Assessing Adrian

My last column for the year is Let’s get loud.

In Adrian E. Cristobal, public man of letters; 75 by Lito Zulueta, he points out that the late Adrian Cristobal was a public intellectual, and he tries to compare and contrast public intellectuals elsewhere with our home-grown kind. I attempted a similar effort in Assessing Adrian, triggered, in part, by Conrado de Quiros own reading of a the man, who was his friend.

On a related note, see The Role of the Public Intellectual by Alan Lightman and The Future of the Public Intellectual: A Forum in The Nation.

May 2008 be as good for you as we all hope it will be for our country.

Technorati Tags: history, ideas, media, philippines, politics, society

Book of the week

“The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments” (Gertrude Himmelfarb)

Nuestro perdido Eden

Every year, people dust off my article on Rizal and Hitler, as Wish You Were Here most recently did.

Although I’m not really a Rizalist (if anything, I am a Mabinian, if there’s such a thing), today is Rizal Day, and I, for one, am all in favor of keeping the Rizal commemoration on this day and for keeping him the preeminent national hero.

My personal hero of heroes, Mabini, wrote this in La Revolucion Filipina:

Although Rizal’s banishment to Dapitan eliminated all possibility of his active participation in the movement, he was found guilty of having been its chief instigator because, had it not been for the articles he had published in La Solidaridad and for his novels, the people would never have taken to politics. This judgment was totally incorrect because political activities in the Philippines antedated Rizal, because Rizal was only a personality created by the needs of these activities: if Rizal had not existed, somebody else would have played his role. The movement was by nature slow and gentle, it had become violent because obstructed. Rizal had not started the resistance, yet he was condemned to death: were he not innocent, he would not be a martyr.

See my Why Rizal Went Bravely to His Death.

I once spoke at a program in the Lyceum where the main attraction was then-congressman Francis Escudero. It was the only time I got to see this up-and-coming politician up-close, and in action.

He began his talk by quoting fthe beginning of Rizal’s last poem in Spanish; what I found remarkable was that as he recited the lines, the students spoke along (I don’t know if this is a unique attribute of Lyceum students):

¡Adiós, Patria adorada, región del sol querida,
Perla del mar de oriente, nuestro perdido Edén!

But it is a demonstration of the motive power of Rizal, and the mastery of rhetoric by Escudero, a mastery now so rare that a demonstration of its elementary devices can inspire awe in young audiences (among these basic devices is to establish rapport with your audience, by means of reciting something they know intimately, too).

Rizal famously condemned the Revolution. As Reynaldo Ileto wrote.

The publicized trial was a farce, but it fitted the scenario perfectly. The prosecutor called Rizal “the soul of this rebellion” whose countrymen render him “liege homage and look up to him as a superior being whose sovereign commands are obeyed without question.” The Office of the Governor General submitted a document to the court that described Rizal as “the great agitator of the Philippines who is not only personally convinced that he is called to be the chosen vessel of a kind of redemption of his race, but who is considered by the masses of the native population to be a superhuman being.”

Faced with such charges, Rizal could only plead that he had nothing to do with political affairs from July 1892 to June of that year and that he was opposed to the armed conspiracy. But the Judge Advocate General refused to allow publication of Rizal’s manifesto condemning the uprising because, in effect it “said in substance: ‘Let us subject ourselves now, for later I shall lead to the Promised Land.’” At the trial’s end, news of Rizal’s impending execution quickly “spread everywhere, producing a deep impression.”

The problem we have with Bonifacio as first head of state is that he did not couch his position or even our nationhood in the terms we assume today, and which trace their origins to the leadership that supplanted Bonifacio. The Supremo would not call us Filipinos, would not view his country as the Philippines; would not even view his supreme authority as a presidency. He asserted that what Rizal and Aguinaldo called Filipinos were The Tagalogs, not in the ethnic sense of a particular tribe, but in the literal meaning of the word, “Taga-Ilog,” the people who dwell by the riverbanks. And, having denounced the Convention, he proclaimed himself not “president,” but “Hari ng Katagalugan.”

For a nation which is still mired in debate over the national language, Bonifacio’s attempt to make the term “Tagalog” have a generic and not ethnic meaning, is unacceptable; and for a nation which views itself in republican term, a self-proclaimed “king” is too much of an anachronism.
Reynaldo Ileto writes (see [93]),

Andres Bonifacio’s defeat at the Tejeros election was facilitated by comments of the opposition that he lacked education, could not handle Spanish, and was not truly a republican because people in the streets hailed him as “Hari ng Katagalugan” (King of the Tagalogs), not to mention his use of the controversial title “Supremo.” Some went to the extent of calling him a leader of bandits called “Katipungoles” and derided his alleged claim that the mythical Bernardo Carpio would come down from Mount Tapusi to help his struggling forces.

