Original Posting Nov 6, 2016
An “Asian Magazine for Human Transformation” is observing its 50th Anniversary this month and the Gardener was asked to comment on why genuine change remains elusive in our society: “It takes More than a President.”
November 3rd – A gardener-friend, Friar Louis Vitale, OFM, reminded us last week in Pace e Bene that it takes more than a President to move the country to a new culture of authentic change: a country free of the yawning gap between a very few rich and the very many poor, free of human rights abuses and environmental destruction. It even takes more than a village. It takes a mass mobilization of people moving together. This is what one sees clearly on reviewing five decades of IMPACT reports.
Culture and Underdevelopment
Some thirty years ago an article written abroad (in the Atlantic Monthly) became the subject of controversy and attention here by its very title – “A DAMAGED CULTURE: A NEW PHILIPPINES?”
It was a time, right after Edsa I, when people thought a New Philippines had dropped down on them from heaven, or, in the very least and more positively: weren’t they now building one? The “evil Marcos” was out, the “saintly Cory” was in, and democracy marched on worldwide, remember? The bloodless dethroning of the almighty Marcos made Filipinos feel good with a new dignity and pride but, also, with worse amnesia than they had ever had. The smug unconscious had merrily whistled the simplistic line: take away Marcos; have a new President and everything would be fine.
We plain forgot that most of the things that now seemed wrong with the economy—such as grotesque extremes of wealth and poverty, land-ownership disputes, monopolistic industries in cahoots with the government — had been wrong for decades, even centuries, before there was a Marcos in Malacanang.
You won’t believe who said the following while one issue of IMPACT followed on another: “Here is a land in which a few are spectacularly rich while the masses remain abjectly poor. . . . Here is a land consecrated to democracy but run by an entrenched plutocracy. Here, too, are a people whose ambitions run high, but whose fulfillment is low and mainly restricted to the self-perpetuating elite.” The words were Ninoy Aquino’s, uttered long before Marcos’ martial rule.
Many Filipinos just didn’t like it when the Atlantic Monthly article said that “in a sociological sense the elevation of Corazon Aquino through the EDSA revolution should probably be seen not as a revolution but as the restoration of the old order.”
Of course the author did not, could not, deny that Edsa’s four days of courage “demonstrated a brave, national-minded spirit”, and “revealed the country’s spiritual essence.” But to author James Fallows, nonetheless, the episode seemed “an exception, even an aberration.” He heard in Manila what Pandit Nehru heard much earlier in Delhi: “The more we change the more we remain the same; we run twenty times faster just to stay in place.”
Deeper in the Philippine reality was the damaged culture that led to a “tradition of political corruption and cronyism, the extremes of wealth and poverty, the tribal fragmentation, the local elite’s willingness to make a separate profitable peace with colonial powers”, old and new — all reflecting a feeble sense of national identity and a contempt for the common good.
At the center of that damaged culture was a twisted view of the ownership of property which ensured the creation and development of oligarchy. That the Philippines is an oligarchy and how it historically became and continues to be an oligarchy is very little understood up to now – which leaves very little chance for the country to ever truly re-form and embrace authentic change. Presidents come and go but the oligarchy stays. Either enough number of us understands this or not. Till now, clearly, we haven’t; hence the incessant, stubborn development of underdevelopment we see all around.
Have we not come to accept the sad fact that the rule and sway of the few vs. the rule of the many is something impossible to abolish, that because it has been around for centuries we may already believe it is permanently here to stay, that the broad masses of our people must always stay poor and sick and malnourished and vulnerable to injustice while only a vibrant few keep outspending even the elite of more industrially advanced nations?
Well, most of us (with one or two exceptions) revere good Pope Francis. What did he have to say about our situation? He reiterated the age-old insight into the “hierarchy of truth.” Any society can have any number of problems and crises, he said, but the task is to find the predominant one that determines and influences the existence and development of all the others (an application of St. Ignatius Loyola’s insight into tackling first one’s predominant fault). And in our time he said that the biggest scandal we must focus our attention on is the ever-growing gap between the rich and the poor.
“The need to resolve the structural causes of poverty cannot be delayed, not only for the pragmatic reason of its urgency for the good order of society, but because society needs to be cured of a sickness which is weakening and frustrating it, and which can only lead to new crises.
Welfare projects, which meet certain urgent needs, should be considered merely temporary responses. As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved … no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems. Inequality is the root of social ills.” (Pope Francis in Evangelii Gaudium, 202) “Growth in justice requires more than economic growth, while presupposing such growth (ibid. 204).”
