A REPUBLIC OF VIRTUE
Dr Azly Rahman
aar26@columbia.edu
http://azlyrahman-illuminations.blogspot.com/
Hari Raya Aidil Fitri is coming up. Selamat Hari Raya to all.
Our malls are gearing up for mega sales. Let us talk about what 'shopping' means these days.
Let me share my views on the act of shopping and the proliferation of malls in Malaysia – these two ideas as they relate to the notion of cultural imperialism. Imperialism, according to Vladimir Lenin in his famous essay, is the highest stage of capitalism. In the context of this essay, it is a step higher than that and a level deeper than just "consuming goods made for mass consumption".
'Cultural imperialism' is a state of beingness in which the culture of the dominant has advanced to a stage of colonisation of the less powerful cultures, with the aid of technological power that fueled the style of colonisation. 'Imperialism' means the stage of advanced capitalist expansion that enabled the form of domination.
Cultural imperialism, by nature is a more powerful consequence of colonisation than say, for example forced occupation or colonisation because it utilises a clever and systematic form of subjugation. Cultural imperialism works more effectively, subtly, and silently when it creates a sense of euphoria, elation, and excitement in the mind, body, and consciousness of those imprisoned by the desire to shop till they drop. The mall provides the haven for this form of sophisticated imperialism.
"How it works"
Let us look at how cultural imperialism works with an illustration of the 'malling' of Malaysia. Imagine the mall as a place of fantasy and utopia that actually stockpile and market the artifacts of cultural imperialism. In writing this essay I draw inspiration from observing how people of varying classes and modern caste system 'shop'.
What else is a 'mall'? It is an enclosure of a shopping experience nicely built to attract people to consume the products they often do not actually need. The malls, especially in Kuala Lumpur, are a direct adaptation of the Western mall, architectured with post-modern stylistics, and sells products produced and/or marketed by multinational corporations from both the Western and the Eastern world. Frederic Jameson, an American cultural theorist writes about Le Corbusier's 'internationalist' design; architecture of urbanism that influence the design of malls as a world of escapism.
In Kuala Lumpur, as in New York City, there is now a place called (Berjaya) Times Square; a place surrounded by some of the biggest malls in Southeast Asia. Their names do not reflect the reality of the local traditions: Subang Parade, MegaMall, The Mall, Lot 10, Bukit Bintang Plaza, AmCorp Mall, Cheras Leisure Mall, Great Eastern Mall, 101 Mall, The Street Mall, and Mid- Valley Mega-Mall. Foreign names utilized to make the local elites richer.
Who owns these malls and who benefits from the creation and sustenance of culture industry that transforms virtually all industries of the body, borrowing Walter Benjamin, into artistic production in an age of globalised mechanical reproduction? The Malaysian malls provide an exciting enclosure for the Malaysian shopping experience since the tropical heat of Malaysia (almost a daily average of 90 degrees) drives in consumers.
Malls have transformed the landscape of Malaysia since perhaps the beginning of the 1980s when the American and Japanese businesses began to dominate the economy. Traditional Malay stores that sell goods produced by family-run cottage industries had to give way to the malls that brought a new meaning to the concept of buying and consuming.
The traditional Malay 'bazaar' or pasar, where customers could bargain and the products were cheap, gave way to modern malls that sell not only products but also transmit values and transform the meaning of consumption. Shopping at these malls often require the consumers to possess credit cards. Classes of people have different classes of cards and credit limits. The idea of cultural imperialism is clear: Malaysians are cleverly socialised into becoming good modern consumers that buy products made to identify them with varying classes and social status. Hence the upper class Malaysian will buy Gucci, Lou Votton, and Ferragamo, and those of the lower class will buy Padang Besar/Golok-made imitations of these products.
Sometimes one can't tell the difference, exemplifying the expertise of the Thais. If I wear an imitation Tommy Hilfigher tie and imitation Santoni shoes, people will not question the authenticity of what I am wearing, as compared to say, the electronic factory worker who wears authentic branded clothing bought with a year's savings. This is the power of brand-name perception that has and continues to shape our consciousness.
The mall is then like an education institution that cleverly and 'common-sensically' socialises the buyer into a utopia of consumerism under the one-roof of a fantasy-like environment/paradise of shopping quite different from the Malaysian reality outside - especially in the slumps of Kuala Lumpur or Johor Bahru. Herein lies the imperialising power of the Western (American and European) and Eastern (Japanese and Korean) business interests that structure and define the culture of mass consumption, so that to be a modern Malaysian means one must consume and be consumed by the products of the culture industry. Ideology of mass consumption
The malls are like cultural installations that attempt to install the ideology of mass consumption. In Malaysia, the transformation is now clear; along Bintang Walk, for example, one can feel like walking down New York City with the signs and symbols of Western and Eastern capitalist interests dominating and inscribing the landscape. One can see McDonalds, Starbucks, Hard Rock Café, Marriot Hotel, Tower Records, Holiday Inn, and hundreds other signs, symbols, and representations of global capitalism sprawled in-between major malls such as KLCC Suria, and Mid-Valley Mega-Mall.
These cultural-industrial complexes and the hundreds of billboards that sell products of the cultural industry are evidence of the way foreign cultures imperialise. The malls of Malaysia provide an outlet for Malaysians who are "depressed" or lived a stressful life to be happier and tranquilised by the pleasant shopping experience and environment (only to be even more depressed and saddened later for overspending and having to face their spouses' wrath).
For urban Malaysians living in the capital city, going to the mall has become a concept as natural as going to a McDonalds or Kentucky Fried Chicken or a Japanese karaoke bar, or for teh tarik. Schoolchildren also play truant to chill out at the malls.
In the United States, the children of the multi-cultural poor shop for brand name clothing; a practice that perhaps help elevates the self-esteem of the children who predominantly grow up without a father figure. Single parents who work two or sometimes three jobs feel that they need to raise their children that way to motivate the latter to behave in school.
"Class, status and culture"
We are what we consume based on the mode of production we engage in, and based on the ever-changing notions of class status, and culture we have designed. The closer one is to the power-keg of the means of production or the richer one is, the more expensive the brand name that one and family members wear. Branding oneself becomes a necessity in this corporatist nation state that is now thriving on brand names such as Islam Hadhari, Bio-tech Malaysia, and the North-South-East-West Malaysian Corridors. Everything now is about branding and world-classism. None about helping the poor get out of the mess the rich have created.
Society is now reproducing itself into classes and caste systems that require malls to provide those very brands and signs and symbols in order for the classes of people – from the rulers to the modern indentured slaves – to identify themselves in order to feel a deep sense of belonging. Malaysian malls - those warehouse of brand name goods produced cheaply by impoverished children of the Third and Fourth World - help define the symbols and signification of those status symbols.
They provide the post-modern cultural artifacts that define what the poor and the rich would wear. We have enculturalised the modern concept of the mall successfully so that it will become a necessary wardrobe for the varying classes of people we have produced historical-materialistically. Culture, in the case of the 'malling' of Malaysia, is also imperialism. Our modern and post-modern shopping malls house the culture of imperialism.
Happy shopping for the holidays. It's also called "retail therapy" in America.
Dr Azly Rahman
aar26@columbia.edu
http://azlyrahman-illuminations.blogspot.com/
Hari Raya Aidil Fitri is coming up. Selamat Hari Raya to all.
Our malls are gearing up for mega sales. Let us talk about what 'shopping' means these days.
Let me share my views on the act of shopping and the proliferation of malls in Malaysia – these two ideas as they relate to the notion of cultural imperialism. Imperialism, according to Vladimir Lenin in his famous essay, is the highest stage of capitalism. In the context of this essay, it is a step higher than that and a level deeper than just "consuming goods made for mass consumption".
'Cultural imperialism' is a state of beingness in which the culture of the dominant has advanced to a stage of colonisation of the less powerful cultures, with the aid of technological power that fueled the style of colonisation. 'Imperialism' means the stage of advanced capitalist expansion that enabled the form of domination.
Cultural imperialism, by nature is a more powerful consequence of colonisation than say, for example forced occupation or colonisation because it utilises a clever and systematic form of subjugation. Cultural imperialism works more effectively, subtly, and silently when it creates a sense of euphoria, elation, and excitement in the mind, body, and consciousness of those imprisoned by the desire to shop till they drop. The mall provides the haven for this form of sophisticated imperialism.
"How it works"
Let us look at how cultural imperialism works with an illustration of the 'malling' of Malaysia. Imagine the mall as a place of fantasy and utopia that actually stockpile and market the artifacts of cultural imperialism. In writing this essay I draw inspiration from observing how people of varying classes and modern caste system 'shop'.
What else is a 'mall'? It is an enclosure of a shopping experience nicely built to attract people to consume the products they often do not actually need. The malls, especially in Kuala Lumpur, are a direct adaptation of the Western mall, architectured with post-modern stylistics, and sells products produced and/or marketed by multinational corporations from both the Western and the Eastern world. Frederic Jameson, an American cultural theorist writes about Le Corbusier's 'internationalist' design; architecture of urbanism that influence the design of malls as a world of escapism.
In Kuala Lumpur, as in New York City, there is now a place called (Berjaya) Times Square; a place surrounded by some of the biggest malls in Southeast Asia. Their names do not reflect the reality of the local traditions: Subang Parade, MegaMall, The Mall, Lot 10, Bukit Bintang Plaza, AmCorp Mall, Cheras Leisure Mall, Great Eastern Mall, 101 Mall, The Street Mall, and Mid- Valley Mega-Mall. Foreign names utilized to make the local elites richer.
Who owns these malls and who benefits from the creation and sustenance of culture industry that transforms virtually all industries of the body, borrowing Walter Benjamin, into artistic production in an age of globalised mechanical reproduction? The Malaysian malls provide an exciting enclosure for the Malaysian shopping experience since the tropical heat of Malaysia (almost a daily average of 90 degrees) drives in consumers.
Malls have transformed the landscape of Malaysia since perhaps the beginning of the 1980s when the American and Japanese businesses began to dominate the economy. Traditional Malay stores that sell goods produced by family-run cottage industries had to give way to the malls that brought a new meaning to the concept of buying and consuming.
The traditional Malay 'bazaar' or pasar, where customers could bargain and the products were cheap, gave way to modern malls that sell not only products but also transmit values and transform the meaning of consumption. Shopping at these malls often require the consumers to possess credit cards. Classes of people have different classes of cards and credit limits. The idea of cultural imperialism is clear: Malaysians are cleverly socialised into becoming good modern consumers that buy products made to identify them with varying classes and social status. Hence the upper class Malaysian will buy Gucci, Lou Votton, and Ferragamo, and those of the lower class will buy Padang Besar/Golok-made imitations of these products.
Sometimes one can't tell the difference, exemplifying the expertise of the Thais. If I wear an imitation Tommy Hilfigher tie and imitation Santoni shoes, people will not question the authenticity of what I am wearing, as compared to say, the electronic factory worker who wears authentic branded clothing bought with a year's savings. This is the power of brand-name perception that has and continues to shape our consciousness.
The mall is then like an education institution that cleverly and 'common-sensically' socialises the buyer into a utopia of consumerism under the one-roof of a fantasy-like environment/paradise of shopping quite different from the Malaysian reality outside - especially in the slumps of Kuala Lumpur or Johor Bahru. Herein lies the imperialising power of the Western (American and European) and Eastern (Japanese and Korean) business interests that structure and define the culture of mass consumption, so that to be a modern Malaysian means one must consume and be consumed by the products of the culture industry. Ideology of mass consumption
The malls are like cultural installations that attempt to install the ideology of mass consumption. In Malaysia, the transformation is now clear; along Bintang Walk, for example, one can feel like walking down New York City with the signs and symbols of Western and Eastern capitalist interests dominating and inscribing the landscape. One can see McDonalds, Starbucks, Hard Rock Café, Marriot Hotel, Tower Records, Holiday Inn, and hundreds other signs, symbols, and representations of global capitalism sprawled in-between major malls such as KLCC Suria, and Mid-Valley Mega-Mall.
These cultural-industrial complexes and the hundreds of billboards that sell products of the cultural industry are evidence of the way foreign cultures imperialise. The malls of Malaysia provide an outlet for Malaysians who are "depressed" or lived a stressful life to be happier and tranquilised by the pleasant shopping experience and environment (only to be even more depressed and saddened later for overspending and having to face their spouses' wrath).
For urban Malaysians living in the capital city, going to the mall has become a concept as natural as going to a McDonalds or Kentucky Fried Chicken or a Japanese karaoke bar, or for teh tarik. Schoolchildren also play truant to chill out at the malls.
In the United States, the children of the multi-cultural poor shop for brand name clothing; a practice that perhaps help elevates the self-esteem of the children who predominantly grow up without a father figure. Single parents who work two or sometimes three jobs feel that they need to raise their children that way to motivate the latter to behave in school.
"Class, status and culture"
We are what we consume based on the mode of production we engage in, and based on the ever-changing notions of class status, and culture we have designed. The closer one is to the power-keg of the means of production or the richer one is, the more expensive the brand name that one and family members wear. Branding oneself becomes a necessity in this corporatist nation state that is now thriving on brand names such as Islam Hadhari, Bio-tech Malaysia, and the North-South-East-West Malaysian Corridors. Everything now is about branding and world-classism. None about helping the poor get out of the mess the rich have created.
Society is now reproducing itself into classes and caste systems that require malls to provide those very brands and signs and symbols in order for the classes of people – from the rulers to the modern indentured slaves – to identify themselves in order to feel a deep sense of belonging. Malaysian malls - those warehouse of brand name goods produced cheaply by impoverished children of the Third and Fourth World - help define the symbols and signification of those status symbols.
They provide the post-modern cultural artifacts that define what the poor and the rich would wear. We have enculturalised the modern concept of the mall successfully so that it will become a necessary wardrobe for the varying classes of people we have produced historical-materialistically. Culture, in the case of the 'malling' of Malaysia, is also imperialism. Our modern and post-modern shopping malls house the culture of imperialism.
Happy shopping for the holidays. It's also called "retail therapy" in America.
A REPUBLIC OF VIRTUE
Dr Azly Rahman
aar26@columbia.edu
http://azlyrahman-illuminations.blogspot.com/
"But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal - there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court.
"It can be the Supreme Court of the United States or the humblest J.P. court in the land, or this honourable court which you serve. Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal."
- Harper Lee, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’
If the video clip purportedly linked to the appointment of the Chief Justice is verified as authentic and those involved in it are clearly identified, will we see a major wave of change? One that would signify and realise our longing for a counter-factual history of our nation?
As the poet Langston Hughes said: "Would it dry up like a raisin in the sun…. or will it explode?"
By counter-factual history, I mean the what-ifs of the way we view history, somewhat like the movie 'Back to the Future' in which one can go back in time and change the nature of things.
Was PKR de facto leader Anwar Ibrahim's expulsion from Umno and the government and consequently his brutal treatment and castration invalid? What could have happened as a moment of counter-factual history? How would things have turned out to be if justice had been blind? As the Muslims would say, "Allah knows best…"
And if the claims in the video recording are verified and the Bar Council embarks upon a boycott of the courts, the question is: where are we heading, given that the general election is said to be about seven months away?
If the opposition parties, NGOs, those rallying behind the Bar Council, and the rakyat march to the Prime Minister's Office demanding explanations, verification and immediate action, what might happen next? Which groups in our society will also march - in this newly-acquired sense of discovery of the powerful civil rights movement?
What would happen to a nation that is already traumatised and psychologically-deranged by a range of issues of our own crafting - from the Altathunya murder case to the riot in Batu Buruk; from the gangsta-ish incidents in Ijok to the demolition of Kampung Berembang; from the continuing socio-economic injustices brought about by abuse of the New Economic Policy to the continuing harassment and criminalisation of students and faculty in public universities? And what about the mega trauma we will be experiencing as we helplessly witness our landscape being transformed into those "super corridors" that attempt to replicate the failed project of the Multimedia Super Corridor?
Imagine a boycott of the courts - can you? I dare not imagine what will happen. I hope we can still respect the rule of law amidst impending chaos.
But then again, are we becoming a nation whose conduct is not only unbecoming but worse, unruly - bordering on the ideology of Mat Rempit-ism as a national-social character of our hyper-modern political culture?
Hegemony and guilt
But we are in it together, aren't we?
In modern European history, the Italians had a similar experience with the national guilt of not doing much to stop Benito Mussolini.
Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci, while in prison and writing his 'Prison Notebooks' - wondered whether Mussolini's Italy had come to that stage where the nation seemed to have accepted the norm - corruption, abuse of power, control of the courts, and the increasing corporatisation of the government.
The rise and consolidation of Fordism (named after the Henry Ford production-house ideology) as a phenomena of Mussolini's modernist philosophy helped soften , rationalise and objectify the issue of class and the rise of the militarist state in the years preceding the rise of the Axis Powers and subsequently of World War II.
"Hegemony" was his explanation of why the Italians did not revolt against the fascist regime or vote the Italian Communist party into power. Gramsci remained in jail and his work remained studied as a source of discourse analysis on the relationship between power, ideology, and history as these interplay to produce totalitarianism and next, fascism.
In Malaysia, we have allowed not only 'hegemony' (defined by Gramsci as "moral and intellectual leadership") to prevail but also 'hegemony' and 'utopianism' crafted by the previous regime, to take root. We have allowed the courts to be controlled, the universities to be shackled, faculty and students to be silenced and appeased, Parliament to be classically conditioned a la Pavlov, and the masses to be Prozac-ed by the 'feel good' messages of this great utopianism called Vision 2020, cemented by a Stalinist style five-year national development agenda.