All of these criticisms actually point to Bonifacio’s ability to render the struggle meaningful to the common people and the disdain with which many members of the “better classes” regarded such behavior.

Mabini minced no words in his memoirs of the revolution:

Andres Bonifacio had no less schooling than any of those elected in the aforesaid assembly, and he had shown an uncommon sagacity in organizing the Katipunan. All the electors were friends of Don Emilio Aguinaldo and Don Mariano Trias, who were united, while Bonifacio, although he had established his integrity, was looked upon with distrust only because he was not a native of the province: this explains his resentment. However, he did not show it by any act of turbulent defiance, for, seeing that no one was working for reconciliation, he was content with quitting the province for San Mateo in the company of his brothers. When it is considered that Mr. Aguinaldo (the elected leader) was primarily answerable for insubordination against the head of the Katipunan of which he was a member; when it is appreciated that reconciliation was the only solution proper in the critical state of the Revolution, the motive for the assassination cannot be ascribed except to feelings and judgments which deeply dishonor the former; in any case, such a crime was the first victory of personal ambition over true patriotism.

Yet Nick Joaquin, an Aguinaldista and fervent Manileno, wrote,

Since Bonifacio’s place in our pantheon is now secure, it’s time we faced up to the reasons we have not been so ready to exult over him as over Rizal — and the reasons go back to racial memory, back to the attitudes of the men who knew Bonifacio. He was not charming, he was not likeable; he had a rough temper; he was impatient, rash and domineering, he had the insecurity of the poor, the touchiness of the upstart. Pio Valenzuela is said to have described him as “algo despota” — rather despotic. There’s the story that when a brother-in-law he had appointed minister of war demurred on the ground that he knew nothing of military science, Bonifacio screamed. “Do as you’re told, because I’ll shoot you if you don’t!” Such stories may be apocryphal, but they indicate the contemporary view of him.

We return, once more, to Leon Ma. Guerrero, in a Rizal lecture he delivered titled Rizal As Liberal; Bonifacio As Democrat.

There is much of Rizal in this: the political -and I say political because there really is no valid historical evidence for it- the political, then, nostalgia for an idyllic past which could not be recovered on the eve of the 20th Century; the unfamiliarity with, not to say indifference toward, the economic and social realities; that reverse colonial mentality which blames all the ills of the country on the foreign ruler’s malevolence; the utopian conviction that a government of the Filipinos by the Filipinos would be very heaven.

In a way, Rizal and Bonifacio were romantics, very much like Rousseau with his “noble savage”, Bonifacio perhaps more than the relatively sophisticated Rizal, and indeed under the influence of Rizal. They seemed to yearn for a simpler and nobler age when men of honor mixed their blood in cups of wine, and the merchants of Cathay and Cipango could leave their silks on unknown beaches to return in their junks after a year for the recompense of jars, honey and beaten gold.

At this point, let us look at the romanticism of Rizal and Bonifacio.

In Reynaldo Ileto’s translation of Bonifacio’s “What the Tagalogs Should Know” (it appears as a footnote in the reproduction of the Agoncillo translation in The Bonifacio Papers), we see this:

In the early days, before the Spaniards set foot on our soil which was governed by our compatriots, Katagalugan enjoyed a life of great abundance (kasaganaan) and prosperity (kaginhawaan). She maintained good relations with her neighbors, especially with Japan, and maintained trade relationships with them all. That is why there was wealth and good behavior in everyone; young and old, women included, could read and write using their own alphabet. Then the Spaniards came and appeared to offer to guide us toward increased betterment and awakening of our minds; our leaders became seduced by the sweetness of such enticing words. The Spaniards, however, were required to comply with the existing customs of the Tagalogs, and to bind their agreements by means of an oath, which consisted of taking blood from each other’s veins, mixing and drinking it as a sign of genuine and wholehearted sincerity in pledging not to be traitorous to their agreement. This was called the “Blood Compact” of King Sikatuna and Legaspi, the representative of the King of Spain.

Returning to Guerrero,

But surely neither really expected to turn back the calendar to the 16th century! Surely Bonifacio did not see himself as a revived Silapulapu, slaying the cuirassed Spaniard in the bloody surf of Manila Bay, or Rizal fancy himself as a reincarnation of Sikatunaw, pledging reforms with the Spanish liberals by mixing their blood in wine!

