At a recent awards ceremony for Outstanding Filipinos President Marcos declared that the Philippines does not have a damaged culture.
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| https://mb.com.ph/2023/9/28/marcos-we-are-not-a-damaged-culture |
Honoring 10 outstanding Filipinos made President Marcos reflect that the Filipino people do not have "a damaged culture."
"We not only honor you but through you, we honor Filipinos. And we remind our countrymen, this is what a Filipino is," Marcos said as he addressed the 2023 Metrobank Foundation Outstanding Filipinos on Thursday, Sept. 28.
"We are not a damaged culture. I hate that. We are a great people, and you are the example of that greatness," he stressed.
The President expressed this after bestowing the medallion of excellence to Filipino teachers, soldiers, and police officers who have been conferred the 2023 Metrobank Foundation Outstanding Filipinos.
Marcos said in his speech that the awardees have taken the extra mile and pushed the limits in contributing to the development of their respective institutions and advocacies.
The awardees, he stressed, is a reflection of Filipino greatness. The excellence that they have demonstrated in their pursuits "is truly worth emulating," he added.
"Your exemplary work as academicians, soldiers and police officers are oftentimes the most demanding —not oftentimes, I take it back — are always the most demanding, exhausting, and wearisome professions that we have to undertake," he said.
The idea that Philippine culture is damaged stems from an article published in The Atlantic in 1987.
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| https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/archives/1987/11/260-5/132615503.pdf |
The gist of this article is that despite the ouster of Marcos and the beginning of a new era under Cory Aquino the Philippines remained backwards and stunted because Filipino culture is fundamentally flawed. Here are a few choice observations.
Unfortunately for its people, the Philippines illustrates the contrary: that culture can make a naturally rich country poor. There may be more miserable places to live in East Asia—Vietnam, Cambodia—but there are few others where the culture itself, rather than a communist political system, is the main barrier to development. The culture in question is Filipino, but it has been heavily shaped by nearly a hundred years of the “Fil-Am relationship.” The result is apparently the only non-communist society in East Asia in which the average living standard is going down.
Still, for all the damage Marcos did, it’s not clear that he caused the country’s economic problems, as opposed to intensifying them. Most of the things that now seem wrong with the economy—grotesque extremes of wealth and poverty, land-ownership disputes, monopolistic industries in cozy, corrupt cahoots with the government—have been wrong for decades.
AM I SHOOTING FISH IN A BARREL? SURE—YOU COULD work up an even starker contrast between Park Avenue and the South Bronx. But that would mean only that the United States and the Philippines share a problem, not that extremes of wealth and poverty are no problem at all. In New York and a few other places the extremes are so visible as to make many Americans uneasy about the every-man-for-himself principle on which our society is based. But while the South Bronx is an American problem, few people would think of it as typical of America. In the Philippines the contrasting extremes are, and have been, the norm.
What has created a society in which people feel fortunate to live in a garbage dump because the money is so good? Where some people shoo flies away from others for 300 pesos, or $15, a month? It can’t be any inherent defect in the people: outside this culture they thrive. Filipino immigrants to the United States are more successful than immigrants from many other countries.
If the problem in the Philippines does not lie in the people themselves or, it would seem, in their choice between capitalism and socialism, what is the problem? I think it is cultural, and that it should be thought of as a failure of nationalism.
Individual Filipinos are at least as brave, kind, and noble-spirited as individual Japanese, but their culture draws the boundaries of decent treatment much more narrowly. Filipinos pride themselves on their lifelong loyalty to family, schoolmates, compadres, members of the same tribe, residents of the same barangay. The mutual tenderness among the people of Smoky Mountain is enough to break your heart. But when observing Filipino friendships I thought often of the Mafia families portrayed in The Godfather: total devotion to those within the circle, total war on those outside. Because the boundaries of decent treatment are limited to the family or tribe, they exclude at least 90 percent of the people in the country. And because of this fragmentation—this lack of nationalism—people treat each other worse in the Philippines than in any other Asian country I have seen. For more than a hundred years certain traits have turned up in domestic descriptions and foreign observations of Philippine society. The 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—all reflect a feeble sense of nationalism and a contempt for the public good. Practically everything that is public in the Philippines seems neglected or abused. On many street corners in downtown Manila an unwary step can mean a broken leg. Holes two feet square and five feet deep lurk just beyond the curb; they are supposed to be covered by metal grates, but scavengers have taken the grates to sell for scrap. Manila has a potentially beautiful setting, divided by the Pasig River and fronting on Manila Bay. But three-fourths of the city’s sewage flows raw into the Pasig, which in turns empties into the bay; the smell of Smoky Mountain is not so different from the smell of some of the prettiest public vistas. The Philippine telephone system is worse than its counterparts anywhere else in non-communist Asia—which bogs down the country’s business and inconveniences its people—but the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company has a long history of high (and not reinvested) profits. In the first-class dining room aboard the steamer to Cebu, a Filipino at the table next to mine picked through his plate of fish. Whenever he found a piece he didn’t like, he pushed it off the edge of his plate, onto the floor. One case of bad manners? Maybe, but I’ve never seen its like in any other country. Outsiders feel they have understood something small but significant about Japan’s success when they watch a bar man carefully wipe the condensation off a bottle of beer and twirl it on the table until the label faces the customer exactly. I felt I had a glimpse into the failures of the Philippines when I saw prosperous-looking matrons buying cakes and donuts in a bakery, eating them in a department store, and dropping the box and wrappers around them as they shopped.
Let's take just one of Fallows' many observations.
But when observing Filipino friendships I thought often of the Mafia families portrayed in The Godfather: total devotion to those within the circle, total war on those outside. Because the boundaries of decent treatment are limited to the family or tribe, they exclude at least 90 percent of the people in the country. And because of this fragmentation—this lack of nationalism—people treat each other worse in the Philippines than in any other Asian country I have seen.
Filipinos are loyal to their own but not to those outside their circle. Can there be a better reason why political assassinations take place nearly every single week? Where is the nationalism and pride in killing your political enemies rather than working with them?
Fallows also mentions that peculiar Filipino trait of delicadeza.
The Filipino ethic of delicadeza, their equivalent of saving face, encourages people to raise unpleasant topics indirectly, or, better still, not to raise them at all.
Indeed politicians especially do not like having to answer unpleasant questions and will do their best to smear their opponent if they believe they have been attacked. We have seen this recently with the debate over Sara Duterte's enormous Confidential Intelligence Fund. Rather than give a straightforward answer as to how the money was spent both she and her supporters have held in utter contempt those who would dare question her. For instance take this guy who thinks being held accountable counts as an attack.
This attitude of delicadeza is what acts as a cover for the most blatant kinds of corruption. As Fallows notes Marcos didn't cause the Philippines' economic problems as much as he exacerbated them. To even question the source of the Marcos family wealth these days and assert the fact that such wealth has been deemed to be ill-gotten is to court scorn from those who support the Marcos family.
And how about this observation:
Practically everything that is public in the Philippines seems neglected or abused. On many street corners in downtown Manila an unwary step can mean a broken leg. Holes two feet square and five feet deep lurk just beyond the curb; they are supposed to be covered by metal grates, but scavengers have taken the grates to sell for scrap. Manila has a potentially beautiful setting, divided by the Pasig River and fronting on Manila Bay. But three-fourths of the city’s sewage flows raw into the Pasig, which in turns empties into the bay;
Roads and sidewalks (or the lack thereof) are often filled with holes. Electrical poles are often rotting and leaning while being overburdened with too many wires. Manila Bay remains a foul cesspit and the government's reclamation attempts have been proven to be totally ineffective and worthless.
It's not just Manila Bay either. The problem of pollution is nationwide. Floods happen every year because the sewers become clogged with garbage. People dump their garbage on the side of the road and they casually litter without a second thought. As Fallows observes:
I felt I had a glimpse into the failures of the Philippines when I saw prosperous-looking matrons buying cakes and donuts in a bakery, eating them in a department store, and dropping the box and wrappers around them as they shopped.
I cannot count the amount of times I have witnessed people litter without blinking an eye. And who can ignore the men publicly urinating all over the city? Such a thing would never happen in South Korea, Japan, or Singapore. If it did the person would be apprehended immediately. So what is the difference in the Philippines if not the culture which allows it to happen? There is not even a store of social capital here as everyone lives behind a fence or a gated compound in order to keep out thieves.
Fallows is smart to point out that none of these observations are new but go back over a hundred years.
For more than a hundred years certain traits have turned up in domestic descriptions and foreign observations of Philippine society. The 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—all reflect a feeble sense of nationalism and a contempt for the public good.
I would argue that they go back even further. In the year 1720 Gaspar de San Agustín wrote at length about these traits. Reading through them one is shocked to see how Philippine society and culture has not changed in 300 years.
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| https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=miun.afk2830.0001.040&seq=187 |
Fallows is sure that this decrepit culture is linked to "a feeble sense of nationalism" but he never gets to the root of that issue. The fact is the Philippines does not exist except as a political fiction. Before the Spanish these islands were inhabited by various warring tribes with their own customs, religion, and languages. It was the Spanish who untied these tribes together and dubbed them "The Philippines."
But when has ever a Filipino seen himself as one member of a united whole? Sure you might have Benigno Aquino Jr. say the Filipino is worth dying for but that doesn't tell us much. Filipinos are divided by region and dialect. Tagalog, Cebuano, Visayas, Solid North, Solid South, etc. Unity, even in the face of a common enemy like China, is fragmented and divided amongst ones own people as was noted above. There is "a feeble sense of nationalism" because there is a "a feeble sense of" nationhood. This is why a revolution will NEVER change a thing.
If the culture does not change then the state of the nation will never change. But don't get me wrong. I am not advocating for a culture change. I am saying that a culture change is never going to happen.
And yet we are supposed to forget what Filipino culture is all about because a few individuals received a medal of excellence. That is ridiculous. It's like pointing to Manny Pacquiao, Lucio Tan, Imelda Marcos, and the unmined gold in the ground and declaring Filipinos aren't poor they are actually rich!
Culture change or not, remember that culture is dynamic. The only difference is Filipinos bandwagoning on pop culture, but if one were to be serious about change I bet the younger Pinoys will not be listened first.
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