The
other week, I was asked by Commodore (ret.) Jose G. Lansangan Jr. to
speak before officials of the National Defense College, the Department
of Foreign Affairs, and Department of Interior and Local Government at
Camp Aguinaldo. The topic: the influence of culture on government, the
Chinese input, the colonial experience, and “what traits we should
improve to be more competent.”
I
told them I am not a cultural anthropologist or a historian, that my
most important bona fide was that I am much older than all of them, that
I have traveled a lot not only in the Philippines but elsewhere, read a
lot as well, and being a writer, I have been most observant.
Cultural
values are, in themselves, neutral as well as universal and so much
depends on how individuals or ethnic groups use them. Values are
influenced by so many factors such as geography, climate, religion, the
economy and technology.
When
I visited the Trobriand islands in Melanesia in the very early Sixties,
the natives — the men and women — were all half naked; they wore skirts
made from shredded banana leaves. When they reach the age of puberty,
they are sexually promiscuous. But once they get married, concubinage or
adultery is punished by death. More than a hundred years ago, the
Eskimos in North America lived in igloos and when a visitor came, the
husband would lend his wife for the night to keep him warm. I saw a
documentary on the Trobriands a couple of years back; no more in leaf
skirts — all were in T-shirts and blue jeans. The Eskimo houses now are
heated. Obviously, their culture, too, has changed.
The
ethnic differences among Filipinos are very real. The paucity of arable
land, for instance, explains the industry of the Ilokanos and the
Cebuanos.
Self-respect,
the value of “face,” is universal but is most pronounced in China, then
in Japan where the Confucian ethic is most influential. With us, “face”
is easily fused with yabang. All of us are afflicted withyabang,
and more so the Moros who have a royalty system of datus and Sultans.
If the Christian politician has five bodyguards, the Moro politician has
10.
Maybe
it is fortunate for us that we never really had royalty although there
was an attempt by Imelda to create one. It was therefore easy for us to
accept the institutions of democracy that the Americans brought here.
They were not new; we already had the Malolos Republic. And much earlier
we syncretized the Catholicism from the Spaniards.
The
cultural mix, however, resulted in our inheriting the vices rather than
the virtues of our colonizers, and worse, to this very day, we have yet
to decolonize our minds.
After
I spoke, two distinguished retired officer-scholars, Cesar P. Pobre and
Rex Robles, contributed insights. Then from the audience, questions,
and again: Why were we left behind?
Why, indeed, when in the Fifties we were doing so well — we were the richest, most modern in Southeast Asia.
One of the old excuses is corruption.
Let
us now look at the Western powers—the United States and Britain. How
was America built? The robber barons, the Vanderbilts, the Morgans,
Rockefellers and Stanfords were not saints—they raped the land,
exploited their workers and were pompous and self-indulgent. But they
built railroads, steel mills, industries, universities; after they
amassed all that wealth, they went into philanthropy. The richest man in
the world today — Bill Gates—poured billions into his crusade to banish
the major illnesses and poverty in the world. He has no equal in the
Philippines.
The
British Empire was envisioned in those smoky London clubs by the
captains of industry, the admirals of the navy, the dons of Oxford and
Cambridge. Read Charles Dickens — it is all there, how the
industrialists exploited their workers. Those navy captains were also
pirates, but together, they built an empire.
In
our part of the world, the leaders who built Korea, Japan, Taiwan were
not saints either. Many of them were also corrupt. Perhaps, the only
recent leader in Asia who was upright but stern and purposeful was Lee
Kwan Yew of Singapore.
For
all their faults, these nation builders had vision and a sense of
nation. These qualities, alas, are what our oligarchs never had and
never will.
It
is easy of course to blame colonialism for our poverty and other
problems for what hindered us from developing are the chains of
colonialism, many of them invisible. We got to grow comfortable with
them and at the same time, complacent with our dependency.
Most
of our elites came from the landlord class and landlords are often
lazy, incapable of initiatives, used to sitting on their buttocks and
waiting for the harvest, the rent.
We haven’t progressed because our elites have no vision.
Remember
how more than a hundred years ago, Rizal thought of colonizing North
Borneo? Shortly after the grant of Independence in July 1946, the
British wanted us to help populate North Borneo. It was then ruled not
by Britain but the British North Borneo company.
In
the mid-Fifties, the late “Admiral” Tomas Cloma took me to Freedom Land
in the Spratleys. We should have colonized many of those islands then.
But we didn’t.
We
are a maritime nation with a glorious tradition in shipbuilding and
seamanship. Why did we not start a maritime industry? Build our own
ships? Patrol boats—not battle ships or aircraft carriers to watch and
protect our territorial waters. Korea has no such tradition, but the
Koreans started building ships and they are now the world’s biggest
shipbuilders.
Industrialization
starts with the formation of capital — it does not matter how. It can
be created by saving, by the state enforcing its will on the people, by
the very rich themselves.
This
is what happened in Japan, Korea, Taiwan which developed very fast —
they did not let their money leak out until they had enough to
modernize. The Koreans even subsidized their foreign ventures to earn
dollars.
Our
elites did not trust the stability of the Philippines. Worse, they did
not trust the capacity of the Filipinos. Like the old colonial masters
who ravaged this country, they sent their loot abroad.
What to do?
First
and foremost, we must understand the culture of poverty and eradicate
it through a massive re-education of our people, a decolonization of the
mind — a revolution in fact which need not be violent.
We will then shape our institutions according to our aspirations.
We
have brilliant managers, technocrats, economic planners in and out of
government. Some of the best economic development plans were shaped way
back, during the time of President Elpidio Quirino in the Fifties, on to
the dictatorship of Marcos, and now, President Aquino.
But
in all these plans, backed up by glowing rhetoric, there is one very
important — in fact the most important- ingredient missing: patriotism,
the iron will to fructify such ambition, such dreams. Development and
the justice it brings can never be achieved for as long as a
self-serving oligarchy — without social responsibility and patriotism-
controls our economy. This is the primary reason why we were left
behind, why we will languish for a long time — in spite of the soaring
skyscrapers in our cities, the fat and glossy cars in our streets.
Not till we become truly Filipino.
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