We the voters have allowed this illusionary sense of 'order and harmony' to prevail and have allowed our leaders to stay as long as they wish in a form of political culture apologetically called 'guided democracy'. We are collectively guilty of installing this brand of democracy, of Asian despotism. We must evolve many levels beyond the desire to merely become spectators of history; one designed by those who know how to turn the nation's selected memories into spectacles of irony. We must rise above the cognitive level of merely accepting what is being projected by the mass media; a medium that has become more of a national fetish that churns out an illusionary hopefulness -- amidst a major undercurrent of hopelessness, as we venture to escape the shackles of the modern class and caste system.
Hegemony permeates all levels of society - psychological, political, economic, cultural and even religious. It creates what Gramsci called a "historical block" in which this moment of history as I re-interpret it, that was supposed to be a passage for the advancement of social justice through regime change, was hijacked and appropriated by a totalitarian regime - much to the ignorance of the masses.
In our case, where would a common person seek justice if the courts are not independent? Isn't there supposed to be the separation of powers - of the Executive, Legislative, and Judiciary - to protect the rights of the citizens; natural rights that the citizen surrendered to the state in place of protection and the advancement of the 'general will'?
Is this the kind of justice system we have built? Are we all doomed as a nation?
I hope not. But what must we do now?
Dr Azly Rahman
aar26@columbia.edu
http://azlyrahman-illuminations.blogspot.com/
"But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal - there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court.
"It can be the Supreme Court of the United States or the humblest J.P. court in the land, or this honourable court which you serve. Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal."
- Harper Lee, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’
If the video clip purportedly linked to the appointment of the Chief Justice is verified as authentic and those involved in it are clearly identified, will we see a major wave of change? One that would signify and realise our longing for a counter-factual history of our nation?
As the poet Langston Hughes said: "Would it dry up like a raisin in the sun…. or will it explode?"
By counter-factual history, I mean the what-ifs of the way we view history, somewhat like the movie 'Back to the Future' in which one can go back in time and change the nature of things.
Was PKR de facto leader Anwar Ibrahim's expulsion from Umno and the government and consequently his brutal treatment and castration invalid? What could have happened as a moment of counter-factual history? How would things have turned out to be if justice had been blind? As the Muslims would say, "Allah knows best…"
And if the claims in the video recording are verified and the Bar Council embarks upon a boycott of the courts, the question is: where are we heading, given that the general election is said to be about seven months away?
If the opposition parties, NGOs, those rallying behind the Bar Council, and the rakyat march to the Prime Minister's Office demanding explanations, verification and immediate action, what might happen next? Which groups in our society will also march - in this newly-acquired sense of discovery of the powerful civil rights movement?
What would happen to a nation that is already traumatised and psychologically-deranged by a range of issues of our own crafting - from the Altathunya murder case to the riot in Batu Buruk; from the gangsta-ish incidents in Ijok to the demolition of Kampung Berembang; from the continuing socio-economic injustices brought about by abuse of the New Economic Policy to the continuing harassment and criminalisation of students and faculty in public universities? And what about the mega trauma we will be experiencing as we helplessly witness our landscape being transformed into those "super corridors" that attempt to replicate the failed project of the Multimedia Super Corridor?
Imagine a boycott of the courts - can you? I dare not imagine what will happen. I hope we can still respect the rule of law amidst impending chaos.
But then again, are we becoming a nation whose conduct is not only unbecoming but worse, unruly - bordering on the ideology of Mat Rempit-ism as a national-social character of our hyper-modern political culture?
Hegemony and guilt
But we are in it together, aren't we?
In modern European history, the Italians had a similar experience with the national guilt of not doing much to stop Benito Mussolini.
Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci, while in prison and writing his 'Prison Notebooks' - wondered whether Mussolini's Italy had come to that stage where the nation seemed to have accepted the norm - corruption, abuse of power, control of the courts, and the increasing corporatisation of the government.
The rise and consolidation of Fordism (named after the Henry Ford production-house ideology) as a phenomena of Mussolini's modernist philosophy helped soften , rationalise and objectify the issue of class and the rise of the militarist state in the years preceding the rise of the Axis Powers and subsequently of World War II.
"Hegemony" was his explanation of why the Italians did not revolt against the fascist regime or vote the Italian Communist party into power. Gramsci remained in jail and his work remained studied as a source of discourse analysis on the relationship between power, ideology, and history as these interplay to produce totalitarianism and next, fascism.
In Malaysia, we have allowed not only 'hegemony' (defined by Gramsci as "moral and intellectual leadership") to prevail but also 'hegemony' and 'utopianism' crafted by the previous regime, to take root. We have allowed the courts to be controlled, the universities to be shackled, faculty and students to be silenced and appeased, Parliament to be classically conditioned a la Pavlov, and the masses to be Prozac-ed by the 'feel good' messages of this great utopianism called Vision 2020, cemented by a Stalinist style five-year national development agenda.
We the voters have allowed this illusionary sense of 'order and harmony' to prevail and have allowed our leaders to stay as long as they wish in a form of political culture apologetically called 'guided democracy'. We are collectively guilty of installing this brand of democracy, of Asian despotism. We must evolve many levels beyond the desire to merely become spectators of history; one designed by those who know how to turn the nation's selected memories into spectacles of irony. We must rise above the cognitive level of merely accepting what is being projected by the mass media; a medium that has become more of a national fetish that churns out an illusionary hopefulness -- amidst a major undercurrent of hopelessness, as we venture to escape the shackles of the modern class and caste system.
Hegemony permeates all levels of society - psychological, political, economic, cultural and even religious. It creates what Gramsci called a "historical block" in which this moment of history as I re-interpret it, that was supposed to be a passage for the advancement of social justice through regime change, was hijacked and appropriated by a totalitarian regime - much to the ignorance of the masses.
In our case, where would a common person seek justice if the courts are not independent? Isn't there supposed to be the separation of powers - of the Executive, Legislative, and Judiciary - to protect the rights of the citizens; natural rights that the citizen surrendered to the state in place of protection and the advancement of the 'general will'?
Is this the kind of justice system we have built? Are we all doomed as a nation?
I hope not. But what must we do now?
A REPUBLIC OF VIRTUE
Dr Azly Rahman
aar26@columbia.edu
http://azlyrahman-illuminations.blogspot.com/
The decision by Umno to create the "Hulubalang Umno" class interests me. It asks us the question of reason and revolution in the rise and fall of nations and how combative must politics continue to be. I have some thoughts on the kind of mindset to be created to deconstruct and reconstruct the consciousness of the Malays.
We begin with some essential questions:
In an age wherein the neuroscientist and bio-semioticians talk about "brain gain", "the global mind", "brain power industries", and "the need for renaissance thinking" must the Malays emulate the thinking of the Arabs, the Jews, the Chinese, the Japanese, the European, the French, or the American?
Or should they go back to the drawing board of conjuring what is good, progressive, rationalistic, and ethical from all these "peoples" and turn this new model of the "Malay mind" so that it will become a powerful synthesis of outlooks that will help the Malays evolve gracefully for a thousand years to come? How might this model be fluid enough to help the Malays work together with other ethnic groups in Malaysia in a peaceful and collaborative manner so that the wealth of this nation can be shared equitably?
The Malays must not continue to be known as a people whose only tool of social change is the keris and amuck. They have never wanted to be known as such a people.The Malay mind has more exciting, stimulating, and positive neurons that are eager to developed and to be made into neural connections that would make the Malays become known as a nation of philosopher-rulers rather than the "hulubalang class of gung-ho soldiers of fortune" proud to be "yes men and women" and always ready to follow orders however questionable and unethical they are.
The Malays have been for centuries colonised by the mental model created out of the feudal mode of production; a mode that continues to perfect itself from the age of the Malay rulers to this age of neo-feudalism characterised by the cybernetic frame of consciousness. In all the stages of growth, the interplay between culture and technology has shaped the kind of thinking that either enables or disables the creativity of the Malays.
Top down reform and "mental revolutions" versus "bottom up" grassroots movement in the revolution of consciousness has characterised the push and pull factor and the thesis/anti-thesis character of the evolution of the Malay mind. Much of the evolution has been dictated by the political-economic elites over successive generations; the evolution facilitated by institutions of power relations that shaped ideology and inscriptions of the Malay psyche.
Mental model
The Malays need to find a mental model of how they should think and be able to ride the wave of globalisation. They must become the subject of this new mental revolution and not merely become objects of consciousness to be manipulated and indoctrinated by those who own the means to control others. They must evolve gracefully and synthesise the elements of "best practices" in formulating a worldview that is going to take them to newer heights.
Even Arjuna, an embodiment of the Kshatriya gets to ask questions to Krishna on the battlefield of Kuruksetra. The dialogue on whether to go to battle against one's family members in the name of dharma or higher goals attest to the need even for the warrior or "hulubalang" to think hard on the issues of ethics and pragmatics in the face of possible destruction.
There is a need for a pragmatic-philosopher class to be created among the Malays. The class can be created out of a bricolage (amalgam/synthesis) of multiculturalist thinking. The Malays need to create the "gentleman class" of thinkers able to not only become guardians of culture and deconstructionists of their worldview as well. They need to create radical, world-wise multiculturalists amongst their best and brightest; a class that is less ultra-nationalistic and parochial but more cosmopolitan and universalistic and socialistic in outlook.
In Confucionist thought, the scholars or the "Chun-Tzu" or those of the gentlemen class sits at the intellectual/meritocratic pedestal of Chinese society. The Malays besides being trained in the classics of Malay literature on the art of statecraft, can learn from the need to train the mind in the rigours of the Classics as in The Analects or the Taoist text of I Ching and to reflect upon the fate of society and on good ethical governance.
Again, there is no need to create a "hulubalang" class. The ethos of "Hang Tuah" is no longer suitable to be embodied by the Malays nor the "spirit of Hang Tuah" to be further refined to be used as a mental construction of the neo-feudalistic Malay mind.
How do we create this new Malay mind – out of the ruins of a dying ultra-nationalist Malay ideology no longer in sync with the principles and progress of neuroscience in the age of deconstructionism brought about by high-speed Internet access and nano-technology? How do we get the Malays and non-Malays alike to agree that human beings are all essentially the same, constructed out of the same basis of life -- the DNA.
How do we create an education system (from pre-kindergarten to post-graduate) that would help us destroy all form of classification of human beings based on race and ethnicity; classifications that are deeply rooted in ideology and destructive race theories and notions of racial superiority used and abused by colonialists to divide and conquer human beings? How do we get our scholars in our universities to teach us how to start looking at ourselves as living objects and human utilities in the historical-materialistic march of Kapital; a Rostowian march of "progress" trajectoried into this new age of mass consumption and drowned in the painful pleasures of globalization? We have become the new colonialists ourselves, using our newer hyper-modern version of the notions of racial superiority to construct a divisive economic policy.
We need to go back to the drawing board or possibly rewrite the history of the Malays; a history that was hijacked by those who owned the pen and made it mightier than the keris.
But first, we must ask the question: what is a "Malay" -- just as the question asked, who is an "American"?
Dr Azly Rahman
aar26@columbia.edu
http://azlyrahman-illuminations.blogspot.com/
The decision by Umno to create the "Hulubalang Umno" class interests me. It asks us the question of reason and revolution in the rise and fall of nations and how combative must politics continue to be. I have some thoughts on the kind of mindset to be created to deconstruct and reconstruct the consciousness of the Malays.
We begin with some essential questions:
In an age wherein the neuroscientist and bio-semioticians talk about "brain gain", "the global mind", "brain power industries", and "the need for renaissance thinking" must the Malays emulate the thinking of the Arabs, the Jews, the Chinese, the Japanese, the European, the French, or the American?
Or should they go back to the drawing board of conjuring what is good, progressive, rationalistic, and ethical from all these "peoples" and turn this new model of the "Malay mind" so that it will become a powerful synthesis of outlooks that will help the Malays evolve gracefully for a thousand years to come? How might this model be fluid enough to help the Malays work together with other ethnic groups in Malaysia in a peaceful and collaborative manner so that the wealth of this nation can be shared equitably?
The Malays must not continue to be known as a people whose only tool of social change is the keris and amuck. They have never wanted to be known as such a people.The Malay mind has more exciting, stimulating, and positive neurons that are eager to developed and to be made into neural connections that would make the Malays become known as a nation of philosopher-rulers rather than the "hulubalang class of gung-ho soldiers of fortune" proud to be "yes men and women" and always ready to follow orders however questionable and unethical they are.
The Malays have been for centuries colonised by the mental model created out of the feudal mode of production; a mode that continues to perfect itself from the age of the Malay rulers to this age of neo-feudalism characterised by the cybernetic frame of consciousness. In all the stages of growth, the interplay between culture and technology has shaped the kind of thinking that either enables or disables the creativity of the Malays.
Top down reform and "mental revolutions" versus "bottom up" grassroots movement in the revolution of consciousness has characterised the push and pull factor and the thesis/anti-thesis character of the evolution of the Malay mind. Much of the evolution has been dictated by the political-economic elites over successive generations; the evolution facilitated by institutions of power relations that shaped ideology and inscriptions of the Malay psyche.
Mental model
The Malays need to find a mental model of how they should think and be able to ride the wave of globalisation. They must become the subject of this new mental revolution and not merely become objects of consciousness to be manipulated and indoctrinated by those who own the means to control others. They must evolve gracefully and synthesise the elements of "best practices" in formulating a worldview that is going to take them to newer heights.
Even Arjuna, an embodiment of the Kshatriya gets to ask questions to Krishna on the battlefield of Kuruksetra. The dialogue on whether to go to battle against one's family members in the name of dharma or higher goals attest to the need even for the warrior or "hulubalang" to think hard on the issues of ethics and pragmatics in the face of possible destruction.
There is a need for a pragmatic-philosopher class to be created among the Malays. The class can be created out of a bricolage (amalgam/synthesis) of multiculturalist thinking. The Malays need to create the "gentleman class" of thinkers able to not only become guardians of culture and deconstructionists of their worldview as well. They need to create radical, world-wise multiculturalists amongst their best and brightest; a class that is less ultra-nationalistic and parochial but more cosmopolitan and universalistic and socialistic in outlook.
In Confucionist thought, the scholars or the "Chun-Tzu" or those of the gentlemen class sits at the intellectual/meritocratic pedestal of Chinese society. The Malays besides being trained in the classics of Malay literature on the art of statecraft, can learn from the need to train the mind in the rigours of the Classics as in The Analects or the Taoist text of I Ching and to reflect upon the fate of society and on good ethical governance.
Again, there is no need to create a "hulubalang" class. The ethos of "Hang Tuah" is no longer suitable to be embodied by the Malays nor the "spirit of Hang Tuah" to be further refined to be used as a mental construction of the neo-feudalistic Malay mind.
How do we create this new Malay mind – out of the ruins of a dying ultra-nationalist Malay ideology no longer in sync with the principles and progress of neuroscience in the age of deconstructionism brought about by high-speed Internet access and nano-technology? How do we get the Malays and non-Malays alike to agree that human beings are all essentially the same, constructed out of the same basis of life -- the DNA.
How do we create an education system (from pre-kindergarten to post-graduate) that would help us destroy all form of classification of human beings based on race and ethnicity; classifications that are deeply rooted in ideology and destructive race theories and notions of racial superiority used and abused by colonialists to divide and conquer human beings? How do we get our scholars in our universities to teach us how to start looking at ourselves as living objects and human utilities in the historical-materialistic march of Kapital; a Rostowian march of "progress" trajectoried into this new age of mass consumption and drowned in the painful pleasures of globalization? We have become the new colonialists ourselves, using our newer hyper-modern version of the notions of racial superiority to construct a divisive economic policy.
We need to go back to the drawing board or possibly rewrite the history of the Malays; a history that was hijacked by those who owned the pen and made it mightier than the keris.
But first, we must ask the question: what is a "Malay" -- just as the question asked, who is an "American"?
14/09: 1511, 7/11, 9/11
A REPUBLIC OF VIRTUE
Dr Azly Rahman
aar26@columbia.edu
http://azlyrahman-illuminations.blogspot.com/
It is Tuesday , Sept 11, 2007 in Corporate America.
Six years ago there was no Ground Zero in the Wall Street district. Six years ago, I saw children on cellphones sobbing in school libraries that were turned into crisis management centres in a matter of minutes, as the television stations carried live the horror in broad daylight on Wall Street.
Every time I cruise by New Jersey's West New York and glance across Hudson River where the Twin Towers once adorned the skyline, I would see billowing smoke meandering across the cityscape of Frank Sinatra's serenade - of the city that never sleeps. New York of 24/7.
I asked myself – is this the work of human beings? Which God would permit such a hideous crime against humanity? I recalled Jean Jacques Rousseau's famous maxim "Everything is good in the hands of the Author of Things. Everything degenerates in the hands of Man". I had some answers to my question on good and evil. I needed more questions on how the world was constructed and have culminated since the rise of America as the sole empire of the post-Cold War period. This America - that has also become part of me. The America of Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau.
For months, the Armageddon on Wall Street became a reminder of what happened after 9/11 and what happens next, and how much has changed in the world many "GAIA-consciousness" activist would call "Spaceship Earth".
America of the common Man was fed with steady supply of soundbites from the corporate media; the producers of truth educating its consumers on what the word "jihad" means and how closely tied it is with "globalisation." Americans were made to believe that it was an "attack on democracy".
Months after that I found myself discussing with my students of political science Ben Barber's now classic piece "Jihad versus McWorld" to understand what was going on. The work of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Zygmunt Bauman, Michel Foucault, Ward Churchill, and Noam Chomsky became popular amongst American academics trying to understand the complex phenomena that led to the collapse of the towers.
America saw its enlightened citizens reading voraciously about Islam. America began to read a steady series of conspiracy theories on why the towers fell. Filmmaker Michael Moore began to produce his "Fahrenheit 9/11" and many other independent producers were crafting urban narratives of the tragedy, culminating in the latest one called "Loose Change."
America of the common Man from the "blue state" was ready to learn what his government has been doing for centuries.
In writing this essay for Malaysians, I thought of the numbers "1511", "7/11", and "9/11". All of them are symbols of disasters.
But how?
1511 and 7/11
1511 – the magic number of the fall of Malacca and the end of days of the Malay sultans.What was that all about? It was the advent of European mercantilism and the expansion of colonies. While Malacca fell in the hands of the Portuguese amidst the struggle for wealth and power of the greedy and warring Malay sultans, New York was being colonised by the Dutch, with names like New Amsterdam and "The Bronx" in New York City and Bergen County in New Jersey being installed.
New York City became the haven for "corporate pirates" of that era, a place wherein bootleggers and smugglers reigned. A gamblers' den of a globalised proportion it was; a den that further transformed itself into this iconoclastic- emblematic-semiotic capital of Western free enterprise in the name "Wall Street."
And I am also thinking of the chain store 7/11, a McDonaldised symbol of corporate America, installed through a form of democracy patrolled by nuclear submarines.
What is it about?
It is about the challenges we face as humanity continues to progress, amongst those are:
Nationally we continue to live in a political system that is based not only on the deformed and degenerating politics of race and economic greed that favors the rich and members of political dynasties but also a system that is threatened with a continuing disregard for human rights; fundamental principles of liberties that ought to protect minorities in a religiously pluralistic and complex state.
Nationally we continue to see abandoned hopes for nations to evolve into a truly multicultural society as we witness the institutionalisation of racism not only the way we think and act daily but in the way we construct our educational, cultural, economic and political institutions. The way we conduct our dialogue on religion and race have lately reflected a clearer and uglier politics of mistrust. The War on Terrorism itself has become yet another leitmotif of hatred and irrationalism couched in the name of national and international security.
Globally, we are faced with challenges in the areas of scientific advancement, morality, economics, ethnic and religious conflicts, population and health.
Scientific advancements and control of knowledge and technology continue to be in the hands of the rich nations with the poor, "developing", and "newly-industrializing and informationalising" ones become slaves in the global production and consumption of technologies. Our scientific world of inquiry and human imagination to solve human problems has become a world of Orwellian drama; one of despair characterized by the use of science for deadly purposes. Markets for weapons are constantly being created so that warring nations may decimate each other while arms dealers may profit as merchants of death.
In each country of the world, the pattern of ownership of the scientific and technological advances mirror the pattern of have and have-nots of the world, of the centre-periphery dependency mode of global political-economic design.
Morality issue
Morality becomes a central issue of this millennium as we question our role as individuals that are defined by the means of subsistence/economic condition we are in. As human beings merely become "knowledge workers" and corporate executives in multinational corporations that have no national governments to answer to, they become merely one of the minute functions of the machinery of global exploitation in the virtually all spheres of human activities.
Prime Ministers and presidents of "developing", "industrialising" or "advancing" nations are now assuming the role of chief executive officers of international oligopoly capitalists; their worth reduced merely as beneficiaries of the international owners of production. The great Indonesian poet WS Rendra's character in Kisah Perjuangan Suku Naga ('The Struggle of the Naga Tribe' written circa mid-1970s) Sri Ratu caricaturize well how Third World political elite skim off percentages from internationally-backed development projects.
Coming back to the issue of morality, one can still rationalise one's work as a scientist in nuclear weapons labs in New Mexico, in an oil drill-company in Iraq, in pesticide-making subsidiary in the Philippines, a designer sneaker-producing company in Vietnam, in a daisy-cutter bomb factory, or in a diamond-mining company in South Africa. As long as profits roll into the coffers of the parent and recipient nation and benefit the power elites, child labour and poor working conditions in the sweatshops are acceptable - in the name of democracy and development.
Global economics continue to become a centrepiece of issues we will need to understand in order to become change agents and informed citizens in this precarious world of interdependence. The role of The World Bank and International Monetary Fund as twin instruments of global domination, borne out of post-World war II Bretton Woods agreement, continue to be challenged peacefully and violently as the world continues to produce more and more impoverished nations as a consequence of policies of ideological lendings and structurally imperialistic adjustments.
Presidents of the World Bank continue to be groomed from hawks of the American ultra-conservative mould, with Paul Wolfowitz as one example. Developments in Latin America of late are pointing towards a transformation of the people's view towards economics – governments that favour the national poor and not the international plunderers will triumph at the polls. The constant revolutions and re-evolution that happen across time and space and across all nations, as many a Maoist theoretician would contend, are testament to the thesis-anti thesis notion of human evolution.
Ethnic and religious conflicts continue to splash the headlines of our global newspapers, with not only border conflicts perpetually increasing but deadly attacks of public places where the innocent work and play becoming a feature of post-Sept 11, 2001 fallout. Every nation is now threatened by the ever-growing tide and tsunamis of racial and religious violence.
"Religion of the Man", as Jean Jacques Rousseau would say, has been transformed into "religion of the State" carrying with it the rationalisation for truncated jihads, senseless crusades, mahabharattas of blind dharmas, questionable kamikazes, globalised amuks, or any form of religious war one may culturally connote.
War over oil
The prolonged occupation in Iraq and the obvious "no-victory-in-sight" of the American forces has become a national issue in America – how long will she let her children die and how many more of the children of the American underclass must be drafted through the economic drafting ideology. The nation has become "Cindy Shehan-ized" in a country Bush-whacked by a Texan gun slinging cowboy-typed foreign policy. Currently more than 3,000 American soldiers/children of the nation have perished in a war over oil that has probably killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children.
War is a crime against humanity, as one Russian diplomat L Bobrakov, once said in an article. We now have the crisis in Lebanon; a perpetual reminder of the historical-materialistic, geographic, and political-economic dimension of the ever-evolving conflictualizing Middle East.
Though the destruction of Iraq is purely economic in nature, it is also perceived as a religious war that has wide-ranging and global ideological implications. Report on Osama Bin Laden's purportedly latest "warning against the Americans" continue to conjure the continuation of a "religious war" but in America however, this message has been overplayed.
The American fear is now centering on the institutionalising of a national wire-tapping. As Massachusetts Information Technology (MIT) linguist-peace activist Noam Chomsky would say, "fear is the weapon of the administration against the people of America" so that the military-industrial complex can continue to live and breathe its ideology. Instill fear of those "orange", "red", or whatever-colour alert and the people will, in the name of "fear" continue to support the war machinery that is bulldozing nations defined as "rogue/terrorist states."
What do all these mean?
We continue to live in an Orwellian work that still does not make sense. We live in a matrix of complexities run by generalissimos in their labyrinths, as the Latin American Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marques would say. Perhaps the only sane way for one to live would be, as the neo-Marxist American thinker Frederic Jameson would say, construct a "personal cartography of oneself" so that we may know where to locate ourselves in a world wherein nature, with the aid of technology, is stolen by culture to become Das Kapital. That's the story of the Frankenstein in us.
Till then, the story of our 7/11 is this: we emerge at the eleventh hour of Creation - just to transform into Creators of 9/11s.
Let there be Peace. Let the Grace of the Merciful and the Compassionate cleanse our souls.
Dr Azly Rahman
aar26@columbia.edu
http://azlyrahman-illuminations.blogspot.com/
It is Tuesday , Sept 11, 2007 in Corporate America.
Six years ago there was no Ground Zero in the Wall Street district. Six years ago, I saw children on cellphones sobbing in school libraries that were turned into crisis management centres in a matter of minutes, as the television stations carried live the horror in broad daylight on Wall Street.
Every time I cruise by New Jersey's West New York and glance across Hudson River where the Twin Towers once adorned the skyline, I would see billowing smoke meandering across the cityscape of Frank Sinatra's serenade - of the city that never sleeps. New York of 24/7.
I asked myself – is this the work of human beings? Which God would permit such a hideous crime against humanity? I recalled Jean Jacques Rousseau's famous maxim "Everything is good in the hands of the Author of Things. Everything degenerates in the hands of Man". I had some answers to my question on good and evil. I needed more questions on how the world was constructed and have culminated since the rise of America as the sole empire of the post-Cold War period. This America - that has also become part of me. The America of Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau.
For months, the Armageddon on Wall Street became a reminder of what happened after 9/11 and what happens next, and how much has changed in the world many "GAIA-consciousness" activist would call "Spaceship Earth".
America of the common Man was fed with steady supply of soundbites from the corporate media; the producers of truth educating its consumers on what the word "jihad" means and how closely tied it is with "globalisation." Americans were made to believe that it was an "attack on democracy".
Months after that I found myself discussing with my students of political science Ben Barber's now classic piece "Jihad versus McWorld" to understand what was going on. The work of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Zygmunt Bauman, Michel Foucault, Ward Churchill, and Noam Chomsky became popular amongst American academics trying to understand the complex phenomena that led to the collapse of the towers.
America saw its enlightened citizens reading voraciously about Islam. America began to read a steady series of conspiracy theories on why the towers fell. Filmmaker Michael Moore began to produce his "Fahrenheit 9/11" and many other independent producers were crafting urban narratives of the tragedy, culminating in the latest one called "Loose Change."
America of the common Man from the "blue state" was ready to learn what his government has been doing for centuries.
In writing this essay for Malaysians, I thought of the numbers "1511", "7/11", and "9/11". All of them are symbols of disasters.
But how?
1511 and 7/11
1511 – the magic number of the fall of Malacca and the end of days of the Malay sultans.What was that all about? It was the advent of European mercantilism and the expansion of colonies. While Malacca fell in the hands of the Portuguese amidst the struggle for wealth and power of the greedy and warring Malay sultans, New York was being colonised by the Dutch, with names like New Amsterdam and "The Bronx" in New York City and Bergen County in New Jersey being installed.
New York City became the haven for "corporate pirates" of that era, a place wherein bootleggers and smugglers reigned. A gamblers' den of a globalised proportion it was; a den that further transformed itself into this iconoclastic- emblematic-semiotic capital of Western free enterprise in the name "Wall Street."
And I am also thinking of the chain store 7/11, a McDonaldised symbol of corporate America, installed through a form of democracy patrolled by nuclear submarines.
What is it about?
It is about the challenges we face as humanity continues to progress, amongst those are:
Nationally we continue to live in a political system that is based not only on the deformed and degenerating politics of race and economic greed that favors the rich and members of political dynasties but also a system that is threatened with a continuing disregard for human rights; fundamental principles of liberties that ought to protect minorities in a religiously pluralistic and complex state.
Nationally we continue to see abandoned hopes for nations to evolve into a truly multicultural society as we witness the institutionalisation of racism not only the way we think and act daily but in the way we construct our educational, cultural, economic and political institutions. The way we conduct our dialogue on religion and race have lately reflected a clearer and uglier politics of mistrust. The War on Terrorism itself has become yet another leitmotif of hatred and irrationalism couched in the name of national and international security.
Globally, we are faced with challenges in the areas of scientific advancement, morality, economics, ethnic and religious conflicts, population and health.
Scientific advancements and control of knowledge and technology continue to be in the hands of the rich nations with the poor, "developing", and "newly-industrializing and informationalising" ones become slaves in the global production and consumption of technologies. Our scientific world of inquiry and human imagination to solve human problems has become a world of Orwellian drama; one of despair characterized by the use of science for deadly purposes. Markets for weapons are constantly being created so that warring nations may decimate each other while arms dealers may profit as merchants of death.
In each country of the world, the pattern of ownership of the scientific and technological advances mirror the pattern of have and have-nots of the world, of the centre-periphery dependency mode of global political-economic design.
Morality issue
Morality becomes a central issue of this millennium as we question our role as individuals that are defined by the means of subsistence/economic condition we are in. As human beings merely become "knowledge workers" and corporate executives in multinational corporations that have no national governments to answer to, they become merely one of the minute functions of the machinery of global exploitation in the virtually all spheres of human activities.
Prime Ministers and presidents of "developing", "industrialising" or "advancing" nations are now assuming the role of chief executive officers of international oligopoly capitalists; their worth reduced merely as beneficiaries of the international owners of production. The great Indonesian poet WS Rendra's character in Kisah Perjuangan Suku Naga ('The Struggle of the Naga Tribe' written circa mid-1970s) Sri Ratu caricaturize well how Third World political elite skim off percentages from internationally-backed development projects.
Coming back to the issue of morality, one can still rationalise one's work as a scientist in nuclear weapons labs in New Mexico, in an oil drill-company in Iraq, in pesticide-making subsidiary in the Philippines, a designer sneaker-producing company in Vietnam, in a daisy-cutter bomb factory, or in a diamond-mining company in South Africa. As long as profits roll into the coffers of the parent and recipient nation and benefit the power elites, child labour and poor working conditions in the sweatshops are acceptable - in the name of democracy and development.
Global economics continue to become a centrepiece of issues we will need to understand in order to become change agents and informed citizens in this precarious world of interdependence. The role of The World Bank and International Monetary Fund as twin instruments of global domination, borne out of post-World war II Bretton Woods agreement, continue to be challenged peacefully and violently as the world continues to produce more and more impoverished nations as a consequence of policies of ideological lendings and structurally imperialistic adjustments.
Presidents of the World Bank continue to be groomed from hawks of the American ultra-conservative mould, with Paul Wolfowitz as one example. Developments in Latin America of late are pointing towards a transformation of the people's view towards economics – governments that favour the national poor and not the international plunderers will triumph at the polls. The constant revolutions and re-evolution that happen across time and space and across all nations, as many a Maoist theoretician would contend, are testament to the thesis-anti thesis notion of human evolution.
Ethnic and religious conflicts continue to splash the headlines of our global newspapers, with not only border conflicts perpetually increasing but deadly attacks of public places where the innocent work and play becoming a feature of post-Sept 11, 2001 fallout. Every nation is now threatened by the ever-growing tide and tsunamis of racial and religious violence.
"Religion of the Man", as Jean Jacques Rousseau would say, has been transformed into "religion of the State" carrying with it the rationalisation for truncated jihads, senseless crusades, mahabharattas of blind dharmas, questionable kamikazes, globalised amuks, or any form of religious war one may culturally connote.
War over oil
The prolonged occupation in Iraq and the obvious "no-victory-in-sight" of the American forces has become a national issue in America – how long will she let her children die and how many more of the children of the American underclass must be drafted through the economic drafting ideology. The nation has become "Cindy Shehan-ized" in a country Bush-whacked by a Texan gun slinging cowboy-typed foreign policy. Currently more than 3,000 American soldiers/children of the nation have perished in a war over oil that has probably killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children.
War is a crime against humanity, as one Russian diplomat L Bobrakov, once said in an article. We now have the crisis in Lebanon; a perpetual reminder of the historical-materialistic, geographic, and political-economic dimension of the ever-evolving conflictualizing Middle East.
Though the destruction of Iraq is purely economic in nature, it is also perceived as a religious war that has wide-ranging and global ideological implications. Report on Osama Bin Laden's purportedly latest "warning against the Americans" continue to conjure the continuation of a "religious war" but in America however, this message has been overplayed.
The American fear is now centering on the institutionalising of a national wire-tapping. As Massachusetts Information Technology (MIT) linguist-peace activist Noam Chomsky would say, "fear is the weapon of the administration against the people of America" so that the military-industrial complex can continue to live and breathe its ideology. Instill fear of those "orange", "red", or whatever-colour alert and the people will, in the name of "fear" continue to support the war machinery that is bulldozing nations defined as "rogue/terrorist states."
What do all these mean?
We continue to live in an Orwellian work that still does not make sense. We live in a matrix of complexities run by generalissimos in their labyrinths, as the Latin American Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marques would say. Perhaps the only sane way for one to live would be, as the neo-Marxist American thinker Frederic Jameson would say, construct a "personal cartography of oneself" so that we may know where to locate ourselves in a world wherein nature, with the aid of technology, is stolen by culture to become Das Kapital. That's the story of the Frankenstein in us.
Till then, the story of our 7/11 is this: we emerge at the eleventh hour of Creation - just to transform into Creators of 9/11s.
Let there be Peace. Let the Grace of the Merciful and the Compassionate cleanse our souls.
A REPUBLIC OF VIRTUE
Dr Azly Rahman
aar26@columbia.edu
http://azlyrahman-illuminations.blogspot.com/
The recent announcement by the Ministry of Higher Education to reconstruct the ideology and modus operandi of our public universities interest me. It seems to provide a good declaration for the nation to embark upon this long walk to academic freedom; for the removal of acts, administrators, apparatuses, and activities that are anathema to the meaning of a university.
The announcement seems to promise a better sense of leadership and scholarship as a response to criticisms on the waning and weakening of purpose of the Malaysian public university.
But how do we reconstruct the consciousness of our higher education institution, so that its body politics can create a holistic sense of beingness – a Ying Yang of intellectual longevity? How do we remove the structures that are caging the mind and soul of the university? What do we need to do to create this "apex" university in perhaps a hundred years to come?
"First things first," as the Management "feel-good guru" Stephen Covey would say. "Think lateral," as the global corporate marketer of thinking skills Edward deBono will advise.
Critical Theory of society
Our developmentalist ideology needs a critical analysis. This ideology has become a shibboleth in itself and one we are trapped in, and one that has driven our nation to the brink of political, economic, social, and cultural chaos on the eve of our 50th. Year of Merdeka. Our Independence needs a radical critique.
If we can step outside of this ideology of race-based, hypermodernised system of evolution of a corporate-nation-state and put this worldview in a crystal ball, we will be able to see something different. We will be able to see a world of alternatives to the one that is falling apart. But what do we need to critique this ideology we are trapped in?
