Coming to Terms with Liberalism, Warts and all (Part III)

This is THIRD in a series of stories about how I have been trying to come to terms with the promises and follies of liberalism. If you haven't read the previous parts, Part I is here and Part II is here

Grappling with Doubts

Rommel A. Curaming

While in Singapore and Indonesia, I applied for a Ph.D. scholarship and was lucky to receive offers from the Australian National University (ANU) and the East-West Center, University of  Hawaii. I opted for the ANU mainly due to a better funding package, which included airfare for my family and an additional monthly stipend for child support. Always struggling financially then, I tended to go where money would be less of an issue. It didn't take long for me to realize that ANU was an excellent place to pursue a Ph.D., particularly in Southeast Asian Studies. The wealth of its intellectual resources, its generous provisions for students, and its nurturing and collegial environment made ANU a standout.  The combined collections of the ANU libraries and the National Library of Australia (NLA) on Indonesia and other Asian countries were very impressive. For my purpose, they were much better than what I had found in repositories in Indonesia.  

I was supervised by three top-notched historians who, despite their uneasiness with my topic and/or preferred analytic approaches, allowed me full freedom to explore. Of equal importance, my fellow Ph.D. students were engaging and supportive, and passionate about pushing the boundaries of knowledge in our respective areas of interest. The time I spent doing a Ph.D. at the ANU was easily the most intellectually exhilarating years to which I look back with gratitude and nostalgia.

Reading intently about the nature of the power-knowledge relations and the Marcos and Suharto eras, the initial unease about liberal democracy which I felt earlier in Singapore and Indonesia (see Part II) gave way to serious questioning of many of the long-standing liberal ideas. Having taken for granted since my UP days the rightfulness of liberal stances and assumptions, I regarded many problems in the Philippines and the world as owing to the failure to effectively employ liberal solutions. These included upholding the primacy of rational thinking, human rights, justice, and personal freedom. 

Foundational here is the assumption, basic to the Enlightenment, that to know is a fundamental good; nothing is blissful in ignorance. This allocates to critical and rational thinking and, by extension, education, a central position in the scheme of things. For instance, Filipinos’ penchants for electing trapos or traditional politicians, or allowing vote-buying to flourish, are all attributed to their ignorance, gullibility, and lack of proper education (more on education in my other post). If only people knew, say, that the Marcoses were corrupt, unscrupulous, and violent, they would not vote for, let alone be loyal, to them. That they did/do vote or are loyal, means they are misled or are plain ignorant. That's what I thought then, same as what many Kakampinks passionately believe now. Fact-checking and voter education programs that are often peddled with noble intents are the practical consequences of this idea. 

Subscribing to this belief or approach, my teaching was precisely geared towards making my students aware and critical of the trapos, the Marcoses, the elites, the US and the West, etc. Looking back, a notable but gradual shift in my attitude and perceptions took place since my NUS days. Whereas before, I took my liberal stances as a purely virtuous service to empower common people and strengthen democracy, I have become aware of their ambivalent impact, depending on the context of actual use. On the one hand, it could be empowering, but on the other, it could also be emasculating and condescending. For instance, common people are looked down as incapable of thinking properly and deciding what is good for themselves, thus scholars and other educated people should decide and speak on their behalf. Before, I did not see the illiberal and totalitarian impulses that drove this common tendency. I did not consider the possibility that given their own situations, they may view the world differently, via an alternative form of rationality; that they may have different needs; and that being different does not necessarily mean being wrong.  What I readily saw, which trumped other considerations, was the good intentions that drove our (liberal) thoughts, aspirations, and actions. If only they would think and act like us, so I've thought, things would be much better for everyone.

In due course, the contradictions between liberals’ aspiration for freedom and rights for everyone, on one side, and their denial of the same to those who don’t agree with them, on another, became clear to me.  As elsewhere, the Philippines is replete with this kind of well-meaning liberal intellectuals. Their passion for pro-marginalized causes (often called "wokeness" in American political parlance) is sometimes directly proportional to their inability or refusal to understand on their own terms the views of the marginalized, who they claim to represent and fight for. It was rather ironic that given their self-assured sense of intellectual superiority, they cannot understand what they regard as ‘simpler’ minds. I know this attitude very well because for decades I had fully imbibed it, and up to now it requires constant efforts on my part to shake it off. 

Looking back, there were two crises of representations I had to overcome to come to terms with my hitherto abiding faith in liberalism. Only recently did I connect the two and found, to my surprise, that they were closely entwined as pillars of the liberal tradition. Earlier, I had missed that the unraveling of one of these crises reinforced that of another, paving for the crumbling of liberal assumptions I held sacred for so long.

