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1992-2003 Heretical Musings about Guyana

by Haslyn Parris

306 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #03-1153; ISBN 1-4120-0785-2; US$24.95, C$32.00, EUR20.80, £14.41

A set of heretical essays dealing with elections in Guyana, including issues such as electoral systems and power sharing.

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About the Book     About the Author     Table of Contents and Excerpt     Catalogue Info

About the Book Heretical Musings is a set of time-bound essays whose merit lies not so much in the truths that they reveal as in the stimulus they provide to pursuit of the 'truth'. Inevitably, they rely on the provocation of conjecture for their appeal - that itching of the mind which should produce the mental analogue of a 'sweet scratch'. The temptation to use as the title for this book the Old French word 'Provocation' as been resisted - on the basis that a self-conscious switch into a foreign language is ont evidence of profundity; but those interested in the affairs of Guyana should enjoy this provocative mental walkabout. The book comprises suites of essays written during the last ten or so years; and the Introductions that accompanied the publication of those essays that had been previously published are themselves treated as mini essays. I sincerely hope that readers will be usefully titillated by the mental promenade. For myself, on reflection I have been most fascinated by including the essays entitled "some of my Favourite Heresies" and have responded to this fascination by including the essay "A Critique of our Constitution" as the penultimate contribution in this publication. My fascination derives substantially from my experiences with the Constitution Reform Commission of 1999, and from review of the current states of Constitution Reform (March 2003). I suspect that a fair proportion of readers of this publication will be equally fascinated; and perhaps the Parliamentary Standing Committee for Constitution Reform will find the ideas at least interesting, and may be useful. More important, however, is the hoary matter of ethnicity and voting behaviour in Guyana. I have long been convinced that voting behaviour is not a field characterized by conceptual elegance and analytical simplicity. The decision-making of humans, including innumerate politicians, in a milieu of non-benign competition, is imbued with a 'fuzziness' that precludes such characterization. That is why I instinctively reject simplistic assertions such as: "Voting behaviour in Guyana is ethnically pre-determined". Such a simplistic and ill-defined hypothesis has an insufficiency of both explanatory and predictive power; and in any event is untestable. Accordingly, it does not merit the place it holds in terms of popular explanations of voting behaviour in Guyana. These summarize the thoughts that have made me heretically swim against the tide of popular opinion, and have resulted in part in the suite of essays on Ethnicity. Those thoughts also colour a number of the other essays in this publications. Happy reading! W. H. Parris 2003

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About the Author The author is a former Deputy Prime Minister, former Secretary to the Constitution Reform Commission (1999) and currently a Commissioner of the Guyana Elections Commission. He brings his formal training in mathematics and economics and statistics to bear on a range of issues related to governance and economic development in Guyana.

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Table of Contents and Excerpt

Suite of Introductions

Some of My Favourite Heresies: Viva Heresy [1995]
Some more of My Favourite Heresies: An Addendum to Viva Heresy [1996]

Heretical Musings: Introduction [2003]

Suite on Ethnicity

Red Balls, Blue Balls, and Ethnic Voting Patterns [1992]
The Ethnic Problem (More Interesting Insights) [1995] with Address by D Hoyte at 150^th Anniversary of Abolition of Slavery Tourism - A Counter-Intuitive Conjecture [ 1995]

Suite on Education

Education - Mais! [1995] Education (A further Note based on the vantage point od the SSEE) [1996]

Suite on Electoral Systems

The Term of Government (or What’s so special about 5?) [1995]
Who Shall Govern Us? Some further Comments on Guyana’s Electoral System [1998]
PEC [1998]
An Initial Comment on the Results of the Electoral Formula used for Elections of 2001 [2001]

Appendix 1 - CRC Questionnaire [1999] Appendix 2 - Political Parties in the Assembly [2001] The Upsidedowness of Power Sharing [2002] Extract from Letter to Ellis re his comments [2002] A Suggested Methodology for Choosing a Non-partisan Board [2001]

Suite of the Future

Whither goest we? [1996] A Critique of our Constitution (An Initial Comment) [1995] CODA - Letter to Stabroek News [2002]

Heretical Musings

This volume of essays entitled ‘Heretical Musings’ was to have been presented inthree parts. In terms of the chronology of the essays that have been written, thoughPart 1 would have preceded Part 2, which in turn would have preceded Part3, the book would have presented the Parts in reverse order; thereby giving the reader the most recent ‘musings’ first. This would have given readers the opportunityto be titillated first by comments related to more recent events. There is, however, a penalty that readers impatient to deal with the most recent would have paid for that choice. That ‘penalty’ is related to the fact that the essays in Part 3, whichwould have been presented first, have had the benefit of thinking developed in Part 1 through Part 2; and there would therefore have been some merit in reading Parts 1 and 2 before reading the offerings in Part 3.

