired values. People behave in ways they know are wrong, but which they believe society requires, approves or will permit. The general consequence is paralysis or frenzy, or, as Yeats put it, a state where the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. (The executive summary reported the study had found this disconnect "a plausible explanation for the low work ethic, high levels of frustration and unhappiness and high levels of dysfunctionality that manifest in the society)."
Which leads back to the Integrity Commission fiasco. This is not the first appalling situation in which the IC's found itself. This leads to an obvious question: does the institution know what it's meant to do, and how to do it? It's also worth noting that the IC's members come from the same talent pool which includes our, ahem, best and brightest: doctors who kill patients without consequences, lawyers who commit far worse crimes than the clients they misrepresent, and judges and political appointees who preside over it all.
There is a kink in this latest fiasco: the zeal shown by Justice Ventour and the Deputy DPP (who gave specific reasons for their actions) which both appear to signal a principled stand. But the acts are perplexing in their singularity. Why now, and why over this? Surely in a legal system as medieval as ours, this is not the only or most atrocious enormity either would have witnessed. (As fascinating as this question is, I'll note it and leave it alone).
A more interesting question is the one of how ideas get into the cultural DNA of judicial and other officials, and the connection to the high levels of national dysfunction. The Barrett survey has a penetrating perspective on this: "The level of dysfunctionality in a society is a direct result of the number of limiting values held by the society and is known as cultural entropy.
"Cultural entropy (dysfunctionality) is the measure of the level of fear, anxiety, unhappiness and frustration that people feel about being able to meet their basic needs and satisfy their growth needs...in the environment/context in which they live...(it is) a reflection of the character and quality of leadership and the amount of care given to meeting the needs of people as opposed to their (the leadership's) own needs."
People feel disconnected, abandoned and helpless throughout society, hence the anarchism everywhere–this is no secret. But what seems unknown are mechanisms for curing this alienation: widely held values which lead to concerted individual action and policies which promote equity and fairness.
In developed societies, the character of nations is as much derived from their art and ideas as military and economic prowess. The British Empire's war machine and economy are shadows of their former glories, but British culture, which made the colonised want to be a part of Empire, persists. I cite British culture because it provided a framework for the local understanding of the notions of tradition, decency, and integrity, but this has been abandoned for we ting. Which seems to be nothing.
No coherent indigenous system of values which aligns the thinking of the educated or privileged exists in Trinidad & Tobago in 2015. Without this acknowledgement as a starting point, the number of schools, tertiary graduates, and billions spent will be for naught.
Remember, the Integrity Commission should be the refinement of the society's best ideas and intentions on integrity. Instead, it's a Frankenstein we're all looking at and cringing.