A Damaged Culture: A New Philippines?
By James Fallows
November 1, 1987, 2:25 AM ET
"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 precise phrasing belongs to Benigno Aquino, in his early days in politics, but the thought has been expressed by hundreds of others.
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.
BECAUSE PREVIOUS CHANGES OF GOVERNMENT HAVE meant so little to the Philippines, it is hard to believe that replacing Marcos with Aquino, desirable as it doubtless is, will do much besides stanching the flow of crony profits out of the country.
"This is a country where the national ambition is to change your nationality,' an American who volunteers at Smoky Mountain told me.
One morning this summer, as I stared out the window at the monsoon rain, I listened to two foreign economists describe the economic trap in which the Philippines is caught. The men had worked in the Philippines for years and had absorbed the ethic of delicadeza.
Manufacturing? "There were not many viable sectors to begin with, and most of them were taken over by cronies. The industrial sector is used to guarantee monopoly and high-tariff protection. It's inward-looking, believes it cannot compete. People are used to paying a lot for goods that are okay-to-shoddy in quality. Labor costs are actually quite high for a country at this stage of development.
Agriculture? "It's been heavily skewed for fifty years to plantation crops. All those traditional exports are down, sugar most of all. Copra is okay for the moment, but it's never going to expand very much. Prawns are the only alternative anybody can think of now.' Agriculture is also nearly paralyzed by arguments over land ownership.
Services and other industries? "They're very much influenced by the political climate. I think this has tremendous potential as a tourist country--it's so beautiful. But they don't have many other ways to sell their labor, except the obvious one.' The obvious one is the *** business, visible in every part of the country--and indeed throughout Asia, where Filipino "entertainers' are common
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 decedent 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.
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.
As in Latin America, the Spanish thereby implanted the idea that "success' meant landed, idle (that is, non-entrepreneurial or commercial) wealth.
The Spanish hammered home the idea of Filipino racial inferiority, discourging the native indios from learning the Spanish language and refusing to consecrate them as priests. (The Spanish are also said to have forbidden the natives to wear tucked-in shirts, which is why the national shirt, the barong tagalog, is now worn untucked, in a rare flash of national pride.)
America knows just what it will do to defend Corazon Aquino against usurpers, like those who planned the last attempted coup. We'll say that we support a demoncratically chosen government, that this one is the country's best hope, that we'll use every tool from economic aid to public-relations pressure to help her serve out her term. But we might start thinking ahead, to what we'll do if the anticoup campaign is successful--to what will happen when Aquino stays in, and the culture doesn't change, and everything gets worse.
SOURCE:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technolog...lippines/7414/
James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States, and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter.