cogni·sans | because our imagination got the better of us

Looking for a job, looking for love

2012-02-12T22:42:00.000-08:00

Is all fair in love and work? I think many would say no, and that is partly because of a difference in attitudes that is entrenched in our culture and in our discourses on love and work.

Consider this: Well-known columnist David Brooks wrote in an article for the New York Times that young people should not "pursue happiness and joy" when deciding on their career paths, focusing instead on solving the problems they come across and seeking fulfillment through "[engaging] their tasks". On the other hand, Brooks wrote in his book The Social Animal that "The relationship between money and happiness is very tenuous; the relationship between personal bonds and happiness is incredibly strong". So we are told that happiness matters in our personal relationships but not in our jobs.

But why this difference in attitudes? How much time do we spend at our workplaces every day versus the time we spend socialising? How many friends do we see every day for durations that come anywhere close to the amount of time we spend at work? Why does happiness not matter in something that forms a significantly larger proportion of our everyday lives?

The only relationship we have with people that can come close in terms of the time and commitment that we have to invest in it is a serious romantic relationship. We might say that it's difficult or even unbearable to be in a serious relationship with someone you don't love, having to see the person daily and to pretend that, deep down, you care about him/her first and foremost. So why do some us think we can do it when it comes to our jobs?

As we are probably well aware, it comes down to a difference in motivation. It's not that happiness matters in our personal relationships and not in our jobs to begin with, it's that a lot of the time we look for happiness in our personal relationships but not in our jobs. That is quite understandable. Work occupies that space between our public and private spheres of life where necessity and practical considerations are dominant. In other words, the primary reason we work is to earn a living, and we don't often have much of a choice in that.

But, that said, we can still ask why we voluntarily set up a teleological barrier between work and personal relationships. Why do we judge people who enter into personal relationships out of purely material concerns? Why are people who work purely for money normal but those who seek partners for material reasons deplorable?

You might put this difference in attitudes down to a matter of frequency and significance. Serious relationships are more significant because they are harder to come by, whereas one can switch jobs relatively easily. But what difference would there be if we keep looking for jobs without putting much weight on how much we love them? Working for purely practical reasons wouldn't therefore be a temporary arrangement.

Or you might put it down to a matter bad faith. Normally, people enter into personal relationships on the understanding that it is mostly, in a strict sense of the word, personal. In other words, as we see it, personal relationships concern our persons and not so much external and material things. So in letting the latter take precedence, you would often be breaking a tacitly made contract.

Yet these days many jobs ask for passion and a degree of personal commitment that justifies the personal sacrifices that we have to make for them, often for no tangible compensation. We can no longer be assembly line workers who perform mechanical tasks while waiting for the working day to end so that we can be free to live our own lives after that. The discourse on work-life balance is increasingly making way for the discourse on work-life integration. The job is no longer something that you have to get over and done with out of necessity; it's very much a part of you as a person. Indeed, it demands to be so. Hence, if we put on a front in our jobs, aren't we similarly lying to our employers and maybe to ourselves?

So, in light of the changes in the way we live and work, is the sacred teleological divide between jobs and personal relationships defensible? Can we condemn people who treat love as labour, as an exchange to be understood in material terms? If we can lie and pretend that love or passion for our jobs is integral to our work ethic, why should we disapprove of people who pretend that love or passion is integral to their relationships? Are we just being hopeless romantics who wish to use moral indignation to protect one of the last aspects of our lives that is not touched by the paradigm of commodity exchange?

Ma Nuo, a Chinese reality show contestant, was famously blasted by the public for stating on the topic of life partners that she "would rather cry in the back of a BMW than laugh on the back of a bicycle". But wouldn't many of us rather cry in the back office of Goldman Sachs than laugh behind the counter of a café? What makes us sure that that is a morally superior sentiment?

So perhaps we can't judge people who enter into personal relationships for material or tangible gains any more than we can judge people who work purely for money. At this point, that seems to be the most logically consistent position we can have.

Zen-like Kant

2012-01-30T16:18:00.000-08:00

Can an immutable law be, at the same time, constrained by context and dependent upon particular circumstances for its construction and application? I think so. To put it simply, a law is made real insofar as it is known and obeyed, and its construction and application is dependent on the societies (and on the particular moments in their history) that institute it and that are governed by it. Yet the same law may have the gravity and the force of an immutable law.

But it is not my intention here to discuss the metaphysical implications of this line of reasoning. Instead, I want to take a brief look at a pillar of Kantian ethics, which is the notion of autonomous will. As my memory of Kant's first two Critiques is sketchy, I am indebted to the SEP in writing this quick recap of Kant's moral philosophy.

Unlike the utilitarians and many other ethical systems, Kantian ethics holds that moral law is constituted not by instrumental principles that rational agents must adhere to in order to attain some form of ultimate good. Rather, moral law is founded upon the categorical imperative, which is a non-instrumental principle and which is not predicated on the existence of an abstract notion of ultimate good.

Nor is morality the product of our physiology. Unlike the central principle of, for example, an ethic that is based on empathy for others, the categorical imperative does not command us to act by virtue of what we feel (although emotions may play an important part in motivating us)—it commands us unconditionally.

Hence, we have a duty to obey the categorical imperative. But not all duties are absolutely binding—the law of the land, for example, is only binding insofar as we fall under its jurisdiction, a status we can often opt out of by leaving. The duty to obey the categorical imperative is, on the other hand, absolute because it is binding for all rational agents who are by definition "capable of guiding their own behaviour on the basis of directives, principles and laws of rationality". And we cannot opt out of our membership in the category of rational agents.

We can therefore see the connection between the categorical imperative and our status as rational agents. But the notion of autonomous will has not yet entered the picture. What role does it play in Kantian ethics? We are tempted to assume that rational agents possess autonomous will, which is a point that Kant does argue for. But how does he do so? And how is this important to the categorical imperative?

As rational agents, human beings possess rational wills, which is a will that "operates by responding to reasons". Hence, for it to be rational, it should not be entirely constrained in its operation by, for example, "being determined through the operation of natural laws, such as those of biology or psychology". To some, this might seem like an attempt to divorce reason from our biological make up, which they would regard as labouring in vain under the idealist illusion. However, Kant does not seem to go so far. He argues only that what is necessary for a will to exercise itself freely is "the Idea of its freedom", holding that having free will means not strictly operating under the constraints of immediate practical considerations when "trying to decide what to do" and "what to hold oneself and others responsible for". In other words, as I understand it, we can be said to have free will because in our practical endeavours we are capable of engaging in "self-directed rational behaviour and to adopt and pursue our own ends"; we are capable of making choices and not just of doing as the physical or material circumstances dictate.

Thus, Kant asserts that rational wills are also necessarily autonomous wills. And the significance in his ethics of the autonomy of a rational will can be found in the Kingdom of Ends and humanity formulations of the categorical imperative. Under the Kingdom of Ends formulation, a will that regards itself as a member of the category of rational wills must "regard itself as enacting laws binding to all rational wills" and thereby as a member of a “systematic union of different rational beings under common laws”—a “Kingdom of Ends” whose members "equally possesses this status as legislator of universal laws". Hence, not only must we acknowledge other people as fellow rational, autonomous beings, we must also recognise that they possess the same responsibilities as we do because they are similarly, in their capacity as rational and autonomous beings, capable of enacting universal moral laws. This is a strong basis for the concept of human dignity, a concept that is articulated in the Humanity formulation of the categorical imperative, which demands that we treat others' humanity not as a mere means to our own ends but as an end in itself.

What this means, in plain language, is that we must respect fellow human beings as equals who, like us, possess a significant basic level of dignity. This is a law that should appear immutable to us as both its legislators and its subjects; it should not be modified depending on who we're talking about or on the prevailing circumstances. Even those who are guilty of heinous crimes retain their humanity and therefore their human dignity, and the punishment meted out to them should not fail to recognise this.

All this might seem quite obvious when we think about it, but when we feel antipathy towards others for the smallest of reasons, we clearly need to remind ourselves why we shouldn't our feelings cloud our reason.

Singapore 21

2012-01-14T06:44:00.000-08:00

Singapore is a bit like a child who was bullied and looked down on by its peers—it grew up having something to prove.

The insecurities of Singaporean society are a reflection of the insecurities of its founding fathers. And as all deep psychological traumas go, the result is a pathological pattern of behaviour—in this case, the perpetual post-Separation obsession with proving that it can prosper without natural resources and an initial industrial base.

To this end, Singapore has transformed itself into a rentier state in all but name. And the resource that is rented: Human labour. Factories and offices in Singapore are in principle no different from the sweatshops of the Third World, riding on loose or non-existent labour laws and wage legislation that help make the country competitive as a magnet for foreign investment. Politically, in order to facilitate this path of economic development, security and stability have been prioritised over other goals such as democracy and social justice—again, much in the manner of the archetypal rentier state.

What sets Singapore apart from other rentier states that rely on renting its workforce to foreign investors is the kind of industries it seeks to attract. Thus, a significant part of the workforce has to be trained and educated enough to do the kind of work that those industries require, but not in a manner that is enough to enable them to challenge the country's socio-economic trajectory.

That is the essence of Singapore's famous economic and political pragmatism.

However, popular dissatisfaction with its immigration policy and with falling standards in the provision of public services point to a parallel but related trend in the country's political and economic stance.

Even the most diligent of workers may not be able to stomach the fate of forever being a mere cog in the economic machine. Hence, as a form of compensation for their dedication to the government's vision, citizens were promised comfortable middle class lifestyles that were ensured by the provision of subsidised high-quality public services. This is one of the reasons why the government has invested heavily in the country's healthcare and transportation infrastructures—things that are, incidentally, important in maintaining the productivity of the workforce.

This social compact has held until fairly recently. As Singapore increasingly aligned itself with the neoliberal paradigm, however, the old wisdom of labour market liberalisation—which also happens to be a core tenet of neoliberalism—was eventually joined by the move towards the privatisation of state-owned enterprises.

With this move, naturally, came an increased emphasis on profitability, which has been blamed for the fall in service standards in the country's public transportation system, as demonstrated by the recent and unprecedented major disruptions to urban rail services. At the same time, fares continue to increase, which only helps to lend credence to the notion that the privatisation of public transport has not been in the public's interest.

In addition, as an extension of its stance towards the labour market, Singapore is importing large numbers of cheap workers in its continuing effort to keep labour costs low, thereby contributing to overcrowding and adding to the stress on the country's infrastructure.

Thus, Singaporeans can no longer expect the nanny state to take care of them. Now, all we get in return for our hard work and dedication are promises that are no longer backed by concrete socio-economic support structures. We may have been a first-class rentier state before, but now, with increasing income inequality and decreasing welfare, there is less and less to separate us from the neighbouring states we so enjoy looking down on.

Can things change? Perhaps with the aid of the vast sums of public money that is currently given to the government's investment bankers with little or no public oversight. Will things change? Probably not if we are counting on the old guard to make it happen.

Unfortunately, at the rate we are going, change probably won't come soon enough. Add in the uncertainty in the global economy and the prospect of slower growth, and you know we're in for a rough ride.

So, in light of our predicament, let me say this: Welcome to the 21st century, ladies and gentlemen. The worst is yet to be.

You vs. the world

2011-12-31T09:26:00.000-08:00

When cornered, many animals fight back. We should probably do the same. Compromise becomes impossible when there is no middle ground. The only options are capitulation and confrontation, and at times only the latter offers a chance at survival.

When people talk about confronting an issue or a problem, they sometimes mean capitulating to it. Catchphrases like "change your mindset" or "adapt to the situation" may conceal a sense of helplessness that has prompted the speaker to give up without actually admitting as much.

Indeed, surrendering may often seem the easier option. Sometimes, the world seems hostile to our ideas and our aspirations; sometimes, it defeats us. However, even if we haven't lost, it's so much easier to give up without a fight. Let the world consume us rather than resist it. After all, isn't defeat inevitable?

It's true that, chances are, going against the world will be a tough long slog. And you're often alone in that struggle. But it may be your only chance at achieving freedom when everything conspires to bind you. The more remote the possibility of compromise, the more you have to fight.

If we do choose to fight, we shouldn't expect to survive, much less to win. But perhaps, by the time we are done fighting, a path towards compromise would have opened. Or perhaps we would indeed have to surrender in the end. But you will certainly never find out for yourself if you give up from the start.

And that I think is a fitting message to think on as the new year rolls around.

Simplicity/sophistication

2011-12-23T21:50:00.000-08:00

What is the simple life? Traditionally, it is understood as a thrifty life lived without pretensions. But what exactly does that entail? Are you thrifty as long as you don't buy yachts or mansions or don't live a jet setting lifestyle? Can you be free of pretensions even when you chase the latest trends and fashions?

Of course, the simple life, in the traditional sense of it, still exists. But in the developed part of the modern world, it is increasingly rare. In everyday life, the urge to consume—to spend and to be wealthy enough to spend—is overwhelming. Through constant exposure to various media whose function is to encourage consumption, we have been conditioned to desire and even need extensive material comforts.

Consumption is also about status and a social-psychological need to earn one's place in modern society. Simply being able to consume and being 'sophisticated' enough to know how to consume confers upon us identities that are compatible with the self image of modern society. And what falls outside of the latter is at best unconventional.

Thus, society exerts a pressure on individuals to conform to a consumerist lifestyle, and this pressure increases as more and more people embrace that way of life. Mass exerts its own gravity; popularity may well correlate with conformity.

One result of this trend is the engendering of a pervasive inertia among the expanding middle class—we have become much more productive over the past century, but most of our time and energy goes into the furious cycle of production and consumption, leaving us perpetually exhausted and, in our spare time, desiring only to enjoy the material comforts that our labours have bought. So despite the great degree of empowerment that human beings have enjoyed over the past century, most of us remain content to let the world take shape around us, to let the powerful and influential push society in whatever direction they desire.

Hence, while the simple life would help bring us out of the passivity induced by the consumerist lifestyle, the simple life is by no means simple to live. And so we drift.

How much to consume education?

2011-11-30T15:44:00.001-08:00

Let's face it, adults as a group are pretty bad at giving advice to young people. For example, if young people aim low, adults tell them to aim higher and have more ambition; on the other hand, if young people aim high, adults tell them to be realistic and to pay their dues first. Basically, a lot of advice actually boils down to "do/don't do what I did" or "be/don't be like me".

Then there are those who assume that people think or should think they way they do, and this group certainly includes young people as well.

In times of great uncertainty, the advice and words of wisdom become especially loud and numerous, as everyone chimes in on what they think people should or will do. And I dare say that most of them haven't got a clue.

Now, on the Guardian's question of whether the tripling of tuition fees to £9,000 will inevitably turn students into consumers –this is a silly question and those who are happy with it are quite inevitably going to come up with silly answers. I mean, it implies that students haven't always been consumers. Does the price of a good determine whether you are a consumer? Or is there some kind of a consumer continuum? Shoppers at cheap Tesco are not as much consumers as shoppers at Waitrose?

Of course, this doesn't matter to those who wish to use the question as an excuse to air their self-righteous opinions and advice. In particular, I'm thinking of those who would take this opportunity to remind young people of the value of education, of which they are themselves naturally and keenly aware.

But instead of rushing to tell people what they should or will do, let's address the question carefully. Aside from the fact that it seems to be predicated on the strange idea that students aren't already consumers of education, there is a related question that we must first ask: What qualities can we objectively attach to consumers as a group? Certainly, there are examples of consumers behaving both rationally and irrationally. At times, they are able to make pretty good cost/benefit calculations and drive the market in a way that benefits them; at other times, they consume almost mindlessly. The diversity of consumer behaviour means we cannot assign any particular quality to consumers in their capacity as consumers and argue whether students will be more or less like them.

It also suggests that it is difficult, if not impossible, to predict how students will generally behave due to the fee increase, beyond invoking a basic economic maxim and saying that demand for higher education will almost certainly go down to some extent.

So there really isn't a good answer to the question of whether university students will become consumers, not even if we interpret it as one that is concerned with the value that future students will place on university education.

Is that a boring answer? Well, I think it certainly beats the millionth musing on how students don't value the education they are receiving enough.

Don't think like a manager

2011-11-21T18:37:00.001-08:00

It is often said that knowledge is power. Is it? Or does knowledge simply avail us to the means of power, if that?

There are criticisms to be made of the naive view that knowledge can automatically solve the world's ills, but we do not even have to venture there. In the first place, we should ask what kind of knowledge is regarded as power.

It stands to reason that not all kinds of knowledge can be associated with power. But aside from the fact that some knowledge is obviously of limited use, there's a particular kind that is foremost in the hierarchy of knowledge, being perhaps the only kind that is really recognised as empowering in the minds of many: Actionable knowledge.

In a way, this is apt when we consider the naive belief that knowledge is automatically empowering. Obviously, actionable knowledge is valuable because it allows us to take actions that would otherwise not have been possible or as effective without it. On the other hand, the notion that only actionable knowledge is empowering leads to the idea that only knowledge that is actionable is worth pursuing. That is why we hear rants, such as the one in New York Times recently, about the amount of time and money spent pursuing 'useless' knowledge.

Such complaints do have their points, but they often leave us with the distinct impression that people expect a lot from the knowledge they pursue. They expect it to pave the way to good jobs, to yield financial profit, to save time—in short, knowledge is expected to have tangible benefits, measured in terms that people are already familiar with and fully expect.

There are two criticisms that can be made. Firstly, such expectations are contrary to the nature of discovery. Whether the discovery is unprecedented or personal, whether the knowledge gained is completely new or already known to others, gaining knowledge entails learning something you didn't know before. It is therefore strange that we think we know what we can expect out of gaining some knowledge. While we can perhaps guess at or imagine its possible outcomes, the process of learning is likely to entail learning more than just actionable knowledge. In any particular body of knowledge learned, perhaps only a small part of it is actionable knowledge. Yet such 'wastage' is an unavoidable part of the learning process, a consequence of not knowing what exactly to expect, and this is especially true when engaging in cutting-edge research that seeks to break new ground.

This brings us to the second point, which is what the New York Times article seems to overlook when it rehashes old complaints about the academic ivory tower: A lot of the knowledge gained through research in institutes of higher learning is 'useless' because research is not an entirely predictable process. Important discoveries are often unexpected and made when pursuing lines of inquiry that might initially seem esoteric and of limited practical consequence. Even if a body knowledge seems to be full of information that is of little use outside of academia, the discourse it generates may have a cumulative effect that could be instrumental to making important discoveries within that body or outside of it. Thus, research is not made up self-contained projects that either yield useful results or not—research can be seen as consisting of discourses that together form the ground from which new knowledge germinates, not necessarily as a result of any single effort.

That is not to say that research need not be directed by practical goals. However, we should not be surprised that only "around 40 percent" or whatever proportion of academic research proves to be immediately useful in practical contexts. These circumstances are part and parcel of the process of research, and perhaps it is a gross misunderstanding of the way knowledge is gained that leads to the kind of cynicism that demands that knowledge yield tangible rewards or be deemed not worthwhile.

Don't give up on English to oppose it

2011-10-28T11:08:00.000-07:00

Illustration by Don Daily

As a debate plays out this weekend regarding the use of Singlish, let us recall the fable of the Fox and the Grapes. It's a story that is familiar to us, in which a fox, unable to reach some grapes, disparages them as sour grapes.

The term 'sour grapes' has come to signify envy, but there is an element of the pathetic in the fable: Unable to obtain something, the fox takes refuge his rejection of that thing.

Those who entertain thoughts of replacing English with Singlish should remember this tale. The idea of replacing English entails doing away with it altogether, and, if they have resistance in mind, that would not constitute a gesture of resistance.

Why is that so?

An act of resistance without a centre or a point to which it is opposed is untenable. While it might seem clear that communicating in Singlish can be conceived of as an act of resistance that is externally directed against the officious imposition of standard English, it would—recalling the fable—be reduced to a desperate cry if it does not arise from an internally-directed conflict.

This argument is motivated by the mirror-image of the maxim that external opposition is inevitably a reflection of internal contradiction—that a deliberate work of art must be internally coherent to project a meaningful opposition externally. The act of speaking Singlish, if it is to be a performance that mimetically mocks or deconstructs official language, must achieve this internal coherence through the act of conscious and deliberate resistance by the speaker, who has the capability to communicate in standard English and yet chooses not to do so. Without this capability and the actor's power to choose to begin with, the act loses its strength.

It seems eminently foolish to oppose centres of power by reducing what power you have to enact gestures of resistance. Even if those who are for replacing English do not intend it as an act of resistance, their position would still be tantamount to advocating the weakening of the power to resist standard English as a symbol of coercive authority. That would certainly impoverish any speak Singlish movement.

Art and its media

2011-10-17T11:26:00.000-07:00

The difficulty of praxis in art is compounded by the intrusion of the empirical or the purely practical. The definition of art is a political matter; it is bound up with the power to dictate or influence what is considered art and what is not. Perhaps the philosophy of art can exist in parallel with the power structures that, in our reality, define art and the beautiful. However, one gets the feeling that praxis should still entail the reconciling of aesthetic theory with aesthetics in practice, if not overcome the latter altoghether.

The trouble for aesthetic theory is, even if it has revealed the secret of the beautiful and why art is art, it frequently does not account for the practical preoccupation with the medium as a crucial determinant of what can be considered art. A digital image is at most 'art' in a much more qualified sense than is a painting on a canvas. This is because it does not in itself (without relying on the reputation of the artist or on physical installations), by virtue of its medium, typically garner the kind of recognition as an artwork that comes with socially-bestowed value and that can provide the artist with the material means to continue his work.

A way of dealing with this reality is to call for an anti-elitist view of art that disregards or devalues the importance of the art establishment, the respected institutions that serve as gatekeepers for universally-recognised art. Such a view would not discriminate between career artists and those who are not or between one medium and another.

Yet, as suggested earlier, this conception of art would only exist in parallel with the politics of art in practice. Praxis becomes viable but constrained, maintaining itself only by the act of a splintering, by taking itself away from dominant trends.

What is needed is an aesthetic theory that critically engages with the politics of art and, in a dialectical fashion, brings theory and practice together under an all-encompassing praxis. If the medium indeed plays a part in deciding what is art and what is not, such a theory would, as is done in Hegel's philosophy of art, explore the essential elements of art and show how they create qualitative differences between different media. However, it would also have to be cognisant of and explicate the power relations that mediate social perceptions of art.

In this sense, only a synthesis between aesthetic theory and the sociology of art can provide an all-encompassing praxis for art.

Education

2011-09-30T09:56:00.000-07:00

Every year it's the same. I would be lulled into thinking that there are possibilities here, that things will be different. This year, I actually convinced myself that I think positively now, that I will see things differently. I was even beginning to think that I may prefer to stay here instead of leaving again. But, in the end, I still feel the same way

The people are still the same. People might change since you've got to know them, but they'd never change again. Here, they are still indifferent. You can't rely on them to make the simplest of gestures unless they can see what's in it for them. In general, old friends tend to become nothing but a tiny blot in the paper of the mind, a memory of people who exist but who are of little concern to you now.

Every year, I learn a little more about how to live a largely solitary existence. When family became lost to me emotionally, I had friends. Now friends are merely a collection of acquaintances. You don't leave a place and expect to pay no price. Maybe some people can, but such are my blessings.

Each time, to stave off bitterness, I have to know that I've become better. I have to be able to say that I've become more self-sufficient. To achieve that, I have to turn again to philosophy. Only philosophy can teach you how to live alone and nonchalantly.

The strong person is an essentially solitary person. I have no need for friends, as they have no need for me.

The Commodification of Leisure, Part II: Mass Culture and Social Disorder

2011-09-08T07:26:00.000-07:00

Part I

In the second part of this discussion of Adorno and Horkheimer's The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, I conclude by building on the key observations made in the first part regarding mass culture and capitalist relations of production, sketching out a slightly different theory of mass culture. The latter is subsequently applied, partly with reference to Slavoj Žižek's Shoplifters of the World Unite, to a brief analysis of the social problems facing contemporary British society (although it applies similarly to many other contemporary societies) that culminated in the disturbances that occurred in the summer of 2011.

It has previously been postulated that mass culture celebrates both consumption and success within the capitalistic paradigm, the latter which revolves around its particular social relations of production. Success in this context, however, has to be seen in relation to consumption, for the market for status and identities in a capitalist society demands equivalence, which in turn demands objective measurability. As such, success is measured by what is called 'purchasing power' and its instantiation in the form of the consumption of goods and services.

