TO CHOOSE immediately from what the question poses seems to relegate all action and no thought. First of all, can the country's choices really only be either the forced removal or the voluntary removal of GMA from her seat? Are the two choices even so different in effect? The question automatically assumes that GMA is the cause of whatever political/economic/moral problems that are plaguing the Philippines, and that once she is removed from her seat, we are automatically better off. But the possibility is all too real that our country is distraught with far more complex and less obvious problems (flaws in the government system? the negative outlook of politics to most Filipinos? the political sphere becoming merely an arena for the powerful to maintain power?) of which GMA is only a symptom, and therefore will not and cannot go away even with the coming elections.
As much as we love the legacy of the 1st Edsa Revolution, the whole oust/resign thing is in danger of becoming a little too routine. Even if (or when?) we do decide that GMA must go, we need to consider what we'll do after she leaves before we up and take to the streets. Do we let Noli de Castro assume the role of president? Do we call for a change to the parliamentary system of government? Do we unite with the NPA to oust all our elected officials and instigate communist rule? Whatever the case, we think that what we need is to find the long-term solution to our problems, before we ever get to the luxury of choosing between the resignation of GMA or her ouster.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
ALLEVIATION, NOT ELIMINATION
A Discourse on the Concept of “Solving Poverty” in the Philippines
Group II: Carlo (?), Philip D., Leo G., Faye G., Hansley J., Michelle N., Lars R.
Before answering the question of how to solve the presumed problem known to us as poverty, we felt the need to present a valid definition of it. We define poverty as “a state of deprivation of the things necessary in the determination of a person’s quality of life,” which includes physiological and ontological needs. As such, we are proposing a means of “alleviating poverty” not by the traditional idealistic (and unfortunately highly improbable) way of “supplying the needs of everyone,” but by “improving the conditions of the impoverished sectors of society.” This was done as we found the word "solving" rather inappropriate, for it entails the elimination of class distinctions (or structures) among the elite, the petty-bourgeois and the proletariat. At this point in time, it is very unlikely to achieve such a status; and the option of a Communist revolution is, in our opinion, counterproductive for the time-being due to its inapplicability (some would say obsolescence) in our country’s context. As an example, even the most developed nations (commonly referred as “First-World”) have a considerable amount of people living below the poverty line. In a structural-functionalist reading like the one proposed by Comte, these sectors are important in the division of labor, an important characteristic for a society to be able to function properly.
Thus, what solutions are we proposing in response to the question?
First, the present administration should achieve the state of balance between immediate relief and a stable economy. We are saying this because, as everyone knows, the leaders of this administration are adamantly claiming that our economy is doing well whereas the supposed “fruits” of this progress does not reach the grassroots (and what little trickles down to them is not even a valid sign). In talking about immediate relief, basic needs such as quality education, adequate food and proper health care should be the priority provisions. It is necessary to provide the populace with immediate relief in order to ensure that the conditions of our people will be better in the long run. If one will look at the law of economic determinism attributed to Marx’s historical materialism, we will see that it is emphasized that the supreme instinct in man is self-preservation and the whole behavioral pattern of human actions must have been governed by the fundamental law concerning survival. As such, self-preservation affects all of the possible solutions to alleviate poverty and by saying that we need immediate relief to ensure that people’s living conditions will improve in the long run, which is in conjunction to Marx’s assertion that self-preservation is a fundamental law that will affect the cultural, legal and political structures of that particular society.
Second is to cater to the need of establishing a credible and able set of political leaders. To achieve this, we are obliged to fix, adjust, improve or, in some cases, do a complete overhaul of the existing systems. Starting with the educational system (in the guiding principle that “education is a right of all and never the privilege of the few”) and completely obliterating the idea of education as a means of employment (rather, we must consider education as a tool for pioneering), we are likely to produce a polity with politically-sound minds that will make them wise voters. We must be careful, however, of preserving the individual right to suffrage. What we are saying is that we must instill among the people the proper criteria of evaluation and teach them to vote for someone not just because of external attractions (which translates to popularity and the all-too familiar Guns, Goons and Gold) but with his/her clear program of action. This involves Marx’s hierarchy of structure which states that the fundamental is the economic structure and next to it is the political system which controls over other systems (such as education and the government) and power-related issues present in a particular society.
Finally, by finishing an overhaul of our present systems, we can instigate an improvement in the “outlook or idea” of the general population. In a sense, we are “psyching up” the people to have a more optimistic view of their surroundings, which is definitely essential considering the highly fatalist and pessimistic view of the impoverished sectors in their capability of transforming their own lives, that it will not happen because the government officials who are supposed to be serving us will always remain "corrupt" and "deceitful." It is precisely because of these mindsets that we give room for the “traditional politicians” (deridingly called “trapos” and, quite rightfully, have this moniker given to a kind of dirt rag) to remain and allow them to continue living luxurious lifestyles at the expense of the public revenues. In changing this perspective and ensuring the delivery of immediate relief, we may ensure a progressive and stable economic growth, as well as functioning and satisfactory educational and political systems. These sorts of developments can improve the general outlook of the populace to promote productivity. We can improve their condition not by showering them with basic needs alone (like dole-outs for disaster victims) but more importantly by reforming their perspectives positively that they may not return to their previous impoverished state.
We were reminded of a certain conversation in Manix Abrera’s comic strip “KikoMachineKomix” from the Philippine Daily Inquirer where the characters were apprehensive that the day will come that we will claim that no one in our country is getting hungry because none of us know what it feels to be full anymore. In relation to this, why not, instead of worrying about the situation, take this concept of “killing the idea,”doing away with it? In “killing the idea” of poverty in this society, we are going to instill a more optimistic view of our surroundings which can translate to productivity, and possibly allow us to achieve the ever-elusive progress.
In summary of our points, we propose a hierarchy of solutions by which poverty could be alleviated. Starting from the fundamental which is the economic structure by achieving balance between immediate relief and stable economy, we can proceed to fixing our society's systems and institutions. The educational system should be given first priority as it will catalyze a "domino effect" among the other systems such as the political sphere. Lastly, we promote a more positive and dedicated ideology and outlook of people towards our lives and our community. By attaining all these, we would likely achieve not the existence of a classless society but one in which people meet their needs while maintaining the established balance in the division of labor which is vital for organic solidarity.
In ending , we would like to share a statement of Karl Marx from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: "It is not consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness."~o~o~o~
ANNEX: Enumeration of Some Key Result Areas and Concrete Measures
Immediate Relief:
- Provide basic needs through lowering costs of living (provide subsidies)
- Generate jobs (lower the unemployment rate)
- Remove the Expanded Value-Added tax (E-VAT) and government royalties from energy sources
- Search for alternative energy sources and support their development (so as to lessen fossil fuel dependence; after all, they’re about to run out in 75 years and prices are skyrocketing)
Economic Stability:
- Improve production (which is to say, build MANUFACTURING FIRMS and not COMMERCIAL ESTABLISHMENTS)
- Support FILIPINO entrepreneurs and pioneers by lending them capital (do not allow them to go the way of the fluorescent lamp and the yo-yo)
- Improve highways and other infrastructures.
- PESO must stand competitively against the DOLLAR (let’s not delude ourselves with merely relying on OFW remittances; concentrate on improving production so we may be at par with other countries)
Fixing Present Systems:
- EDUCATION FOR ALL
- IMPROVE BASIC CURRICULUM (PROMOTE HIGH STANDARDS)
- VOTER EDUCATION SHOULD BE PROPER AND SENSIBLE
- AMEND LAWS FOR THE BENEFIT OF ALL
- PROVIDE EFFECTIVE AND GENUINE AGRARIAN REFORM
Between Founding and Ordering: Towards a Properly
Transcript of Session 1
Let me begin with a reading of our contemporary political existence. It seems to me that we modern men are possessed by an excessively arrogant compulsion to collapse and breakdown animating sources of tradition. This is evident not just in what appears to be the fad of modern men which is stirred by the rejection of anything passed on to us by authority but more so in our unquestioned and uncritical trust in the progressive hope of an unknown future whose contours are unavailable for scrutiny and public validation. Hannah Arendt writes: “This double perspective into infinity, which corresponds most closely to our newly found historical consciousness, not only somehow contradicts the biblical myth of creation, but also eliminates the much older and more general question as to whether historical time itself can have a beginning. In its very chronology, the modern age has established a kind of earthly immortality for mankind.” While I find some kind of hope in the former, which in fact, proves that we are still thinking beings with the ability to begin something new, I am quite terrified by the latter tendency, because it rids our thinking of any politics and reifies the notion that politics does not need thinking – everything is just a “thrownness” into the present/future.
