Cherian George

Author: Cherian George (Page 2 of 6)

DIVERSITY

On October 26, 2018

LIVING UP TO OUR PLEDGE

This is the text of a presentation at the Institute of Policy Studies’ 30th Anniversary Conference on 26 October 2018.

In recent years we have seen countries with far longer histories of nation-building succumb to the politics of division.

Hate is suddenly a more potent motivator than hope in democratic politics.

This global pattern can’t be just coincidental. The best thinkers on this subject suggest we are at a world-historic inflection points, as significant as, say, the end of the Cold War. They say we are witnessing the end of the free market ideology of neoliberalism.

Pankaj Mishra in his book Age of Anger probably does the best job of analysing these times. He suggests that the 1990s neoliberal wave sparked aspirations among peoples everywhere that could not be satisfied, because they were based on a materialist ethic and mindless emulation, not genuine needs or sustainability.

The resulting resentment — a mix of envy, humiliation and powerlessness — is poisoning civil society, undermining political liberty, and causing a global turn to authoritarianism and chauvinism.

Mainstream elites and political parties haven’t found a replacement for the neoliberal order. The populists and demagogues who are filling the void don’t have a cure either; but what they do have is the snake oil of scapegoatism, and the salesmanship to hawk it effectively.

There is an economic debate to be had about this, but this is not the space nor am I the person for it. Instead I would like to reflect on the kind of political values that would best equip us for this age.

I want to suggest that Singapore’s horizontal, people-to-people relations, as well as our vertical government-people relations need strengthening.

National strengths

Before probing some of the weaknesses, though, I should emphasise that I don’t think the worst that we’ve seen elsewhere will visit our shores.

We do have some natural immunity to global trends.

One advantage we enjoy is that no single religion enfolds a majority of Singaporeans, which means politicians can gain no electoral advantage from religious nationalism. Second, we have compulsory voting; more than 90 per cent of the electorate habitually participates – and this means that election results are not prone to hijack by highly mobilised but unrepresentative groups while more reasonable people stay at home. Third, we are a city-state, so like most large cities everywhere we’re more inclined to cosmopolitan values, but unlike most cities these values are not in contention with a more homogeneous hinterland or economically backward regions where intolerant forms of nationalism tend to take root.

So my concern is not motivated by a fear of impending doom, but by the sense that our nation could be so much better.

Rampant individualism

We are certainly not spared the fundamental contradictions that always have plagued modern societies.

Our earliest nation builders recognised the tension between, on the one hand, enabling the pursuit of individual happiness and prosperity, which is essential for state legitimacy, and on the other, striving for the collective identity and cooperative instinct we need for national survival.

This is the concern at the heart of our 52-year-old national Pledge. The fact that we continue to grapple with this tension is in part a problem of success, in creating an island of opportunity for individuals and their families.

As individuals, we have come to equate progress with ever widening choice in material comforts and lifestyles. Social mobility for most of us means escaping the masses, out of the void deck into the country club; into ever more exclusive circles; where we can be increasingly fashion-conscious about what we eat and wear; finicky about the neighbourhoods where we live; and fastidious about our forms of worship.

When will religion regain its role as a champion of progressive values? – Click here for an extract from the Q&A

The rise of what Mishra calls “revolutionary individualism” and a “revolution of aspiration” was encouraged by Singapore’s embrace of neoliberalism in the 1990s, when the market became an ethic, not just a tool.

In the resulting privatised, gated version of the Singapore Dream, there’s not much room for other Singaporeans. Gotong royong is out, jealously guarded entitlement is in.

Live and let live is replaced by intolerance, by snobberies of class, culture and creed.

Approaches to diversity management

What should we be aiming for? What sort of unity or consensus should we aspire to as a diverse society?

There are at least three distinct ways of approaching the goal of national unity. The first is to think of it as a question of social order. This approach sees cohesion mainly as a security imperative. Ethnic diversity is regarded as a disadvantage, but acknowledged as a given we can’t erase, so we should at least make sure it doesn’t blow up in our faces. As for political diversity, there are fewer compunctions about flattening differences and forcing a consensus. When we view diversity through the lens of social order, we end up outsourcing its management to the state, along with other security problems.

A second approach emphasises the principle of reciprocity. We expect our rights to be respected but by the same token recognise the rights of others, even if this means we don’t always get our own way. We create fair and transparent rules for handling disputes, and will honour the outcomes of these procedures. The legitimacy of the system hinges on everyone’s equal ability to participate in it. In this worldview, it’s OK if we don’t always get our way, if at least we always get our say.

A third approach to managing diversity is based on a civic ethos, where people’s notion of the good life and a good society factors in the well-being others, including people very different from themselves. This worldview is in evidence when, for example, leaders and members of a majority faith instinctively rise in defence of minority religions that are under attack. Another indicator of a strong civic ethos would be when people are willing to support higher personal income taxes if it means that their children can grow up in a more civilised environment with more social justice and less poverty.

This is part of the social compact in some societies, and if it seems wildly unrealistic and idealistic in Singapore, well, that just goes to show that it’s not been part of our public discourse for a long time.

Back to basics

We shouldn’t think that a civic ethos is a totally foreign idea, though. It almost made its way into our national Pledge.

Go take another look at S. Rajaratnam’s first draft. It didn’t say what it now says, that the goal is “to achieve happiness, prosperity and progress for our nation”. No, it said, “we will seek happiness and progress by helping one another”. I actually find this a more meaningful statement than Lee Kuan Yew’s edited version, making much clearer what nationhood actually demands of us.

A strong civic ethos combined the principle of reciprocity form the best defence against attempts to divide us. They thicken our horizontal bonds. They are the antidotes to the law-of-the-jungle, might-is-right thinking being pushed by hatemongers around the world.

