On his My Choice segment on I95.5 two weeks ago, journalist and radio talkshow host Dale Enoch played a recent cover version of the late King Austin’s classic calypso Progress, sang as a ballad by Sharissa Camejo, who was last year’s Junior Calypso Monarch. And, listening to the lyrics, it struck me that, more than anything else, the song revealed how wrong its pessimistic perspective was even in 1980 when the calypso was first performed.
Penned by Winsford ‘Joker’ Devine, Progress begins “Today when I look around in the world what do I see?/I see footprints that man has left on the sand/While walking through time.” As the rest of the song makes clear, those footprints are seen as scars on the pristine earth. “It is plain to see, universally,/This land is not as bountiful as it was.”
Now, as a matter of hard fact, that claim had become untrue long before 1980. Famines no longer occur anywhere in the world except possibly North Korea, and even famines in the 20th century, as the Nobel economist Amartya Sen has demonstrated, happened mainly because of bad government—colonial rule in the case of India, communist rule in China, socialism in Ethiopia—rather than lack of resources.
Before the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, famines due to crop failures were common everywhere in the world.
Even in Europe, for which we have the best records, famines were a regular occurrence—France, for example, had 26 national famines in the 11th century and 16 in the 18th.
In Finland in the late 17th century, between a quarter and a third of the population died from starvation.
Famines were even more devastating in poorer regions like China and India.
The calypso laments “Soil that wouldn’t bear” but, in the 1950s, biologist Norman Borlaug developed disease-resistance high-yield dwarf wheat plants, which he introduced to Mexico, Pakistan, and India.
This was a key moment in the development of agriculture. “One hundred and fifty years ago it took 25 men all day to harvest and thresh a ton of grain,” writes journalist Johan Norberg in his book Progress.
“With a modern combine harvester, a single person can do it in six minutes.”
The second stanza starts: “I see charity deplored, equal rights totally ignored.”
With apartheid still extant in South Africa, Devine and Austin had some basis for this perspective but, in historical terms, the world had already advanced greatly in terms of international aid and in human rights. Three key years mark the evolution of human rights in Western civilisation: 1776 (American Declaration of Independence); 1789 (French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen); and 1948 (United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights).
Far from “The world has come divided/Between race, colour, creed and class”, the latter half of the 20th century saw what scholar Steven Pinker labels “Rights Revolutions” in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature.
“It has spread to vulnerable classes of victims that in earlier eras fell outside the circle of protection, such as racial minorities, women, children, homosexuals, and animals,” Pinker writes.
Even in T&T in 2017, a political administration for the first time in our history is opposing religious fundamentalists.
1776 was also the year that Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was published, and may justifiably be marked as a key shift in the political perspective on charity.
Science journalist Matt Ridley in his 2010 book The Rational Optimist writes: “Charitable giving has been growing faster than the economy as a whole in recent decades,” pointing out that “It was the ‘nation of shopkeepers’ that first worried about abolishing the slave trade, emancipating Catholics, and feeding the poor.
“Just as it was the noveau riche merchants, with names like Wedgewood and Wilberforce, who financed and led the anti-slavery movement before and after 1800, while the old county money looked on with indifference, so today it is the new money of entrepreneurs and actors that funds compassion for people, pets and planets.” ‘Progress’, by contrast, asserts that “Money makes egos inflate/And thereby creates a turbulent state.”
The calypso expresses what at the time were legitimate worries about “Such inventions as thermonuclear warfare/And environmental warfare,” but the former became improbable with the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.
Environmental degradation has been a key policy concern in the West for over 50 years now, and climate change is probably the leading cause célèbre of the 21st century.
But, as statistician Bjørn Lomborg argues in his book The Sceptical Environmentalist, “We are not running out of energy or natural resources...Global warming, though its size and future projections are rather unrealistically pessimistic, is almost certainly taking place, but the typical cure of early and radical fossil fuel cutbacks is way worse than the original affliction, and moreover its total impact will not pose a devastating problem for our future.”
As record and prophecy, therefore, Progress missed several marks, which is hardly surprising in a song that claims “Some of the things the scriptures predict/Truthfully come to pass.”
What I find it somewhat disturbing is that, in 2017, a talented 15-year-old girl should be resurrecting such a pessimistic dirge.
But, then again, history is hardly a well-taught subject either in secondary schools or at the UWI.
KEVIN BALDEOSINGH is a professional writer, author of three novels, and co-author of a History textbook.
