Coming to Terms with Liberalism, Warts and All (Part 1)

This is FIRST in a series of stories that trace the trajectory of my encounter, fascination, doubts, frustration with, and renewed faith in liberalism-progressivism. This installment narrates how the liberal me was born out of my experience at UP Diliman.

                     The Making of a Liberal 

                             by Rommel A. Curaming

‘Martial law baby.’ That was what I was called long before I knew I was. I didn’t know what that meant until one day I heard a student leader at the University of the Philippines in Diliman (UP-Diliman) complaining about how apathetic UP students had become. That was sometime in 1987. In a tone I would understand only much later as sarcastic, he said the lack of parking lot had become UP’s major problem and that the current generations of UP students being “martial law babies” were blissfully oblivious to the many problems that beset the country. 

I remember a heavy air hanged over the campus. Students were being mobilized to protest the killing of someone called Lean Alejandro. The student leader seemed flustered by the disinterest among students, including me. A promdi who just entered UP, I had no idea who Lean Alejandro was, and why he seemed important. It intrigued why his death was deeply angered and mourned by groups of students while ignored by many others. I also wondered why the student leader said UP students were apathetic while most fellow students I encountered seemed brimming with life, passionate about something. Why parking was a problem also made me ponder “how come?” From hindsight, I was too naïve and consumed by efforts to make sense of my new life in a new environment to care about what was going on in Diliman.

In this post, I wish to look back and trace the trajectory of my encounter and engagement with liberalism. I wish to make it clear to me, and to others who may be interested, how I ended being an ardent liberal, then evolved into a questioning one, and how I emerged from the experience with a renewed faith in liberalism, provided it is reformed. I have started writing this since last year as a chapter in an anthology on the Marcos era, but I've realized in due course that the shape it was taking might not fit within the overall theme of that book. Writing dragged on as I find it challenging to articulate my own thoughts and feelings with the complex facets of liberalism. 

-o0o-

I was born in 1970 in a remote seaside town of Catanauan, in the district called Bondoc Peninsula in southern Quezon. The whole area of 13 towns was impoverished, with national roads began to be paved only when I already had my own kids. Simple life in this isolated community was disturbed only occasionally, such as when gossips of possible NPA attacks spread, which did not actually happen in our town, but it did in others. The chilling presence of the New People’s Army (NPA), their intermittent encounters with the government troops, the kangaroo and their revolutionary taxes figured prominently in my memories of those years. Another was the assassination of Ninoy Aquino in 1983 and the news of frequent anti-Marcos rallies in Manila since then. Private conversations were infused with the movie-like dramas, intrigues, and gossips about the Marcoses, Aquinos, Laurels and others. I have recollections of the snap elections in 1986 and the subsequent EDSA uprising. Our town had a long tradition of anti-Marcos voting behavior. He never won there in the 1960s up to 1986, and BBM also lost there recently. I was among those excited and hopeful to see what was to happen after EDSA. But all these were fleeting; they quickly receded as a distant backdrop to my struggles as a high school and later college student, besides the challenges that beset our family.

The memories of my primary school years in the late 1970s and early 1980s were laced with fondness for nutribun, bulgur, powdered milk, and corn flour that from time to time we pupils received in public schools. Routines included occasional field demonstrations of folk or modern dances, daily flag-raising ceremonies and calisthenics, singing national anthem and other songs, and reciting slogans that later I was told were propaganda by the Marcos regime. I recall in particular the song with these lines “May bagong silang, May bagong buhay…”. Its distinctive marching rhythm stuck in me. When I heard it again months ago as briefly captured in the news of BBM’s motorcades, I was jolted by floods of warm memories of my primary school years. Yes, my memories of those years were warm and comforting overall. 

My father worked as a municipal agriculturist. I remember him busy visiting barrios, talking to farmers, giving seminars about new programs and techniques in farming and aqua-culture. Faint memories about Masagana 99, irrigations, land reform, the different varieties of 'miracle rice',  parades and agricultural fairs I still carry to this day. Clearer are my memories of rural banks and cooperatives of various types, as my parents and us kids took part as borrowers and depositors. I particularly had fond memories of buying cheaper goods and accumulating rebates from cooperative stores, particularly the credit cooperative and Kadiwa Center in our hometown. Up to now, I still remember how deeply sad I felt seeing their shelves increasingly un-replenished, until they closed altogether, never to be revived, as the post-Marcos era wore on.  

In 1987, I was surprised and overjoyed to have passed the UPCAT,  UP's entrance examination. Hearing the news, our parish priest warned my mother against studying at UP. I served as a sacristan, an altar boy, for ten years, growing up at the center of our town’s Catholic world. Our parish priest might have feared what seemed to be a hard-core Catholic like me would go wayward and become a communist or an aktibista. With all derogatory and scary connotations they carry among town folks, a mere mention of those words brought chills to the spine. It was a typical small-town mindset, which I understood well. But I was too excited by the thought of studying at UP-Diliman to be bothered by our priest's concerns. That said, I entered UP rather wary about the leftist ideologies whose negative impressions I carried over from my conservative, provincial background. I grew up, for instance, reading what turned out to be Cold War propaganda-laden books, newspapers and magazines like Reader’s Digests and the Asiaweek. I’ve realized the subtle but deeply propagandistic nature of these and other media only much later, sometime in 2000s, when I wrote a paper on the rhetoric of Ramon Magsaysay Awards as part of the repertoire of the Cold War propaganda (downloadable here). 

