Love of country

Rodel Rodis, Jul 20, 2005, Philippine News

In his 1987 Atlantic Monthly essay, "Damaged Culture,"
James Fallows observed that there was a noticeable
lack of nationalism, or love of country, among
Filipinos compared to other people in other countries.
One American he met in Manila explained that "This is
a country where the national ambition is to change
nationality" citing a 1982 survey of 207
Filipino grade school students who were asked their
preferred nationality. Less than five percent (10
students) answered 'Filipino.'

Nationalism is valuable because, as Fallows wrote,
it causes people to look beyond themselves rather than
pursuing their own interests to the ruination of
everyone else. Japan is strong because its ethics
dictate that all Japanese deserve decent treatment. In
contrast, Fallows notes, Filipino culture places more
importance on loyalty to one's family,
compadres, and members of his or her region rather
than to the nation or people as a whole.

"When observing Filipino friendships," Fallows wrote,
"I thought often of the Mafia families portrayed in
The Godfather: total devotion within the
circle, total war on the outside. And since boundaries
of decent treatment are limited to the family or
regional group, they exclude at least 90% of
the country. Because of this fragmentation - this lack
of nationalism - people treat each other worse in the
Philippines than in any other Asian country."

Most Filipinos will tell you that the main cause of
poverty in the Philippines is the endemic and systemic
corruption in the Philippines. It is so demoralizing
that, because of it, many Filipinos want to "change
nationality."

But a Korean student by the name of Jaeyoun Kim begs
to differ. In his essay which has been circulating in
the Internet for years, Jaeyoun wrote: "Filipinos
always complain about the corruption in the
Philippines. Do you really think the corruption is the
problem of the Philippines? I do not think so. I
strongly believe that the problem is the lack of love
for the Philippines."

"Let me first talk about my country, Korea. It might
help you understand my point. After the Korean War,
South Korea was one of the poorest countries in the
world. Koreans had to start from scratch because the
entire country was destroyed completely after the
Korean War, and we had no natural resources. Koreans
used to talk about the Philippines, for Filipinos were
very rich in Asia. We envy Filipinos. Koreans really
wanted to be well off like Filipinos. Many Koreans
died of famine"

"Korean government was awfully corrupt and is still
very corrupt beyond your imagination, but Korea was
able to develop dramatically because Koreans really
did their best for the common good with their heart
burning with patriotism. Koreans did not work just for
themselves but also for their neighborhood and
country. Education inspired young men with the spirit
of patriotism. Many Korean scientists and engineers in
the USA came back to Korea to help develop the country
because they wanted their country to be well off.
Though they received very small salary, they did their
best for Korea. They always hoped that their
children would live in a well off country."

Jaeyoun's fervent message to Filipinos is this:
"Please love your neighbor and country. If you have a
child, teach them how to love the Philippines.
Teach them why they have to love their neighbor and
country."

We can follow Jaeyoun's advice and teach our children
how to love the Philippines. But can we teach it to
the leaders of the Philippines?

Our "Damaged Culture"

The Case For A National Unity Government
Blas F. Ople - 31 August 1988

There are some Filipino writers who took offense when the theory of a "damaged culture" advanced by American journalist to explain the unrealized potentials of the Filipinos, gained quick currency in the intellectual circles in this country. After all, Jose Rizal much more deeply analyzed and documented this "damaged culture" in his novels the Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. The journalist, James Fallows of Atlantic Monthly, however, undoubtedly updated those earlier insights and made them contemporary with "Smokey Mountain" in Tondo. He was the first newspaperman, local or foreign, to study this phenomenon as a cultutral issue and parlayed it into a morbid attraction for tourists eager to explore the seamy side of Filipino society. (Whoever thought of putting Smoky Mountain on the tourist itinerary must be celebrating a streak of sado-masochiam in the national psyche).

The distinctive attribute of our damaged culture, Fallows wrote, was stubborn incapacity to identify with the public interest so that everyone looks out only for himself or his own kin. The result is a dichotomy between the individual and his society, a glaring absence of the sense of community. He found that absence remarkable even by Southeast Asia standards.