In essence, the development of underdevelopment causes the poverty keenly felt by the majority populace. Peasants, agricultural workers, rural landless, fisher folk, indigenous peoples, workers, urban poor, students and professionals, patriotic businessmen and small entrepreneurs – all alike are victims of social injustice and the loss of economic sovereignty, which in turn cannot be changed unless we wake up to their root cause in our own minds’ notion of ownership, and its resultant social practices, institutions and structures – in other words, unless we first wage a tenacious cultural revolution.
We have to go back a couple of centuries quickly. It was the occupation of the Philippines by Westerners that brought a significant and negative change in the idea of property ownership. Heads of barangays were encouraged to individually own what traditionally were regarded as communal lands (amin or atin, not akin) of the whole barangay and to lay de facto claims to the lands of those indebted to him. For the first time ever people could and would now appropriate for themselves as their exclusive property the lands that had hitherto honestly in their mind and in actual practice truly belonged to all. This process of individual appropriation of land accelerated in the Philippines throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is how oligarchy came about.
If one has the time and the inclination one could telescope the evolution of property ownership from land ownership to the ownership of modern industrial, commercial, finance, political(yes, ownership of the state) and other forms of capital to this very day. It’s a tale of who owns what for how long a time now to the exclusion of the great majority. It’s a tale of elite families shaping and being shaped by the processes of change and the persistence of an unjust absolutist and exclusivist ownership concept designed to create this yawning gap between rich and poor.
The problem of injustice in ownership is, first of all, a problem of philosophy or ideology. Without a clear-cut ideological alternative to the prevailing concept, rebellions and movements toward reforms, including changes in Presidential personae from Ramon Magsaysay to Rodrigo Duterte, no matter how many and how strong, ultimately fail. Without it, insurrections like we have seen in early Rome and latter-day Philippines will not necessarily result in genuine social revolutions. Thousands will be killed or die – for nothing.
Thus the moral-philosophical view was advanced that human ownership of anything at all must be regarded in the nature of stewardship – not in the nature of an absolute and exclusivist dominium, as in the Roman law concept so prevalent till now. And a “steward” (vs. a “dominus” or absolute owner) is indeed, one, who has right and powers over property but not absolutely – not in any way he wants – but merely according to the will of the real or absolute Owner of all things.
The Herculean task then and now is to confront this established ownership concept and stand it on its head with reformed policies, laws and strong governance backed up by even stronger people’s organizations – the type which are not merely for the people but of the people and by the people themselves. Simple? Yes, but not quite, as the predicate for success is precisely getting into existence such vibrant organizations of the people. Indeed, it takes more than a President.
From being an instrument of exclusion and separation we would now want ownership to be one of inclusion and community creation. Instead of an unlimited and absolute power it should be a limited one, related to genuine human values. Instead of being considered an end in itself it must be considered a means to certain clear ends.
For instance, if land ownership is merely a means to the proper use of land, what land use and land ownership programs would be realistic enough to follow a moral philosophy of having? What kind of land value taxation can or should be used for this purpose (right now – zero)? Clearly, the question is crucial if one expects to have peace and prosperity of being. A given community may agree among themselves, for instance, that the purposes of land use are food security for all, decent habitats for all, and an ecologically harmonious economic regime for the common good.
Many IMPACT issues the past 50 years clearly show how we adopted the kind of land distribution that often led to land destruction and never bothered to go for rural development and rural industrialization. Other countries, like South Korea and Taiwan, did – and they are prosperous nations today.
There seems no end of reports regarding the perverted politics of money, personalities, patronage. social connections and coercive violence practiced by the rent-seeking wealthy and powerful who own the state and its agencies in various ways of sharing and altercation – all the while singing praises to any incumbent popular President’s obligatory commitment to the common good.
Hence, so many of us know in our guts that a mere change of political personalities may only mean more of the same – the same oligarchy that has reigned the past few hundred years using the same money tactics to hold captive politicians exhibiting the same attitudes, doing the same practices with the same results that differ only as the years go by because they become smarter, and get to be worse and worse—which is not to deny the contradiction that somehow (with increasing difficulty now) some Presidents manage to maintain an image of good intention and incorruptibility. The reality, however, is: it takes more than a President.
The needed change we desire, for instance, the re-structuring of society into a modern indigenous network of rural industries and other community-based industries requires a strong people’s movement led by a spearhead of organized change makers (development workers or leaders), and supported by all kinds of direct and representative people’s actions – evidence of a transformed populace. Yes, indeed, it takes more than a President. It takes a new mind, a new culture, a new people. Can this ever be possible? FINIS.