However, it is the realpolitik social order argument that tends to dominate the government’s rhetoric about managing difference. We have been taught for half a century to view differences of culture and opinion as a disadvantage, as potentially dangerous faultlines.

Vulnerability has become a national ideology, treating difference of any kind — race, religion but also political — as something to fear rather than celebrate. The management of difference is framed in negative terms: riot prevention.

This sort of thinking doesn’t permit horizontal, people-to-people trust to thicken. It feeds into the very kind of fear and zero-sum thinking — your difference is potentially at the cost of my well-being — that is being encouraged and exploited by populists elsewhere.

We should instead be cultivating the mentality that the Singapore whole is more than the sum of our different parts, that our diversity isn’t just a tourist attraction, but also enriches our own lives. And it is this net gain from diversity that makes a civic ethos not an act of charity or altruism, but of enlightened self-interest.

These ideas — of reciprocal rights, inclusive and fair processes, and of a civic responsibility to the strangers beyond our families and tribes — are essentially democratic values. It may seem odd to hitch our hopes to democratic values right now, considering the crisis some established democracies are in. Political scientists talk of a “democratic recession”, and it is indeed difficult to maintain faith in a one-person-one-vote system that has delivered Donald Trump, Brexit and a number of dangerous far right parties in Europe.

But the correct response to these events is to find ways to make democracy work better, rather than to abandon it and defect to Chinese- or Russian-style autocracy. That would be as rational as saying that your heart medication has got unpleasant side effects so you’re going to back to smoking.

Democratic values

Democratic values are still the best answer to, not the cause of, the self-serving individualism we’ve been talking about.

And this is not some contraband notion that I smuggled in on SQ21 from America yesterday. It too is an idea at the core of our national Pledge. When the founding fathers of our republic wanted a way to focus children’s minds on nation-building, on accomplishing unity in diversity, what did they do? They wrote a pledge “to build a democratic society”. Democracy, as they saw it, wasn’t the problem; democracy was the solution.

Of course the PAP continues to embrace democratic institutions insofar as reasonably free and fair elections give it the legitimacy to rule. There is also a non-trivial sense in which the formal Constitutional separation of powers is maintained.

But the Pledge doesn’t merely say we the citizens of Singapore will protect and preserve the democratic structures that have been given to us. No, it requires citizens to build a democratic society. It’s supposed to be an on-going, active process in which all of us participate.

Contained in our Pledge is the understanding that when we all collectively build a democratic society, when we think horizontally and not just vertically, we learn to recognise one another as equal citizens despite our differences; indeed, we discover we have mutual stakes in one another’s rights. My group protects your group’s dignity today, because otherwise we know we may be the victims of intolerance tomorrow.

This is what we pledge, but this is the meaning that has been hollowed out in the decades since those words were written. The PAP’s preferred model of democracy is one where citizens stay out of the kitchen and entrust the job to professional cooks.

This minimal conception of democratic government as elections fails to harness fully the nation-building potential of democracy that PAP ideologue and wordsmith S. Rajaratnam wrote into the Pledge, that and his editor Lee Kuan Yew did not remove.

Political capital

Singapore’s illiberal approach to democracy creates another problem relevant to today’s theme. It is behind certain policy failures that have depleted the political capital the PAP needs to fulfill its nation-building mission.

Recall that the PAP has always maintained that it’s more than just another political party; it is a national movement. And I don’t think this is just hype.

One of the positive side effects of one-party dominance is that the PAP straddles the class, ethnic and sectoral spectrum. We don’t think of the PAP as the party of any one group, unlike multi-party democracies where competition produces market segmentation, such that parties tend to have narrower bases – business or worker, rural or urban, religious or secular, for example. The PAP has tried to occupy the full spectrum.

The PAP’s character as a national movement has been an important resource in Singapore’s management of difference. Because in intra-societal disputes, people generally felt they could trust the referee, even if not everyone liked him. To the extent that the PAP was dictatorial, at least it was an equal-opportunity dictator.

Thus, one of the traditional strengths of the PAP has been its reputation as a generally neutral arbiter among competing communities.

I say this has been a “traditional” strength because I don’t think it’s as true today as it was before. The PAP’s mismanagement of immigration tarnished its reputation as the protector of ordinary Singaporeans’ interests. It has allowed nativists to claim some of that space.

When disaffection finally bubbled over in the 2011 general election, the government finally moderated its policies. But lasting damage had already been done to its moral legitimacy.

Two signal events, each unprecedented in its own way, revealed the extent of that damage.

First, in 2013, the government’s Population White Paper and its 6.9 million population planning figure was rebuffed even in Parliament. The government could not carry the ground, because people simply did not trust that it was acting in their interests.

Then, in 2014, Philippine nationals in Singapore had to abort their Independence Day celebration at Orchard Road on the advice of police after online protests. This is a country that is trusted to hosted some of the world’s most sensitive meetings, like the Shangrila Dialogues and the Trump-Kim Summit, so it is inconceivable that the police could not guarantee the safety of this party at Ngee Ann City.

The cancelling of the event was an admission of the government’s depleted political capital with regard to the immigration issue. It knew what the right thing to do was, but it could not carry the ground.

The government may have learned to treat immigration policy more sensitively, but it does not seem to want to get to the bottom of how it made this mistake in the first place. If it did, it would see that the stifling of immigration debates over the preceding one or two decades was a key reason why unhappiness had been allowed to build up.

Anticompetitive tendencies

Of course, the government says that it consults internally and externally, and that important decisions are open to debate. But just as many countries claim to believe in free trade but in practice operate a whole regime of regulations and tariffs to protect their markets, the Singapore government ensures that the trade in information and ideas never challenges its monopoly.

And it’s unclear how this anticompetitive approach helps Singapore or the PAP itself in the 21st century.

We know, in every other enterprise, how stress-testing through vigorous competition brings out the best in people and organisations, and how external scrutiny and transparency are the safest checks against abuse. It’s hard to see why these commonsense rules don’t apply to government and politics, where instead a dominant monopoly that is its own regulator is somehow supposed to be better for stakeholders.

This model has already compromised the quality of decision making and led to an unnecessary, avoidable depletion of the political capital the government needs to serve its nation-building role. It is also at odds with the clarion call contained in our Pledge, that we the citizens of Singapore are fellow nation-builders.

The 4G agenda

This event, like other recent IPS conferences, is a showcase of Singapore’s 4th Generation leadership. I hope 4G is not just the old operating system in a shiny new body, but a major upgrade that fixes bugs we’ve lived with for too long.

In the next leadership turnover, it would be nice if our leaders were so confident in themselves and their product that they would be prepared to lower the protectionist barriers around the marketplace of ideas; and to subject themselves and their ideas to constant stress-testing.

Equally overdue is a leadership able to model an enthusiasm for multiculturalism deeper than the superficiality of colourful costumes and spicy cuisine, not just to appeal to tourists but more importantly to get Singaporeans to see diversity mainly as a source of vitality and not always a vulnerability.

Until we see our glass as more than half full, as mainly a strength with some accompanying risks, rather than as a massive liability with some incidental benefits like batik and cendol, we are not going to live up to our Pledge.

Q&A – VIDEO

How has living in a multiethnic society helped us? Read Tommy Koh’s take – click on the photo.

CAMPUS CONTROL

By Cherian George

On March 9, 2018

In Media, Politics

NO PLACE LIKE HOME?

A National University of Singapore department was impeded when it tried to organise a talk by me. It’s part of a standard screening process, I’m told.

It’s Friday 9 March. My calendar tells me I’m supposed to be delivering a lecture today at the National University of Singapore. The view from my window tells me I never left Hong Kong. My host was unable to go ahead with the event because official approval was not forthcoming — until 3pm today.

Although this turn of events has spared me a work trip I can do without, I wouldn’t be doing NUS any favours if I silently let the matter slide.

In December, the head of a research centre at NUS invited me to deliver a public lecture, as part of a series on the state of media in Asia. In 2015, he had accepted my invitation to speak at a conference I organised in Singapore, and I was happy to reciprocate.

We fixed the date — March 9. A couple of weeks later, I got this email: “Rest assured that your visit in March is being co-ordinated.” My suspicions were aroused by this assurance, since I’d not expressed any impatience. Was there some hitch, I now wondered. Sure enough, in mid-February, I was informed that “all visitors to the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences [FASS] are subject to screening”.

A few days later, my host apologised for the hold-up. I could sense his frustration and helplessness. We agreed to wait and see.

A few days ago, he was forced to ask for a rain check, since there was no longer time to make my travel arrangements or publicise the talk even if suddenly we got the green light.

This afternoon, approval finally came, like the punchline to a bad joke.

No explanation was offered for the nature of the screening or why it had taken so long.

In my time as an academic, I have given talks on campuses in around 25 countries. This is the first time that an invitation to speak has been, in effect, voided. It’s the kind of hitch that I’m mentally prepared for if I need to deal with universities in the People’s Republic of China. I wasn’t expecting it from my own country. I wonder if we’ve hit a new low (and new heights of irony), when the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, in which foreigners occupy half the head-of-department positions, can’t freely decide to have a Singapore citizen visit for a couple of hours to share his research.

I’ve been in this business long enough to know that, at this point in my story, two separate groups of readers will roll their eyes, for very different reasons. At one end of the spectrum are conservatives who have indestructible faith in our System. [1] The System, they’d suggest, must have good reasons for vetting academic talks.

At the other end of the spectrum are the cynics who’d laugh that I should have seen this coming, since Singapore’s totalitarian tendencies are well known. People would have to be daft to expect NUS to demonstrate any academic freedom, least of all toward someone known to be a critic of the government, they’d say.

Neither of these views is well founded, but I will address them seriously because they are both common obstacles to a productive debate about public discourse in Singapore.

First, though, I should share more details about the aborted event. Here are its title and abstract:

Rethinking censorship in an age of authoritarian resilience

Most discussions of media freedom implicitly contrast it to totalitarian control. While it is commonsensical to think of freedom as the opposite of tyranny, this binary model does not help us understand how modern authoritarian regimes sustain themselves. Drawing examples mainly from Asia, including Singapore [3], this presentation considers how media policies contribute to authoritarian resilience. Although not averse to exercising repression, these states also understand that maximum coercion is not optimal. They apply differential levels of censorship, allowing selective pluralisation to enhance their legitimacy among publics and co-opt large segments of the media industry, while stifling media and communication that would potentially challenge their political dominance.

The lecture was to be based on three forthcoming publications, ranging from 6,000–9,000 words each:

“Journalism and Authoritarian Resilience”, in The Handbook of Journalism Studies, 2^nd edition, edited by Karin Wahl-Jorgensen and Thomas Hanitzsch (Routledge).
“Journalism, Censorship, and Press Freedom”, in The Handbooks of Communication Science: Journalism, edited by Tim P. Vos (De Gruyter Mouton).
“Asian Journalism”, in The International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies, edited by Tim P. Vos, Folker Hanusch, Margaretha Geertsema-Sligh, Annika Sehl, and Dimitra Dimitrakopoulou (International Communication Association & Wiley).