In this lecture, I hope to retrieve the deep bond and close association between the two activities which are the subject matter of our present preoccupation: that of thinking and acting politically. I shall do this by highlighting the role of tradition in providing an analytical framework for thinking and as such and rather surprisingly animate a rich and radical resistance to the pervasive currency of the formless stylistic of thinking and acting that has gained preeminence in our modern context. In what follows, I first give an exegetical discussion of the role of tradition in political theory expounded by Hannah Arendt in the essay, “The Tradition of Political Thought”, then give a more detailed appreciation of the contours of this “tradition” through a summary of its elements elegantly constructed by Sheldon Wolin and simplified in Mark Warren’s article. Third, I analyze the relation between thinking and acting in James Tully’s “Political Philosophy as Practical Activity”
1. From Finding Tradition to a Tradition of Founding
A wrong way of interpreting tradition is to understand it in the imagery of ruling and being ruled, which is the pervasive imagery of human relations in our modern socio-political consciousness: where tradition is the ruler and we, its practitioners and consumers are the passive ruled. Hannah Arendt makes this unequivocal point in the passage:
The transformation of action into ruling and being ruled – that is, into those who command and those who execute commands – is the unavoidable result when the model for understanding action is taken form the private realm of household life and transposed to the public-political realm where action, properly speaking, as an activity that goes on only between persons, takes place (Kohn 2005, 52).
The problem with making tradition equivalent to the metaphor of ruling and being ruled is its relegation into the private sphere whose model is precisely the life of the household, simplistically put, the danger in this conceptualization is the radical privatization of tradition, dialectically, the colonization of tradition by the private. This privatization of tradition, however, is not something totally new or modern. Its origins according to Arendt, were in fact, found in the Greek, typically, Platonian and Aristotelian inversions of the hierarchy of human activities, namely, the radical polarization between the bios theoretikos and the bios politikus which became the foundational principle of Western political theory. The culmination of this tension between the political and theoretical life was discovered by the Greeks and acquired by the Romans in the figure of the lawgiver and his triumph over the war hero as the penultimate source of authority, memory and imagination. Hence, our modern understanding of tradition is derived from the private experience of ruling, which has, in the pre-polis, that is pre-Platonic philosophy of the Greeks, had no place in public and political life.
A greater danger, however, in the privatization of tradition lies in the positivist, behavioralist compulsion to prove. Once, tradition has been relegated into the realm of private judgment, it becomes a matter to be proven, hence to find out whether its aims are efficiently and productively matched with its means. Tradition becomes reduced to our modern preoccupation with means and ends. One, as it were, needs to find tradition.
It seems to me then, that for Arendt, the proper way to understand tradition is to situate it in the public realm of human affairs, beyond the calculus of ruling and being ruled, and embedded in the necessarily public nature of human thought: “it lies in the nature of a tradition to be accepted and absorbed as it were, by common sense, which fits the particular and idiosyncratic data of our other senses into a world we inhabit together and share in common” (41, emphases mine). By inscribing tradition into the realm of common sense, Arendt is hardly making a concession to private judgment here, instead, her idea of common sense is one that “obviously operates chiefly in the public realm of politics and morals, and it is that realm which must suffer when common sense and its matter-of-course judgments no longer function, no longer make sense” (42). This is something very different from how we understand common sense nowadays, where “sense” in a very individualized way is the emphasis rather than the common.
As such, for Arendt, tradition is linked to the human capacities to a) remember the greatness of human action; and b) forgive the contingency and frailty of human relations. Allow me to discuss each.
Human Action
Human action, for the Greeks was considered the human activity proper to the realm of living in a political community. Human deeds “were supposed to possess and make apparent a specific greatness of their own, so that no end, no ultimate telos, was needed or could even be used for their justification” (46) and were the only activities available to man that afforded him the possibility of immortalization. But the immortalization of human action necessitated some form of remembering, practices of praising – which can only be achieved through words and the replication of such great deeds. Arendt writes, “the hero, the ‘doer of great deeds and speaker of great words’ as Achilles was called, needed the poet – whose divine gift sees in the past what is worth telling in the present and the future” (45). Thus, the greatness of human action depended so much and exclusively on men talking about it and praising its glory, and therefore on the preservation of a public space where the very essence of action - archein and prattein (beginning and completing) – can be attained. I think this is a crucial point, because it disturbs our contemporary dichotomization between thinking and acting: the need to preserve the episodic and fleeting moments of human glory demands that these two spheres of human life not be seen as opposing each other. Acting, if it has to be meaningful then, must require thinking men. In the same, way, thinking if it has to have any substance at all must depend upon the capacity of men to act. This is what we mean by the tradition of political thought.
The Romans articulated this need to preserve human glory through the use of a much interesting metaphor: the foundation of a civitas. Arendt writes, “the whole of Roman history is based on this foundation as a beginning for eternity. Founded for eternity, Rome has remained even for us, the only Eternal City” (49). What is interesting in Roman political consciousness is the role of religion as a transmitter of the tradition of acting and thinking. Obviously, religious tradition here does not refer to some form of private encounter with God as we nowadays conceive it, but as a bearer of the political community’s esteemed stories of greatness, “handed down from the ancestors, the maiores or greater ones” (ibid). Thus, Arendt writes, “religion, authority and tradition, thus became inseparable from one another, expressing the sacred binding force of an authoritative beginning to which one remained bound through the strength of tradition” (50).
What opposed acting and thinking from each other was therefore some thing or some things other than these two. Arendt identifies two: 1) the Platonic/Aristotelian misunderstanding of the relationship between acting and thinking and its modern realization in the conception of human nature as homo rational (60) ; and 2) the modern equation of action to fabrication, making and labor or the theorization of man as homo faber (ibid). The first, Arendt says is Plato’s radical individualization of the human activity of thinking as thaumadzein – the philosophical marvel and wonder which makes philosophy, “wherever and whenever it reached true greatness, had to break even its own tradition” (55). The second, is more modern. By equating acting with making, modern theorists removed the human capacity to act from the realm of the public and transported it into the realm of the private. But the reverse could also be held true: that the realm of the private invaded the realm of the public thus making it unable for human action to be viewed other than the opposite of human thinking. The isolated nature of these two ascendant activities – laboring and philosophical wonder – it seems to me, is the greatest factor which contributed to the abandonment of the tradition of foundation and preservation which stands as the central principles of political life. Without the guidance of tradition, theory left man to his own devices – figuratively but also literally.
Forgiveness
Forgiveness, according to the political theorist, Hannah Arendt, is what makes politics possible. For Arendt, the ability to forgive releases human action from “the predicament of irreversibility – of being unable to undo what one has done” (Arendt 1958, 237) and allows men to come together anew and begin, because “without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever” (ibid). The human faculty to forgive then makes it possible for political actors not to be enslaved to the past and consequently makes sure that the task of politics is not abandoned.
The justification for the necessity of forgiveness rests on two Arendtian accounts of human life: 1) her characterization of political action as unpredictable; and 2) her understanding of history as irreversible. Central to Arendt’s political theory is the capacity of man for action which she likens to a miraculous disruption of natural processes. For Arendt, it is action and its disruptive nature that engenders the political space. Action transcends the futile “natural rhythm of coming to be and passing away” of human biological processes by disclosing not just the what-ness but more importantly the who-ness that distinguishes man from animals acting merely out of instinct. The novelty in Arendt’s conception of action is that for her, it is a beginning that has no end in sight – existing outside the established categories of means/ends and exhausted by the unique and multiple forms of its sheer performance. Arendt’s theory of action can therefore be frustrating and vulnerable to moral haphazardness (Weiner 2005, 154). She writes:
Men have known that he who acts never quite knows what he is doing, that he always becomes guilty of consequences he never intended or even foresaw, that no matter how disastrous and unexpected the consequences of his deed he can never undo it, that the process he starts is never consummated unequivocally in one single deed or event, and that its very meaning never discloses itself to the actor but only to the backward glance of the historian who himself does not act.
It is only by forgiving, if we follow Arendt’s thought, that man can be redeemed from the moral and tragic consequences of human political action.
