When Turtles Come Home

by Victoria Hoffarth

  Further, it was alleged that many of the elites, especially those occupying seats of power as well as those who exercised control over economic resources, the so-called “establishment”, had been too insensitive to listen to the voices of the rest of the country, instead looking only towards the welfare of their own kind. As a result, a protest movement named Occupy Wall Street started in 2011 with the slogan “We are the 99%”, to underscore income and wealth inequality in the United States between the wealthiest 1% and the rest of the population.17 It highlighted corporate influence in government and political corruption.

  You might posit a Thatcherite response to all this: income inequality does not matter, so long as our own living standard improves. The focus therefore should be on overall growth, as a rising tide lifts all boats. According to a World Bank study, during the past thirty years, global poverty has fallen in absolute terms by more than half, even as income inequality has considerably increased. I personally think that rather than simple envy from those occupying the lower social strata, income inequality matters greatly because it can usher in what Karen Armstrong calls “structural violence”, where the rich accumulate more power. This development could so dominate our lives as to significantly limit the choices available to the rest of us. In other words, an over-concentration of wealth can result in power under the hands of the few, and can create institutions that thwart the will of the governed until they are checked by rebellion or migration.

  The gradual parting of the clouds in 2012 has moreover exposed to sight the evolving socio-economic effects of the technological revolution. The escalating influences of the Internet, social media, automation, and the growth of the knowledge industry have ushered in a new “global village”. Currently, capital can be transferred in little more than a blink of an eye, and goods readily exchanged through a number of free trade zones in most regions, thus bypassing cumbersome procedures and tariff disincentives. The service industry likewise has become more mobile—from Starbucks franchises located in heretofore remote places, to Marriott International now operating 6,500 hotels and more across the world. Labour mobility is not far behind: an Indian heads Microsoft, and until recently, the Welshman Sir Howard Stringer was chairman and CEO of Sony Corporation. Big corporations are losing their national identity.

  In this global economy, where information can be availed instantaneously, people in remote places are made aware of potential opportunities in other regions and countries. Thus, as mentioned above, intractable local issues are being solved by, among other things, mass migrations. Humans have never stopped moving across the earth in search of better lives, but nonetheless, history also tells us that mass migrations have often brought about violent conflicts with those who already inhabit their host locations.

  Further, these recent emigrations are occurring at the time when other societies are also adjusting with some difficulty to the effects of the revolution in technology. It is said that it takes as much as a generation lag between the introduction of a major change and its acceptance. Automation has displaced unskilled labour but the re-training and the re-education of those excluded from the new knowledge industry—the responsibility of our schools and of government programmes—are inadequate or have not yet caught up. As a consequence, those with no proper education and skills, those living in less cosmopolitan areas with less opportunity to benefit from the world economy, and the less flexible elderly suffer disproportionately. (An example of these inflexible elderly is myself who, until today, still struggle at working with the basic functions of my computer, yet cannot perform heretofore routine activities without its use.)

  In present day America, many working class white males are increasingly feeling left behind as their skills are becoming obsolete. They realise that they are losing their place in the social order, and thus view the system as rigged. It has been pointed out time and again that poverty is largely relative—it is not so much what you have, as the perception of what your neighbour has in comparison, which makes you think about how impoverished you are. Social media moreover creates increasing disaffection among those who previously were not reminded by these differences.

  All told, a large segment of the population remain frustrated, not only in America but in many other places in the world. People are angry at the “establishment” for perpetuating what they feel is an unfair system. They are frustrated at their seeming helplessness to better their lot. And they feel threatened by mass immigration, suspecting that whatever jobs they now have would be taken over by poor migrants, who would, potentially, also take advantage of their social welfare system without having contributed to it, thus leaving little to those who have paid for them through their taxes. Likewise, many are anxious that these immigrants through criminal activities would destroy the peace and harmony they have previously enjoyed. Such outsiders with different value systems, will undermine the integrity and the very fabric of their communities.

  Possibly, it is the pace of change that is coming in too fast, compounded by the perception that, in this current revolution, there are winners and losers. They are being divided according to class, geography, and age: the upper classes versus the lower, the urbanites versus the provincial, the young versus the old.

  Likewise, there are the fears of the unknown. Are Trump, Duterte, the Brexiteers, and the rest of the current nationalistic influencers a hallmark of our anxiety-ridden world? When we are fearful, we want to be led, to exchange freedom for order so we do not have to have the responsibility to choose. Does our current state of affairs perhaps represent acts of desperation as we look for a way out of our troubles? Terrorism, uncontrolled migration, irresponsible elites, increasing automation: these signify only some of the “elephants” crowded together in a small room.

