Ethnic Voting - A Myth?

• Author: Haslyn Parris
• Pages: 234-252

234 CARICOM Options: Towards Full Integration Into the World Economy

ETHNIC VOTING - A MYTH?

Haslyn Parris

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“The mind is slow to unlearn what it learnt early”

-Seneca

In previous essays (for example, ‘The Ethnicity Suite’, ‘The Suite on

Education’, and ‘The Suite on Electoral Systems’, in Heretical Musings, 1993

to 2003), I have suggested and sought to demonstrate that current theories of

ethnic voting in Guyana have neither explanatory nor predictive power about

voting behaviour in Guyana. Indeed, it has struck me that the assertions

about ethnic voting in Guyana, with their companion allegation that each

election is simply an ethnic census of the electorate, may well qualify for

inclusion in the category of the great malignant myths of my lifetime.

Perhaps of these the myth most relevant to me personally, and to persons

of my perceived ethnicity, is the one that asserts that Africa had no history

until the Europeans discovered it, and consequently, that the peoples of Africa

had made no significant contribution to human growth and civilization.

Proselytizers like Hegel (in the mid 1820s with his lectures on the Philosophy

of History) and more recently Trevor-Roper (in the 1960s)1 thus relegated my

ancestors to the status of a race of inferior nobodies, and set the stage for me

and persons of my ethnic origin to be assigned no more than an inferior role

in the saga of the development of the world, and therefore of Guyana - we

who have among our ethnic forebears the likes of Aleksandr Pushkin, the

three Dumases (General, Pere, and Fils), and Chevalier de St. Georges; and

who had inculcated in our architecture, our hairstyles, our fabric designs,

and our urban plans, concepts of fractal geometry long before the developed

West hit upon Fractals and chaos theory.2

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Ethnic Voting - A Myth?

Another of those myths is the set of dream theories of Sigmund Freud

and Carl Jung. Those theories comprised a powerful meme with a high

survival characteristic, even though they were simply subjective speculation

without empirical support. My understanding is that Freud’s Interpretation

of Dreams was published in 1899 (1900 appears on the title page by mistake);

that Freud’s work was most fashionable in the United States in the 1920s and

1930s; that Freud was a heavy user of cocaine in the period during which he

made up his dream theory; and that by the end of the 1970s the American

academic establishment had relegated Freudianism to the category of

interesting misplaced conjectures, totally unsupported by the scientific method.

The late 1980s and early 1990s saw many books declaring Freud to be an

unscientific eccentric, and even a quack. Nevertheless, Freudianism is

respectably ensconced in the English language – note the use of ‘Freudian

slip’ to mean ‘an unintentional error regarded as revealing subconscious

feelings.’

This last observation perhaps makes it inappropriate to compare the

theories of ethnic voting in Guyana with now discredited Freudianism, since

Freudianism’s 40 year reign in American academia has ended, while the

meme of ethnic voting in Guyana is alive, well, and fecund! The theory

espouses a certain Newtonian determinism, based on an algorithm linking

voting behaviour to ethnicity. It is a chimera cherished by the cognoscenti

in their analyses and predictions about the outcome of free and fair elections

in Guyana. This view is bolstered by the existence of a correlation between

ethnicity and voting preferences; but the fuzziness of ethnicity apart, correlation

does not unwaveringly either imply causation or offer explanation.

Further, while Freudianism had a Freud and a Jung associated with it,

Ethnic Voting in Guyana has no person’s name popularly associated with it.3

Like many ideas, it is capable of assuming and maintaining an aura of

fundamental, self-evident, truth through frequent repetition, and thus needs

no parentage. Indeed, the idea is not unlike that associated with the demise

of the dinosaurs being attributable to their failure to adapt to new conditions.

The success of that meme has caused the term ‘dinosaur’ to become entrenched

in English to mean ‘a large unwieldy system of organisation, especially one

not adapting to new conditions’ [cf. The Concise Oxford Dictionary, Ninth

Edition]. Similarly, belief in the theory of ethnic voting in Guyana persists,

certainly bolstered by anecdotal evidence, and perhaps by an Occam’s razor

type of preference – a preference that flies in the face of the reality that

sometimes problems are made easier to solve by adding complications.