2. Thinking About Politics or the Politics of Thinking
The public nature of political thought and its derivation from tradition links Arendt and Sheldon Wolin’s work closely together. According to Wolin, the inquiry of political philosophy is a tradition concerned with “the continuity of preoccupations not the unanimity of response” (1960, 3). Drawing from this definition, we already get an idea that political philosophy is concerned with matters that are of common preoccupations, by that, public, and because of its public nature, it is also concerned with power. In what follows, I will highlight how Wolin’s characterizations of the form, substance, matter, vision and task of political philosophy can be described as one that seeks to make public the relations of power that underpin human relations and thinking about human relations.
a. Political philosophy as a form of inquiry. Wolin argues that “ever since Plato first perceived that the inquiry into the nature of the good life of the individual was necessarily associated with a converging inquiry into the nature of the good community, a close and continuing association has persisted between political philosophy and philosophy in general.”
b. Form and substance. The task of political theory and philosophy for Wolin is to identify where the political begins and the non-political leaves off. But in answering this question, he argues that the articulation of what constitutes the political has always been a matter of conflict and tension. Unlike the natural sciences, the substance of the political is never self-evident, it is rather, defined. This makes games of power central to the analysis of political philosophy. The political theorist gives meaning, he does not prescribe political actions.
c. Political thought and institutions. Wolin’s discussions of political institutions is very instructive. For him, institutions are not process-oriented mechanical systems but “they serve to define, so to speak, political space or the locus wherein the tensional forces of society are related.”
d. Political philosophy and the political. When Wolin says that “no political theorist has ever advocated a disordered society, and no political theorist has ever proposed a permanent revolution as a way of life” he is not asking us to accept that the order of society is a natural order, but rather inviting us to reflect that what we identify as political is a result of an ordering. The task of political philosophy is to unmask this process of ordering, that is to take “politics as one reflection of this phenomenon has come to be an activity expressive of society’s need for constant readjustment.” Simply put, political philosophy’s task is to characterize how one historical age has defined the space of politics and therefore to allow us the opportunity to challenge and contest what we mean by the political, to open new possibilities for the political.
e. The vocabulary of political philosophy. Political theory uses specific languages to describe human realities. It can come in the form of a dark prediction or an opening up of spaces for political imagination. In the process of revealing the specific and systematized linguistic significations underlying political theorizing, Wolin seems to me to be insinuating that political theory advances a specific understanding of the world through the use of language. This is what we mean by the line, “theory does not exist in a vacuum”: theory is laden with a political objective. There is no value-free theory.
f. Vision and political imagination. Political philosophy allows us to understand that a vision of politics is always relative to where the theorist stands. The end result of this envisioning can come in two ways, according to Wolin: on the one hand, descriptive, on the other hand, normative. The aim of political imagining or envisioning is not to cast a finite depiction of an ideal situation. The political theorist must avoid understanding utopia in the wrong manner: that utopia must be realized. On the contrary, a properly political understanding utopic visions is that “precisely because political theory pictured society in an exaggerated, unreal, (unrealizable utopia), it opens an entire sphere of political possibilities.
g. A Tradition of Discourse. The discursive tradition of political theorizing means that theory and thinking is never done alone. It is always shared, it links the past and the present, and therefore historical. As such, it requires a public space in order for it to exist.
All of these aims of political theory are not suspended in some abstract field of thought. Rather, they provide us with a proper understanding of what “practical” means. Certainly, the definition of practical that we are adopting here does not refer to pragmatic, nor realistic. In fact, the very basis of the practicality of political theory and philosophy is the impracticality of its depictions of the world in the commonsensical understanding of the term practical.
Let me begin with a reading of our contemporary political existence. It seems to me that we modern men are possessed by an excessively arrogant compulsion to collapse and breakdown animating sources of tradition. This is evident not just in what appears to be the fad of modern men which is stirred by the rejection of anything passed on to us by authority but more so in our unquestioned and uncritical trust in the progressive hope of an unknown future whose contours are unavailable for scrutiny and public validation. Hannah Arendt writes: “This double perspective into infinity, which corresponds most closely to our newly found historical consciousness, not only somehow contradicts the biblical myth of creation, but also eliminates the much older and more general question as to whether historical time itself can have a beginning. In its very chronology, the modern age has established a kind of earthly immortality for mankind.” While I find some kind of hope in the former, which in fact, proves that we are still thinking beings with the ability to begin something new, I am quite terrified by the latter tendency, because it rids our thinking of any politics and reifies the notion that politics does not need thinking – everything is just a “thrownness” into the present/future.
In this lecture, I hope to retrieve the deep bond and close association between the two activities which are the subject matter of our present preoccupation: that of thinking and acting politically. I shall do this by highlighting the role of tradition in providing an analytical framework for thinking and as such and rather surprisingly animate a rich and radical resistance to the pervasive currency of the formless stylistic of thinking and acting that has gained preeminence in our modern context. In what follows, I first give an exegetical discussion of the role of tradition in political theory expounded by Hannah Arendt in the essay, “The Tradition of Political Thought”, then give a more detailed appreciation of the contours of this “tradition” through a summary of its elements elegantly constructed by Sheldon Wolin and simplified in Mark Warren’s article. Third, I analyze the relation between thinking and acting in James Tully’s “Political Philosophy as Practical Activity”
1. From Finding Tradition to a Tradition of Founding
A wrong way of interpreting tradition is to understand it in the imagery of ruling and being ruled, which is the pervasive imagery of human relations in our modern socio-political consciousness: where tradition is the ruler and we, its practitioners and consumers are the passive ruled. Hannah Arendt makes this unequivocal point in the passage:
The transformation of action into ruling and being ruled – that is, into those who command and those who execute commands – is the unavoidable result when the model for understanding action is taken form the private realm of household life and transposed to the public-political realm where action, properly speaking, as an activity that goes on only between persons, takes place (Kohn 2005, 52).
The problem with making tradition equivalent to the metaphor of ruling and being ruled is its relegation into the private sphere whose model is precisely the life of the household, simplistically put, the danger in this conceptualization is the radical privatization of tradition, dialectically, the colonization of tradition by the private. This privatization of tradition, however, is not something totally new or modern. Its origins according to Arendt, were in fact, found in the Greek, typically, Platonian and Aristotelian inversions of the hierarchy of human activities, namely, the radical polarization between the bios theoretikos and the bios politikus which became the foundational principle of Western political theory. The culmination of this tension between the political and theoretical life was discovered by the Greeks and acquired by the Romans in the figure of the lawgiver and his triumph over the war hero as the penultimate source of authority, memory and imagination. Hence, our modern understanding of tradition is derived from the private experience of ruling, which has, in the pre-polis, that is pre-Platonic philosophy of the Greeks, had no place in public and political life.
A greater danger, however, in the privatization of tradition lies in the positivist, behavioralist compulsion to prove. Once, tradition has been relegated into the realm of private judgment, it becomes a matter to be proven, hence to find out whether its aims are efficiently and productively matched with its means. Tradition becomes reduced to our modern preoccupation with means and ends. One, as it were, needs to find tradition.
It seems to me then, that for Arendt, the proper way to understand tradition is to situate it in the public realm of human affairs, beyond the calculus of ruling and being ruled, and embedded in the necessarily public nature of human thought: “it lies in the nature of a tradition to be accepted and absorbed as it were, by common sense, which fits the particular and idiosyncratic data of our other senses into a world we inhabit together and share in common” (41, emphases mine). By inscribing tradition into the realm of common sense, Arendt is hardly making a concession to private judgment here, instead, her idea of common sense is one that “obviously operates chiefly in the public realm of politics and morals, and it is that realm which must suffer when common sense and its matter-of-course judgments no longer function, no longer make sense” (42). This is something very different from how we understand common sense nowadays, where “sense” in a very individualized way is the emphasis rather than the common.
As such, for Arendt, tradition is linked to the human capacities to a) remember the greatness of human action; and b) forgive the contingency and frailty of human relations. Allow me to discuss each.
Human Action
Human action, for the Greeks was considered the human activity proper to the realm of living in a political community. Human deeds “were supposed to possess and make apparent a specific greatness of their own, so that no end, no ultimate telos, was needed or could even be used for their justification” (46) and were the only activities available to man that afforded him the possibility of immortalization. But the immortalization of human action necessitated some form of remembering, practices of praising – which can only be achieved through words and the replication of such great deeds. Arendt writes, “the hero, the ‘doer of great deeds and speaker of great words’ as Achilles was called, needed the poet – whose divine gift sees in the past what is worth telling in the present and the future” (45). Thus, the greatness of human action depended so much and exclusively on men talking about it and praising its glory, and therefore on the preservation of a public space where the very essence of action - archein and prattein (beginning and completing) – can be attained. I think this is a crucial point, because it disturbs our contemporary dichotomization between thinking and acting: the need to preserve the episodic and fleeting moments of human glory demands that these two spheres of human life not be seen as opposing each other. Acting, if it has to be meaningful then, must require thinking men. In the same, way, thinking if it has to have any substance at all must depend upon the capacity of men to act. This is what we mean by the tradition of political thought.