Indeed the basic question of the Philippine revolution still awaits a fully satisfactory answer. Why exactly did it take place? Why did the Filipinos take up arms against the Spanish colonial regime?

…The contrast between Rizal and Bonifacio deepens when we observe that Bonifacio’s grievances do not include, at least specifically, the main points of Rizal’s avowed program of reforms: representation in the Spanish Cortes, extension of Spanish legislation and the Spanish Constitution to the Philippines, equality of rights and opportunities, in brief, the Hispanization of the Philippines.

These reforms might indeed have prevented or remedied the abuses which rankled in Bonifacio’s heart, but the man from Tondo was not one to be thinking of constitutions and parliaments. His grievances were those of the common people among whom he lived, of whom indeed he was truly one, grievances that, homely and petty as they might sound, they felt in their own shacks and tenements, in their own families, in their own bodies, the stick on their backs, the empty plate.

If we ask ourselves again why the Filipinos took up arms, we may be nearer the correct answer in Bonifacio’s wrongs, the wrongs inflicted upon the common people, than in Rizal’s rights, the rights which he desired for his aborning nation…

In the end, Guerrero wrote,

I have suggested that Rizal and Bonifacio both appear to be romantics, nurturing illusions of an idyllic pre-Spanish past. But their romanticism was really political tactics: Rizal’s to refute the clerical claim that Mother Church and Mother Spain had brought the natives down from the trees; Bonifacio’s to attract followers with the vision of a primitive paradise without taxes and police…

It was the perennial conflict between the intellectual, on the one hand, who is always waiting for something more, one more condition to be fulfilled, one more factor to be supplied, one last question that should be answered, and the man of instinct, on the other hand, who knows only when he has had enough.

It was also the conflict between the liberal, anxious to reconcile the old and the new in an orderly and controlled progress, and the democrat, ready and willing to leave it all to the will of the people, right or wrong.

On a more contemporary note, and shifting the focus back to Bonifacio again, the American historian Glenn May was basically ridden out of town on a rail, because of his questioning what he described as myth-making by Filipino historians:

The works of Artigas, de los Santos, Santos, Agoncillo, and even to some extent Ileto, in addition to being historical studies and contributions to an ongoing nationalist discourse, are, at their core, modern-day Philippine varieties of “hero myths” — stories in the tradition of Greek tales about Theseus and Herakles and Indian ones about Krishna and Karna.3 But, within that genre, they fall within a distinct, somewhat underexplored, contemporary category — the national hero myth, the national hero being a relatively modern mythical figure since the nation-state is itself of recent vintage. Not surprisingly, then, both in form as well as content, many of the stories told by the Philippine mythmakers bear a striking resemblance to those found in Weems’s biography of Washington and other early books about the heroes of the American Revolution. The hero’s humble origins and intellectual powers are emphasized, even when, as in the case of Washington, the evidence does not necessarily support the claims. Also emphasized are the hero’s virtues and strength of character. For American and Filipino mythmakers alike, the hero served as a model to be emulated.

But national heroes differ from truly legendary heroes in one important respect. As modern historical figures, their lives can be studied by historians. Furthermore, historians being what they are, the lives of the great and presumably great are much more likely to be studied and restudied, and then restudied again, than are the lives of anyone else. If modern-day hero stories are based on weak or nonexistent evidential foundations, it seems inevitable that they will eventually be exposed.

A summary of the whole brouhaha is in History and Histrionics by Patricio Abinales:

These books can (must?) therefore be seen as a clash of interpretations arising from the relative inadequacy of historical material. To appreciate them more meaningfully, and thus go past the acrimony of present debates, they must be understood as part of a continuing effort by historians and their peers to make sense of a vital period in Philippine history which — alas — remains obstinately coy in revealing to us its fullness. Any serious student of history can find value in this anarchy of interpretations, especially since the full story of how our nation came into being has yet to be written.

Visit the Jose Rizal Website and Bonifacio Papers.

Technorati Tags: history, ideas, philippines, society

An oppositionist’s estimation

See Juan Sumulong: Dreamer, not demagogue, circa 1938.

