Arab News Newspaper: A Puritan Republic: America’s Closeness to Islamic Ideals

A Puritan Republic: America’s Closeness to Islamic Ideals Manuel L. Quezon III

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GILBERT Chesterton once quipped that, “A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things”. I was reminded of this due to the national convulsion in America over the fate of Terri Schiavo. She collapsed in 1990 from cardiac arrest and suffered brain damage because of lack of oxygen, and has been in the center of a decade-long legal tug-of-war between her husband and guardian, Michael, and her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, over whether or not to end life support and let her die. The debate, as it developed, was peculiarly American, and highly puritan, in that those against letting Terri Schiavo die a natural death viewed their efforts as a moral crusade. The Puritan religious tradition of America makes no provision for a central religious authority to define right and wrong — therefore, those against removing the feeding tube that had kept Terri Schiavo alive did so as a loose coalition of concerned people; at the same time, their religiously-motivated efforts resulted in a demand for action by secular institutions. Again, this was quite American. The result is that while American politicians piously leaped to respond to the pleas of Schiavo’s parents, the most thoroughly secular of American institutions, the courts, worked in favor of Schiavo’s husband, setting aside religious arguments. Here, to me, is a paradox for the modern era, then: America is closer, in a sense, to the Islamic ideals it is pitted against, than the liberal, post-Enlightenment attitudes of the Western nations it is expected to rub shoulders with as its natural allies. Those who oppose America as a Godless country, festering in the filth of its own materialism, must come to terms with the insistence on the part of many Americans themselves, that theirs is a profoundly religious country. The American religious right claims America has always been so, and it is time to recognize once more, that this is so: “One nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.” Which is not to say a significant portion of America doesn’t feel God is best left to the churches and excluded from public discourse. There has always been such a faction. The debate between the two sides is actually a war over the soul of America that has been raging not just for decades, but for centuries. There is, on the one hand, the Puritan, dour, busybody underpinnings of rural American society on one hand, the America of today’s Red States — conservative, Christian, Republican — and the more liberal, even frankly contemptuous of tradition, morals, and piety of the American cities, beleaguered bulwarks of the Blue States — liberal, for whom religion is irrelevant, and Democratic — on the other. The war might be more of a Manichean struggle if it weren’t for the confusing situation of the United States being a nation avowedly secular in its institutions but explicitly Deist (meaning it acknowledges a fuzzily-defined “Supreme Being”) in its national ideology. Not for nothing is “In God We Trust” emblazoned on American currency, or the pledge, “One Nation, Under God,” required of all Americans who take the pledge of allegiance to an object, their flag: Sanitizing religion was the compromise made by the patrician founders of the United States, who knew they could not eliminate, and thus had to moderate, the enthusiasms (including religious passions) of the yokel-citizens of their new republic. 170 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville, in his famous book on America, noted that, “Religion in America, takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must be regarded as the first of their political institutions…I do not know whether all Americans have a sincere faith in their religion — for who can search the human heart? — but I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizens or to a party, but it belongs to the whole nation and to every rank of society.” These pulpits have fulminated for centuries, to borrow an official American term, “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” The Puritan John Winthrop left England to establish himself in Massachusetts, proclaiming it the “New Jerusalem,” only to promptly banish Roger Williams, who, cast out from Winthrop’s Massachusetts Bay colony, then founded Rhode Island. The Puritan penchant for public investigations into private morality, and for legislation to promote cleanliness and Godliness, has surfaced again and again, from the Salem witchcraft trials, to the Temperance Movement and a constitutional prohibition on alcohol, to the seeking out of Communists in the 1950s and now, terrorists. American political and military traditions are infused with visions of Biblical struggles between light and darkness, whether against bootleggers, socialists and communists, or in search of a “manifest destiny” for America, the chosen people. The struggles have been against Native Americans, overseas colonial subjects, fascism, or again, communism and now, terrorism. So should we conclude, then, that between the religious police tactics of the Taleban, and the periodic episodes of witch-hunting in America, there is only a difference in methods, but not intent? But to say so would be heresy, would it not? At least, for an America that believes — and votes — out of the conviction that it remains a shining city on a hill, the New Jerusalem of the Western world. Â

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Today’s Columns

A personal matter – INQ7.net is my PDI column for today.

A Puritan Republic: America’s Closeness to Islamic Ideals is my column for today in The Arab News.

