This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on July 31, 2017 - August 6, 2017
The final test of the level of civilisation that we have achieved and by which we judge our society is the type of behaviour that we find in our people. This, of course, depends on the kinds of values that are dominant in society. Let us consider the example of corruption.
Malaysia has fallen once again in the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index (2016). Our ranking dropped from 54 out of 168 countries to 55 out of 176 countries. That corruption is perceived to be rampant in the country points to a crisis, not only of confidence but also of values. It means that, by the reckoning of many people, many Malaysian politicians and bureaucrats are willing to abuse their office for private gain. This also means that many members of the public are willing to participate in corrupt activities such as offering bribes to obtain a service or to elude the law.
Values refer to what a society regards as right, desirable and important. Respect, tolerance, compassion, concern for the community, freedom, security and peace are examples of values that are more or less universal, which are cherished by all peoples. The problem then becomes one of a contradiction between the values that parents, religious leaders and educators want to inculcate in our children and those that are dominant in our modern consumerist societies.
There are obviously many positive points of modern society. In the past 200 years or so, there have been relatively higher growth rates in much of the world, advances in the transport of people and goods, the discovery of new sources of energy, the development of information technology, the invention of artificially produced materials, improvements in healthcare, the abolition of slavery, progress in human rights, and so on.
On the negative side, however, humanitarian disasters, environmental degradation and political repression all point to a crisis of humanity. In the past century, millions have died as a result of genocidal acts against Europe’s Jews and Muslims. Many have died at the hands of Muslim extremists. At the same time, Muslims themselves are victims of violence as is the case in Myanmar today. In the West, Muslims have become victims of Islamophobia. Elsewhere, others die of malnutrition, disease and civil strife.
As far as the environment is concerned, rapid economic growth in the past couple of centuries has led to great demands for power, transport and communications, resulting in pollution, congestion, climate changes and overall damage to ecosystems. Politically, many countries around the world continue to be ruled by dictatorial regimes, where people live insecurely under arbitrary rule.
Therefore, the family, educational institutions and religious organisations must be the sites where people are encouraged not just to study hard for the sake of getting jobs and material possessions but also to become ethical human beings. Different countries in Southeast Asia pride themselves on being bastions of Buddhism, Catholicism and Islam. But the battle is continuously being waged against consumerism and negative practices and lifestyles. If this battle is being lost in the schools and in the workplace, the family as a battleground becomes all the more important.
Two problems arise in this battle. One is the demonisation of the West. There has been much talk of values, particularly in the context of the contradiction between the East and West. To a great extent, however, the problem of global well-being and harmony is not so much one of value conflicts between the East and West. In fact, it has often been the case that nations from the same civilisation went to war against one another. Consider the two world wars, the Korean and Vietnam wars, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf Crisis and the war against the so-called Islamic State. The issues that were fought over had little to do with fundamental value conflicts.
Is there much to fear from Western cultural influences as they spread throughout the globe? In addressing this issue, let us first of all not see the West as one undifferentiated whole. Very often, what we mean by Westernisation is Americanisation. Even in Europe, this problem is felt. For example, the Dutch and the French have been feeling the need to protect their languages from the encroachment of English. Secondly, we share many values with the West. Notions of justice and freedom, the value of security of life and property, the value of literacy, and so on are common to many civilisations.
We ought to consider that a greater threat to our lives is the kind of order that capitalism, industrialisation and bureaucratisation have created, rather than Western culture. We have been born into an order based on the technical and economic conditions of machine production and factory life. The capitalist order created a highly efficient system for the management of capitalism. This is based on the bureaucratic division of labour. But there is a tension between the need for technical efficiency in administration and human values of freedom and autonomy.
This brings us to the second problem. In modern society, people are governed by bureaucratic norms of efficiency and calculability. Thus, we have come to regard values in instrumental terms. We appreciate values for their usefulness in bringing about economic development. In the 1980s, Confucianism and traditional values were sometimes invoked in a very instrumental manner. We were told of the “cash value of values”.
We also heard of Malaysia Inc and Singapore Inc. If these notions were restricted to privatisation and other development programmes, this can be a good thing. But this is not the same thing as having our countries modelled after a corporation and run along over-bureaucratised lines. The danger of an instrumental approach to values is that the values will not be taken seriously and that an instrumental, opportunistic attitude will be inculcated rather than the values themselves.
When this happens, when an instrumental outlook on life rules, values are not respected for themselves and people become indifferent to the evil and wrongdoing that exist in the world, even those that are manifested in the death and suffering of others. Humans lose their moral responsibility. This is especially so in the affluent countries of the industrialised world. In such countries, decisions that can alleviate suffering are rarely taken.
At the governmental level, richer countries do not provide assistance of the magnitude that could reduce suffering to a minimum, even in cases where they were the originators of the suffering. Sometimes, it happens that assistance exacerbates the situation, as in Rwanda in the 1990s, where French troops had occupied as much as one-third of the country and were protecting Hutu leaders responsible for the massacre of the Tutsis.
The problem of indifference can be illustrated vividly by an incident that took place in the early 1990s. On Jan 17, 1994, Martin Luther King Jr Day in the US, a science teacher from Castlemont High School in Oakland, California, took 70 students to see the movie, Schindler’s List. These students were promptly told to leave the theatre by the owner after some of them were heard laughing at a scene of a Nazi soldier shooting a Jewish woman.
If we accept the principle that death and suffering from a lack of food, medical care and shelter, from corrupt practices, or from torture and murder are injustices, then we either have to do everything in our power to prevent these things from happening or, if they have happened, we need to help in the alleviation of the resultant suffering.
From the point of view of morality, it makes little difference whether the victims are near us or far away or existed in another time. If we are not able to feel horrified by the systematic extermination of millions of people just because they professed another religion or because it happened five decades ago in a far-off place, then we have lost some of our humanity and are out of touch with history.
The family is an important site for the socialisation of citizens with the values of respect, tolerance, compassion, concern for the community, freedom and universal peace. The family is the sanctuary and sanctum of those values and prescriptions for conduct that may result in the emergence of a new generation of economic and political elite that abhors war, corruption, destruction and the lack of compassion.
In speaking of the role of the family in this regard, the importance of the impact of women must be stressed. In this male-dominated, patriarchal world, it is safe to say that the men have generally made a mess of things. The role of women in the socialisation of family members, especially where conscientisation with regard to humanitarian disasters, ecological destruction and political repression are concerned, cannot be emphasised enough.
Syed Farid Alatas is Professor of Sociology at the National University of Singapore
Save by subscribing to us for your print and/or digital copy.
P/S: The Edge is also available on Apple's AppStore and Androids' Google Play.