At the same time, the association between consumption and success also has its implications on consumption—while it has been suggested that consumption promises an inauthentic easy form of happiness, it is only always easy in a metaphysical sense, inasmuch as happiness as a concept, as Adorno conceives of it, is always being sought rather than readily found. In practice, consumption is by no means always attainable, particularly in forms that are socially valued and identified with success.

Yet, in spite of the relative difficulty of socially-valued consumption, mass culture must nevertheless persist in tempting audiences with it in order to maintain their interest and, consequently, the industries that depend on it. This creates a harsh paradox in which consumption is sold as an easy and attainable pleasure that is, on the contrary, more difficult to accomplish than it is made out to be, and must be so in order to maintain a degree of exclusivity that upholds the social value of consumption.

The contrast between the expectations generated by mass culture and economic realities in turn leads to social tension, as segments of society are continually being seduced by the promise of socially-valued consumption without the means to engage in it to substantial extent. And this phenomenon may have serious practical consequences for society: For example, the violence and the looting that occurred in London and a few other English cities can be understood as at least partly the result of the frustrations engendered by mass culture in its celebration of consumption and of success as measured by consumption.

That is not to say that there is a simple causal relationship between mass culture and social unrest in contemporary capitalist society. Discontent may, at least initially, emerge as movements of resistance, some of which express themselves in benign ways.

Yet what Žižek calls the "impotent rage and despair [that is] masked as a display of force" and the "consumerist desire violently enacted when unable to realise itself in the ‘proper’ way" (2011) seems manifestly connected to the influence of mass culture. The latter's power may not be as absolute as the Frankfurt School asserts. However, unless we choose to regard the looters simply as human beings who became "beasts" (Žižek, 2011) on their own accord, we must see that mass culture, in wielding significant influence over the modern psyche through the pervasiveness of mass media and through its relentless and seductive celebration of consumption, helps to create an impetus for them to go out and take what they want. Moreover, on a fundamental level, the 'anti-social' act of looting is partly one of lashing out against the fundamental tenet of capitalist society that is property rights, the legal framework that maintains the exclusivity of material ownership and socially-valued consumption.

In light of this, as a famous revolutionary once asked, what is to be done? There seems to be no option other than to continue resisting, but in a different way. While capitalism, presented to us by the messenger that is mass culture, "represents truth without meaning", giving us the freedom to choose only "between playing by the rules and (self-)destructive violence" (Žižek, 2011), we have to return to what is perhaps a less novel and less cynical way of thinking—we need to adopt a teleology of social and personal life that is both meaningful and lucidly aware of its humanity. We must become aware of the centrality not of particular things or even of transcendent things that may cloud our vision, but of human life itself and the importance of realising it in the fullest capacity possible.

I believe that this is the essence of the Frankfurt School critique of mass culture, or indeed of the Marxist critique of the capitalist relations of production. And this is a point that is not undermined by the dispute over facts about audience reception.

The Social Waxwork

2011-08-15T13:55:00.000-07:00

I wanted to write something about the riots and looting that happened in London recently, but at present I don't have the time to compose such a heavy piece. Besides, I've just realised something that I feel I need to write about.

One is never too young to complain about technology. After all, everyone knows that sometimes it's more of an inconvenience than an aid. On my part, I've realised just how bad social networking sites are for me.

There's been a lot of talk about the impact that social networking sites have on productivity and efficiency, but that's not the problem that I have. I don't spend much time on Facebook—the only social networking site I use regularly—although I do have it open most of the time so I can occasionally glance at it for a tiny relief from the boredom of work (or of trying to do work). The longest time I spend on it is at the beginning of each day when I catch up with what has been happening in my social network while I was asleep.

But that's where the problems begin. My so-called social network is an illusion. I know most of the people whose names appear in my newsfeed, but I barely know some of them, and many of them I've simply lost touch with. If this is a social scene, it's the most distant social scene I've ever seen. Here are people constantly telling me something about their lives in which I have absolutely no part and no stake. Why do I even bother reading? Social networking sites may be useful for keeping in touch with friends and acquaintances, but this isn't a way of keeping in touch with them.

It might satisfy my curiosity sometimes to read the newsfeed, but more often than not I have no real idea about what is happening in these people's lives. What people display on social networking sites is merely what they choose to display. So in terms of finding out about the ins-and-outs of others' lives, it's not very rewarding either.

This leads me to the reason why social networking sites are actually bad for me: Reading all about the fun that people are having is not good for my psychological well-being at a stage in my life where it's largely uninteresting. Maybe people go on Facebook and talk about or show how interesting their lives are because they're looking to enhance their status. Maybe it's just that at any one time, some people in my social network are bound to be having a good time. Maybe people do complain as much about how much their lives suck, but selectively I tend to pay attention to the positive things they show because people's problems aren't interesting. Whatever the reason for my seeing it, evidence of people having a good time intensifies disappointment with my own circumstances and reduces the satisfaction I feel with what I have.

The effect is to make me feel less happy than I think I could be. I start looking for reasons why my life is not as great. The truth is, of course, layered and complex, but I'd blame my school, my work, my luck—I've blamed various things for my relative misery. Then I'd start thinking of doing something about my life so I could be like one of those people I read about in my newsfeed. But if anything is clearly ineffective at helping you improve yourself, it's the rather vague, incomplete and sometimes misleading information about other people's lives that you see on social networking sites.

The irony is, the more uninteresting my life is at the moment, the more I need to look at Facebook for relief from boredom. And thus I would sometimes experience a downward spiral in which boredom becomes unhappiness and unhappiness leads to the loss of interest in my own life. I think I know by now that sometimes we just need to close the browser and go about living our own lives, but it remains to be seen whether I can resist the temptation of looking.

I suppose that's what social networks are—a collection of waxworks of human life. It's unreal, yet you can't resist looking in order to compare it with the real.

If this sounds perilously close to our obsession with celebrities, maybe that's because it is. So here's one more thought: Maybe a social networking site functions like a tabloid, but one that affords ordinary people the chance to be celebrities in their own right through the gossip mill that is the newsfeed.

Now that's an idea—people don't only worship celebrities; they also like to see celebrities brought down to earth in the tabloids. So I guess I have two options: I could simply close the browser; or I could pay more attention to the whining I see on my newsfeed and feel the schadenfreude. I have to say, that's a tough choice.

Living death

2011-07-31T16:03:00.000-07:00

I think there are exists two broad ways of tackling life in the middle class consciousness. Both are geared towards consumption, but both go about achieving it differently. The first and more traditional way is associated with the 'Protestant ethic' and involves delaying consumption. It looks at the economic rewards of doing so, namely interest earned by money saved or invested and, more importantly, the accumulated material wealth that can be enjoyed without worry after retirement.

The second way seeks instant or near-instant gratification through consumption. This younger and more hedonistic approach stands in opposition towards the older way, seeking to rebuff the latter's firm demeanour and re-evaluating life as something that is lived moment-by-moment and not (entirely) towards some final end.

Those who subscribe to the first approach disapprove of the other's foolish and unrestrained ways, while those who subscribe to the second approach regard the former in return as boring and straitlaced people who do not know how to live.

As I am more familiar with the first approach, having been brought up in a household that subscribes to the Protestant ethic, it forms the locus of the following thoughts.

Those who prefer the hedonistic lifestyle are absolutely correct. Although the general pre-eminence of a 'Protestant ethic', as described by Weber, is questionable, it exists at least in a hyperreal sense as a kind of personal ideology to some. The Protestant character of the ethic stems from what Nietzsche derided as a preoccupation with the afterlife, whereby one spends one's life in preparation for an eternal life that is to come—a teleology of death, so to speak. In a similar sense, some would focus a large part of their earthly efforts on preparing for the future, namely for the time of retirement, when one is no longer as capable of hard work.

Little or nothing else matters beside this goal. Little else is of value. All their lives they look for that elusive final happiness. When their plans have finally come to fruition in this life, when they can show off their hard-earned wealth and berate other people, they may seem to be a picture of success. But a life of misery may well belie that exterior.

Perhaps they are just incredibly patient people who are always contented along the way. But it seems more likely that they are simply unhappy people. It's no surprise—a teleology of death tends not to bring life to its believers.

Authentically false

2011-07-26T11:48:00.000-07:00

I'm sure we have, as consumers, critics and individuals, expended effort, time and money to look for the authentic. As tourists, we sometimes look for the authentic experience of a place; as gastronomes, we look for authentic cuisine; as individuals, we look for authenticity in matters of identity. These are but a few of the myriad instances in which we search for authenticity.

Yet, what do we mean by 'authentic'? Does authenticity exist at all? Sometimes we may even be sure that we have found it; but have we, really?

I believe that the notion of authenticity can be deconstructed or demythologised in the manner of Barthes. But why stop at revealing the class influences behind it? Studies on diasporas and postcolonial theory have also shown that the notion of authenticity is fraught with difficulties. But is there nothing more to it than the workings of ideology or a kind of collective consciousness?

Here, I want to explore the meaning of authenticity as it is cognised by the individual, to find out more about what authenticity means to each of us, if it actually means anything at all.

To a significant extent, the search for the natural parallels the search for the authentic, providing a reference with which we can understand the latter—we simply have to substitute the goal of a natural state with the goal of the original state of a human activity or creation. Hence, when we look for the authentic, we are looking for the original condition of something man-made.

The search for an original condition indicates the existence of a history. If something that we use or adopt is in its original condition, we would not need to find its original condition. However, in addition, if the history of the type of object or the practice being considered is a short one, then it is likely that we would merely be conservative in choosing to stick to the original—in other words, the notion of authenticity is not likely to be involved at all. Hence, something has to have a relatively long history or, more precisely, has to have undergone many transformations before we would be interested in rediscovering its original form.

But how often can we find the original state of something that has undergone many transformations? Human beings modify and reappropriate the things they create to fit their environment and their own uses. After numerous transformations, the original condition of something may not be knowable or recognisable to us. In instances where we think that we have found something authentic, chances are we have not found something that is in its original condition. So does authenticity have anything to do with the original condition?

To answer this question, consider the fact that some people object to the conducting of major restoration work on ruins on grounds that the ruins would lose their authenticity. It does not seem to matter that restoration work might, ironically, bring a ruin closer to the condition of its original structure. In this light, what is so authentic about their 'authentic' unrestored forms? The quality of authenticity, therefore, has a curious tendency to be unrelated to the original condition of the object concerned.

If so, what can authenticity be reliably said to describe? I think it is precisely that authenticity is a vague and to some extent illusory concept that it is so conveniently used. While there might not be sufficient reason to be loyal to originals as simply originals, there are reasons to prefer the authentic when authenticity also connotes superiority. In fact, my contention is that the condition of being original only matters insofar as it provides a reason for claiming the superiority of an object—it is in claiming the superiority of an object that people are actually interested. Authenticity is thus another label that is frequently used as a means of distinction without necessarily denoting an innate characteristic of objects. In other words, the notion of authenticity is quite arbitrary.

In this light, I think we can certainly afford to be less concerned about authenticity. The next time you are tempted to go further for something authentic, think about saving your resources for something really good.

Death to the patriot!

2011-06-30T15:59:00.000-07:00

Often, I would read about things that make me embarrassed of even downright ashamed of my country. I'm aware of its rather dirty history, and I don't have such faith in it to be certain that it's not involved in some reprehensible business today. In this light, is there any place for patriotism?

I find it amazing how people get up in arms over criticism of their country. Some of them do not even care if the criticism holds some truth. That or they are simply convinced that it is false. Perhaps to them, their country can do no wrong. What is the source of such touchy pride?

I'd like to say that it's because these people are aware of the historical significance of their statehood, because they truly understand how it compares to the alternatives. But that is a distant knowledge, if it can be grasped at all. Rather, I suspect the source is found in 'education' and propaganda, in the meanings they imbue through symbolic power and in the paranoid alternative scenarios that they plant in people's minds.

It is patently ridiculous that the paraphernalia and icons of national identification are treated with such reverence, so much so that acts that indicate disrespect towards them may be subject to legal sanction. These symbols are said to have a unifying function, yet in affording them true iconic status, the real things that they might have stood for become overlooked, relegated into the obscurity reserved for complex ideas that seem difficult for the minds of the brash to hold.

Thus we have the flag, the lion and what-not, symbols that are regularly wheeled out to summon feelings of pride and attachment so the masses can cheer as they did for kings. These are closely associated with the conception of the nation, together with and sometimes more prominently than real things such as community and solidarity with your fellowmen. They are mere noise, the pop of party poppers and the drunken singing of anthems before the wars that kill citizens in the name of the fatherland.

Far from being its defender, the unthinking patriot who is swayed by these icons, by pithy calls to augment the glory of the nation, is a danger to the community. It is the patriot who gives strength to hegemony and oppression. In his blindness, he may allow all manner of evil and political deception to come to pass. What's more, he may play the role of a soldier and marshal for them, actively aiding them and coercing his countrymen. Hence, if there is one slogan that we must have for patriotism, let it be "Death to the patriot!”

Patriotism in peacetime is as useful as anger is while one is resting.

The Last Man

2011-06-21T02:11:00.000-07:00

Life is beautiful—so much so that there's little need to change it in any significant way. Such is the sentiment that I feel is predominant in the middle class public sphere, to the extent that, apart from a handful of disparate issues on the agenda, there is little prospect for active participation in social transformation.

"We have discovered happiness"—say the last men, and blink thereby.

This Nietzschean imagery seems particularly apt if we conceive of modern consumer society as the endpoint of a grand enlightenment project, namely that of turning human beings into masters of their own fates—beginning with mastery over nature through scientific progress (which is still ongoing), and arguably taken to the fullest extent in the Marxist vision of the human mastery over its own labour power.

This endpoint does not mark the fulfilment of the project, however. It seems that while science is still moving irresistibly forward, there is no longer much impetus to expand this project into other domains of human life. We have stopped, it seems, because life is good enough. Material conditions for the large middle classes in wealthier societies are sufficient for the pursuit of individual happiness; so what else do we need?

With the notion of success measured primarily in terms of the accumulation of material goods and perhaps influence, and now that pleasure as a chief mode of happiness is easily attainable, 'structural adjustment' is only used in a macroeconomic and financial sense. The drive for revolution dissipates in the humdrum of daily work and entertainment, drowned out by television and music. It's an uneventful and perhaps even blissful death.

Thus, it is perhaps the case that human agency can only, at least in present times, play but a small part in historical change. Mass action is generally precipitated by external changes and not vice versa. I think this certainly has implications on participation in social organisation, implications that are, unfortunately, less than inspiring.

The Culture Industry revisited

2011-05-31T15:57:00.000-07:00

While cultural studies has today succeeded in appearing to undermine the Frankfurt School critique of the Culture Industry, the machinery of commodification steams ahead, more productive than ever. The intellectual world is powerless before this trend and continues to concede its influence. Numerous scholars of culture are striving to make their field at once more obscure and more accessible. They toil to create a happy vision of a world that is poised to reap the benefits of new communications technology, promising a cosmopolitan future of choice and enlightened consumption.

This vision is constructed through discourse that is sprinkled with an ever-growing list of newly-coined terms. Yet it is, at the same time, one that people can readily identify with—for who isn't ready to believe in the prospect of a brave new world, especially when the media has just informed them of the exciting new products available in the market?

Admittedly, Critical Theory does not often fare well in today's intellectual climate, a circumstance that I feel is attributable to its underpinnings in the labour theory of value, or at least in varying degrees of economic determinism. Popular conceptions of value no longer hold it as something objective or cardinal. Value is something that is purely relational and manifested in actual preferences. In other words, that people value something more than another cannot often be explained in terms of natural and tangible causes. Valuation is often a subjective affair.

In a powerful way, this undermines the Marxist critique of exchange value, not only by dispelling the labour theory of value on which the critique is based, but also by replacing the concept of use value with ordinal utility. Now we have another conception of value that is also Subject-determined and correlated with exchange value but is not equivalent to the latter. And the concept of use value seems cumbersome and obsolete beside one that is able to account for all Subject perceptions of value, including the intangible, instead of being mired in the materialist paradigm. Moreover, this conception of value is seductively democratic. After all, what can appear more empowering than a view of value that privileges people's preferences and decisions?

What this means for the Frankfurt School critique is its effective isolation as an elitist view of culture that presumes to tell people what they ought to value. If preferences are subjective, what right does anyone have to proscribe any as long as no actual harm can reasonably be alleged to result?

It is difficult to defend the Frankfurt School from such a charge. Yet I maintain that its critique of the Culture Industry still rings true, albeit in a way that may necessitate some distancing from Marxist discourse. My proposition is to look at the critique from a particularly modern perspective that revolves around expectations and hype.

If there is anything that we have learned from the last global financial crisis, it is that expectations may diverge from a more tangible reality of a situation, whatever the latter may be. Perhaps this can be seen in terms of the divergence between short-term and long-term confidence, the latter which is dependent on a stricter or more complete procedure of reasoning. But regardless of what exactly we should compare expectations to, the evidence seems to point to the existence of hype.

Hype can be understood, in that sense, as the inflating of expectations of returns relative to a more tangible measure of actual returns. Even under conventional ways of looking at the market, hype is rarely a good thing—it implies that buyers are ultimately losing out in terms of expected versus real returns to their spending. And since hype is paid for by marketing costs that are likely to figure in pricing decisions, hype also represents a potential deadweight loss.

What does this have to do with the Culture Industry? It is my contention that the Culture Industry is a major source of hype. It deals in feelings, manufacturing them in order to generate interest in things—a process that is typically subsumed under the goal of making profit. It thus becomes the primary source of trends that influence people's preferences in goods. To grasp the commercial importance of the Culture Industry under late capitalism, simply witness how advertising thrives on the products of the Culture Industry.

Moreover, this principle does not apply merely to the products of various industries, but also to more general things such as lifestyles and even happiness—the message is that spending our money on something or adopting a certain attitude or lifestyle can bring us happiness or a sense of fulfillment.

But can hype not become real if it proves to be permanent? After all, there are still many people who would be very happy to buy, for example, the latest Apple products simply on the basis of the expectations that have been generated through marketing. Thus, it would seem to be the case that these people continue to get what they expect.

Yet it remains true that no one really knows how long the ephemeral expectations that are associated with hype can last, especially on the level of the individual. All it takes is for the realisation to come, in one fine moment, that there is no basis for believing that something is as good as it has been made out to be. Much of the perceived returns would be lost in that moment, just as the perceived values of certain financial instruments evaporated a few years ago.

The lie that Culture Industry sells us does not, therefore, have to depend on a highly contentious philosophical analysis of value. Whatever the exact nature or typology of value may be, hype as the commodification of feelings can be observed in our everyday experience; and it stands clearly a means of extracting profit through the inflating of expectations.

The perpetual requiem

2011-05-22T19:32:00.000-07:00

Those who wish to hold on to dreams should also be prepared to give them up. One cannot be uncompromising about dreams, for dreams have power over us. They have the power to reveal our mortal limitations, unclothed by the delusions of power that flights of fancy bring. For dreams are always a few steps ahead of us—the more we are able to realise, the fancier they become. Confidence often leads to our undoing, and the moment when we see the precariousness of our situation, the potential futility of our efforts, is the moment of despondency; a moment of lifelessness and regret for failures past.

To dare to dream is to dare to give them up. Yet, on the other hand, can we do without them? As dreams give meaning to our lives, they may also take them away. Thus, it is not having dreams or giving them up that is most crucial. Most importantly, accept the passing of dreams. Old dreams die to be replaced by newer, often less exalted ones. As we age, so do our dreams decay. But still you must hold on to them, to give them up later or perhaps to even realise them. That is what we really live for—the chance, however small, to see some of our dreams realised, or to fight again another day until we breathe no longer.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Big picture, small picture—who the hell knows anyway?

2011-05-05T20:18:00.000-07:00

More technocratic or elitist discourses on governance often bring up concepts like 'the big picture' or the 'the long view'. I won't dispute the fact that these terms have meanings (albeit relative ones). But they don't seem as clear as they are made out to be in those instances. It's always worth asking what the big picture or the long view is, and how anyone knows what it is. Otherwise, it would only serve as a cover that allows the powerful to explain things away with a wave of the hand.

The problem in thinking in terms of the big picture becomes clear when there are competing claims about the same reality, typically with some grounded in experienced reality and others in more abstract or socially-constructed terms. For example, it is possible to enjoy a period of posted economic growth and rising nominal (or even real) wages while having people report decreasing standards of living in their everyday experience. Of course, facts grounded in experienced reality are often fragmentary and contentious—they are typically anecdotal and it is easy to find examples that contradict each other. To the rationally-minded, such facts might therefore be unquestionably devalued.

However, this does not mean that they are necessarily untrue or unreal. Everyone sees reality through the veil of a particular (and partly self-imposed) perspective. However, this reality is also the reality that each of us knows. It's cold comfort to be told that some abstraction or another person's reality can free our perceptions from the constraints of the experienced. What we experience is necessarily treated as true because we experience it. That is a fundamental tautology in epistemology.

Of course, ontologically this is a problematic position. Yet in practical matters, the empirical is the most directly relevant to the individual. Small epistemologically-determined problems can culminate in an ontological crisis. After a certain point, we just don't know if a claim that has been 'proven' to be ontologically true is indeed true. It becomes increasingly difficult, for example, to hold on to a traditionally held view that something is good when we are finding so many little things that are wrong with it.

The epistemological/ontological divide translates into a small picture/big picture divide in the socio-economic realm. What I call the 'small picture' is obvious enough to each individual, as it concerns the present and immediate reality around him. But how do we derive the big picture? Are we able to see how all the small things, consisting as they are of an insurmountable mountain of conflicting data, form the big picture? The long view is even more complicated as time constantly introduces change.

What people wind up doing is simplifying the reality that they see. They abstract reality, deriving theories, numbers and indicators to allow them take stock of it in a convenient and concise way. When they need to think about the future, they make projections based on these abstractions. This is a powerful and useful method, but it's not without its risks. If experienced reality is affected by perspective, what exempts our visions of the big picture from the same influence? In fact, most if not all attempts at abstracting reality are acts of interpretation—we are interpreting reality according to a certain framework or paradigm.

In governance, the tendency to abstract and derive the big picture for policy purposes has led governments to pursue numbers. They rely on indicators to measure the effectiveness of their policy, the welfare of the people and virtually everything that pertains to their business. This is often a necessary measure in their position, yet the problem with these indicators is that they are interpretive. The real problem, however, comes when people are not aware of this. Numbers and abstractions become totalitarian teleologies, imposing an "iron cage", as Max Weber put it, of rationalism on the lives of individuals. And worst of all, they become held as 'truth'.

The elitism regarding the big picture is a manifestation of this rationalist arrogance and its obliteration of the hermeneutic. What individuals think and feel is completely unimportant beside the data. Unfortunately, the people who champion the big picture often neglect to ask how the data is derived. Emptily they claim to be bastions of reason and lovers of wisdom, and those who disagree they declare to be contrarian or oppositional. Hence, the position of the unthinking rationalist is readily assumed by the most dangerous ignorant people of all—the pseudo-educated, the body of the reactionary middle class.

A note on the elections and on change

2011-04-22T12:17:00.000-07:00

I don't care much for procedural politics in general. My aspirations for social and political change are a little bit on the 'pie-in-the-sky' side. This is not to say, though, that I don't care to vote. Voting is important for some rather obscure reasons to do with the technicalities of particular representative democratic systems, barring some really exciting circumstances—and this comes from someone who normally likes pretty obscure stuff. Real life seems rather too important and straightforward for obscure reasoning, but in the absence of strong reasons to believe otherwise, citizens should exercise their voting rights.

So that is to say that I am normally pretty agnostic towards voting, but I am leaning more for it than against it. Now let me explain why I don't think voting is anywhere near the limit or the be-all-end-all of the exercise of one's capacity as a political (in the bona fide classical sense) individual.

In order to do so, it looks like I have to first explain why I have little faith in the electoral process as a mechanism for social and political change anyway. Perhaps I live under somewhat exceptional circumstances, but I have seen the election of new governments fail spectacularly to institute much meaningful change. In a country like Singapore, where institutions can be expected to be particularly sticky or conservative, the electoral process certainly doesn't inspire me with much hope.