The Long View: Assessing Adrian

The Long View
Assessing Adrian

By Manuel L. Quezon III
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 23:11:00 12/26/2007

MANILA, Philippines. Recently I made an observation in my blog (www.quezon.ph) that what has endured, and may even be said to have triumphed, is the Marcosian idea of a New Society. Even as communism has degenerated into a kind of religious cult, and democracy is floundering between the reliance of professional politicians on a cynical mass base while faced with their inability to motivate our professional classes, who are fleeing the country, the dominant desire seems to be: if only someone proposed a thorough reordering of our society, people would support it.

The idea that we could have a Year One, as the French might have had it, but without the guillotine, or without resorting to a Year Zero, which is what Pol Pot decreed as he emptied out the cities and embarked on exterminating his countrymen, is one that hasn’t lost its appeal. Which begs the question, of course, of just how thorough an overhaul can be, without watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants, as Jefferson put it. But there is wisdom in recognizing the inherent preference of our people for avoiding wholesale slaughter.

The New Society was based on the idea that if only the Filipino could be purged, not necessarily of undesirable people, but undesirable characteristics in our behavior, then the nation could be great again, as Marcos famously declaimed. Rizal and Bonifacio both looked back to a Garden of Eden, a Paradise Lost as expressed in the martyr’s last poem and the place of happiness, prosperity, and unsullied innocence in the Supremo’s manifestos.

But it’s a contradictory desire. In theory, a thoroughgoing reordering of society is desirable; in practice, no one wants to go beyond the curious comfort offered by a dysfunctional political system whose ins and outs the public knows and can therefore live with. The pining for a return to lost innocence remains with us, a fantasy that provides satisfaction for bitching, as borne out by the perpetual cackling over a “œcountry run like hell.”

But as Teodoro M. Locsin once pointedly observed, having lived through the period, “The government run by Americans was hardly heavenly, what with its colonial economy and the Filipino people in their place as ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water.’ The Army and Navy Club with the sign: ‘Dogs and Filipinos not allowed.’ And a cultural brainwashing that left the Filipino with one dream: to be an imitation American.”

We must evolve or perish and it was once in the hands of writers that evolution first manifested itself and then, in today’s terminology, turned viral. As Leon Ma. Guerrero famously proclaimed him, Rizal was the “first Filipino,” while Bonifacio had a different conception of our identity as a nation: “Tagalog” was, for him, not an ethnic group but an entire country struggling to be free. Both used their pens though they differed on the efficacy of using the sword. The foundation of our nationhood, then, is not blood, it’s paper; not battles in the field, but the battle of ideas.

The only question, for generations, was which kind of idea would prevail and which exponent would gain the most clout. The Rizalian model was that of the cultivated, shrewd, intellectual armed with a wit made even more biting by a tendency to alienate the less clever; that of Bonifacio, by the trenchant social critics who were self-taught: the autodidacts with a political bent and little affection for the socially advantaged.

The supreme autodidact -the ultimate self-made man, precisely because self-taught- was Adrian Cristobal, who served as an inspiration to all those who live by Oscar Wilde’s dictum that education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember that nothing worth knowing can be taught. In a nation where the fetish for formal education makes someone without a college degree only half a person, Cristobal achieved eminence despite -and perhaps even due to- his lack of a diploma.

Cristobal understood power because he’d worked in such close proximity to its most adept wielders. He wasn’t alone in gaining this heady, even corrosive, experience. State patronage of the arts was last taken seriously during the Marcos years, and by the arts we should include the liberal arts, both the ancient and modern meanings of the term, an irony considering the restrictive nature of the New Society. Scores of intellectuals were kept on the government payroll, and never before, or since, have so many men and women of brilliance been employed by, and achieved prominence in, the state. For such individuals, there was, for a time, the genuine possibility they could contribute to great things, rather than fleeing to the hills in pursuit of Maoism or abroad to devote their brain power to the improvement of other nations.

A heretical thought, but one that needs exploration, is that Cristobal may not have been so much on the wrong side of history, but instead completely correct because firmly grounded in a complex yet razor-sharp understanding of our society and its needs. The only problem was that the vessel in which he and so many others poured their talents was fatally flawed. After all, even Marcos’ bitterest critics said he could have been the greatest leader this country has ever known, if only he hadn’t succumbed to avarice, practiced nepotism with such enthusiasm, and, finally, had his legendary intellect and will sapped by disease.

Everything that Marcos claimed was the problem: a conceited yet essentially incompetent ruling class, a slavish society devoid of a sense of intrinsic self-worth, a society that required a firm hand to rule it -all continue to be said of ourselves, by ourselves, all the time. Whatever the infinite variation, the central theme continues to be that of the need for a New Society: it was precisely that, but without the Great Dictator, that even Edsa tried to accomplish, and which has been used as an indictment of People Power since.