A critical theory of society - that's what we need in this post-half-a-century of the nation's independence. We need a new paradigm of looking at ideology and how to deconstruct it.
What is a critical theory of society? Where do we begin to germinate the seed of this kind of education?
Many of our university leaders still cannot and will not understand the difference between the concept of hegemony and totalitarianism as opposed to education and liberation. To them, it is a place to exercise total control of the mind, body and the soul.
Critical thinking, which is supposed to be made to permeate all disciplines, all curriculum, all written and spoken discourse is flushed down the drain of academia, replaced with the structures of mental oppression, making human beings merely cogs in the wheels of Kapital as these replacements serve the weakening and failing corporatist Malaysian nation-state. Whether an university is run via a "faculty" or "college" system, is not the matter.
What is key is the manner critical discourse is made to permeate all the disciplines and into the minds of the faculty and the students. What is important is to celebrate critical thinking and to honor radical minds that can help construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct society so that any government that no longer serves the needs of the people and the environment can be replaced by the work of the thinking university. Nothing lasts forever but perhaps, the Earth and Sky.
What is the value of this mode of thinking?
Critical thinking will help in the process of removing the structures that are shackling the nation; structures that are making us unable to clearly see the issue of race, class, ethnicity, political-economy, controlling interests, and ideological domination in a newer light. These structures will continue to help facilitate the role of the universities as instrumentally-relevant institutions useful to the survival of the deteriorating Asian-Despotic corporate-nation state.
Structures of a vulture-culture
These structures are built with clear awareness of their usefulness; true to what the French thinker Louis Althusser called "ideological state apparatuses". In mission statements of our public universities, absent is "critical thinking" as one of the skills to be infused into students and as an educational/pedagogical process to create a thinking citizenry. We do not see a conscious effort to promote the skills of critical thinking about society, to teach students to name the oppressive strictures in it, and to make radical changes to impact progressive and peaceful well-beings of citizens. In these mission statements, there is no declaration of the need to respect and encourage the free flow of ideas however radical they are – in the name of academic freedom and the allegiance to truth through scientific inquiry, rather that allegiance to state-designed totalitarianism through all levels of indoctrination and the monitoring and molding of student thinking.
Our universities have become a "conveyor" belt to produce one-dimensional human beings who will help ease the way for young-hooliganistic leaders who are claiming a continuation of neo-colonialism as their "birthright" - leaders who are beginning to employ even rougher, rowdier, more brutal "mat-rempitized" brigades (the grandchildren of Merdeka/Independence) to achieve their goals, as the Black nationalist Malcolm X would say, by whatever means necessary.
Human capital re-evolution?
What a waste of human resource and human talent, what a subtle form of oppression - for those ruled, reproduced, and be made to repeat and regurgitate what the Official and Packaged Knowledge System tells their brain to respond to. When during interviews graduates cannot string together a good sentence in English let alone provide a synthesised/integrative analysis of what they have learned, we have got a problem with what goes on in the classrooms and the nature and culture of critical thinking we have cultivated. Continue to keep the emerging middle class passive and docile in their thinking - this will be good for total control so that this nation and its generations will be lobotomised of its critical sensibility.
But there is still hope for our nation. Like Albert Camus would say of Sisyphus, we will continue to roll the rock up on the hill and at least imagine ourselves happy.
Dr Azly Rahman
aar26@columbia.edu
http://azlyrahman-illuminations.blogspot.com/
The recent announcement by the Ministry of Higher Education to reconstruct the ideology and modus operandi of our public universities interest me. It seems to provide a good declaration for the nation to embark upon this long walk to academic freedom; for the removal of acts, administrators, apparatuses, and activities that are anathema to the meaning of a university.
The announcement seems to promise a better sense of leadership and scholarship as a response to criticisms on the waning and weakening of purpose of the Malaysian public university.
But how do we reconstruct the consciousness of our higher education institution, so that its body politics can create a holistic sense of beingness – a Ying Yang of intellectual longevity? How do we remove the structures that are caging the mind and soul of the university? What do we need to do to create this "apex" university in perhaps a hundred years to come?
"First things first," as the Management "feel-good guru" Stephen Covey would say. "Think lateral," as the global corporate marketer of thinking skills Edward deBono will advise.
Critical Theory of society
Our developmentalist ideology needs a critical analysis. This ideology has become a shibboleth in itself and one we are trapped in, and one that has driven our nation to the brink of political, economic, social, and cultural chaos on the eve of our 50th. Year of Merdeka. Our Independence needs a radical critique.
If we can step outside of this ideology of race-based, hypermodernised system of evolution of a corporate-nation-state and put this worldview in a crystal ball, we will be able to see something different. We will be able to see a world of alternatives to the one that is falling apart. But what do we need to critique this ideology we are trapped in?
A critical theory of society - that's what we need in this post-half-a-century of the nation's independence. We need a new paradigm of looking at ideology and how to deconstruct it.
What is a critical theory of society? Where do we begin to germinate the seed of this kind of education?
Many of our university leaders still cannot and will not understand the difference between the concept of hegemony and totalitarianism as opposed to education and liberation. To them, it is a place to exercise total control of the mind, body and the soul.
Critical thinking, which is supposed to be made to permeate all disciplines, all curriculum, all written and spoken discourse is flushed down the drain of academia, replaced with the structures of mental oppression, making human beings merely cogs in the wheels of Kapital as these replacements serve the weakening and failing corporatist Malaysian nation-state. Whether an university is run via a "faculty" or "college" system, is not the matter.
What is key is the manner critical discourse is made to permeate all the disciplines and into the minds of the faculty and the students. What is important is to celebrate critical thinking and to honor radical minds that can help construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct society so that any government that no longer serves the needs of the people and the environment can be replaced by the work of the thinking university. Nothing lasts forever but perhaps, the Earth and Sky.
What is the value of this mode of thinking?
Critical thinking will help in the process of removing the structures that are shackling the nation; structures that are making us unable to clearly see the issue of race, class, ethnicity, political-economy, controlling interests, and ideological domination in a newer light. These structures will continue to help facilitate the role of the universities as instrumentally-relevant institutions useful to the survival of the deteriorating Asian-Despotic corporate-nation state.
Structures of a vulture-culture
These structures are built with clear awareness of their usefulness; true to what the French thinker Louis Althusser called "ideological state apparatuses". In mission statements of our public universities, absent is "critical thinking" as one of the skills to be infused into students and as an educational/pedagogical process to create a thinking citizenry. We do not see a conscious effort to promote the skills of critical thinking about society, to teach students to name the oppressive strictures in it, and to make radical changes to impact progressive and peaceful well-beings of citizens. In these mission statements, there is no declaration of the need to respect and encourage the free flow of ideas however radical they are – in the name of academic freedom and the allegiance to truth through scientific inquiry, rather that allegiance to state-designed totalitarianism through all levels of indoctrination and the monitoring and molding of student thinking.
Our universities have become a "conveyor" belt to produce one-dimensional human beings who will help ease the way for young-hooliganistic leaders who are claiming a continuation of neo-colonialism as their "birthright" - leaders who are beginning to employ even rougher, rowdier, more brutal "mat-rempitized" brigades (the grandchildren of Merdeka/Independence) to achieve their goals, as the Black nationalist Malcolm X would say, by whatever means necessary.
Human capital re-evolution?
What a waste of human resource and human talent, what a subtle form of oppression - for those ruled, reproduced, and be made to repeat and regurgitate what the Official and Packaged Knowledge System tells their brain to respond to. When during interviews graduates cannot string together a good sentence in English let alone provide a synthesised/integrative analysis of what they have learned, we have got a problem with what goes on in the classrooms and the nature and culture of critical thinking we have cultivated. Continue to keep the emerging middle class passive and docile in their thinking - this will be good for total control so that this nation and its generations will be lobotomised of its critical sensibility.
But there is still hope for our nation. Like Albert Camus would say of Sisyphus, we will continue to roll the rock up on the hill and at least imagine ourselves happy.
01/09: "Non-bumiputras" no more?
A REPUBLIC OF VIRTUE
Dr Azly Rahman
aar26@columbia.edu
http://azlyrahman-illuminations.blogspot.com/
Sometime ago in a column I wrote the following:
We are in the 21st century. About three years from now, we will arrive at the year 2010. The non-Malays and non-bumiputeras have come a long way into being accepted as full-fledged Malaysians, by virtue of the ethics, rights and responsibilities of citizenship. They ought to be given equal opportunity in the name of social justice, racial tolerance and the alleviation of poverty.
Bright and hard-working Malaysians regardless of racial origin who now call themselves Malaysians must be given all the opportunities that have been given to Malays since 40 years back.
Islam and other religions require this form of social justice to be applied to the lives of human beings. Islam does not discriminate one on the basis of race, ethnicity, color, creed nor national origin. It is race-based politics, borne out of the elusiveness of nationalism, that creates post-industrial tribalistic leaders; leaders that will design post-industrial tribalistic policies. It is the philosophy of greed, facilitated by free enterprise runamuck that will evolvingly force leaders of each race to threaten each other over the control of the economic pie. This is the ideology of independence we have cultivated.
I want to elaborate the point further:
A Malay child of Merdeka
As a child born into a Malay family a few years after the shouts of "Merdeka!" filled the nation's stadium, and as a child privileged to be given the opportunities accorded to a "bumiputera," I have a statement of hope to convey to our nation.
As an adult growing learning multiple ways of knowing about the world, through people of multiple cultures, I often ask the question of what will happen to the children and grandchildren of Mr Wong, my Jawi teacher in Johor Bahru, Ah Lan of Jalan Segget, the lady who taught my mother how to sew clothes for a living, Dr Das of Jalan Ah Fook who treated my childhood illness and taught me how to be "patient" about wanting to make changes in the world, Mr PV Kulasingam my fearful headmaster in Sekolah Temenggong Abdul Rahman, Miss Chan my favourite Maths teachers who suddenly became angry at me a day after the May 13, 1969 riots, Miss Yap and Mr Ambrose my English teachers who taught me to love the language when I was struggling with other subjects, and countless other "non-Malays non-bumis" I have come to be indebted to – those who have contributed to the "subjectivity" of what I am as a "cultural being living in an ever changing and evolving world of shifting cultural constructs."
In short, I ask the question – what have this nation done to the children and grandchildren of these people through the policies we create to alienate each other?
Because in my profession as an educator, questions are more important than the answers, I present them as such below:
After this Merdeka celebrations will we all be called the "new bumiputeras"? Will the false dichotomy of "Malays" versus "non-Malays" and "bumiputeras " versus "non-bumiputeras" be abolished? Will we come together as "true blue Malaysians" that will progress through the guiding national development philosophy crafted by the principles of scientific socialism, multiculturalism, affirmative action and meritocratic principles in a balance, and the respect, cultivation, and preservation of indigenous cultures that sustain the dignity of each race?
Will more financial aid be given to the deserving students of all races? Will more scholarships be given to "non-Malays" or "non-bumiputeras" so that they too will enjoy the fruits of labour of the parents and grandparents who toiled for this nation? Will more deserving "non-Malays" be given the much needed aid to study abroad and to come home and serve, so that they will take pride in building the nation that has been kind to them? Will this new preferential treatment cure the ill-feeling and silent animosity over the awarding of resources amongst the different races?
Will the children and grandchildren of great Malaysians – Soh Chin Aun, V Arumugam, Santokh Singh, (the grand-daddies of the real Beckhams of the Malaysian cultural iconoclasm) and Andre Goh, M. Jegathesan, or the members of the pop group "Alleycats" be given the scholarship they deserve?
Will preferential treatment be given to those born after the Aug 31, 1957 to their children and grandchildren as well?
It will be a shame to the hard work of the "founding fathers" of Merdeka if we do not work towards providing equality, equity, and equal opportunity to the children of all races. It would kill the spirit of Merdeka.
Our Merdeka gone astray?
This Merdeka, we have gone astray. Race-politics has reached its boiling point. It is predictable as a consequence of the outgrowth of politics in a pluralistic nation. Scholars who write about the difference between nationalism and socialism have predicted the bankruptcy of the former, in an age of globalisation and mass consumption – in an age wherein blind nationalism has become a blinder for the politics of plunder.
This Merdeka, let us extend our special rights to all who deserve to live a life of dignity, based on the principles of universal declaration of human rights. In a nation wherein the three major races help build the nation, the nation must now belong to the children of all these races. It is the logic of the brighter side of Social Darwinism – that all must be made fit to survive, not through natural selection but through an inclusive philosophy of developmentalism. It is an antidote to racial discrimination based on a sound philosophy of peaceful evolution.
We cannot continue to alienate each other through arguments on "social contract" that is alien from perhaps what Jean Jacques Rousseau the great Swiss wrote about some 300 years ago – a philosophy that inspired the founding of America, a nation of immigrants constantly struggling (albeit imperfectly) to meet the standards requirements of equality, equity, and equal opportunity especially in education.
How do we come together as Malaysians, as neo-bumiputeras free from false political-economic and ideological dichotomies of Malays versus non-Malays, "bumi" versus "non-bumis' and craft a better way of looking at our political, economic, social, cultural, and psychological, and spiritual destiny – so that we may continue to survive as a specie of Malaysians the next 50 years?
As a privileged Malay and a "bumiputera", I want to see the false dichotomies destroyed and a new sense of social order emerging, based on a more just form of linguistic play designed as a new Merdeka game plan. "Think Malaysian" - we do not have anything to lose except our mental chains.
There is still a reason to celebrate.
NOTE: Through this column, let us post our thoughtful Merdeka/Independence Day wishes of hope and goodwill for our children and grandchildren. These questions remain: What kind of Malaysia do we want? How do we work towards this vision? How do we make a "republic of virtue" come into being? As usual, post comments rationally, politely, and intellectually. Let us show our youth how ideas can move nations.
Dr Azly Rahman
aar26@columbia.edu
http://azlyrahman-illuminations.blogspot.com/
Sometime ago in a column I wrote the following:
We are in the 21st century. About three years from now, we will arrive at the year 2010. The non-Malays and non-bumiputeras have come a long way into being accepted as full-fledged Malaysians, by virtue of the ethics, rights and responsibilities of citizenship. They ought to be given equal opportunity in the name of social justice, racial tolerance and the alleviation of poverty.
Bright and hard-working Malaysians regardless of racial origin who now call themselves Malaysians must be given all the opportunities that have been given to Malays since 40 years back.
Islam and other religions require this form of social justice to be applied to the lives of human beings. Islam does not discriminate one on the basis of race, ethnicity, color, creed nor national origin. It is race-based politics, borne out of the elusiveness of nationalism, that creates post-industrial tribalistic leaders; leaders that will design post-industrial tribalistic policies. It is the philosophy of greed, facilitated by free enterprise runamuck that will evolvingly force leaders of each race to threaten each other over the control of the economic pie. This is the ideology of independence we have cultivated.
I want to elaborate the point further:
A Malay child of Merdeka
As a child born into a Malay family a few years after the shouts of "Merdeka!" filled the nation's stadium, and as a child privileged to be given the opportunities accorded to a "bumiputera," I have a statement of hope to convey to our nation.
As an adult growing learning multiple ways of knowing about the world, through people of multiple cultures, I often ask the question of what will happen to the children and grandchildren of Mr Wong, my Jawi teacher in Johor Bahru, Ah Lan of Jalan Segget, the lady who taught my mother how to sew clothes for a living, Dr Das of Jalan Ah Fook who treated my childhood illness and taught me how to be "patient" about wanting to make changes in the world, Mr PV Kulasingam my fearful headmaster in Sekolah Temenggong Abdul Rahman, Miss Chan my favourite Maths teachers who suddenly became angry at me a day after the May 13, 1969 riots, Miss Yap and Mr Ambrose my English teachers who taught me to love the language when I was struggling with other subjects, and countless other "non-Malays non-bumis" I have come to be indebted to – those who have contributed to the "subjectivity" of what I am as a "cultural being living in an ever changing and evolving world of shifting cultural constructs."
In short, I ask the question – what have this nation done to the children and grandchildren of these people through the policies we create to alienate each other?
Because in my profession as an educator, questions are more important than the answers, I present them as such below:
After this Merdeka celebrations will we all be called the "new bumiputeras"? Will the false dichotomy of "Malays" versus "non-Malays" and "bumiputeras " versus "non-bumiputeras" be abolished? Will we come together as "true blue Malaysians" that will progress through the guiding national development philosophy crafted by the principles of scientific socialism, multiculturalism, affirmative action and meritocratic principles in a balance, and the respect, cultivation, and preservation of indigenous cultures that sustain the dignity of each race?
Will more financial aid be given to the deserving students of all races? Will more scholarships be given to "non-Malays" or "non-bumiputeras" so that they too will enjoy the fruits of labour of the parents and grandparents who toiled for this nation? Will more deserving "non-Malays" be given the much needed aid to study abroad and to come home and serve, so that they will take pride in building the nation that has been kind to them? Will this new preferential treatment cure the ill-feeling and silent animosity over the awarding of resources amongst the different races?
Will the children and grandchildren of great Malaysians – Soh Chin Aun, V Arumugam, Santokh Singh, (the grand-daddies of the real Beckhams of the Malaysian cultural iconoclasm) and Andre Goh, M. Jegathesan, or the members of the pop group "Alleycats" be given the scholarship they deserve?
Will preferential treatment be given to those born after the Aug 31, 1957 to their children and grandchildren as well?
It will be a shame to the hard work of the "founding fathers" of Merdeka if we do not work towards providing equality, equity, and equal opportunity to the children of all races. It would kill the spirit of Merdeka.
Our Merdeka gone astray?