The Romans articulated this need to preserve human glory through the use of a much interesting metaphor: the foundation of a civitas. Arendt writes, “the whole of Roman history is based on this foundation as a beginning for eternity. Founded for eternity, Rome has remained even for us, the only Eternal City” (49). What is interesting in Roman political consciousness is the role of religion as a transmitter of the tradition of acting and thinking. Obviously, religious tradition here does not refer to some form of private encounter with God as we nowadays conceive it, but as a bearer of the political community’s esteemed stories of greatness, “handed down from the ancestors, the maiores or greater ones” (ibid). Thus, Arendt writes, “religion, authority and tradition, thus became inseparable from one another, expressing the sacred binding force of an authoritative beginning to which one remained bound through the strength of tradition” (50).
What opposed acting and thinking from each other was therefore some thing or some things other than these two. Arendt identifies two: 1) the Platonic/Aristotelian misunderstanding of the relationship between acting and thinking and its modern realization in the conception of human nature as homo rational (60) ; and 2) the modern equation of action to fabrication, making and labor or the theorization of man as homo faber (ibid). The first, Arendt says is Plato’s radical individualization of the human activity of thinking as thaumadzein – the philosophical marvel and wonder which makes philosophy, “wherever and whenever it reached true greatness, had to break even its own tradition” (55). The second, is more modern. By equating acting with making, modern theorists removed the human capacity to act from the realm of the public and transported it into the realm of the private. But the reverse could also be held true: that the realm of the private invaded the realm of the public thus making it unable for human action to be viewed other than the opposite of human thinking. The isolated nature of these two ascendant activities – laboring and philosophical wonder – it seems to me, is the greatest factor which contributed to the abandonment of the tradition of foundation and preservation which stands as the central principles of political life. Without the guidance of tradition, theory left man to his own devices – figuratively but also literally.
Forgiveness
Forgiveness, according to the political theorist, Hannah Arendt, is what makes politics possible. For Arendt, the ability to forgive releases human action from “the predicament of irreversibility – of being unable to undo what one has done” (Arendt 1958, 237) and allows men to come together anew and begin, because “without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever” (ibid). The human faculty to forgive then makes it possible for political actors not to be enslaved to the past and consequently makes sure that the task of politics is not abandoned.
The justification for the necessity of forgiveness rests on two Arendtian accounts of human life: 1) her characterization of political action as unpredictable; and 2) her understanding of history as irreversible. Central to Arendt’s political theory is the capacity of man for action which she likens to a miraculous disruption of natural processes. For Arendt, it is action and its disruptive nature that engenders the political space. Action transcends the futile “natural rhythm of coming to be and passing away” of human biological processes by disclosing not just the what-ness but more importantly the who-ness that distinguishes man from animals acting merely out of instinct. The novelty in Arendt’s conception of action is that for her, it is a beginning that has no end in sight – existing outside the established categories of means/ends and exhausted by the unique and multiple forms of its sheer performance. Arendt’s theory of action can therefore be frustrating and vulnerable to moral haphazardness (Weiner 2005, 154). She writes:
Men have known that he who acts never quite knows what he is doing, that he always becomes guilty of consequences he never intended or even foresaw, that no matter how disastrous and unexpected the consequences of his deed he can never undo it, that the process he starts is never consummated unequivocally in one single deed or event, and that its very meaning never discloses itself to the actor but only to the backward glance of the historian who himself does not act.
It is only by forgiving, if we follow Arendt’s thought, that man can be redeemed from the moral and tragic consequences of human political action.
2. Thinking About Politics or the Politics of Thinking
The public nature of political thought and its derivation from tradition links Arendt and Sheldon Wolin’s work closely together. According to Wolin, the inquiry of political philosophy is a tradition concerned with “the continuity of preoccupations not the unanimity of response” (1960, 3). Drawing from this definition, we already get an idea that political philosophy is concerned with matters that are of common preoccupations, by that, public, and because of its public nature, it is also concerned with power. In what follows, I will highlight how Wolin’s characterizations of the form, substance, matter, vision and task of political philosophy can be described as one that seeks to make public the relations of power that underpin human relations and thinking about human relations.
a. Political philosophy as a form of inquiry. Wolin argues that “ever since Plato first perceived that the inquiry into the nature of the good life of the individual was necessarily associated with a converging inquiry into the nature of the good community, a close and continuing association has persisted between political philosophy and philosophy in general.”
b. Form and substance. The task of political theory and philosophy for Wolin is to identify where the political begins and the non-political leaves off. But in answering this question, he argues that the articulation of what constitutes the political has always been a matter of conflict and tension. Unlike the natural sciences, the substance of the political is never self-evident, it is rather, defined. This makes games of power central to the analysis of political philosophy. The political theorist gives meaning, he does not prescribe political actions.
c. Political thought and institutions. Wolin’s discussions of political institutions is very instructive. For him, institutions are not process-oriented mechanical systems but “they serve to define, so to speak, political space or the locus wherein the tensional forces of society are related.”
d. Political philosophy and the political. When Wolin says that “no political theorist has ever advocated a disordered society, and no political theorist has ever proposed a permanent revolution as a way of life” he is not asking us to accept that the order of society is a natural order, but rather inviting us to reflect that what we identify as political is a result of an ordering. The task of political philosophy is to unmask this process of ordering, that is to take “politics as one reflection of this phenomenon has come to be an activity expressive of society’s need for constant readjustment.” Simply put, political philosophy’s task is to characterize how one historical age has defined the space of politics and therefore to allow us the opportunity to challenge and contest what we mean by the political, to open new possibilities for the political.
e. The vocabulary of political philosophy. Political theory uses specific languages to describe human realities. It can come in the form of a dark prediction or an opening up of spaces for political imagination. In the process of revealing the specific and systematized linguistic significations underlying political theorizing, Wolin seems to me to be insinuating that political theory advances a specific understanding of the world through the use of language. This is what we mean by the line, “theory does not exist in a vacuum”: theory is laden with a political objective. There is no value-free theory.
f. Vision and political imagination. Political philosophy allows us to understand that a vision of politics is always relative to where the theorist stands. The end result of this envisioning can come in two ways, according to Wolin: on the one hand, descriptive, on the other hand, normative. The aim of political imagining or envisioning is not to cast a finite depiction of an ideal situation. The political theorist must avoid understanding utopia in the wrong manner: that utopia must be realized. On the contrary, a properly political understanding utopic visions is that “precisely because political theory pictured society in an exaggerated, unreal, (unrealizable utopia), it opens an entire sphere of political possibilities.
g. A Tradition of Discourse. The discursive tradition of political theorizing means that theory and thinking is never done alone. It is always shared, it links the past and the present, and therefore historical. As such, it requires a public space in order for it to exist.
All of these aims of political theory are not suspended in some abstract field of thought. Rather, they provide us with a proper understanding of what “practical” means. Certainly, the definition of practical that we are adopting here does not refer to pragmatic, nor realistic. In fact, the very basis of the practicality of political theory and philosophy is the impracticality of its depictions of the world in the commonsensical understanding of the term practical.
Tatsulok
I on the other hand don't really agree with the points raised in the previous blog. My comment got longer and longer, so I thought that maybe my stand on the issue should merit an entry of its own. (Our group hasn't posted the summary of our discussion yet, and we got the same question, but I’ll go ahead and put my opinions here anyway.)
Should we just wait for GMA to resign or for her term to end when she is clearly feeding our country with lies instead of nourishment amidst a global food crisis? Should we allow the violation of human rights to persist considering the rising numbers of desaparasidos and victims of extra-judicial killings? Should we just stand back and wait for her to resign while under her administration, the gulf between the elite and the lower class is growing larger?
GMA will NEVER admit to the accusations held against her, ergo she will never resign. She doesn't have the delicadesa to step down from office. (Allow me to be blunt here) HELLO, have you ever listened to a SONA speech? Clearly, the things she states there are far detached from what's actually happening in our country. (Trivia: did you know that during the SONA, they actually hire a lights designer? You have a fictional script, a stage, an actor, special lights, and a few audience members who are willing to suspend their disbelief. So yes ladies and gentlemen, the SONA is a real theatrical production. It's JUST A SHOW.)
Before I move on with this next point, let me first discuss the difference between the State and the Nation. Once people start sharing in one culture and see a collective vision, only then can they be called a Nation. The Nation is not merely the masses, or just one sector of our four economic castes. The Nation is that collective in which we are all part of. To put it more poetically, the Nation, more than just a random collection of individuals sharing one territory, is actually the mind and spirit of a country. The State, on the other hand (or you can call it the Government, the Administration), is that who should be responsible for providing the people with their needs, and for upholding the rights and the laws which should protect and nurture the people it governs. But now we find that the State is deaf to the cries of its people.