Book of the week

“The Tyrannicide Brief: The Story of the Man Who Sent Charles I to the Scaffold” (Geoffrey Robertson)

Season’s Greetings!

To all of you, dear readers, Season’s Greetings! I hope you are all snug in the bosom of your respective families, and that the coming year brings you happiness and the best of everything -for you, your loved ones, and the country we all love.

Thank, you in particular, for continuing to visit this blog, and for enriching the discussion that takes place in the comments sections. We may vigorously disagree more often than not, but that we continue to exchange views and learn from each other, offers up the prospect of our all being part of the solution and not the problem.

Season’s Greetings!

This e-mail made me laugh:

“Christmas Carols for Psych Students”

1. Schizophrenia—Do You Hear What I Hear?

2. Multiple Personality Disorder—We Three Kings Disoriented Are

3. Dementia—I Think I’ll be Home for Christmas

4. Narcissistic—Hark the Herald Angels Sing About Me

5. Manic—Deck the Halls and Walls and House and Lawn and Streets and Stores and Office and Town and Cars and Buses and Trucks and Trees and…..

6. Paranoid—Santa Claus is Coming to Town to Get Me

7. Borderline Personality Disorder—Thoughts of Roasting on an Open Fire

8. Personality Disorder—You Better Watch Out, I’m Gonna Cry, I’m Gonna Pout, Maybe I’ll Tell You Why

9. Attention Deficit Disorder—Silent night, Holy oooh look at the Froggy – can I have a chocolate, why is France so far away?

10. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder—Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bell s, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle,Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells

And for all of you, holiday films!

Fallowship

My column for today is Happiness is a ham .

On a more serious note, Newsstand first brought it up: its been two decades since James Fallows wrote A Damaged Culture: A New Philippines?

I was supposed to speak at the Asian Institute of Management on the subject but the symposium took place at the time I got sick.

My Arab News column, How Fallows’ Essay Gutted Morale of the Filipinos, contains my initial thoughts, originally for the paper I was going to deliver. This is a work in progress, but I thought I’d put the ideas forward, now.

N.B. James Fallows blogs at The Atlantic.com.

And Conrado de Quiros on the endurance of feudalism.

Technorati Tags: ideas, philippines, society

First step only

Pleasant news for all medicine-takers:    House okays cheap medicines bill; more debates at bicam.

Although the Inquirer editorial takes the President to task over the near-release of Jalosjos, most people are happy that the President met with the Sumilao farmers. Though not everyone: Quisumbing company argues: Facts ‘twisted’.

Arroyo revokes land-use conversion of Sumilao estate, which should encourage Fr. Joaquin Bernas. In his Monday column, A golden opportunity for GMA, the Jesuit lawyer had pointed out that,

One of the principles which first-year law students learn early is what is called the “doctrine of qualified political agency.” The doctrine, recognizing that the Constitution has established a single and not a plural executive, postulates that “all executive and administrative organizations are adjuncts of the Executive Department, the heads of the various executive departments are assistants and agents of the Chief Executive, and, except in cases where the Chief Executive is required by the Constitution or law to act in person or the exigencies of the situation demand that he act personally, the multifarious executive and administrative functions of the Chief Executive are performed by and through the executive departments, and the acts of the secretaries of such departments, performed and promulgated in the regular course of business, are, unless disapproved or reprobated by the Chief Executive, presumptively the acts of the Chief Executive.”

And explained what this means:

Pardon the involved kilometric sentence, but, put simply, when a department secretary makes a decision in the course of performing his or her official duties, the decision, whether honorable or disgraceful, is presumptively the decision of the President, unless she quickly and clearly disowns it.

Bernas further explained the principle behind the authority wielded by cabinet secretaries, in order to point out that the buck stops at the President’s desk:

The secretary of agrarian reform has just made an utterly disgraceful decision in the case involving the farmers of Bukidnon. He has refused to read the law and the rules promulgated by the department itself. You can read the law and rules backward and forward and you will reach the conclusion that the secretary is wrong. He has uttered a decision commanding the farmers to accept an unlawful act and authorizing San Miguel Foods to proceed with unauthorized conversion of the farm land. The land had been previously awarded to the farmers under the Agrarian Reform Law. True it is that the award was taken back, but under a highly controversial conversion order which went through the Supreme Court three times.

So the President revoked the order, giving the Sumilao farmers not the land, but the opportunity to own the land; the whole thing has a ways to go, still.