  In many democratic societies, their only option for change is through the power of the ballot box. Hence, In June 2016, UK Prime Minister David Cameron, as part of his political maneuverings, called for a referendum on membership to the European Union assuming that the Brexit option could never win, but win it did. The Brexiters’ campaign focused on keeping immigrants out. Only a few months later, Donald Trump, a reality television personality known for his moral depravity and demagoguery, ran for election to the highest office of the United States of America. Again, no one took his candidacy seriously and his surprise victory was called “a stunning repudiation of the establishment” by the The New York Times. His campaign platform included building a physical wall between Mexico and the US, keeping Muslims out of America, and standing up to the establishment to protect his followers. At the time of this writing, he has remained a cult figure with the unwavering support of some 40% of US voters!

  This seemingly strange phenomenon is not isolated in the Anglo-Saxon world. All over Europe we see the growth of populism singing the same tune—from Hungry, Austria, Poland, Italy, Turkey, and of course Putin of Russia. With the consent of their citizenry, democratically elected leaders are turning their countries inward, wanting to keep their borders closed, to keep their culture and their society free from the presence of outsiders, much as they had lived in their more homogenous communities of only a generation ago.

  For different reasons, Southeast Asia has a similar scenario of populism and attraction toward “strongmen”. China has just consented that the popular Xi Jinping lead the country indefinitely. In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte with his more than 80% approval rating, is similar to Trump, although Trump did not win the popular vote in America but instead through the more political Electoral College. Both Duterte and Trump are undermining their country’s institutions by not respecting the rule of law. Supremely confident of his supporters’ loyalty, Trump has bragged, “I can stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot someone, and my followers will stick by me.” Similarly, Duterte speaks before a large group of business leaders, “In Davao [city where he was mayor], I used to do it [killing] personally. Just to show to the guys [the police] that if I can do
it why can’t you.” However, unlike America which will survive Trump because of its strong institutions, Duterte is risking his country sliding into another failed state.

  But what is this “rule of law”? It is not something you can touch or hear or see or taste. To the supporters of Trump, it does not matter if Trump is a poor excuse of a human being, for morality is irrelevant in the face of a healthy personal gain. Filipinos likewise are not interested in abstractions. They see what they think is less crime in the streets, and therefore they are for the status quo, even as some innocents become “collateral damage” whilst suspected drug users are denied their rights to a fair trial. “I don’t understand”, I told my skilled physiotherapist who makes do with his Philippine earnings whilst waiting for his American immigration papers to be processed. He and his friends voted for Duterte. “With seven billion people on earth,” I said, “I am not surprised to see a Trump or a Duterte. What surprises me is that they win elections!” My physiotherapist’s answer: “We are desperate for change, and any change is better than no change, because any change brings us hope.” It may not be the ideal answer, but an understandable one.

  When all is said, we might perhaps wonder where is the world today? Who have we become? Have we all become—collectivists and individualists alike—totally pragmatic instead of moral creatures? I would like to think that the societal dislocations, the cultural confrontations over our identity, and the fracturing of our communities—Brexiters and Remainers, Trump and anti-Trump, Duterte and anti-Duterte, and AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) and CDU (Christian Democtratic Union) in Germany—are the symptoms of the dislocation we feel as the era of the nation-state wanes. Feasibly, the diffusion of the effects of technology is making the idea of the nation-state obsolete, and, in the process, what we are currently experiencing are expressions of societal resistance to change.

  To again quote Bernard-Henri Lévy:

  The history of this past century teaches us that when we place our bets on nostalgia, when we dedicate ourselves to the search for some lost native land, for something pure, we only pave the way for totalitarianism… When we instead commit ourselves to moving forward … in all its uncertainty, then we embark … on the very road to freedom.

  America’s foreign policy bias is to install American-type democracy as the dominant structure informing the world order, equating it to freedom. However, I am one of those who believe that American democracy is not necessarily the best fit to the needs of every nation and, more importantly, to the current state of each nation. It requires a certain level of sophistication amongst a citizenry, a long timeframe to develop its attendant institutions, and a culture that favours American political value systems. Most importantly, American democracy and its emphasis on individual liberty clashes with the collectivistic cultures of many countries. Thus, American interventions in many areas of the world, supposedly to instill American democratic ideologies, have often had disappointing results.