The State no longer upholds even the most basic rights of the people. Many are hungry, there is a lack in education, many are dying and many more are being killed. We tolerate crimes and lies being done on such a large scale, thus we also encourage crime amongst ordinary citizens. The very corruption of the government morally corrupts the people it reigns over. Should we not, as a Nation, at the very least be outraged at this? If we are truly part of one Nation, one collective, if we as individuals can truly see a vision for our country, then it is only our right that we call for an ouster. It is OUR call, as a Nation, as a people, to oust the current administration which continues to oppress us.
I think the reason many are stuck at a paralysis when deciding on the fate of GMA’s stay in the palace is that we are so bent on finding a feasible concrete solution –an alternative, a replacement –and nothing can ever seem to suffice. We are stuck by the technical parameters that surround the issue. We stop thinking and analyzing and imagining once the issue of leaving a country without a president is brought up. No alternative ever seems to suffice because we can only see one problem being replaced by another. But I think there’s a deeper problem here that is not being talked about: the deeper issue might not be the administration in itself, or the people who are working in the administration, but the system in which our administration is operating.
The basic premise of the system on which our administration thrives is the disparity between the poor and the elite. The cruel irony of this is that the majority of our population consists of the poor who are unwittingly supporting the whims of the elite minority. The rich protect their wealth from competition and economic uncertainties by defending it against the poor, by perpetuating a system which will leave the have-nots powerless. As long as the rich ensure that the poor remain powerless, the cliché proves true: the rich become richer, and the poor become poorer. Of course, the poor being poor and powerless remain victims of the situation. It is a basic model that has existed for centuries, and it is the model on which our current administration is working.
The alliance of the government and the upper-class against the poor ensures that they who are powerful maintain their power, those who are wealthy maintain their wealth, and the influential maintain their influence.
This is why, I think, that as long as the poor are not empowered, there can never be a radical change in our country. What we really need is an ideological revolution. We need to be able to imagine possibilities outside the realm and technicalities of capitalism, consumerism, and bureaucracy.
I’ll be definitely criticized for saying this, but I think that compared to EDSA I, EDSA II was not a real revolution. Sure we were able to shoo Erap away, but what did we change? Was there even a new ideology that we were able to bring? EDSA II was instigated by an outraged middle and upper class, whose businesses were failing because of the economic damage Erap was causing. Not that I’m pro-Erap or anything, but I just think that the EDSA II was a mere perpetuation of a system that interminably oppressed and disregarded the masses. If you need proof, just look at how we regard EDSA III.
EDSA I on the other hand, was really a stirring of the masses who were stifled to slumber under a deadly nightmare of Marcos’s tyranny. What was brought about during EDSA I was an acknowledgement of two things: 1.) that our country was struggling under a perverted government and that had to change, and 2.) that the people of the nation are part of the process of history; that the creation of history is not legalistic or determined by those in power, rather, it is WE who create our country’s history and craft our country’s future. We acknowledged the power that we, as a people, had. (Kaya nga People Power.) And with that, we realized that we weren’t so helpless after all. With EDSA I, we learned to hope again.
But it seems, after twenty-two years, that hope is lost. And now instead of fighting against it, we have turned a blind eye to the structure that continues to chain us. It seems that the promise of change remains so elusive. Yet I believe that despite how temporary hope and change may be, we should never stop fighting. We should continue to be outraged at how the present system violates human dignity. We should stop telling ourselves that we are trapped in a condition of limits. Only then can we truly see that a new world is indeed possible.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Should GMA resign or be ousted?
Group: Lexx Aquino, Geelo Arayata, Mati Bautista, Jauro Castro, Frances Estipono, Patricia Sta. Maria
Question/Topic: Should GMA resign or be ousted?
Underlying questions:
- Is GMA really the problem? Is this a case of putting a bad factor into a working tradition/system, or is this a case of a decaying system which will give bad outputs regardless of who the input is?
- Will her leaving position (either through resignation or ouster) better the state of the government and country?
o Given that she has indeed committed wrongs, will it be better to take her out immediately, or allow her to finish her term?
o To take her out may cause other problems, and a power struggle that could lead to catastrophic results.
- What are the other options?
Answer to the main question/ Report
Given only two options, we think that President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo should resign rather than be ousted. Resignation would mean that she acknowledges her faults, and can therefore be held accountable for said faults. If she is ousted however, she maintains her stand of not doing anything wrong. This will hinder us from getting anywhere, as accountability is a key factor in whatever we would want to achieve, be it her conviction, her making ammends for her crimes, or correcting her mistakes. Furthermore, resignation is a far cleaner and more peaceful process. Resignation will take one person, the president, and no one else. Attempting to oust her will take much time and effort from everyone, and may even generate violence and economic backlashes. Furthermore, we do not think that ouster will work on a president like Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. She is too smart to be ousted. Ouster may work on blatantly corrupt people like former President Estrada or dicators such as former President Marcos, but for someone like her, who is wise in the ways of creating illusions and who allegedly controls much of the people in power, ouster would not be so effective. We also believe that to some extent, ouster ignores the due process required and provided for by the law. Also, if we attempt to oust her, it is our opinion that many people will try and take advantage of the power of the people to alleviate themselves and their reputations. Many will try to sway the masses to one side or another. Thus we cannot be sure if all the force generated by the people in the effort to oust her will really be directed into exactly that direction, or if it will be manipulated by others to serve their own needs.
Having said all this, we also think however, that her resignation is not a feasible option. It is our opinion that she will never resign. Outside these two options, we believe it is better for her to stay in power, and for people to use the time left until the next election to properly analyze the situation of whether our system is still working, and what kind of people and actions our country really needs. At the risk of allowing her to continue her allegedly corrupt actions while in office, we think there is a far greater risk if we were to abruptly take her out of of the system she serves in, a system which in fact, has her at the top.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Hands-off the Kalashnikov (AK-47)
Only a few decades ago and even at present child soldiers were much utilized in the armed conflicts of Africa, especially in Somalia. Kids handling Kalashnikov and RPG's were used my leftist groups as the meat of their private army. A few days ago, when Ces Drilon was released from captivity, a shocking recurrence of history was revealed but this time on Philippine Soil-Child Soldiers.
In line of political thinking the radical leftists have made a terrifying move. This change of tactic could mold the kind of warfare that AFP would be facing in the south for the upcoming years.The question is, "Is Malacañang ready for it?". Are the Filipino people ready for the horror that is coming?
The NPA, MILF, MNLF and ABU-SAYAF in thier menacing reign of the south for the past few decades have only used Adults or at most teenagers as infantry in their questionable cause. Never before have their any children used. Suicide bombers in those days were already radical and dreaded and now we face children. Even if they acted in an inappropriate manner, they still considered their families as top priority.
WHY USE CHILDREN ?
Children are the most energetic, agile and impressionable units in an army. They fight because they are fed and they are sheltered. A few words of fatherly care and false propaganda could already captivate their loyalty plus they don't fight for a high price. Since their minds are fresh, they seek to learn and if you feed the information you want at the right method they would absorb it like a sponge.
During the Somalian Civil war, when UN peace keeping forces were operating, the UN soldiers had a hard time pinpointing the enemy for there was no uniform to distinguish them and no specific age that determine possible targets. The age bracket of their infantry ranges from 7-30 years old. Their Commanders were probably 30-50 years old. This age hierarchy depicts a father-son relation, wherein the commanders are their fathers.It was not only identifying the targets that hindered the UN commissioned soldiers in the combat operations but it was also their hesitation to shoot a 7 year old kid which more or less has the same age with their sons and daughters. These children at their age could have been playing baseball or going to school but instead, they're in front of them carrying an AK and firing RPG's at their comrades still dropping from the helicopter.
Although our country has not yet reach that kind of situation, the fact that 7-12 year old's were holding bolos and determined to chop the head of Ces if demands were not met indicates that an alarming possibility of the kind of targets that the AFP will be facing. It is unbelievable for 7 year old's without proper education to conceive such a plan-kidnap for ransom. I myself exposed to violent media during my early years could not even imagine how to carry out the operation.Where did they get the intelligence? Who supplied them?
NEW BREED OF COMBATANTS
The former USSR and present RUSSIA has been training children in the KGB (now SPETZNAZ). They are trained from basic field stripping to executing covert operations. This might not be the case in our country but the presence of these underage insurgents could possibly trigger that situation. With a lot of street children roaming in our streets hungry the leftists have a wide supermarket to supply infantry. One day we pro ably will wake-up seeing in the news that child soldiers have captured malacañang and they are demanding legislative body to change our democratic government into a socialist one. And even worse is a 7 year old kid pointing a gun at you when you wake up and you see you wife and daughter being molested by teens. Who knows?