I am not familiar with comparative and more empirical theories of democracy, and so I turn to bigger narratives to find reasons why it is the case that elections are not normally game-changing. There is a myth defended by the older stuffy liberals (sometimes known as conservatives) that voting is the ultimate exercise of one's capacity as a responsible political agent. This is the myth we are brought up to believe, which may explain the religious seriousness with which some attend to the matter of voting in elections. However, reflecting Habermas' narrative of the decline of the public sphere, elections constitute a dated procedure handed down from ages past, an old gentlemen's game that has been massified but nevertheless expected to retain the same significance for each individual voter. Meanwhile, as the actualisation of the sovereign will of the people, it is actively being circumvented in modern times by influential political organisations with direct access to policy makers and by purported political exigencies that are subject to little public scrutiny. In other words, your votes as individuals pale in significance to how much power and influence is wielded by a political elite, whose mandate to rule over you is ironically affirmed by your votes.

The only way forward, under present constraints of the prevailing democratic systems, seems to be in trying to match the direct policy-making influence of powerful organisations. We are in need of a large civil society consisting of citizen activists who would fight for the causes they believe in. The only way forward is through citizen advocacy groups, unions and active everyday participation in politics. The days of waiting for elections and for your representatives in parliament to make your voices heard are over, if they were ever there. Only then can the public put itself on the same playing field as elite organisations in determining the character of governance.

In a sense, the conservatives have it right: Don't trust the authorities. But that does not mean we should minimise government—the government does many beneficial things after all; it means we should have a civil society to match. This, if anything, is the true meaning of a big society.

For this to happen, however, there must be a lively as well as a quality culture of political participation in society. It takes a certain amount of awareness, political wisdom and community spirit amongst citizens to institute a strong civil society. Unfortunately, the current state of Singapore's society and its public discourse does not inspire me with much hope in this either at present. Nevertheless, the stirrings in the public, if rather too naively focused on the electoral process, might be a sign of the beginnings of change. This may also be somewhat 'pie-in-the-sky', but, ultimately, I think one should be optimistic and look forward to real change.

The Commodification of Leisure, Part I: Art and the Culture Industry

2011-04-17T18:35:00.000-07:00

Here I present a reading of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, with reference to Frederic Jameson's essays on Adorno in Late Marxism and Amresh Sinha's Adorno on Mimesis in Aesthetic Theory.

So where should we begin? The first thing to note is the fact that there is more to Adorno and Horkheimer's theory than the suggestion of mass culture as fundamentally characterised by passive consumption. That is really only a symptom (though a very important one for Adorno and Horkheimer) of the general 'malaise' of mass culture, and one that has received far too much emphasis in media studies to the detriment of the discussion of its other aspects. In light of this, I will endeavour to present a more contextual reading of this essay.

I am looking at Adorno and Horkheimer's critique of mass culture from the perspective of their critique of pleasure as it is associated with mass entertainment under late capitalism. It should be noted that Adorno and Horkheimer's analysis of pleasure "takes place within a framework of the theory of the alienated labor process" (Jameson, 1990: 145). This entails the analysis of mass culture as the colonisation and the commodification of leisure time—amusement is the prolongation of the working day insofar as it merely functions as a period of relaxation that demands no effort (hence the passivity of the consumer), which is sold to the individual worker so that he/she can continue working contentedly the next day. Pleasure is therefore seen not only as a flight from reality but also as the flight from "any last thought of resistance" (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1998).

The full implications of commodification will be brought out later. Presently, we will attend more closely to the notion of the colonisation of leisure, which involves the mechanisation of culture that reflects the mechanisation of modern economic production: The enjoyment of culture is schematised for a passive audience so that, as mentioned above, no effort is required on the part of the latter. This entails the presentation of "repetition and the familiar" (Jameson, 1990: 148) in order not to tax the audience's minds. Thus, the familiar character of the labour process is ironically reproduced in entertainment, which indicates that the monotony of "standardised operations" that characterises the working day "can be evaded only by approximation to it in one's leisure time" (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1998).

This is where media scholars' criticisms of Adorno and Horkheimer are typically focused, with their rather belaboured emphasis on the examination of the link between media consumption and power (sometimes in an effort to deny that the media wield power over the audience). As stated in the beginning, such a perspective is sorely inadequate, and this will become evident as we examine the other aspects of Adorno and Horkheimer's theory on mass culture, beginning with its aesthetic critique of pleasure.

Adorno and Horkheimer hold that pleasure/happiness is found in what is yet to be, and their charge is that the Culture Industry offers 'inauthentic' pleasure that is purported to already exist and is ready for consumption. Furthermore, Adorno postulates a conception of the artistic mimesis as pure expression, which is antithetical to the notion of 'expressing something' (Sinha, 2000). Artistic expression is hence self-identical (Sinha, 2000) and thereby incompatible with the notion of equivalence, which is so important to the process of commodity exchange. Like the mystical in Wittgenstein's philosophy, in other words, it cannot be substituted by something else. Therefore, unlike the products of the Culture Industry, it cannot be subsumed under the mechanism of substituting means for ends (Sinha, 2000), being thus quite apart from the market for identity and leisure that under late capitalism are treated as just more commodities to be exchanged.

One important insight that we can derive from Adorno's conception of art is that, for Adorno and Horkheimer, reception is identified with the capitalist mode of production, particularly in the context of commodification. This means the reception of the products of the Culture Industry has to be understood in relation to their production. The most common criticisms of Adorno and Horkheimer are heavily invested in the critique of their claims regarding reception, emboldened by evidence indicating that audiences are not passive. Thus, a good way to uphold the Frankfurt School critique, without explicitly invoking theories of power, is to bring production back into the discourse.

Equivalence is, as stated earlier, crucial for commodity exchange, and it is created through abstraction—the Marxist account of commodity exchange involves the abstraction of the use values of goods into exchange/monetary value, "allowing comparable and measurable quantities to be manipulated" (Jameson, 1990: 149). This forms a vital part of the commodification of leisure as it is the need to conform to the principle of equivalence and create monetary value that drives the production of cultural products in a manner that is similar to the production of consumer goods, leading to the creation of what Walter Benjamin calls the mechanically reproducible work of art.

But what implications does the nature of production in the Culture Industry have on consumption? Questions of quality come first to mind, but this is, understandably, shaky ground on which to stake a critique of mass culture. We need look above and beyond, at the implications of the relations of production on the consumption of mass culture as a whole and not as discrete cultural products.

Roland Barthes asserted, mirroring Adorno's critique of pleasure, that mass-produced culture under late capitalism serves to conceal or obscure the capitalist mode of production, thereby eliminating resistance. However, this line of argument is once again susceptible to the criticism, born of audience studies, that audiences are not simply passive recipients. Indeed, I think the exact opposite is the case: Far from hiding it, the Culture Industry revels in the capitalist mode of production, showing us the promises that await us should we acquiesce to the system, namely all manner of consumer goods and the status and identities that come with them—rewards that are, however, readily available. It tempts the audience with these prizes, rather than compelling or co-opting them directly. But, crucially, it also promises the more elusive, yet-to-be prospect of success itself, embodied most vividly and blatantly by the stars it churns out as the human end-products of its capitalist mode of production. It is therefore unsurprising, though ironic in light of Adorno's linking of pleasure to readily achievable ends, that audiences are so preoccupied with stars.

Continued in Part II

The Subject of Pipe Dreams

2011-03-22T18:38:00.000-07:00

Postmodern approaches to social theory emphasise multiplicity and de-centring, and these themes find their natural articulation in cultural analyses. Such analyses focus on the richness of cultural interaction and the reproduction of identities in non-linear ways, and where they concern themselves with politics and social organisation, they seek to realise this vision of cosmopolitan society—a society consisting of empowered and complex Subjects. Some theorists have even gone so far as to announce that we live in the age of the Subject.

Is this true? The last claim is especially dubious; our everyday experiences are enough to cast serious doubt on it. There are structural and physical limitations that ensure that Subject-Object relations continue to exist in force and often dominate the social terrain. Thus, trying to establish the existence or even plausibility of pure Subject-Subject relations in mass society amounts, at least under present conditions, to an exercise in wishful thinking.

Such limitations can be observed most clearly in political processes. Indeed, politics may be said to define these limitations insofar as it is considered as the necessary framework of social organisation. Politics, therefore, exercises a restrictive rule on the freedom and the pure reciprocity that would give rise to a society consisting only of relations between empowered Subjects.

The agents that enforce this rule are institutions. Institutions impose their decisions on Subjects in non-negotiable ways, and this happens every day in processes of governance. Democracy and dialogue fade away when individuals are faced with institutional decisions made under the guise of systemic necessity. Dreamers might continue to insist on the democratic possibility of changing such outcomes, but as Marx said, "Between equal rights force decides."

The will of individuals as Subjects and systemic concerns (as they are treated by institutions) are thereby locked in a Hegelian moral opposition—the dialectic is a forceful one. Even Subjects with dialogic aspirations for society need to be able to resort to confrontation in order to assert themselves in reforming or recreating institutions to carry out the vision of a cosmopolitan society.

It is no wonder, then, that non-violence and compliance are attributes that are often considered highly desirable, if not the most desirable, in liberal democracies—institutions may depend upon them to survive when there is potential conflict with the will of the demos, the collective body of Subjects.

Hence, democracy as an ideal exists only in its immutable form in a theoretical revolutionary moment, when the will of the demos is able to assert itself without institutional restriction. Echoing the structuralist critique of the metaphysics of presence, the ideal of democracy is not actually present in everyday procedures of governance and planning. There is typically only the reality of individuals acting as economic units under systems that often vaguely recognise their status as free and equal beings.

What about dialogue? Is there more that can be said about it? Indeed, the critique of dialogical interaction can be expanded from an institutional focus to the relations between Subjects within the demos or the public sphere itself. Some of these relations are no doubt power relations, but the existence of Subject-Object relations can be established beyond the influence of power and as the product of necessity as well. Once we move from small-scale interpersonal relations to mass society, it becomes difficult to avoid the constitution of Subject-Object relations. Mass communication is inherently objectifying because it is depersonalised—in addressing a mass of individuals, Subjects communicate without the ability to recognise particular and distinct Subjects as the recipients of their messages. As such, they must necessarily generalise about and even essentialise their audience, moulding the latter's image according to their messages. While dialogue is possible, it is nevertheless unable create a public sphere consisting of Subject-Subject relations as long as the whole of the mass is considered. The conversation will not be able to take into account every individual in his/her full complexity as a Subject; nor will it empower every Subject by allowing his/her unique voice to be heard fully.

So where does this leave postmodern approaches that try to construct a rhizomatic web of non-essentialising relations between Subjects? The pessimistic answer is "Nowhere"—there will always be Subject-Object relations and they will continue to have great relevance in social organisation. However, to give a more optimistic assessment, postmodernists may take a cue from modernist approaches and seek to address the actual existence of centres, instead of pretending that the Subject has got the better of them. Otherwise, like the proverbial ostrich, they can only make themselves more vulnerable to objectifying processes.

On the relative unimportance of the relativity of truth

2011-03-11T18:02:00.000-08:00

I wonder how often the pronouncement that "It's all relative anyway" is accompanied by the knowledge of why exactly that is so. Perhaps utterance without precise understanding is somewhat apt within a relativist paradigm. In any case, it would certainly be apt to draw upon one philosophical tradition, which grounds beliefs on a particular theoretical basis, in order to explain and mitigate the notion that truth is relative. Hence, I want to look at structuralism and its take on the crisis of foundationalism.

The structuralist critique of foundationalism and the metaphysics of presence revolves around the arbitrariness of the link between the signifier and the signified. Essentially, it denies that inherent ideas or mental states accompany the utterance of words such as to supply the words with fixed and unmistakeable meanings. The arbitrary nature of the signifier/signified connection, however, does not imply that individuals simply decide what they mean when they say something. Meanings are decided, subject to perpetual change, through the relations of words with one another, governed by principles that constitute a language (by which I mean langue or a system of signification) and that are beyond the simple agency of individuals.

The implication is that truth claims are problematic insofar as the instability and arbitrariness of meaning make the communication of claims about objective or universal truths impossible—meanings and the truths they are supposed to convey do not necessarily translate from language to language or, depending on which philosopher you are reading, between communities that speak different languages based on the respective forms of life that characterise them. And if thought is a form of internal communication insofar as it is constructed linguistically, then it seems to follow that it is impossible to apprehend objective truths that must by nature correspond perfectly in the minds of all individuals.

Thus, there appears to be two aspects to the problem, one communicative and the other epistemological. In downplaying the practical implications of relativism, I will focus on the communicative aspect as it seems more directly applicable to our everyday lives. This seems, at any rate, appropriate in view of the linguistic orientation of the structuralist critique. Moreover, communication that is not crippled by relativism may help address the epistemological dimension to the problem, so it might be useful to deal with the communicative aspect first.

What indications are there that meanings are not hopelessly relative and mutually unintelligible when we communicate with each other? For one, there is the interesting fact that individuals who may be regarded as belonging to different communities are capable of being ‘on the same page’ while communicating to each other, even when they are making truth claims. This may be attributed on a broader level to experiences that are common to all human beings, which may, for example, make certain ethical propositions more or less universally acceptable. Even if we were to narrow down the scope of our analysis, we would find that shared experiences that constitute what is called ‘intersubjectivity’ do not permit us to neatly categorise people into distinct communities that draw on exclusive pools of meanings. We often share experiences with one another and thereby establish common grounds of shared meanings that cut across all divisions that traditionally delineate communities.

As part of our daily experience, communication in turn helps us find and perpetuate such common grounds. The act of communicating the structuralist critique of foundationalism itself presupposes shared meanings that are communicated in an effort to create a larger common ground with a potentially vast group of individuals from a range of different communities. Hence, intersubjectivity is arguably an inevitable outcome of communication.

This suggests that even if the epistemological side of the problem proves intractable, even if we can never really know whether objective truths exist, we can get by pretty well without being mutually unintelligible to an extent that cripples communication. And part of our process of getting by would undoubtedly involve having beliefs in ‘objective’ truths that we share with others who are able to empathise with the reasons for those beliefs.

Furthermore, communication can help us to come to know more about objective truths through processes of discourse, as theorists of communicative rationality might argue. In this sense, as I have mentioned earlier, the communicative aspect may be said to precede the epistemological.

Most importantly, however, the fact that we are able to communicate with a diverse range of individuals from different communities means that the relativity of truth, whether it is itself objectively true, is almost irrelevant to our daily practices in a modern liberal society. And in times when the notion of multiculturalism is under sustained attack, it reminds us that there is likely no water-tight philosophical reason for not being able to coexist and communicate with each other.

Politics as tacit knowledge

2011-02-25T18:12:00.000-08:00

The world of experts is a perplexing one. And that's partly because you wouldn't know what it's really about unless you are an expert yourself.

One might think that the role of the expert can be democratised in the modern world, devolved to a larger base of 'common man' experts in a context where knowledge is widely available, thanks to a trend that can perhaps be traced from the invention of the printing press to the advent of mass literacy and most recently to the development of information technology. Apparently not.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein referred to "that whereof we cannot speak", a tacit kind of knowledge that agents draw upon in order to interpret meanings in a language, knowledge that can only be apprehended in its instantiation as part and parcel of practices that comprise social life. This knowledge, therefore, cannot simply be codified and read off the pages of a book or passed through any communicative medium. It has to be lived.

A field of expertise may be regarded as a kind of language, if we apply principles from structural linguistics to the wider realm of social theory. And it makes sense in this instance. Experts are experts not just because they have read a large number of texts on a subject, though that certainly helps; they are experts because they have been extensively engaged in a body of knowledge and have participated in the social activities that are central to the production and reproduction of the knowledge and the field. They literally know it inside-out.

I find the field of politics especially interesting because, rather than just interwoven with power relations in the Foucauldian sense, most knowledge pertaining to the field deals directly with power. It is therefore very relevant to everyone's lives. Are there experts in politics? Michael Oakeshott certainly thought so. Politicians, people who know the 'art' of politics through extensive experience in it, are supposedly the experts, notwithstanding their dodgy reputations and their sometimes alarming ignorance of basic facts. However, taking a cue from the title's reference to Max Weber's Politics as a Vocation, we have to be slightly careful: Are politicians the experts, or does the label more accurately apply to the political bosses?

Oakeshott seems to have had in mind the statesman rather than the campaigning or vocational politician, although the ability to acquire and retain power in a democratic context is certainly implicit in his conception. So let us treat politics in the sense that relates to governance and whatever political manoeuvring is necessary to govern a society.

A kind of elite theory of democracy that this notion of political expertise implies is consistent with a rationalisation of representative democracy. Representative democracy is held to be superior to direct democracy because 'a government by the people' is mediated by the people's representatives, the politicians, who presumably know more about what governing is really about.

I don't wish to argue for or against the notion of politics as tacit knowledge here, although I think it's undeniably true to some extent. Instead, I want to offer a critique of expertise as a myth, whereby the expert becomes a high priest of knowledge who is to be consulted and heeded, as augurs were, in an uncritical and almost superstitious manner. In other words, we sometimes think too highly of experts. And with their own interests in mind, they seldom want to correct us. Rather, they readily assume the robes of the high priest.

I've talked about instances where experts treat a given subject matter in isolation, causing them to draw bad conclusions. Here, I have in mind experts who do not even understand what they are talking about. We can have a significant amount of certainty about their ignorance when it comes to very recent political events, as insufficient time has passed to allow for an extensive body of reliable knowledge on it to emerge.

The Harvard professor who was dead wrong about the North African/Middle Eastern political upheavals comes to mind here. Yet we still see experts coming forward to offer their expert opinion on this very topic, even as events are still unfolding. It might not matter so much if they were merely at risk of being wrong, but they are also party to the framing of the present struggles of real people as political theatre, as a spectacle for entertainment or as a commodified platform for making a point. And these experts congregate or belong altogether in the media, eager to broadcast their messages to a wide audience partly because this may further their careers.

Therefore, I much prefer the historian's perspective—at the very least, the intervening dimension of time allows for observation that is more respectful and accurate. This notion has some implications on the question of whether politicians can be trusted as experts.

Not having the luxury of dealing with content that is mediated by time and yet (unlike many experts in the media) having to deal with it all the same, politicians are frequently engaging in necessary guess work. Tacit knowledge could certainly help in making ‘educated' guesses, but given the incentives involved, we don't always know whether they want to make guesses for the benefit of the public. This suggests that while it's generally pretty stupid to tell scientists that they are wrong about things like climate change, this is not the case with politicians. Experts in the natural sciences are in a completely different class compared to experts in politics when it comes to certainty in their knowledge, as well as when it comes to their integrity, occasional scandals notwithstanding.

Hence, for the sake of a publicly-oriented participatory democracy, we should feel free to take up the role of the common man political expert. It's only for our own good.

Word to the diligent

2011-02-23T15:45:00.001-08:00

The divide between theory and practice is illusory.

I don't mean to say that there are no such distinct categories as 'theory' and 'practice'. Rather, the distinction between theory and practice is not as clear as common wisdom has it. Moreover, a sharp division between the two is a convenient illusion that is maintained for intellectual comfort.

I say this because I believe that most of those who profess to have a practical approach simply wish to do things the way they have always done them, without subjecting it to questioning and critique. They like to interact with and learn about the world as it readily appears to them. Anything else strikes them as pointless and uninteresting.

This lack of reflexivity should obviously be unsettling to anyone who values learning. But where does theory come in? Why is it necessary?

Once we go beyond the perceptually apparent, thinking in abstraction becomes our only recourse. This doesn't mean we take leave of the real world and wander into a fantastic realm. Within abstract thought referents may still be present that ground theory in the real world. Theory should begin and end in reality.

This brings us to the concept of praxis, which is the living of theory. It is where theory and practice meet, the fleshing out of the actual integration between the two. It is also the ideal, outside of which either one or the other is incomplete.

It may not always be the case that theory readily becomes praxis. However, following from what has been said earlier, as long as we keep praxis as the end point, we would not be in danger of becoming out of touch while theorising. Nor would we, as long as we are willing to employ theory as critique, put ourselves at unnecessary risk of losing reflexivity and intellectual curiosity.

Thinking in terms of a clear black-and-white divide between theory and practice is easy, but the easier way is not self-evidently the right way.

Losing the world and one's soul

2011-01-31T07:46:00.000-08:00

Maybe this is why one should not simply inflict the world upon a potential life.

Everyday people are born, persons of flesh and blood who live and die by their physical bodies. But men of God teach that the flesh is vulgar; and some believe them. They believe that we should live not for this world, but for the next.

Think about the children born to people who hold such beliefs. From a young age they are taught that the world is a vulgar place, from whose vulgarity they need to be insulated. The unbelievers, people who are worldly and are therefore vulgar should hence be kept at arm's length. On the other hand, there are safe places filled with people who think like them, places on which divine grace shines in a special manner. These children are to grow up within the circles found there, and they are to beget children within those circles when they have grown up.

This may indeed turn out to be the good life for some of them. For a few, however, the mixture of such teachings and a dash of naivety might result in lives that are worse off.

Experience might indicate that such beliefs need to be re-examined. People may not prove to be necessarily vulgar, or men of God might prove to be just as vulgar. Or perhaps the term vulgar itself has to be re-evaluated. Yet for some of these children, naivety may prevent them from adjusting their expectations according to the reality that they experience. They were taught to insulate themselves, and in the course of their formative years they isolate themselves.

A further subgroup of them might grow up relatively oblivious to the problem that they are facing, or they might remain nevertheless firmly entrenched in the beliefs they have been taught. Others, however, might realise that the task of living has been made more difficult. Having being taught to look forward to another world, they know little about how to live in this one.

Then they begin to doubt. They question what they have been taught and why it brings them pain. What good is it to gain the world but lose one's soul, one might ask? At this rate, some of those children can gain neither. If souls actually exist, that is—we know the world exists from experience, but the existence of souls is not so clear.

So what can be done to prevent this scenario? Maybe we should worry about what happens in this life first. Or maybe we should not simply seek to propagate our beliefs through our children's lives—that should be written into a contract that parents-to-be should be made to sign.

Our worst enemy

2011-01-20T16:57:00.000-08:00

It might seem awfully difficult to empathise when you want something out of other people.

Indeed, the culture of selfishness that a capitalistic society fosters, for 'the good of all' (enter the invisible hand), orientates us towards the demand side of exchange. The baker does not care that you are hungry. He cares only that you are paying him good money for the bread he makes. Likewise, the buyer doesn't care if the baker has many mouths to feed in his family. He cares only that he gets the bread he wants as cheaply as he can.

This makes bourgeois culture exceedingly hostile towards perceived inefficiency in satisfying demand. We want something and we want it when we want it, the denial of which is irritating at best. The more capitalistic the society, the more hostile it is. On the producer side, this creates an atmosphere of cut-throat competition or a rat race, in which you need to offer what others can offer in order to thrive.

Unlike individual workers, however, businesses have some clout. Through political or market influence, they give themselves room to manoeuvre by ensuring that they retain some avenue for profit without always having to offer what is necessary or what is the best. Where and when they do need to compete with each other, they turn to their workers, wringing more of the latter's labour in order to increase efficiency and maximise profit.

To defend themselves, the workers have to agitate for rights and form unions to negotiate with their employers; or they could deliberately adopt inefficient practices to mitigate or spite the exploitation that they are subject to. And when they do these things, the spotlight of bourgeois wrath is turned upon them—they are seen as lazy and motivated by an unjustified sense of entitlement. This is the capitalist blame game.

Some societies may be less susceptible to such finger-pointing, but the potential for its existence is always there if we believe that human beings are inherently selfish at some level. As such, for us to rise above it, we have to actively moderate our short-sighted tendency to be selfish, to balance empathy against our desire for quick gratification. That remains virtually impossible until we stop buying into modern consumer culture—until we break the vicious cycle of capitalist ideology—for the good of ourselves as both consumers and producers.

A systematic defense of Wikileaks

2010-12-30T11:45:00.000-08:00

Having had a few garbled conversations with people where I've had to play the solitary role of a Wikileaks apologist, I'd like to do this systematically. (On a side note, who would have thought that it's Wikileaks that needs to have apologists, not the powerful organisations whose much more serious wrongdoings the former tries to uncover. This shows just how powerful ideology is in getting even ordinary people, who have little to nothing invested in it, to support the cause of governments and corporations.)

Let me begin with a very simple one-sentence argument, which I will expand on: The problem with secrets is that we cannot know and therefore make an informed judgement on them. Thus, people who are condemning Wikileaks for leaking out some 'inappropriate' information have the logic backwards, so to speak. You only know some things were inappropriate for release and are therefore condemning Wikileaks because they have been released.