Outed as an Editorial Writer

The Philippine Daily Inquirer weighs into the dispute between Publisher Teodoro Locsin, Jr. and the union of the old Manila Standard, now merged with Today to form Manila Standard Today. In its editorial this morning, PDI’’s editorial, Conflict of interest – INQ7.net, takes the side of the union and uses me as an example:

Manuel Quezon III had to resign as presidential adviser on historical affairs before joining the Inquirer as editorial writer and columnist.

This, incidentally, “outs” me as an editorial writer. Usually the PDI does not disclose who writes its editorials.

My own comments on the case (since I worked for Rep. Locsin for 10 years), in my column on Thursday.

The PDI’s string of stories on the issue can be found here:

March 23: Locsin told: No. 4 paper can’t be taken over by No. 7 – INQ7.net

March 24: Today’s view: What conflict of interest? – INQ7.net

March 28: PPI dared: Shed ‘old boys club’ mentality – INQ7.net

A summary of the history of newspapers (and newspaper ownership) can be found here: Philippine Communication Centrum Foundation – Knowledge Museum-Forum-Poverty and globalization-The forum

If only I cook…

… but if you do, you may wish to check out: Market Manila – A food weblog that talks about ingredients, food, food stuffs, recipes, restaurants and markets here in the Philippines and around the globe..

The Philippines are or is?

In Filipino Librarian: The Philippines, Von Totanes asks why we refer to the country as The Philippines and not simply, Philippines.

As a child, I once heard a speech of my grandfather in which he said, “The Philippines are your country and the only country God has given you,” and I asked my dad if this was simply a case of bad English. He said no, members of the older generation used the plural because in those days, the country was viewed as a collection of islands: our official name under the Americans was The Philippine Islands.

Starting where the revolutionaries of 1896-1898 had left off, the framers of the 1935 Constitution aimed to create a unitary state, one which emphasized the wholeness of the Philippines as a country, instead of the collection of islands referred to by the Americans. To be sure, the Americans themselves began the process of changing the reference to the Philippines from The Philippine Islands to The Philippines, specifically in the Philippine Autonomy Act or Jones Law, which served as the Organic Act or Constitution of the Philippines from 1916-1935:

(from the Jones Law):

WHEREAS it was never the intention of the people of the United States in the incipiency of the war with Spain to make it a war of conquest or for territorial aggrandizement; and

WHEREAS it is, as it has always been, the purpose of the people of the United States to withdraw their sovereignty over the Philippine Islands and to recognize their independence as soon as a stable government can be established therein; and

WHEREAS for the speedy accomplishment of such purpose it is desirable to place in the hands of the people of the Philippines as large a control of their domestic affairs as can be given them without, in the meantime, impairing the exercise of the rights of sovereignty by the people of the United States, in order that, by the use and exercise of popular franchise and governmental powers, they may be the better prepared to fully assume the responsibilities and enjoy all the privileges of complete independence: Therefore

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the provisions of this Act and the name “The Philippines” as used in this Act shall apply to and include the Philippine Islands ceded to the United States Government by the treaty of peace concluded between the United States and Spain on the eleventh day of April, eighteen hundred and ninety-nine, the boundaries of which are set forth in Article III of said treaty, together with those islands embraced in the treaty between Spain and the United States concluded at Washington on the seventh day of November, nineteen hundred.

Thus, what was used for convenience by the Americans was, for the framers of the 1935 charter, a conscious adoption of a new name, with very definite ideas about what the new reference implied:

ARTICLE XVIII The Commonwealth and the Republic

Section. 1. The government established by this Constitution shall be known as the Commonwealth of the Philippines. Upon the final and complete withdrawal of the sovereignty of the United States and the proclamation of Philippine independence, the Commonwealth of the Philippines shall thenceforth be known as the Republic of the Philippines.

In a sense, this was a reversion to “La Republica Filipina” although because of the change in dominant official languages from Spanish to English, the sense is still different. Under the First Republic, we were “The Philippine Republic,” which is more in keeping with the sense of the Malolos Constitution that the Philippines comprised the political union of The Filipinos:

THE REPUBLIC

Article 1. The political association of all Filipinos constitutes a nation, whose state shall be known as the Philippine Republic.