Land Reform resources: Agrarian reform in the Philippines, by the Asian NGO Coalition for Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ANGOC) and by the Ford Foundation. See also The Antisocial on Land Reform, with the Lumads in mind.

In his column, Manuel Buencamino points out the differences between the involvement in business of Jose de Venecia III and Diosdado Macapagal Jr.:

Now I understand why Rep. Teodoro Locsin Jr. said it’s possible the bidders colluded and Monte Oro will sell shares to the losing bidders.

As to the younger Macapagal, “Buboy,” well, he was cleared of any wrongdoing by no less than Raul Gonzalez, the unconfirmed secretary of justice.

Gonzalez said, “Assuming that he participated, it’s unfair that just because he is the brother of the President, he will be deprived of joining [the auction]. He’s a legitimate businessman.”

That’s definitely different from the case of another legitimate businessman, Joey de Venecia. Buboy is the brother of the Gloria Arroyo; Joey is the son of the Speaker, and he blew the whistle on the broadband deal.

Gonzalez added, “It was the corporation that participated. The personality of the corporation is different from the individual.”

Again, that’s different for Joey de Venecia whose personality is inseparable from Amsterdam Holdings Inc., the company whose “no-sovereign-guarantee” bid for a broadband network was shanghaied by Abalos and his principal.

An interesting blog:  The Philippine Claim over Sabah: Legal and Historical Bases.

Technorati Tags: philippines, president, society

Book chapter: The perpetual avoidance of opportunity

The perpetual avoidance of opportunity
Manuel L. Quezon III
(From In Pursuit of the Philippine Competitive Edge: An Oral History of a Continuing Journey by 50 wisdom-keepers, AIM Policy Center, 2007).

IN 1953, the Philippines Free Press published an editorial in which it observed that “The need to establish a regime above personalities, a government of law instead of men, cannot be exaggerated. In a rule of law alone lies social stability. Those who are for chaos may welcome a personal regime; those who are for order know the need for an impersonal government.” It said that while notable Filipino leaders in the past had a “private conscience drew the line beyond which it would be dishonorable for a public official to go,” the country couldn’t continue pinning its hopes on officials privately drawing “a line which only an impersonal law should draw.” The editorial writer couldn’t know how prophetic he was being.

That year, Ramon Magsaysay was elected in a landslide not seen in Philippine politics since before World War II; such was the charisma and integrity of the man that he almost single-handedly rejuvenated public confidence in government. But by 1957 Magsaysay was dead; and the country was left with the painful realization the editorial writer had expressed three years before: in the absence of a genuine rule of law, the restoration of public confidence was an impossible task.

By 1962, the Philippines had begun the decline that it continues to experience to this day.  The decline has, at times, accelerated; at other times, it has slowed to the extent that it offered up hopes, though always dashed, of reversing that decline.  And yet the decline has been inexorable: due to an inability, often bordering on an obstinate refusal, to embrace modernity. Because of that, the foundations of a cohesive, progressive, society -a sense of national solidarity arising from confidence in the law, and in government’s ability to mediate contending sectoral interests- has been absent.

Politics and government are all about competition -and competitiveness. The manner in which leaders and followers choose to compete, and the methods they adapt and permit to either foster, or stifle, competition, are reflections of the larger competitive abilities of society. The Philippine experience in the fifty years that the country has been said to be have been declining, has been that of a society’s refusal to compete.

NATIONAL solidarity, already brittle prior to World War II, fractured over the question of resistance to the Japanese and alliance with the United States. The national leadership prior to the war had been extremely attentive, and thus derived a strong legitimacy, to a limited electorate. The late 1930s had witnessed developments that had already begun to weaken the relationship between leaders and followers: the introduction of women’s suffrage in 1937; the gradual extension of suffrage from the propertied that had a monopoly on the vote prior to that point, thus increasingly injecting populism as a means of attracting the masses; an increasingly cosmopolitan, and radical, intelligentsia; and the impatience of young leaders to wrest political control from the leaders that had dominated government for forty years.

What emerged as the official response to these trends was a series of constitutional amendments approved in 1940: the restoration of a bicameral congress to replace the unicameral National Assembly, in order to forestall the radical infiltration of the legislature being foremost among them (just how inevitable this was going to be would only be demonstrated after the war, with the election of peasant leaders to represent certain districts in Central Luzon: the Roxas administration had to embark on evicting these leaders from their congressional seats). Bloc voting was introduced, both to enforce party discipline and as a means for ensuring dominant coalition control, which would also be fostered by institutionalizing a Commission on Elections, whose rules strongly favored the interests of the dominant coalition.

