EDITORIAL: Finding the correct balance

THE recent electorally rejected Democratic Labour Party governing administration made it a point of honour to emphasise that Barbados was more than an economy, but was a society too.

Some people might argue fairly that these two concepts are not mutually exclusive; that Barbados is indeed both an economy and a society and that to concentrate on one while ignoring the other will lead to either a wealthy dystopia or an economically depressed polity.

Currently, owing to the immediate sequelae of the global pandemic, Barbados finds itself in the midst of an economic recession and, as if to demonstrate the validity of the argument above, some relatively recent events have also borne witness to an alarming incidence of anomie and antisocial conduct among our very young.

In recent days there have been reports of a group of pre-adolescent youngsters beating one of their playmates into a vegetative state; a pre-teen child stabbing his older sister to death; and some youths, for no apparent reason except maybe their own amusement, deciding to assault sundry homeless men and having it recorded on social media for posterity.

And, all the while, the horrifying spate of random killings by firearms persists with a seemingly intractable frequency.

We really must do better, if we are to deserve the high reputation we appear to hold of ourselves to the point where we prefer to regard the recent US travel advisory as a national affront, rather than either as a genuine attempt by the US to close its borders to its citizens or even as an unwitting sop to protect our relatively efficient handling of the virus.

The truth is that we are so accustomed to viewing travel advisories issued by the US and the UK as condemnatory of the object nation that we have reacted to this one with knees a-jerking and hackles raised, rather than with deliberate thought.

But this is to digress from our immediate thesis; that we have to get both our economy and our society back on track.

The current spate of crime has raised once more the hoary suggestion that the administration of corporal punishment is the answer to our woes. This is unsurprising. Despite cogent evidence to the contrary, there is a pervasive local superstition that a good “cut-tail” is the sole antidote to youthful, and adult, indiscretions of whatever hue.

We have also seen suggestions of placing a vicarious responsibility on parents for the wrongful acts of their children. The concept is not unknown, although it has been restricted so far to the liability of employers for their employees’ acts in the course of employment and of principals for the acts of their agents done for the principal’s benefit.

We are of the view that despite the allure of the concept, principles of fairness militate against it. A parent may do only so much to influence his or her child’s conduct, but the combined influences of the child’s peers, his or her education in the broad sense, and their psychological make-up may all act as intervening causes between the parental instruction and the conduct to be censured.

It may eventually be a matter for an already laden public discourse agenda, but we yearn for an impression that officialdom is keen to confront existing social ills, in much the same way it has emphasised the importance of the various aspects of the economy, with the array of ministers and consultants under that portfolio, to add to the discrete ministries dedicated to the green, blue and creative economies. A balance is essential.