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Showing posts with label ideology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ideology. Show all posts

Singapore: Missing the Forest for the Fees

Posted by moses @ 00:04 • , , , , • 0 comments


This post is a social commentary I wrote as the editor of sociopolitical site Inconvenient Questions.

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There is an inherent tension between preservation and development. Has Singapore leaned too much towards development in its quest for economic progress? Could this tendency have eroded Singaporeans’ sense of connection to their country?

A controversy over building the Cross Island MRT Line through part of Singapore’s Central Catchment Nature Reserve flared up recently. The government has promised to consult the public and conduct careful studies before arriving at a decision, but some are not convinced that it is willing to compromise on cost.

Yet others are asking why nature lovers are so up-in-arms about this issue. Should they not be supportive of the government’s balanced approach? Are they just being irrational treehuggers?

Facts and practical arguments aside, and indeed those are not yet settled at this point, I can understand the groundswell of anger at the prospect of damaging the nature reserve. The feeling of loss is something that Singaporeans have often experienced with regard to their surroundings, and it may not get any easier each time.

As a Singaporean, one of the strategies for coping with life in Singapore is not to get too attached to your surroundings. You may love that spot, that structure, that area or that forest; the next thing you know, they might have been altered permanently or even removed.

The reasons for this can be both public and private. Spiralling rental costs have eliminated some of our favourite haunts—places like Borders bookstore at Wheelock Place, for example. Property developers keen to ensure ever-increasing rents have also gone to great lengths to ‘upgrade’ and change familiar surroundings.

In other instances, the inexorable march of public machinery—literally and figuratively— have ripped the living proof of our memories out of existence, such as in the case of the old National Library building. If part of the Central Catchment Nature Reserve will ultimately be damaged by the construction of a new MRT line, who should really be surprised at that outcome?



 A casualty of the ever-forward march of progress: The old National Library building. (Photo: Timothy)

Sometimes we may wonder whether all this is necessary or unavoidable. Certainly, the
authorities would be inclined to say “Yes”: We cannot afford to stay still, and the desire for
preservation has to be balanced with the need for development.

But if almost no place and no sliver of sentimental attachment is sacred, if we must always
be prepared to sacrifice these things at the altar of economic progress, then who can blame
people for feeling little connection to the country they live in?

Could we seek solace in artistic forms of expression? Has much of that not also been
meticulously pruned away to satisfy both a pragmatic worldview and a narrow vision of an
orderly society? So where else can we anchor our desire for meaning in being Singaporean
that goes beyond just our location and our passports?

For many of us, the answer would be family and friends—we want to live in Singapore
because they are here. But people are more mobile than ever, and communications
technology is getting better by the day. Not being here or not having a Singapore passport
does not necessarily mean losing touch with family and friends.

We may need the time and opportunity to be attached to our surroundings in order to better
appreciate what it means to live here and to be ‘locals’. Top-down feel good campaigns or
spontaneous exhortations to shout “Majulah!” can feel empty and forced. As important, if
not more important, to our sense of identity as a people are natural outgrowths of sentiment
stemming from the places, customs and languages that we live with—things that have all
been affected by at least one official campaign or another.

As things stand, the relationship for many is merely a marriage of convenience—if we really
question ourselves, how many of us are here only because the country is safe and
prosperous? What happens when there is a better prospect out there?

It is not that we can always choose to preserve everything, or that some trade-off between
identity and growth is not necessary. However, we must recognise our national ideology for
what it is; and hard pragmatism does not come without a cost. When we wonder why, as
some people do, potentially more than 50% of Singaporeans want to leave or why many
would not die for the country, we should acknowledge that the lack of personal connection
may be a price our nation pays for taking this path.

 Top image created by Liyana Yeo; photo of MacRitchie Reservoir by RickDeye.

It's Time

Posted by moses @ 05:00 • , , , , • 0 comments


With so many things that are happening and that have happened, I've decided to fire up my blog again.
Singapore is going into election day, and the media has been abuzz with election-related news and discussions. The parties in the opposition have received unprecedentedly positive attention this election cycle, and the role of social media in contemporary politics is undoubtedly the primary contributing factor.

My social media is full of messages in support of the opposition, although there certainly are enough supporters of the ruling party as well (especially the wealthier, conservative or typically apolitical people). It actually seems to have become quite a norm. And judging from the attendance at the opposition rallies, the sentiment on the ground is also pretty warm.

I think Singapore politics will see exciting days ahead. Like it or not, we are seeing a trend where we can expect more successful politicians to be those who have their ears closer to the ground. There are more debates among the public, and politicians of all stripes will have to be responsive to public sentiment, balancing traditional rationality with an appeal to citizens' passions.