The ubiquitous garbage in the metropolitan region, matched by the exponential growth of urban slums, has not created any sense of crisis, as it would elsewhere, perhaps because the leading families nestled in their self-contained enclaves can look out for themselves. The water crisis is for the masses: the rich have their own individual, customized clean wells. There are few public parks. The rich can afford their own private gardens. Why is it that most Filipinos have not been able to expand their loyalty to family and clan to the wider interests of community and nation? Why the notable absence of public spirit? Why has Rizal Park, hitherto a symbol of the nation's capacity for public cleanliness and discipline, now deteriorated into another showcase of civic incompetence and indifference to the common good?

Certainly democracy is not to blame for these shortcomings. Neither hopeless deadlocks, failures of discipline, nor anarchy in the civic realm are the inevitable consequences of choosing the democratic option. Democracy is not synonymous with public apathy. Properly summoned and led, it can generate the leadership and discipline to overcome its own weaknesses or surmount any crises. But whereas the concentrated powers in an authoritarian society can compel obedience, the centrifugal forces of democracy stand in greater need of leadership so that the vast, dynamic and often unruly energies that thrive on pluralism or free choice can be effectively harnessed for the common good.

Today, almost in direct proportion to the sense of drift that pervades government, leadership has become a nagging issue - and some say a disturbing one - in our country.

This is the text as originally published in the magazine.
Copyright 1987 Atlantic Monthly Company
The Atlantic Monthly: November, 1987

No Soul

By Antonio C. Abaya May 29, 2003 TAPATT Foundation Inc.

The recent publication by Anvil of the Philippine edition of Benedict Anderson?s ?Imagined Communities? occasioned a thoughtful piece by Columnist Raul Rodrigo in Today (May 20) and a personal reminiscence from Columnist Patricio Abinales in the Philippines Free Press (May 17).

I had previously heard of the book but never got around to reading it; I must do so now that it is available at a reader-friendly price. In the meantime, let me comment on Raul?s quote of what must be the essence of Anderson?s thesis: ?(The nation) is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.?

Raul is correct this ?deep, horizontal comradeship? has continued to elude us Filipinos. Writes Raul: ?Whatever national comradeship we feel is neither deep nor horizontal..?

Why this sense of nationhood has eluded us, and why whatever national comradeship we feel is neither deep nor horizontal, should concern thoughtful Filipinos because it is in the righting of this wrong, in the definition of our national soul, that we Filipinos can redeem and rediscover ourselves. And I do not mean becoming anti-American and anti-capitalist, which in essence is how Marxist-Leninist ideologues, who have transformed this country into a black hole forever lost and wandering aimlessly in time-space, continue to define that soul.

James Fallows wrote that we suffer from a ?damaged culture?. We have a weak sense of nationhood. Our circle of loyalty has a uniquely small radius, limited to family, clan, tribe, ethno-linguistic group, but rarely expanding to cover nation.

To some extent, this is true. Unlike the Japanese or the Koreans or the Chinese or the Indians, we are not heirs to a great and ancient civilization. When the Europeans first came to impose their culture, this archipelago was largely inhabited by animist tribes; only parts of Mindanao had been settled by Muslim colonists from what is now Indonesia..

Unlike the Indonesians, the Cambodians, the Burmese, we have no Borobodur, no Angkor Wat, no Pagan to remind us of a spectacularly rich heritage. The closest that we have in the way of monuments are our Catholic mission churches, some of truly remarkable architecture, but if they remind us of anything it is that we are an anomaly in this part of the world: that we are an outpost of a civilization that has no authentic roots in the indigenous soil.

But the absence of any outstanding monuments to a past civilization has not deterred the Malaysians or the Singaporeans from succeeding in defining their national souls. A task much more complex for them because they are ethnically, linguistically and religiously much more diverse than we are. And yet, look at them, seemingly united in building their nation and going from success to success, and then look at us, forever quarrelling with each other, with a weak sense of nationhood, and going nowhere fast

Judging by their success and our failure, I would say that the difference lies in the political culture and the political leadership.

