Politics and spiritual values

Speech of Honorable Leticia Ramos-Shahani, Presidential Adviser on Culture, Commencement Exercises, Asian Social Institute, Philippine International Convention Center, Manila

I should like to thank Dr. Mina Ramirez, the President of the Asian Social Institute (ASI) for her invitation for me to be the commencement speaker at this important event. I have long been an admirer of the work of the ASI and have held in the highest regard its president, my good friend, Dr. Mina Ramirez. I truly welcome this opportunity to be in closer touch with the students, teachers, and administration of ASI at this happy occasion.

May I, first of all, congratulate the graduates today who are marking an end to another academic preparation and will soon be embarking on their professional careers. Oren Arnold defined maturity as: "the ability to live in someone else’s world." I am sure that ASI has prepared you for this kind of much-needed maturity. I should also like to congratulate the proud parents and friends of the graduates at this commencement exercise.

I must confess it was difficult for me to find an appropriate topic for my talk this afternoon within the context of your graduation theme "Promoting SoPHIA (Wisdom) among our Educators." I am aware that ASI is a well-known and tested pioneer in the areas of social change, community transformation as well as inter-faith dialogue and cultural understanding in the Asian region. Its founder, the well-loved Fr. Martin M. Senden, was unique and prophetic in his vision for genuine human development. His emphasis that those who want to help the poor have to live like the poor and embody in their lives the example of whom Christ called "the poor in spirit", the humble, the unselfish and compassionate and those detached from the hot pursuit of fame, name or gain. This is an ideal highly valued by the spiritual teachers of Asia and certainly an ideal which promotes SoPHIA (wisdom). It is not often that personalities succeed during their lifetime in giving concrete reality to their original inspiration as Fr. Senden did and it is rare that institutions are able to continue the purity and the integrity of their early years as ASI has been able to do. It is my prayer and hope that ASI will continue its valuable and inspiring work in the years to come.

I thought an appropriate topic for my talk this afternoon would be politics and spiritual values. I felt this was a topic I could discuss with some authority with young people today having been in national politics as a Senator for 12 years and having worked in the bureaucracy of our government and that of the United Nations for some thirty-three years. Another reason for my choosing this topic is that at no time in my memory have the issues of values and human survival been more intertwined than they are today. Threats like terrorism, regional alarmed conflicts, SARS, HIV/AIDS, saw evil itself, have frighteningly confronted us face-to-face. Our lives have suddenly become vulnerable, fragile and cheap. Not only individuals but nations as well have now to grapple with the questions: What is truly important in life? What values should we uphold for human survival? Suddenly spiritual and moral values have become important. Or have they?

In the early days of their existence, development agencies such as the United Nations and its affiliates, the World Bank and its affiliates, looked at national development as some kind of a predictable science. If the right elements were in place, according to conventional wisdom, economic development would automatically be set in motion and a nation would progress, even ethically. Such was the analysis Gunnar Myrdal made in his classic work, Asian Drama. If poverty were minimized, democratic government would be possible, the rule of law would follow and a system of universal peace and justice could be achieved. In other words, material development would bring automatically in a moral order.

But after nearly fifty years of preaching this gospel, the world remains mired in poverty, oppression and injustice. Among the 4.4 billion people who live in developing countries, three-fifths have no access to basic sanitation, almost one-third are without safe drinking water, one-quarter lack adequate housing, one-fifth live beyond the reach of modern health services, one-fifth of the children do not get as far as grade five in school. The richest 20% of the world’s population account for 80% of the world’s consumption of goods and services. Since 1985, world military expenditures have totaled over $14 trillion. But we should not look at these statistics merely in terms of physical deprivation and material suffering. Is not the widening gap between the rich and the poor also an indication of the felt absence of a moral order which should guide the lives of individuals and nations in the modern world?

In my talk, I would like to focus on the Philippine situation on values and politics as this is complex enough. And for those graduates who come from other countries, I am quite certain that the Philippines has similarities with conditions in their own countries.

I belong to that generation born in the Philippines before the Second World War and graduated from college in 1951 when our world was flush with hope and enthusiasm despite the horrors of the Second World War and the brutal Japanese occupation. At that time, the United Nations was just created; colonialism and imperialism were ending; new nations were emerging the world over. That surge of optimism and the promise of prosperity made my generation optimistic for a while but with the onset of Martial Law in 1972 that hope dimmed and lost its glow that was rekindled in 1986 by EDSA I, a political victory of the people based on spiritual faith and moral courage.

I entered politics by accident in 1986 when then President Corazon C. Aquino invited me to be part of her senatorial slate since there had to be some women candidates. Although I did not have adequate funds to contribute to the party coffers and did not enjoy the popularity of a movie actress, I succeeded in landing a respectable number seven among the elected twenty-four Senators partly due, perhaps, to a dance number called "Sha-sha-sha, si Letty Ramos Sha" which I executed throughout our vast archipelago. But seriously speaking, the main reason for my success during my first attempt at national politics was because people in 1986 desperately wanted political change; they demanded new faces and credible candidates and were not willing to compromise on that non-negotiable stand; they did not think of selling their votes and candidates did not think of buying them. For once in the history of Philippine democracy, the sovereign will of the people prevailed. We must recapture that vision and political will again.

