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(I provide below a summary of the paper I will deliver at a multidisciplinary
conference in Barrie, Ontario, Canada, on May 2.)
The United Nations has long advocated democracy
committed to human rights and anchored on the rule of law as the
ideal for Third World nations to aspire to and strive toward. To
many of the member nations, it signifies that a government has
reached political maturity and has emerged from barbarism to
civilization. Developed nations, particularly those of the First
World, have attained it and hope that developing nations soon
follow.
The promotion of this ideal was the avowed
intention of the United States when it set its sights further west
beyond the Pacific Ocean and ventured into the experiment of
colonization. This was its declared mission then as a colonial
power; this describes its alleged role and remains its vision now as
a world power. The US proclaimed this colonial expansion as its
manifest destiny in fulfilling the policy of benevolent
assimilation. When the experiment was over, it unabashedly paraded
the Philippines to the world as “the show window of democracy”
in Asia.
I do not challenge the sincerity of the United
States in pursuing the policy even though this is suspect, nor the
perceived merit and worth of this ideal, which is in many ways
deserved. In fact, I concede its value. I describe it as the desired
destination of all developing nations and refer to it as the ideal
of a constitutional democracy.
The challenge that present-day terror brings to
the rule of law places seriously in doubt whether the Philippines
will ever attain the ideal. Instead of progressing toward
constitutional democracy, the politics of hypocrisy, division,
negativity, intolerance, violence and terror has, ever since the
internationally acclaimed people power event known as the EDSA
Revolution, increased so alarmingly as to cause the rapid
deterioration of its political health. As a result, its medical
condition may worsen, perhaps to the point of incurability, if it
fails to arrest further debilitation.
Some attribute the cause of the debilitation to
the betrayal of the revolution’s proclaimed principles perpetrated
by governments after the revolutionary one. I make a more radical
claim. The debilitation is nothing but the inevitable consequence of
the revolution itself and of the moral and political hypocrisy and
corruption that attended, from its conception, its external
manifestation and execution.
Terror is politically manifested in two basic
ways: in terms of citizen dissent or opposition to government and in
terms of government containment or suppression of dissent and
opposition. Philippine law, government, politics and society have,
since that event, developed in such a way as to turn the rule of
law, not just into a sham, but more problematically into an
increasingly unattainable ideal.
The Philippine government has progressively
relied on extralegal methods of violence and terror to suppress
opposition and to ensure survival, while citizens have repeatedly
availed of extra-legal methods, including violence and terror, in
manifesting opposition to government.
In support of the radical claim, I use a legal
and a philosophical framework of analysis, informed by actual events
and possessed of practical purpose, in the hope of arriving at a
diagnosis leading to a cure. Such a cure aims to reinvigorate the
Philippines, through the reform of Philippine law, government,
politics and society, to the healthy and vibrant condition of a
constitutional democracy.
Fundamental principles or values underlie the
assumptions guiding the analysis. There is nothing intellectually
suspect in this. This is precisely the method of analytic philosophy
which acknowledges that every inquiry must have and be grounded on a
philosophically cogent, sound and defensible starting point.
As a philosopher who learns from and adapts the
intuitive wisdom of the East and the rigorous logic of the West, my
underlying values and principles are essentially spiritual and my
proposal for reform depends upon the inculcation of spiritual
virtues in the social and political reformer.
I classify spiritual virtues into two: the
inward self-realizing ones of solitude, contemplation, purification,
surrender and peace; and the outward social and political ones of
wisdom, humility, integrity, justice and compassion. By imbibing the
inward self-realizing virtues, a reformer exhibits towards others
the proper social and political virtues by which meaningful and
enduring change can be effected.
The inability of the reformer to develop these
virtues inevitably results in disastrous failure. That encapsulates
the EDSA revolution. There existed too much arrogance, resentment,
indignation, hypocrisy, intolerance, resentment, envy, and hate in
its revolutionaries for meaningfully positive change to have borne
fruit. Thus emerged the extant debilitation of Philippine democracy,
which is dangerously and rapidly deteriorating towards the well-nigh
incurable condition of a banana republic.
This is not to deny that there were genuine
heroes of EDSA, nuns and civilians who bravely and selflessly
sacrificed their lives to avoid bloodshed. That being said, it
cannot be denied either that the political leadership and main
propagandists of the revolution suffered a woeful dearth of
spirituality and compassion. How many heroes of EDSA are villains
today?
opinion@manilatimes.net
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