When the CBCP statement came Tuesday night, it had the effect of a cold shower on a hot and troubled time.
In the days and hours before the meeting, those who wanted to make a mountain out of a molehill were frantically lobbying the bishops to push them towards issuing a call for the President’s resignation. They wanted to drive things down the path towards cataclysm, using the bishops as a battering ram to break the walls of sobriety and possibly polarize not only the religious but also the political community.
Wisdom prevailed over agitation. Discernment over rage.
After much discussion, the bishops concluded that corruption was not just an urgent problem. It was a profoundly complex one. It is not just systematic; but also systemic. It does not just persist in our midst; it persists within us all.
In a word, it is a culture.
It cannot be cured by occasionally tearing down governments, in highly dramatic but ultimately futile ceremonies of upheaval that the peddlers of instant political gratification demand, much like smokers demand a nicotine fix now and then. Enough of made-for-television drama that only apparently provide a “resolution” to the problem. That is an illusion.
A genuine resolution demands harder work that, over time, achieves less than dramatic results. It requires continuous retooling of our policies and procedures for public governance, to lessen the margins of whim and arbitrariness. To improve transparency and accountability.
It demands the regeneration of our civic culture so that we all abide by the commonly agreed upon rules of the game. That in turn requires a reconfiguration of public practices and expectations so that compliance is rewarded and misdemeanor is penalized with certainty.
Corruption is not the work of the devil. It is the foreseeable outcome of imperfect men working under imperfect conditions. Those conditions are more easily made perfect than the tangle of attitudes and vulnerabilities that make men imperfect.
Seasonal ceremonies of political exorcism is therefore not the solution.
Over the last few days, we have seen the advocates of yet another ceremony of political exorcism at play in the streets. They offer a most simplistic solution to the complex problems of corruption that hound not just government but the popular culture that in fact governs its behavior.
That simplistic solution, by its sheer simplicity, has served as an opiate to some of our people. It is a solution served on the basis of hearsay and innuendo that denies others their day in court.
Their simplistic proposition, the basis for fruitless street agitation carried out by those who have made a cottage industry of this activity, is arguably not seditious even as it imagines a collective act of sedition. But it definitely subverts the quality of public appreciation of our problems and challenges, limiting it to demonization of those who lead us. It definitely subverts public conviction in favor of due process and the rule of law, essential premises for an orderly democracy to persist.
That simplistic solution is particularly seductive to the self-righteous. Self-righteousness is, by itself a vulnerability to simplistic black-and-white views of things. Especially if that self-righteousness is laced with malice and infused with bad faith.
See how those self-righteous ones, who fill up the Senate gallery every hearing day, behave with the intolerance we see only among the worst fascists. They cheer lustily what they want to hear and hiss down witnesses whose versions of the truth do not conform with theirs. The Hitler Youth had better manners.
The simplistic solution has been embraced by two former presidents who presided over the least illustrious episodes for our economy and, arguably, accomplished the least improvement in raising the competence of our public governance. Theirs is a proposal that has corrupted the understanding of our young about what “people power” is: a force for improving the nation, not destroying it.
And so it was, that on the day we celebrated the 22nd anniversary of the 1986 popular rising, there was some confusion about what that event meant for a nation reclaiming its destiny. The moment was used by those who wanted to peddle a corrupted view of “people power” and the opportunity for a national discussion on strengthening our civic virtues and our democratic institutions was nearly drowned out by clowning in the streets.
“People power” is not a bludgeon used to throw out governments at whim. It is a virtue constantly at our disposal each day we affirm the best virtues on which a progressive, peaceful and productive community might be built.
Those who suffer the delusion that “people power” might be called out any time a faction of the elite invokes its powerful imagery were dealt a cautionary blow by the CBCP statement. In their collective wisdom, the bishops told the flock that there are no instant solutions to the problems that bedevil our whole society.
There are indeed things that might be immediately called for, like the repeal of EO 464. And there are things we might immediately desist from doing, like distorted and partisan media play.
Too, there are things we must be wary about, such as powerful political blocs using well-meaning people’s movements to serve their agenda for power.
All other things require careful thought and tireless labor. Most important, the task of diminishing the evil of corruption involves not just improving procedures in government but redeeming our civic culture. There rests our collective soul.