PUBLIC LIVES
September 2, 2010
Randy David
Leadership in a transitional society
In our society, when something goes wrong, people ask: who’s to blame? Remedy is instantly sought in the replacement of officials rather than in the review of systems. In other societies, the prior question that is asked is: what went wrong? Only after this is answered do heads roll. The focus on personalities is not something unique to us, nor is it inherent in Filipino culture. It is just what differentiates a traditional from a modern society.
The fact that we are in transition only makes our situation a bit more confusing. We have modern systems in various domains of our national life, but these are easily trumped by the traditional authority of powerful and influential figures. The latter typically claim all the credit for successes. But, when failures and breakdowns occur, they quickly point to their limited responsibility under modern rules.
Take our political system. We tend to highlight the deficiencies of leaders, forgetting that they themselves are creations of the same traditional system in which we all play a role and which we help reproduce in our daily lives. In quest of solutions, we like to cast around for heroic individuals who can redeem the deficiencies of an entire society. As a result, our elections become nothing more than exercises in finding someone we can trust at any given moment, and later blame for all the dysfunctions of our society.
Our politicians not only willingly play this game but indeed they encourage it, for that’s how they win votes. Instead of concrete plans and programs of government, they concentrate on fundamental contrasts in personal virtues and endowments. In all this, the systemic character of persistent social problems – poverty, corruption, social injustice, incompetence, etc. – is effectively concealed. And so when these problems explode in our face, the first thing we do is, again, find someone to blame. Sometimes, sensing that the blame should not be heaped on a few people, we go through episodes of collective breast-beating in atonement for our moral failings.
Yet these problems are largely the outcome of structural failings. Catharsis and atonement alone will not make them go away. The governance of a society like ours has become an incredibly complex business. We have not only greatly multiplied in number. Our people’s experiences, values, and beliefs have also become extremely diverse. Our links to the rest of the world have likewise phenomenally expanded. No longer are we merely responsible for ourselves and to ourselves, we are today also answerable to many other peoples around the world whose lives ours are intertwined with ours.
The old ways of governing, dependent upon the performance of strong, charismatic, or extraordinary leaders at the top, are no longer adequate for managing such complexity. They belong to simple hierarchical societies. Modern problems require differentiated institutional systems and reliable professional response. The era of the heroic individual whose direct personal intervention is demanded in every crisis is long past. Modern impersonal systems are built precisely as a way of reducing complexity. They will not work properly, however, when their operation can, at any point, be overridden by the personal decisions of lone rangers.
In a previous column on the hostage crisis that led to the tragic death of eight Hong Kong tourists, I noted that the bungled effort to rescue the hostages could not be ascribed solely to incompetence or lack of equipment on the part of the police. The entire effort seemed marked by “institutional paralysis.” A system was in place for dealing with hostage situations. But, from what we now know, it appears that the police officers in charge were unable to fully activate this system and confidently assert their authority in the presence of the many big shots that were interfering in the operation. In the end, no one in particular was in charge.
We would be mistaken to think that this systemic problem will go away by simply dismissing people ahead of a full report of what happened. This may appease some people, but it will only hide the larger institutional crisis that is upon us. This crisis did not grow overnight, and it will not be solved overnight. Indeed it was allowed to fester over the years, providing the setting for quick fixes like martial law and people power revolutions. At every turning point, the ensuing change never went deep enough to disturb the basic framework of a patronage-driven hierarchical society. It is this whole system that is today in crisis.
Tragic events like Typhoon Ondoy, the Maguindanao massacre, and the hostage crisis at the Quirino grandstand have one thing in common – they all lay bare the dysfunctionality of our existing social system. They underscore the need to review and strengthen our institutions, or, at the very least, free them from the grip of traditional patrons and authority figures. The structural solutions will increasingly become clear to us in time, if we can resist the tendency to moralize and personalize everything.