This Merdeka, we have gone astray. Race-politics has reached its boiling point. It is predictable as a consequence of the outgrowth of politics in a pluralistic nation. Scholars who write about the difference between nationalism and socialism have predicted the bankruptcy of the former, in an age of globalisation and mass consumption – in an age wherein blind nationalism has become a blinder for the politics of plunder.
This Merdeka, let us extend our special rights to all who deserve to live a life of dignity, based on the principles of universal declaration of human rights. In a nation wherein the three major races help build the nation, the nation must now belong to the children of all these races. It is the logic of the brighter side of Social Darwinism – that all must be made fit to survive, not through natural selection but through an inclusive philosophy of developmentalism. It is an antidote to racial discrimination based on a sound philosophy of peaceful evolution.
We cannot continue to alienate each other through arguments on "social contract" that is alien from perhaps what Jean Jacques Rousseau the great Swiss wrote about some 300 years ago – a philosophy that inspired the founding of America, a nation of immigrants constantly struggling (albeit imperfectly) to meet the standards requirements of equality, equity, and equal opportunity especially in education.
How do we come together as Malaysians, as neo-bumiputeras free from false political-economic and ideological dichotomies of Malays versus non-Malays, "bumi" versus "non-bumis' and craft a better way of looking at our political, economic, social, cultural, and psychological, and spiritual destiny – so that we may continue to survive as a specie of Malaysians the next 50 years?
As a privileged Malay and a "bumiputera", I want to see the false dichotomies destroyed and a new sense of social order emerging, based on a more just form of linguistic play designed as a new Merdeka game plan. "Think Malaysian" - we do not have anything to lose except our mental chains.
There is still a reason to celebrate.
NOTE: Through this column, let us post our thoughtful Merdeka/Independence Day wishes of hope and goodwill for our children and grandchildren. These questions remain: What kind of Malaysia do we want? How do we work towards this vision? How do we make a "republic of virtue" come into being? As usual, post comments rationally, politely, and intellectually. Let us show our youth how ideas can move nations.
A REPUBLIC OF VIRTUE
Dr Azly Rahman
aar26@columbia.edu
http://azlyrahman-illuminations.blogspot.com/
Let me share my thoughts on independence and social contract by first quoting excerpts from a poem by the American poet Emma Lazarus, and next from the Enlightenment thinker Jean Jacques Rousseau.
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" (The New Colossus by Lazarus, inscribed on the Statue of Liberty in the New York).
"Nations, like men, are teachable only in their youth, with age they become incorrigible. Once customs have been established and prejudices rooted, reform is a dangerous and fruitless enterprise, a people cannot bear to see its evils touched, even if only to be eradicated, it is like a stupid, pusillanimous invalid who trembles at the sight of a physician" (Rousseau in The Social Contract).
The excerpts above inspire my essay on the meaning of social contract.
Let us go back to our history and listen attentively to the idea of the formation of Malaysia. We must revise our understanding of social contract that we derive from state-authored textbooks, written by the intelligentsia; knowledge that has since formed the perception of policy makers.
What revisions do we need to make to our social contract, if we are to be independent?
Our ideology
The validity of an argument has its birth and death. It's life-line is determined by the historical moment and essentially by the historical-materialistic condition of existence. Ideas become bankrupt, designed to collapse under their own internal weight of contradiction. Ideas that once 'moved nations' may also mark their end of history.
The post-independence argument that formed the New Economic Policy (NEP) is one such collapsing argument.
Human beings with ideological and constitutive interests craft arguments in favour of this or that political-economic advantage. Those arguments become a basis for this and that contract/compact/covenant or even law enforced with iron hands.
In our history, the British-colonialist produced argument on the issue of 'social contract' that has become an emerging issue as Malaysia celebrates her 50th. birthday this Friday. Let us revisit this argument.
What did the British Empire still want when it granted Malaya independence on a silver platter? What ideological paradigm was transplanted into the consciousness of the people and the political-economic landscape of Malaya when the Reid Commission laid out its arguments for the protection of the rights of this or that person and how did this benefit the British in the overall scheme of neo-colonialism?
What character of neo-colonialism was about to take shape as the 'newly-Independent' Malaysia struggled with an identity crisis of deciding who owned the land and who should be considered second-class citizens?
These are difficult questions that are surfacing in a newer light. These are haunting us - the new generations of 'hyphenated' Malaysians. But I think there are answers to these questions and they must be crafted differently and require a re-interpretation of history.
Let us reconstruct our understanding of social contract so that it may become real to the lived experience of the working class multi-cultural poor and those marginalised and yearning to be free.
I am inspired by Rousseau's notion of social contract: 'How to find a form of association which will defend the person and the goods of each member with the collective force of all, and under which each individual, while uniting himself with others, obeys no one but himself, and remains as free as before. This is the fundamental problem to which the social contract holds the solution."
Newly-branded arguments
History, said Hannah Arendt, does not necessarily mean progress. Malaysia's history cannot be equated with the progress of arguments that are taught by her imperialist masters and race theoreticians. If this is the notion of progress we are embracing, we are actually accentuating the haze of totalitarianism. To package and market these argument anew is failure to analyse it historically using the tools of what I call, 'post-structuralist dialogical materialism'.
To let the story of this nation called Malaysia continue, let us abandon the race-based definition of citizenship and ownership of national wealth, definitions derived from race theorist produced by the process of 'othering', or 'we versus them'.
We must not be afraid to even reinterpret the spirit of the constitution and call upon constitutional conventions to amend parts of it that no longer suit our generation that continues to evolve as Malaysians. This is the essence of creativity and problem-solving in a nation that is complex and in constant cultural flux. This will make our nation stronger and its citizens wiser. We will no longer need a keris-based argument.
The history of the American Constitution, saw amendments to make it relevant to the changing times and fundamentally to make it closer to the meaning of America as a land of immigrants. In spite of its shortcomings, America has constantly renewed the spirit of multi-culturalism.
If we are to also renew our understanding of multi-culturalism, think of the following proposition.
In Malaysia, are we not all immigrants and time travelers that are being tested based on how we treat each other in non-discriminatory terms irrespective of race, colour, creed, and national origin? Is this not what all religions profess too?
The gradual migration of the Malays, Chinese, Indians and other peoples of varied linguistic stock (yet with similar DNA make-up) to Tanah Melayu, illustrate phases of historical moments in the epic of British colonialism.
The great epic of Pax Brittanica is one which tells the story of a world dominated by an empire that controlled the means of production, and thereby controlled the means of mental production and hence, the production of the ideology called 'colonialism'.
It is a story of the economic drafting of 'indentured servants' forced to enrich the British Empire and how the ideology of imperialism bred class antagonism cleverly masked in the name of race and ethnic politics. One needs to read the history of slavery and civil rights movement in America in order to understand how we are evolving and how race is not a specific and isolated moment in Malaysian history, but a global and historical phenomena in the development of the cultural logic of late, middle, and early capitalism.
Economic interest
It has been 50 years since this experiment called 'Malaysia' was designed by the long-dead and gone British imperialists. The children and grand-children of those rubber tappers, padi planters, fishermen, petty traders, and tin-miners have all grown up and become classes of people ideologised, hegemonised and subjugated by a modern version of British colonialist divide-and-rule policy – the ideology of the NEP.
The earlier crafters of the neo-colonialist ideology of Malaysian communalism believed that a just social contract is one that protected and promoted the economic interest of each major race separately. It has worked to a certain extent as, for instance, in the creation of a professional bumiputera class and a few millionaires.
But a neo-colonialist ideology creates a neo-colonialist system of production of human beings, materials, and culture based on a pseudo-sophisticated strands of arguments of race theory that is founded upon the structure of hyper-modernity.
Are we seeing a bankruptcy of race-based ideology of a post-Reid Commission, post-NEP confusion agenda of neo-colonialist based developmentalism that squeezes the blood, sweat and tears out of the cheap human labour of different colour and national origins?
In this Malaysia in the year 2007, how must we construct a more accurate definition of a native, an immigrant, a first/second/third generation of this or that?
Why must we not question history if we are to become new makers of it?
Why must we still treat the grandchildren of immigrants as 'second-class' citizens?
Why must we not accord them with opportunities that resemble equitable/regulative justice?
Have not their parents laboured for the prosperity of this nation, a nation that has trumpeted itself the world over as a modern developing state?
Have not the children of these serfs and labourers think, act, and feel Malaysian enough to be treated as equals?
Why must we not declare, as the principles of social redistributive justice requires, that we must design a new social contract that will abolish all interpretations of human beings based on racial origin and use the abundant resources we have for the benefit of all - all the children and grandchildren of tine miners, rubber tappers, and padi planters, fishermen who were cleverly divided, conquered, and exploited by the British imperialists?
Or even better, I propose we not only think ourselves no longer, constitutionally as 'hyphenated-this-or-that-Malaysian', but reject any form of ethnic-chauvinistic-based politics that are only interested in advancing neo-colonialist ideology we wish to expunge from our consciousness.
That will be a good beginning to our new resolution for Merdeka.
Lived democracy
What is independence then?
I have some thoughts on this.
Independence is not a slogan but an existential state of mind and a condition of 'lived democracy', one in which citizens are aware of how oppressive systems are cultivated. We cannot be independent until we arrive at these historical junctures, and until we do the following:
1. Free the human mind from all forms of dogmas, superstitions, mental chains, hegemonic formations, and transitional levels of totalitarianism. Our educational system at all levels must strengthen the scientific and philosophical foundation of its curriculum and practices to effect changes in the higher-order thinking skills of the next generation. We should not tolerate any forms of bigotry, racial chauvinism, and retarded form of democracy in our educational system.
2. Understand the relationship between the 'self and the system of social relations of production' and how the self becomes alienated and reduced to labour and appendages and cogs in the wheels of industrial system of production, a system that hides under the name of the corporatist nation and any other term that masks the real exploitation of the human self.
3. Make ourselves aware that our social systems, through the rapid development of technology and its synthesis with local and international predatory culture, have helped create classes of human beings that transforms their bodies into different classes of labour (manual, secretarial, managerial, militarial, intellectual, and capital-owning) that is now shaping the nature of class antagonism locally and globally.
4. Understand how our political, economic, cultural institutions have evolved and are created out of the vestiges of newer forms of colonialism, institutions that are built upon the ideology of race-based interpretations of human and material development that benefit the few who own the means of cultural, material, and intellectual production.
5. Understand how ideologies that oppress humanity works, how prevailing political, economic, cultural ideologies help craft false consciousness and create psychological barriers to the creation of a society that puts the principles of social contract into practice.
6. Be aware of how our physical landscape creates spaces of power and knowledge and alienates us and how huge structural transformations such as the Multimedia Super Corridor create a new form of technological city-scape (technopoles) that benefits local and international real estate profiteers more that they provide more humane living spaces for the poor and the marginalised in an increasingly cybernated society.
7. Be fully aware of the relationship between science, culture, and society and how these interplay with contemporary global challenges and how we clearly or blindly adopt these rapid changes and transform them into our newer shibboleths of developmentalism – one such policy being the National BioTechnology Programme.
8. Put a halt to the systematic stupefication of academicians and students in our public universities by first incorporating Academic Freedom Clauses in their mission statements and next enculturalising intellectualism in these learning environments.
I am not keen on thinking about celebrating Merdeka. I feel that the indicators of our psychological, economical, political and technological well being, are telling us that there is a rupture in progress - one that is signifying the collapse of an argument taught to us by the British imperialists.
The powerful amongst us are now the new imperialists, new mandarins with their own daulat (sovereignty), creating a more sophisticated caste system, and keeping this matrix functioning.
I am more keen in exploring the possibilities of Rousseau's ideas of 'social contract' and crafting a new definition of Malaysian multi-culturalism.
And borrowing the words of Lazarus, let us lift our lamps 'beside our golden door'.
Dr Azly Rahman
aar26@columbia.edu
http://azlyrahman-illuminations.blogspot.com/
Let me share my thoughts on independence and social contract by first quoting excerpts from a poem by the American poet Emma Lazarus, and next from the Enlightenment thinker Jean Jacques Rousseau.
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" (The New Colossus by Lazarus, inscribed on the Statue of Liberty in the New York).
"Nations, like men, are teachable only in their youth, with age they become incorrigible. Once customs have been established and prejudices rooted, reform is a dangerous and fruitless enterprise, a people cannot bear to see its evils touched, even if only to be eradicated, it is like a stupid, pusillanimous invalid who trembles at the sight of a physician" (Rousseau in The Social Contract).
The excerpts above inspire my essay on the meaning of social contract.
Let us go back to our history and listen attentively to the idea of the formation of Malaysia. We must revise our understanding of social contract that we derive from state-authored textbooks, written by the intelligentsia; knowledge that has since formed the perception of policy makers.
What revisions do we need to make to our social contract, if we are to be independent?
Our ideology
The validity of an argument has its birth and death. It's life-line is determined by the historical moment and essentially by the historical-materialistic condition of existence. Ideas become bankrupt, designed to collapse under their own internal weight of contradiction. Ideas that once 'moved nations' may also mark their end of history.
The post-independence argument that formed the New Economic Policy (NEP) is one such collapsing argument.
Human beings with ideological and constitutive interests craft arguments in favour of this or that political-economic advantage. Those arguments become a basis for this and that contract/compact/covenant or even law enforced with iron hands.
In our history, the British-colonialist produced argument on the issue of 'social contract' that has become an emerging issue as Malaysia celebrates her 50th. birthday this Friday. Let us revisit this argument.
What did the British Empire still want when it granted Malaya independence on a silver platter? What ideological paradigm was transplanted into the consciousness of the people and the political-economic landscape of Malaya when the Reid Commission laid out its arguments for the protection of the rights of this or that person and how did this benefit the British in the overall scheme of neo-colonialism?
What character of neo-colonialism was about to take shape as the 'newly-Independent' Malaysia struggled with an identity crisis of deciding who owned the land and who should be considered second-class citizens?
These are difficult questions that are surfacing in a newer light. These are haunting us - the new generations of 'hyphenated' Malaysians. But I think there are answers to these questions and they must be crafted differently and require a re-interpretation of history.
Let us reconstruct our understanding of social contract so that it may become real to the lived experience of the working class multi-cultural poor and those marginalised and yearning to be free.
I am inspired by Rousseau's notion of social contract: 'How to find a form of association which will defend the person and the goods of each member with the collective force of all, and under which each individual, while uniting himself with others, obeys no one but himself, and remains as free as before. This is the fundamental problem to which the social contract holds the solution."
Newly-branded arguments
History, said Hannah Arendt, does not necessarily mean progress. Malaysia's history cannot be equated with the progress of arguments that are taught by her imperialist masters and race theoreticians. If this is the notion of progress we are embracing, we are actually accentuating the haze of totalitarianism. To package and market these argument anew is failure to analyse it historically using the tools of what I call, 'post-structuralist dialogical materialism'.
To let the story of this nation called Malaysia continue, let us abandon the race-based definition of citizenship and ownership of national wealth, definitions derived from race theorist produced by the process of 'othering', or 'we versus them'.
We must not be afraid to even reinterpret the spirit of the constitution and call upon constitutional conventions to amend parts of it that no longer suit our generation that continues to evolve as Malaysians. This is the essence of creativity and problem-solving in a nation that is complex and in constant cultural flux. This will make our nation stronger and its citizens wiser. We will no longer need a keris-based argument.
The history of the American Constitution, saw amendments to make it relevant to the changing times and fundamentally to make it closer to the meaning of America as a land of immigrants. In spite of its shortcomings, America has constantly renewed the spirit of multi-culturalism.
If we are to also renew our understanding of multi-culturalism, think of the following proposition.
In Malaysia, are we not all immigrants and time travelers that are being tested based on how we treat each other in non-discriminatory terms irrespective of race, colour, creed, and national origin? Is this not what all religions profess too?
The gradual migration of the Malays, Chinese, Indians and other peoples of varied linguistic stock (yet with similar DNA make-up) to Tanah Melayu, illustrate phases of historical moments in the epic of British colonialism.
The great epic of Pax Brittanica is one which tells the story of a world dominated by an empire that controlled the means of production, and thereby controlled the means of mental production and hence, the production of the ideology called 'colonialism'.
It is a story of the economic drafting of 'indentured servants' forced to enrich the British Empire and how the ideology of imperialism bred class antagonism cleverly masked in the name of race and ethnic politics. One needs to read the history of slavery and civil rights movement in America in order to understand how we are evolving and how race is not a specific and isolated moment in Malaysian history, but a global and historical phenomena in the development of the cultural logic of late, middle, and early capitalism.
Economic interest
It has been 50 years since this experiment called 'Malaysia' was designed by the long-dead and gone British imperialists. The children and grand-children of those rubber tappers, padi planters, fishermen, petty traders, and tin-miners have all grown up and become classes of people ideologised, hegemonised and subjugated by a modern version of British colonialist divide-and-rule policy – the ideology of the NEP.
The earlier crafters of the neo-colonialist ideology of Malaysian communalism believed that a just social contract is one that protected and promoted the economic interest of each major race separately. It has worked to a certain extent as, for instance, in the creation of a professional bumiputera class and a few millionaires.
But a neo-colonialist ideology creates a neo-colonialist system of production of human beings, materials, and culture based on a pseudo-sophisticated strands of arguments of race theory that is founded upon the structure of hyper-modernity.
Are we seeing a bankruptcy of race-based ideology of a post-Reid Commission, post-NEP confusion agenda of neo-colonialist based developmentalism that squeezes the blood, sweat and tears out of the cheap human labour of different colour and national origins?
In this Malaysia in the year 2007, how must we construct a more accurate definition of a native, an immigrant, a first/second/third generation of this or that?
Why must we not question history if we are to become new makers of it?
Why must we still treat the grandchildren of immigrants as 'second-class' citizens?
