Any self-respecting domestic or foreign social critic or political analyst who pretends to be an expert on Philippine society and politics should read below the extensive essay of a great left-of-center Filipino writer and thinker, F. Sionil Jose, which recently appeared in his column in the Philippine Star.
I am reproducing it hereinbelow verbatim, for legal research purposes of the visitors of this blog.
It speaks of the continuing but hidden evils of modern-day neo-colonialism, the greed and abuses of oligarchic capitalism, the deleterious effects of a flawed electoral system, the inequitable distribution of wealth within and among the basic strata of the Philippine society (which is commonly the root cause of bloody social revolutions and civil wars), and the unconscionable prostitution and rape of Philippine democracy.
I subscribe to most of the critical thoughts stated in the said article (which was actually a paper that F. Sionil Jose presented during a recent lecture sponsored by the National Defense College of the Philippines).
Philippine society and the elections
HINDSIGHT By F Sionil Jose
(The Philippine Star)
Updated March 14, 2010 12:00 AM
(The National Defense College of the Armed Forces of the Philippines conducted the other week its regular Executive Course on National Security. Commodore Carlos L. Agustin asked me to talk about Philippine society and the forthcoming elections. This is the basic paper I presented to the senior military and police officers and CEOs of the bureaucracy).
Before making this presentation, let me inform you of my core beliefs which I will gladly abandon if convinced they are wrong because I do not want to be a prisoner of convictions. First, I believe in the righteousness but not necessarily in the inevitability of a nationalist revolution which would transfer power from the oppressor to the oppressed. Second, I believe that a nation’s economy is the most important determinant of that nation’s culture.
Now, let me tell you about myself, not so much as a matter of ego, but to explain my observations. I am 85 years old, ancient enough to have witnessed three generations of Filipinos mature and fade. I am no academic who probes the minutiae. I write on the basis of perceptions which, after all, are based on realities. It is upon perceptions that we often base our decisions.
This now is how I perceive our society, the givens in our history.
Colonialists, domestic or foreign, thrive on monopolies. During the Spanish regime — the galleon trade, the tobacco monopoly, even basi in the Ilokos. Closer to today, remember when the telephone monopoly made it so difficult for us to get telephones? The airline monopoly — how expensive was air travel? If it isn’t monopolies, it is the cartels today — the rice cartel, the shipping cartel, the oil cartel.
We are going to be a hundred million in a few years. This is a mass market with the potential for mass production. “A Ford in every garage,” so to speak, and with it, the potential for egalitarianism: “A chicken in every pot.”
Even the very poor now have cell phones — which explains the great wealth of those who have exploited this communication need which in turn has opened so many possibilities for social cohesion — and political persuasion.
Colonialism has thoroughly influenced our culture. Colonizers like the Dutch did not interfere too much with the social structures of their colonies; they did not educate the natives; they merely tutored enough of them to be adequate “hewers of wood and drawers of water”; they utilized the existing social structures, the elites to plunder the native resources. Not so with the Spaniards who were our first foreign rulers — they intermarried, converted us to Catholicism, a process that was continued on a broader scale by the Americans who implanted their institutions, particularly their two-party political system which, as we soon saw, could not accommodate our splintered political aspirations.
Perhaps there is some validity in our easy adoption of the presidential system; we had no firmly established political institutions — certainly not a monarchy or its equivalent. There was a tribal and kinship system that developed loyalties — the kamag-anak alliance so deeply entrenched in all our institutions. It is a major obstruction in the development of a broader political grouping and, therefore, in the formation of a nation.
The differences between our many ethnic groups are real. For instance, the industry of the Ilokanos is evident in the land wherein they live, as compared to the indolence of other ethnic groups, for instance, the Warays, the Moros — the ostentation of the Pampangos, the Negrenses, the musicality of the Cebuanos, the culinary expertise of the Pampangos, and so on.
If such differences are easily discernible, so too, are the commonalities — the yabang, the egoism of all Filipinos, our love of the panoply of office, title, achievement, wealth. It is also easy to realize that it is the sea that unites us, rather than the land. And most important, a shared history which — for all the cussedness and betrayals in it — also reveals our solid virtues, our capacity for perseverance, our heroism.
Some 20 years ago, the American writer James Fallows, after a protracted visit to the Philippines, described in Atlantic Monthly magazine our Philippine culture as “damaged” — damaged in the sense that it has not made us, after our American tutelage and heroic history, into a prosperous nation. The article has provoked a lot of discussion to this day.