Perhaps it is a good thing that despite the uniquely personal circumstances that thrust him to the presidency, President Aquino has kept a very low profile. He speaks plainly and almost diffidently, and, instead of projecting an aura of charismatic confidence, is quick to admit lapses. Given the existing political culture, this may not be the most astute demeanor for a new president to project. But it is the best setting in which to strengthen institutions.
public.lives@gmail.com
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Language on thoughts - update
Whorf, we now know, made many mistakes. The most serious one was to assume that our mother tongue constrains our minds and prevents us from being able to think certain thoughts
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Language matters
PUBLIC LIVES
August 19, 2010
Randy David
Language matters
It is that time of the year when we are prompted to revisit language issues in our society. In what language should we educate our children? What language should the government use to communicate with our people? What language should the courts in our country use? Is the bilingual policy that makes Filipino and English the official media of communication and instruction serving the national purpose? Are we doing enough to develop and enrich Filipino as the national language, as mandated by the Constitution? These issues have remained contentious and unresolved:
Even as languages evolve on their own, nations find themselves having to choose which languages best work for them as they pursue specific goals and purposes. As with persons, language preference ultimately mirrors a nation’s hierarchy of values. In the post-colonial years, especially in those societies marked by cultural diversity, the designation of a national language was thought crucial to the task of nation-building and political integration. Today, nations that have premised their growth on being able to ride the tide of globalization find little need to develop their own languages. They not only turn to English as the language of modernity; they also want to make it the lingua franca of their people.
This brings instant rewards to individuals who seek careers in the modern sector of the economy or in the global labor market. But for the majority who remain in the country, the costs are immense. Education becomes an alienating experience for schoolchildren, who cannot use their own language to create and access knowledge. Social inequalities are exacerbated. As English becomes a marker of class, a mechanism of exclusion, local languages are relegated to the margins of public discourse. Perhaps, most important of all, as we lose the use of our languages, we also break with our own basic orientations as a people. This is especially a problem for the English-speaking Filipino intelligentsia who find that increasingly they can neither understand nor communicate with their own people.
Recent research on the connection between language and ways of seeing and thinking provides new evidence for the thesis that language is not just a carrier but a shaper of thought. These studies, echoing the “linguistic turn” in philosophy, shift the analysis from the nature of the mind to the uses of language.
In an article for the Wall Street Journal (07/23/10), Dr. Lera Boroditsky, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, discusses recent field experiments that show how language structures not just the way we see but the way we solve problems and accumulate knowledge about the world. This is not a new idea at all. But Dr. Boroditsky has come up with new material to prove the point.
Language, she argues, shapes our notions of space, time, and causality. Such notions are not the same in all languages. “About a third of the world’s languages (spoken in all kinds of physical environments) rely on absolute directions for space.” Dr. Boroditsky and another colleague went to Australia to study the Pormpuraaw, an aboriginal group whose languages have no “terms like ‘left’ and ‘right.’ Instead, everything is talked about in terms of absolute cardinal directions (north, south, east, west), which means you say things like, ‘There’s an ant on your southwest leg.” This astounding precision in the language for depicting space allows people like the Pormpuraaws to “build many other more complex or abstract representations including time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions.”
Does the way we talk about space have any bearing on the way we talk about time? To find out, the researchers showed the Pormpuraaws some pictures indicating a progression of events – photos of a person or crocodile at different ages, or a banana being consumed in stages. While seated, the subjects were repeatedly asked to arrange the photos in the correct temporal order, facing in a different direction each time. English speakers arrange time from left to right. Speakers of languages that are written from right to left, like Hebrew, Bororditsky says, arrange time from right to left.
But the Pormpuraaws depict time progression in an east-to-west direction. Facing south, the subjects arranged the time photos from left to right. Facing north, they arranged them right to left. Facing east, they arranged them toward the body. No one needed to tell them where east or west was. In other languages, Boroditsky adds, the past may be represented as above, while the future is below (as in Mandarin). “In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the past in front.”
What is true for time and space seems true as well for notions of causality. In some languages, accidents are attributed to no one, whereas in others, the doer who caused the accident is identified, what witnesses saw is important, and blame is assigned.
This reminds me of a story that Michel Foucault tells in an interview. A team of psychologists showed a short film about three characters to a village in Africa, and then asked the viewers to recount the film in their own words. They remembered nothing about the characters; only one thing engaged their attention: “the movement of the light and shadow through the trees.”