This is an important distinction first pointed out to me by a French historian. According to him, you have to contrast the Malolos definition of the Philippines with that contained in the 1935 and subsequent Constitutions:

1935 Constitution: ARTICLE I The National Territory

Section 1. The Philippines comprises all the territory ceded to the United States by the Treaty of Paris concluded between the United States and Spain on the tenth day of December, eighteen hundred and ninety-eight, the limits which are set forth in Article III of said treaty, together with all the islands embraced in the treaty concluded at Washington between the United States and Spain on the seventh day of November, nineteen hundred, and the treaty concluded between the United States and Great Britain on the second day of January, nineteen hundred and thirty, and all territory over which the present Government of the Philippine Islands exercises jurisdiction.

1973 Constitution: ARTICLE I The National Territory

Section 1. The national territory comprises the Philippine archipelago, with all the islands and waters embraced therein, and all the other territories belonging to the Philippines by historic or legal title, including the territorial sea, the air space, the subsoil, the sea-bed, the insular shelves, and the submarine areas over which the Philippines has sovereignty or jurisdiction. The waters around, between, and connecting the islands of the archipelago, irrespective of their breadth and dimensions, form part of the internal waters of the Philippines.

The present Constitution:

ARTICLE I

NATIONAL TERRITORY

The national territory comprises the Philippine archipelago, with all the islands and waters embraced therein, and all other territories over which the Philippines has sovereignty or jurisdiction, consisting of its terrestrial, fluvial and aerial domains, including its territorial sea, the seabed, the subsoil, the insular shelves, and other submarine areas. The waters around, between, and connecting the islands of the archipelago, regardless of their breadth and dimensions, form part of the internal waters of the Philippines.

All of the above, 1935 to the present, according to the French historian, are profoundly Anglo-Saxon definitions of nationhood, defining a country according to boundaries and soil. The Malolos Constitution, on the other hand, basically defines national identity and nationhood by blood, which he says is very German and even very French. So it was that, for example, one of the first reforms prior to the extreme phase of the French revolution was to change Louis XVI’s title to King of the French from King of France. The former was leader of a collective union, the latter, sovereign of a personally-owned fiefdom. This is why, also, Louis-Philippe was named King of the French, and Napoleon III, Emperor of the French; to this day, the sovereign of Belgium is King of the Belgians.

So when the framers of the 1935 Constitution in a sense, named their country, a chance Filipinos hadn’t had since 1898, they decided to view their country in the singular and not the plural: my guess is that an attempt would have been made to drop “The” even later on. In 1940, the Coat of Arms of the Commonwealth was briefly changed, the scroll underneath, for one, which had said “Commonwealth of the Philippines,” changed to simply, “Philippines.” Unfortunately the design (very similar to today’s national coat of arms) was unpopular at the time, and the old Commonwealth arms swiftly restored.

You may wonder why, in Constitutional Conventions, there are Committees on Style. Lawyers who require precision of language know the importance of style, and the ability of the framers of Constitutions to be arbiters of proper (or authorized) usage is clearly shown in the decision to refer to the Philippines in the singular instead of the old plural:

1935 Constitution:

ARTICLE II Declaration of Principles

Section 1. The Philippines, is a republican state. Sovereignty resides in the people and all government authority emanates from them.

Anyway, that is why we say “The Philippines is…” and not, “The Philippines are…”, the continuation of “the” simply being to keep the language mellifluous: simply “Philippines” would be too abrupt in spoken and written English.

A Baguio of new memories

A Baguio of new memories – INQ7.net is my column for today.

Could Terrorists Use the Strait of Disquietude to Wreak Havoc? was my Arab News column last Thursday.

A kind of referendum

A kind of referendum – INQ7.net is my column for today.

Information on Cebu is available here: Demographic Characteristics.

Read and Weep

The Complete Bushisms – Updated frequently. By Jacob Weisberg should get you off on a good start for the week.

Capitol Planning

In Philstar.com – The Filipino Global Community, Paolo Alcazaren weighs in on the disparity between the dreams and attempts to scientific plan a national capital, and what we have ended up with today.

And in the “Good Riddance” Department, the last remaining statue of Generalissimo Francisco Franco in Madrid has been removed: BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Madrid removes last Franco statue.

Now, while I don’t like dictators, there’s something quite cool about the title “Generalissimo.” Instead of announcing “czars”, we should adopt the title: “PGMA announces anti-terrorism Generalissimo today” has a nice ring to it.

Today’s Columns

The Perils of People Power is my Arab News column for this week.

My Inquirer column for today is Defining terrorism – INQ7.net.

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