Secrets, therefore, present a particularly tricky ethical problem because by definition they cannot be known, thus defying any attempt at rational analysis by which a sound ethical position can be arrived at. You cannot make an informed judgement on things that are secret, the knowledge of which is not available to you. Strange how this almost Mosaic principle in neo-classical economics is so often ignored in the neo-liberal world, for all its talk about free markets and the ubiquity of utilitarian decision making processes, which stress the ability to make informed judgements in order to maximise utility.

So you can rail against Wikileaks, but it doesn't seem to make much sense to be fundamentally opposed to its modus operandi as long as you are relying on the knowledge of the content of what it released. Also, asking Wikileaks to filter the information it gets before going public is to ask it to be yet another gatekeeper for information that only a select few can know, which seems to contradict its very raison d'être.

To reinforce this point and illustrate it in simple practical terms, let's take a look at the essential argument that the consequentialist stance entails:

Wikileaks leaked the diplomatic cables. Having seen them, I am capable of deciding for myself whether some cables should not have been made public. Therefore, I think Wikileaks was wrong to release some of them.

The second premise sits uncomfortably with an objection to the leaking of the information, which is after all being used to arrive at the conclusion. Thus, it would have to be removed in order to be consistent, which would necessitate a modification of the argument:

Wikileaks leaked the diplomatic cables. Therefore, Wikileaks is wrong.

Clearly, the argument becomes arbitrary. At best, it is inadequate—some premises and assumptions have to be filled in to make any sense of it. One way of doing so is to add "The authorities say that Wikileaks is wrong to do so" between the two sentences, thereby grounding one's ethical stance simply on what the authorities say.

Alternatively, one could acknowledge that basing one's opposition on a consequentialist argument (essentially, that leaking the cables is 'not a good thing to do') is unworkable, instead opposing Wikileaks' action on deontological grounds for 'not being the right thing to do' in principle. This position would then require a further argument regarding the ethical principles that Wikileaks have violated through the act of leaking the cables.

However, from I've seen so far, arguments to that effect seem to rely on treating public officials as private individuals who must be afforded privacy in their correspondence to each other through diplomatic channels. This argument is absurd because as long as public officials are using official channels to communicate to each other, they are performing roles on a public capacity. Therefore, the concept of privacy does not apply to them in such instances. Privacy applies to private individuals, and, as things stand, it may not even apply to the more public aspects of private individuals' lives, such as on the internet and at work. Confidentiality would be the more appropriate concept to use in this case, and it is governed by a different set of principles altogether.

Evidently, there is much work to be done disentangling some of the basic concepts and ideas involved in taking a stance on the Wikileaks issue. Being aware of the fundamental problem with secrets, I can nevertheless imagine that there are indeed certain situations where absolute transparency is not viable, especially where it directly endangers lives. However, in order to formulate rational beliefs about issues of public information, we first need to know what concepts to apply, where not to apply them and what principles may accordingly be invoked. This is what should be discussed out there in the public sphere, but I guess there won't be a slot on prime time programming as long as the public is preoccupied with blind furore over the leaks.

The present farce that is liberal democracy

2010-12-11T06:53:00.000-08:00

Having witnessed first hand the large student protest against the UK government's decision to raise tuition fee caps, I'm neither unnerved by the sporadic violence nor disheartened by the chaos of mass action. Rather, looking at the aftermath of the day, I've become more convinced of the corruption and the absurdity of the system.

Bourgeois sensitivity towards militant action is amusing. Repeatedly, we've been treated to condemnations of acts of violence and hooliganism by the established channels of the dominant bourgeois voice. The emphasis has been on the contrast between justified peaceful protest and bad violent protest. Perhaps if those sitting in their sofas watching the telly would reach a little into their memory and recall the last large-scale peaceful protest, they might remember the time when more than a million marched against Britain's participation in the Iraq War. The government went ahead with it anyway.

So what the official mouthpieces are really advocating is mass action that can be sidelined and ignored while the elite go on with their business. God forbid that a demonstration might make the latter anxious.

Violence is inherently problematic as it is simultaneously a powerful tool of the dominant ideology. Yet this does not diminish the idiocy of refusing to recognise the violence as a politically relevant part of this mass action. Statements about how a peaceful student movement has been hijacked by violent factions is begging the question: Where do these violent people come from and what do they want? Are they simply embodiments of the semi-mythical anarchic ruffian archetype? Or are some of them—God forbid—people who are genuinely frustrated by how they are treated by the politicians and their law enforcement minions?

While people are desperately protesting their disenfranchisement in ways that they think might have an impact, the official mouthpieces are busy trying to appeal to middle class disgust towards violence. They are also painting attacks on icons of traditional authority as appalling anti-social acts. Under this 'objective' and 'reasonable' surface discourse, ideology is plainly at work, and there is nothing too absurd for its efforts.

The attack on a royal car, in particular, has received much coverage worldwide. In Britain, some channels have been very active in expressing horror at the act. The time-honoured and sacred tradition of the monarchy itself seems to be under attack. Will those protesters stop at nothing in their quest to destroy the very fabric of society? Nevertheless, the public would be glad to know that the royalty proceeded bravely and resolutely to attend the royal variety show despite the attack.

A comedian on the show couldn't have done better.

The Odyssey

2010-12-04T20:24:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking: Maybe I can find no answers to the big ontological or ethical-political questions; maybe there is just too much that I don't know to give my own comprehensive and interesting account of how human society should be organised. Maybe I should strive, first of all, to answer one question—how to be?

A great many thinkers have devoted much time and effort to answering this question. Camus, one of those whom I remember most clearly, gives an absurdist answer when he asks and responds to his central question: If the universe is an absurd place, why live at all?

Yet, even though he deals exhaustively with the problem of existing with the awareness of the absurd, he seems to devote little attention to the material and therefore political-economic constitution of our everyday lives. That seems to be the domain of Marxist humanist philosophy, where the question has a different formulation: How does the individual assert himself as a human subject in a society that objectifies him and his labour through processes of reification and exchange? In other words, how does one be a human being who is capable of action unencumbered by the systems of domination immanent to our commercial society?

The answer seems to be revolution, one way or another—to destroy or destructively resist the systems of domination. Yet as we live our everyday lives, it seems to me that it is often not apparent what each of us as individuals can do in that regard. Between thriving through conformity and a difficult survival in opposition to everything that our society stands for, it's quite clear what most of us would choose.

So how might we chart the happiest path in our existence, neither completely consigning ourselves to having self-destructive tendencies to give up our subjectiveness nor sacrificing ourselves as martyrs on the barricades? How do we exist as human subjects in our normal everyday lives?

Nietzsche gives a pretty compelling answer: Be a strong subject. In essence, do not bow down to the rules imposed on you by others, but strive to create your own for yourself; assert yourself as a person with minimal regard to what others want to turn you into.

This sounds like a good general principle, but how do we go about applying it? What tangible thing can we build on it and hold on to?

Moving our attention away from the will to power, which can only reproduce systems of domination and thus lead to circularity, I believe that we must live for a labour of love. In other words, instead of instrumentalising ourselves to the conventions and modes of life prescribed by society in order to live, we have to subsume the necessity of conforming under our attempts to live to work on our own magna opera. Thus, in a Marxist way, we are re-inverting the order—instead of serving the rules, we are trying to make the rules serve us.

I think this is an interesting way of thinking because it implicitly makes a few crucial points—that we are only human in doing, and that we are only subjects in being able to do what we want (in a broad and existential sense of it). And I believe these points are crucial because they inform us on how to be.

Thus the journey begins.

Open letter to a neo-liberal or technocratic apologist

2010-11-26T17:38:00.000-08:00

This letter is a synthesis of my arguments in an extended on-line debate with a member of an older generation. The debate pertains to the political situation in Singapore, but I believe my arguments can also be applied to the context of some of today's so-called liberal democracies, particularly the United Kingdom.

---

Dear Sir,

In the past year, I have witnessed growing discontent in the two societies that I am part of. There is increasing resentment against the ruling elite that stems from economic grievances. Yet, as apt as this may seem from a Marxist point of view, I think much of the resentment is not as productive as one might hope.

In saying this, I appear to be critical of criticisms from the ground, but this neither suggests that I am on your side nor that I have an intellectually elitist viewpoint. I just don't think the criticisms are radical enough.

I'm saying that simpler socio-economic complaints belie the real issue of our need to take back our agency. I'm also saying that we shouldn't get sidetracked into pseudo-xenophobic discussions about immigration. Many European countries are getting mired in this situation and it basically only allows the disaffected to expend their energy on something that wouldn't help them in the longer run. They can restrict immigration, but it wouldn't solve the fundamental problems in their society.

Essentially, the root of the problem is the fact that the people have been patronised all along by the government. I believe what many of us also believe—that our democracy is dysfunctional. You know why the government doesn't listen to us? Because it doesn't really have to. How are we even going to debate public policy properly when the government holds all the cards? And our own culture, mentality and method of opposition are contributing to this. We ourselves are guilty for letting this continue.

One reason might be that we are engaging in politics of wish-fulfilment. We look to the government to fulfil our wants and needs, and we give it pretty much a free hand as long as it can do this. That may sound par the course in politics, but that's also why we're so easily duped. In the next election, the ruling elite would come up with some bones to toss our way, and the majority of us would lap it all up and once again perpetuate the system. Who really holds the power—whether it's the bureaucrats, the politicians or the people—never really mattered to us. And no matter what evasive answers one might give about the necessity of a true participatory democracy, nothing changes the fact that it is what enables the people to govern themselves. If we don't want it, then we can't really cry when we are ignored by the ruling power. We have to blame ourselves for that.

To be fair, it's not entirely our fault. Our psychology is the product of the system. But that's all in the past. The government might have justified a top-down system because of the need to develop. However, now that we have developed to a large extent, what is pretty much the same system is still being kept around in the name of continued economic growth. When will this stop? That is the present question, and only we can come up with the answer.

On the economic aspect of social organisation, I agree that material interests are legitimate interests, but not when we run away with them and forget everything else. Now that times are hard, people are unhappy—that's a perfectly valid sentiment. But what about when times were good? Did we care about how things were done?

A true participatory democracy cannot guarantee that we meet our desired material goals, especially when we set the bar higher and higher. However, what it does guarantee is that we have a real say and that we as a people run our country. The overly risk-averse state of mind is what makes us captives of the system—we want rights and we want to be heard, but we won't take the necessary material risks to make our country our own.

The basic reactionary position is to deny that there is a real fundamental problem, or at least to justify the current system by pointing out that other systems have problems too. Yes, there is an empirical basis for making the latter claim. But does that mean that every society is simply stuck with its own set of problems? I'm saying that there is a possible way forward through changing the system. And systemic change is worth looking at because the problem is structural—it has to do with mechanisms of feedback and control.

There is no panacea for all problems, but we can choose to do something about them instead of simply suffering perpetual injury.

I doubt, however, that you will understand this line of reasoning as long as you choose to regard it as yet another normative point of view in a relativist political paradigm. It doesn't simply boil down to a subjective choice of political and moral values. Advocates of participatory democracy have valid and positive points to make about issues of power and participation as long as democracy serves as our political ideal.

On a final note, you might point to an uncertain future as the defining problem, but so does the ruling elite. And their proposed solution is to band together under their banner to work for the common good.

Yet there is an alternative, one that neither you nor they are willing to entertain. But perhaps under a system that clearly favours one particular brand of hegemonic discourse it's not surprising that we are not really being heard. Just like many of those who have simpler grievances.

A pro-choice critique of choice

2010-11-22T18:47:00.000-08:00

There are some things that are perhaps confusing or seemingly very contentious in what I wrote about last. Therefore there is a need to qualify it or, more precisely, to delve into the unspoken claims behind some of the statements made. Most importantly, I think, I must talk about my perspective on choice, freedom of choice and the critique of choice.

I've written some time ago about the ability to question the choice of others. I argued that the sovereignty of the subject is illusory, since choices are often externally induced rather generated by an authentic individual will. I should add that whether there is such a thing as authentic individual will does not pose a problem to this view. In fact, if there is no such thing as authentic individual will, if choices are therefore entirely a matter of persuasion, all the more it should be possible to legitimately debate subjective choice.

There are two new things that I want to bring up here: Firstly, I want argue for the existence of general or common conceptions of what constitutes bad choices. Secondly, I want to question the non-invasiveness of subjective personal choice.

Some might disagree fiercely that what I consider bad are truly bad in any objective sense. Some might go on to say that there is nothing objective about taste. I'd like to question this last statement. Indeed, my position stems from my scepticism regarding absolute relativism even in the notoriously personal and subjective realm of tastes.

As such, I'm not so much positive of the existence of one correct theory of the good as I am sceptical of the notion that people cannot commonly share certain conceptions about what is bad. It may be impossibly difficult to find a general enough conception of the good with which we can objectively judge all choices, but it's a lot easier to find general ideas about what is bad with which we can legitimately argue that certain choices are bad.

This is a lot more obvious for choices with real material, physical and psychological consequences, but if we can establish this in the realm of tastes, it's probably safe to say that it's a solid claim. Are there instances where people commonly regard certain cultural products as lacking in quality? I think so. When I talk to people about reality TV shows, for example, I find that many would admit that certain shows are "trashy" or "bad", even if they admit to having a 'guilty pleasure' in watching them.

Perhaps this is too anecdotal, and perhaps there is a correlation between such sentiment and education level or class. However, there is still something to be said about this phenomenon.

Firstly, this implies that pleasure and people's conception of the good do sometimes diverge. Thus, it seems to contradict the central thesis of traditional hedonistic Utilitarianism, which is ironically a very popular mode of thinking. As such, good and bad is not merely a question of what consequences a choice brings in terms of utility or pleasure.

Secondly, though one might convincingly argue that common perceptions on what cultural products are bad could simply be explained by the fact that people have been told by the 'experts' about what could be considered good and what could not, all is not lost. At first glance, this may seem to corroborate the notion that nothing is objective, that what seems objective is simply the imposition of a subjective viewpoint. Yet, no matter what we think of some of those 'experts', there tends to be a process of discourse that generates and moderates the opinions offered within serious critical analyses of cultural products. Discourse, whether it is realised through an actual debate or through the influence of intellectual traditions that play off one another, lends criticism credibility as something greater than simply a collection of individualist subjective viewpoints.

Therefore, it might be that what is considered bad is something whose merits cannot be seriously analysed and discussed. Hence, it is mostly examined, if at all, merely as a symptom of a cultural trend, tending on its own to fall outside the process of discourse. What is good is a question that is debated, perhaps endlessly, in the discourse, but what is bad simply falls outside of it. The reverse is not true; what falls outside of the discourse is not necessarily bad. However, at least we now have somewhere to begin in deciding what is bad—by asking why some things don't come up in serious discussion on their own merits.

This is a bold argument, and it might come off as some kind of intellectual snobbery. But I would add that it's not necessarily a sin to enjoy something simply for any kind of pleasure that it gives. The problem is when the vast majority of what is offered can only be enjoyed in terms of the overt pleasure that it brings. Thus we come to the issue of the invasiveness of subjective choice.

If you want to do business, half the job would be done for you if you appeal to what people want. Does this mean, however, that consumer choice is paramount in production and marketing decisions? In fact, the very nature of marketing is antithetical to consumer choice. But the power of capital is not so much in forcing you to consume what you do not want, but in making you consume what you want all the time and, in the process, making you want to consume associated products as well.

Thus, the companies appeal to the lowest common denominator in order to increase sales. And they do not let your attention wander, for the sales of other cultural products and physical goods, upon which billions of units of exchange value ride, depend upon your near-undivided attention.

This is how capital imposes a near-monolithic culture on our tastes, by giving us what we want, but on their own terms and hindering our ability to emancipate ourselves from the pre-determined choices that we as consumers and members of modern society are expected to make.

But the burden of creating these circumstances does not lie on inhuman capital alone. In continuing to make the same kind of choices, we are also guilty of imposing on society a narrow range of tastes as the determinant of the cultural products that are available. Hence, our subjective choices are invasive in that, collectively, they deny other people and society at large choices that are emancipated from the dominant cultural milieu, while at the same time bulldozing through any question of quality in favour of focusing on the levels of pleasure obtained from cultural products.

Hence, like slaves who have never apprehended the notion of freedom or like the benighted denizens of Plato’s cave, we perpetually choose to live within the same kind of paradigm, not knowing what else lies outside of it, including things that convincingly possess qualitative value. The market may give us choices, but as long as we are unable to escape the paradigm of pleasure, we know that we are still fundamentally unfree.

Marx contra Nozick

2010-11-05T17:23:00.000-07:00

If it is true that we are all free, why do we consistently choose what is bad? Why does participation not lead to quality in society?

This is a question that Christianity asks in order to call to our attention true freedom in God, free of enslavement and of human weakness, which causes us to be unable to choose anything but the slavery of sin. Unfortunately, Christianity cannot be divine because it is tainted by human beings. Thus we are left to ask questions on our own, as the Church Fathers did.

Does choosing to be slaves imply freedom? Some might say yes. This absurdity and contradiction comes about through two main threads of human thought: Libertarianism and relativism gone mad. The first posits that human agency is so absolute that human beings can, if they so choose, lose it. The second would have us believe that anything can be good to someone—perhaps some people choose to be slaves because they want to be slaves, perceiving slavery as a good? Or perhaps there is no good at all, only preferences, in which case we might as well be nihilists.

Marxist thought, on the other hand, offers a human solution to this puzzle. In our apparent freedom, we perpetually choose to be unfree because of false consciousness. We are not attuned to our real interests, and therefore we choose what is bad by first allowing our freedom to be subverted in letting powerful groups tell us what we want.

"We are free to choose," they say, as they readily queue up for the next Apple product like the hungry for bread.

It is probably true that to some extent preferences are negotiated. The industries give us what we want while trying to mould our tastes to further their own interests. But, if this picture allows neither side to wield near-absolute power, why does the reality feel so stunted? Why does a relatively free market not produce the promised creativity? Why does the UK publishing industry, for example, only publish what appeals to lowest common denominators, what will attract by virtue of its harlot-like easiness?

Why can we not, for the most part, refuse the bad?

Either we are extremely stupid as free beings, or we are not truly free. I choose to believe the latter.

The fact is we are not free as long as we are enslaved by uncompromisingly non-objective conceptions of the good, or by false notions about freedom. And this is something we as free beings are responsible for—we are guilty of enslaving ourselves through our own ways of thinking.

Some scholars are quite dismissive of the Frankfurt School, thinking it an artefact of a bygone age, while they indulge in blissful proclamations about an age of freedom and choice brought about by technologies they hardly know themselves. They study every petty whim of society and profess to find all that is good with the universe in Coronation Street.

But, far from dissipating, power merely grows ever more subtle in its application. The Frankfurt School is not wrong. It has just become less easy to see what they criticised in their time.

The Internet; serious business?

2010-10-20T19:40:00.000-07:00

Somewhat unsatisfied with the conclusion of a seminar and in a fit of madness, I decided to post my thoughts on the course forum, which I quote below:

Hi, people. I'm sure all of us had our discussions on this topic in our seminars, where, unfortunately, there wasn't much time to get more in-depth. I'm fairly interested in this topic, so I just want to (hopefully) continue those discussions a little by adding a few thoughts. I think the internet has the potential to be the source of a new Habermasian public sphere, but not in its entirety.

In my seminar group, we were drawn into a debate with arguments for and against the internet as a new public sphere, and I don't think that does the complex issue justice. From a Habermasian perspective, I don't think the internet can in itself become a new public sphere. I believe this is because a Kantian approach grounds rationality in humanity; that is to say, the basis of rationality is found in our ability as persons to apprehend rational concepts and arguments (i.e. our having practical reason). In turn, public discourse is grounded on rationality and can only be carried out if we let our rationality take precedence and thereby respect one another as rational beings, which is where the equality (or non-relevance) of status comes in - what matters is not our background and individual social status, but our universal capacity to reason.

To see public discourse as purely a contest of disembodied arguments is, I think, to miss the point a little. The human aspect is highly important because our capacity to reason is also what makes us able to be rationally persuaded by others and thereby reach a consensus. For this we need some kind of reciprocity, the ability to give each other credit for being right where it is appropriate. The problem with the internet is that, as a depersonalised community that people can opt in and out of easily and where individuals can hide behind a veil of anonymity, it does not lend itself to the kind of reciprocity needed for rational debate. Instead, people tend to become personifications of their arguments and are thus objectified. Internet debates are so fragmented and pointless because consensus is something that is reached by persons, not by objects or strawmen on which are pinned various viewpoints and arguments.

As such, although the internet does give people a platform for expressing their views with less of an eye to status and negative real-life consequences, it also tends to throw out the human (in the Kantian sense) aspect of discourse. Thus, I think there are a few criteria that must be satisfied before a new public sphere can be constituted from the internet:

1) Any proper debate must be moderated to ensure that the participants respect each other.

2) There must be some way for the participants to maintain credibility so that they would respect each other and no one's views would simply be dismissed.

3) There must be regularity, both of participants and of debate, since reciprocity is not achieved in one-off engagements but in a continuous relationship.

There are probably more, but these are what I can think of for now.

This way, a new public sphere can come from within the internet, even though the internet itself cannot be from my understanding of Habermas' theory.

So, will we show the rational efficacy of the internet and debate a little more on this topic?

Fittingly enough, no one responded. From this experience, I can make two observations: First, the Internet can't seem to hold a rational debate to save itself, even within a university environment. Second, professors don't tend to care much for contributions if those do not fall neatly within the programme.

Pig Iron: Why I like and dislike Iron Man 2

2010-10-11T20:08:00.000-07:00

I quite liked the first iteration of Iron Man on the big screen so I had more than half a mind to catch the sequel. However, I didn't manage to see it in the cinema. Fortunately, a long plane ride a few days ago afforded me the chance. And I wasn't disappointed.

For a superhero movie, it was refreshingly honest. We like Iron Man, or Tony Stark, because he is rich and 'cool', not because he is a brooding hero with larger-than-life psychological problems or teenage angst. And it featured a promising villain whom we can sympathise with, at least initially. And by that I mean real sympathy, not some sort of twisted admiration for a fictitious terrorist or madman.

But in some ways the things I like about the movie also form what I, on hindsight, dislike about it. In its portrayal of the hero, the movie embodies the culture and social consciousness of the present age: We celebrate the lucky ones, those 'blessed' with ability, means or just plain luck that ultimately makes them our heroes and icons. On the other hand, those whose lot in life are different but who struggle against it are 'doing the wrong thing'. And because they are, they must be bad—ruthless, barbaric or simply inhuman.

That's how it works, not the other way round. The latter doesn't even find chronological support in the movie. As I said, we can initially sympathise with the antagonist in Iron Man 2. However, in the end, because he is gradually shown to be cruel and inhuman, we are fine with the fact that the lucky hero triumphs. First we see the unlucky man, then the man who is (therefore) filled with the desire for vengeful satisfaction; because he was deprived, he must therefore become something less than human, destined to eventually be beaten back by his betters.

This parallels story arcs found in other contemporary stories such as the agonisingly bad Harry Potter series. It even has a close resemblance to the model of paternalism seen in the Agamemnon/Clytemnestra dynamic in Aeschylus' masterpiece more than two thousand years ago. Perhaps celebrity worship is a time-honoured tradition after all.

Having said all that, sometimes the guilty pleasure elicited by an honest Hollywood flick can remind ourselves what fools we are. But, then again, with the popularity of the Twilight series as it is, maybe the human capacity for self-reflection has been Eclipsed.

Now, at the risk of spoiling my ending, let me end with a thought: We study pop culture as a representation or commentary of contemporary society because studying it as art would just be depressing.

Zarathustra the nomad

2010-09-25T12:37:00.000-07:00

A resilient society, especially in this fast-moving age, is said to be one where the losers are allowed to be eliminated and new winners are ready to usurp the positions of those whose time has passed. Indeed, evolution (and not just the biological kind) seems to conform to this picture, with losers constantly being eliminated and the winners' positions being ever threatened by new challenges. And interestingly, the latter is what most people are blind to. The winners don't usually win forever.

This picture is a positive one for society as a whole—there is continuity and everyone collectively has some chance. However, it is not one that is fair to individuals. Every person has aspirations; many want to carve their own niche. Unfortunately, most would not get there, and those who do may not stay there for very long. You may aspire to be an Alexander and become a Pyrrhus, only to die ignominiously in the streets of Argos.