One of the first acts I did in 1987 as a Senator was to propose a Moral Recovery Program (MRP) stating that while our devastated economy needed an economic and technological long-term program, the country also needed a Moral Recovery Program. I wanted to show the organic relationship between values and development, realizing that the message of EDSA I was profoundly moral and ethical. On 18 September 1987, I declared on the floor of the Senate:

"Ours is a sick nation gravely afflicted with interlocking diseases of poverty, passivity, graft and corruption, exploitative patronage, factionalism, political instability, love for intrigue, lack of discipline, lack of patriotism and the desire for instant self-gratification. A cancerous growth is affecting the vital organs of or society to the extent that we seem to be in a state of paralysis: the patient is not responding to the problems confronting it. The times call for an analysis of our social cancer. We are both the doctor and the patient. As Jesus Christ said in quoting a proverb: ‘Physician, heal thyself."

"The sickness afflicting this country is moral in nature. It is my view that at the bottom of our economic problems and political instability is the weakness and corruption of the moral foundations of our society. We do need an economic recovery program: we also urgently need a moral, intellectual and spiritual recovery program."

When I first thought of initiating the Moral Recovery Program in the Senate I asked my legal assistant what he thought about the idea. He objected and raised his hands in horror and said: "Please don’t do it." When I asked him why, he replied: "Your colleagues in the Senate are mainly lawyers and they are not interested in morality, that is in what is right or wrong. They are mainly interested in what is legal or illegal." That remark perhaps explains why in this country where there are so many lawyers, the spirit of our laws is constantly violated. All the same, I went ahead with my idea to initiate the MRP in the Senate which bore fruit in the form of a report undertaken by leading Filipino social scientists on the strengths and weakness of the Filipino character. The purpose of the analysis was to strengthen our virtues and eliminate our identified weaknesses so that we could rebuild our country. It was the first time, I suppose, that an actual analysis of our strengths and weaknesses as a people was made although the idea of using moral values to constitute the foundation of the nation was not new. Our revolutionary leaders, Rizal, Mabini, Bonifacio and Jacinto always referred in their writings to the need for human values in order to build the nation. During his term, President Manuel L. Quezon commissioned the Moral Code Committee, a group of well-known and highly educated Filipinos, to draft what would alter be called the Code of Ethics and whose members included Jose Laurel, Manuel Roxas, Jorge Bocobo, Norberto Romualdez and Chief Justice Avanceña. What was perhaps unique in the Moral Recovery Program I proposed in the Senate was that I advocated it as a politician directly to the people as part of my program of good government, not as a religious movement but rather a secular program of civic virtues which, however, also believed in God. I advocated the program in speeches, seminars and talk shows but due to lack of time, I was not able to develop learning modules nor did I create a specific institution to propagate the Moral Recovery Program. Neither did I fully appreciate the fact then that if change in the Philippines had to come it had to come from deep within the person’s spirit in terms of individual transformation or in terms of structural changes reflecting, not only the legal aspects but more important, the moral demands of principles such as justice, respect for human rights and equity.

During the time of President Fidel V. Ramos the Moral Recovery Program was adopted as part of his administration’s development thrust. He created in 1992 a structure to implement it and provided it with a budget and staff which propagated the program nationwide mainly in government offices. After 1998, with the change of administration, the MRP ceased to be a government program and although self-transformation could not be easily measured in a bureaucratic set-up, the MRP during the Ramos years unleashed new energy and enthusiasm among government employees. Unfortunately, it became a pro-poor program at the end, when the original intention was to embrace all Filipinos, including the rich who probably needed it more than the poor. When I left the Senate in 1998, I lost a major political forum from which to advocate values. The heartening thing, however, is that although I left politics nearly five years ago, people in our country still remember the Moral Recovery Program and they repeatedly ask me to continue it. This goes to show that values is a good issue for a politician to advocate but, and this should not be underestimated by those who have political ambitions, the public figure advocating it must herself or himself embody the values concerned; credibility is, indeed, a must.

Responding to the clamor to continue the Moral Recovery Program, I recently prepared a handbook which, I hope, will encourage those interested in teaching values whether in a barangay, in an office, or school. By simplifying the process and making its methodology accessible and in cooperation with all similar activities in our country such as those of ASI, there could be, perhaps, a more widespread moral and spiritual education among of our people and which would create a critical mass powerful enough to reform our society.

This time I stress in the MRP handbook, which will be out in June, rather than mere advocacy, or lecturing, a more deliberate approach in values formation, such as the need for meditation, for self-analysis, self-purification and self-awareness, the need for regular spiritual discipline, all of which can bring about inner change. Because in the disciplined world of values the law of karma prevails where very thought, word and deed has a positive or negative consequence.