What is Philippine culture? As an anthropological constant? As an aesthetic condition? We are so different from our neighbors with their classical traditions as influenced by the two great religions of Asia, Buddhism and Hinduism. We are Western because most of us are Christians — but without the Western attributes of the Europeans or Americans. We are shallow, not given to philosophical introspection. We are so visceral, so ostentatious, and baroque — just look at the gaudy lighting along Roxas Boulevard — and yes, so corrupt.
And so we are poor, we are hungry, a nation of servants, as one Hong Kong columnist has stated.
And worse, we are yet to be a nation.
Nations shaped by history, civil wars and revolutions, bonded by nationalism, are sustained by institutions carefully nurtured by their citizens. These institutions take decades, centuries even to build and they are then held together by the strongest institution of that nation — the state.
Our Hollow Institutions
I suggest that, in analyzing our society and tracing the root causes of our decay, we focus on the structure of the society: its institutions.
Foremost of these institutions is the family. The other institutions are the economic system, the socio-civic structures — the church, the bureaucracy, the educational system, the judiciary, congress and the executive — and lest we forget, the protector of the state: the army.
The function of the army is well defined — to protect the nation from internal and external aggression. For the ambitious national leader, it is his power base. In a democracy, its rank and file comes from the broadest range of the citizenry; in times of war, its ranks are swelled by conscription. In the experience of some powerful countries, the army is the vanguard of modernization and empire.
The family is the basic Filipino institution. In the sense of institutions, the whole country is a vacuum, or a blank sheet of paper. Anyone with political skills can join the oligarchy. Yes, the doors of Forbes Park are wide open. Just study the past of so many of today’s richest Filipinos — where were they 40 years ago? And why have very rich families of 40 years ago dropped from the list? How easily can the economic future of the nation be altered? Washington Sycip — he knows so much of this country’s political economy — told me that, with two billion dollars, anyone can alter or write our destiny on that blank sheet of paper.
We see the necessity for its extension and largeness in an agrarian society because the family is also the basic work force. Its splintering is inevitable as the agrarian economy is urbanized. The family is therefore both a social and economic unit. As such, Filipino society is dominated, according to the scholars, by no more than 300 families that hold more than 70 percent of the national wealth. These families form the oligarchy; they intermarry, expand or decay through history, accumulate political power or lose it in their relationship with politicians who usually come from their ranks to form dynasties. They extract payment for their political contributions to non-family members — in other words, they corrupt the electoral process. The family, then — for all the cohesion that it promotes — can demean the ideal of nation as well. The oligarchy is, therefore, the oppressor of the people.
Beneath this oligarchy are the ordinary families of the middle classes and the vast majority — the lower classes. The first loyalty of people is to their families. Massive poverty has made so many families dysfunctional as family heads leave for employment abroad. The breakdown of middle and lower class families has become a very serious social problem, exacerbated by urbanization, population growth, and according to new and frightening statistics, disastrous drug addiction.
If we examine all our institutions minutely — the Church, the business community, the bureaucracy, the Army, the political parties which come to life only during elections — we see how divided they are. This is the ancient malaise that afflicts Filipino society as a whole: we are always in the process of breaking up, instead of uniting. As the late Harry Benda, a Southeast Asia specialist from Yale, said: “Filipinos will never be able to manage a revolution because they can never get their act together.”
Maybe so, but there was one shining moment in our history when we did and that was in February of 1986 when we got rid of Marcos at EDSA 1. Unfortunately for us, that revolution — and it was one glorious revolution with the Filipinos acting as one! — was followed by Cory Aquino who dissipated it, and made it into a restoration of the oligarchy that Marcos had emasculated.
Is it absolutely necessary for our institutions to be united? Shouldn’t it be the individuals — the citizens — who should be strong? Or the leaders of these institutions?
Are elections necessary to strengthen them?
We have been having elections since the founding of the Malolos Republic in 1898; the elementary ideas of democracy as espoused by the Ilustrados are now in our bones, but the democratic institutions we developed were vastly conditioned by our colonizers and did not spring wholly from our great diversities and contradictions in our own ethos; in fact, it should have been a natural development nurtured by our genius for we had no royalty, and our rulers sprang from the indigenous system of barangays.
There are no “ifs” in history, but I would dare suggest that if we were not colonized, most probably our history would have been like that of the Japanese — clans decimating each other until one group that was superior to all united the country under its iron heel. In other words, we would have developed — just like most societies not with a democratically elected ruler, but with a ruler who achieved power with the sword.
We see this compulsion in the existence today of private armies. If an army were to rule — but this already exists in our own armed forces. A military dictatorship, then? I am not suggesting one for I remember only too well what Fr. Horacio dela Costa said, which was also our deleterious experience with Marcos: “The Army is a bad master but it is a good servant.” Ergo, we must then be prepared to elect a leader who may easily morph into a dictator.