Hence, while it is often to our benefit to labour under the impression that we as individuals carry weight, the reality is we can really only expect to be infinitesimal parts of the big picture. Our individual selves might matter little, while the primordial life force will thrive—Nietzsche's very vision of the Dionysian.

When we celebrate the Dionysian, we become conscious of the continuity of the whole and disregard our own individual fates. In fact, this often constitutes the essence of national projects: To work for and celebrate the success of the nation, whether or not you as a part stand to benefit yourself.

Nevertheless, self-abrogation, though often encouraged and edified by the community, will not make everyone content. Hence the illusions under which many of us labour. We need the heroic myth, the Apollonian tale of human endeavour that holds the promise of what is possible for ourselves.

This is often a necessary lie, without which we might be left despairing. Yet, again, it is one we can see past easily as we acknowledge that only a small number can attain even a shadow of the promise. Meanwhile, those whom we hail as titans of the day could soon become of no consequence, another noteworthy addendum. We are so obsessed with the present that we don't realise the heroes of today might become distant memories tomorrow. Nor do we realise that many of these 'movers and shakers' do not have the impact we attribute to them today.

Thus, wanting to make your mark on the world is virtually a pipe dream. But does that mean we can and should hope instead to make a mark in the lives of a few people? It's certainly more realistic, but we should still be wary. If we depend on others for our fulfilment, we might still be in for a rude awakening.

Arguably, and I agree with this point, finding fulfilment in our lives almost always requires the participation of other people. Nevertheless, I believe that a life too dependent on others is a life not worth living. Better seek our own happiness, with or without the involvement of others.

These are things that I have in mind as I contemplate a trip to the Orkhon Gol and the Altai Mountains, to the hinterland of those nomads who roamed the vast steppes for thousands of years. Who would know better about lives full of constant movement and change? How many people can claim to know the solitude of the infinite like the top of their saddles? Which society can better demonstrate the survival of the whole through the unquestioning generosity of the individual?

And yet these nomads, full of vigour and survival wisdom, ride at the very margins the modern world. There, in a different plane of existence that reflects all our lives, like the realm of Ideas.

Identity Crisis

2010-09-07T12:05:00.000-07:00

Social groups are often formed around common subjects or content, but much less frequently do the latter remain the defining characteristics of those same groups.

What do I mean? To get to the point, I am referring to the problem of identification: I believe that although identification with a group is initially inseparable from agreement with its formative tenets, and the two may always remain tied to some extent, there will probably come a point where identification with the outward image of the group becomes the members' main connection to it.

Indeed, we see this very often in history and in daily life. While a nation may have been founded on principles of liberty, for example, its citizens eventually become patriots first and defenders of liberty second. And national identity, in particular, rests very heavily on the nation's outward image—on names and symbols, including flags, pledges, anthems and various other markers of identity.

Such markers of identity, which collectively form the outward image of the group, become a checklist for identification. We become concerned with questions such as "How American are you?" or "How Christian are you?" without simultaneously contemplating what those identities really entail, or might have entailed before they became nigh empty shells.

This problem is what has allowed the corruption of social groups. It is what allowed corporations to successfully court counter-culture groups such as the hippies and the hipsters, for instance, as their identity markers turned towards the domains of lifestyle and fashion. Sometimes it has even allowed groups to do an about-face and turn against everything they had stood for without loss of identity and credibility. Just look at many revolutionary governments in history, or the changing economic doctrines of Communist China.

I think the chief cause of it lies in the need for the human brain to be able to recognise easily. An evolutionary scientist might say that this has its roots in our ancestors' need to quickly recognise predators and prey. We need to recognise easily and therefore our brain takes shortcuts. We pick out certain convenient markers and associate them with the corresponding things.

On the other hand, remembering the actual content behind a group's identity requires us to remember lists or arguments that often don't come readily to mind. This unwieldy information is stored somewhere in our brain and has to be found again. Compare this to the quick and easy identification offered by markers; it's no surprise that our brains favour the latter.

Nowhere is the problem of identification better exemplified than in the world of politics. The existence of party whips in 'free' countries (a relatively benign force for party discipline), which maintain the loyalty of party members, point to a common culture that prioritises identity (i.e. in accordance with its markers) over substance. It might be worth noting that it would be unreasonable to presume instead that the whip is the constant defender of the party's tenets, as it is answerable to the ever-changing leadership.

Even without such formal enforcement, the very act of adopting a certain political label often necessitates conformity in order to be accepted and recognised within the group. So it is with other kinds of social groups.

And, in case I have not stressed this enough, for most people conformity is measured by one's adherence to the markers of identity.

A God delusion?

2010-08-30T10:42:00.000-07:00

I suppose this is covered by the law of economy.

But let's not talk logic here. Let's speak intuitively, so that our hearts and minds can truly engage with the issue. So this is now an existential question: Is there a 'why' in the grand scheme of things?

When I sit and listen to a sermon in a church, I am often treated to a theistic perspective of the universe. On the face of it, that seems fine. If we are honestly agnostic, a theistic perspective cannot simply be discounted.

But it gets very complex. In the Christian perspective, God has a very elaborate plan for the universe and our souls. Moreover, how this plan relates to our everyday lives is rather obscure. Hence the many books needed to explain it—and even then we are often left wondering. "Well, God's ways are sometimes hidden to us," we are told.

I'm skeptical. It seems to me that centuries of (both Jewish and Christian) doctrinal issues and debate have created a worldview with many—probably fragile—moving parts. And we don't even need to get into differences between sects and denominations.

Looking at it from the outside, it seems that the only way someone can comfortably accept such a tangle of 'truths' is if one is already primed to accept it—if one is, for prior personal reasons, already willing to accept the faith. Or, in Christian parlance, if the Holy Spirit has opened one's heart.

I see what you did there.

So even in a matter of faith existence precedes essence—the existence of the desire comes before the meaty stuff that concerns the truth of it.

And therefore, if we are skeptical of a cosmological plan, especially a very complex one, we'd probably make the same observation about the universe. There is no 'why'; it simply exists as it is. The whys belong to the domain of human beings. It is our fate and our prerogative.

I guess there is comfort in thinking that there is a grand architect, a Divine Provider who guides us. Well, it's not an unacceptable notion. I just wonder if it has to come with the incredible complexity that organised religion tends to construct.

I'm going back to the start

2010-08-18T06:29:00.000-07:00

What might seem like simple things can indeed unravel the whole.

I don't even need to look elsewhere. I just need to look inwards. At the end of another pointless day doing mundane work for an exploitatively small wage, I feel little.

But I can blame the world for that, talk about how stupidly work is organised in this society, how for the sake of a few lines in our résumés we force ourselves to seek 'work experiences' that, in reality, teach us almost nothing.

However, there is something else I can't push away in self-pity—something that might seem much simpler on the face of it, but that might mean a lot to someone else. Something that ultimately means a lot to me as well.

At the end of another pointless day, after an errand done "on the way home" that sent me in a different direction from home, I was wishing that things were better. That was when a woman fell onto her hands and knees on the side of the path just in front of me, without a sound. I even looked. She looked like she might be ill.

And I didn't know what to do, so I walked on as though I was afraid of doing something about it. People walked past. I turned back to look after a short while, but I didn't stop. Perhaps I was hoping that she had gotten up on her own. She hadn't.

At first, after I left the scene, it bothered me a little and I thought to treat it as a lesson learned. "Next time, be sure to offer help when something like this happens."

But I couldn't think of why I couldn't have done that earlier.

Then I thought to myself, "Well, if you're going to be ruthless to get ahead in this world, maybe you shouldn't let this bother you. It was probably nothing serious anyway."

Unfortunately, I couldn't buy that thought for more than a few seconds. It occurred to me that, having walked past, I was no different from the others around me at that time. I am the same. I am the most Singaporean of Singaporeans.

This was like poison in my mind. I realised that I am not different, that I can't look past myself. I feel little. Too little to offer even the simplest of help in a little situation.

What have I got to be proud of? I have lived for a good while and I have failed to really learn anything worthwhile. I realised that, because of this, I can't be anything.

And perhaps that is my real problem—today has proven that, after more than twenty years, I have done nothing.

The ignorant critic, or happy N-Day!

2010-08-09T01:44:00.000-07:00

Since it's National Day, maybe I should do a bit of my patriotic duty by slamming criticism of the government. I'm proud of Singapore, man!

About a week ago, I read a blog entry complaining about the government's approach to solving the problem of insufficient parking spaces in public housing areas. Apparently, the authorities decided to double "the overnight parking fee from $2 to $4".

Cars need to find a place to park at night. You increase the parking fee, they still need to park there if they have to. How is increasing the fee from $2 to $4 going to help?

So says the blogger, who also adds:

Planning guys! Planning. Either you increase the number of parking spaces or you decrease the number of cars on the road. Increasing the parking fee only give you a bigger bonus at the end of the year. It does not help anyone at all. End of the day, those car still need to park somewhere.

Tsk, tsk. This ignorant bad person obviously needs to get into the shoes of a bureaucrat. Here is a very simple economic model that shows the supply and demand of parking spaces and the effect of price fixing on the market, which I think is sufficient to explain the situation:

*I meant "spaces" not "lots"

The two grey diagonal lines represent the supply (S) and demand (D) 'curves' for parking spaces respectively. The y (vertical) axis of the graph measures the price of each parking lot, while the x (horizontal) axis measures the number of parking spaces used. Clearly, the graph shows the relationship between the price and the number of parking spaces used.

If the market is left to sort itself out, the common assumption is that it would default to a 'natural' sort of equilibrium. The equilibrium (default state of the market at which an equilibrium price is charged and an equilibrium number of parking spaces are used) point would be where the S and D curves intersect. So the equilibrium price would be represented by 'Pe' and the number of parking spaces used would be represented by 'Qe'. That is the point at which supply meets demand, so to speak.

However, let's say that in actual fact there aren't as many parking spaces as 'Qe'. Imagine that the S curve is vertical in the short term, since building of new car parks would take time or there just isn't enough space in the near future. Let's say there really are only 'Q`' number of parking spaces in the short term. So what happens then? The price has to correspondingly go up to 'P`' to reflect the reality of a shortage of supply.

But of course the real world doesn't quite work that way. Parking fees in public housing areas are most likely set by the authorities. That means when the authorities realise that there are too few parking spaces to meet demand, they would fix the price at a higher level in order to curb use and reserve available places for those who need them the most and are therefore willing to pay.

So what happens in the above model is the authorities would impose the price of 'P`', represented by the red line, in order to meet a target of 'Q`' number of parking spaces used. In other words, this is similar to ERP and such price-based congestion-reducing measures. You increase the price (or impose a 'tax') to decrease the number of people who are ready to use the particular infrastructure.

But why not have the S curve vertical in the model to approximate reality better? First of all, as discussed above, since parking fees are set by the authorities, I want to show the effects of price fixing rather than those of limited and very inelastic supply. Secondly, I'm not sure that 'P`' is the price that corresponds (given demand) to the actual number of parking spaces available, so I can't say that 'Q`' is the number of parking spaces available in reality. Thirdly, this is just an example using very basic economic concepts, so it may not be the best model. Lastly, this can reflect the real situation in the longer term, when there is enough time to increase the supply of parking spaces.

So one of the things worth talking about is not the fact that people still need to park their cars despite the price increase, which is neither here nor there as it skips any attempt at rational analysis, but the fact that there is deadweight loss as represented by the shaded area. However, what is more relevant in this situation is not even that, since we are speaking from the public's point of view, but the loss of consumer surplus, which is represented by the black and yellow shaded area. This area represents the utility loss of those people who don't get to use the parking spaces they otherwise would have used because the fee is now higher than they deem affordable.

Now, it's probably the case that, in the short term, demand for car parks is more inelastic than shown (D curve more vertical) so doubling the price would indeed not result in a significant reduction in the number of parking spaces used. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that people can either have nowhere to park their cars or pay up, as the blogger seems to imply. They may decide to use non-public car parks since those are no longer as expensive relative to public car parks, or they may be more willing to risk parking illegally. More importantly, in the longer run, this may discourage people from using personal vehicles, allowing the supply of car parks to catch up more easily with the demand.

So although this measure is not exactly good in the short term, it's a reasonable enough solution for the longer run. Besides, in the first place, what else can be done in the short term?

The reality is increasing the supply of parking spaces is not a short term solution, nor is managing the trend of growing use of personal vehicles. In fact, the increase in parking fees, as I've explained, is one way of doing the latter. Furthermore, the officials quoted in the news article this blog entry cites do talk about the need for longer-term solutions, so the entry proves to be very selective in what it mentions. And it certainly ignores the fact that, from an economic point of view, the price increase would better reflect the situation on the ground, giving preference to those with greater need and hence (presumably) greater willingness to pay.

So I've written one of my longest entries ever just to discuss a relatively trivial issue. But the point isn't really to prove that blogger wrong. The point is to illustrate that you don't have to be an expert to criticise something, as many people in Singapore like to imply (when it suits their purposes), but you should at least think through what you're saying. As it is, given such a small pool of dissent in the country, there is too much crap swirling around for it to be taken seriously. Any wonder that the opposition doesn't have much credibility?

Singaporeans like to complain about small things—well, who doesn't? But get it right more often. For a nation of brilliant scorers, we say a lot of stupid things.

Now go watch the parade.

Home

2010-07-30T12:46:00.000-07:00

I think this is a problem that people in such a small country like Singapore don't often appreciate.

When you move to a new place, you don't know anyone and you have to build your life anew. In a large country where there actually are different towns and cities, that is, where moving would count for something. But that's fine—you just have to work on it. The trouble is if it's temporary. Then it's simply going to get torn down again. And when you get back (if you do go back), you don't know anyone anymore either.

The problem can be set up and compounded by two things: The fact that you are moving to a different country with a different culture, and the fact that your original country is a deeply impersonal place. That way, you'd be a stranger everywhere.

But we don't have to complicate things that way. We can say something about the uprooting itself. When you uproot yourself, you set before you the task of building a new life. A new network, a new schedule, new habits, a new lifestyle (to a certain extent). But the normal assumption is that this is a task of some permanence. You rebuild. You don't normally rebuild to tear down again.

So I'm in a rare enough position.

But for me there is yet another dimension to this: Leaving my hometown (which isn't where I originated), I felt that I had begun to build a life of my own, and it was good. Losing that has an impact.

Maybe I'm just sensitive. Maybe this also has to do with the fact that I left my hometown having lost almost all connection with the people around me.

Nevertheless, I think one thing is true: They say you must know your roots, but the truth is you mostly need to grow them. Where you are, that's where you need to plant. There is no home where you don't have much to hold on to.

And that will never make it into one of the National Day anthems.

David's Sling

2010-07-26T01:34:00.000-07:00

It's the small things that sometimes trip up the giant.

For big problems, there are big answers. In the case of arguments against theism, for example, there is the problem of evil, which many theologians have spent much time answering. Whether or not they succeed entirely is quite beside the point here. The fact that there are substantial answers would suffice to keep theism afloat.

For small problems, however, the big answers often can't fit. Or they might simply be unable to cover every small problem.

Let's consider the notion of intelligent design. Why would there be any great imperfection (such as the existence of suffering) in the world if it was designed by an all-powerful and benevolent God? Well, a Christian might answer, God has a plan—perhaps we need to experience these large imperfections in order to grow spiritually.

But let's take a small problem. Let's say we ask why many of us continue (long after our less evolved ancestors) to grow extra teeth when our jaws might be too small to accommodate them. Would it not be absurd to say, as the answer to such a question, that "God has a plan" or that "It is because we have fallen into sin"?

To give a big answer to such a small problem would indeed strike most people as ridiculous. God planned human beings' teeth issues so that they would grow spiritually? This problem is a consequence or perhaps a punishment for falling into sin?

I suspect, therefore, that most believers would, owing to its lack of magnitude, simply shrug the problem off. However, it does not go away, and after we've accumulated enough of such problems we begin to build a strong case against intelligent design: If intelligent design is true, why do so many small imperfections exist that are clearly too trivial to serve a larger cosmic purpose?

You can't even neatly package some of these small problems as part of the larger problem of suffering—a major flaw can exist by design, but the existence of many small disconnected flaws can only point to carelessness or the lack of deliberation. The meaning of 'intelligent' would thereby become lost if one still insists that intelligent design is true regardless.

So, ultimately, a cosmic scheme involving a deity with a plan simply isn't good at coming up with explanations for small factual phenomena; although it's always tentative, science can.

Emphatically lacking

2010-07-12T12:10:00.000-07:00

Human, all too human—that describes the best of us.

Again we must talk about the foolishness of what I call 'feel good talk', the kind we console ourselves with and which makes human society sound rosier than it is. To that end, people talk about empathy, about the ability to put yourself in others' shoes as an important ingredient in social interaction and in winning love and respect.

What they seem to forget, however, is the fact that you are a person too, that you have your own perspective and sometimes your own (valid) reasons for doing things the way you do. What use is having empathy when, the moment there is disagreement, you might as well not have any in the eyes of others?

And disagreements are inevitable. As I've mentioned, you are your own person, and you view the world from your particular perspective. There is a necessary 'I' that fundamentally shapes how you interact with your surroundings. Given the uniqueness of each individual, there is bound to be instances where points of view clash.

So what happens then? Very often, we'd find that even with a lot of empathy we can't avoid conflict. It is often not enough, in personal matters, that others know that you respect their points of view. They want you to agree with them wholeheartedly. Otherwise, you are a bad person, or at least one lacking in empathy.

We see, therefore, that many people don't understand empathy. They understand it only from the point of view of themselves.

Ah, so it turns out that the problem is recursive. We are trapped in this unending loop of "me, myself and I", even when it comes to what is supposed to be about understanding others.

We are so hopeless we can hardly believe it. Even the people closest to you may, after a period of separation, be so detached to your fate that you might not have been able to imagine it had you tried to before being separated.

And, again, this stems from the fact that each of us only sees the world from each of our own particular perspective. Moreover, there is only so much information that we can process and consciously act on at any point of time. Once we are removed from some kind of stimuli, we will often fail to pay attention to the associated things.

I think it takes a great mind to be able to rise above such failings, or even to be aware of them. Hence, for the most part in this life, Michel de Montaigne's saying comes to mind:

"O my friends, there is no friend."

Truth cuts both ways

2010-06-28T22:39:00.000-07:00

I've been reading an interesting book called The Black Swan. I'm about two-thirds of the way through now and I think I have grasped the central message of the book, which is that our ability to predict the future in social matters is highly limited.

I think this is a very interesting point, and I find myself agreeing with it. I'm not so sure, however, with the seemingly suggested conclusion that a skeptical-empirical approach (which is similar to but more comprehensive than the open-minded attitude I've talked about) is linked to the libertarian position in questions of political economy. Indeed, Hayek and the Austrian school—those proclaimed bastions of libertarian thought—receive not few words of praise in the book and almost no criticism.

The thing is, Hayek might have a good point about economics, but in his political commentary he is guilty of the same thing the book criticises heavily. As I understand it, Hayek alleges that attempts to control economic activity will lead to authoritarianism, hence the 'The Road to Serfdom'. But the evidence speaks for itself. Describing, say, modern-day Britain as authoritarian is a bit of a stretch—what more labelling it as serfdom.

The truth is economic activity in modern society will always be controlled in some (not insignificant) degree, for better or for worse. And this has not and does not seem likely to result in large-scale authoritarianism. Thus, Hayek too fails when he attempts to predict a potential socio-political trend.

But I don't want to focus my criticism on Hayek. Rather, I'd like to talk about why a libertarian position does not necessarily follow from the main point of the book.

The crux of my point is this: As many have pointed out, doing little or nothing also tends to incur costs. There is a price for instituting social programs aimed at helping the impoverished, for example; on the other hand, the alternative of inaction would also have a price.

The book says that not to form quick conclusions is an act as it requires effort. Similarly, not to do something is an act as it tends to have its own cost. Hence, the lack of certainty on the possible consequences cannot justify inaction. As the book also says, having people who take their chances is often necessary for social development.

Therefore, it is rather the case that people are justified in acting on their beliefs as long as they are acting on good faith and are constantly aware of their limitations.

This leads us to another point: It is precisely the lack of absolute certainty in social matters that prevents one from judging a certain school of thought as absolutely wrong, as long as it is not in the business of making predictions or creating concrete historical narratives. So despite, say, the book's criticism of the historicity and scientism of Marxism, a non-scientific/deterministic brand of Marxism is not as vulnerable to the same criticism. Simply put, observations that are not necessarily false cannot be called out for being false.

It turns out, therefore, that under conditions of uncertainty we have to be open-minded about things that have not been proven false. But that's hardly surprising, isn't it? Except perhaps to stubborn libertarians.

Essays on Mind and Matter II

2010-06-10T20:42:00.000-07:00

Sometimes things just don't work out; life seems intent on proving that you are not capable enough. Sometimes you are prevented on moving to higher or better paths and endeavours. Instead, you are dragged down and forced to traverse the lower roads, to eke out a bland existence in a fundamentally alienating universe.

You may then be left with a feeling of purposelessness, a sense that things took their own turn and have left you high and dry with your wants and your plans. Perhaps you may even realise that you don't know what you want anymore.

Strangely, though, I'm not too hung up on these feelings. Well, it's not exactly strange because I think I know why. The reason, however, is strange enough—I'm not so bothered by purposelessness because I've realised that it's pointless anyway. At least when you don't have the means to control your life.

So how does it work? How can the realisation of pointlessness somehow be helpful?

Perhaps it will become clear once I explain my reasoning. The point is when you realise that there is no point, you become less insistent on fulfilling a specific purpose (as opposed to a general one, such as to be happy). You become less preoccupied with following a predetermined course. In a somewhat Schopenhauerian sense, when you realise that there is nothing but the chains that bind you to the material world, all that you can lose are the chains that bind you to self-inflicted suffering; if you desire nothing that badly, you wouldn't feel that bad about not having something.

But what do I mean by the fact that there is no point? Have we perchance arrived at the Grand Hotel Abyss?

This isn't a sigh of despair. If you've read some of my earlier entries, you might notice that I try to draw strength from weakness, zest from purposelessness. Why I reason about life is not to express a desire to give up, but to articulate a wish to go on.

As for why there is no point, I'm not going to offer a grandiose narrative about suffering. I think suffering is merely a consequence and could therefore be reduced or avoided if we focus on the right things. Instead, my reasoning is much more Marxist in character. It stems from our alienation from our own labour.

The fact is, out there, almost no one is interested in your purpose or the exact function that you desire for yourself. They say that you have to sell yourself. What this really means is you have to make you seem useful to others. And that's how you make you useful to yourself—without being made use of, you'd seldom have the means for subsistence. You serve yourself by, willingly or not, first serving the purposes of others, most likely the impersonal ends of your employers.

Thus, what is the point of being stubborn about a specific purpose of yours, especially when that doesn't mesh well with reality as it turns out? You'd only inflict physical and emotional suffering on yourself. If you can serve your own purpose while at the same time serving those of your employers, that's great. But such serendipity may be hard to come by.

This realisation that they hardly matter in society is what makes me fairly indifferent to personal milestones and sense of direction. If no one else cares, why should you care? It's your choice: You can choose to be exacting and suffer, or you can choose to shrug them off as inconsequential.

A personal kind of purposelessness, therefore, turns out to be good. But to take it further you need to turn it into the ability to adapt, something that I'm still trying to learn. Basically, if I don't have anything that I badly want to be, I can be anything that people want me to be.

And therein lies power, the flowering of your potential to actually take control.

Like a cruel angel

2010-06-07T23:17:00.000-07:00

I think some people figured out that it's best to be nice and positive-sounding, even if the ends of others are sometimes better furthered by truthfulness. Clearly, there is nothing inherently 'nice' about this attitude. It's merely convenient. But perhaps I should give these people more credit—it's quite cunning.

The simple trick lies in the fact that people love the sugar coating. They love the smiles, the sweet words and the genial laughs, whether or not they know if those are genuine. Of course, many would say that they prefer to hear true words. Nonetheless, most of them are still susceptible to the psychological effect of being met with niceties.

I think we should be at least a little wary of those who speak good but dishonest words. The mask they wear might make them seem better people than they really are, and it's only when you expect something of them that you might realise the true depth of their good-natured ways. Then you might be in for a disappointment. Or worse. After all, doesn't it resemble a confidence trick?