Actually, Part 1 would have comprised essays that were published in1995 as ‘some of My Favourite Heresies’; and Part 2 those published in 1996 as ‘some More of MyFavourite Heresies’. They would have been re-presented, complete with their original introductions. Those introductions disclose the mind set which I, as the authorof the essays, had at the time of writing; but subsequent events convinced me that‘what was play to the schoolboy was indeed detrimental to the frog.’ Too much of what those essays envisaged or predicted was indeed coming to pass -e.g. the alienation of the electorate form the political leadership -in a discomfiting manner.

The net result would have been that though Part 3 would have retained the ‘tongue-in-cheekness’ of its predecessors, it would have acquired, at least in my mind as the author,a seriousness of concern and conjecture that no longer satisfies the criterion of the essays being merely a mental walkabout by an ageing retiree, designed in its sharing mainly to ‘provoke’ readers and not offer blueprints.

However, the structure of this book has not followed that initial plan.

Instead, the essays are grouped into ‘Suites’ of topics with each essay being identified by the time of original publication (or authorship). Thus, the sequence of idea development is preserved within each topic group; and the reader is not forced to jumpfrom topic group to topic group as would have been the case in the initial plan.

The structure offered is:

The Suite of Introductions (an insight into the mindset of the author); The Suite on Ethnicity;
The Suite on Education;
The Suite on Electoral Systems; and
The Suite on the Future.

Also, each essay, including the Introductions, is identified in terms of the date of previous publication or construction where applicable.

This retreat from the original stance of simply playing a conjectural game has derived from my private continuing study of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS), as analysed inthe published works of members of the Santa Fe Institute, and related works such asMitchell Waldrop’s ‘COMPLEXITYThe Emerging Science at the Edge of Order andChaos’. I am currently of the view that the wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth in Guyana today about the state of Guyana, though evidence of justified concern, is simply a reaction from ‘agents’ in Guyana in response to the fact that Guyana, as a CAS, has moved to the ‘edge of chaos’ in an evolutionary process over which there is, and can be no central control. The ‘edge of chaos’ is where CAS go to solve complex problems.

This is not the view of one who has given up and become a despairing pessimist! Quite the opposite. I am convinced, more than I had been at the time of publishing the essays that would have comprised Part 1 and Part 2 (1993 -1996), that making sense of what is happening in Guyana requires a shift in vantage point, a paradigmatic shift of approach, to understand and react to Guyana’s current evolving economic and social state. It is against this background of ideas that the essays that would have comprised Part 3 have been written. These ideas suggest, for instance, thatwe ought to revisit the memes which assert that Guyana’s problem is mainly an ethnic one; or that Executive Power Sharing on the basis of acceptance of that meme is a key element of our salvation; or that we have a Westminster model of government, dependent for its success on fostering a strong, responsible ‘Opposition’.

I am, more than ever, a convert to the idea that it is useful and perhaps necessary, as Walter Kaufmann noted about the work of Friedrich Nietzsche in his translator’s preface to ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, to become “a dedicated enemy of all convention, intent on exposing the stupidity and arbitrariness of custom.” The powerof the Information Age, with its capacity to generate rapidly evolving memes, almost certainly needs to be harnessed by skeptical inquiry into popular ideas.

Further, I believe that I have stumbled on a reason why ageing is often attended by progressive impairment of the faculties of hearing and seeing. It appears to me that through that phenomenon of degeneration, nature provides a stimulus for the protective pseudo-politeness of looking without seeing, and hearing without listening. Thus, there is a minimisation of the vexation to the aged soul caused by the preponderanceof rubbish that constitutes action, and the superfluity of officialdom’s words seeking to justify that rubbish. There is nothing more psychologically traumatic than being verbally confronted with ignorance or stupidity and knowing it. In older age one can retreat into the comfortable cocoon of selective blindness and deafness. Retirement simultaneously provides the freedom to follow through one’s puzzles and curiosities with the patience and persistence of a peasant farmer (or a Charles Dodgson), and with the aplomb of donkeys at midnight on the warm Corentyne highway at Tarlogie village turn, exploring solution spaces without the jeopardy of being held responsible or accountable; and to perform thought experiments pondering the socially unthinkable. The strength of the cocoon is increased by the device of my conviction of the correctness of a statement that Waldrop attributes to George Cowan of the Santa Fe Institute: ‘I’ve just reached the age when I don’t bother with people I have to make allowances for.’

In this era of preemptive wars, of the arrogance and chicanery of the mighty and powerful,and of the technological facilitation of “spin doctoring” in the evolution of memes, while I am certainly concerned about the evolution of events in Guyana, I am more fascinated than worried. ‘Fascination’ is the most apt description I can find for myown reaction as I observe the Guyanese response to a local and foreign milieu of: gallows humour; courtly love; duplicity through misinformation; and the non-reasonable hope that God cares, is not deaf, is insomniac, and will intervene benignly, thereby giving substance to the alleged efficacy of prayer by the soi-disant downtrodden seeking justice.

March, 2003