SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2007 Edition

 

 

DESPITE all the efforts of Patrick Delanoe, the Mayor of Paris, to bring summer to his city, the Paris Plage remained deserted this year. Plage is the Mayor’s gift to the deprived. “If the poor of Paris cannot go to the beach in summer, the beach will come to Paris,” he had promised with typical French grandiosity - and created a new tradition: a beach along the Seine every August. The sand and the water were there this month but no beautiful bikini-clad Parisians. Summer had made an accidental stopover here in April. And then ashamed at her mistake, hasn’t shown up in May, June, July or August. Unable to banish their trench coats, trousers, hats and umbrellas, thenormally miserable Parisian continued to be even more miserable, or flew south across the Mediterranean to old France in greater numbers than ever before. Foreigners, on the other hand, were oblivious of the weather and continued to replace every missing native, two for one, providing free English conversation practice to diligent French students, who, for lack of opportunity, lag behind their European counterparts in spoken English. Recently, on one such miserable afternoon, I was indulging in an indoor luncheon and the interesting conversation that usually accompanies such indoor affairs.

Two friends had just returned from their holidays overseas. One from Guadeloupe, a French island in the Caribbean and the other from Sweden. The notable observations of the island visitors were that the Guadeloupeans were probably the laziest people in the world.“Nobody works in Guadeloupe. They don’t even pick the ripe mangoes off the laden trees. They even get people from Haiti to come and cut the sugarcane in Guadeloupe…” Both my friends were from India. The visitor to Sweden observed that the majority of people he had met in Malmo did not work. Those who did said that they did so merely out of a feeling of self- esteem or that their work was fulfilling.Work as a source of fulfillment? Work as a source of self- esteem? Never for the slaves! Not for those who don’t have the liberty to decide their own lives! Being of the school that believes that beneath the rather thin veneer of historical and geographical conditions that feed culture, human nature comes in one standard model, I was set thinking as to why native Guadeloupeans and native Malmos were so different. The common factor was the highly benevolent social welfare system that both France and Sweden practise.

So what was the difference? History provides us the answer. In northern Europe, since Calvin a work ethic developed (it’s principle export to America), now commonly known as the Protestant work ethic. In Calvinist times it was believed that hard work was a moral statement. Loosely translated, it meant that you reaped the material benefits of your labour and became prosperous. It was largely this belief (and its direct results) that led to the prosperity of western Europe for the last few centuries. The Guadealoupeans, on the other hand, can trace their history to western Africa, from where they were brought as slaves to the Islands. Forcefully cut off from their origins, cruelly deprived of their identity and all their rights as human beings, including the right to literacy and education (often punishable by death, asin the US), their attitude towards work was a direct derivative of their circumstances. The benefits of their labour accrued, not to them, but to their masters. The more they worked, the more work they were given. The better they worked, the better they were expected to work. Shirking without being caught became the natural outcome and thereby the slave work ethic. A whole paradigm was created where work had a negative connotation. If history is to be rightly interpreted, much of western European prosperity came from exploiting both the wealth and labour of the colonised world – and not from the commonly accepted myth of merely working hard. Sadly, it continues to his day. Therefore, to call the natives of the colonised world, lazy, is to heap insult upon centuries of injury. The most ‘American’ of American Presidents, master of the glib one-liners, Ronald Reagan’s coinage of the ‘Welfare Queen’ has become a part of American folklore and added immensely to the myth and image of the lazy African. The truth is that even in the Swedish and French systems, welfare benefits ever exceed 80 per cent of the last salary earned. The US is way below that figure. To consume excessively on such welfare benefits, as Reagan claimed, is well nigh impossible. This century is surely going to change some of the basic economic premises on which we have been bred since Calvin, and above all, the later day capitalist saint, Adam Smith. If An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations were to be conducted today, surely we would arrive at some very different conclusions from those of Mr Smith. The ecological imperative (on which the very survival of the human race may depend) will surely force us to reject the economics of such anunsustainable, ever-spiralling cycle of production and consumption that we had (to our great chagrin) taken for granted.

In such a utopian world of reduced consumption how would we view the ‘lazy’ Guadeloupean ? In such a world we will discover that ourecological footprint directly correlates to, not only our consumption, but to our ownership and thereby to our ‘prosperity’. Prosperity may not continue to command the same respect it does at present. Gandhian values of simplicity may one day take hold of our imagination. In that utopian world surely our role models, like the President of the French Republic, will be frowned upon if they continue to spend obscene amounts of money (reportedly $22,000 per day on rent alone) on his holiday, like he did this week in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, US. Fraternising with Microsoft big wigs in Davos may not be seen in the same light as renting their celebrity pads for a family holiday.

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