Infuriatingly, however, such consummate liars also tend to get away with things. People really do love the sugar coating. It's usually only when the truth stares them in the face would they admit that they've been bought. And the trickster would still be able to count on the goodwill of others who have not had their own encounter with his or her true character.

This makes me think, sadly, that the trick is too effective. Thus, on reflection, I can't say that I don't find something that I could learn from it. Therefore, try to reveal the truth only if you know that it's relatively safe to do so.

You might object that it's difficult to constantly be insincere, and that people will eventually be able to tell if you don't mean something.

However, there's a deeper level to this. If you're convinced yourself that you are being kind and pleasant by withholding your true feelings, you can certainly appear genuinely nice despite the fact that you are insincere. The goodwill of others can thus be maintained. People love their sugar coating. They adore those who are loveable and well-meaning.

The Death of Danton

2010-05-28T17:31:00.000-07:00

Every year on Armistice Day and V-Day Europe remembers the dangers of nationalism—at least one would hope. In contrast, I don't think too many people in Asia are attuned to it. Maybe not enough of us have died tragically in its name?

Certainly, between violent squabbles about the ruins of a temple and lengthy periods of compulsory military service, a cacophony of nationalist sentiments permeates Southeast Asia. And few seem to stop and ask: Why does it matter?

Indeed, why? I'm sure we've all heard John F. Kennedy's famous line, "Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for the country". I think that should be reformulated, and not as a statement but as a question: What does your country even mean to you?

In truth, for many people, I can think of very little. Sure, your country gives you a sense of identity as the place you were born in, where you perhaps live and have the right to be. But you pay your taxes, don't you? As productive or at least honest members of society, you are paying your dues to the community as a member. You are participating in the community.

Yes, everyone stands to lose if the country is weak and vulnerable, but up to what point are concerns about security still reasonable? When does it start to resemble paranoia?

The leaders know that simple pragmatism alone wouldn't commit people to readily pledge their service to the country, at least not to the extent that they're hoping for. That's why they come up with nationalistic propaganda. Their hope is that some sort of love for and sense of responsibility to the country would be instilled in you. The blinder you are as a follower the better. When they need martyrs, they know where to look.

So why do we play along? What is it that the country gives us in exchange? We know why the politicians hold office and why the government is in power. They give their service in exchange for power and position. I can perhaps understand the American sentiment that the country is the defender of their liberties. But especially in places like Singapore, where you're always simply asked to go the extra mile for the 'greater good', so that the country can be competitive, what's in it for you?

Do you think the country takes care of you? In the age of globalisation, where the welfare state is deemed inefficient, the country can no longer make the promises it used to make. Will you have jobs? Will you be able to earn a decent living? Will you have enough funds to retire comfortably? The paradigm of the neo-liberal state gives no clear answers to such questions. You are essentially on your own. The role of the state is to leave you free to do what you want, provided you have the means to do it. Batteries not included, of course.

Even then, in some countries you're not actually free to do a great number of relatively harmless things, like buying chewing gum.

And so, as I've said some time ago, is there any real meaning to nationalism today? How is it that they are asking you to love something selflessly in a world of self-love? If you love yourself, you will find the means to live. That is the living ethic of today. Can loving your country provide an alternative?

It's funny that years ago I had a pragmatic attitude towards nationalism, seeing it as necessarily existent and even necessary. Young minds are impressionable, I suppose. And that's when it's most dangerous. If the leaders want to fight a great war, they need the young to be on board.

A mutinous army results in a dead Tsar. Do we want to give him the power with which he could kill us instead?

May I ask why?

2010-05-15T10:30:00.000-07:00

I read an amusing blog entry recently that set me thinking about whether the reflection of people's choices is correct simply because it reflects people's choices, as is often implied in economics.

As I've mentioned before, a liberal society is all for autonomy. It is thus, in effect, for individual choice. We've heard the maxims: "To each his own", "Different strokes for different folks"; even J.S. Mill's harm principle can be considered one.

No doubt, choice is great—and everyone knows that these days. Economics is about preferences and choices. Capitalism too promotes individual choice. You can choose what you want to acquire for yourself. Might you be interested in some of these wares? An iPod? An iRiver? Just remember, it's about me. It's about you.

Where do you want to go today?

Yet how do we know that the choices that we make are ours? Is it simply by virtue of the fact that they are the choices we end up making, the fact that they are our revealed preferences? Might there not be something important about their unrevealed aspect, about the psychological processes that take place behind decision making?

I think if we delve into these processes we might find that those are not really our (with emphasis on the sense of ownership) choices. They are not what we really want as individuals abstracted from our surroundings and our social contexts. The fact is we are subject to a lot influences that are external to our wants and needs, at least initially—not least from those who would sell something as your choice.

Indeed, it seems to make little sense to talk about individuals without context. So, in short, life really isn't all about autonomy and choice. It's about existing as an individual, a social creature and a limited physical being at the same time.

Thus, this begs the question: Should we never ask why people make the choices they make?

To some extent our society is conditioned to abhor such questioning. Remember the maxims? If you were to challenge another person's choices, you would often be regarded as a nuisance. It certainly wouldn't help to win you friends.

But you might protest that people do question others' choices, such when they choose to drop out of school at an early age or to acquire bad and destructive habits. However, such questions do not usually arise where decisions are perceived as utility-based. If an individual determines rationally that a choice gives him enough utility as to be worth making, he is justified in making that choice.

And what are the criteria for rational decision making? Typically, it would entail something like weighing decisions in terms of utility gained to the best of one's knowledge. Interestingly, even if it is thus held that people are not always capable of making the best or most accurate choice in terms utility, the above description would seem to leave out instances such as impulse buying. That means many of the decisions made in the marketplace, for a start, might not be considered rational under such a common understanding of rationality.

Yet, ironically, those tend to be regarded as perfectly legitimate economic decisions. The sellers would certainly be quick to assert that they are.

So it turns out that, even assuming that we generally are rational utility-maximising agents, there is still room to question the choices that we make. But how would we go about doing that without attempting to impose arbitrary preferences on each other, as is often presumed to be the case when we dare ask why?

I think this is where the criterion of rationality is worth emphasising. If there are to be questioning and debate, they have to be based on reason. That means we must have good reasons that are backed by good reasoning—and if we do, I see no reason to stop us from asking.

Hence, while questioning and disapproval are not necessarily judgemental in the negative sense that we mean the word, we would come across as judgemental if our positions are not backed up by reason.

Well, that deals nicely with both sanctimonious conservatives and High Street liberals.

At the feet of the gods

2010-04-30T14:16:00.000-07:00

How much would divinity cost?

I think there's something to Roger Ebert's contention that video games are not art, which he seems to have stammered out like an uncomprehending seer. And there's something amusing about the Singapore salesman who helped to swindle the public of millions of dollars for a wealthy family. Both may have something similar in mind. Both of them provoke this thought: How do we value something subjective?

The value of art is subjective because its purpose is, ultimately, that of subjective expression. And subjective expression is all that is directly relevant to the artistic process. No matter what other motivations exist in the artist's head, which purpose the artwork ends up incarnating is what we appreciate—and in art we appreciate the purpose of subjective expression.

Perhaps we need an example to illustrate this point more vividly. Think of the Pagliacci paradigm. At any moment during a performer's performance, he may have a number of motivations. He may be performing to get the performance over and done with so he could go home. Or perhaps he is performing with a conscious desire to earn some money to feed his family. But these motivations are irrelevant to his art, and if he betrays them his performance would suffer. In the theatre, the purpose that we want to apprehend in a performer's act is that of expressing the character he is playing. And so it is with all art.

If the artistic process requires subjectivity, it is opposed by the objective. Objective ideas external to the individual pollute the artistry of an object that is intended to be an artwork. Imagine an artist who has a marketing team that gives their input to the creative process based on what they expect would sell in the market. We would find the artist engaged in a process that is less about artistic creation and more about product design. That is why video games tend to be far from being purely artistic—the commercial aspect permeates and corrupts the creative process.

For that matter, artworks that are created to be sold in the marketplace might face the same problem. After all, we can see the difference between a true work of art and a souvenir. The latter is more about craft, created as a pretty or impressive thing specifically to be sold for a sum of money. Thus, if the creator is clearly motivated to create something that has objective value, especially in monetary terms, the art becomes suspect. By this reasoning, amateur art is hence the most secure in terms of its artistry—we are most assured of its subjective quality, its brilliance notwithstanding.

We can see, therefore, a crucial difference between the work of man and the work of genius. Why, then, are we so keen on translating everything into the former?

Once we try to put an objective value to the subjective, we turn something that is incommensurably valuable into something of bounded value. And, at the same time, we enter into the realm of absurdity. As the charlatan of a salesman said, "How I value my history and heritage will be different from the way you value it"—hence his valuation of a museum contribution at fifteen million dollars while 'expert' valuations put it at less than two million. We start arguing and imposing arbitrary terms.

The result is a patently uninteresting universe. Our own imagination has filled our world with numbers and robbed us of the kind of imagination that paints it with colour. No wonder boredom is the modern affliction.

Why, seeing this, do we not complete it by fully converting the spiritual into worldly terms? Shouldn't we ask, "What price divinity?"

But perhaps we have—nature gave the pagans their gods; men in suits give us ours. On postcards there is the picture of an island of offices on a well-oiled sea. And to such a creature we yield our sacrifices. Our love's labour.

An unpessimistic pessimism

2010-04-15T20:56:00.000-07:00

What has kept me going with a smile is philosophy.

In the face of the unknown, I find joy in discovering that the absurd man might be superman or overman. Vanity? No, reality.

And, in a way, I find myself agreeing the Hegelian sentiment here—while religion might have been the opium, philosophy offers the vision.

Let me explain what I mean. It begins like a story, "zeer-e gonbad'e kabood", or under the dark sky, as the Persian Shia tradition goes. One day, we wake up to discover that the world is an impersonal place. We find that it is unfamiliar to our reason and hostile to our plans. This is the moment of the absurd, as Camus describes it, the moment when we realise that our selves are subject to a universe whose laws are indifferent to our thoughts. We know then an irresistible force, but it isn't a living one; it does not know us. "Yeki-bood; yeki-nabood"—there was one, and there was no one.

But let us break away from lyricism. While Habermas, perhaps echoing Kierkegaard but from a less fatalistic perspective, says that secular reason is somewhat lost and "unenlightened about itself", Camus contends that the absurd man lives with the imperfection of reason and does not leap into what he considers the irrational—blind faith, or the obliteration of reason. The former, however, would reply that the banner of reason has only led, ironically, to a naive faith in science.

It's hard to say who's right. Yet I think Habermas has merely arrived at epistemic circularity, the practical fact that we need faith in our basic ways of perceiving and reasoning to make any sense of the world; he is probably also saying that reason doesn't tell us why we should have faith in those. And the absurd is more than admitting and living with these 'deficiencies'. It is the knowledge that what matters to each of us most in this world, the subjective self, does not square with the objective world.

This is the reality that I was talking about, a reality where the subjective individual is alienated and dominated by the objective. We live in a world that is, in truth, very far from enlightenment; and this gulf will remain as long as we live or die by the grace of money.

That is the reality that needs lyricism. But, above all, it needs thought.

And so we tune in again. Julian Young writes in Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art that nausea, the reaction to the absurd existence, is almost a dignified condition. Down this path, he sees Nietzsche's overman as the world-affirming man, one who is willing to go through each and every experience in his life over and over, who regrets nothing. "Yes", the overman says, "the world is a hostile place—and so what?"

Is the overman, then, the absurd man? Have we been looking at the man in the red cape and never thought to look at any person that we might pass by in the street?

This perhaps is key: in the affirming of a harsh reality, the subjective self reveals its strength and is affirmed. While in the most agonising moments, we like critical patients might need some morphine to go on, it would not solve the problem of existence. In times, I imagine, when even your faith abandons you, you choose to live or die; and in choosing the former, what we always know as the human spirit refuses to submit itself to be obliterated.

The lyricism and the introspection, then, are not vanities. They remind us of the problem of existence. They might be our lifeblood when we lie wounded.

And in the spirit of storytelling and reflection, I've realised something else: the mourning Mother Courage, the mother of slain children who is able to stop clinging to her wares to go on is the tragic heroine of the working class.

In the end, revolutionaries might be the sons of a better age, but they should not forget themselves—lest they forget to pass over a petty careless existence.

April's fool

2010-04-06T08:07:00.000-07:00

When it comes to faith, I doubt.

But it doesn't stop there. Yes, we do have reasonable beliefs; religious faith too can be reasonable. In fact, if epistemic circularity is unavoidable, then every aspect of our life involves some kind of faith.

Still, this doesn't mean we shouldn't doubt our beliefs. More precisely, we should doubt our understanding of the world from which our beliefs arise.

Invariably, there are times when I doubt what I know, doubt that I can be certain about anything but the simplest things. During those times, like the experience the eponymous philosopher of the Bible describes, the good things in life just don't feel as good. Without certainty, one becomes anxious.

Fortunately, I find that the anxiety soon passes, and what I have instead is a refreshing sense of peace. It's a feeling that is akin to floating along a flowing river rather than struggling and going under—it's something that you could only feel if you're willing to ease up on the struggle to maintain certainty.

Indeed, I think perpetual anxiety is our lot if we are so desperate to remain certain. Or, if we never admit it, we would merely be living in an illusory shell. Faith requires lies in order to exist freely and indefinitely without doubt creeping in. And doubt that is not embraced, that is not allowed to come into opposition with our certainties, can only give us anxiety.

Openness of mind, then, is the only real cure to the discomfort that doubt brings.

To be sure, as physical beings, we have physical needs that give rise to a need for some physical and material security. And I think this is a legitimate general need, the satisfaction of which is a worthwhile social goal—hence my support for socialism.

Beyond a certain albeit (granting the possibility that specific needs are subject to change) non-specific point, however, we should probably be more comfortable with uncertainty. And in learning and thinking, we could achieve this by having an open mind, a disposition that does not hold on too tightly to the certainties that we think our understanding gives us.

I suspect that we have been conditioned to loathe uncertainty in most aspects of life. We need to know, we want predictions and projections. Living in society has taught us that this is the way to live. It has become like an instinct, something that drives us mechanically.

And instead of living, in a richer sense of the word, we are letting our shoddily-constructed faiths and mice-and-men plans dictate our lives. I think we become something less than what we could be.

It seems apt, therefore, to quote the words that Nietzsche put in Zarathustra's mouth:

Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss... What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under. I love those who do not know how to live, for they are those who cross over.

Only doubt is certain; what we do know is that we might not know. And that might not be a bad thing. For one, it might give us a key to overcoming our petty troubles.

Essays on mind and matter I

2010-03-27T10:53:00.000-07:00

As you get older, you tend to find yourself looking back more and more.

When you're young, chances are you couldn't wait to grow up because you wanted to do things you couldn't do as a child. But as we get older, I think many of us find that we want to go back, half-wishing that somehow we could reverse time, perhaps dreaming that we could change some things about the past.

Is life doomed to be full of nostalgia and regret?

Well, I think nostalgia can be a kind of recreation, so it's not really a bad thing. Regret, however, is much more difficult to judge. I won't say that we should never have regrets, because some things are worth regretting—without the prospect of regret, we might do things that we would do well to regret later. But is it worthwhile to live a life full of regrets?

As I reflect on it, it becomes more apparent how different and perhaps incommensurate with others' every individual's experiences are. You would think that people with broadly similar circumstances would have broadly similar experiences, but that's not necessarily true at all. While today's mainstream philosophy often regards experience as very much an internal thing—experience is intangibly subjective and thus it is impossible for one person to fully apprehend another's experiences—most people still intuitively think of it as an external thing—there is a real world that we are obviously interacting with and is therefore what determines our experiences.

I think the truth is somewhere in between (or a configuration of both?). How you felt, thought and acted are determined both by your circumstances and how you perceived them. The past is like this or that because you are partly responsible for making it the way it is, not just through your externally-oriented decisions but also through an internally-oriented one—how you chose to see and internalise your circumstances at that time.

Indeed, how you perceive the past is also a choice. However, there is a relatively inflexible element to memory in that it is to a large extent determined by past decisions you made, which are unchangeable. If you saw your days as miserable, you're likely remember them as miserable today whether you want to or not because the decision has been made in the past to perceive and thus remember them that way.

How you feel about the past is perhaps more of a choice. But, by extension, you're still relatively unfree to choose since the memory that you are reacting to is, as I mentioned above, inflexible even in the internal (self-determined) sense. Therefore, I think regret is often an unavoidable feeling.

What can certainly be helped and what really matters is your decisions on the present and, to some extent, on the future. And as I mentioned on New Year's eve, past experiences can help by informing these decisions. So you may regret things in the past, but don't let the mistakes you regret bleed into the present, either by persisting or by negatively affecting your ability to choose how you live your life today.

Thus, the past may be there to be wept over and the future may be there to worry about, but the present is here to be lived and enjoyed.

As we get older, I think we would do well to keep that in mind.

For a eudaimonic society

2010-03-15T03:20:00.000-07:00

What does it mean to live the good life?

That is Aristotle's question. It's also one that we would do well to think about in this day and age. Does it merely translate to pleasure-seeking, a vulgarised Epicurean way of life, or a crude Utilitarian one based on the consumption of material goods? Looking at how many people view life and its rewards today, those do seem to be very popular views.

Well, I won't be preaching about the good life here. I will merely borrow Aristotle's concept of the eudaimon life—meaning a fulfilling or flourishing life—because I think it's very appealing. Basically, it's a life in which one seeks to realise one's potential as fully as possible.

What I will instead talk about is how the eudaimon life figures in politics. After all, a coherent ethical system has to integrate the private with the public or the individual with the social and political.

I think it's a great weakness of the modern (and here I mean liberal) political system that it doesn't tackle this question. At most, it only goes as far as to praise freedom or autonomy and encourage the means that are necessary to ensure it, such as political participation. Of course, governments often do promote the concepts of a harmonious society, healthy living and etcetera, but these are a matter of policy rather than integral aspects of a coherent philosophy.

The problem comes where, instead of enabling a pluralism of perspectives that the prizing of autonomy warrants, modern political philosophy merely ends up looking away while a dominant ideology monopolises the people's consciousness.

And that ideology can do so because people have material needs, which it has been able to dictate, both through their provision and through the creation of new ones. In other words, with a pervasive market system based on the valuation of most aspects of life through currency, it has been able to dictate people's way of life. It has also been able to create a false consciousness, which I take to mean the creation of endless wants and needs that it and only it can fulfil.

It's no wonder that many view life as a long road of hard (or not so hard) work that promises to reward them with comforts and luxury. And in such a society, money (and I don't mean just hard currency), as the universal medium, becomes paramount. Everyone becomes, often involuntarily, money-minded.

That is quite contrary to the eudaimon life. What the latter seeks is not material wealth, but wealth of character and being. It teaches moderation and encourages the pursuit of excellence. It seeks a balance between the material, social and spiritual.

But only if people are released from the shackles of material domination and false consciousness would they be truly free to pursue such a way of life.

And this is why I think the eudaimon life is related to and forms a moral structure for a socialist society. Far from being an egalitarian hell, socialism seeks to collapse the structures of material domination, to put the fruits of labour in the hands of those who laboured for them so that they may live their lives to the full. It does not stand for authoritarianism and collectivism. It stands for freedom in more aspects life than just the political.

Now, on a final note, does a political philosophy that seeks the fulfilling of one's potential imply support for a meritocratic system? This is something that needs more time to be considered. But if I were to hazard a guess I'd say no, in the sense that if meritocracy gives license for material domination by the meritorious, then it would be contrary to the spirit of a eudaimonic society.

Besides, we need to be careful when we talk about meritocracy. Without a level playing field and true quality of opportunity, true meritocracy is not possible. We need to distinguish between true and idealistic meritocracy and pragmatic meritocracy, the latter which Singapore (for example) subscribes to. Which do we mean?

Pragmatic meritocracy does not make a clear distinction between those who have the odds stacked against them and those who were born lucky. And our sense of fairness, which is apparently corroborated by neuroscientific evidence, should prevent us from buying into it.

Missing the forest, or how experts can be dumb

2010-03-03T12:09:00.000-08:00

If there is something wrong with the method of inquiry that analytical philosophy is partly guilty of, it would be the fragmentary way in which reality is examined. Each field or subject tends to be seen independently, frequently leading to big-picture incoherence.

Moreover, there is often (in less straightforwardly philosophical fields) a tendency towards a strictly realist method, focusing almost entirely on the empirical and taking revealed reality as the only plausible element in discussion. This again leads to incoherence, even where the subject is labelled as 'comparative'.

Now, (on a somewhat ironic note) all this might sound rather abstract and hence obscure. Well, I'll cut to the chase and speak from an example. After all, the empirical does have a substantiating role.

I read, with a measure of bemusement mixed with ruefulness, the 'expert' analyses on the recent trend of casino-themed toys becoming popular in Singapore.

In response to public concern, a few psychologists quoted by Today downplayed the significance of this trend. One compared it to the availability of "toy guns which encourage kids to play shooting and killing games", stating that "it is up to parents to decide what they want for their children".

At first glance, that's a pretty good comparison. Certainly, we can agree that casino-related toys becoming popular does not mean more children will grow up to be compulsive or reckless gamblers, as much as legalising homosexuality does not mean more people will become homosexuals.

However, in this case, that argument is only good as long as it stands alone. I suppose this is where psychologists who examine the individual removed from his/her social context should retire to the backbenches.

Had the toys become popular years ago, those experts would be completely right. But what makes this trend worrying is not some unfounded fear about the toys. Rather, it's the fact that it comes in the wake of the opening of the casino and all the hype that surrounds it. Hence, it's not a question of psychological effect alone; it's also a question of cultural trends.

What is worrisome, therefore, is not that the toys could exert some insidious influence on kids, but that the culture celebrating extravagance could. The toys are merely a vivid manifestation of that culture, a sign of how far down it has crept and become positioned to affect the people's psyche.

Businesses thrive on exploiting opportunities, and social trends generate the latter. Parents don't buy casino-themed toys to teach their kids "the concepts of chance and risk playing" and "the consequences of incurring debt", as one psychologist puts it glibly. After all, as the expert noted herself, more conventional games such as Monopoly could serve that purpose. Parents buy casino-themed toys now because they buy into the hype, one that is reminiscent of Wall Street's extravagantly reckless culture. That's not exactly the best thing to aspire towards, is it?

I think this is one of the instances where science, steeped in its own arcane knowledge, becomes negligent. Reason and science are not synonymous. I've written favourably about scientists (including psychologists), but I have to say that putting your faith in just any form of scientific inquiry isn't prudent either.

Here, I say that it is almost a crime to talk only about trees.

Why we are a passive-aggressive society

2010-02-28T20:10:00.000-08:00

I'm not the only one amongst the people I know to have opined that Singaporeans are easily offended. I'm also not the only one to have been on the receiving end of their knife-in-the-dark kind of wrath. Nor am I the only person to have been frustrated trying to work something out with them, whether it's a project or just a get-together, and failing due to their lack of commitment, only to have them play victim in the aftermath. At the same time, we quite frequently observe farcical outbursts and quarrels amongst strangers in the street.

All this seems to be a curious mixture. Actually, this bubbling cauldron may be a regular feature amongst urban populations living in high-stress environments. But I think there's a special dimension to this amongst Singaporeans, so let me offer a uniquely Singaporean analysis of how I think this condition comes to be.

I think by now you're not a stranger to the fact that Singapore is an authoritarian society. Dissent faces disapproval at best and sometimes even open persecution. Certainly, it's not very difficult to be obfuscatory about this in legal language. But, when it comes down to it, Singaporeans who care to defend the system would defend it on the basis that that's how things are done over there and that it works.

But we're not exactly interested in the politics of the country now. I'm going to talk about how that translates into the people's behaviour.

And not only is dissent not politically tolerated, there is a consciousness that, as a multicultural society, speech needs to be regulated. Besides the prevalence of censorship backed by the legal stick (as three guys found out recently), I think the indoctrination is so successful that people actively censor themselves from openly saying things that might provoke conflict.

Added to the mixture is a twist of Asian reserve, engendering a dislike for confrontation. The result is a people who tend to be 'quietly' unhappy. Resolving problems with open, honest communication is frequently eschewed for fear of unpleasant emotional encounters. After all, the latter are not the kind of stuff responsible members of the community should engage in.