First, our political culture is defined to a large extent by the political system and values inherited from the Americans: jealously liberal, nominally egalitarian and ideologically protective of the individual (and his family or tribe) rather than the national community.

Political liberalism has not been beneficial to the Philippines. It has allowed Marxist-Leninists to infiltrate and influence practically every sector of Philippine society: media, the clergy, academe, labor unions, student bodies, women?s groups, environmentalists, government employees, public school teachers, fisher-folk, urban poor, peasants, even Congress.

Since Marxist-Leninists will never be content unless and until a communist government is in power, the culture of unremitting protest against everything that smacks of capitalist profit-seeking (oil prices, bus fares, power and water rates, PPA, Bt corn, tuition etc) has been and will continue to be a permanent feature of our political life, magnifying a conflict when there is one, creating one when there is none, crippling the efforts of the government, any government, to arrive at consensus and unity, and all designed to create an environment conducive to their revolution.

(In Malaysia and Singapore [as well as South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia and Thailand], by contrast, communists are pointedly and specifically excluded from their political life under pain of indefinite detention without trial, allowing their governments the stability and civil peace to concentrate on economic development.)

Nominal egalitarianism has helped trivialize our politics and idiotize our masa by opening the doors of public office to anyone with the least common denominators. It is simply inconceivable that a patently illiterate and ignorant person like Erap, or a mere TV news reader like Noli de Castro, can ever be elected prime minister of Malaysia or Singapore, where the idea of setting high standards for public office is not considered offensive to political correctness.

The American glorification of the individual, over and above the community, has created in the Philippines a political milieu where the emphasis is on the rights of individuals, rather than on their responsibilities to the community. Thus in the Philippines, everyone and his grandmother is a vociferous critic of government, but relatively few individuals bother to pay any income tax to allow that government to function.

In Malaysia and Singapore, it is the other way around: there is consensus that there are many circumstances where the good of the community must prevail over the rights of the individual. Thus the good of the greater number is considered more important than the right of individuals to espouse certain political advocacies considered inimical to the greater number.

In such a community-oriented society, it is easier for the political leaders to define the national soul and to nurture a ?deep, horizontal comradeship,? and to define the national soul, among the citizens, than in an individual-oriented one like that of the Philippines. American-style liberalism has stunted the growth of our sense of nationhood.

A further reason for our weak sense of nationhood is the distance in time from the Golden Age of our history ? the Propaganda Movement and Revolution of 1896 against Spain ? to the post-World War II and post-EDSA generations. We have no living memory of our most glorious days as a nation, and whatever we know of that period is mere book-learning, a blur in our collective memory that is soon and easily overwhelmed by the latest must-have fads of the consumer revolution.

Unlike the Vietnamese, who are acutely aware that millions of their fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, and sons and daughters willingly sacrificed themselves for the sake of the motherland. Unlike the Chinese, who were led during their modernizing years by authentic veterans of the Long March. Unlike the Malaysians and the Singaporeans, whose sense of nationhood was forged during the struggle against, first the British, then against the Communists, in the 1950s and the 1960s.

But a major reason for our lack of national soul is the failure of our political leaders, both to articulate and define that soul, and to translate that concept, abstract and ephemeral as it necessarily must be, into concrete programs of governance that would have meaning even to the most humble citizen.

Arroyo's glittering political fairytale unravels

By Louise Williams July 23, 2005 Sydney Morning Herald

The opening move of her political career was nothing short of inspired.

Gloria Macapagal Arroyo understood the women of the Philippines. So when she stepped out on the campaign trail for the first time more than 10 years ago, she headed straight for the airport and left the country.

While her opponents dragged their bread and circus shows along the potholed streets, the well-heeled Dr Arroyo took some time out in Hong Kong, Singapore and Italy.