They might be mere speculations right but it has already happened in Africa.
WHY IS THIS A POLITICAL MATTER?
According to Politics and Governance: Theory and Practice in the Philippine context, "While wars may be caused by politics and may result in politics, war itself is not politics. War is the death and failure of Politics." More or less this
statement might be true but i believe that this statement is only applicable in conventional warfare. In modern or contemporary warfare, war is part of politics. The scope and nature of warfare at present already links with politics.
War has changed. Covert operations, a campaign tactic rampantly use in modern warfare, for instance is an exercise of politics. When Ninoy was shot by an unknown gunman, was not that a covert operation which is rather political? Although Political Scientists may argue that covert operations are not public, which is a major characteristic of politics, the resulting effects of the silent operation is made public for its effects affect the public-in various forms, of course.
In line with our topic about child soldiers, the act of the leftist to Finlay use children in combat is a political maneuver as well as a tactical maneuver in warfare. In politics this could mean that the government would create certain policies to respond to this political move affecting the tactical procedures of the AFP in engaging children in combat. Politics and modern warfare in a sense play in similar field.
FORESIGHT
What is to come after this event would definitely change not only the nature of warfare in the our country but as well as the nature of politics between the government and the leftists. Let us keep watch, as political scientist in the
unfolding events for maybe we could possibly create an idea that could cure the newly formulated viral idea that is plaguing the minds of the children the south. Pray that this ideological epidemic would not move north into comforts of your homes.
*Forgive the Grammatical errors if there are any.
Posted By:
VINTOY [Vince Suelto]
In line of political thinking the radical leftists have made a terrifying move. This change of tactic could mold the kind of warfare that AFP would be facing in the south for the upcoming years.The question is, "Is Malacañang ready for it?". Are the Filipino people ready for the horror that is coming?
The NPA, MILF, MNLF and ABU-SAYAF in thier menacing reign of the south for the past few decades have only used Adults or at most teenagers as infantry in their questionable cause. Never before have their any children used. Suicide bombers in those days were already radical and dreaded and now we face children. Even if they acted in an inappropriate manner, they still considered their families as top priority.
WHY USE CHILDREN ?
Children are the most energetic, agile and impressionable units in an army. They fight because they are fed and they are sheltered. A few words of fatherly care and false propaganda could already captivate their loyalty plus they don't fight for a high price. Since their minds are fresh, they seek to learn and if you feed the information you want at the right method they would absorb it like a sponge.
During the Somalian Civil war, when UN peace keeping forces were operating, the UN soldiers had a hard time pinpointing the enemy for there was no uniform to distinguish them and no specific age that determine possible targets. The age bracket of their infantry ranges from 7-30 years old. Their Commanders were probably 30-50 years old. This age hierarchy depicts a father-son relation, wherein the commanders are their fathers.It was not only identifying the targets that hindered the UN commissioned soldiers in the combat operations but it was also their hesitation to shoot a 7 year old kid which more or less has the same age with their sons and daughters. These children at their age could have been playing baseball or going to school but instead, they're in front of them carrying an AK and firing RPG's at their comrades still dropping from the helicopter.
Although our country has not yet reach that kind of situation, the fact that 7-12 year old's were holding bolos and determined to chop the head of Ces if demands were not met indicates that an alarming possibility of the kind of targets that the AFP will be facing. It is unbelievable for 7 year old's without proper education to conceive such a plan-kidnap for ransom. I myself exposed to violent media during my early years could not even imagine how to carry out the operation.Where did they get the intelligence? Who supplied them?
NEW BREED OF COMBATANTS
The former USSR and present RUSSIA has been training children in the KGB (now SPETZNAZ). They are trained from basic field stripping to executing covert operations. This might not be the case in our country but the presence of these underage insurgents could possibly trigger that situation. With a lot of street children roaming in our streets hungry the leftists have a wide supermarket to supply infantry. One day we pro ably will wake-up seeing in the news that child soldiers have captured malacañang and they are demanding legislative body to change our democratic government into a socialist one. And even worse is a 7 year old kid pointing a gun at you when you wake up and you see you wife and daughter being molested by teens. Who knows?
They might be mere speculations right but it has already happened in Africa.
WHY IS THIS A POLITICAL MATTER?
According to Politics and Governance: Theory and Practice in the Philippine context, "While wars may be caused by politics and may result in politics, war itself is not politics. War is the death and failure of Politics." More or less this
statement might be true but i believe that this statement is only applicable in conventional warfare. In modern or contemporary warfare, war is part of politics. The scope and nature of warfare at present already links with politics.
War has changed. Covert operations, a campaign tactic rampantly use in modern warfare, for instance is an exercise of politics. When Ninoy was shot by an unknown gunman, was not that a covert operation which is rather political? Although Political Scientists may argue that covert operations are not public, which is a major characteristic of politics, the resulting effects of the silent operation is made public for its effects affect the public-in various forms, of course.
In line with our topic about child soldiers, the act of the leftist to Finlay use children in combat is a political maneuver as well as a tactical maneuver in warfare. In politics this could mean that the government would create certain policies to respond to this political move affecting the tactical procedures of the AFP in engaging children in combat. Politics and modern warfare in a sense play in similar field.
FORESIGHT
What is to come after this event would definitely change not only the nature of warfare in the our country but as well as the nature of politics between the government and the leftists. Let us keep watch, as political scientist in the
unfolding events for maybe we could possibly create an idea that could cure the newly formulated viral idea that is plaguing the minds of the children the south. Pray that this ideological epidemic would not move north into comforts of your homes.
*Forgive the Grammatical errors if there are any.
Posted By:
VINTOY [Vince Suelto]
Friday, June 20, 2008
Backlash
Pos 60 question thrown at our group: How do we solve Poverty?
Now, a lot of people have asked, been asking, and in all probability will ask this question; young and old, rich and poor, you get it. Everyone. People have died asking this question, and people have died trying to answer it. Generations have preceded ours, encountering the same problem, the same wall they've been trying to tear down, go around, or go through. I stare at the question on the chalkboard, wondering how a handful of hotshot students could ever think of something as magnanimous as a solution to poverty, where so many have already failed.
What is poverty anyway?
It's not so much as lacking possessions, or adequate funds to provide one's self with basic needs. Poverty isn't really about living in the streets, or begging for money, or doing blue collar jobs that barely support your family of five. Poverty is something far more frightening that we create these materialistic definitions as facades to disillusion us from what poverty truly is.
Poverty is an Idea.
It is a way of thinking, a way of life, it is a principle. And the frightening thing about ideas is that they move things, they cause change, they affect the way human life operates. Poverty embeds in us this concept that life is something static, something that we cannot change, and that humanity is powerless to the system that it worships. Poverty, in its very existence, promotes the social disparity that it has condemned for so long. Poverty is a thorn in society's paw, a painful reminder of our exiguity to lift ourselves even from the most basic of problems. Poverty tells us there is a "scarcity of resources", when what really is happening is a "misappropriation of resources".
Poverty is a perspective, a way of viewing life as something fleeting, and that because humanity is powerless to change society, all he can do is tend to himself. Poverty promotes consumerism, it puts a price tag on everything, and where you stand in the system is grossly dictated by how much you can buy.
But poverty's persistence to exist lies in the one thing that it promises people; happiness. Poverty gives people an opportunity to escape their problems, a choice to forsake this world of all earthly attachments and hardships. Poverty gives people an excuse to be lazy, to be complacent of the status quo. Poverty ceases forms of questioning, using instead excuses normalcy or inadequacy of human ability, or the preponderance of the powers that be.
To be satisfied with what you have now, without even striving harder to achieve something far more greater is just simply inhuman.
But poverty does have its perks. In our country, it is the poverty that votes. Due to this form of thinking, they only ask you please them come election day for them to vote for you. In our country, it is the poverty that consumes the most. Television and Film mold and shape themselves into what we have today for television and film; a pathetic and grotesque window to our fractured society, devoid of any form of intelligence and integrity. In our country, products and businesses are reaping millions and millions of pesos from selling everything in lilliputian packagings, because poverty only asks you "buy enough for the day", and that "buying big costs too much". In our country, the youth is educated to be good employees, instead of being taught how to be good leaders.
In our country, it is better to read about Rizal than to live like him.
But what do we do about poverty?