Why must we not accord them with opportunities that resemble equitable/regulative justice?
Have not their parents laboured for the prosperity of this nation, a nation that has trumpeted itself the world over as a modern developing state?
Have not the children of these serfs and labourers think, act, and feel Malaysian enough to be treated as equals?
Why must we not declare, as the principles of social redistributive justice requires, that we must design a new social contract that will abolish all interpretations of human beings based on racial origin and use the abundant resources we have for the benefit of all - all the children and grandchildren of tine miners, rubber tappers, and padi planters, fishermen who were cleverly divided, conquered, and exploited by the British imperialists?
Or even better, I propose we not only think ourselves no longer, constitutionally as 'hyphenated-this-or-that-Malaysian', but reject any form of ethnic-chauvinistic-based politics that are only interested in advancing neo-colonialist ideology we wish to expunge from our consciousness.
That will be a good beginning to our new resolution for Merdeka.
Lived democracy
What is independence then?
I have some thoughts on this.
Independence is not a slogan but an existential state of mind and a condition of 'lived democracy', one in which citizens are aware of how oppressive systems are cultivated. We cannot be independent until we arrive at these historical junctures, and until we do the following:
1. Free the human mind from all forms of dogmas, superstitions, mental chains, hegemonic formations, and transitional levels of totalitarianism. Our educational system at all levels must strengthen the scientific and philosophical foundation of its curriculum and practices to effect changes in the higher-order thinking skills of the next generation. We should not tolerate any forms of bigotry, racial chauvinism, and retarded form of democracy in our educational system.
2. Understand the relationship between the 'self and the system of social relations of production' and how the self becomes alienated and reduced to labour and appendages and cogs in the wheels of industrial system of production, a system that hides under the name of the corporatist nation and any other term that masks the real exploitation of the human self.
3. Make ourselves aware that our social systems, through the rapid development of technology and its synthesis with local and international predatory culture, have helped create classes of human beings that transforms their bodies into different classes of labour (manual, secretarial, managerial, militarial, intellectual, and capital-owning) that is now shaping the nature of class antagonism locally and globally.
4. Understand how our political, economic, cultural institutions have evolved and are created out of the vestiges of newer forms of colonialism, institutions that are built upon the ideology of race-based interpretations of human and material development that benefit the few who own the means of cultural, material, and intellectual production.
5. Understand how ideologies that oppress humanity works, how prevailing political, economic, cultural ideologies help craft false consciousness and create psychological barriers to the creation of a society that puts the principles of social contract into practice.
6. Be aware of how our physical landscape creates spaces of power and knowledge and alienates us and how huge structural transformations such as the Multimedia Super Corridor create a new form of technological city-scape (technopoles) that benefits local and international real estate profiteers more that they provide more humane living spaces for the poor and the marginalised in an increasingly cybernated society.
7. Be fully aware of the relationship between science, culture, and society and how these interplay with contemporary global challenges and how we clearly or blindly adopt these rapid changes and transform them into our newer shibboleths of developmentalism – one such policy being the National BioTechnology Programme.
8. Put a halt to the systematic stupefication of academicians and students in our public universities by first incorporating Academic Freedom Clauses in their mission statements and next enculturalising intellectualism in these learning environments.
I am not keen on thinking about celebrating Merdeka. I feel that the indicators of our psychological, economical, political and technological well being, are telling us that there is a rupture in progress - one that is signifying the collapse of an argument taught to us by the British imperialists.
The powerful amongst us are now the new imperialists, new mandarins with their own daulat (sovereignty), creating a more sophisticated caste system, and keeping this matrix functioning.
I am more keen in exploring the possibilities of Rousseau's ideas of 'social contract' and crafting a new definition of Malaysian multi-culturalism.
And borrowing the words of Lazarus, let us lift our lamps 'beside our golden door'.
A REPUBLIC OF VIRTUE
Dr Azly Rahman
aar26@columbia.edu
http://azlyrahman-illuminations.blogspot.com/
Here is my interpretation and extrapolation of the speech recently given by Raja Nazrin to our students, particularly on his call for students to psychologically prepare for the needs of changing times:
Our students must be taught to think radically and globally. They must evolve to become pragmatic idealist and collaborate to become peaceful revolutionary thinkers that will be ready to make radical changes to meet the needs of nation-building in a world plagued with complexities.
Core Ideas
1] It is imperative that our universities prepare students to think like a scientist, and moralist, a futurist, and an activist in grasping a good understanding of contemporary issues. We must train out students to think relationally and holistically and to make them understand how the particulars explain the general, and how the parts fit in the whole. The coloniser does not wish the colonised to see the whole. This is the strategy of divide and conquer.
2] Nationally, we must teach them how our government functions, how resources are allocated, and how conflicts emerge out of the political economic design. We may begin by having them analyze their own surrounding – how has the power and how power is used to subjugate so that the mind of the students can be divided, conquered, and pacified.
3] We may begin by challenging our university students to create a "perfect society" or "republics of virtue" and by first questioning the historical and ideological premises upon which past and present ruling governments are built upon.
4] We may begin with this question: Is this the best nations of this world have done/achieved in terms of creating governments that respects human rights, encourages freedom of speech, protects the environment, manage ethnic and religious conflicts well, battle corruption and social ills sincerely, improve the quality of our educational institutions, and allocate the nation's wealth justly?
5] Thinking globally for our students require us to be skilled in interdisciplinary thinking and to understand their role as "organic intellectuals"; one whose role will be exemplars of critical thinking, the bastions of academic freedom and free inquiry, and finally the igniters of mental revolutions.
An "organic intellectual" as the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci would say, will not sell his/her soul to the ruling government by being reduced into a member of some "intelligentsia". An organic intellectual, say the French intellectual and Nobel Laureate Jean Paul Sartre, helps the masses explain the contradiction they are in-- on that is a result of a world created by those who believe in the God Technocracy.
Our world continues to be plagued with a range of issues that threaten our survival as a species. Issue ranging from the use of monopolized science and corporatised technological advancements to plunder the Earth and subjugate Humanity, to the issue of nations racing to build the most sophisticated bombs to blow the world many times over -- these have become challenges and threats we live by.
Key Challenges
Let us explore further what these challenges are:
1] Nationally we continue to live in a political system that is based not only on the deformed and degenerating politics of race and economic greed that favors the rich and members of political dynasties but also a system that is threatened with a continuing disregard for human rights; fundamental principles of liberties that ought to protect minorities in a religiously pluralistic and complex state.
2] Nationally we continue to see abandoned hopes for our nation to evolve into a truly multicultural society as we witness the institutionalization of racism not only the way we think and act daily but in the way we construct our educational, cultural, economic and political institutions. The way we conduct our dialogue on religion and race have lately reflect a clearer and uglier politics of mistrust.
3] Globally we are faced with challenges in the areas of scientific advancement, morality, economics, ethnic and religious conflicts, population, and health.
Scientific advancements and control of knowledge and technology continue to be in the hands of the rich nations with the poor, "developing", and "newly-industrializing and informationalising" ones become slaves in the global production and consumption of technologies. Our scientific world of inquiry and human imagination to solve human problems has become a world of Orwellian drama; one of despair characterized by the use of science for deadly purposes. In each country of the world, the pattern of ownership of the scientific ands technological advances mirror the pattern of have and have-nots of the world, of the Centre-periphery dependency mode of global political-economic design.
4] Morality becomes a central issue of this millennium as we question our role as individuals that are defined by the means of subsistence/economic condition we are in. As human beings merely become "knowledge workers" and corporate executives in multinational corporations that have no national governments to answer to, they become merely one of the minute function of the machinery of global exploitation in the virtually all spheres of human activities. Prime Minister and presidents of "developing", "industrializing" or "advancing" nations are now assuming the role of chief executive officers of international oligopoly capitalists; their worth are merely as beneficiaries of the international owners of production.
As long as profits roll into the coffers of the parent and recipient nation and benefit the power elites, child labor and poor working conditions in the sweatshops are acceptable-- in the name of democracy and development.
5] Global economics will continue to become a centrepiece of issues that our graduates will need to understand in order to become change agents and informed citizens in this precarious world of interdependence.
Developments in Latin America of late are pointing towards a transformation of the people's view towards economics – governments that favour the national poor and not the international plunderers will triumph at the polls. The constant revolutions and re-evolutions that happen across time and space and across all nations are a testament to the thesis-anti thesis notion of human evolution.
6] Our planet earth, our global environment continues to be threatened by global warming, destruction of rain forest, carbon emission from fossil fuels and the suffocating of our oceans. The U.S. military continues to be the greatest guzzler of the world's oil, and a Frankenstein it has become in itself.
Each nation is in need of national governments that will be the least corrupt enough not to embark upon major projects that will not deforestate nature, create thicker and more dangerous industrial smog, dump toxic waste into rivers, and shave hilltops and hillsides for commercial and residential development projects.
7] Ethnic and religious conflicts continue to splash the headlines of our global newspapers, with not only border conflicts perpetually increasing but deadly attacks of public places where the innocent work and play becoming a feature of post-September 11, 2001 fallout. Every nation is now threatened by the ever-growing tide and tsunamis of racial and religious violence.
The prolonged occupation in Iraq and the obvious "no-victory-in-sight" of the American forces has become a national issue even in America – how long will she let her children die and how many more of the children of the American underclass must be drafted through the "economic drafting" ideology.
8] Lastly, global health issues continue to be of concern especially with the continuing AIDS epidemic in Africa and now in all continents, the spread of Avian Flu, and re-emergence of small pox that might become the next global epidemic.
I hope educators will explore the ideas above and translate them into themes of the challenges of a globalized to be infused in the study of the disciplines so that we may find integrative approaches to complex problems.
As the German philosopher Frederich Nietzsche once said: "Educate! … but first let us educate the educators"
Congratulations on a nice speech for our precious youth, Raja Nazrin.
Dr Azly Rahman
aar26@columbia.edu
http://azlyrahman-illuminations.blogspot.com/
Here is my interpretation and extrapolation of the speech recently given by Raja Nazrin to our students, particularly on his call for students to psychologically prepare for the needs of changing times:
Our students must be taught to think radically and globally. They must evolve to become pragmatic idealist and collaborate to become peaceful revolutionary thinkers that will be ready to make radical changes to meet the needs of nation-building in a world plagued with complexities.
Core Ideas
1] It is imperative that our universities prepare students to think like a scientist, and moralist, a futurist, and an activist in grasping a good understanding of contemporary issues. We must train out students to think relationally and holistically and to make them understand how the particulars explain the general, and how the parts fit in the whole. The coloniser does not wish the colonised to see the whole. This is the strategy of divide and conquer.
2] Nationally, we must teach them how our government functions, how resources are allocated, and how conflicts emerge out of the political economic design. We may begin by having them analyze their own surrounding – how has the power and how power is used to subjugate so that the mind of the students can be divided, conquered, and pacified.
3] We may begin by challenging our university students to create a "perfect society" or "republics of virtue" and by first questioning the historical and ideological premises upon which past and present ruling governments are built upon.
4] We may begin with this question: Is this the best nations of this world have done/achieved in terms of creating governments that respects human rights, encourages freedom of speech, protects the environment, manage ethnic and religious conflicts well, battle corruption and social ills sincerely, improve the quality of our educational institutions, and allocate the nation's wealth justly?
5] Thinking globally for our students require us to be skilled in interdisciplinary thinking and to understand their role as "organic intellectuals"; one whose role will be exemplars of critical thinking, the bastions of academic freedom and free inquiry, and finally the igniters of mental revolutions.
An "organic intellectual" as the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci would say, will not sell his/her soul to the ruling government by being reduced into a member of some "intelligentsia". An organic intellectual, say the French intellectual and Nobel Laureate Jean Paul Sartre, helps the masses explain the contradiction they are in-- on that is a result of a world created by those who believe in the God Technocracy.
Our world continues to be plagued with a range of issues that threaten our survival as a species. Issue ranging from the use of monopolized science and corporatised technological advancements to plunder the Earth and subjugate Humanity, to the issue of nations racing to build the most sophisticated bombs to blow the world many times over -- these have become challenges and threats we live by.
Key Challenges
Let us explore further what these challenges are:
1] Nationally we continue to live in a political system that is based not only on the deformed and degenerating politics of race and economic greed that favors the rich and members of political dynasties but also a system that is threatened with a continuing disregard for human rights; fundamental principles of liberties that ought to protect minorities in a religiously pluralistic and complex state.
2] Nationally we continue to see abandoned hopes for our nation to evolve into a truly multicultural society as we witness the institutionalization of racism not only the way we think and act daily but in the way we construct our educational, cultural, economic and political institutions. The way we conduct our dialogue on religion and race have lately reflect a clearer and uglier politics of mistrust.
3] Globally we are faced with challenges in the areas of scientific advancement, morality, economics, ethnic and religious conflicts, population, and health.
Scientific advancements and control of knowledge and technology continue to be in the hands of the rich nations with the poor, "developing", and "newly-industrializing and informationalising" ones become slaves in the global production and consumption of technologies. Our scientific world of inquiry and human imagination to solve human problems has become a world of Orwellian drama; one of despair characterized by the use of science for deadly purposes. In each country of the world, the pattern of ownership of the scientific ands technological advances mirror the pattern of have and have-nots of the world, of the Centre-periphery dependency mode of global political-economic design.
4] Morality becomes a central issue of this millennium as we question our role as individuals that are defined by the means of subsistence/economic condition we are in. As human beings merely become "knowledge workers" and corporate executives in multinational corporations that have no national governments to answer to, they become merely one of the minute function of the machinery of global exploitation in the virtually all spheres of human activities. Prime Minister and presidents of "developing", "industrializing" or "advancing" nations are now assuming the role of chief executive officers of international oligopoly capitalists; their worth are merely as beneficiaries of the international owners of production.
As long as profits roll into the coffers of the parent and recipient nation and benefit the power elites, child labor and poor working conditions in the sweatshops are acceptable-- in the name of democracy and development.
5] Global economics will continue to become a centrepiece of issues that our graduates will need to understand in order to become change agents and informed citizens in this precarious world of interdependence.
Developments in Latin America of late are pointing towards a transformation of the people's view towards economics – governments that favour the national poor and not the international plunderers will triumph at the polls. The constant revolutions and re-evolutions that happen across time and space and across all nations are a testament to the thesis-anti thesis notion of human evolution.
6] Our planet earth, our global environment continues to be threatened by global warming, destruction of rain forest, carbon emission from fossil fuels and the suffocating of our oceans. The U.S. military continues to be the greatest guzzler of the world's oil, and a Frankenstein it has become in itself.
Each nation is in need of national governments that will be the least corrupt enough not to embark upon major projects that will not deforestate nature, create thicker and more dangerous industrial smog, dump toxic waste into rivers, and shave hilltops and hillsides for commercial and residential development projects.
7] Ethnic and religious conflicts continue to splash the headlines of our global newspapers, with not only border conflicts perpetually increasing but deadly attacks of public places where the innocent work and play becoming a feature of post-September 11, 2001 fallout. Every nation is now threatened by the ever-growing tide and tsunamis of racial and religious violence.
The prolonged occupation in Iraq and the obvious "no-victory-in-sight" of the American forces has become a national issue even in America – how long will she let her children die and how many more of the children of the American underclass must be drafted through the "economic drafting" ideology.
8] Lastly, global health issues continue to be of concern especially with the continuing AIDS epidemic in Africa and now in all continents, the spread of Avian Flu, and re-emergence of small pox that might become the next global epidemic.
I hope educators will explore the ideas above and translate them into themes of the challenges of a globalized to be infused in the study of the disciplines so that we may find integrative approaches to complex problems.
As the German philosopher Frederich Nietzsche once said: "Educate! … but first let us educate the educators"
Congratulations on a nice speech for our precious youth, Raja Nazrin.
03/08: Academics and the 'Akujanji'
A REPUBLIC OF VIRTUE
Dr Azly Rahman
aar26@columbia.edu
http://azlyrahman-illuminations.blogspot.com/
Consider the power of the written word in shaping reality. Consider how words not only can become flesh, but become inscriptions, installation, and ideology. Words can imprison the mind. Becoming tools of oppression.
A simple clause/sentence can have brutish implications for the intellectual sanity of the Malaysian academic.
A simple sentence/clause can clearly illustrate how these academics are being controlled and their intelligence subdued. It takes us to deconstruct the clause and analyse what kind of 'truth' it embodies and how the 'truth-force' operates in the learning environment, to understand how thought-control operates.
The clause I am referring to is from the now infamous Surat Akujanji (Oath of Loyalty) for 'government servants'. Let us inquire into the genealogy of the production of the clause, how it is used to dishonour the university, and how the academics are being silenced and stupefied by it.
The irony is that we have graduates from universities abroad who themselves were trained in the best and rigorous environment of learning that protects intellectual freedom.
We expect them to embody the ethos of a committed intellectual who will translate good expressions of freedom of practice, but instead, they have become the new colonisers of the neo-colonialist state.
Let us now compare, for example, what academic freedom means in America and in Malaysia. Let us then offer suggestions on how the Malaysian academic community can have its right to be intelligent.
Right to be intelligent
In the US, public school teachers, community college and university professors have all the guarantees of academic freedom as rights in their collective agreement with their respective institutions; rights that are also enshrined to ensure that the students they educate will become intelligent and informed citizens.
Academic Freedom clauses from the American Association of University Professors include:
1) Teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results, subject to the adequate performance of their other academic duties; but research for pecuniary return should be based upon an understanding with the authorities of the institution.
2) Teachers are entitled in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject. Limitations of academic freedom because of religious or other aims of the institutions should be clearly stated in writing at the time of the appointment.
