I know I shouldn’t indulge in stereotypes but I was
considered an odd ball when I was growing up as an Asian kid in the Western
world. The reasons were simple, my strengths were in the use of language rather
than in numbers and I preferred going out with people rather than studying. Asian
students were always assumed to be quiet, less social but always hardworking. The
Americans describe their Asian communities as being the “model minority.” The
kids are always at school and the parent are always at work.
Singapore’s first non-Caucasian colonial administrator, Mr.
Lee Kuan Yew, made the most of that stereotype when seeking foreign investment from
the Western world. He was the cheerleader of “Asian Values,” which a phrase he
used to say that anyone setting up shop in Singapore would find a population of
authority-respecting (the boss is God on earth) and hardworking people (happy
to work whatever hours you set).
Once again, there is some truth of that. Singapore’s school
kids have to slog it out in one of the world’s more demanding education
systems. Our old folks who carry the heaviest loads in fast-food outlets are probably
amongst the hardest working people around.
However, as with everything related to the public image of
Singapore, that’s not quite accurate. Whilst our old folks are among the more
hardworking people around, they are also among the least rewarded. Our system
does not exactly encourage hard work. In fact, if you look our system, we
actually encourage the opposite of hard work. If you look at what our Prime
Minister calls “Natural Aristocracy,” you will notice that sloth, particularly
intellectual sloth is a prerequisite of being part of the elite.
Take the example of the regular debate on 377A, the section
of the penal code that criminalises consensual sex among adult men. Evidence that
this is a useless law that does not do anything for society is overwhelming. However,
not a single one of our highly educated representatives have bothered to point
out the obvious? Why is that?
The answer is simple. The biggest proponent of keeping this
law, is a legal professor who has spent a good portion of her life arguing that
the removing the law will effectively make the increase the number of
homosexuals. How does our natural aristocracy respond to this scientifically
challenged claim? One elected representative I used to work alongside in his
day job, commented that the professor just used a lot of big words. In hind
sight this particular member of parliament was effectively saying that was too much
hard work trying to understand big words and therefore too trying to understand
if the message made sense.
Another example of how sloth is celebrated by our natural
aristocracy comes from another former nominated member of parliament, Mr.
Calvin Cheng. Mr. Cheng is everything that I am not. He is brainy (Oxford
University), he is rich and more importantly he has hair. Because he has the
things that I don’t have, he gets to indulge in intellectual laziness. Take his
celebration of the announcement that the Yale-NUS college would be shutting down,
which he pasted on his Facebook page.
His only explanation was that the Yale-NUS college was a
bastion of evil American liberalism and his only evidence was the fact that there
was a professor who happens to be a leading light among opposition voices
thought that Singapore didn’t need an American college as a partner.
Perhaps you could argue that I’m just being jealous because
Mr. Cheng has hair. However, it seems to be that this is one of the biggest
examples of celebrating intellectual sloth. Sure, Singapore can build a college
of its own to suite its own cultural context. However, that would take time and
effort that no one is prepared to invest. Yale on the other hand has a “brand”
(merely ranks among the best in the world) and what could be the easiest way
for our National University of Singapore (NUS) to put itself on the world map
than to tie up with Yale. Then, when things don’t go as planned, close everything
down and call it a bastion of values that incompatible with the rest of
society.
What else can you call this other than laziness? You don’t
want to invest the time in building something on your own. Then, you decide to
tie up with a foreign institution but don’t want to put in the time and effort
to either see if there is cultural compatibility with the institutions or in
trying to create said cultural compatibility. You merely close it down after millions
of dollars spent without even including the person that you hired to make
things happen in the discussion process.
Mr. Cheng is a cheerleader of laziness. He’ll take a position
and come up with a banal argument that fails to scratch the surface of the
issue and expects to be treated as an intelligent person (which he actually is
and there are times when he actually makes sense). Take his posting on the
super majority of the ruling party, which can be found at:
https://calvincheng.sg/2020/07/supermajority/
The crux of his argument seems to be, if the ruling party
isn’t going to have supermajority to change the constitution at will, the
opposition can’t have one either. Besides, nobody cares so why bother. Let me
repeat that this is coming from someone who graduated from Oxford (one of the world’s
best) and not the ranting of senile person.
Mr. Cheng is unfortunately not the only member of the
natural aristocracy who takes pride in being lazy. He’s merely the most vocal
in his celebration of laziness. Read through his rantings and you get a good of
idea of why someone of our larger home-grown corporations have performed so
underwhelmingly. The man on top comes up with an idea and expects people who
worship the idea because it is his. Any challenge to the said idea is
considered heresy and incompatible with local culture. When things go wrong,
its everyone else’s fault and when a paltry solution to the surface problem is
discovered, the man on top is a hero. Why are people surprised that nobody goes
out of their way to build better things in such management cultures?
I’ve argued that the problem is not that Singapore imports
people from elsewhere. The problem here is that our people have been discouraged
from the doing the hard work of actually thinking and people who try to think
are slapped down as being Western liberals. As such, local talent leaves and goes
elsewhere and we waste talent.
Let’s remember why the teaching of liberal arts was discouraged
in the first place. To do well in the liberal arts, one is required to challenge
established ideas and liberal arts students spend their time debating all sorts
of things. The liberal arts don’t qualify you for anything in particular but
they train you to think of issues from a variety of angles. If you look at Mr.
Cheng’s celebration of the closure of Yale-NUS, it would seem that training
people to think is incompatible with Singapore culture. If Mr. Cheng and his
fellow members of the natural aristocracy want Singapore to succeed, they
should not celebrate this and do their best to make thinking part of the local
culture.
No comments
Post a Comment