Financial Times

Ceylon Chamber in dire straits
By Nous
To say that the country’s oldest trade and industry association, the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce (CCC) is faced with an intellectual crisis would be to suggest that its accustomed way of doing things is, in some measure, studious and reflective.

It may have had a studious side to it in the distant past. However, at present, the CCC is seen as an organisation that is accustomed to a crudely pragmatic and reactive way of doing things.

There is no doubt that the CCC’s institutionalised habits are distinctively Sri Lankan and emblematic of the crystallised experiences of its members whose careers collectively span the length and breadth of the commercial life in this country.

This fact, which is that the institutionalised habits of the CCC mirror those of business in this country, is enough to seek refuge in meditation. But despondency seems misplaced when we think of the speed at which our region is being transformed.

By all accounts, business in this country is marked by an aversion to risk. The mind of its leadership is usually over-confident and boastful in prosperity. However, in adversity, it is pulled in all directions, and is driven to superstition, which is expressed in the belief that misfortune, failure and evil could at least be averted, if not diverted, with the rituals of religious worship.

In some such way it would be possible to show a connection between the superstitious view of religious worship and the CCC ceremony dedicated to the lighting of oil lamps around the Beira Lake on the eve of the Geneva talks. After all, having conceived no policy and forged no plan of action to strengthen the hand of the government even in a small way in the peace process, what else was left for the CCC to do but fly for refuge from its sense of impotence?

Nevertheless, it is terribly unmerciful to condemn any trade association in this country just because its action is seen to spring from nothing more than the lust for power and prestige. For, a man who is driven to superstition is ill adapted to facilitate a devotion to ideal or spiritual ends, or to be touched by an ideal, which would function as the measure of his progress.

The CCC may indeed have fallen prey to superstition — which would be understandable, given the fact that “superstition’s chief victims are those persons who greedily covet temporal advantages”.

Yet what makes the CCC so irrelevant today is its failure to conceive the nation’s struggle with the LTTE in terms of the CCC’s own Hobbesian inclination: “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power”.

It is tempting to suggest that, if the leaders of the CCC had known their own minds or had a consciousness of what they were about, they would have seen in Hobbes what the peace process needs: “without a common power to keep men in awe, they are in that condition which is called war”.

Because they lacked the awareness of their own leviathan desire for power and prestige, they went to Ireland to learn peace, instead of connecting with a civilising agent, mighty and benevolent enough, to keep the LTTE in awe to ensure that they develop a disposition to make peace through compromise and rational co-operation.

The CCC ought to have taken the lead in building bridges to the West, particularly to its leader the US. In India, the Indians are resolving the impact of modernity on the Indian traditions – traditions, which as a cultural whole represents probably the most sophisticated rationalisation of the terror inspired by the mysterious.

Nevertheless, mysticism and superstition have not yet been vanquished in India, and the scars that India’s Westernising odyssey has left – pacifism, nationalism and socialism – are still highly visible.

Yet, the general pattern of India’s cultural change is clear - the Indian middleclass is being counted, in increasing numbers, among those who have a deep and abiding respect for the US.

There is perhaps no higher ambition for the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce to embrace than the ambition to be a bridge builder to the US. On the assumption of such a task, it would gain its rightful place among the leading actors in the struggle aimed at the progressive realisation of liberty, the rule of law and the spirit of science in this country.

Back to Business