About 10 per cent of Filipinos live overseas, a giant diaspora of overqualified overseas workers pushed by poverty into menial jobs. Dr Arroyo was looking for maids, millions of them. The hard currency they earn mopping richer women's floors converts favourably back home; their status and influence are designated by the concrete floors of their family homes, dotted among the dirt and thatch huts of abject poverty.

The maids sent a message back to their villages with their next round of remittances: trust Gloria. In 1994 she won the highest number of votes ever recorded for the Senate. By 2001 she was President, the nation's most powerful woman - bar one.

This week's opinion polls suggest 70 per cent of Filipinos no longer trust Gloria.

How her political fairytale unravelled has something to do with all the President's men. Her husband, son and various in-laws have long starred in tawdry rumours, apparently toting around bags of ill-gotten cash. "Big Mike", the First Gentleman, is gone, dispatched overseas, his wife declaring she is now "married to the nation". At least 10 cabinet members have resigned.

Dr Arroyo may be hanging on to power with the tenacity of a pit bull but it was her voice on those recent wire taps, improperly contacting an election official during vote counting in last year's presidential poll. And that directs responsibility right to her door.

Dr Arroyo is the second woman to lead the Philippines.

She came to office with impeccable credentials; daughter of the respected former president Diosdado Macapagal, who was usurped by the hated dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Her own stellar economic qualifications were widely seen as just what the Philippines needed to drag it out of the mire.

But the story of the first woman to lead the Philippines was always a more compelling tale.

Corazon Aquino, housewife, mother and widow of the assassinated opposition leader Ninoy Aquino, was the figurehead of the massive people's power revolution of 1986, which faced down the troops of the Marcos regime and prevailed. She was a shy, devout Catholic and a reluctant president. She once quaintly pointed out the hair and make-up challenges for a middle-aged woman, should a coup attempt drag her out of bed in the middle of the night. Rumours of corruption swirled around her extended family, too, but never reached her own office.

That Mrs Aquino has stepped back into public spotlight to implore Dr Arroyo to resign carries considerable moral authority.

For all the Philippines' veneer of machismo, female authority is, in fact, common. Matriarchal village structures predated Spanish colonialism in many regions; it was the Europeans who introduced the strange notion that only men should rule.

Twenty years since the fall of the Marcos dictatorship the Filipino people are no better served by many of their elected representatives. Burma aside, the Philippines - once second only to Japan in wealth - is East Asia's least successful nation.

A US essayist, James Fallows, provoked national outrage in 1987 when he challenged the post-Marcos euphoria to suggest the Philippines was "a damaged culture". Lacking useful nationalism, life had "degenerated into a war of every man against every man", he said, with decent behaviour reserved only for family or tribe.

But Fallows's words have since been frequently revisited. Much of the political elite seems unable to separate the obligations of public office from the opportunities for personal gain. Dr Arroyo's predecessor, the one-time film idol Joseph Estrada, is in jail on charges of stealing $US77 million ($100 million) during his brief presidency.

Meanwhile, the Philippines is buried under foreign debt and poverty is deepening; a fertile environment for regional terrorist networks linked to the Muslim south. Perhaps most disheartening is that Dr Arroyo was the great hope for reform.

But, as Mrs Aquino said, "Good and effective government has became an impossible undertaking".

With no obvious, competent successor and an opposition united only in its own quest for power, there is plenty of messy, political manoeuvring to go. But Dr Arroyo can no longer serve out her term.

As matriarchs go, Mrs Aquino outranks the pretender.

A persistently damaged culture

Commentary By Paulynn P. Sicam Tuesday, 9 August 2003

In November 1987, when we were still feeling good about ourselves after the glorious EDSA people power revolution of 1986, the American essayist James Fallows wrote a devastating analysis of Filipinos as a people in The Atlantic Monthly. In an essay entitled "A Damaged Culture", Fallows wrote:

"Individual Filipinos are at least as brave, kind and noble-spirited as individual Japanese, but their culture draws the boundaries of decent treatment much more narrowly. Filipinos pride themselves on their lifelong loyalty to family, schoolmates, compadres, members of the same tribe, residents of the same barangay ... Because these boundaries are limited to the family or tribe, they exclude at any given moment 99 percent of the other people in the country. Because of this fragmentation, this lack of useful nationalism, people treat each other worse in the Philippines than in any other Asian country I have seen ... The tradition of political corruption and cronyism, the extremes of wealth and poverty, the tribal fragmentation, the local élite's willingness to make a separate profitable peace with colonial powers--all reflect a feeble sense of national interest and a contempt for the public good."