I should draw attention to the fact that all three manuscripts are being published in so-called handbooks/encyclopedias in my field. Such books have a distinct place in academic publishing. Unlike academic journals, they are not a venue for surfacing contentious new findings or avant-garde ideas. Instead, their editors invite experts to provide authoritative overviews of particular topics and to help shape the agenda for future scholarship. So, when a university impedes the presentation of such material, it’s not weeding out fringe theories (not that it should even do that) — it’s basically obstructing the main currents of that field.

Of course, the System is not obliged to put any academic work on a pedestal. But then academic events, like the one my host was planning, don’t do that either. They are not convened to endorse the presented research as Truth that is above criticism, but quite the opposite — to invite scrutiny and challenge. Repeating cycles of peer review are the lifeblood of scholarship. [3]

Having one’s work openly demolished with reasoned arguments is what scholars are prepared for. But it’s something else altogether to have to subject yourself to censors who get the final say on whether you can present your research or not, without needing to account for their verdicts. That’s the essence of an opaque screening process that is able to veto NUS faculty members’ decisions about whom to invite to speak at their events.

One would think that NUS professors, of all people, have earned some benefit of the doubt from the System. They have transformed the university into Asia’s number one. Even if we are skeptical about the details of university rankings, it’s quite clear that NUS is world-class. Indeed, there are few institutions of any kind in Singapore that have as strong a global reputation within their respective sectors. Universities are highly decentralised organisations, so NUS’s success could only have been achieved through the across-the-board excellence of its academics. It’s mystifying that its professors are not trusted to decide whom to invite as guest speakers.

Screening makes even less sense when we consider the quality of Singapore’s university students, who represent the top one-third in academic ability from an already-strong education system. Ten years’ experience teaching Singaporean undergrads tells me they need no shielding from the ideas of an academic like me; they are quite capable of making up their own minds. If the System does not share this confidence, I suspect it’s because its decision-makers are too distant from the young Singaporeans they are supposed to serve.

The above background should help answer the conservatives who are inclined to find excuses for the System. The only apparent benefit of a black-box screening process is to remind academics who’s boss. And since there are no explicit guidelines, staff are likely to second-guess the process by avoiding topics and speakers that may get caught in time-consuming red tape. Over time, a habit of self-censorship sets in.

None of this will be news to the other group of eye-rollers — the cynics who take it for granted that political control in Singapore is all-encompassing. The conservatives and the cynics may be at opposite ends of the ideological scale, but they are united in their indifference. When they hear people complain, both sides believe there is nothing remarkable to see here, and therefore nothing to say. But the cynics, like the conservatives, are wrong.

If social science and humanities departments in Singapore’s main university are required to have their academic visitors undergo non-academic vetting, yes, that’s certainly part of a larger pattern of control of our campuses (which we already know includes political screening of job applicants and disincentives for local scholarship), and part of an even larger culture that suppresses free thought through controls on media and public assembly. But it’s still important to register new data points that may reveal shifts in the political climate.

It is not true that academic events have always been subject to such vetting. I worked at NTU from 2004–2014 and never encountered any rule requiring us to seek permission before inviting a speaker. One of my colleagues had opposition politician J B Jeyaretnam speak in his media law class, for example. I asked a couple friends at NUS if they were familiar with the screening requirement that my talk had been subject to. They, like my host, were surprised to learn of it.

It’s equally untrue that this is simply the way Singapore is. Since moving to Hong Kong, I have flown back to deliver a keynote speech at a regional conference organised by the Institute of Policy Studies and sponsored by Temasek Foundation Connects, as well as seminars at the Singapore Institute of International Affairs and Singapore Management University. I’ve also spoken on panels organised by the Singapore Art Museum and ArtScience Museum. The treatment I’ve just received is not typical.

We know that there are sensitivities around foreign citizens being given a platform to talk about issues that the government deems controversial. The authorities equate such talks to foreign interference in Singapore’s domestic affairs. But this particular case does not fit that mould.

All said and done, like the conservatives and the cynics, I have no expectation that the System will feel any need to change course. I also know that most NUS faculty made their peace long ago with the way things are. Experience tells me that some will even apply their considerable intellect to finding creative justifications for the way the System works. Most will profess an understandable helplessness.

Having no illusions about the System’s inclination for self-reflection, I offer just one modest suggestion — that NUS make its policies more transparent.

Singapore’s academic community and its minders are free to develop their own norms regarding academic freedom. But why not have the courage of their convictions and openly declare the “standard procedure” (the term conveyed to me) that applies to visitors. Guest speakers should be informed at the outset that the invitation is subject to vetting that is outside the organiser’s control. They can then make an informed decision about whether to accept the invitation. Regardless of political orientation, surely we can agree that this is a professional courtesy that NUS owes to members of the global academic community.

UPDATES

Monday 12 March: I’ve been re-invited and have agreed to speak at NUS later this month. I was in two minds about whether to say yes, in case it’s seen as accepting of a process that treats Singaporeans this way. But I don’t doubt my host’s sincerity in inviting me. And, I’d like to believe that collegiality still has a place in academia.

Thursday 15 March: Subsequent media reports have quoted an NUS spokesman as expressing “regret” for the “unfortunate incident”, saying that “internal administrative processes took longer than expected due to an oversight”. NUS has not contradicted any part of the above article. (As some have asked, I should add that the spokesman’s statement to the press is the only communication I’ve seen from the NUS administration.) News reports have appeared in Singapore media (Channel NewsAsia, The Straits Times and Today) and Inside Higher Education.

Notes

[1] In this essay, I use the term “System” as shorthand for actors with the power to insert extraneous factors into the decision-making processes of formally autonomous institutions (such as universities and media), thus limiting their scope to act independently according to their professional norms and standards. The System’s actors may include top executives within the institution as well as government agencies and political masters. The System’s decisions are ultimately issued by the institution’s own administrators, and it is often difficult even for insiders to tell whether they have been explicitly prompted by government actors, or whether political priorities have been successfully internalised within the institution’s thinking such that no direct external intervention is required (resulting in “self-censorship”).

