Compassion and crucibles

People everywhere must put a high premium on togetherness. Otherwise, societies could not have come about, much less endured. For both practical and emotional reasons, people have found it necessary to traffic with each other, to initiate and sustain communities persisting across the millennia. The rational, utilitarian bond is naturally strong; after all, people do depend on each other for material subsistence in one way or another.

Still, as Rousseau points out, if pragmatic reason were the only thing that drove people into common association, society might have been contractually initiated but it probably would not have lasted more than a day. It is the sense of compasssion — the instinctive ability of most people to see themselves in others and to identify with each other in the full range of human conditions — that ultimately sustains human communities.

This sense of compassion has eroded much in Philippine society. Many Filipinos now go about life as if it were contained totally within the confines of an I, myself and me, with the most comprehensive extension of this notion limiting itself to a personally focused nuclear or extended family. This truth is most obvious in the way the country’s political and economic notables normally conduct themselves. Hardly a week passes without a public scandal reflecting human greed being headlined by media. Graft and corruption in the public service, quick megabuck attempts by private sector companies, unethical practices by erstwhile moralizing civil society groups – all these have been daily fare served the citizenry of this much-debilitated republic.

Beyond the leaders, the ordinary people too appear to have crossed their personal thresholds where considerations of right and wrong finally disappear and sheer expediency and personal gain become the only governing concerns. That the sense of community is fast breaking down finds its merciless confirmation in the way most people drive or walk in traffic, the manner in which they dispose of their garbage or even simply the volume they use in playing their home karaokes and high fidelity sets. One does not have to mention the terrible apathy which permits neighbors to live next door to each other for years without really knowing or caring much what happens to the other. Compassion is an alien sentiment among such people who live atomistic lives and find fulfillment in their egoistic existence.

What can enable Filipinos to irreversibly develop a sense of compassion and regenerate their society accordingly? The historian Teodoro Agoncillo used to remark on how the people of this country had never really gone through a crucible, a truly life-threatening experience that enables Filipinos to reach into their deepest resources as a people to survive and – in surviving – to find themselves a truly transformed nation. The Japanese occupation years were not enough of a crucible for Agoncillo and he died with the hope that that crucible might come soon.

The hope has not been realized up to now. The Marcos dictatorship and all the trying years thereafter – inclusive of current times that indeed try a woman’s (and of course other people’s) patience most – have not provided this country the crucible it needs. Filipinos so far have not suffered a threat to their very existence that simultaneously equates their survival with the requisite national transformation, the emergence of an enduringly compassionate society.

There is hope. The crucible is yet to come.

It may sound strange, but it just might be true too. If we gird for the worst, we may survive the worst as it comes and then we will indeed be among the best. A glorious test no less, this current one that our nation must pass, summa cum laude necessarily.