Too much venting, hardly any inventing

Mostly everyone in this country talks and writes well. From the airwaves, the newspaper columns and editorials, the Internet e-mail, government and anti-government manifestoes and public, face-to- face conversations, one gets the impression that all the concerns of this nation — serious as well as illusory ones — had already been talked to death. Yet, the country remains orally fixated and in a tropical country where both political and meteorological temperatures continue to rise, the main value added to the gross domestic product appears to be so much hot air.

The government, the opposition, the private sector and the amorphous civil society groups cannot be demonstrated as having gone beyond the venting of their respective grievances and claims — and unimaginative excuses — for a bigger share of a currently deteriorating pool of national resources.

It makes little difference whether one concerns oneself with the demonstrable and inequitable biases of the national budget, the nationally oppressive and even punitive system called national taxation or the much-ballyhooed, fundamentally sound and secure financial systems within the Philippines. In all of these structures among so many others, one can argue that the operational historical biases have not been pro-people, as in favoring the majority of the citizenry in a functional democracy. The evidence for this accusation is unassailable. In at least the last 100 years, whether the national economy has prospered or deteriorated, these systems have not worked to improve the material quality of life of most Filipinos, nor have they even provided the social safety nets that could have somewhat mitigated the brutish life of so many people.

The recent mea maxima culpa of the well-heeled and the truly-spirited — greatly inspired by the violent masa demonstrations of May First — is a belated recognition of a theme that runs like a red thread in the nation’s history. Until suffering Filipinos are persuaded by the seriousness of the authorities who made this self-criticism, until poor people become an integral part of programs that develop their human resources by allowing them to live recognizable human lives — the rhetoric of their better-off’s pronouncements will be much like chasing the wind.

Venting or talking about national concerns is not necessarily bad. However, when endless talk is substituted for material efforts at improving the nation’s concerns, people — the materially well-off as well as the grossly deprived — develop a callousness to human suffering which is regrettable in any society. This callousness might have developed national economies and political systems during the earlier and more brutal stages of capitalism. However, given the contemporary nexus within which a nation’s development must take place — one where the survival and material enhancement even of endangered beasts and their natural environments is ardently called for — a country can no longer pursue national development by blatantly brutalizing its human capital.

It is not by accident that most economists have now dropped the discourse of development within a simple first-growth-then-equity frame, a paradigm that captivated them in the 50s and through the early 70s. When conservative agencies like the World Bank and the UN Development Program eventually concerned themselves with serious indicators of human development in the late 80s, and the 90s, economists found it hard to ignore the ethics of development as if it were an embarrassing "imperfection" or "externality" in their elegant models. Corollarily, more and more economists actually have served their respective national societies — and the world — better by refusing to see themselves as simple technical arms of political decision-makers.

The call of the times in societies like the Philippines is invention, even reinvention which predictably will be much resisted where powerful vested interests have developed and yet social reformatting is unavoidably indicated. Perhaps the most patriotic thing most Filipinos — particularly those more gifted by nature as well as by social conventions and historical accidents — can now do is to take a vow of silence and, in determined collaboration with all agencies of their society, quietly invent and willfully help activate humanizing structures and programs which have been a long time coming to this country.

Perhaps paraphrasing a rather serious philosopher and a compleat playwright — one might start by doing away with most lawyers, nearly all politicians and possibly even more of those who write as if their nation’s destiny could be reduced to an emotional discussion of yesterday’s headlines.