The carnage and virtual civil war that was the Philippine experience during the war not only laid waste to the country’s physical infrastructure, but took an enormous toll on the country’s leadership, young and old. The veneer of unity and statesmanship carefully-nurtured for forty years was stripped away by questions of collaboration with the Japanese and the struggles within the guerrilla movement.

In this book, Gerardo Sicat argues that “when we began as a new republic, we were on a competitive footing with the rest of Asia and the world.  We had good resources and human resources.  We had then the prospect of building a good future because we had financial resources, despite the destruction caused by the war.” But maximizing those resources required a sense of national purpose fostered by cooperation. Neither would be particularly evident in the postwar years: or to be precise, a divided national leadership made the effort; that effort, however, was hampered by developments already foreseen prior to the war, but accelerated by the trauma of the war: too many had had their faith in the leadership shaken, too many had operated in an atmosphere of lawlessness and unpredictability, to be satisfied with the restoration of the antebellum order.

And the onset of independence in 1946 also marked an unrecognized but important development.

The prewar elite, from that date, actually retreated; its ranks decimated, and displaced politically, it ensured its primacy in commerce through a kind of elaborate protectionist racket: since politico and businessman now increasingly came from different worlds, the camaraderie and common affectations of gentility of prewar days was untenable. Politicians gladly alternated between outright extortion and (increasingly) indiscreetly being on retainer to financial interests to fuel their campaigns; the old elite, still firmly entrenched in business, demanded protectionist policies in turn to protect their monopolies.

STILL, from the 40s to the late 50s enough of  the pre-war political leadership survived to give the impression that pre-war solidarity had not only survived, but been rebuilt; but this was a case of old assumptions artificially supported by nostalgia and the old generation’s believing its own propaganda.

But with Magsaysay this all came clearly to an end: the old parties built on generations-old networks of leaders had been supplanted by his  strategy of barnstorming and media manipulation. His election had been as much a referendum on the old ruling class as it was a validation of the vitality of a new generation. The means for political control and continuity put in place during the Commonwealth were systematically dismantled: bloc voting abolished; the power of the president to appoint mayors taken away; celebrity politics introduced (signaled, for example, by the election of matinee idol Rogelio de la Rosa to the Senate) and with it, the unstoppable transformation of both the standards expected of candidates by the electorate, and the manner in which candidates courted voters.

The Last Hurrah of the old cozy relationship between the politicians and businessmen was the Garcia administration: its election as the first plurality, and not majority, presidency in Philippine history again served as a harbinger of the fatally-divided and unresponsive political culture familiar to Filipinos today.

The Garcia government, however, nationalist as it was, presented an increasingly clear picture of an elite stripped of actual political power, but canny enough to continue fostering and pandering to a new grasping class, the guerrilla generation with its warlord inclinations. Macapagal’s election was the final repudiation of the prewar leadership, but his attempts at modernizing the political system foundered due to a combination of his own authoritarian instincts and his inability to counter the cunning of his opponents. They marshaled a coalition of landowners antagonized by talk of land reform, financial interests hostile to liberalizing the economy, and the guerrilla generation contemptuous of the New Era’s prewar pretenses to class.

WHEN Ferdinand Marcos, exemplar of that grasping class, came to power, he knew that the ruling class’s control of politics was fiction, and that armed with the populism and anti-elitism of the Magsaysay era, he could preside over the liquidation, socially, financially, and politically, of that class; he could, in turn, appropriate the Marxism of the youth more successfully than Macapagal ever could; he could turn it, at least, into a weapon to frighten his generation into supporting him in waging war not only against the Old Society, but the New Generation rallying in the streets. There was simply no line, written or unwritten, that he would not cross.

By the Marcos years, a middle class born in the American period had matured; educated and trained in the style of the ruling class, it shared many of that class’s biases and even pretensions. Among them was the illusion that it was the successor to the old landed and industrial families. They were not; they remained employees: the managers and directors comfortable in the new suburbs designed in imitation of the suburban communities of their bosses. They had homes, their children went to college, but in those colleges their children increasingly asked impertinent questions. Their reaction to impertinent questions and demonstrations was to express solidarity with the alarmed political and business leadership: after all, even as students established the Diliman commune, solidly middle-class residents of the vicinity established vigilante groups to assist the constabulary in flushing the rebels out.