Hence, we tend to bottle our feelings up, letting them out only behind the backs of the people with whom we are unhappy. But that's not enough sometimes. With all the pressure we are under, we might really need to let off steam. So we take it out on strangers, people that we don't have to see every day and don't have a personal relationship with—bus drivers, public servants, salespeople and etcetera. Hence the quarrels in the street.

Moreover, in such a competitive and authoritarian environment, where the stick is ready to hit and people are ever ready to take your place should you slip, we hate to be wrong. Out of concern for our own good, we will try to push the blame or at least minimise our culpability. In fact, we often want to seem to be the victims because, otherwise, the responsibility is too heavy to bear. Or we might be confronted by angry people.

And when people dare suggest that we are wrong, we bring our personal indignation to bear—we quickly feel offended.

All these symptoms seem to be the hallmarks of passive-aggressive behaviour. And I think that's what we are, a bunch of passive-aggressives. We are also irresponsible since we loathe the full implications of responsibility.

I firmly believe that politics shape the way we live. So I do wonder if the latter is surprising in light of the fact that we're not given the responsibility of political choice.

Simply put, the government thinks we are children and we let that pass. And so we are.

Challenger's defense

2010-02-24T10:13:00.000-08:00

Without realising it, it's been more than half a year on. I think it's time for a little introspection. I'm actually surprised I haven't done this before, though I remember at least intending to do so. So let's take a look at where this blog has gone, where it stands and what direction it should take in the future.

Looking back at its short history, there have been a few developments. First, there was a short period of uncertainty as to whether it should continue. But I decided that this blog is not so easily found and associated with me such that unfamiliar people can pick out things that they don't like and acquire an immediate prejudice (face it, that's how people tend to operate) against me in real tangible life. So that's history now.

A more interesting development is an evolutionary one—the fact that entries have on average become longer and denser.

That is actually contrary to my initial intentions. I wanted to write short, snappy things, but influence from my studies got the better of me. And I do often wonder if this is for the better.

But, at the end of the day, many things just can't be said in a few short sentences. And, on the flip side, I'm not going to turn this into a perpetual essay-writing exercise either. Essays, though more rigorous, don't tend to get the point across effectively. I'm sure that's reflected in how most of us feel or felt when we read academic papers.

And this where the apologetics begin: I wish to defend the direction that this blog is taking.

I should say that philosophy isn't my forte—political philosophy is more like it—but I do follow broadly in the continental tradition, as opposed to the analytic one. The differences between them are somewhat confusing, but it's possible to make out some trends. Most clearly, analytic philosophy has a greater predisposition towards propositional logic.

That doesn't mean continental philosophy is illogical, though. But it does mean that analytic philosophy seeks to avoid contradictions while continental philosophy, with its dialectical tendencies, finds an important place for them. Provided that they make sense, of course.

Now this implies that continental philosophers tend to write in a more nuanced way in order to be able to capture and convey the contradictions that are present in reality. It certainly means they are unlikely to argue with the same kind of formalistic structure employed by analytic philosophers.

But, having pronounced where I stand, my sympathies are actually a little divided. Nuance to the point of ambiguity may be appropriate in some cases, but I do value clarity. A paper full of propositional logic is hell to read, but so is one filled with ambiguity.

So, in sum, I think the way that I currently write is, perhaps with a little refinement, in the right direction—a non-formalistic and sometimes nuanced way, adopting points of view that are rationally defensible (hence the need for clarity and mass) without attempting to be formally logical.

It also helps that my intention here is not to write papers. At the same time, however, I wish to retain some cautiousness. Quite a lot criticism can probably still be made from a formalist angle, but it also helps that I'm not exactly trying to be right. My intention has always been to provoke thought rather than necessarily convince anyone. I aim to question more than to provide complete answers.

And I think that suits my character rather well.

Faithless faithful

2010-02-13T13:48:00.000-08:00

The question of religious faith is something very difficult to untangle in a coherent manner. And I address it despite warnings from within and without. One would hope that this question can be addressed without evoking judgemental reactions, but I don't know if that is possible. I think the best thing I can do is to be as non-judgemental as possible on my own part. And so I write this, as I had written my previous entry, with the caveat that this is what I think without claiming that it is necessarily true. But, at the same time, in support of what I'm writing, I'd like to say that it is derived from years of experience interacting with believers (it's also worth mentioning here that my views might be more relevant to Christianity than any other faith, since the vast majority of my experiences are with it), as well as a fair measure of reasoning. In other words, I'm not doing this like Ronny Tan. And now that I've mentioned it, that's a good place to start.

I'm mildly amused by the reactions to the Ronny Tan incident in Singapore. The issue itself, however, is of little interest to me—I know evangelistic rhetoric well enough not to be surprised. The point is I see no reason why we should pay attention to some ignorant or dissembling provocateur. I mean, in a similar way, who cares about what Westboro Baptist Church says next? If these people are vested with authority in state institutional positions, then we can talk about them being irresponsible, as with the case of Thio Li Ann. Otherwise, if we think that something said from a pulpit we don't sit below is complete nonsense, the best thing to do is to ignore it. That doesn't mean it's not important to address mistaken beliefs propagated by such rubbish. That means we ought to focus on the underlying problem, not on the nonsense itself. Hence, all the righteous anger that has emerged in reaction to what was said only seems childish and misguided. It adds nothing valuable whatsoever.

And the underlying problem is what I'm going to be referring to here: The fact that religious faith seems to have become synonymous with opted ignorance.

Recently, I've come across a notion of God that I find very appealing: God is excellence
—and it isn't just referring to moral excellence. This implies that to be faithful followers we must try as best as possible to approximate God's perfect excellence. This is very interesting, but it also raises problems with religious faith and what it means to be faithful as we have encountered them.

Here is where I've been quite consistently disappointed by the religious community. I've met quite a few perfectly decent and intelligent people who say ridiculous things that are patently false simply because their worldview is coloured by their unquestioned beliefs. Even amongst congregations that profess to be intellectually inclined, I'm seldom ever impressed by the actual intellectual capabilities of their members. They may know their apologetics and hermeneutics very well, but they know very little about things outside their religious framework. And a good part of the reason for this is they don't see external knowledge as anything near as valuable as knowledge acquired within the faith. In other words, they are relatively dismissive of a vast amount of existing knowledge, things that could make the positions they have learned untenable (and many of them don't want to know it precisely because they are afraid of this).

I don't mean to say that believers are necessarily ignorant. Certainly, I'm not young enough to know everything either. However, I'm quite willing to learn from anything. And that is what I mean by intellectual capabilities: The unrestricted willingness to learn and the products of that willingness. Even many of the believers who are actively engaged in the pursuit of knowledge are unable to achieve this. Their pursuit of knowledge is frequently channelled by their religious sympathies, directed towards some things that conform to their beliefs and away from others that do not. And this tendency is even couched in moral terms—basically, hear no evil.

Now, I might be accused of having too much faith, ironically, in the ability of human reason to divine the truth. Of course, human minds are not perfect. But this doesn't mean reason flies out of the window. As a scholar during the Enlightenment might say, God gave us a brain, so we should use it. Indeed, even speaking within the religious framework, when people talk glowingly about the "leap of faith", I'm not sure they know what they're talking about. They are often unaware that the concept is not such a central part of established Christian schools of thought. There is plenty of emphasis on reason and rationality, which, I should add, is why people traditionally asked for signs; they wanted evidence, and the desire for evidence to support your beliefs is manifestly rational.

Similarly, when some believers talk about concepts such as "spiritual war", they are unaware that the notion borders on the heretical. And it's bad enough that believers don't know enough about their own theology, there are some groups that have virtually no theological grounding! Thus, the problem of intellectual inexcellence constitutes a vast malady amongst believers—that of a lack of inquisitiveness. They are content to be told what they like to hear and to be told that they like to hear it. And this is supposedly justified by the concept of faith or "simple faith".

One might say that that's true for any system of beliefs. But you could change your political views, for example, and it might not cost you anything. On the other hand, if you're convinced that the matter concerns your immortal soul, the equation changes.

To be fair, I've known a few believers whom I respect greatly. However, these people seem to be rare exceptions, and that is why I'm not sure whether one can be religious and be open-minded at the same time. It's a fine balance, and even the most excellence-oriented believer is quite likely to trip up. After all, if there are two things that might be true and they contradict each other, you'd simply lean towards whichever one your faith dictates.

So, as Kierkegaard was, I am sceptical towards the idea of congregations or indeed of organised religion. If a community of believers is supposed to help you nurture your faith, it certainly hasn't done mine any favours with what I've seen; so what's the point? Unlike Kierkegaard, however, I'm not willing to make the leap of faith. My willingness to learn seems to overcome that.

The veiled truth

2010-01-31T21:28:00.000-08:00

What I'm going to talk about this time is certainly a controversial topic. And I think must state clearly that this is my opinion. I don't like saying that because I don't like how opinions are commonly regarded (i.e. as either equally right or equally wrong). But as I cannot claim to have a very informed opinion on this matter, it's better to be humble when there's reason to be, isn't it?

Recently, France has moved towards partially banning the burqa in public places. Of course this has provoked both outrage and approval, often across traditional political lines. I'm not exactly going to take a side on this issue, since my own position straddles both sides of the debate somewhat. I think that this is not a good move, especially with how it has been portrayed by its proponents—I'm not a fan of European views on foreign cultures and integration. However, I don't agree with those who say that this is a clear violation of the freedom of conscience as I disagree that the veil is Islamic.

And I say that because I have a generally positive view of Islam, which can be more progressive than Christianity in issues of social justice (as the Christian conservative majority seeks to prove daily). The notion of an Islamic veil, therefore, sits uncomfortably with me.

Ultimately, the argument boils down to whether hadiths should be seen as binding and what implications this has on one's faith and devotion. In the article, an imam answers the former in the negative, stating there is nothing in the Quran that directs women to cover their faces. And I agree with him. I think that Islam is primarily based on the Quran and that hadiths, as a secondary source on the words and deeds of the Prophet, are a matter of tradition. Thus, I don't think they can be binding, and they should certainly not reflect on the strength of one's faith and devotion.

However, as a more detailed treatment of Islamic doctrine is beyond my ability, I shall offer a logical and ethical argument for this view. There are, I'm sure, many practices based on religious traditions that are uncontroversially disallowed in modern societies. Female genital mutilation is one good example. Of course, not all of them are based on such an old and supposedly weighty set of traditions. But if an ancient and important religious authority did prescribe the practice of female genital mutilation, does that make it more acceptable? (Of course, this question presumes at least some degree of moral realism; I am assuming that we don't think something is right just because people think that it is, or that moral statements merely reflect our emotions)

I also find it disturbing that people are using the notion of freedom to support repressive ideas and practices. Is the veil even really worn for the purposes of modesty today? Cultural norms have changed, and I think the only reason why the veil remains in a lot of places is the patriarchal traditions that some Muslims subscribe to. Besides, if it is about modesty, why do men not wear it as well?

The only good thing that I've heard about it (found here) is that it potentially renders the issue of female looks irrelevant to career prospects in jobs that don't technically require good looks. However, communities that place great importance on it also don't tend to value women's education and work as much as men's. That certainly has implications on the notion that it serves as a gender equaliser.

And as with any other issue, to shout about freedom in arguing for the acceptance of repressive things is inherently contradictory. The logical conclusion of such a view would be akin to the extreme libertarian view, as espoused by Robert Nozick, that someone is free to sell him/herself into slavery. The contradiction in such a line of thinking should be clear, and if we subscribe to the notion of fundamental rights we cannot at the same time think that people can give them up. If that is the case, they wouldn't be 'fundamental'; the argument is thus self-defeating.

Hence, also noting that the ban is after all only partial, I disagree with a lot of the criticisms of this move. But, having said that, I do think that it is misguided in the way it has been conceived and recommended. Even if equality is to be merely paid lip-service, the legislation shouldn't have been expressly aimed at Muslims. Otherwise, it sends a message that xenophobia plays a part in the decision. And if you like to think in slippery slopes, you can imagine what sort of precedent this might set on the issue of integration.

The Importance of Being Destructive

2010-01-20T16:51:00.000-08:00

People say there is no such thing as a free lunch. Surprisingly, the very same people who might say something like that often seem to expect it.

Let's not talk about corporate bailouts and taxpayer-funded bonuses. That's too much of a fish in a barrel (though it's a large fish that manages to swim away nonetheless). Let's talk about public action, in the sense that the public takes action to negotiate—diplomatically or otherwise—with the authorities.

I've written some time ago that people must organise themselves to fight for their interests, and that legality is not a necessary moral consideration because of the imperfections of the legal system. The angle I'm going to take here is similar but slightly different. It can be encapsulated by a question: What are the ethics of public action?

And, to go straight to the point, I will ask another question: What is the moral worth of representative democracy if the representatives are not willing to, first and foremost, present the interests of the people they represent but are overwhelmingly concerned about being 'constructive'?

Certainly, there are valid considerations that call into question the idea that you must do exactly as the people you represent wish. What if you think that what they want isn't in their interest or is morally wrong? But the issue is not quite so complex here. The issue is whether the desire to be constructive trumps the proper presentation of a legitimate concern of the public.

Well, unlike in what seem to pass for public campaigns these days, the ethics of public action should not be based primarily on etiquette. Whether you are seen as being polite or positive should not be considered ahead of doing what is necessary to push for the interests of the people you are representing. This isn't business, and the fact that business etiquette has bled into politics is quite alarming.

The issue remains when it's the public itself that is overly concerned about the tone of the negotiations. Essentially, the point is you are either prepared to do some tough bargaining if it proves necessary, or you won't change anything. Being positive is not a trump card and asking for charity is seldom going to work. There's no free lunch, remember?

Or is that an excuse for some things only?

But going deeper than that, being constructive means accepting the framework that is imposed by those in positions of power. And by doing so, you are often being put on the defensive when you should be on the offensive.

To take an example from real life, the fact that students pay (sometimes exorbitant) fees for their education is a fact. Hence, that the executives making decisions for the university feel that they are free to increase those fees while cutting services should not, from every reasonable perspective, simply be accepted. It should be resisted as far as possible by the students. However, by choosing to be strictly 'constructive', a student union that is supposed to fight for their interests has already given up half the fight. By doing so, it is assuming a weaker position and is relying on the goodwill of the executives to grant concessions on a matter where there is a conflict of interest between the students and the university. And how such a body can thereafter retain the claim to represent students is beyond me.

On the contrary, the ethics of public action should demand that the necessary actions be taken to fight for the interests of the public. And if that means having to be less constructive and even destructive, so be it.

However, we must note that being destructive does not necessarily mean being physically destructive. In many cases, physical destruction is unwarranted and morally wrong. Rather, being destructive means the opposite of being constructive, and that is not to accept the imposed framework, rejecting it from the democratic perspective of the people's right to decide their affairs. For what is the moral worth of democracy if the people are merely suppliants bound by codes of conduct, amongst other fetters? Similarly, the ethics of public action must be closely tied to the public itself, the subject and the object of public action.

Now, having rejected the imposed framework, negotiations might come to an impasse. And this is where we return to the subject of tough bargaining. Only when you are able to threaten the prevailing order will you have any basis for negotiations. Only when you are willing to commit fully to your own cause will you get anything. To think otherwise is naive and irresponsible.

There are other reasons for declining rates of political participation in some liberal democracies, but the impotence of the public, its inability to effect the desired changes, certainly plays a part.

After all, if we can only go as far as it's polite to do, then we're only going to be politely declined. So what's the point?

The Prestige

2010-01-06T18:28:00.000-08:00

There's plenty to hate about pop culture. I'm sure all that can be said has been said and is being said again, even by the same people who embrace it daily. Also, I personally don't hate pop culture. I'm fascinated by it to some extent. I think the feeling that it should sometimes inspire is not so much hate (contempt, perhaps, when you're faced with its excesses). Rather, I think the occasional feeling towards it should be fear.

Why be afraid? Well, because of its power and its blindness. And while the weight of its mass is blind, it is controllable and is controlled. On one hand, it expresses the fickleness of public opinion. On the other, it reeks of the real possibility of moulding and pushing that ephemeral opinion one way or another. Moreover, this is done under an appealing visage of individuality and 'culture'.

Take the death of Michael Jackson as an example. Just before it happened, he was a joke, a figure receiving of laughter and contempt in the public consciousness. He was hated for being a likely paedophile, reviled for opting to disfigure himself to change his skin colour and labelled as a has-been. That was the kind of image that the media portrayed.

And then he died. Suddenly, he was a star again. He was remembered as the king of pop, not the has-been that he had just been regarded as. His unsavoury lifestyle and habits were forgotten amidst a worldwide phenomenon of mourning. And that is itself phenomenal. People suddenly acted as if he was a hero, as if he was universally loved for his contributions. But what has he done to merit such an image? Can he really be considered a heroic figure?

So what could explain such a turnaround? What else, if not the fact that people buy readily into hype? And hype is just one face of the manipulation of public opinion that pop culture facilitates and disguises. Behind the phenomena, there are people who want you to think this or that at their whim. One day you're allied with Eurasia and at war with Eastasia; tomorrow, you're suddenly allied with Eastasia and at war with Eurasia – and that is accepted with hardly a blink!

Don't you get a shudder when you think of this? But perhaps you wouldn't, simply because such an incredible leverage is not used for overtly sinister purposes. Why, at most these controlling interests ultimately want you consume this or that, right?

But, once again, that is only one face of the whole machinery, a vast apparatus that is also perpetuating all sorts of problems across the world. And that is because it is an amoral force, a force motivated by objects and concepts that are not even actual objects except by the tacit acknowledgement of people who want them to be. It is an inhuman force.

In this instance, however, the force appears very much human. Pop culture is frequently about celebrating individuality, about expressing yourself. It is called culture. Yet it is one that is mass produced, packaged and marketed to as many people as possible. It celebrates the same 'individual' identities that many celebrate, and also that certain people want you to celebrate. It appears as some sort of social consciousness, but it is one that is very much controlled by large profit-oriented private interests. Clearly, it is paradoxical and absurd.

I guess the fear really lies in the thought that this might be both the present and the future, the idea that we could be watching an unending show that sickens us. And that is because society is unable to break free from the mechanisms behind the phenomena. We watch, engrossed for a while, but as soon as we care to look into it, we realise the trick. And with horror we witness how it captures the audience again and again.

Perhaps they want to believe what they are seeing.

Are you watching closely?

Santayana Night

2009-12-31T09:38:00.000-08:00

It's new year's eve again, and I feel no compunction to join the merry-makers out there. As it would often seem to me, New Year's Day is just another day. Why would I suffer the vicissitudes of a crowded night in anticipation of it?

This year, though, I do feel that the coming of the year has some sort of significance—perhaps as a celebration of the passing of days past and of hope for the future?

Well, you're likely to reap what you've sowed for the past year or even earlier, so you shouldn't be too surprised at what's coming. And wishing for luck is meaningless. I just don't like the vague idea of hope, without a good reason behind it, as it soon translates disappointment—as many will find out once again.

Maybe, for this year, the fact that the new millennium is entering into its teens is a fact worth celebrating? After all, when will you see a 9-year-old millennium turn 10 again? But, the interesting idea aside, does that really make a difference?

It seems hard to find much significance when the coming of the year does not by itself bring about change. But I think I found a good and simple answer.

Ultimately, the greatest meaning that could be ascribed to the occasion lies not so much in looking towards the new year as in looking at the passing one. And it's not to look at the past for some sort validation for present decisions on the future, but to look at past mistakes and to learn from them.

I think that's what new year resolutions amount to if they're any good at all—you tell yourself not to repeat the mistakes of the past year (or years). That's much more concrete and meaningful than having a vague and ephemeral hope for the coming year, or a determination to do a random assortment of things that you don't have much reason to believe you would end up doing. It gives a genuine reason to be hopeful.

And with that in mind, I hope you have a happy new year.

He who controls the past...

2009-12-16T23:14:00.000-08:00

I just remembered an article I read a few months ago that talks about how and why Singaporeans are forward-looking and orientated towards the future.

Basically, the article says that because Singapore does not really have a glorious founding history to look back to (its independence was viewed with a sense of disaster and failure – i.e. failure to unify with Malaysia), Singaporeans are forced to forge a sense of national identity that is always focused on future possibilities for the nation.

Quite the bon mot there. Unfortunately, just as the article talks about myth-making, this is itself a myth.

Singapore is forward-looking inasmuch as policy makers and government planners make plans (or try to) for the future. But how many people are involved in making such decisions? Many Singaporeans don't even get to vote on who should represent them.

The truth is Singaporeans are always justifying their choices with reference to the past. How many times have we both heard and argued that we can be sure the current government or system is the right one because of its track record? Even the article suggests the same notion: Look at what we've built – surely that means we're making the right choices?

Even discounting the fact that the article itself argues for the unreality of the time present as such (to Singaporeans, it is merely "an incidental passage towards time future"), it is a mistake to be too focused on the successful present. Present success has little bearing on present decisions. It can only validate past decisions. The economic accomplishments of Singapore are not due to decisions made today or even yesterday, but decisions made as far back as decades ago.

The rationale that you make certain decisions today because similar decisions made in the past have proven to yield good results today is not self-sufficient logic – it is not necessarily the best way to make decisions. Since the consequences of today's decisions lie in the future and are unverifiable, we cannot simply make judgements based on the empirically verifiable. We also need to question the reason behind our decisions today, keeping in mind that the present is different from the past.

It is a matter of fact that Singaporeans persist in following the ways of the past because those worked. They don't find it necessary or urgent to question such assumptions in light of the fact that 2009 is very different from 1969, to consider that maybe it's time to change their political outlook for the future of the country. Moreover, there is a perpetual wealth of self-congratulatory messages, while criticisms tend to either be confined to the trivial or dismissed as dismissive of the achievements of the nation thus far.

If the article can say that every National Day Singaporeans come together to look towards the future of the nation, we can equally say that every Election Day they come together to put their confidence in the past.

I wonder which is more significant.

An expensive naiveté

2009-12-13T18:57:00.000-08:00

I read with some amusement a student-written editorial in a campus newspaper. It deals with the issue of cutting bankers' bonuses, and its conclusion is that we shouldn't because we will lose out if we do. It makes me wonder if it's not the case that at least one of the writers is an aspiring banker.

I call into question the article's portrayal of a symbiotic relationship between bankers and society. Yes, they generate income, provide capital that ultimately creates jobs and etc. But this is a bit like saying you need your abusive husband because he earns money. Sometimes, you have to weigh whether the abuse you get is better than being independent, though no doubt the latter will be hard.

I say this because of two fundamental problems with bankers and their performance. First, there is no balance between risk and reward. Everybody wins when the times are good, especially bankers, with their large bonuses. However, when things take a turn for the worse because of the latter's decisions, society is left to foot the bill. Sure, plenty of bankers lost their jobs, but that's after they have profited massively from the bubbles they created. Besides, many others who were not in the driver's seat of crisis creation also lost their jobs. Is it surprising that people are angry, especially when the bankers want to keep their bonuses despite all this?

And aren't the trillions that taxpayers have spent to bailout the banks a good enough demonstration of a lopsided relationship? Privatising the gains and socialising the losses – that's a good description of current practice.

Second, bankers' performance is overrated. The article says that bonuses "should be directly linked to a bankers’ long-term performance and should not reward reckless risk taking". But the point is that's not how they work. Bankers are rewarded for the right results regardless of whether they did it right. They get the money as soon as they show that they are turning a profit. The large bonuses are not given only after they can show many years of consistent results, the ultimate proof of good performance. That wouldn't be something the bankers want either, and hence they would also quit. Thus, the article's call for not cutting bankers’ bonuses can only mean one thing, and that is the continuation of a broken system.

The conclusion that I draw is therefore very different: We should cut their bonuses until the bankers have something to show for them. Otherwise, all we are doing is incentivising bad behaviour. It might be hard to cut a hand off, but we should if it turns out to be gangrenous.

Utilitarianism as common sense

2009-11-30T22:27:00.000-08:00

Coursework is coming to a head, so I'm just going to jot down a quick one.