[2] My host had originally proposed that I speak about the Singapore media system. I said I’d prefer to go regional, in line with my current research: “Frankly I’m bored with talking about Singapore, since things don’t change much so I end up just repeating myself!”

[3] This is one reason why I welcomed the chance to present my research at a comprehensive university like NUS — to engage with scholars not just in my own field of communication, but also from its strong sociology and Asian studies departments, for example.

Those of us outside the establishment take it for granted that … organisations will invite us and then disinvite us.” – Me, in “Singapore, Incomplete”, page 99.

#THARMAN4THEJOB

By Cherian George

On February 7, 2018

In My Choice, Politics

SINGAPORE’S MYSTIFYING POLITICAL SUCCESSION

Published in New Mandala.

STREET ART

By Cherian George

On January 15, 2018

In Media, Society

RECLAIMING SPACE FOR CITIZENS

My talk at “Conversations: If Walls Could Talk”, a forum organised in conjunction with the exhibition, “Art from the Streets“, at the ArtScience Museum, Singapore.

It is good to know that the street art scene in Singapore is growing. I think of the gritty graffiti of Sao Paulo, the whimsical pieces around Manhattan’s Lower East Side and the selfie-friendly art adorning Georgetown, Penang. Street art humanises our urban habitats and adds to a city’s capacity to surprise.

We’ve heard today how practitioners here like Zul “Zero” Othman have been fighting for more space for their art. But it occurred to me that someone visiting Singapore from another planet or another era may wonder what all the fuss is about. Isn’t there enough of this artform already?

If you arrive at Changi Airport’s T4 like I did yesterday, you’d be immediately confronted with bold graphic creations….

As you approach Immigration, instead of a big Welcome to Singapore sign, there’s another massive piece….

Pass through Immigration and there’s more of this artist’s work. He signs off with the tag “Watsons”. I understand he is a Hongkong-based artist, so famous that you’ll find many stores across Asia carrying his name.

I trust you’d have realised by now that I’m not seriously equating commercial advertising with art. I’m highlighting this example to challenge some the entrenched assumptions and blindspots that come into play when we discuss whether we should make more room for street art.

Street art is sometimes talked about as if it is a kind of pollution, adding to clutter, spoiling the visual purity of the city. This is based on the notion that the urban landscape must conform to some kind of civic and aesthetic orderliness; that people going about their lives shouldn’t have to be assaulted by messages and symbols against their will.

The thing is, if Singapore ever was such a city, it certainly isn’t now.

Our urban media landscape has long been punctuated with words and images placed by private parties to serve their own interests. The Terminal 4 experience is hardly unique. Our public transport operators in particular exploit the fact that they have a captive audience.

Indeed, the outdoor advertising industry likes to promote itself as the medium that people can’t turn off.

So the real policy question we need to ask ourselves is not whether to preserve a dignified and austere aesthetic style versus a livelier visual field – that bus left the station long ago. Rather, it is how do we as a society decide who gets to place words and images on urban surfaces and infrastructure for all to see.

What are the rules of the game — the aesthetic or ethical principles, and the legal and regulatory arrangements — that determine the allocation of spaces for either artistic or commercial expression? When we ponder this question, we’ll quickly realise that the market has been given enormous power to make those decisions on our behalf.

If this doesn’t occur to us most of the time – if it seems normal, natural or even inevitable that money talks – it’s only because we’re so used to it, and because the same market logic dictates so much of the rest of our lives. Once we open our eyes and minds, we’d have to admit that our society’s generally negative reaction to street art is inconsistent and hypocritical. Most of the accusations levelled at street art could apply as much to commercial art, but aren’t.

For example, in terms of aesthetics, even if you don’t like particular styles of street art, it’s not as if you get to veto ugly advertisements placed around you by commercial firms or your town councils. And even if more space was opened up for artists, they would still account for a very small proportion of all the images and words being placed in public view, compared with other institutions that currently monopolise our urban media landscape.

Then there are people, including the authorities, who worry about the content of street art, fearing that it may be too “political” or “controversial”. Again, it’s not clear why such paternalism is confined to non-commercial art, and not applied to the many for-profit messages around us. If we are sincerely concerned about the potentially harmful effects of words and images placed in public, then surely the following commercial messages are far more problematic than whatever our street artists are willing and able to plaster on walls:

Sexist ads and displays that objectify women and girls…

Ads for alcohol, which are permitted on buses…

Ads that promote sugary drinks and fried food – like this misleading video commercial for coconut oil inside a taxi that implies that fried food will give you a longer life…

The cause-and-effect link between these persuasive messages and actual harms is far more strongly established than any wild claims about the dangers of today’s street art.

Yes, we do need to regulate what appears in the public eye, but regulations should be based on consistently applied principles, not cultural or ideological biases that result in too much latitude being given to commercial messages and not enough to not-for-profit art and self-expression.

Pro-Palestine messages have been removed from the approved graffiti walls at the youth spaces in Somerset. But if the principle being applied here is that the Singapore streetscape should not get entangled with the fraught Middle Eastern conflict, what about the fact that Marina Bay Sands is one of the top sources of profit for Sheldon Adelson, who was the biggest single donor to Donald Trump’s hate-filled election campaign and a major supporter of Israel’s illegal settlement building in the Occupied Territories? If we are fine with Marina Bay Sands’ prominence on the Singapore skyline despite its fairly direct and demonstrable connection to the subjugation of Palestinians, it seems only fair that we should allow artists to make pro-Palestinian art on a little wall that has been set aside specifically for graffiti.