We were shocked and angry, insulted by this foreigner who deigned to analyze our culture like he knew us. He was called names, the worst of which was a "parachutist", which referred to foreign correspondents who flew into the country on Sunday, looked around Metro Manila on Monday, flew out of Tuesday, and published an "in-depth" story about us on Wednesday.

We met up with a lot of such enterprising journalists in those days, when the Philippines was the darling of the West and stories about Philippine politics were snapped up by editors who could not get enough of our peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.

How dare he, many Filipino commentators bristled at Fallows' arrogant assessment of Philippine society during that honeymoon period. His judgment stung--"lack of useful nationalism", "a feeble sense of national interest"--being the worst of all. But what stayed with me was his observation that "people treat each other worse in the Philippines than in any other Asian country I have seen..."

Recently, local commentators, despairing over the bad and ugly politics that have engulfed us in the run-up to the 2004 presidential elections, have dug up their fading copies of Fallows' essay for a closer reading. And they are seeing that the mirror he held to our faces in 1987 may have been accurate then, and is certainly accurate now.

Just observing the Philippine Senate-traditionally been the breeding ground for Presidents- holding a public hearing for ten minutes, we see the worst possible example of tribal fragmentation among the local elite. Administration and opposition senators regard each other with undisguised distrust and disgust, and treat their witnesses-invited guests, if you will--even worse. When the senators cannot get them to dance to their partisan tunes, they call them liars and obstructionists, put words in their mouths and threaten them with contempt and detention.

With kid gloves off and cloven hooves and fangs showing, they gnarl and leap at one another, as well as at anyone whom they wish to bully to follow their line. All the while, of course, they are protected by parliamentary immunity from anyone who wishes to fight back.

Such public displays of meanness and uncivility over national television by our supposedly "honorable" senators add nothing to the Filipinos' sense of national interest or pride in their country and people. They only drive home Fallows' point that in this country, we draw "the boundaries of decent treatment" very narrowly, limiting them to the family or tribe, and truly excluding 99 percent of the other people in the country.

In 1971, Fr. Pacifico Ortiz SJ, in an invocation at the opening of Congress, described the country as trembling on the edge of a smoldering volcano. Well, 32 years later, we are back on the edge of that volcano, which goes to show that we have learned little-if anything - in the last 32 years. Perhaps we never really left the edge; the volcano just dissipated for a while when the dictator departed, and we mistook the restoration of the trappings of democracy for the fundamental changes we needed to implement.

But as it turns out, we have only marked time, wallowing in a culture so damaged, it has, as James Fallows so astutely observed, stood in the way of our development and has made a naturally rich country poor. The Philippines, wrote Fallows, describing the situation here, is "a society that has degenerated into a war of every man against every man".

Recently, the bishops and priests spoke from the pulpit condemning graft and corruption and the life-sucking dirty politics that our daily lives are mired in and distracted Congress from its task of legislation and the Government from governance.

Newspapers are raking it in with paid advertisements from sectoral groups and NGOs pleading with the administration to act on the plight of the poor and powerless, with supposed coup plotters to abandon their destructive ambitions to rule the country by military force, with politicians to set aside their partisan agendas and focus on the larger picture, and with the media to help set a forward-looking agenda for the country, and not be content to merely reflect the mire it is in. The paid advertisements are starting to become news items themselves, especially for a people used to getting their information from reading between the lines.

The call of the hour is for everyone to think outside of themselves and consider the country, the people, our children, and--as the visiting Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra told Filipino businessmen on Monday--think of the next generation.

