Tag Archives: Plato

The Passing of a Legend

23 Mon Mar 2015

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Lee Kuan YewIn the early hours of March 23, 2015, Lee Kuan Yew passed away at Singapore General Hospital; he was 91. Having dominated Singapore’s politics for over five decades – as prime minister from 1959, even before the city-state’s independence from Malaysia, to 1990 and then in a ministerial capacity until 2011 – Lee seemed virtually immortal. In his time at the helm, Lee transformed Singapore from a tiny tropical port city with no natural resources and a multicultural population to a glistening first-world metropolis with one of the highest per capita incomes in the world.

Lee was truly one of the great men of his era, though of a different sort from most leaders. He did not command vast armies nor did he possess enormous wealth; he did not seek the limelight nor did he shun it. In its early days, Singapore was as ridden with ethnic conflict (Maria Hertogh, 1964 Race Riots, 1969 Race Riots), linguistic differences (Malay, Tamil, English, Mandarin), and poor literacy as any of the other new post-World War II countries. Yet Lee was able to mould a functioning state from these disparate elements and foster prosperity among its citizens.

Lee’s remarkable record is even more poignant when juxtaposed with the results of the policies of the galaxy of new world leaders that emerged in the decolonisation of the 1950s and 1960s – Jawaharlal Nehru, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Soekarno, Kwame Nkrumah, Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong. Not one surpassed Yew in providing their citizens education, sanitation, the rule of law, employment, infrastructure, and security. Or aspiration. Singapore is today an inspiration for the countries in the region.

What marked Lee out from his early days as prime minister until his death was a clarity of thought and directness of speech few politicians ever exhibit. His utterances were always considered, never verbose, and substantial. Lee was never afraid to buck the trend – he spoke and acted with conviction that came from careful thought rather than opinion polls or outside influence. His model of governance, though it has come under much flak, was a peculiarly Asian understanding of the political process that was at once liberal yet restrictive, democratic yet paternal.

Lee offered – unintentionally, perhaps – those who wished to emulate him a style of politics that was a palatable alternative to the European model, one in which liberty did not mean license and decorum was insisted upon in public life. Graffiti, slander, and a media that reveled in mockery and reporting the prurient was not tolerated but the press was not muzzled as one might expect in an authoritarian state. However, harsh libel laws kept most publishers on edge. In fact, publishing houses were made to issue special “management shares” that carried more voting privileges than regular shares and these were held by Singaporeans appointed by the government. This gave the government influence in the media without taking it over completely. The ministers of Lee’s party, the People’s Action Party, defended this measure by arguing that not all ideas were worthy of consideration and undesirable ideologies or philosophies could not be allowed to infect the people of Singapore. Lee kept the foreign press was kept at bay, allowing them to report Singapore to the world and bring the world to Singapore but denying them the right to play a role as “invigilator, adversary, and inquisitor” of the Singaporean democratic process.

A famous example of Singapore’s libel laws is the case of lawyer and parliamentarian, JB Jeyaratnam. Lee relentlessly sued his opponent over every act of libel until Jeyaretnam was declared bankrupt and barred from standing for elections for a while. When asked about the incident in an interview, Lee merely pointed out that the libel laws apply to him as well and no one had ever sued him for libel. Dignity in the public sphere trumped the freedom of expression.

Lee’s Singapore did not believe in equality, at least as it is normally defined in the West. In fact, the late prime minister unequivocally rejected the notion. However, the state provided quality education, free up to a certain level, to give Singaporeans the opportunity to better their lot in life. Citizens were equal before law but social equality had to come from the character, conduct, and effort of the individual.

Lee inculcated a spirit of meritocracy and elitism among Singaporeans. For him, it was essential that the best man for a job do it; after all, the rulers must be beyond reproach in a paternalistic system. For the less competent and non-elite, these were labels worthy of scorn for they denied access to life on a grander scale. Lee was absolutely unapologetic about the unofficial class system in his country. Statecraft was serious business, he argued, and it affected the lives of all. Government could not be left to the whims of anyone who might be interested in the trappings of power.

Housing laws in Singapore enforced heterogeneous neighbourhoods: regulations dictated the approximate ethnic breakdown of each locality so that ghettos would not form. A ghetto of location transforms quickly into a ghetto of mind and could become a divisive force in Singapore. Harsh fines against litter, spitting in public, failure toflush public toilets, and even chewing gum were enacted to clean up the streets and waterways of the city state. A clean, law-abiding, and peaceful city would be a place of pride for the people, Lee thought, and it would also attract foreign investments. An excellent public transport system was developed to encourage commuters to give up private vehicles.

Some have criticised Lee’s Asian model on the grounds that Western liberal democracy can just as easily implement conservative policies if there is support for those ideas. Unfortunately, this does not grasp the full nature of Lee’s model which has at its core an unapologetic elitism. Lee did not believe that the common man was capable of always deciding in his best interest, let alone that of larger society. In Lee was embodied the closest 20th century approximation of Plato’s philosopher king.