Behind such inconsistency in treatment is perhaps the assumption that support for a cause expressed in words and images is more problematic than support expressed in cash, even though common sense tells us that money usually speaks louder than symbols.

Of course, market logic is a very powerful force that is difficult to resist. The commercialisation of our public spaces is partly driven by a very large and growing outdoor advertising industry. To give it its due, advertising does help to subsidise the provision of public services and infrastructure. To put it very simply, we’d probably have to pay more for our MRT and bus rides if we denied public transport operators the right to monetise their surfaces by selling advertising spaces instead of giving it away for not-for-profit purposes such as art.

Furthermore, the idea of property rights is probably too entrenched to dislodge, so let’s banish any dreams of allowing anyone to paint anything without permission. If street artists want to gain more than fringe acceptance, they would have to respect people’s expectation that what they own or manage shouldn’t be messed with in any way without their consent.

For some artists, law-breaking may be integral to the spirit of their performance (a bit like how civil disobedience deliberately seeks to break the law). I’m going to sidestep this issue, because I believe the vast majority of street artists are not in this category.

Certainly, they want to break convention, to challenge norms, to push boundaries. As Zul said earlier, he does not want to confine himself to “sanctioned” or “commissioned” art. But whether it’s legal or illegal is something others decide. The art does not set out to break law, it’s the law that breaks the art.

Take Samantha Lo’s efforts to humanise our streets.

As many others have already pointed out, it’s quite a stretch to claim that her humorous stickers were a danger to society. On the contrary, it was a wonderful way to add a layer of quirky Singaporean meaning to otherwise anonymous streets. It hardly deserved to be treated as a criminal act.

Last year, there was Priyageetha Dia’s golden staircase. Like Lo, Priya didn’t have permission to do this. But this was a hardly-used staircase. And after hearing from her today, you’d have to say that few Singaporeans could have as much moral justification as she had to turn this staircase into a canvas for self-expression. She has lived in the block all her life. It means something to her. Since the block has been upgraded with lift landings on every floor, residents don’t use those stairs anymore. Fortunately her town council was wise enough not to punish her. But, shockingly, she did receive violent online threats from members of the public, including threats of rape, showing how deeply ingrained is some Singaporeans’ view that anything in the public realm belongs to big government and big business, and that non-sanctioned citizen initiative is absolutely not welcome.

My gut feel tells me that there must be ways we can change the law, and with it social attitudes, to be more hospitable to street art. Not to remove regulation but to improve regulation.

The kind of interventions that Samantha and Priyageetha made in our public space should be positively welcomed. This is Nation Building 3.0, where citizens, without waiting for top-down guidance, find and express their personal connections to their country. Technically, they may be rebelling against bureaucratic rules, but at a deeper level they thicken the ties between citizen and nation. Our authorities need to understand this and adapt regulation accordingly.

If, for example, an artist agrees to restore a surface to its original condition if asked to; if there is no permanent damage to property; if there is no material loss to property owners while the art is on display – do we really need to criminalise such art as acts of vandalism? Policy and regulatory creativity needs to catch up with artistic creativity or, for that matter, or citizens’ desire to reclaim their city, a city that we too often feel alienated from, taken from us by faceless corporations and bureaucrats. Thus, I hope we can find ways to minimise the cost to the artist of engaging in street art.

In addition, I hope we can create more opportunities for such activity. The lowest-hanging fruit, the goal that is the easiest to accomplish, is of course to encourage more private and public sector property owners to commission street artists to adorn their walls.

I started with an airport example; let me return to airports, this time Jakarta’s new terminal, also opened last year. Someone had the bright idea to get an artist to doodle around the fire extinguishers.

The result is to make the long, tiresome walk from the gate to immigration a little more pleasurable. It shouldn’t be too difficult to find other such win-win opportunities.

In addition to commissioned street art, we should find ways to open up more spaces for freer expression. Most of our current sites are in “alternative” neighbourhoods.

To bring street art to the heartlands, I’d like to see town councils, six months before blocks are due for repainting, open up selected walls for street art. Let the artists run wild. Then allow residents vote on whether the art should be preserved or painted over at the appointed time. I think this would be an educational experience for all. And since the wall was due for repainting anyway, this exercise would be at no cost to residents or taxpayers.

Public transport operators are currently the most welcoming of commercial advertising, and I’d like to see them allocate some of that space for street art. Why can’t bus companies, as part of their licensing requirements or voluntarily as part of their corporate social responsibility, allocate 5 per cent of their buses for free to artists instead of commercial advertisers.

This would of course require artists to change medium, exchange their spray cans for digital printing on adhesive vinyl, but as this exhibition makes clear, many street artists around the world have welcomed the opportunity to work on new surfaces and with new materials.

The current system has decided that we we as residents of this city should be exposed to ads on wheels. If so, why not also art on wheels.

I hope this exhibition and the discussion we’ve had this afternoon will help shake up the rarely questioned logics behind the way we currently do things. We shouldn’t blindly surrender our urban media landscape to commercial interests. We can afford to allow artistic expression occasionally to take priority over the impulse to sell goods and services.

Notes on images

Main image: “State of Decline” by Singaporean artist Speak Cryptic, created on site at the ArtScience Museum.
The bus and MRT ad graphics are from Moove Media’s brochure.
The SAFRA gym ad caused a controversy in 2014.

UNIVERSITIES

By Cherian George

On January 11, 2018

In Uncategorized

SINGAPORE’S POWERHOUSES NEGLECT LOCAL INTELLECTUAL LIFE

Published in Times Higher Education and in Singapore, Incomplete.