3) College and university teachers are citizens, members of a learned profession, and officers of an educational institution. When they speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional censorship or discipline, but their special position in the community imposes special obligations. As scholars and educational officers, they should remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances. Hence they should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and should make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for the institution.
Another example comes from the reknown research university, Columbia University, in New York:
'The University is committed to maintaining a climate of academic freedom, in which officers of instruction and research are given the widest possible latitude in their teaching and scholarship. However, the freedoms traditionally accorded those officers carry corresponding responsibilities. By accepting appointments at the University, officers of instruction and research assume varied obligations and duties.'
Clarifying that commitment, it states:
'Academic freedom implies that all officers of instruction are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subjects; that they are entitled to freedom in research and in the publication of its results; and that they may not be penalised by the University for expressions of opinion or associations in their private or civic capacity; but they should bear in mind the special obligations arising from their position in the academic community.'
These statements of guarantee have become the cornerstone of the culture of 'free spirit of inquiry' enshrined in the thinking of American academicians and one that emanated from the protection of the fundamental rights of the individual.
The Surat Akujanji is doing exactly the opposite. Consider the implications of the clause (ix), in Bahasa Melayu and in English, from the document forced upon the Malaysian intellectual community:
bahawa saya antara lain:
(ix) tidak akan ingkar perintah atau berkelakuan dengan apa apa cara yang boleh ditafsirkan sebagai ingkar perintah (I shall not be insubordinate or conduct myself in such manner as is likely be construed as being insubordinate.)
Such a sweeping and generalised statement endangers faculty members in their pursuit of truth through critical inquiry. The clause entails that the academician shall have no freedom, rights, and responsibility in deciding the nature of 'truth' to be pursued. The idea of insubordination implies that the work of academicians will be subjected to the rigours defined by the prevailing ideology and those who are in power to impose such ideology.
In addition, the difference between the Academic Freedom clauses and that in Surat Akujanji is clear; while the one produced by American institutions encourage freedom and responsibility, the one adopted by Malaysian universities take away such freedom and assures that even academicians are inherently irresponsible.
In other words, the American academic community sees the 'goodness and genius in the human being' while the one adopted by Malaysian universities see the 'evil and sub-standard intelligence of the human being' and the need for the mind to be subdued, tamed, and domesticated. The latter is unquestionably reminiscent of colonial discourse.
Why should we perpetuate such a discourse among the people of independent Malaysia?
Power-hungry leaders
We must understand that organisations are made up of human beings who have personal biases, grudges, and motivations that can be counter-productive to the development of intellectual tradition of any university.
A leader of an organisation, even in a supposedly intellectual environment as in a university, can never claim neutrality in the way decisions are made. Our purpose as intellectuals must be to produce as best as we can, statements of guarantees that the nobility of the university environment must be preserved by all, and especially that rights of the faculty must be guarded against attempts by the leadership to subvert them.
The phrase 'insubordinate… likely to be construed as being insubordinate' is definitely problematic. In the hands of an autocratic leader who wishes to maintain his/her hegemony over others, or to maintain control and power over the powerless, or to maintain rule via Machiavellian tactics, the semantics of 'insubordination' can be a powerful instrument of oppression.
Ultimately, who defines what 'insubordination' means and what are its dimensions? It is too subjective of a term to be used in such a supposedly-objective manner. It will be open to abuse. Academics do not wish to be oppressed nor abused especially in an academic environment.
Why can we not learn the virtue of intellectual freedom and the fundamental rights of the individual from nations such as the US? Must we not implement what is good from world-class practices?
Is not the purpose of education in Malaysia is to educate its students to become intelligent, creative, critical and open-minded? Do we not understand what a 'university' means and why we lecturers and professors have the moral obligation to help open minds and not close them shut? Do we really understand what a world-class university mean?
What then must the Malaysian academic do?
Academics need not be powerless entirely. In times like this that try their intellectual sensibility, they may discover that they can no longer seek the help of the university to address grievances - judging from the fact that there is no provision for an academician to argue for academic freedom, and that there is no mechanism to attend to such grievances fairly.
Clause (viii) of the Surat Akujanji guarantees that such a recourse cannot be taken. It states (in translation) that an officer "… shall not bring or attempt to bring any form of outside influence or pressure to support or advance (his/her) claim or that of other public officers relating to the public services …"
One must be aware how damaging the clause can be to the interest of the aggrieved party. Should there be instances of abuse of power, corruption in all forms, attempts to subvert the intellectual foundations of Malaysia universities, or any form of unethical practices, the clause would ensure that the complainant would not be able to seek the help of more credible outside agencies/organisations/bodies/persons to resolve those issues.
How do academics criminalised by the system seek justice from the administration when they do not have faith in the organisation's capability to be objective and to understand what the rights of an academic might be - when in fact, there is no charter or covenant/compact to guarantee such rights?
We must now be concerned how our universities will, in future be seen in the eyes of the international academic community with this clause that illustrates the intellectual problematique of this nation.
What then must we do? We must have the universities nullify, revise or discard the Surat Akujanji.
We must demand that the university administration forms academic freedom committees so that parameters of freedom of expression can be constructed. The committees must produce a statement of guarantees of academic freedom to be signed and honoured by all.
We must encourage dissenting views from as many perspectives as possible, true to the development of newer philosophies of multi-culturalism that is developing.
We must elect progressive university leaders into office; ones that will promote the rights of academics and students to be more intelligent and more rigorous in their thinking.
Malaysian academics, stand up for your rights!
Do not allow those who abuse power to trample on your hard-earned intellectualism. We have generations of creative young minds to educate. They are waiting for academicians to regain their right to be treated intelligently.
--------
Let us read how the Americans dealt with their Akujanji/Oath of Loyalty:
U.S. Supreme Court strikes down loyalty oaths for Washington state employees on June 1, 1964.
HistoryLink.org Essay 5200
On June 1, 1964, the United States Supreme Court strikes down Washington laws requiring state employees to take loyalty oaths. The loyalty oath statutes are challenged by more than 60 faculty members, staff, and students of the University of Washington in a case organized by the Washington chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the UW chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). The Court rules that both a 1955 statute requiring all state employees to swear they are not "subversive persons" and a 1931 statute requiring teachers to swear to promote respect for government institutions are unconstitutionally vague and violate due process.
Loyalty oaths were common during the Cold War era. Between 1947 and 1956, 42 states and more than 2000 local jurisdictions adopted laws requiring such oaths from public employees. In 1951, the Washington Legislature imposed a loyalty oath requirement for all state employees. In 1955, the statute was amended to require employees to swear that "I am not a subversive person." According to the law, a "subversive person" was:
"any person who commits, attempts to commit, or aids in the commission, or advocates, abets, advises or teaches by any means any person to commit, attempt to commit, or aid in the commission of any act intended to overthrow, destroy or alter, or to assist in the overthrow, destruction or alteration of, the constitutional form of the government of the United States, or of the state of Washington, or any political subdivision of either of them by revolution, force, or violence; or who with knowledge ... becomes or remains a member of a subversive organization."
"Subversive organization" was defined in the same terms used in the definition of subversive person, and the law also specifically declared the Communist Party a subversive organization.
Civil libertarians opposed the loyalty oath requirement, particularly on university campuses, where they believed that having to swear one was not "subversive" suppressed academic freedom and led to conformity of thought. Soon after the 1955 amendment was enacted, the Washington ACLU brought its first challenge to the loyalty oath statute on behalf of two University of Washington professors, Howard Nostrand (Romance Languages) and Max Savelle (American History). The ACLU obtained an injunction prohibiting enforcement of the loyalty oath while the case was pending. However, in 1962, after seven years of complicated legal maneuvering in state and federal courts, the United States Supreme Court dismissed that case and dissolved the injunction.
Once the injunction was dissolved, the University Board of Regents announced in May 1962, that all employees were required to sign the oath by October 1, 1962, and that any who did not would be dismissed as of October 31, 1962. Teaching faculty were also required to sign an additional oath, based on a 1931 statute applicable to all teachers, swearing to "support the constitution and laws of the United States of America and of the state of Washington, and ... by precept and example promote respect for the flag and the institutions of the United States of America and the state of Washington, reverence for law and order, and undivided allegiance to the government of the United States" (RCW 9.81.010).
In response to the Regents' announcement, on June 6, 1962, the ACLU and the UW chapter of the American Association of University Professors brought a new lawsuit in federal district court that challenged both loyalty oaths and ultimately led to the Supreme Court's 1964 decision. The suit was brought as a class action, which more than 60 UW faculty members, staff, and students eventually joined as plaintiffs. The defendants were the members of the Board of Regents, University President Charles E. Odegaard (1911-1999), and Washington Attorney General John J. O'Connell. Attorneys Byron Coney, Kenneth MacDonald, a longtime ACLU member and past president of the Washington chapter, and Arval Morris, who was also a UW law professor, represented the plaintiffs in district court.
The case became known as Baggett v. Bullitt, because the first named plaintiff was mathematics professor Lawrence W. Baggett, and the first named defendant was Board of Regents member Dorothy Bullitt, the well-known Seattle civic and business leader who founded and ran King Broadcasting Company. Among the other faculty challenging the oaths were Professors Nostrand and Savelle, who had brought the earlier challenge, historian Giovanni Costigan, geographer Rhoads Murphey, and philosophy professor Melvin Rader, who was president of the Washington ACLU chapter in 1961-62 and earlier had successfully fought the Washington Legislature's Fact-finding Committee on Un-American Activities (known as the Canwell Committee, after its chairman, Representative Albert F. Canwell of Spokane).
A three-judge panel of the district court granted an injunction against enforcement of the statutes by the University, so even after the October 1962, deadlines no oaths were required and no employees were dismissed. On February 9, 1963, the district court panel rejected the challenges to the loyalty oath laws, but kept the injunction in effect pending an appeal to the Supreme Court.
ACLU attorneys Ken MacDonald and Arval Morris brought the appeal in the Supreme Court, while Deputy Attorney General Herbert Fuller argued for the defendants. The Court heard argument on March 24, 1964, and issued its decision striking down both statutes by a 7-2 vote on June 1, 1964.
The Court held that "the oath requirements and the statutory provisions on which they are based are invalid on their face because their language is unduly vague, uncertain and broad." For example, the Court noted that under the 1955 statute, it might be subversive just to teach known Communist Party members or participate in international academic conferences that included Communist scholars, while under the 1931 statute, it could be deemed disloyal to criticize the design of the state flag, or the work of a judge, court, commission or other government institution. The Court concluded that the laws violated due process and were unconstitutional.
On the day of the ruling, Morris, the ACLU attorney and law professor, told The Seattle Times that the decision "reaffirmed an honored tradition in American law," which he defined as the "conviction that governmental coercion of opinion is a mistake." Following the decision in the Washington case, similar loyalty oaths in other states were also declared unconstitutional.
Washington's last loyalty oath, which was imposed on candidates for public office, was invalidated by the Washington Supreme Court in a 1974 case handled by ACLU attorney John Darrah, a former Washington ACLU Executive Director and Board member who later became a King County Superior Court judge.
Sources:
Baggett v. Bullitt, 377 U.S. 360, 84 S.Ct. 1316, 12 L.Ed.2d 377 (1964); Baggett v. Bullitt, 215 F. Supp. 439 (1963); Orians v. James, 84 Wn.2d 819, 529 P.2d 1063 (1974); RCW 9.81.010; Douglas Honig and Laura Brenner, On Freedom's Frontier: The First Fifty Years of the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington State (Seattle: American Civil Liberties Union, 1987), 25-27, 31-32, 117; "55 at U.W. Sue to Ban State Loyalty Oath," The Seattle Times, June 7, 1962, p. 27; "2 State Loyalty Oaths Struck Down,"Ibid., June 1, 1964, p. 1.
By Kit Oldham , February 14, 2003
Dr Azly Rahman
aar26@columbia.edu
http://azlyrahman-illuminations.blogspot.com/
Consider the power of the written word in shaping reality. Consider how words not only can become flesh, but become inscriptions, installation, and ideology. Words can imprison the mind. Becoming tools of oppression.
A simple clause/sentence can have brutish implications for the intellectual sanity of the Malaysian academic.
A simple sentence/clause can clearly illustrate how these academics are being controlled and their intelligence subdued. It takes us to deconstruct the clause and analyse what kind of 'truth' it embodies and how the 'truth-force' operates in the learning environment, to understand how thought-control operates.
The clause I am referring to is from the now infamous Surat Akujanji (Oath of Loyalty) for 'government servants'. Let us inquire into the genealogy of the production of the clause, how it is used to dishonour the university, and how the academics are being silenced and stupefied by it.
The irony is that we have graduates from universities abroad who themselves were trained in the best and rigorous environment of learning that protects intellectual freedom.
We expect them to embody the ethos of a committed intellectual who will translate good expressions of freedom of practice, but instead, they have become the new colonisers of the neo-colonialist state.
Let us now compare, for example, what academic freedom means in America and in Malaysia. Let us then offer suggestions on how the Malaysian academic community can have its right to be intelligent.
Right to be intelligent
In the US, public school teachers, community college and university professors have all the guarantees of academic freedom as rights in their collective agreement with their respective institutions; rights that are also enshrined to ensure that the students they educate will become intelligent and informed citizens.
Academic Freedom clauses from the American Association of University Professors include:
1) Teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results, subject to the adequate performance of their other academic duties; but research for pecuniary return should be based upon an understanding with the authorities of the institution.
2) Teachers are entitled in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject. Limitations of academic freedom because of religious or other aims of the institutions should be clearly stated in writing at the time of the appointment.
3) College and university teachers are citizens, members of a learned profession, and officers of an educational institution. When they speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional censorship or discipline, but their special position in the community imposes special obligations. As scholars and educational officers, they should remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances. Hence they should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and should make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for the institution.
Another example comes from the reknown research university, Columbia University, in New York:
'The University is committed to maintaining a climate of academic freedom, in which officers of instruction and research are given the widest possible latitude in their teaching and scholarship. However, the freedoms traditionally accorded those officers carry corresponding responsibilities. By accepting appointments at the University, officers of instruction and research assume varied obligations and duties.'
Clarifying that commitment, it states:
'Academic freedom implies that all officers of instruction are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subjects; that they are entitled to freedom in research and in the publication of its results; and that they may not be penalised by the University for expressions of opinion or associations in their private or civic capacity; but they should bear in mind the special obligations arising from their position in the academic community.'
These statements of guarantee have become the cornerstone of the culture of 'free spirit of inquiry' enshrined in the thinking of American academicians and one that emanated from the protection of the fundamental rights of the individual.
The Surat Akujanji is doing exactly the opposite. Consider the implications of the clause (ix), in Bahasa Melayu and in English, from the document forced upon the Malaysian intellectual community:
bahawa saya antara lain:
(ix) tidak akan ingkar perintah atau berkelakuan dengan apa apa cara yang boleh ditafsirkan sebagai ingkar perintah (I shall not be insubordinate or conduct myself in such manner as is likely be construed as being insubordinate.)
Such a sweeping and generalised statement endangers faculty members in their pursuit of truth through critical inquiry. The clause entails that the academician shall have no freedom, rights, and responsibility in deciding the nature of 'truth' to be pursued. The idea of insubordination implies that the work of academicians will be subjected to the rigours defined by the prevailing ideology and those who are in power to impose such ideology.
In addition, the difference between the Academic Freedom clauses and that in Surat Akujanji is clear; while the one produced by American institutions encourage freedom and responsibility, the one adopted by Malaysian universities take away such freedom and assures that even academicians are inherently irresponsible.
In other words, the American academic community sees the 'goodness and genius in the human being' while the one adopted by Malaysian universities see the 'evil and sub-standard intelligence of the human being' and the need for the mind to be subdued, tamed, and domesticated. The latter is unquestionably reminiscent of colonial discourse.
Why should we perpetuate such a discourse among the people of independent Malaysia?
Power-hungry leaders
We must understand that organisations are made up of human beings who have personal biases, grudges, and motivations that can be counter-productive to the development of intellectual tradition of any university.
A leader of an organisation, even in a supposedly intellectual environment as in a university, can never claim neutrality in the way decisions are made. Our purpose as intellectuals must be to produce as best as we can, statements of guarantees that the nobility of the university environment must be preserved by all, and especially that rights of the faculty must be guarded against attempts by the leadership to subvert them.
The phrase 'insubordinate… likely to be construed as being insubordinate' is definitely problematic. In the hands of an autocratic leader who wishes to maintain his/her hegemony over others, or to maintain control and power over the powerless, or to maintain rule via Machiavellian tactics, the semantics of 'insubordination' can be a powerful instrument of oppression.
Ultimately, who defines what 'insubordination' means and what are its dimensions? It is too subjective of a term to be used in such a supposedly-objective manner. It will be open to abuse. Academics do not wish to be oppressed nor abused especially in an academic environment.
Why can we not learn the virtue of intellectual freedom and the fundamental rights of the individual from nations such as the US? Must we not implement what is good from world-class practices?
Is not the purpose of education in Malaysia is to educate its students to become intelligent, creative, critical and open-minded? Do we not understand what a 'university' means and why we lecturers and professors have the moral obligation to help open minds and not close them shut? Do we really understand what a world-class university mean?
What then must the Malaysian academic do?
Academics need not be powerless entirely. In times like this that try their intellectual sensibility, they may discover that they can no longer seek the help of the university to address grievances - judging from the fact that there is no provision for an academician to argue for academic freedom, and that there is no mechanism to attend to such grievances fairly.