The four years I spent as an Education student at UP majoring in Social Studies proved exhilarating. It was there where my liberal self was born. The very interdisciplinary nature of this major allowed me to bask in the freedom to think freely, take the courses I truly liked across the vast social sciences and humanities, and read whatever I fancied. It was a veritable liberal education, transformative in process and empowering in aspiration. For a while I was a trainee at the culture section of the Philippine Collegian, UP’s official student organ and the mouthpiece of the radical-leftist ideologues at UP. In high school, I dreamed of becoming a journalist so when I was filling in the UPCAT form, I looked for the code for Journalism. Rather strangely the form that reached my school did not include Journalism on the list! So I put the code for Secondary Education as my first choice thinking that UP did not offer a major in Journalism. It hardly bothered me then, thinking that passing the UPCAT was like a punch on the moon for me anyway. But I did pass the UPCAT and when I went to UP for the first time, I was startled while riding Ikot jeep seeing Plaridel Building, the Institute for Mass Communication, where Journalism was one of the majors. The Catholic in me took it as a providential intervention, steering me to one direction rather than another. But anyway, awe-struck as I was by the Philippine Collegian and thinking I could still take a shot at my dream of being a journalist, I decided to heed one of their recruitment calls. I took the test and I was notified to my delight that I passed for a provisional training.

In due time, I realized how much time press work required, entailing not just extended night-time work but also skipping classes. I opted out when academic pressures forced me to choose which to prioritize. In hindsight, that moment was an ideological crossroads for me. Had I stayed and become a full-fledged staff of the Collegian, I would have been at the center of radical politics not just in UP but in the country. I would have been clearly aktibista in action, not just in thoughts. My departure from Collegian allowed me a more free-flowing political education, at my own pace and ways. I was thrilled by the shedding of my conservative outlook, imbibing the anti-colonial nationalist and radical standpoint that UP liberal and Marxist activists have propounded. Before I knew it, I became a self-appointed critic of colonial education and colonial historiography, as well as of the roles of the World Bank, IMF, and US imperialism in forcing third world countries to do “structural adjustment” and to “mortgage their future”. I remember being inspired by the works of Alejandro Licauco (Nationalist Economics) Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed), Michael Apple, Henry Giroux,  Teodoro Agoncillo, Renato and Leticia Constatino (“Miseducation of the Filipinos,” “World Bank Textbooks”, Past Revisited and Continuing Past), and Luisa Doronilla among many others. I did not become a communist, as our parish priest feared, but I was deeply fascinated by their beliefs; I admired their conviction and courage and I understood why they pushed for a revolutionary transformation. Participating only twice or thrice in campus mobilizations (against the US bases and for socialized tuition at UP), I was among those otherized pejoratively as armchair activist by the hegemonic, Diliman-centric culture of activism in the country.

The years I was at UP coincided with the post-EDSA years of turmoil and the unrelenting tirade against the previous regime and the US. The “Never Again!” and anti-US narratives were pervasive, and I absorbed them as every budding Filipino intellectual was expected. Being critical entailed being anti-US, anti-colonial, anti-Marcos and pro-Cory, among other things.  

Graduating from UP in 1991, I started teaching Asian History in high school in an elite Catholic high school in the posh Dasmarinas village in Makati. Not long after, I returned to UP to pursue a graduate degree in Asian Studies. The deepening of my interest in Asian philosophies, history and culture proved to be a turning point in my intellectual development, and my understanding of the political, and life in general. My intellectual pursuit, however, had to take a backseat to the harsh realities of daily life. For the remainder of the 1990s, I was consumed by the need to survive, establish a career, keep a gainful employment in Manila, and prepare for marriage and raise own family. It was frenetic. Looking back, I wonder how I managed to endure those years. I woke up early and came home late, braved traffic jams and pollution every day, not to mention floods during rainy season, shuttling between two teaching jobs in distant parts of Metro Manila. Simultaneously, I pursued graduate studies and did odd jobs in textbook writing and conference organizing. Political and economic developments like expulsion of the US bases, the disintegration of the left in the Philippines, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of Asian economic dragons and the Asian financial crisis were momentous, but they we mere transitory backdrop to my toils as one among millions of struggling ordinary Filipinos.

It was inside the classrooms that my liberal-radical intellectual stances flourished during this time. I taught part-time courses on Philippine History and Rizal in an elite Catholic university, in addition to Asian History in a privileged Catholic school and a highly selective, public science high school. My teaching style was imbued with the spirit of critical pedagogy expounded by the likes of Paulo Freire and Michael Apple, as interpreted and modelled by Maria Luisa Doronila. Despite teaching only 1-unit Education course (courses in UP normally carry 3 credit units) called Senior Seminar,  she managed to provide what to me, looking back, was a brilliant synthesis of educational processes and why critical approach to education must be employed. I consider her one of the most competent and admirable teachers I ever had, not just in UP Diliman, but in my entire life. Through their ideas and illustrative examples, I came to realize for the first time the truly radical potentials and transformative power of teaching. The world out there, its past and present, is not simply to be understood, but more importantly to change for the betterment of humanity, the marginalized groups in particular. Both incremental and fundamental changes were (still are) needed because the status quo was configured in favor of numerically small but powerful political, cultural and economic elites. True to the liberal aspirations to locate humans at the center of the schemes of things and to empower them to serve as engine of historical transformation, I took teaching as a foundational training for thinking right, enabling students to be the agent of change the liberal tradition envisioned them to be. Rational thinking, in short, is at the forefront as well as baseline of efforts to address practically every problem. Looking back this was among the earliest liberal fantasies that I imbibed. Why I now call it a “liberal fantasy” while before I took it as a calling or a mission, will become clear as my story further unfolds.

-To be continued-

Part II is here