But unlike conservative ideologues in Singapore, I will not hasten to trot out the label 'populism' here, because responsiveness and accountability to the electorate is part and parcel of a democratic system. 
Too often, modern audiences are fixated on procedural democracy—on the process of holding elections—as well as on the representative part of democracy. However, the traditional idea of democracy was not usually limited to having an elected aristocracy. In democratic thinking, the people are meant to have a say in how they are governed. There is populism, and then there is democracy; the latter does not necessarily translate to the former just because one party no longer has a free hand to rule as they see fit.

Understandably, many in Singapore will feel some trepidation about the opening of the floodgates. Are we as a society ready for the full democratic experience? Will we be able to maintain current levels of prosperity when the ruling party no longer dominates local politics with impunity?

No matter who is in charge, the future will remain uncertain. As the financiers say, past success is not indicative of future performance. For now, it's time to prepare ourselves for societal change.


Privilege and want: Unpacking the terms

Posted by moses @ 14:30 • , , • 0 comments


What is a legitimate want in our society?

Living in a materialistic society at once obsessed with survival and with accumulating wealth like Singapore, legitimate wants seem to stop at the fulfillment of one's basic material needs–one has no right to demand anything else beyond that, and what is excluded ranges from things like political freedom to self-fulfillment. Those who have the basic needs fulfilled are by definition speaking from a position of privilege and can therefore never claim to be wronged by the system.

But the fact of the matter is people want different things. Some may indeed be happy with a safe and mundane life where they just work and spend their money; others may not be. Labeling those who are not as "ungrateful" or asking them to leave is simply a demonstration of the inability to see outside of the box that you have placed your mind in.

Yes, in a society with a developed economy, all of us can be said to speak from a somewhat privileged position. Most of us are privileged in that we don't actually need to be overly concerned with our survival (despite the political scaremongering). Our issues can be described as, quite literally, 'First World problems'.

Be that as it may, the problem of having a narrow range of legitimate wants has to do the goals of national development. As long as the state ideology is predicated on the notion of development as a single-track route to economic prosperity, our state and our society would be unable to comprehend the multiplicity of human goals. And because of that, our society would continue to be keen on imposing the same goals for everyone. And this is precisely why, on one hand, people are feeling stifled and, on the other, there are retorts that label such people as "ungrateful".

So, in this light, perhaps we need to be careful in referring to issues beyond basic material needs as 'First World problems'. While it may conventionally be correct, the term is misleading at the same time, as it assumes that 'First World' is a kind of privileged position that everyone in the world aspires or must aspire to. That is manifestly untrue. Yes, it's nice to have good nutrition and an adequate wardrobe as a matter of course. But some people are willing to trade some luxury off for more fulfilling human experiences. I think this is a reasonable desire, and it cannot be dismissed by simply invoking privilege.


Film review: The Dark Knight Rises

Posted by moses @ 05:07 • , , , , , , , • 0 comments



I'd finally gotten round to seeing The Dark Knight Rises last month, and, frankly, I enjoyed it. As such, although the film—like Nolan's other works—did not leave me with much of a lasting impression, I will not be too critical of it, acknowledging the film for what it is: An encapsulation of Hollywood at its flashiest.

Certainly, one may detect proto-fascist undertones in the film. The Dark Knight Rises tells us, after all, that raw violence and not money or influence is the ultimate source of power—Bruce Wayne's wealth and position may get him all his fancy gadgets, but he could not defeat Bane until he trained himself up physically and prevailed against his adversary in a slugging match.

Nevertheless, I will not go as far as to say that The Dark Knight Rises' politics are regressive or backward. For one, the film strikes me as partly an attempt to articulate a contemporary brand of political consciousness; although it does so in a traditional comic-book-hero fashion, hence the seemingly more backward elements in its symbolisms. The film's favouring of muscle power over sophisticated methods could, for example, simply be explained by the film's comic book roots.

The Batman of the Nolan films is also very much a traditional comic book hero. He is basically benevolent, despite his psychological scars and his initial motivation to seek vengeance. And he fights for a supposedly universal sense of justice while remaining outside of the political and legal systems. The latter is an especially important aspect in The Dark Knight Rises, and it has been given a contemporary twist: The legal and political system of Gotham are structurally unable to solve the city's serious crime problem, and it's thanks to the work of a vigilante hero that the city is saved—a narrative that banks heavily on today's post-crises distrust of traditional institutions.

But Batman isn't just Batman; he is also Bruce Wayne, whose wealth and technological expertise can save the world in their own right. How he uses or does not use them is bound to be interesting. And it turns out that he chooses not to use them except in aid of his role as the vigilante hero—all because of his fear that someone might misuse whatever technological marvel he came up with that could, on the other hand, have untold benefits for humankind.