  In the case of the Philippines, the country currently needs radical changes, and thus daring measures in order to effect these changes, whilst at the same time protecting the humanity of its citizenry. That Filipinos are up to the task has been proven by history. Think of the secret society of the Katipuneros and other courageous revolutionaries who, from 1896 to 1902, fought against the odds in order to expel their colonisers. Remember also those numerous Filipino guerrillas who went up the hills to resist the Japanese occupation from 1942–1945. And recall the million-strong Filipinos who braved Marcos’s tanks during the “Miracle at EDSA” in 1986.

  What is needed now is strong leadership. Again, I call to mind the theory of cognitive dissonance of Leon Festinger that I first discussed in Chapter three, i.e. how you can provide structures to limit unacceptable behaviour in order to effect attitude change. Nonetheless, this strong leadership should work towards the development and strengthening of our weak institutions. Instead, muscular Duterte who is destroying our institutions. Although running a state with some five million people is significantly different from managing one with over 100 million inhabitants, we might learn from Singapore. Rising from the disorders of the 1950s, when it was overcrowded and unsanitary, it has morphed in a single generation to become one of the most modern and prosperous countries in the world. In the main, historians have traced this transformation to improvements in education. Singapore has poured major resources on education.

  At the time I was considering working for Nanyang University, I remember comparing notes with a German friend who, in the 1980s, was teaching at the National University of Singapore. She briefed me about the high pay, comfortable housing, and other good benefits offered by her university. The one drawback, she warned me, was that the university did not often grant tenure to its foreign faculty. Instead, there were short-term fixed contracts rolled over until such a time that those Singaporeans who were given scholarships abroad could come back and replace the foreign nationals. Singapore provides us with a good lesson: to place our focus into education.

  The Philippine government, on the contrary, has been cutting resources from its already sub-par educational system to serve what are thought as more urgent needs—an over-concentration on short term goals rather than investing in the future. I remember talking to my old house helper Carmen who came to me in the hope that I could provide some financial assistance so that her daughter could go to university to read education. She (the daughter) had wanted to be a teacher since childhood and, moreover, was one of the best in her class, or so I was told. I agreed to help in principle, so I proceeded to give a little arithmetic test and was surprised to find out that the fifteen-year-old girl could not do simple multiplication and division!

  The government‘s relative neglect of education is coupled with the high value given by most Filipino families to their children’s education, indeed as in most Asian cultures. Presently , the private sector has serviced this gap, but as profitability has been their main concern, most charge fees far beyond the capability of the average family. One way to address the situation is perhaps if the government can treat private schools like utility companies, with a cap on fees they can charge their students.

  Along with education, a number of Filipinos search for an alternative political system that could be more relevant to its many diverse island cultures. Currently, most important decision-making takes place within the centralised government in Manila. I hear that some members of the Philippine Congress are thinking of working towards greater federalism, giving increasing autonomy to each of the country’s eighty-one provinces. Duterte has supported such a move, which immediately alienates those who have been critical of him, and who think it a ploy in order to call a constitutional convention and, in the process, extend his term in power. Moreover, many are of the opinion that it will take a couple of decades before systems can be put in place to effectively devolve power to the provinces; in the meantime, there are more urgent needs.

  Thankfully, the economic scenario in the foreseeable future is encouraging, if we are to believe in the picture painted by Bill Gates, that great American computer visionary and donor of the biggest private philanthropy in the world. He sees general improvements in the well-being of peoples everywhere, spearheaded by further major breakthroughs in technology. He asserts, for instance, that by 2035, there will no longer be poor countries, if what we mean by poor is people earning less than USD$1.90 per day, the poverty line currently drawn by the World Bank. Almost all countries including the poorest ones today will belong, at the very least, to the lower-middle income group.

  The continent of Africa, currently home to some 1.26 billion people, will become entirely self-sufficient in food production even with its high birth rates, as innovations in farming, including better seeds, go on stream. Other developments such as new vaccines and similar advances in healthcare, more digital inventions, mobile banking, and sources of cheap, clean energy to power the world will be universal. Thus, discounting
the possibility of bioterrorism, Bill Gates is optimistic about the direction of human civilisation.

  However, he also cautions that, despite the egalitarianism imposed by some states, great income inequalities will not go away. Inequality in income, more than absolute income per se, will remain a big source of discontent.

  Personally, I think income inequality will continue to separate the world between the powerful and the powerless. Further, technological revolutions are not necessarily universally beneficial without qualifications. They have their downside, as I mentioned earlier, including the societal dislocations brought about by the introduction of new technology. Our political beliefs for i stance , often remain hyper-local, and lag between their attendant social demands, and the societal acceptance of these demands. For instance, our political beliefs—often remaining hyper-local—lag behind our embrace of the global economy brought about by technological advancement. In short, whilst technological changes can be revolutionary, changes in our social constructs remain an evolutionary process.