Why Elections Fail
In my 30s, when I was already old enough to see how the provincial politicians ran for office, there were only two political parties patterned after the American experience. I had an uncle who ran for alcalde of our town; he had sold some of his lands for his campaign and to feed the voters in his house. This was standard practice; the candidates did not have entertainment personalities to endorse them
— they appealed to the voters with their own speeches.
In those days, it was also rare for the presidential or senatorial candidates to campaign in the provinces, except in the major cities. The party leaders in the provinces, usually the big landlords, did that for them.
A major change happened during the time of Ramon Magsaysay. He was then Secretary of National Defense — the Huk uprising was at its strongest, so much so that in the late 1940s, the Huks had surrounded Manila and firefights erupted right in the city itself.
When he ran for president, Magsaysay campaigned strenuously in the barrios; he ushered a new way of winning the vote. He used media, too, in a new and widespread manner, in a way media had never been used by the politicians before him.
After Magsaysay, we saw in the emergence of Garcia, Macapagal and Marcos, politicians who did not come from the oligarchy but whose rise to power was
supported by them.
Of these economic forces, the sugar bloc was the most powerful. It was able to make its narrow sectoral interest into the national interest, and every ambassador we sent to the United States was a spokesman for the sugar bloc.
That has changed through the years but the national interest is still interpreted as the economic interest of powerful Filipinos. This is the political economy as manipulated by the oligarchy, which, to this day, strangles our people. The election in May will not change it.
In our quest for social justice and a moral order, in our desire to build a strong nation by first creating a strong state, the “brains” of this country should ponder the nature of the Philippine state and rethink its development from a new paradigm, away from that which we have inherited from our colonial past.
We must not forget that many of the institutions of the state as we know them today were imposed by the sword — religion, democracy were the excuse for colonialist conquest.
A tabula rasa, a blank sheet with nothing written on it, must now be emblazoned with our very nature, our diversity — the fact that we have been colonized. What can we deduce from our present malaise? Are elections the solution?
This process by which we legitimize our leaders and make a new government is flawed. We continue invoking the Constitution, which we had shaped as a defense against the emergence of another corrupt leader like Marcos.
The experience of other nations has shown us that a country must take at least one generation for it to recover or develop from its present state of decay. Too, a nation can develop economically only if there is strong leadership and a unity among the people — a unity forced on them not so much by a sense of community — although that will tremendously help — but by a dictatorship brought about by civil war, or a coup. That dictatorship, however, must be guided by goals that transcend the ego of the ruler. Sukarno, for instance, as supreme leader of Indonesia led his country to disaster because his ego was not transcended by a social and economic program. And this, too, was what happened with Marcos.
The basics: in looking towards the future, we must look at our past, at Marcos who ruled for 20 years, and Gloria Arroyo who ruled for half that period. In both, we can see how power was not used to develop the country economically — although both regimes have had the opportunities to do so. Economic development is a precondition for democratization. The people must first be fed before they can appreciate freedom.
Economic development starts with capital formation.
In both regimes, this has not happened; the hemorrhage of capital was not stopped — and this was exacerbated by policies that made this society consumerist rather than productive — a society which cannot feed its own people because its agriculture was not developed.
I have given so much time to thinking and daydreaming about our condition. I believe that revolution would be the solution — not elections, for in this exercise, only the very rich are able to run for the highest public office. Sure, there were men like Magsaysay, Garcia, Macapagal who came from the middle class — but they had to have the support of the oligarchy and to them they had to pay.
When Marcos declared martial law, I thought that the New People’s Army would be the correct response to his tyranny. I had hoped they were nationalists for they propagandized their cause with nationalist slogans. But when they were not at EDSA in 1986, I realized that they were orthodox communists.
I have not given up my belief in non-constitutional response to our problems but I can see that revolution — either the EDSA variety or the its alternative — is not possible in my lifetime.
What we must recognize then is not so much the failure of democratic institutions to lift us from poverty — we must look within ourselves and our puny institutions for our own salvation. I am not suggesting that we abandon the ballot but that we should not place all our hopes in it.
Surely our people are getting educated; as the past election showed, minor miracles are possible in the election of Among Ed Panlilio of Pampanga and that feisty Grace Padaca of Isabela and so many more whose bright emergence we do not know. So many of our young people, particularly those in our schools are now political activists, armed with idealism and the correct information available to them in the new instruments of communication. And as the polls show, Estrada’s magic has lost its potency.
