Belonging

You could usefully ask yourself, what would happen if you replace the values that appear to lie so on the surface of the ambitions of Jamaican society, the trappings of modernity, the imitation of pressure and purposefulness with others, with values such as living without a sense of progress, a cryptic and mythical return to the supposed stability of the eternal rehearsal, the eternal return, the immovable hierarchies and conservatism of a purpose mediated by rest and consisting in the contemplation of what passes by?

One would become like beasts again. In the spirit of Borges' Immortals. This could be a good thing. Although I suspect that the categories of good and bad don't apply in infinity or rigid conservatism in the same way. They are subject to scale and perspective.

Modernism, to be modern is a concept like the cloak of Mary, it gives a wonderfully protective feeling. Third world countries love the modern. They fill the concpt with divinities, angels and desires. Third world modernism is accused of being an imitation of modernism, a western modernism, and a bad one at that. An absurd luxury in the face of hunger and starvation. Modernism is... a luxury, a decadence? 

That is a defensible position. But do not forget that cultural criticism in the West makes the same accusation against people in the West who are so desperate to show their belonging to an idea, pretending to belong to something that promises a cloak and a hierophany.. Such people are suspect. Not to belong is cool and independent, it shows you to be a fully fledged and initiated member of a small elite.