The first crisis of representation was one I encountered via a course on Postcolonial theory, which I took at the NUS, as I already mentioned in Part II (here and here for  more details about my engagement with Postcolonial theory). The crisis of representation refers to the questioning of the ability of human-made tools like language and logic to represent reality as it is. I took it for granted for so long, just like almost everyone else did, that knowledge corresponds to reality out there; that language is a transparent or neutral tool that captures the real. The so-called “linguistic turn” in the humanities and social sciences cast doubts on this long-standing idea, foregrounding instead the contextual and constructed nature of language, knowledge, and even rationality. Among other things, it implies that knowing may not be a fundamental good; that it is the contexts that decide whether it is or not. It also suggests that representation is a function of various human and social factors, possibly the most important of which is the prevailing power relations. In Foucault's and Nietzsche’s pithy framing, power/knowledge. This approach—propagated by proponents of critical approaches like poststructuralism, postmodernism, feminism, postcolonial theory, and cultural studies—rattled and infuriated many conservative, liberal and radical intellectuals. The nihilistic or anarchist implications were simply too much for them to tolerate; its anti-foundationalism is viewed to undermine the basis for any political vision, as everything is reduced to a standpoint, thus, dependent on shifting power relations. For a story of how I engaged with these complex issues, you may wish to check this out.

That knowledge is a function more fundamentally of unequal power relations, and only secondarily of accurate representation, resonated deeply in me. It coincided with my long-standing fascination with some key concepts in Asian philosophies, such as the Hindu-Buddhist idea that the world is an illusion or maya. This illusion ensues from humans’ mistaking the ceiling for the lower limit of their ability to capture the real. Confusing what we see in the world as incontrovertible reality may be a form of hubris, an overestimation of one’s capability and misrecognition of humans’ place in the scheme of things. This breeds worldly attachments or desire, which is the well-spring of human frustrations or sufferings. I leave out the part on human suffering here as it entails a lengthy philosophical digression. The ideas of misrecognition and desire, however, are crucial. 

When my conservative, provincial outlook gave way to cosmopolitan, liberal, radical, or progressive ones while I was in UP Diliman, I took the shift as a welcome corrective to what I deemed was wrong. I understood it as progress, a step towards an indisputable rational political stance. Only years later did I realize that my desire for an “indisputable rational political stance” was a product of the misrecognition of the nature of knowledge and human ability. Rather than the Kuhnian epistemic stance, which rooted knowledge in social contexts and is premised on the limits of human cognition, I was clinging to the Newtonian naturalistic, or God's eye (omniscient) perspective of knowledge. From this viewpoint, power relations had nothing to do with knowledge; they, in fact, stand oppositional to one another. It was just a matter of time and proper techniques to attain absolutely accurate representation. After all, modern humanity was born out of the presumed human capability and desire to know reality as it is, in an objective or absolute sense. This capability used to be reserved for God. But daring to play God, liberal forebears allocated humans a central place in the scheme of things. This gave rise, among others, to the logic of power that enabled and concealed at the same time the tendency to view things from a God’s eye standpoint. It is, in hindsight, a fantasy that I took to be self-evidently true for so long. It required time and deliberate effort before I could extricate myself from it, as detailed in my other article.

The second crisis refers to the representation via plebiscites or electoral exercises, which goes at the heart of liberal democracy. Direct democracy via self-representation, which to an extent was practiced in ancient Greece, had long become impossible. Public voting or elections served as a substitute. Whoever receives the majority or plurality of votes assumes the right to represent the people (demos). In theory, each voter exercises, and at the same surrenders, one’s sovereign right or freedom to whoever s/he votes for, in exchange for the promise to represent, protect and promote the interests of the voters. But due to various factors, instances were rife when this covenant is repeatedly broken every time elected leaders did not actually promote, protect and represent the interests of the people. For a long time, ordinary people in the Philippines and beyond endured the situation, but apparently, their patience is running out, or has already run out. Various oppositional social and revolutionary movements emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries, including the anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s and 1970s and the anti-globalization movements in the 1980s-2000s. More recently, the Occupy movement in 2011-2012, as well as the election of Trump, Duterte, Modi and other populist leaders manifested people’s disgust over gross inequality, hypocrisy and other failures of elite democracy. 

These instances form part of the rise of populism in various parts of the world, including the Philippines. Often derided as irrational and anti-democratic, populism manifests peoples’ frustration with and distrust of conventional politics and politicians, as well as scholars and other experts. Viewed as colluding with each other, they promoted and benefited from the cosmopolitan, globally-oriented economic, political and intellectual ideas and practices of the post-2^nd World War and post-Cold War liberal and neo-liberal world order, at the expense of the welfare of common people (Porter, 2020). Anti-expert or anti-intellectual sentiments that used to be confined at the margin since time immemorial have flourished, even gone mainstream. 

The advent of various social media platforms enabled self-representation and direct communication in scales and forms, as well as impact unprecedented in history. The long-standing monopolies by political, economic, religious, and intellectual elites of various power-wielding and knowledge-generating mechanisms were broken, effectively undercutting many conventional practices and ideas that underpin liberal democracy. This poses a lot of risks and challenges, but it offers a myriad of opportunities as well to reinvent and reinvigorate liberalism. This I shall try to address in the concluding part of this series.

-To be concluded-