FERDINAND Marcos mounted a coup after efforts to buy the 1971 Constitutional Convention failed; he was pleasantly relieved to discover that the country, on the whole, welcomed his “constitutional authoritarianism.” Democracy had proven to unpredictable; dictatorship was a more palatable approach, mirroring the preferred way for handling problems of the propertied and influential. It was, in more ways than anyone could imagine at the time, a deal with the devil.

Dictatorship demands conformity and conformity kills innovation. The systematic plunder of the country by Marcos and his cronies stripped the Old Society of its finances and thus, its political means; next came the looting of everything else. The middle class discovered itself defenseless, and without a champion in government: with the disgruntled old oligarchy it rebelled but lost to the old oligarchy as it, in turn, proceeded to loot the post-Edsa democracy to compensate itself for the losses of the martial law years.

The middle class, disheartened and disillusioned, clinging as it had to the romantic notion it represented something noble together with the old oligarchy, fled the country (and is now virtually absent from the scene). What’s left of it attempted its own Last Hurrah with Edsa Two, only to discover it was fatally divided over a residual romanticism towards politics, and the adoption of the Marcosian grasping class’s attitudes towards government. A society growing exponentially, and increasingly unexposed to the old institutional controls of education, religion, and civic organization, in turn has reduced the political, business, and middle classes to even more of a minority status, and thus even more fiercely dependent on the military as its protector and enforcer than even the Marcos government was.

TWO gentlemen in this book, one identified as having tried to mitigate the excesses of the Marcos years, and the other an eminent voice since the Edsa Revolution, have succinctly summarized the political call of the times. Former Prime Minister Virata said, “We need the concentration, we have to develop more other areas, we have to complete the communities.” For the Philippines has lost its sense of national unity, or feelings of solidarity, which serve to moderate the winner-take-all nature of politics and governance.

And Jesus Estanislao points to the perpetual failure of the country’s leadership to institute the real rule of law, and thus genuine modernity -and by extension, authentic competitiveness- when he asked, “The prospect depends on many Filipinos are willing to take up the cudgels for deep genuine reforms. This is where we begin thinking: ‘Where will these reforms come from?’ Reforms always come from a set of individuals who see the future or wanting to change or committed to doing something, and I think it can be done.”

But for it to be done requires an appreciation of the past; and how each time the country has been confronted with an opportunity to institute change, it has shrunk from the task.

The Philippines since 1962, faced several choices, each of which presented the opportunity to expand democracy, integrate the formerly marginalized into the body politic, and rejuvenate public confidence in its political institutions. Instead, protectionism, not just economic, but political, was the preferred choice. The 1971 Constitutional Convention ended up pandering to a dictatorship that sent an entire generation of Filipino professionals, stifled by the dictatorship, into exile; an entire political generation was deprived of power until it came to geriatric and greedy power in 1987, in a sense triggering a second exodus as devastating as that of the 70s: the middle class exodus from the 90s to the present.

A new Philippines, it must be said, is being born. Together with the academic and professional elite that migrated in the 70s went Filipinos of modest means who have only begun to establish themselves as a new, entirely different, middle class. Their influence in politics is only beginning to be felt, not in Metro Manila, but in the provinces. The increasingly cosmopolitan and entrepreneurial nature of such Filipinos is, at present, inspiring yet another effort to hold change at bay. It is a confusing, chaotic, even dangerous situation. But proof positive that the lost opportunities of the past needn’t represent an eternal regret, but only a means for reflection in order to more firmly, and daringly, embrace the future.

Bibliographic note

My thoughts on the trends in Philippine society were initially developed in two essays: “Elections are like Water,” and “Circle to Circle”, in i-Magazine (2004). The Free Press editorial, “Politics: Means and End” from August 29, 1953, has also influenced me greatly.

The relationship between Filipino politicians and businessmen is best explored in Amando Doronila’s The State, Economic Transformation, and Political Change in the Philippines, 1946-1972 and in Nick Cullather’s Illusions of Influence: The Political Economy of United States-Philippine Relations, 1942-1960. Controversial and debatable though many of his assertions are, Lew Gleeck’s President Marcos and the Philippine Political Culture also makes for informative reading.

An over-reliance on the (at the time) trailblazing ideas and scholarship of Teodoro Agoncillo and Renato Constantino is, to my mind, unhealthy. State and Society in the Philippines by Patricio Abinales and Donna J. Amoroso incorporates the tremendous advances in thinking and scholarship in the four decades since, and makes for indispensable reading, particularly in exploring the evolution of the Philippine state.

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