Not only that, while fighting crime as Batman, the wealthy and powerful Bruce Wayne does little or nothing to transform the legal and political systems that are part of Gotham's problem. As such, Bruce Wayne/Batman stands for the contemporary reluctance to rock the boat too hard, representing our bitterness towards the capitalist/democratic system that is, at the same time, tempered by an unwillingness to cast it aside. Nolan's Batman is thus the hero of today: A benevolent but broadly non-interventionist patriarch, shaking his head at the excesses of late capitalist society but letting it go on nonetheless, only scraping at the mould on the rotting meat. If anything, the world must be "ready" for utopia before it can be given it—or, more correctly, it must ready itself, because he is too cynical to help it along.

Where radical movement and revolution are represented in the film, they are portrayed as simply a big con job perpetrated by the terrorist Bane, who is not actually interested in emancipating the people. Even then, when Bane's motives are finally revealed, the film plainly steers clear of any portrayal of ideological conflict. The origins of the war (on terror) can ultimately be attributed to family drama, a perennial bourgeois favourite of a genre since when novels were the most prevalent form of mass entertainment.

Thus, it's difficult not to see the film as reactionary, a middle class abrogation of things like the Occupy movement, or perhaps even a vision in a Tea Party reverie with Bruce Wayne standing in for the Koch brothers. However, it is probably overstating the case to say, for example, that the film advocates fascist politics or plain old feudalism. After all, I would hesitate to attribute a nefarious genius to a politically-flat director like Nolan. Instead, I would suggest that the film was primarily made to entertain and, like many other films, to make money, and that its haphazard politics are merely an accident, the result of the film being made in contemporary times.

Thinking that way certainly helped me switch off and enjoy the mindless entertainment while it lasted.

We the Citizens

Posted by moses @ 18:16 • , , , , , , , • 0 comments


Doing some research on the public discourse surrounding last year's racist tram incident in the UK, I was prompted to ponder the rise of xenophobic sentiments in Singapore. 

As held in diaspora studies, there is no such thing as a mythical, unchanging homeland. A people's conception of their homeland is formed through experience: What you grow up knowing as your home will be the home that you know. That may seem obvious and tautological; yet people persist in perceiving their homeland as a thing unchanging, when, in reality, their conception of the homeland is simply that which they have learned.

As such, if you're used to the idea of a homogeneous or monocultural homeland, that is how you would conceive of your homeland; that is the image in which you might want to remake your country.

At the very least, Singaporeans are accustomed to the idea of multi-racialism. It has been drilled into us since we were young. Those with a libertarian bent may deride such education as plain indoctrination, but, in truth, it is hardly alien to the process of socialisation that every normal member of society goes through as he/she grows up. And it works. Of course, racism still exists, but there is no popular challenge to idea of Singapore as a multi-racial society.

Yet it has not saved Singapore from the tensions and culture shock associated with immigration, as immigrants from 'alien' cultures have become numerous enough to have a perceived impact on the local way of life. 

Further fuelling the tensions is the political situation, the official support for mass immigration, which sets up a bitter conflict between the authorities and citizens who feel that their grievances are being ignored. While I believe that an open immigration policy is, as typically held by liberal political philosophy, morally right, Singapore's immigration policy is firmly rooted in neoliberalism. In line with the country's ideology of 'pragmatism', immigration is to be supported on the basis of its necessity for economic growth. 

This ideology reduces not only immigrants into economic units, it does the same to the locals, who must embrace cutthroat competition. Wages are driven down and the economic worth of immigrants, especially that of the wealthy among them, is emphasised. The latter is clearly demonstrated by the Chinese evening daily's headline on the recent accident involving a reckless Ferrari driver from China. While hardly relevant to the tragic incident, the newspaper opted to announce the wealth and prestige of the driver first, perhaps to pre-empt local anger, ever-simmering as it was, towards Chinese immigrants. 

What the headline ends up doing is intensifying the existing social tensions, as locals once again feel that they are being treated as mere economic units whose worth is incessantly being compared to the immigrants'. And the fact that local media is tightly controlled by the authorities lends whatever the former prints an air of official legitimacy—it certainly means the authorities cannot conveniently push the blame away. 

Thus, the knee-jerk xenophobia among the public, while deplorable, should be understood as a by-product of the neoliberal race to the bottom, which has exacerbated social inequality in the name of economic growth. And as long as growth takes precedence over social justice and a fair distribution of rights and responsibilities, the government will continue to give ammunition to the xenophobes; which is a pity, since an open immigration policy could work without driving down local living standards and causing so much resentment, if only the government would speak the right language of multiculturalism, abandon the neoliberal religion and adopt better labour regulations. 

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

Posted by moses @ 07:26 • , , , , , , , • 1 comments


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.

Our worst enemy

Posted by moses @ 16:57 • , , , , , • 0 comments

 
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

Posted by moses @ 11:45 • , , , • 0 comments


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.