Now we face national elections in 2004 and if this coming political activity is to truly reform and cleanse our fetid and stagnant society we the people must demand high standards of moral values from candidates who wish to win elections in order to occupy public offices.

Many people who come to the Philippines for the first time cannot comprehend why we are poor. They say: "But you have nearly 300 days of sunshine a year, plenty of water during the rainy season with enough to save for the dry spell, an intelligent and educated populace with a literacy rate of about 95%. You have a democratic form of government." But why do we remain poor?

There are many reasons for our widespread poverty. It is not my intention to do a full-scale analysis here but will retain my focus on values and politics. Father Senden rightly said that widespread poverty is caused by an unjust social structure where the majority poor are deprived of the social, economic, cultural and political opportunities to improve themselves.

One of the results of this unjust social structure is the concept of politics as both patronage and show business, the unholy alliance of money, political power and cheap entertainment. Thus the compulsion to amass wealth by crooked, illegal means on the part of political leaders who in turn create their own self-financed machinery which serve as buying stations to purchase votes from people who willingly sell their votes in exchange for a McDonald hamburger. So much for liberal democracy, Philippine style. Should one, however, not have the amassed funds to run for public office but has the good fortune to have a face and name known to the masses through movies and the TV, one can be easily elected to be governor, congressman, senator and even President of the Republic. Clearly, the voting public and the candidates feed on each other to create an incestuous relation of the rule of the corrupt and the corruptible. But I do not wish to place the onus of corruption only on elected officials but on the two other branches of government as well, the executive and the judiciary. Our government, with exceptions apart, is paralyzed by a culture of corruption.

The margin of error is getting narrower. Let us heed the words of Mabini:

"Let us never lose sight of the fact that we are in the first step towards our national life, that we are called upon to go up, and that we can only ascend by the ladder of virtue and heroism; above all, let us not forget that if we do not grow, we must die without having been great, without being able to reach manhood as people and as a nation, which is the way of a degenerate race."

Our political culture, therefore, must change. We should elect men and women who understand that public office exists to serve the people, to enable the private sector to function dynamically and to cooperate with civil society in common concerns. It is not enough to look cute or pile up "pogi" points for the press.

It is evident that purely material, technical, military and scientific approaches to development are no longer adequate to solve our problems. Even in the area of foreign policy, the relations among nations can no longer be determined mainly by political and economic means if we are to enjoy peace and security. The United Nations and the powerful nations are realizing this. We have to include the moral and spiritual in our lives, especially in those areas which have not been touched by non-material considerations – politics, economics and science. Moreover, we have to move from an economics with a human face to an economics with a human soul. The moral and the spiritual must never be lost in our vision because, we are beginning to realize after so many false starts, that, in the words of Alfredo Younis, we are not material begins having a spiritual experience but, rather, spiritual beings having a material experience on earth.

I hope that this group of ASI graduates, disciplined in "Social Praxis Holistically Integrating Asia" will adopt as one of its responsibilities the political education of people – to enable people to appreciate the fact that politics, in itself, is not dirty but that it becomes dirty when the means to achieve political victory turns dirty. Politics and public service can be the noblest undertaking if oriented and committed to the people’s welfare and realized through ethical means. In public office, the congruence of ends and means is so basic. The means should justify the ends for means are ends in themselves. Thus, political leaders, in the words of Confucius, "must rule through virtue not through force."

But it is not enough to preach or just talk about values. In the best Asian spiritual tradition, the learning of values is not merely intellectual or semantic; a Ph.D. degree in values education is not a guarantee of a high level of spirituality or morality. The imbibing of values on the part of the student should be experiential; values are caught, for instance from a living embodiment of these values; a spiritual guide enables values to be internalized which can lead to inner change and transformation on the part of the aspirant. This inner power, which comes from God, can become the basis for leaders to initiate genuine structural and political changes which can be sustained over a period time. This process needs patience, faith, courage and love of country and people but this holistic approach seems to be the only path.

Certainly the Asian Social Institute is poised to lead the way in this endeavor. With its understanding and appreciation of the great spiritual traditions of Asia, its experience in handling socio-economic and political issues such as poverty alleviation, environmental protection and respect for human rights; it has a role to play in a world facing violence and oppression on many fronts. The combination of inner moral power and scientific knowledge of socio-economic conditions is the way for our countries to move ahead.

Our spiritual faith teaches us never to loose hope and not to abandon our dreams, for dreams come true. Perhaps a new dawn is rising on the horizon and a new world of spirituality, peace, joy, justice and economic prosperity will emerge. After all the pain and suffering and the worship of false gods, a new world order of spiritual values and economic prosperity can be created, based on that most realistic and practical of ideologies, articulated by Christ when He said: "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you."

Thank you.