In rethinking the efficacy of the ballot, we must not forget that we are part of the large community of nations, that we cannot avoid globalism and its negative impact upon us — climate change, for instance, that is caused by the wanton depredation of the environment by the industrial nations. A rethinking of modernization goals imperative and consumerism, for instance, must be curbed.
In the end, the proof of the pudding is in the eating; we have thousands of excellent lawyers who can write pages and pages of brilliant arguments on whether or not a comma or a period should be used. Thus, we have one of the longest-lasting constitutions ever in the world, which we know is faulty. But because of our imprisonment in legalism, we cannot resolve so many of the obvious contradictions in our laws. We know, for instance, that our elected president is not a majority president in the sense that he may have just 30 percent of the vote; in countries such as Indonesia, a run-off election between the two highest recipients of votes assures the people that their ruler is the majority choice.
Sure, there is corruption everywhere, but the corruption in our country is now so blatant, so pervasive, we know it is the foremost obstruction to our development. And we also know that whoever wins in this election cannot minimize it to our satisfaction. So many of our thinkers have concluded that we may have to revolve these contradictions outside of the constitutional process.
Being this ancient and having seen so much of the opportunities that were wasted, I am pessimistic about the future. Sure, there are signs of growth as, indeed, we can see the towering monoliths which stud our skyline, the fat and glossy cars in our streets and the many new homes of varying Western design in the midst of rice fields. But these cannot hide the massive poverty, people eating only once a day, the unending violence — and I do not mean that which is inflicted by the communist and Moro rebellions. We all know that so many killings are no longer reported and are never resolved.
And the massive corruption everywhere! Proof of it? Just try applying for a business license anywhere in the country. Just try!
To get to the highest position in the land and achieve power starts with having money to buy an election. And Filipinos are not educated enough to vote for candidates with intelligence and integrity to rule them.
We will therefore muddle along, until that time comes when the system will implode and the only institution that can keep the country from breaking up will be the army — if the army will be united as it should be, and its officer corps which come from the lower classes will remember where they came from and will be united — not by ethnicity or comradeship, but by a sense of a nation.
These are the constants we must not forget.
We must now think seriously of transforming the so-called democratic process because it has not worked, and will not work for as long as the way to power is to buy an election, and for as long as our people do not have the intelligence to elect good leaders.
Given these realities, it is necessary for the “brains” of the nation to think out of the box, to look at the Constitution in this manner — the good ruler does not need it, the bad ruler will only mangle it. Let us not be imprisoned by convictions about democratic legalisms.
Think of how an equitable society can be achieved for the many who are poor. Poverty itself can be endured, lived with for as long as there is justice and recourse from tyranny without proscribing the right to life.
These are humanitarian goals defined according to our needs, not in the colonial legacies from the United States, Spain or Japan. Given these aspirations which may seem quite limited and modest in the West, we will realize that Marcos did not do wrong in declaring martial law; what was absolutely wrong was that he wasted all that power with his greed and corruption. Lesson: nationalism is not obsolete if that idea is equated with the masa. Our aspiration for social justice is not a utopian abstraction, if it is safe drinking water, three meals a day, education for the children, a sturdy roof over their heads and medicine when they are sick.
Listen, I was with President Fidel V. Ramos the other evening. I told him he made a tremendous mistake; he should have declared a coup before the end of his term. I say this knowing the General is not a killer, that he is development-focused like General Park Chung Hee of Korea, like Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore.
It takes 20 years of continuous stability and hard work for a nation to modernize: Japan after the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and after the rubble of World War II. Korea after the Korean War, Singapore after its break-up with Malaysia, Taiwan after the communist takeover of the mainland in 1949. The models we can learn from are all around us.
Wake up — elections are expensive and wasteful, and they haven’t worked. As we can see people can live with their poverty for as long as they have security. In that huge slum area, Barrio Magsaysay in Tondo, after martial law, the slum dwellers were very pleased; they still did not have sewage, they were still poor but they were happy that the thugs who preyed on them were either sent to prison or “salvaged” by the military.
In making this presentation, I identified what I perceive as our oppressor: the oligarchy, which controls and manipulates the political economy, and we, ourselves — our apathy and “damaged” culture. I inferentially suggested methods by which we can lift ourselves from this miasma which we and our colonial past have made. I also suggested that the army is a very important and positive actor in this nationalist effort. If…
To paraphrase what one thinker said much, much earlier: the problem is not how to analyze or understand the Filipino condition, but to change it.
See:
http://www.philstar.com/Article.aspx?articleId=557649&publicationSubCategoryId=86
