Our crisis: The technology gap / No, not yet a valedictory

Our so-called "civil society" is still in a deep and dolorous sweat over "the revolt of the masses" last May 1. In a huddle with some of my close friends just a few days ago, I could feel the clammy hand of fear and foreboding. Oh my God, what will happen to our country? They said the May 1 assault on Malacañang – now referred to as EDSA Tres – could have succeeded, so close was it to overpowering the presidency of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Just a small burst of rebel infantry, they said, and Malacañang would have fallen.

After long reflection, I can now look at things and events more soberly, more objectively My readings of new books have also greatly helped. The situation can still be saved if our leaders and the many civic organizations who manned our street demonstrations (People Power II) should mount a sustained cavalry charge against poverty. To be sure, the "social volcano" can erupt again and engulf us.

Let me say something that will shock my readers. I am glad EDSA Tres happened. I am glad it scared the wits out of our leadership. I am glad the rich in Makati and elsewhere have been severely jolted out (have they been really?) of their social insensitivity and indifference. I am glad that media have chronicled the event or events like an upraised journalistic saber. I am glad the comfortable cocoon we have all wrapped around us has burst – and now we feel exposed to the elements. And, lastly, I am glad the level of discussion and dialogue, of social and intellectual discourse, has gone up by a quantum jump. Our attitudes, our outlook, our intellectual insights were so superficial before EDSA Tres.

Events have pushed us to sharp awareness which is the beginning of enlightenment. Now we have an opportunity to crack the poverty code, which has wired the Philippines to the backwaters of Asian society.

The first grim lesson that we learn – as we peer through a dozen keyholes of history – is that we Filipinos have been left far behind by the huge advances in science and technology. This is called the technological gap. This may sound trite, but it is at the core of our poverty, the impotence of our economic system. So we have a lag – a big, big lag – between the vast technological progress streaking across the world and the capability of our society to adjust. So what happens? Sample: China now produces three times more rice per hectare than we Filipinos do. And they learned the techniques from Los Baños. Sample: China produces four times more sugar per unit of capital than we do. Once we were a major sugar exporter to the world.

Noted economist (winner of the Nobel prize for economics in 1995) and social scientist Robert Wuilliam Fogel states: "The (technological) lag has provoked the crises that periodically usher in profound reconsideration of social values that produces new agendas for ethical and social reforms, and that give rise to new political movements that champion new agendas." I would like to add lightning and thunder to Mr. Fogel’s depiction of technological gap.

You have, in a word, the dangerous tumbling together of four layers of the earth’s crust – a cultural crisis, an economic crisis, a religious crisis, a religious crisis, and a political crisis. This is what is happening now in the Philippines. The end product is seething social unrest, a fragile democracy, galloping crime, a deeply divided society, more graft, more corruption, the ground under our feet about to crack. Feel it? When that happens, run for your life.

If you don’t move to address these four crises – you blow up like bridge on the river Kwai. EDSA Tres was the result of decades of neglect and indifference on the part of our government, on the part of our elite. We really didn’t care about the poor. As hovels, shanty neighborhoods, squatter lean-tos multiplied in Metro Manila, we just looked the other way. We pretended Smokey Mountain and Payatas weren’t there.

The urgent, desperate need is for new political realignments, not the tinsel ring of Joe de Venecia’s 747. These realignments will cope with "the ethical and practical complexities that new technologies entail." Remember what I told you, Joe de V., that China at any one time has 53,000 students in the US enrolled in its best schools and universities in courses topped by science, technology, and modern management.

If we Filipinos don’t respond, we will end up like Cambodia, Burma, Sri Lanka, the ultimate sinkholes of poverty in Asia.

Yes, a "new elite" will have to emerge. Here I should like to call the attention of the Makati Business Club and the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines. Listen. Evangelical churches "played a leadership role in ending aristocratic privilege in the US and were the principal vehicle through which the common people have been drawn into the process of shaping American society." Fogel further points out: "Income was also to be transferred from the rich to the poor by imposing income taxes on the rich and using the revenue to finance welfare programs for the poor… By the 1990s, close to 30 percent of the income of the richest fifth of US households was being transferred to those in the lower part of the income distribution." The heavens be blessed!

Here, our rich cheat like Ali Baba in the non-payment or gross underpayment of income and corporate taxes. Hell’s bells!

At the forefront of this social crusade were the Anglicans, the Lutherans, the Orthodox churches, the Methodists, yes the activist Catholics. "America’s evangelical churches often served as critics of state policy and as advocates of individual rights. Evangelical churches promoted popular democracy partly because they were based on the principle that the congregation rather than the hierarchy was the pivot of church government." Can our Church or churches do the same thing here? More from Fogel: "Evangelical churches emphasized the responsibility of each individual to study and interpret the Bible, guided by a personal struggle to be cleansed of sin and become ‘born again’."

Fogel and this new wave of cultural gurus and social anthropologists we must read and understand if we want to scratch off the fetid tarpaulin that covers our sick and rotting society. That "Yellow Paper II" of 30 top economists and social scientists (UP, Ateneo, La Salle) was just a rehash of old documents on the subject. They held up flasks of "drops of water" when they should have dived to feel and examine the deep currents of a raging social river.

So we are, to follow Fogel’s thesis (The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism) at the heart of the turmoil with three overriding factors, vide: (1) a new technological revolution; (2) a new cultural crisis precipitated by technologically induced change in the structure of the economy; (3) two powerful social and political movements confronting each other across an ideological and ethical chasm – threatening to undermine the great egalitarian reforms of the 20th century.

Sadly, our churches are split. The Roman church holds the moral fort. Mike Velarde’s El Shaddai and Erdie Manalo’s Iglesia ni Cristo stuck close to Erap Estrada. Shockingly, they were not "fueled by a revulsion with what believers see as a corruption of contemporary society (the Estrada presidency). Believers in the new revival are against sexual debauchery, against indulgence in alcohol, against all other forms of self-indulgence that titillate the senses and destroy the soul (again, the Estrada presidency)."

We have more to say, more to explain but, alas, our space for this subject is no more.

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A great and good friend, Dindo Gonzales, called up to shower kudos on our column ("The Streets Are Silent"). He added many of his close relatives and friends called him up to say the same thing, and to kindly contact me. "That was a great valedictory," Dindo said. My dear friend, valedictory it was not. Although we did mention we were nearing the end of a long journey in journalism. Whatever. Thanks a lot.

I believe we have many more years of committed journalism left in our saddle bag. We are still in that boiler room, white hot, seething, still slinging passionate prose. And we propose to continue that way, until by an act of God, or an act of man, something happens to bring the curtains down.

Many have asked us why we remain at the barricades when a great bulk of my earlier companions and colleagues have either died or suffered a stroke or retired or become hors de combat because of writer’s fatigue. And the same question is always asked: "The way you write, aren’t you afraid, one day they will get you?" My answer has always been: Danger comes with the territory and you have to learn to live with it. My great disappointment is that former comrades-in-arms in street demonstration have sheathed their swords, refused to fight the good fight any longer, or, worse, have been lured by the Scylla of success or the Charybdis of power, not to mention prestige and the tinkle of silver. That is sad. Because the moral armor disappears. And old friendships are tarnished.

Like good wine, wisdom comes with age. And so we persevere.