I'll tell you what we ought to do. We think about it. We talk about it. We write about it. Because it is in the form of discourse that ideas are resolved. When it comes to poverty in our country, the one thing we should really do is discuss it, because there isn't enough we know about poverty for us to really solve it. Generations before us have done so much to achieve so little, would we make the same mistake? I'm not saying that the past generations never thought about what they did to solve poverty, but all I'm saying is that maybe we ought to stop giving them cash subsidies that last for a day and start giving them a way to make money for life. Because what we are fighting is not a scarcity of resources, or a lack of employment, or a weakening economy.
What we are fighting is a culture of apathy, a religion of complacency, a disgusting way of life.
written by:
Leiron Conrad T. Martija
cross-posted at:
Tinted Reflections
Now, a lot of people have asked, been asking, and in all probability will ask this question; young and old, rich and poor, you get it. Everyone. People have died asking this question, and people have died trying to answer it. Generations have preceded ours, encountering the same problem, the same wall they've been trying to tear down, go around, or go through. I stare at the question on the chalkboard, wondering how a handful of hotshot students could ever think of something as magnanimous as a solution to poverty, where so many have already failed.
What is poverty anyway?
It's not so much as lacking possessions, or adequate funds to provide one's self with basic needs. Poverty isn't really about living in the streets, or begging for money, or doing blue collar jobs that barely support your family of five. Poverty is something far more frightening that we create these materialistic definitions as facades to disillusion us from what poverty truly is.
Poverty is an Idea.
It is a way of thinking, a way of life, it is a principle. And the frightening thing about ideas is that they move things, they cause change, they affect the way human life operates. Poverty embeds in us this concept that life is something static, something that we cannot change, and that humanity is powerless to the system that it worships. Poverty, in its very existence, promotes the social disparity that it has condemned for so long. Poverty is a thorn in society's paw, a painful reminder of our exiguity to lift ourselves even from the most basic of problems. Poverty tells us there is a "scarcity of resources", when what really is happening is a "misappropriation of resources".
Poverty is a perspective, a way of viewing life as something fleeting, and that because humanity is powerless to change society, all he can do is tend to himself. Poverty promotes consumerism, it puts a price tag on everything, and where you stand in the system is grossly dictated by how much you can buy.
But poverty's persistence to exist lies in the one thing that it promises people; happiness. Poverty gives people an opportunity to escape their problems, a choice to forsake this world of all earthly attachments and hardships. Poverty gives people an excuse to be lazy, to be complacent of the status quo. Poverty ceases forms of questioning, using instead excuses normalcy or inadequacy of human ability, or the preponderance of the powers that be.
To be satisfied with what you have now, without even striving harder to achieve something far more greater is just simply inhuman.
But poverty does have its perks. In our country, it is the poverty that votes. Due to this form of thinking, they only ask you please them come election day for them to vote for you. In our country, it is the poverty that consumes the most. Television and Film mold and shape themselves into what we have today for television and film; a pathetic and grotesque window to our fractured society, devoid of any form of intelligence and integrity. In our country, products and businesses are reaping millions and millions of pesos from selling everything in lilliputian packagings, because poverty only asks you "buy enough for the day", and that "buying big costs too much". In our country, the youth is educated to be good employees, instead of being taught how to be good leaders.
In our country, it is better to read about Rizal than to live like him.
But what do we do about poverty?
I'll tell you what we ought to do. We think about it. We talk about it. We write about it. Because it is in the form of discourse that ideas are resolved. When it comes to poverty in our country, the one thing we should really do is discuss it, because there isn't enough we know about poverty for us to really solve it. Generations before us have done so much to achieve so little, would we make the same mistake? I'm not saying that the past generations never thought about what they did to solve poverty, but all I'm saying is that maybe we ought to stop giving them cash subsidies that last for a day and start giving them a way to make money for life. Because what we are fighting is not a scarcity of resources, or a lack of employment, or a weakening economy.
What we are fighting is a culture of apathy, a religion of complacency, a disgusting way of life.
written by:
Leiron Conrad T. Martija
cross-posted at:
Tinted Reflections
Taking on Four: Additions to Previous Points
As classmates who have posted here considered it prudent to post disclaimers, I will too. First, I am not nor do I claim to know all the ins and outs of each “socially-relevant” issue I am going to comment on below, and I may not have very original opinions; I will simply put out what I think about them and willingly listen to your comments or counterpoints.
1. The Drilon Abduction
Let’s get this straight; Ces Drilon and her companions, in going to Mindanao in the first place despite its long-standing history of secessionism and civil war, are fully aware of the possibilities that behold them. The danger of abduction, injury and death are very apparent in such situations. Yet the mere fact that they have pushed through it illustrates their dedication to their work as journalists.
In my work as a student journalist, I have seen my colleagues practicing their job as professional as possible, going through the extra mile to make their reportage as analytical and relevant to their readers as possible. It is already known to a journalist that in pursuit of truth and relativity, putting your life on the line is a given.
What with all the 56 (and counting) journalists murdered in this administration of the midget (including Ateneo de Davao student journalist Benjaline Hernandez in 2002)? What else would have driven them to continue but the pursuit of truth at the expense of their safety and lives? It would be quite naïve for us to belittle such a sacrifice. Of course, with what I have related, I may be biased.
On her abductors, however, I am quite tempted to agree with what Puno claimed that they are mercenaries “not yet fully immersed” into the craft of terrorism. They are likely belonging to the new generation of Mindanao natives who, by virtue of the hapless and backward handling of politics in the outskirts and remote provinces, are disillusioned with reform and recruited through the deceptive hand of terrorist networks promising change through armed and violent struggle.
2. On the Rice and Power Crisis
Remember the heyday of the scandalous ZTE-NBN Deal? It was precisely at the crucial moment when evidences are beginning to pile up that these problems arose (or, as other partisans would say, “Magnified”) by the administration. It is narrow-minded to immediately conclude that this was a deliberate plot to sideline the issue and contain the massive damage to the credibility of the midget and her cabinet, but the timing couldn’t have been more inopportune suspicious.
Given this, the rice shortage situation is definitely paradoxical. We, by nature an agricultural country and once one of the rice bowls of Asia, are finding it difficult to serve the vital grains on our tables. I would view it perhaps as the emergence of the ghosts of our failures in practicing genuine agrarian reform. It has been said before and I would say it again: a prosperous farmer is the foundation of a prosperous society. That, and combined with cartels and hoarders, would constitute it.
As to the power crisis… if we would swallow hook, line and sinker what Judy Ann Santos is saying in the advertisement, then it would appear that the government alone is the one actually behind the manipulations on prices. But such would be one-sided and invalid. One should take to account a passing fact in ES 10: our global supply of fossil fuels (which runs the majority of power plants in the country) is due to run out in 75 years. With the increasing need for consumption, the oil cartels, following the law of supply and demand, would naturally increase prices. Intermediaries and Meralco will, so as to recover their losses, would resort to underhanded measures of gaining revenues the general (and, unfortunately, mostly ignorant) public are not aware of.
3. The hammering on ABS-CBN
This is likely a battle between partisans, one of which both parties cannot have a bold claim to innocence. The allegations of extrajudicial killings, as well as rampant mudslinging among the coalition of the midget with her critics (belonging to the clique of the ousted plunderer) have so characterized this regime that to put a sincere faith into its undertakings is similar to what Simoun described as “offering fresh meat to vultures.”
ABS-CBN, on the other hand, has been from the outset of the “Hello Garci” issue quite observant and watchfully monitoring, even magnifying, the crookedness of what is already a rotting corpse of a government. I would view it from the point that the Lopez network is not being rightfully punished by an authority whose majesty was challenged and disgraced. Instead, it is a fight between two kids arguing how a grasshopper flies.
4. Pros and Cons on the “Possibility” of Leftist Policy
This one I got interested to speak on when RR brought it up during the first day of class. Though I am definitely in no way a staunch advocate of what the Communist Party of the Philippines and the National Democratic Front are pushing for as a means of applying Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Communism in the country (that is, armed struggle), I quite understand the validity of why the revolutionary movement still persists in fighting and is still steadily recruiting (albeit not as popular during the martial rule of Marcos) members and cadres. They have solutions that they are persisting on, and are confident (if not arrogant) that they will reach. In addition to this, they have taken the cudgel of the poor, the working class and the oppressed minorities of society, which comprise a great deal of the country’s population more than the social elite. Rights, beliefs and spirits yearning to be free cannot be suppressed for so long, even with a revitalized government hiding under the pretense of “free democracy.”
However, in what we have discussed so far in class and came upon, I oppose what form of government Communism usually adopts: the totalitarian form. Maoist China and the Cambodian Khmer Rouge, being the best examples, shows too well what happens when “the philosopher is king.” Thinking, being confined to the leaders of the movement when they were in power, has imposed suppression among the majority as well. In this way, Communism takes up the means of the ideology it denounces the most: that of Fascism, which defeats the purpose of what they have fought for all along.