Thaskin seemed to be talking about the ruinous politics in the land when he told the business leaders the difference between a politician and a statesman: "A politician always thinks about the next election," Thaskin said, "while a statesman always thinks about the next generation. If you think about the next generation, then you can do a lot of change."

Painful as it is to accept the image of ourselves that Fallows has confronted us with, it is time to give it serious thought and action. Nothing else--not self-praise, not self-flagellation, and not those occasional spurts of national pride-has made us the nation that we ought to be by now.

We might start by making James Fallows' essay on our damaged culture required reading for every member of Congress and the administration. And to make sure they understand it, maybe we should commission an illustrated-comics version.

Damaging culture

HERE I STAND
By Geronimo L. Sy
Thursday, November 24, 2005 - Manila Times

IN the November 1987 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, the American essayist James Fallows wrote, “Individual Filipinos are at least as brave, kind and noble-spirited as individual Japanese, but their culture draws the boundaries of decent treatment much more narrowly. Because these boundaries are limited to the family or tribe, they exclude at any given moment 99 percent of the other people in the country. Because of this fragmentation, this lack of useful nationalism, people treat each other worse in the Philippines than in any other Asian country I have seen. The tradition of political corruption and cronyism, the extremes of wealth and poverty, the tribal fragmentation, the local elite’s willingness to make a separate profitable peace with colonial powers—all reflect a feeble sense of national interest and a contempt for the public good.”

The article started a furious debate on our culture and the right of a foreigner to criticize us. The question “What’s wrong with us?” continues to nag and hound us today in every imaginable forum or discussion. Everyone has an opinion on it, although there is no consensus on what ails us, if at all it is a sickness. It is a good exercise in that it becomes a call for reflection and introspection not only on deciphering our country’s woes but also to help us individually understand, and hopefully act on solutions.

What has not been brought up or clearly presented is that for a culture to be damaged there must be a culprit—a “damager,” so to speak. A damaged culture may mean a deviation from a healthy culture. In the Philippine context, a damaged culture exists only in relation to a damaging culture. Both meanings can be true in that our way of life was good and a-OK until external elements intervened and disrupted our natural state. And who are the guilty?

To blame our colonizers is an easy way out and simplistic, at the very least. To point the accusing finger to our ruling class or elites suffers from the same fallacy. This is not to say that either or both did not contribute or exacerbate our present state of development, rather, underdevelopment. Is it the collective body of Filipinos? No doubt we each are responsible for our actions and should be held accountable for the consequences. Who do we then hold liable for past sins and historical faults?

Regardless of the answer to this question, we need a fresh page to write our destiny. A new day is always the best start to a new life. By all means this is not to advocate forgetfulness or to condone offenders. It is saying that we let go of the mental mindsets and the emotional baggage that hamper us from achieving our potential as a people. By all means, punish the guilty, protect the innocent, make reparations – these cannot be compromised. What can be done is not to stop moving forward into the future even as we deal with our present and look back at our past. The first step is to identify what is wrong with how we live and how we do things and expel and cast it away from our system.

We are a consuming nation, although materialism is not a Filipino value. By and large, I can say with honesty that we value family, character and reputation more than a bigger house and shinier cars. Pervasive corruption is but a result of inverted and skewed priorities.

Relativism is an imported evil. We’ve always had a notion of the good of the community. It is not a “me, myself and I” type of thing. Filipinos are considerate; we treat each other better. We are God fearing and God loving; our self-interest ought to come after the welfare of others. Our politics is a reflection of selfishness and lack of concern.

We can be punctual. Lately, the meetings and functions I attended began on time. Much remains to be done in terms of valuing and respecting time. One way to do it is to simply decide that on December 1, 2005, and henceforth, we will hold events and functions on time all the time. We can also declare that on the same date, all drivers will be courteous and practice defensive driving. Ambitious, yes! Impossible, no!

These modern ills are not ours exclusively. We need not fret or worry too much for today is sufficient unto itself. Indeed, when Fallows said that ours is “a society that has degenerated into a war of every man against every man,” he could as well have been writing about any other country.