PRESIDENCY

By Cherian George

On September 1, 2017

In Elections, Politics

THE MISSED OPPORTUNITY OF THE 2017 PRESIDENTIAL TURNOVER

This chapter from my book, Singapore, Incomplete, can be downloaded here.

THE HOUSE OF LEE

By Cherian George

On June 15, 2017

In My Choice, Politics

NO TOUTING PLEASE

If the letter of Lee Kuan Yew’s final will is not honoured, at least its spirit should be.

The Lee family feud is a test of Singapore’s political maturity. The first step toward dealing with this highly polarising debate is to acknowledge its complexity. This is not a multiple choice question with a clear right and wrong, no matter how convinced each side is of its own arguments.

And although 38 Oxley Road is just a house, it is not just a space; it is a place, invested with meaning by a family and a nation. If we treat places like mere spaces and subject them to cold calculation, we’ll rob them of emotion and memory, and lose a bit of what turns a collection of people into a community. We need to approach the matter with open hearts and minds.

Furthermore, Lee Kuan Yew’s own views about legacy and governance do not make it easy to come to a consensus about what to do with the house. On the one hand, we have on record his strong personal desire that the family home be demolished. It’s not hard to understand how determined two of his children, Lee Wei Ling and Lee Hsien Yang, are to fulfill their parents’ wishes.

But on the other, the system he built never allowed individual preferences to stand in the way of the public good, as interpreted by the government of the day.

Nowhere is this principle more apparent than in Lee’s land policies. Countless patriarchs’ plans for their property holdings have been dashed by Lee’s all-powerful land acquisition laws—freehold leases be damned. Countless others, who would have undoubtedly preferred their final resting places to be exactly that, have been dug up from their graves when the state decided their cemetery plots were needed for other purposes. If everyone else’s voice from the grave can be vetoed by the government, it’s not clear why Lee Kuan Yew’s should be the exception—especially when the government’s hardnosed, unsentimental approach to such matters is utterly in Lee’s own image.

By Singapore standards, therefore, it’s not necessarily sacrilegious for the government to consider the option of conserving Lee’s storied bungalow, no matter how firmly Lee would have opposed the idea. Part of the challenge of maturing our polity is to get used to the idea of operating by the rule of law, not the rule of Lee.

But maturation also demands that we pay close attention to the reasons Lee gave when he said, repeatedly, that he wanted his house flattened. This was in line with his well-known abhorrence of emotional pulls in politics, whether in the form of race, religion, language or charismatic personality. He wanted to build legitimacy around performance not identity, and to train Singaporeans to exercise a more clinical, legal-bureaucratic rationality.

You don’t need to be a disciple of Lee Kuan Yew to recognise this as a worthy principle for Singapore governance. Nor do you have to be a traitor to Lee Hsien Loong to acknowledge the risk, red-flagged by his siblings, that this principle will be compromised by preserving their house as a monument, against their father’s wishes.

Lee Wei Ling and Lee Hsien Yang fear that such a plan is being hatched to carry forward the family name to benefit the future political career of Lee Hsien Loong’s son. The prime minister and his wife have absolutely denied having any such dynastic ambitions.

The dynasty factor aside, though, we should remain wary of encouraging a political culture obsessed with personality. A people who are taught to credit their nation’s past progress to Great Men will long for more Great Men to solve future problems. That way lies the kind of populism and demagoguery that is rampant in today’s world.

The government should treat these concerns seriously if it’s contemplating overriding Lee Kuan Yew’s wishes. Even if the two younger Lee siblings’ most pointed allegations are unfounded, their broader concern is legitimate. The public interest should be insulated from the political interests of any individual or group.

The government would lose nothing but short-term pride if it were to dissolve its ministerial committee immediately and provide the assurance that any new body tasked to make recommendations will be constituted only after Lee Hsien Loong has left Cabinet. It serves nobody to allow any perception to linger that a government decision on the house is being influenced by Lee Hsien Loong’s private interest in capitalising on his father’s name.

The conflict of interest question can also be addressed by ensuring that any such committee is chaired by an independent eminent historian, and not by a politician or civil servant. It should be obliged to consult widely, especially with the Heritage Society and other relevant groups.

But it’s impossible to prevent a third or fourth generation Lee from milking an LKY monument for personal advantage down the line. Citizens of sound mind have a right to stand for election, and it is hard to think of a reasonable way to stop any candidate from talking about his or her family heritage.

In the first place, though, I wonder if we’re getting carried away with the fate of the house. Yes, 38 Oxley Road is an iconic site. But we need a sense of proportion. It is not what Jerusalem is to People of the Book. Nor is it Mount Doom in The Lord of the Rings—the place where the One Ring was forged, the only place it can be destroyed, and where the entire fate of Middle Earth hangs in balance.

No, the Lee family home is neither a necessary nor a sufficient possession for anyone determined to use or abuse the power of Lee Kuan Yew’s memory for selfish reasons. Even if it’s demolished, a replica could be erected elsewhere (including in Gardens by the Bay, still my choice of site that should be named after LKY). Alternatively, an augmented reality version could be reconstructed digitally, allowing people to put on a 3D headset for an immersive experience that, with the right music and narration, could be even more emotive—and manipulative—than a real-life visit to the actual site.

What’s more, since the vast majority of Singaporeans have no idea what the house looks like, a proposed monument doesn’t even need any connection to that address. For that matter, it doesn’t need to be a building. Even if the younger Lee siblings succeed in their bid to demolish No. 38, it’s not going to stop any individual or group from memorialising the LKY name through educational resources, books, movies, cartoons, songs, plays, paintings, exhibitions, t-shirts, stickers and other paraphernalia. The Estate could attempt to block commercially exploitative uses of the Lee name and likeness, but efforts to keep Brand LKY out of politics will probably be futile.

