Myopic

The other evening, one of the grand old men of Philippine finance and economics pulled me aside and asked a question that stumped me: Is there any one, or any group, thinking hard about where the country should be after 2010?

I thought hard. I rubbed my chin. Grimaced. Fretted. Looked up the ceiling.

None, I finally said. None in academe I know of – and the most loquacious academics I know are busy trying to overthrow government. None at the Foundation for Economic Freedom, although we still manage to get together monthly – although lately such gatherings have focused on speculating who could lead the country in case everything falls apart.

I suppose no one bothers to think about the form, shape, condition and direction of the nation deep into the medium term because no one gets rewarded for doing so. We have all been sucked into the world of television, where everything is done on a day-to-day basis. Where everything is sound bite and fleeting image. Where memory of what has passed is short and the future’s horizon shorter still.

As cocktail conversations go, other people butt in. The topic is changed. The disturbing question trickles away.

That is itself symbolic of the predicament we find ourselves in. Focusing on one question alone is a luxury. Thinking beyond the next day has become difficult given all the distractions. Building a consensus on one strategic vision or another is a challenge.

I exaggerate a little when I say that television, as a medium with all its particular characteristics, colonized our minds. There is a complicity of circumstances that inhibit all of us from thinking too far beyond tomorrow.

We all live in a world where product cycles get shorter by the day. A modern economy dissolves all large constituencies and makes daily life diversified and segmented. Our notion of what is urgent becomes smaller and smaller, more hurried and more fleeting.

No one really drops everything to ponder the fact that oil is being consumed at twice the rate that new deposits are being discovered – and what this small fact implies for the entirety of our internal combustion-driven civilization.

In the same way, no one really stops to think about the fact that our political system has long ago lost the ability to produce leaders for our people – so that, if you noticed, we keep on recycling old faces until senility captures them or recycling old names by recruiting offspring to fill old shoes qualified by nothing more than the surnames they carry. That dooms us to nursing old partisanships, fighting old battles over and over again.

Among the new tasks modern society has assigned its governments is to evolve long-term visions and build support for them. The universities, still organized like their medieval forebears as conservers of old wisdom, cannot do that task. The corporations, organized to look ahead of the technological curve in order to take advantage of opportunities to profit, are not oriented towards building social consensus.

But in our case, at this time, can a government constantly besieged by political speculators be effective in espousing a vision for our people?

That is, of course, a rhetorical question with an obvious answer. But let me underscore the compounding element that this government is besieged by political speculators: people who take political positions, make alliances and undertake political action on the basis of what seems imminently profitable.

They do not, therefore, confront the sitting government with alternative visions that makes the lines of contention and alliance a little more principled – and public debate a little more edifying. A principled opposition actually assists in the task of organizing the public around a vision. An unprincipled opposition simply aggravates the disintegration of our society into a Babel of superficial utterance.

In our case, we have had to deal with an unprincipled opposition: one that relies on shallow moralizing for political effect. It is an opposition that has used democratic rhetoric as a cover for indulging in an undemocratic political project.

And so it is that between a government forced to fight for its survival day-to-day against an assortment of political speculators and an unprincipled opposition engrossed solely with political displacement, there is very little space for contemplating the nation’s long fate. Between this government and this opposition, we can only have myopic politics.

I am still thinking about that question posed the other night, wondering if the quick answer I gave was a most accurate one.

Having gone through the abovementioned factors that might explain the poverty of far-sighed discourse at this time, I am still not sure my instant answer was correct. There might, indeed, be a consensus about where we want to go and what we want to do as a nation. But it is a consensus that is so matter-of-factly taken that there no need to articulate or intellectualize it.

It could be a consensus that has, so far, allowed us to delineate the mainstream from the fringe, to decide on what is politically preferable and what is not.

I had the pleasure of listening, the other night, to Ricky Carandang’s interview with Bong Austero – author of that much-examined blog that circulated furiously among various e-groups in the days following the Marine stand-off at Fort Bonifacio. That blog, written hastily in a moment of anger minutes after the stand-off ended anti-climactically, has made Austero a prophet of sorts for the Filipino middle-class in this season of confusion.

Although Austero shudders at the thought of being anointed spokesman of a fractured middle class, the fact that his letter to Cory Aquino et al circulated so widely so quickly suggests he has struck a chord we all knew was there but refused to listen to it well because it seems banal to do so. I myself received that letter 50 times from 50 different individuals.

I will read it again and again. In this unlikely manifesto from someone who personifies this nation’s thoughtful and articulate Everyman, I might find some wisdom regarding that disturbing question posed at the top of this essay. The language with which we contemplate our collective fate might have shifted dramatically away from the language normally used by the usual intellectuals and politicians who hog the mediums of our public discourse.