I have written a piece discussing more precisely my views on this in my personal blog (Click here) though I am quite sure not many will quite understand it, being written in Filipino.
That would be all I have to say, and thank you for allowing me to do so.
Hansley A. Juliano
II-AB PoS
1. The Drilon Abduction
Let’s get this straight; Ces Drilon and her companions, in going to Mindanao in the first place despite its long-standing history of secessionism and civil war, are fully aware of the possibilities that behold them. The danger of abduction, injury and death are very apparent in such situations. Yet the mere fact that they have pushed through it illustrates their dedication to their work as journalists.
In my work as a student journalist, I have seen my colleagues practicing their job as professional as possible, going through the extra mile to make their reportage as analytical and relevant to their readers as possible. It is already known to a journalist that in pursuit of truth and relativity, putting your life on the line is a given.
What with all the 56 (and counting) journalists murdered in this administration of the midget (including Ateneo de Davao student journalist Benjaline Hernandez in 2002)? What else would have driven them to continue but the pursuit of truth at the expense of their safety and lives? It would be quite naïve for us to belittle such a sacrifice. Of course, with what I have related, I may be biased.
On her abductors, however, I am quite tempted to agree with what Puno claimed that they are mercenaries “not yet fully immersed” into the craft of terrorism. They are likely belonging to the new generation of Mindanao natives who, by virtue of the hapless and backward handling of politics in the outskirts and remote provinces, are disillusioned with reform and recruited through the deceptive hand of terrorist networks promising change through armed and violent struggle.
2. On the Rice and Power Crisis
Remember the heyday of the scandalous ZTE-NBN Deal? It was precisely at the crucial moment when evidences are beginning to pile up that these problems arose (or, as other partisans would say, “Magnified”) by the administration. It is narrow-minded to immediately conclude that this was a deliberate plot to sideline the issue and contain the massive damage to the credibility of the midget and her cabinet, but the timing couldn’t have been more inopportune suspicious.
Given this, the rice shortage situation is definitely paradoxical. We, by nature an agricultural country and once one of the rice bowls of Asia, are finding it difficult to serve the vital grains on our tables. I would view it perhaps as the emergence of the ghosts of our failures in practicing genuine agrarian reform. It has been said before and I would say it again: a prosperous farmer is the foundation of a prosperous society. That, and combined with cartels and hoarders, would constitute it.
As to the power crisis… if we would swallow hook, line and sinker what Judy Ann Santos is saying in the advertisement, then it would appear that the government alone is the one actually behind the manipulations on prices. But such would be one-sided and invalid. One should take to account a passing fact in ES 10: our global supply of fossil fuels (which runs the majority of power plants in the country) is due to run out in 75 years. With the increasing need for consumption, the oil cartels, following the law of supply and demand, would naturally increase prices. Intermediaries and Meralco will, so as to recover their losses, would resort to underhanded measures of gaining revenues the general (and, unfortunately, mostly ignorant) public are not aware of.
3. The hammering on ABS-CBN
This is likely a battle between partisans, one of which both parties cannot have a bold claim to innocence. The allegations of extrajudicial killings, as well as rampant mudslinging among the coalition of the midget with her critics (belonging to the clique of the ousted plunderer) have so characterized this regime that to put a sincere faith into its undertakings is similar to what Simoun described as “offering fresh meat to vultures.”
ABS-CBN, on the other hand, has been from the outset of the “Hello Garci” issue quite observant and watchfully monitoring, even magnifying, the crookedness of what is already a rotting corpse of a government. I would view it from the point that the Lopez network is not being rightfully punished by an authority whose majesty was challenged and disgraced. Instead, it is a fight between two kids arguing how a grasshopper flies.
4. Pros and Cons on the “Possibility” of Leftist Policy
This one I got interested to speak on when RR brought it up during the first day of class. Though I am definitely in no way a staunch advocate of what the Communist Party of the Philippines and the National Democratic Front are pushing for as a means of applying Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Communism in the country (that is, armed struggle), I quite understand the validity of why the revolutionary movement still persists in fighting and is still steadily recruiting (albeit not as popular during the martial rule of Marcos) members and cadres. They have solutions that they are persisting on, and are confident (if not arrogant) that they will reach. In addition to this, they have taken the cudgel of the poor, the working class and the oppressed minorities of society, which comprise a great deal of the country’s population more than the social elite. Rights, beliefs and spirits yearning to be free cannot be suppressed for so long, even with a revitalized government hiding under the pretense of “free democracy.”
However, in what we have discussed so far in class and came upon, I oppose what form of government Communism usually adopts: the totalitarian form. Maoist China and the Cambodian Khmer Rouge, being the best examples, shows too well what happens when “the philosopher is king.” Thinking, being confined to the leaders of the movement when they were in power, has imposed suppression among the majority as well. In this way, Communism takes up the means of the ideology it denounces the most: that of Fascism, which defeats the purpose of what they have fought for all along.
I have written a piece discussing more precisely my views on this in my personal blog (Click here) though I am quite sure not many will quite understand it, being written in Filipino.
That would be all I have to say, and thank you for allowing me to do so.
Hansley A. Juliano
II-AB PoS
They deserve the punishment anyway
Well I just thought of this after reading through Enrique Moran's post about the recent kidnapping of Ces Drilon.
If you would think about it, the administration has been attacking the Lopez family recently. From ABS CBN, to Meralco, to North Luzon Expressway, and to all the other companies the Lopez Family owns (ie. Maynilad, Sky Cable, First holdings, etc. etc.), they have been bombarded with issues like the Wowowee incident a couple years ago and the system loss issue with the Meralco. If you would ask me, I would agree with the administration with what they are doing against the Lopezes for one simple reason: The Lopezes have monopolized basic needs, and because they have the power of monopoly in their hands, they abuse this power in such a way that they make the community suffer for their selfish benefits.
A good example of this? The Meralco issue. Since they have practically dominated the competition for electrical distribution, what they did is to make the price of their services sky-high though billing consumers various fees that the consumer is not aware of nor has an idea what and why there is such fee included to our electrical bills. And what makes that worse is that they do not actually pay their electricity bills for their offices since they get the money from the consumers, hence, making the consumers pay for their bills. (Haven't you wondered why the Meralco Building in Pasig is heavily lighted at night almost everyday? Think about it.)
As with the issue of the kidnapping of Ces Drilon . . . well yes it may be Ces Drilon's fault for going to Mindanao without being aware of the risks, but this whole issue just adds up to the upcoming issues and cases against the Lopez Family.
Feel free to comment, criticize, or add insights to this.
Duey Guison
Thursday, June 19, 2008
The fight for First Lady
We all know that the American presidential race is on the way. And both Obama and Mc Cain are going head to head on this race to the White House. but on the other hand, I have been reading reports and watching news about the other race in this election. the Race for the First Lady.
recently, Michelle Obama said, " for the first time in my adult life, i feel proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback"
Alot of people have commented on that, both positive and negative. she even appeared on the show "The View" and explained her side. even now First Lady Laura Bush supports Michelle Obama. but Cindy Mc Cain is not.
What can we say about this line? is she really patriotic? are the words used to express what she wanted to say right? could she have said it another way? Is Michelle Obama the better candidate for the position of First Lady?
any thoughts or insights, please feel free to post something.
Thank you,
Enrique Moran
Kidnapping
Im new to blogging so please, bare with me. ill start this new blogsite RR made for us since im the beadle for his second class. so ill be posting the idea or issue about the recent or not so recent kidnapping incident involving ABS-CBN new crew.
Im sure most of us, or all of us already knows about this. as I was going through the situation and talking to people, mostly uncles and aunts over the weekend, i couldn't help but think who is really to blame for this? and other thoughts came into my mind.
1. Is it the fault of the LGU/Govt of Sulu for not protecting the crew?
2. Is it the fault of the news crew or ABS-CBN for not informing the LGU/Govt of Sulu about their desire to feature the abu sayyafs?
3. Who's call was it anyway to continue the coverage? was it Ces Drilon's? ABS-CBN? the question again is why do reporters continue to do such reports or coverages if they already know that these things can happen. is it in pursuit of truth? or pursuit of fame? or to divert the attention of the people from the Meralco issue?
4. What does Mayor Alvarez got to do with the negotiations? remember, elections in that area will be sometime this year.
- please feel free to comment, add insights, more details, questions, other points... really interesting to know more about this issue or topic.
Thanks,
Enrique Moran
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