Indeed, the painful truth for the younger Lees is that the ship has probably already sailed. It weighed anchor at Lee Kuan Yew’s funeral, when most Singaporeans were moved by the sight of Lee Hsien Loong having to bear his Prime Ministerial duty to lead a mourning nation through its loss while at the same time dealing with his own grief as a son. In coldly political terms, this was the moment that being the son of LKY became a clear asset instead of a potential liability. A few months later, during the 2015 general election campaign, Lee Hsien Loong went so far as to channel his father in his Fullerton rally speech—“This is not a game of cards! This is your life and mine!” PAP critics may have been unimpressed, but to the party faithful, it was a goosebump-worthy moment.

All in all, it is simply unrealistic to try to stop anyone—least of all any member of the Lee family—from feeding an LKY cult, either deliberately or inadvertently. Instead, the more effective counter-strategy would be to build up Singaporeans’ critical thinking skills so we can resist simplistic Great Man accounts of history.

The core of this effort must be led by academic historians, who are best placed to help us develop a more contextual understand of our heritage, fed by multiple and even competing narratives. Also able to help develop society’s antibodies against demagoguery are filmmakers, playwrights and artists who, through their factual and fictional stories, have been trying to surface Singaporean narratives neglected by mainstream history. Sadly, some of the most thought-provoking creations in this genre—like Tan Pin Pin’s To Singapore, With Love and Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye—have been treated as dissident works instead of the loving, nation-building reflections they really are. We should let historical discussions and debates flow, unimpeded by OB markers or censorship.

A more mature attitude to our history and politics can allow us to have the best of both worlds. We can honour and, yes, even monumentalise what is truly remarkable about our first Prime Minister, while avoiding the trap of deifying any mortal leader. Whether or not Lee Kuan Yew’s house remains standing isn’t really the issue. It’s whether we keep the doors and windows open to the fresh air of new information and ideas about our past and future.

– Photo of 38 Oxley Road: GOOGLE STREETVIEW

OLYMPIC GOLD

By Cherian George

On August 13, 2016

In My Choice, Society

FLOAT LIKE A BUTTERFLY

Many Singaporeans want Joseph Schooling exempted from National Service. Can the government bend the rules?

In the wake of Joseph Schooling’s spectacular, surging success in Rio de Janeiro, two-thirds of people I polled said that the young hero should now be excused from his National Service obligation. The inconvenient question of his NS status had been raised by a couple of friends, so I was curious to find out what others thought.

My informal poll results, as at 7pm on August 13. Click through to view the latest numbers.

Admittedly, this was an unscientific survey, probably skewed by post-Rio euphoria, tilted toward the viewpoints of those with time to dawdle over social media, and under-representing men and women in uniform who are too busy keeping the country safe to take part in an online poll.

Nevertheless, I’d wager that most Singaporeans do indeed feel that Schooling should be allowed to continue serving the nation in his swimming trunks instead of a No. 4 camouflage uniform.

Those who don’t know Singapore may think that this reflects people’s indifference toward NS. I doubt that that’s the case. Singaporeans may complain about specific aspects of NS, but there is broad and deep commitment to the institution of compulsory enlistment for all males. NS is regarded as a key rite of passage, and one of the great equalisers in a divided society.

So, when Singaporeans say they are prepared to make an exception for Schooling, you can bet it’s not because they dismiss NS as no big deal, but because they regard his accomplishment as, well, Olympian.

This sentiment may put the Singapore government in a bind. With good reason, the government does not exempt able-bodied males from NS. Every now and then, Singaporeans suggest alternative avenues for service, including through sport. But the government has, correctly in my view, resisted calls to dilute the core mission of NS. It maintains that NS is meant to serve one purpose: defending the security of the nation. You can’t substitute it with other forms of contribution, no matter how valuable they may seem.

To do so would lead to endless bickering over legitimate justifications for being excused from military service. Take, for example, a young technopreneur who has just launched a world-beating startup that could be the next Samsung or Apple. Without the two-year interruption of NS, he could create a homegrown private-sector MNC—something as rare an Olympic medal, and much more tangible in value.

On what basis would this geek get his NS call-up while Schooling is allowed to continue chasing sporting glory?

The main reason I’m opposed to liberalising enlistment rules is that educated, upper middle class families are bound to benefit disproportionately—they are the ones who will be able to find the loopholes and write up convincing justifications. We could end up with a situation where less privileged Singaporeans are the ones compelled to put their lives on the line for the country.

I would not fault the government for thinking through such complications. After all, Singapore did not get to where it is through impulsive, arbitrary decision-making (except, perhaps, when dealing with critics and opponents). Bureaucratic rationality can be a massive turn-off, but with something like NS, the government really has no choice but to take into account boring things like rules and precedents.

And yet.

When we saw that gold medal around a Bedok boy’s neck; when we gaped at our Singapore flag flying higher than the American stars and stripes; when Majulah Singapura played, and we realised that hundreds of millions of people around the world might be listening with us—can anyone fault us for wanting even more?

What makes Schooling’s triumph in the 100m butterfly so addictively sweet is the sense that this is just the beginning. The 21-year-old can keep delivering, and if he is allowed time to sustain and better his world-beating performance, other Singaporeans will follow. This dream is not some mythical unicorn that vanishes into the night, but an achievable goal with the proven nation-building potential of competitive sport.

Schooling’s NS status is a policy dilemma that is emblematic of the times. On many fronts, Singapore’s leaders are called on to balance the hard truths that dictated past decisions with the less tangible needs of a First World society. If they are up to the challenge, they will be able to find a creative way to let Schooling keep swimming, without compromising the principle of universal conscription that underlies national defence.

Then, to quote another champ, Singapore can float like a butterfly and still sting like a bee.