The greatness of Lee was in that he recognised what was required for and of society. He unabashedly pointed out that none of the Western democracies were born liberal; there is no instance of liberal democracy having assisted in the development of any poor nation. While human rights organisations complained about Singapore’s authoritarianism and Freedom House and Reporters Without Borders gave Singapore a poor rating in their indices, Lee was forthright in declaring that he judged a system by how well it provides for its people’s needs, not by what some theoretician on democracy opined.

As the generation changed in Singapore, the mindset of the new youth changed too. Lee was sensitive to this transformation and stepped down from office voluntarily in 1990. “The time has come for a younger generation to carry Singapore forward in a more difficult and complex situation,” he declared in his letter of resignation. As Lee told one student at a National University of Singapore forum in 2009, the old generation built the country up, the next generation made it wealthy, and now it was for the youth to figure out where to go next. Lee continued to stand for parliament until the elections of 2011 when he finally retired from public life for good. For 21 years after his resignation from the highest post in the land, he served the people of Singapore but in an increasingly less prominent role. He was senior minister until 2004 when he became minister mentor.

The new generation is indeed different from the one of their parents or grandparents. They do not know of dire poverty, desperation, or what it is to live in a flailing state. And thank the gods for that. In this new era, Singapore has different problems – immigration, radicalisation, terrorism – that may require different solutions. Lee was traditional, perhaps, but he was not orthodox. He recognised that the era of his top-down governance was nearing an end and stepped down to make way for someone capable of handling the new times. Lee had done his part – he had set Singapore on a very firm footing. Only the next 50 years will tell if Singaporeans have learned Lee’s lessons well.

This post appeared on FirstPost on March 24, 2015.

Apathy Also Begins At Home

14 Sun Jul 2013

Posted by in Society

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Perhaps not in the sense of foreboding that William Shakespeare meant it in his Richard III, but more in the metre of John Steinbeck’s message of moral decay and rhyming with Helmut Flieg’s (Stefan Heym) tale of utter despair, this really feels like the winter of India’s discontent. I am not sure if it has become worse these past few years, or whether it has just been a very long winter and we didn’t know about it.

It was not the malaise of the economy, the alarming security condition, a new multi-kharab (खरब) scandal, or even yet another encroachment upon my civil liberties by the state that brought about this melancholy – living in the Third World, one is inured to many such things. Rather, it was the gratitude of my maid when I brewed a fresh pot of coffee for her when she arrived for work early in the morning, wet from a pleasant Bangalore drizzle. What is there to be grateful about coffee for someone working in an economically solidly middle class home (upper middle by Indian standards, I suppose)?

The plain truth of the matter is that despite the loud support many of us express for India’s rampant welfarism – FSB, NREGA, RTE, UHC – we treat our own servants (domestic help for the politically correct, or, why not – domestic management executives?) quite inhumanely. Collectively, India’s financially better-off classes seem to suffer from a combination of a massive Genovese syndrome and apathy. We would prefer that the state stepped in and helped these poor wretches, that they not take up any more of our time than they absolutely have to. After all, what are our tax rupees doing?

The fundamental nature of domestic help has changed over the years. A couple of decades ago, the conditions were harsher but the master-servant relationship was warmer. Today, the circumstances are not as onerous but the association is transactional and cold. As many poor have seen their financial status inch up and more and more handouts, quotas, and also opportunities come their way, many have abandoned manual labour, or have placed conditions upon their employment. It is harder to find domestic help nowadays, but not only because of the slight financial upturn the poor have enjoyed. Few servants feel the same loyalty and attachment to their employers that their parents’ generation might have felt. When employers mistreat their employees or don’t invest in them, the same is reciprocated from the bottom up.

I am not restating the silly Bollywood fallacy of the pre-liberalisation era, that the rich are bad and the poor are good. If one were to step away from the strawman zone of either extreme to the more common and everyday centre, there are many matters of virtue, prudence, justice, and beneficence that deserve to be pondered.

This mistreatment of servants need not take extreme forms; indeed, as Søren Kierkegaard warns us of the slow and unnoticed process of losing one’s Self, the daily erosion of human dignity between master and servant nudges us closer towards the precipice. It is not uncommon nowadays to find children being rude to the help; after all, they probably observed and replicated the behaviour from their possibly nouveau riche parents. I have seen guests leave their hotel rooms in deplorable states because housekeeping will clean up the room later anyway. My servant, who could not expect a hot cup of coffee on a cold morning, also had stories to tell of homes in which it was near impossible to keep up with the owners’ constant littering around the house. Others, she said, were unhappy with the stale leftovers they were sometimes given at the homes they worked in, but owing to their poverty, accepted it anyway. Sometimes, they would not even get that simply because the memsahib had forgotten or was busy. Pay is a monthly battle, as inflation corrodes the purchasing power of a salary and employers resist the upward creep in demands from their employees. Any time off is deeply resented, though the masters themselves need their two-day weekend and year for the occasional long weekend.

These are just some of the seemingly insignificant frictions between the master and servant that are caused more by apathy than malice. India’s New Society – rapidly wealthy, sometimes double-income, individualist, Bacchean, greed-is-good mantra’ed – has unfortunately not been able to cope with the accompanying social shifts. Modes of social exchange have been transformed, whether for better or for worse, without full cognisance. In our parents’ generation, servants stayed employed to their masters for long periods, sometimes over multiple generations. They got little, but there was little to go around in our socialist republic then, the black market and long queues outside ration shops for substandard goods being the norm. Other social injustices such as caste discrimination were, no doubt, more common, but literacy was low and poverty high. As is wont when we leave theory for the real world, we lived in paradoxes –  as a child, I remember my grandmother making it a point to give the servants the same food we ate but serve them in their own special utensils that no one else would use. Despite having several servants, my grandfather used to insist that we clean up ourselves; several of my friend and cousins were also reprimanded for their rare rudeness with the help. Our neighbour, a severe taskmistress if I ever saw one, would ask me or my cousins to help the servants’ children with their homework and ask after their progress in school though never allow us to play with them; for some of our friends, money might have been tight but anyone who worked for them was additionally compensated in food, firewood, clothes, and sometimes even a place to stay during the monsoons. For all the handed-down caste bigotry previous generations exhibited, many were equally generous and built relationships with their workers.

This is not a nostalgic recounting of the “good old days,” nor is it an eternal damnation of the present. Then, as now, the experience is mixed; however, nowadays, the value of the relationship-building of yore seems to have been missed. Interestingly enough, some of the same apathetic people have also given substantial sums to charitable organisations (though I wonder about the purchase of social approbation), which points back to unthinking indifference rather than malice. Though coined by the French philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau, it was a sociologist from the same country, Émile Durkheim, who popularised the term Anomie to describe the dissipation of bonds between individuals in a society. Normally,

sensitivity to mutual needs promotes evolution in the division of labour. Producers, being near consumers, can easily reckon the extent of the needs to be satisfied. Equilibrium is established without any trouble and production regulates itself.

However, as we become a more transactional and impersonal society, these ties that bind begin to unravel. The breakdown in empathy between employer and employee, when replicated across society, carries with it unseen scars in much the same way as Basil Hallward’s painting did of Dorian Gray.

We don’t need philosophers to tell us that Man is a social animal, or that the good life is possible only through society. However, al-Farabi, the famous 9thcentury Islamic Neoplatonist polymath, goes a step further than self-interest of association (Plato) or even eudaimonia (Aristotle) to the soteriological dimension of cooperative – dare I say eusocial? – living. Unlike Plato or Aristotle, al-Farabi believed that happiness can be achieved by the masses as well as the elite. Some scholars think that al-Farabi’s theory of four-fold happiness (theoretical, deliberative, moral, practical arts) rests not only on the Greek thinkers but also on the Qur’an (9:71) and hadith (al-Tirmidhi 604, Muslim 496, 1774), but the philosopher himself, interestingly, steers clear of religious vocabulary in expressing similar ideas. Al-Farabi exhorts us, beyond philosophical enlightenment, physical skill, and mental excellence, to support each other in need as limbs cooperate with a body. Only thus can a good (perfect) state evolve.

Qur’an, Surat al-Tawbah (9:71): The believers, both men and women: they are guardians, confidants, and helpers of one another. They enjoin and promote what is right and good, and forbid and try to prevent the evil, and they establish prayer in conformity with its conditions, and pay the zakaat.Sahih Muslim, Hadith 1774: The believers, in their love, mutual kindness, and close ties, are like one body; when any part complains, the whole body responds to it with wakefulness and fever.

Another thinker who expressed similar communitarian ideas is none other than the father of capitalism, Adam Smith. In his oft-neglected The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith lays out the framework of what informs all his other writing. Rejecting reason alone as a guide to moral action, Smith informs his world view with psychology in an early echo of Antonio Damasio’s explication of the importance of emotion in higher rationality. Smith’s “invisible hand,” for long taken as an endorsement of market forces, also makes a case for concern for the welfare of your fellow citizen.

The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.

To return from my brief philosophical rambling to the topic at hand – apathy towards our servants – the importance of being nice, not just to service providers like maids, waiters, and receptionists, but to all, cannot be understated socially, morally, or even economically. Our present state of apathy is blamed on many things – sudden wealth, erosion of traditional values, internet isolationism, rampant materialism, postmodernism, delayed adulthood, constant distractions – and I have neither the expertise nor the space to open that can of worms. While a quick “good morning, how are you today?” or if you feel like it, a fresh warm meal, might not cost you much, it could go a long way in forming bonds whose value is not discernible today.

This post appeared on Tehelka Blogs on July 24, 2013.