Sometime last week I encountered a utilitarian objection to John Rawls' difference principle. It is put forward by economist John Harsanyi and goes like this:

Consider a society consisting of two individuals. Both of them have their material needs properly taken care of, but society still has a surplus of resources left over. This surplus can be used either to provide education in higher mathematics for individual A, who has a truly exceptional mathematical ability, and has an all-consuming interest in receiving instruction in higher mathematics. Or it could be used to provide remedial training for B, who is a severely retarded person. Such training could achieve only trivial improvements in B’s condition (he could perhaps learn how to tie his shoelaces) but presumably it would give him some minor satisfaction. Finally, suppose that it is not possible to divide up the surplus resources between the two individuals. The difference principle would require that these resources be spent on B’s remedial training, since he is the less fortunate of the two individuals. In contrast, both utilitarianism and common sense would suggest that they be spent on A.

This scenario is quite absurd, and hence I disagree that it can yield any satisfying conclusion. In a society with only two individuals, I contend that it makes little sense to give surplus resources to one person just on the basis that it would produce greater satisfaction by allowing him to learn something not directly translatable into practical advantages. Why would it matter? Why would the person care about satisfaction that can be gained from learning higher mathematics? What is the point?

In reality, people gain satisfaction for tangible reasons. A person is likely to gain satisfaction from learning higher mathematics because it allows him to further his own interests in the context of living in a complex society. Even if it is purely out of passion, it would be a passion that he seeks to share with other people (who are able to appreciate his abilities) in various ways. I find it difficult to imagine a hermit gaining much satisfaction from learning mathematics while living alone in a cave. While that may be possible, it would be the exception and not the rule.

Hence, there is no reason to hold on to a moral rule that demands that we always choose the option that we perceive as leading to higher satisfaction. Estimates of satisfaction are complex and are likely to have a social dimension. In situations like that which is described above, the choice is not a moral choice but an arbitrary one. Sticking to the utilitarian rule in this context only seems silly and not at all common sense.

In this sense, utilitarianism may be good at giving us directions, but I'm not sure those would lead us anywhere.

God is dead, but we do not know it

2009-11-19T10:12:00.000-08:00

A while ago I talked about my scepticism towards concepts like Corporate Social Responsibility. While it's not nowadays considered nice or constructive to be dismissive of such things – we are dismissing all the good that do exist in the world, they would say – I think I gave a good enough explanation of why those are inherently absurd. But allow me to elaborate on it, with a view to what we can do.

What I'm going to say might not sound new here, but I hope it's a coherent synthesis of the ideas I have expressed, delivered concisely at a particular angle of social commentary.

A few centuries ago, it might have been feasible to appeal to a traditional regard for virtues or a sense of honour and responsibility in the powerful – noblesse oblige, the responsibility of those who have. That was a world of stratified social relations based on feudal or patriarchal links. There were strong forces of tradition that prescribe relationships between a someone of higher rank and someone of lower rank, relationships generally involving responsibility and even compassion on one side and loyalty on the other. Appeals to the ideas associated with such traditions would thus make perfect sense.

Now, I'm not looking at history with nostalgic glasses. Of course, there were plenty of inherent injustices in the old stratified societies. What I'm trying to point out is the anachronism of a method with respect to the times.

The rise of the classical liberals has destroyed the old forms of society. Social relations are no longer to be forged out of customs and slavish adherence to associated ideas. Rather, as Adam Smith suggested, they are to consist of mutual relations of self-interest. This is the bourgeois revolution. Fetters of tradition and its morality were to be removed to allow all men (and eventually women) to advance their own interests to a potentially unlimited extent. The rule of law is to be established to keep things in order, but no longer are people bound by prescribed roles and responsibilities.

The only duty one owes is to the state, the embodiment of the social contract. But the rhetoric of loyalty and virtue that is still frequently used sits uncomfortably with the new direction of political philosophy. Strictly speaking, we have a duty to the state not because of some traditional moral concept or other, but because we are bound by the common interest in a stable society.

This arrangement sounds fine and well. However, the role of the state is still a grey area. We know why the state is there, but is the existence of a raison d'être enough?

In practice, the state needs to perpetually affirm its purpose and existence through its acts, which interfere even with our daily lives. A state that does not act is a state that no one has faith in; it is naturally one that will subsequently cease to exist. Some people might wish to say otherwise, but reality attests to the fact that the only viable states are states that act. And so what the state ends up doing is a matter of concern, and with it comes the question of its role and responsibilities.

The problem, as in the case of other legal entities such as corporations, is with the fact that the state is not a person. The state is a machine consisting of multitudes of individuals and bureaucratic apparatuses with non-human systemic considerations, likely controlled by certain interests that are themselves collective groups. The state has legally-defined responsibilities, but an appeal to its sense of responsibility or to its moral sense is useless. What you might expect to move a monarch or a lord is not likely to move a modern state with highly distributed powers, especially since it is constructed from relations of mutual self-interest.

As such, appealing to morality – that might work on some individuals within the system, but it would be absurd to expect it to move the system as a whole. Chances are, that way, we will be hung out to dry waiting for our concerns to be addressed satisfactorily.

If we assume a system that is somewhat just, as Rawls does, relying on the state's legally-defined responsibilities would be enough. But I fail to see how a state that is, in reality, perpetually in the stranglehold of particular interests would ever realistically be just enough. We only need to look at the state of the world to confirm this: How many people remain hungry, poor and oppressed just because certain interests have to be kept satisfied, even in liberal democracies (keeping in mind, of course, the effect one nation has on another)?

And, if what I have said so far is correct, the satisfaction of the concerns of those who are unjustly treated cannot be achieved merely by appealing to old concepts and traditions of morality. In a society built on mutual self-interest, you are pretty much responsible for advancing your own interests. This is why those who are oppressed must organise themselves as a force to fight for their interests.

But should they act only within legally-defined limits?

I believe that they cannot always do so. Ideally, we would want obey the law to preserve stability in the society for everyone's benefit. However, the resources at the disposal of the powerful make attempts to effect change through the prescribed channels very difficult. The playing field is far from level. Thus, it is unreasonable to expect us to only exercise our political freedom by voting in elections and appealing to our political representatives. We need other avenues, the most drastic of which is revolution. This is the practical argument for extra-legality. And since the same argument applies to the constitution, which is not necessarily just, extra-legality really amounts to extra-constitutionality.

Now, I do believe that the virtues are not completely lost. Otherwise, I could easily be construed as envisioning a world moved entirely by the force of might. However, in order to be able to appeal to them effectively, we have to take people out of their modern (liberal) institutional contexts. We have to appeal to human beings, the timeless individuals, not to citizens, soldiers or politicians. And this is the essence of the moral argument for extra-constitutionality – we do not adhere merely to the laws, but also to common moral concepts that hopefully have not died out. The moral appeal would strengthen the movement. However, before the movement can speak on such a level, it has to be able to operate on a level beyond the constitutional (i.e. in keeping with the practical argument). Otherwise, it would be trapped by the legal realist loop that smothers moral thinking.

In effect, what I espouse is a belief in the freedom to fight. Neo-liberals and free marketeers believe in free competition. But, as much as they might want to deny it, they are stuck within their own rigid systems. To be truly for liberty, we cannot advocate only a free market for products. We must advocate, above all, a free market for ideas and the political actions of individuals.

Conflict of interest is a circumstance of justice, and the lack of a viable conflict of interest in real life is an indication that something is wrong. A political system where we can only vote for parties with few differences between them is recipe for perpetual injustice. We must bring back other avenues of pressing for our interests, even if they are illegal. And we must appeal to human beings outside of the control of the modern state to fight in the name of what is good and just. This is the vision of justice as struggle and dialectics.

It is what it takes to strive for justice in the kind of society we live in.

Big faith, small minds

2009-11-10T09:58:00.000-08:00

A week or two ago, the blog of someone I know received an unexpected comment. Some unknown dude (I shall presume it's a guy, since he sounds like one) seemed to have found the blog and commented, on the entry that talks about moving away from home for the year, that the author sucks and must be "a closet gay".

Well, I don't see what could justify such a comment to begin with. Is any personal reflection a sign of someone being a closet gay?

Another funny thing is the idiot seemed to have done this at work, without being aware that his IP address could be traced to his office. And apparently he works for Firebrand Interactive Ltd at North Bridge Road. Sounds like a pretty regular office worker.

So we can tentatively establish that some Singaporean office workers are juvenile. But the fact that he used the word "gay" in a derogatory manner also indicates that he is intolerant towards a sexuality that is different from his own. And I guess it would not be news to anyone who knows Singapore to say that many Singaporeans are intolerant in the homophobic sense.

Personally, I have little tolerance for the intolerant, but I like how John Rawls puts it: In the absence of a real threat to liberty, we should tolerate the intolerant because we shouldn't act unjustly just because others act unjustly. Moreover, a society that tolerates people who have no title to complain about intolerance towards them (because they preach intolerance themselves) might have a civilising influence on them over time.

In other words, we don't try to outlaw them like they try to outlaw others because we're civilised people, unlike them.

But I'm a Marxist, so I do believe that we should fight back. And we can do so by aggressively questioning the rationale of their political crusade. I'm confident that there is no way institutionalised homophobia is defensible in a modern and secular country. Who said it is immoral and why? Why is it unnatural? The clothes you wear are unnatural – do you propose having them banned for being unnatural? These are just basic questions that I've never heard a homophobe give satisfactory answers to.

And, even under the purview of freedom of speech, there are reasonable limits. Freedom of speech is not an excuse, for one, to have someone in a public position run away with her mouth. Leadership is, after all, supposed to carry responsibility, right? What would happen if public leaders started talking about their reservations regarding certain ethnic groups? What effect would that have on the society?

But I've written on this before, so besides the few points that I've raised here, I would like to leave the intolerant with something they do deserve – ridicule.

I bet they haven't spent much time thinking about what they believe. Maybe only prayed hard about it.

Notes from the underground

2009-10-24T16:12:00.000-07:00

A very common accusation made against the left-wing is that it is too idealistic. Communism fails to take into account human nature, they like to say – it's just too impractical.

Those who are fashionably or vacuously apathetic might be especially fond of this criticism. Moreover, according to many of these people, left-wingers and 'liberals' aren't just dreamers, they are also "self-righteous" bores who are always "pontificating".

As a matter of fact, there seems to be an inherent contradiction when one says that Marxism is "idealistic". Marx is said to have turned Hegelian dialectics on its head (or back on its feet) when he transformed it from an idealist to a materialist approach. Marxists generally see matter, not ideas, as the beginning and end of reality.

So why is Marxism labelled as "idealistic"? Well, you might say, that just means that it focuses on an ideal state or has an ideal state of society as its end.

What about democracy, then? Is it not essentially an ideal state of society? A few centuries ago, many would have laughed at those who extolled the virtues of democracy. It's too ideal, they'd say – the people are too unruly to rule themselves. Compare that to the common perception of it today. Many of the same people who would dismiss Marxism as too idealistic are likely to chide authoritarian regimes for being undemocratic. There's at least a tad bit of irony there, don't you think?

But democracy doesn't really have an ideal end, you might now say. It's an achievable state that has been realised and isn't aimed at creating a utopia.

Well, has it been achieved? Is the democratic process not ongoing, repeated regularly in the form of voting exercises? Does it not have to constantly face forces that seek to usurp its procedures, perhaps even powers that want people to choose to be unfree? Is it not always in conflict with the bureaucracy, the state within the state that has its own aims and its own way of doing things?

Democracy, therefore, is an end in itself, and one that will never be 'achieved' in the simple sense of the word. Democracy is a constant struggle.

And so is socialism.

Orthodox deterministic Marxism does lay claim to a scientific view that presages an inevitable Communist society, which is preceded by a period of 'socialism', a dictatorship of the proletariat. And Leninism goes on to say that this period is brought about by a revolutionary party. But these set paths and clear milestones are not necessary elements of Marxism or of its method of historical materialism.

Some Marxists believe in the constant struggle and conflict for a just society – a class struggle, the dialectics of society. Just as the struggle for democracy never really ends, this struggle is perpetual. We make no predictions or promises about a specific kind of utopian society at the end. We know, however, that struggle is the way to progress, that entrenched traditions of injustice have to be gradually worn down. And our end is the human being, who is deserving of equality and dignity.

Gradual progress is not impossible progress. It does not call for world revolution. I believe in working within the constraints of parliamentary government, in working autonomously as individuals in resisting exploitation, as well as in extra-constitutional methods – we can and should use whatever means is necessary and beneficial without contravening the over-riding principle: The equality and dignity of human life. We work towards an end, but we do not specify a particular situation as the outcome, much less do anything and everything to achieve that outcome. Marxism isn't about gulags and purges. Marxism should be humanist and highly realistic.

So, again, what is it about the left that is so idealistic? Choosing the status quo is not being realistic. Left-wingers are the genuine realists because they are attuned to reality and the great suffering that is present, which motivates them to fight for change. They are also realists because they believe that real material life is too important to be dictated by abstract ideas. Reality bears down upon us like an inexorable force. Hunger demands food; tiredness demands rest; discomfort demands alleviation. So when we are told that we have to face poverty and deprivation because of some concept or other, we find it difficult to accept, and we fight. And that is to face reality. That is what it really means to be realistic.

Now to those apathetic types, according to whom we are always "pontificating" and being merely "faux intellectual", there's not very much that needs to be said. Of course, such comments do not constitute criticism, merely some brash lashing out that likely hides an inferiority complex. And if such comments apply to us, they would apply to anyone who has argued for anything, such as in academics. Have such comments enough merit to invalidate whole fields of inquiry, just because these people have no mind for arguments?

But I think we should be quite sympathetic to them. After all, we are opposed to the real faux intellectuals – the 'experts' who treat ideas and unintelligible categories as science. In any case, the left-wing position should not be difficult to grasp. If everything else is ignored, an essential principle can still be easily understood, one that a fireman adheres to everyday: People first, property and wealth later.

The tragedy of the Gracchi

2009-10-09T12:17:00.000-07:00

This is a sad story of political repression.

Repression always makes for a sad story, no matter what they would have you believe. That might sound amazingly obvious to those accustomed to living in a free society, but in authoritarian ones, things get rather muddled. Repression leads to stability and prosperity, the official tune goes. If the government and the people had to deal with politics, they would have less time to concentrate on the economy.

That is utterly simplistic, of course. There is no reason why healthy political discourse cannot contribute to greater stability and prosperity. As a matter of fact, political accountability is an important factor in creating stability and prosperity in the most economically developed nations. And how do we have real accountability without healthy political discourse?

Certainly, the happy story of repression is a way to justify control.

Recently, five activists in Singapore were acquitted of "participating in a procession without a valid permit", a charge brought against them for simply walking down the street with slogans written on their T-shirts. A small victory, perhaps, but what should concern people is the fact that an assembly of more than four people is illegal. Worse, the law has been changed to ban any gathering of people that is in any way political, no matter the number. And that, supposedly, is for security reasons.

I really doubt that docile Singaporeans are going to riot, especially a mere handful of them.

What seems clear is that such laws are part of a long tradition of political paranoia.

On that note, let's assume for a while that the authorities are right. Let's say that even without hostile armies ravaging its countryside like in the Russian Civil War, a country needs to crack down on dissent in order to establish a semblance of stability. How long can such a circumstance last before all legitimate reasons evaporate if the country is not to be considered a failed state?

It's like taking a loan to keep afloat. Perhaps necessary in the short run, but if one does it for 40 or 50 years, one creates an unhealthy dependence, if one is not already bankrupt.

How long has it been since Singapore needed to be paranoid about dissent? If the authorities think that they have always been doing well, why are they so afraid? And a few decades ago, they had the cover of the Cold War. Now, with the Communists out of the way, the country that stands for freedom still doesn't bat an eyelid when its ally persists in its own internal Cold War against freedom.

It is said that politics is the art of the possible. I think politics is an art where any absurdity is possible.

But what's so bad about crushing dissent if things are working fine, you might ask. The first sign of a problem is the lack of substance in the political discourse. As differing opinions are suppressed and people are indoctrinated in the official line, no effective opposition remains to put the government in check when it is blundering into a catastrophe.

Such conditions have become an entrenched reality in Singapore. A small group of elites from the same schools and institutions are constantly being pulled into the government, which is essentially synonymous with the ruling party. People who dare speak out are hit with charges of libel and various legal-political methods of silencing them. As a result, people become reluctant to speak, and whoever is not co-opted is generally unable to match the intellectual muscle of the ruling group. The political culture is dead. The existing ideas are the ideas of the ruling class, and they exist to reinforce the position of the ruling class.

Hubris and bad luck are the only ingredients needed for a disaster.

So what can be done in this situation? Perhaps change has to come slowly; perhaps gradual change can happen. Or perhaps there will be an explosion of discontent one day; perhaps there will be crowds in the streets, trying to effect immediate change.

When that happens, will the rulers themselves march out to club their opponents to death? If they are determined to continue writing the story of repression, yes, they would.

And if they succeed, the blood on their hands would merely be what is needed to grease the economy.

Is there hope?

2009-10-06T08:40:00.000-07:00

To those less enamoured of the economic realities of the world today, things might seem pretty bleak.

We've witnessed the destruction wrought by the big risk-takers and deregulators, those who stand for an unblinking faith in 'experts' and suit-wearing leaders; those who oppose all fetters in the name of freedom, and who think that the consequent risks can be managed.

Yet it's unlikely that these people will go away. There is a renewed consciousness of the need for regulation and moderation, but business culture remains as people continue to buy into it. There's a persistent love for the well-dressed, for achievers, success stories and unlimited accumulation – the Faustian of Spengler actualised; a penchant for concepts and the infinite with little regard for reality.

Who can stand against the colossi who bestride the world, at whose legs we merely peep about to find ourselves dishonourable graves?

From my experience, the average Joe is typically of the opinion that the old Left is a thing of the past. Didn't Communism effectively end with the collapse of the Berlin Wall? And the more astute might observe that developments such as Reaganomics and Thatcherism, as part of a general shift towards the right in the developed world, indicate that capitalism has inexorably triumphed.

History has ended, and it ended at Wall Street.

Now the opposition, it seems, is chiefly between the Right and the New Left. The latter is an umbrella for various causes ranging from women's rights to environmentalism, causes that are frequently allied but do not form a unified front. Most coherently, it is embodied by people with progressive sensibilities who are labelled as 'liberals'. These people are opposed to the markedly right-wing but are often inherently capitalistic. Thus, they are perhaps best described as left-of-centre or even centrist.

Significantly, however, they do not have a strong opposition towards the fundamental characteristics of bourgeois-capitalist thinking. They are also frequently misled by positivism, by a tendency towards abstraction and spiritualism, or by a false sense of independence. Thus, in principle, they represent merely variations of the ideas of the ruling class.

And thus, from the perspective of political ideology, their opposition is not truly dialectical. Consequently, it cannot be truly transformative.

However, I submit that to think in such terms is to deviate from dialectical materialism. As Georg Lukács put it, "It is not men’s consciousness that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness." As I interpret it, this implies that the struggle against the social framework of naked capitalism follows from our economic conditions of existence. In effect, we have to look at what is made possible by economic stimuli that push people into action, rather than how ideological currents drive people.

Class struggle embodies the conflict between advancing mode of production and restraining social relations. I think the conflict is intensified when the prevailing social relations actually threaten to undermine the current mode of production. Witnessing the threat posed by modern capitalism to economic stability and survival is a wake up call for many people. Now more aware of dangers inherent in a 'free' market that is dictated by profiteering entrepreneurs, people are calling for greater regulation, smaller corporations, and the abolition of reckless risk-taking.

I think this should be regarded as a movement in the struggle. It has the potential to nudge the focus away from individuals, in the form of industry leaders, and towards the masses, brought about by greater state oversight and the increased strength of workers relative to smaller companies.

As such, I think anyone who is interested in social change should join hands and put their collective weight behind this development. Ideological currents do not often hold people together for long, and there is no use sitting down and waiting for a revolution. Marx himself seems to have disparaged Ultra-Leftists who refused to work with reformists. Left or New Left, we should be interested in improving the economic conditions of the masses, and this can be achieved in some measure by taking power away from the conmen and the charlatans who have controlled the government in past decades.

This could be a chance to undo past reverses and make another step forward.

As for the undying business culture, there is no need to resign ourselves to it. We must cultivate the seeds of resentment that have been sown. This is our side of the culture war. Now that the men in suits are down, albeit only slightly, it's time to press the advantage. We must again join forces with all who are of similar mind to show that the myth of the entrepreneurial Atlas is poison to economic well-being, that the world of business is not the world of the seeing, and that solidarity rather than selfish profit-seeking is the path of stable progress.

Let the precarious economic conditions of the day lead our way. There is hope in solidarity of action. And there is hope for a gradual progress towards a better society.

Walk the talk? That's all talk.

2009-09-30T03:51:00.000-07:00

I might sometimes be guilty of this myself, but I try hard not to be. I have very little respect for people who don't do as they say, people who don't keep their word. But, of course, at the same time, I'm not sure I like Chigurh-style honour either. I guess the choice is often between two evils. As they say, there is no such thing as a free lunch; no such thing, perhaps, as genuine kindness.

Another quip that is often repeated is "Talk is cheap". It sure is. It's much cheaper to talk about integrity than to actually practice it at the cost of giving up the advantages you get by being unprincipled. And, ironically enough, when some people are caught red-handed, they'd be full of it – they'd be full of remorse, warning others not to follow their example, reshaping themselves anew as moral leaders.

But what if they had never been caught?

On a related note, you might expect that I don't believe in things like Corporate Social Responsibility. Well, no surprises here – you'd be right on the money. Corporate Social Responsibility should have a new marketing name: Bull Fucking Shit.

By definition, corporations don't have any sense of social responsibility. Anything they do is for profit or for the bottom line. Why, a company is not an individual with a moral compass. It's a collectively profit-oriented entity composed of business people who employ workers. In fact, Adam Smith, the grandfather of capitalism himself, killed the idea of Corporate Social Responsibility centuries ago by stating that it is self interest that motivates people to work; that good arises out of selfishness by virtue of the invisible hand, which ordains that more social benefit will come out of it than loss.

Of course, today, it's all about dressing it up. The concept of the invisible hand is one of the earliest moral pretences that have been constructed to justify profit-seeking and selfishness in the consciences of people. Another example is the capitalist or conservative ethic: You 'deserve' every penny you earn and don't 'deserve' every penny you don't. In other words, poor people are generally lazy and morally bankrupt people, and that's why they are poor. Evidently, circular logic is sometimes needed to forget the nagging feeling that something isn't right.

And it's actually easy to see what is wrong, if only we'd wrest ourselves from our conditioning. When selling bread, the baker might not be concerned about feeding you, being concerned instead about getting paid. Nonetheless, the baker needs your custom and you need his bread. You exist within a community whose members are interdependent and are thus inevitably working for each other's benefit. Individualism and selfishness are the main reason why there is inequality and poverty. The invisible hand is a myth, and people, by the non-principle of selfishness, go on to create systems that seek to maximise their respective individual benefits even at a terrible price to others. Is the good of a Warren Buffet greater than the good of a hundred people without adequate health care? Is the good of one American or European greater than the good of a hundred Africans?

Therefore, all the moralising hides a serious moral lapse that was born when our imaginations took a leap of faith away from the reality of interdependence.

Speaking of morality, we can probably agree that lying is generally immoral. But is the alternative then to be honest?

Sometimes people have candid moments that betray their true interests, especially when pressed. At a recent conference, a business representative warned that more regulations against corruption would force companies to maintain profits by engaging in more corruption. In a letter to the newspaper, the Singapore National Employers Federation (ST, Sept 30) resisted calls to implement fair employment practices for women, particularly pregnant women, citing the need to maintain profits. These are moments of honesty where we can clearly see that companies are not interested in society insofar as it is not profitable to be.

Does their honesty make it better? The Singapore government argues that it is better than corrupt governments in the region because it is open about paying senior politicians astronomical salaries based on salary estimates of (overvalued) private sector executives, rather than letting them engage in backroom deals. Is it right in saying so?

I contend that being honest about it is no better. Exploitation is exploitation. Injustice is injustice. Dressing them up does not change the fundamental wrongs. The only better way is to say good things and act accordingly.

That said, on a personal level, I do appreciate people who do not mince their words. It is much less tiring to deal with even outright meanness than having to guess what people's true intentions are.

Unfortunately, if we do not engage with hypocrites, some of whom might be living around us, how many people and parties do we have left to deal with? Would we be able to do anything?

Looks like we all have to be willing accomplices in this nauseating game. Personally, I have to reserve my contempt to those who have proven themselves to be completely untrustworthy. Sometimes, or perhaps most of the time, there is no choice but to single out only the worst offenders.

Sometimes, it's hard to be optimistic about this world.