Clause (viii) of the Surat Akujanji guarantees that such a recourse cannot be taken. It states (in translation) that an officer "… shall not bring or attempt to bring any form of outside influence or pressure to support or advance (his/her) claim or that of other public officers relating to the public services …"
One must be aware how damaging the clause can be to the interest of the aggrieved party. Should there be instances of abuse of power, corruption in all forms, attempts to subvert the intellectual foundations of Malaysia universities, or any form of unethical practices, the clause would ensure that the complainant would not be able to seek the help of more credible outside agencies/organisations/bodies/persons to resolve those issues.
How do academics criminalised by the system seek justice from the administration when they do not have faith in the organisation's capability to be objective and to understand what the rights of an academic might be - when in fact, there is no charter or covenant/compact to guarantee such rights?
We must now be concerned how our universities will, in future be seen in the eyes of the international academic community with this clause that illustrates the intellectual problematique of this nation.
What then must we do? We must have the universities nullify, revise or discard the Surat Akujanji.
We must demand that the university administration forms academic freedom committees so that parameters of freedom of expression can be constructed. The committees must produce a statement of guarantees of academic freedom to be signed and honoured by all.
We must encourage dissenting views from as many perspectives as possible, true to the development of newer philosophies of multi-culturalism that is developing.
We must elect progressive university leaders into office; ones that will promote the rights of academics and students to be more intelligent and more rigorous in their thinking.
Malaysian academics, stand up for your rights!
Do not allow those who abuse power to trample on your hard-earned intellectualism. We have generations of creative young minds to educate. They are waiting for academicians to regain their right to be treated intelligently.
--------
Let us read how the Americans dealt with their Akujanji/Oath of Loyalty:
U.S. Supreme Court strikes down loyalty oaths for Washington state employees on June 1, 1964.
HistoryLink.org Essay 5200
On June 1, 1964, the United States Supreme Court strikes down Washington laws requiring state employees to take loyalty oaths. The loyalty oath statutes are challenged by more than 60 faculty members, staff, and students of the University of Washington in a case organized by the Washington chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the UW chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). The Court rules that both a 1955 statute requiring all state employees to swear they are not "subversive persons" and a 1931 statute requiring teachers to swear to promote respect for government institutions are unconstitutionally vague and violate due process.
Loyalty oaths were common during the Cold War era. Between 1947 and 1956, 42 states and more than 2000 local jurisdictions adopted laws requiring such oaths from public employees. In 1951, the Washington Legislature imposed a loyalty oath requirement for all state employees. In 1955, the statute was amended to require employees to swear that "I am not a subversive person." According to the law, a "subversive person" was:
"any person who commits, attempts to commit, or aids in the commission, or advocates, abets, advises or teaches by any means any person to commit, attempt to commit, or aid in the commission of any act intended to overthrow, destroy or alter, or to assist in the overthrow, destruction or alteration of, the constitutional form of the government of the United States, or of the state of Washington, or any political subdivision of either of them by revolution, force, or violence; or who with knowledge ... becomes or remains a member of a subversive organization."
"Subversive organization" was defined in the same terms used in the definition of subversive person, and the law also specifically declared the Communist Party a subversive organization.
Civil libertarians opposed the loyalty oath requirement, particularly on university campuses, where they believed that having to swear one was not "subversive" suppressed academic freedom and led to conformity of thought. Soon after the 1955 amendment was enacted, the Washington ACLU brought its first challenge to the loyalty oath statute on behalf of two University of Washington professors, Howard Nostrand (Romance Languages) and Max Savelle (American History). The ACLU obtained an injunction prohibiting enforcement of the loyalty oath while the case was pending. However, in 1962, after seven years of complicated legal maneuvering in state and federal courts, the United States Supreme Court dismissed that case and dissolved the injunction.
Once the injunction was dissolved, the University Board of Regents announced in May 1962, that all employees were required to sign the oath by October 1, 1962, and that any who did not would be dismissed as of October 31, 1962. Teaching faculty were also required to sign an additional oath, based on a 1931 statute applicable to all teachers, swearing to "support the constitution and laws of the United States of America and of the state of Washington, and ... by precept and example promote respect for the flag and the institutions of the United States of America and the state of Washington, reverence for law and order, and undivided allegiance to the government of the United States" (RCW 9.81.010).
In response to the Regents' announcement, on June 6, 1962, the ACLU and the UW chapter of the American Association of University Professors brought a new lawsuit in federal district court that challenged both loyalty oaths and ultimately led to the Supreme Court's 1964 decision. The suit was brought as a class action, which more than 60 UW faculty members, staff, and students eventually joined as plaintiffs. The defendants were the members of the Board of Regents, University President Charles E. Odegaard (1911-1999), and Washington Attorney General John J. O'Connell. Attorneys Byron Coney, Kenneth MacDonald, a longtime ACLU member and past president of the Washington chapter, and Arval Morris, who was also a UW law professor, represented the plaintiffs in district court.
The case became known as Baggett v. Bullitt, because the first named plaintiff was mathematics professor Lawrence W. Baggett, and the first named defendant was Board of Regents member Dorothy Bullitt, the well-known Seattle civic and business leader who founded and ran King Broadcasting Company. Among the other faculty challenging the oaths were Professors Nostrand and Savelle, who had brought the earlier challenge, historian Giovanni Costigan, geographer Rhoads Murphey, and philosophy professor Melvin Rader, who was president of the Washington ACLU chapter in 1961-62 and earlier had successfully fought the Washington Legislature's Fact-finding Committee on Un-American Activities (known as the Canwell Committee, after its chairman, Representative Albert F. Canwell of Spokane).
A three-judge panel of the district court granted an injunction against enforcement of the statutes by the University, so even after the October 1962, deadlines no oaths were required and no employees were dismissed. On February 9, 1963, the district court panel rejected the challenges to the loyalty oath laws, but kept the injunction in effect pending an appeal to the Supreme Court.
ACLU attorneys Ken MacDonald and Arval Morris brought the appeal in the Supreme Court, while Deputy Attorney General Herbert Fuller argued for the defendants. The Court heard argument on March 24, 1964, and issued its decision striking down both statutes by a 7-2 vote on June 1, 1964.
The Court held that "the oath requirements and the statutory provisions on which they are based are invalid on their face because their language is unduly vague, uncertain and broad." For example, the Court noted that under the 1955 statute, it might be subversive just to teach known Communist Party members or participate in international academic conferences that included Communist scholars, while under the 1931 statute, it could be deemed disloyal to criticize the design of the state flag, or the work of a judge, court, commission or other government institution. The Court concluded that the laws violated due process and were unconstitutional.
On the day of the ruling, Morris, the ACLU attorney and law professor, told The Seattle Times that the decision "reaffirmed an honored tradition in American law," which he defined as the "conviction that governmental coercion of opinion is a mistake." Following the decision in the Washington case, similar loyalty oaths in other states were also declared unconstitutional.
Washington's last loyalty oath, which was imposed on candidates for public office, was invalidated by the Washington Supreme Court in a 1974 case handled by ACLU attorney John Darrah, a former Washington ACLU Executive Director and Board member who later became a King County Superior Court judge.
Sources:
Baggett v. Bullitt, 377 U.S. 360, 84 S.Ct. 1316, 12 L.Ed.2d 377 (1964); Baggett v. Bullitt, 215 F. Supp. 439 (1963); Orians v. James, 84 Wn.2d 819, 529 P.2d 1063 (1974); RCW 9.81.010; Douglas Honig and Laura Brenner, On Freedom's Frontier: The First Fifty Years of the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington State (Seattle: American Civil Liberties Union, 1987), 25-27, 31-32, 117; "55 at U.W. Sue to Ban State Loyalty Oath," The Seattle Times, June 7, 1962, p. 27; "2 State Loyalty Oaths Struck Down,"Ibid., June 1, 1964, p. 1.
By Kit Oldham , February 14, 2003
30/07: An ode to Malaysian bloggers
A REPUBLIC OF VIRTUE
Dr Azly Rahman
aar26@columbia.edu
http://azlyrahman-illuminations.blogspot.com/
[NOTE: As we have always reminded each other and as I have always maintained, please comment politely, rationally, ethically, responsibly, and intelligently. Women, children and youth are reading our comments. The Internet is a wonderful medium of free speech. It is an educator par excellence to be harnessed wisely]
Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
-- Denis Diderot, French Enlightenment thinker
There was non among the myriads of men that existed who would pity or assist me; and should I feel kindness towards my enemies? No: from that moment I declared everlasting war against the species, and, more than all, against him who had formed me and sent me forth to this insupportable misery.
-- 'Frankenstein' by Mary Shelley-Wollstonecraft
Sometime ago, after reading Plato's narration of a conversation between King Thamus and the inventor Theuth concerning the impact of new technologies on society, after reading media guru Neil Postman's work Technopoly, and after deep reflection on the idea of the Luddites (a movement that "raged against the machine" during the Industrial Revolution), I penned verses which I find suitable to honour Malaysian bloggers in their onward march towards creating a spectre that will haunt the state-owned print media.
Here it goes:
P H A E D R U S II
The Last Judgement of Thamus
Circa A.D. 2020
Lines composed near the banks of Hudson River, New York city
Background notes: They say that there dwelt at Naucratis in Egypt one of the old gods of that country, to whom the bird they call Ibis was sacred, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. Among his inventions were number and calculation . . . and, above all, writing. . . . To [the king, Thamus] came Theuth and exhibited his inventions . . . when it came to writing, Theuth declared: "There is an accomplishment, my lord the kind, which will improve both the wisdom and the mentory of the Egyptians. I have discovered a sure receipt for memory and wisdom." "Theuth, my paragon of inventors," replied the king, "the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practise it. . . . Those who acquire [writing] will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful. . . . What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory . . . ( Phaedrus, 95-96)
And it was in the year 2020
In a not-too-distant cybercity
As Socrates' narratives on cybertechnology
Laments King Thamus's concern for the fate of academies
And Theuth my inventor par excellence
What say you concerning educational excellence?
Of the methods and principles of teaching
Brought about by new technologies of communicating?
O' Thamus, Wise King of Cyberjaya
Indeed our children will undergo Karma
Of one imbued with Dharma
Which will bring us all to Moksha
Karma is Rebirth
Dharma is Devotion and Duty
And Moksha is art of being one with Creation
Of which educational practice will assume a new reality
This invention called blogging
Of which for many ages we have waited so patiently
Will transform the meaning of Reality
and Democracy as it marries Virtuality
More than what print media has guaranteed
O' wise King Thamus
We are witnessing the death of Papyrus
the demise of Gutenberg legacy
As we witness the birth of PERSONACRACY
A deeply personalized form of postmodern democracy
In the brilliance of anarchy
To be cultivated with the media of blogging
By way of this ideology called PERSONACRACY,
O' King
Our children, the true song of democracy they will sing
Of which the teacher will die a slow death
Like the first teacher Socrates
whose fate was a choice he once had
Our children will be Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu
The Creator, Destroyer, and the One who Renews
Our children will make history and create Knowledge
Destroy paradigms
and like Vishnu, preserve what is old and what is new
They will be Renaissance men and women
In their mind neural connections will be made, synapses will be woven
And the boundaries of the Real and the Imagined
we can no longer ascertain
In this onward march towards Virtuality
Classrooms will cease to exist nor too the concept of teaching
The sage of Russia Illich will be singing
In honor of this day when education means deschooling
O' Thamus wise ruler of Cyberjaya
The days wherein authorities rule capital cities
Will be gone with the advent of my invention called blogging
Pedagogy will be replaced with METAPHYSICAL TRANSITION THEORIES
And Plato's academy will be history
Buried underneath the magnificence of blogging
Gone will be the idea of faculties
In their place will emerge knowledge patterned like fractal geometries
And Chaos will be the order of the day
And Complexity will be king of pedagogies
For the sage Mandelbrott did once spoke
Of the patterns inherent in knowledge and wisdom
O' Theuth my kingdom's most honored inventor,
What say you of the blogger's impact on the teacher?
One who holds the key to any civilization's treasure
And who guards the principles of a moral character?
Wise King Thamus,
this is my conjecture: My invention is Frankensteinish in nature
Aren't we already at the end of history?
Wherein the Knower and the Known has no longer a boundary?
This technology will destroy authorities
Including values we guard with jealousy
Slain like the dragon in Beowulf's story
Buried with Socrates and Dante Alighieri
A further elaboration concerning the death of authority:
O' King, I call this an Age of Subalternity
In which we will witness the dawn of PERSONACRACY
Of which with the help of blogging,
the child constructs his customized version of democracy
O' Theuth Master Inventor
Yours is a song of conjectures
For, can you as a creator
Be the judge of what good and bad blogging will bring into our future?
My greatest apologies Wisest of all Kings
Do you not remember that we are in the year 2020?
In which kingdoms have been crushed under the weight of technologies of virtual realities?
And you dear king - are you not already ancient history?
You and your kingdom destroyed by technologies of Virtuality?
Dr Azly Rahman
aar26@columbia.edu
http://azlyrahman-illuminations.blogspot.com/
[NOTE: As we have always reminded each other and as I have always maintained, please comment politely, rationally, ethically, responsibly, and intelligently. Women, children and youth are reading our comments. The Internet is a wonderful medium of free speech. It is an educator par excellence to be harnessed wisely]
Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
-- Denis Diderot, French Enlightenment thinker
There was non among the myriads of men that existed who would pity or assist me; and should I feel kindness towards my enemies? No: from that moment I declared everlasting war against the species, and, more than all, against him who had formed me and sent me forth to this insupportable misery.
-- 'Frankenstein' by Mary Shelley-Wollstonecraft
Sometime ago, after reading Plato's narration of a conversation between King Thamus and the inventor Theuth concerning the impact of new technologies on society, after reading media guru Neil Postman's work Technopoly, and after deep reflection on the idea of the Luddites (a movement that "raged against the machine" during the Industrial Revolution), I penned verses which I find suitable to honour Malaysian bloggers in their onward march towards creating a spectre that will haunt the state-owned print media.
Here it goes:
P H A E D R U S II
The Last Judgement of Thamus
Circa A.D. 2020
Lines composed near the banks of Hudson River, New York city
Background notes: They say that there dwelt at Naucratis in Egypt one of the old gods of that country, to whom the bird they call Ibis was sacred, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. Among his inventions were number and calculation . . . and, above all, writing. . . . To [the king, Thamus] came Theuth and exhibited his inventions . . . when it came to writing, Theuth declared: "There is an accomplishment, my lord the kind, which will improve both the wisdom and the mentory of the Egyptians. I have discovered a sure receipt for memory and wisdom." "Theuth, my paragon of inventors," replied the king, "the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practise it. . . . Those who acquire [writing] will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful. . . . What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory . . . ( Phaedrus, 95-96)
And it was in the year 2020
In a not-too-distant cybercity
As Socrates' narratives on cybertechnology
Laments King Thamus's concern for the fate of academies
And Theuth my inventor par excellence
What say you concerning educational excellence?
Of the methods and principles of teaching
Brought about by new technologies of communicating?
O' Thamus, Wise King of Cyberjaya
Indeed our children will undergo Karma
Of one imbued with Dharma
Which will bring us all to Moksha
Karma is Rebirth
Dharma is Devotion and Duty
And Moksha is art of being one with Creation
Of which educational practice will assume a new reality
This invention called blogging
Of which for many ages we have waited so patiently
Will transform the meaning of Reality
and Democracy as it marries Virtuality
More than what print media has guaranteed
O' wise King Thamus
We are witnessing the death of Papyrus
the demise of Gutenberg legacy
As we witness the birth of PERSONACRACY
A deeply personalized form of postmodern democracy
In the brilliance of anarchy
To be cultivated with the media of blogging
By way of this ideology called PERSONACRACY,
O' King
Our children, the true song of democracy they will sing
Of which the teacher will die a slow death
Like the first teacher Socrates
whose fate was a choice he once had
Our children will be Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu
The Creator, Destroyer, and the One who Renews
Our children will make history and create Knowledge
Destroy paradigms
and like Vishnu, preserve what is old and what is new
They will be Renaissance men and women
In their mind neural connections will be made, synapses will be woven
And the boundaries of the Real and the Imagined
we can no longer ascertain
In this onward march towards Virtuality
Classrooms will cease to exist nor too the concept of teaching
The sage of Russia Illich will be singing
In honor of this day when education means deschooling
O' Thamus wise ruler of Cyberjaya
The days wherein authorities rule capital cities
Will be gone with the advent of my invention called blogging
Pedagogy will be replaced with METAPHYSICAL TRANSITION THEORIES
And Plato's academy will be history
Buried underneath the magnificence of blogging
Gone will be the idea of faculties
In their place will emerge knowledge patterned like fractal geometries
And Chaos will be the order of the day
And Complexity will be king of pedagogies
For the sage Mandelbrott did once spoke
Of the patterns inherent in knowledge and wisdom
O' Theuth my kingdom's most honored inventor,
What say you of the blogger's impact on the teacher?
One who holds the key to any civilization's treasure
And who guards the principles of a moral character?
Wise King Thamus,
this is my conjecture: My invention is Frankensteinish in nature
Aren't we already at the end of history?
Wherein the Knower and the Known has no longer a boundary?
This technology will destroy authorities
Including values we guard with jealousy
Slain like the dragon in Beowulf's story
Buried with Socrates and Dante Alighieri
A further elaboration concerning the death of authority:
O' King, I call this an Age of Subalternity
In which we will witness the dawn of PERSONACRACY
Of which with the help of blogging,
the child constructs his customized version of democracy
O' Theuth Master Inventor
Yours is a song of conjectures
For, can you as a creator
Be the judge of what good and bad blogging will bring into our future?
My greatest apologies Wisest of all Kings
Do you not remember that we are in the year 2020?
In which kingdoms have been crushed under the weight of technologies of virtual realities?
And you dear king - are you not already ancient history?
You and your kingdom destroyed by technologies of Virtuality?