Language matters. We are formed by the language we speak. When we lose our language, we lose a part of ourselves. Ludwig Wittgenstein captured it so well in a crisp aphorism: “The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.”
public.lives@gmail.com
August 19, 2010
Randy David
Language matters
It is that time of the year when we are prompted to revisit language issues in our society. In what language should we educate our children? What language should the government use to communicate with our people? What language should the courts in our country use? Is the bilingual policy that makes Filipino and English the official media of communication and instruction serving the national purpose? Are we doing enough to develop and enrich Filipino as the national language, as mandated by the Constitution? These issues have remained contentious and unresolved:
Even as languages evolve on their own, nations find themselves having to choose which languages best work for them as they pursue specific goals and purposes. As with persons, language preference ultimately mirrors a nation’s hierarchy of values. In the post-colonial years, especially in those societies marked by cultural diversity, the designation of a national language was thought crucial to the task of nation-building and political integration. Today, nations that have premised their growth on being able to ride the tide of globalization find little need to develop their own languages. They not only turn to English as the language of modernity; they also want to make it the lingua franca of their people.
This brings instant rewards to individuals who seek careers in the modern sector of the economy or in the global labor market. But for the majority who remain in the country, the costs are immense. Education becomes an alienating experience for schoolchildren, who cannot use their own language to create and access knowledge. Social inequalities are exacerbated. As English becomes a marker of class, a mechanism of exclusion, local languages are relegated to the margins of public discourse. Perhaps, most important of all, as we lose the use of our languages, we also break with our own basic orientations as a people. This is especially a problem for the English-speaking Filipino intelligentsia who find that increasingly they can neither understand nor communicate with their own people.
Recent research on the connection between language and ways of seeing and thinking provides new evidence for the thesis that language is not just a carrier but a shaper of thought. These studies, echoing the “linguistic turn” in philosophy, shift the analysis from the nature of the mind to the uses of language.
In an article for the Wall Street Journal (07/23/10), Dr. Lera Boroditsky, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, discusses recent field experiments that show how language structures not just the way we see but the way we solve problems and accumulate knowledge about the world. This is not a new idea at all. But Dr. Boroditsky has come up with new material to prove the point.
Language, she argues, shapes our notions of space, time, and causality. Such notions are not the same in all languages. “About a third of the world’s languages (spoken in all kinds of physical environments) rely on absolute directions for space.” Dr. Boroditsky and another colleague went to Australia to study the Pormpuraaw, an aboriginal group whose languages have no “terms like ‘left’ and ‘right.’ Instead, everything is talked about in terms of absolute cardinal directions (north, south, east, west), which means you say things like, ‘There’s an ant on your southwest leg.” This astounding precision in the language for depicting space allows people like the Pormpuraaws to “build many other more complex or abstract representations including time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions.”
Does the way we talk about space have any bearing on the way we talk about time? To find out, the researchers showed the Pormpuraaws some pictures indicating a progression of events – photos of a person or crocodile at different ages, or a banana being consumed in stages. While seated, the subjects were repeatedly asked to arrange the photos in the correct temporal order, facing in a different direction each time. English speakers arrange time from left to right. Speakers of languages that are written from right to left, like Hebrew, Bororditsky says, arrange time from right to left.
But the Pormpuraaws depict time progression in an east-to-west direction. Facing south, the subjects arranged the time photos from left to right. Facing north, they arranged them right to left. Facing east, they arranged them toward the body. No one needed to tell them where east or west was. In other languages, Boroditsky adds, the past may be represented as above, while the future is below (as in Mandarin). “In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the past in front.”
What is true for time and space seems true as well for notions of causality. In some languages, accidents are attributed to no one, whereas in others, the doer who caused the accident is identified, what witnesses saw is important, and blame is assigned.
This reminds me of a story that Michel Foucault tells in an interview. A team of psychologists showed a short film about three characters to a village in Africa, and then asked the viewers to recount the film in their own words. They remembered nothing about the characters; only one thing engaged their attention: “the movement of the light and shadow through the trees.”
Language matters. We are formed by the language we speak. When we lose our language, we lose a part of ourselves. Ludwig Wittgenstein captured it so well in a crisp aphorism: “The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.”
public.lives@gmail.com
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