“There wouldn’t be a Single Round Eye in an American University if the System was truly about merit” – An Old Rogue.

 

Thanks to the return of Donald Trump to the White House, getting news pegs for things you rant about has become easier. Donald Trump did not disappoint in that department when over the weekend, Mr. Trump fired the Chairman of the Joint Chief’s of Staff, General CQ Brown, along with other senior military officers, including the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Lisa Franchetti and vice-chief for the air force, General Jim Slife.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyr2xvn4dpo

 

 The moves caught people by surprise but were predictable. The Secretary of Defence, Pete Hegseth had stated that one of his first moves would have been to fire General Brown because he was considered “woke” for having spoken up about the George Floyd murder four years ago.

As mentioned, the Trump administration is on the war path against the “management fad” known as “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” or “DEI.” Federal Government agencies and corporations who were once trying to have lots of DEI programs and now rushing to scale back.

https://www.pgsf.org/diversity-equity-inclusion-dei/

 

 According to the Mr. Hegseth, the firing of the likes of General Brown, the second African-American to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Admiral Franchetti, the first woman to be Chief of Naval Operations, ends the era of “DEI Nonsense” and returns the military to “merit based” promotions and focus on “war fighting.”

On the surface, the end of “woke” and things like “DEI” seems to sound like a common-sense return to old fashioned focus on getting things done. To an extent, this sounds like a relief after years of “cultural wars” over things like trans-rights, pronouns and so on.

However, whilst this may sound like a return to what many of us might consider normal, the truth is that the whole point of DEI is misunderstood and the war against the DEI is likely to do exactly the opposite of what its propagators claim they want to do – restore merit to the system.

Let’s face it, meritocracy is a wonderful ideal. In an ideal world, only the best and brightest would get ahead regardless of ethnicity, religion, gender or sexual orientation. Being “colour-blind” when it comes to doing things is the way things “should be.”

However, the reality is that we don’t live in an ideal world and more often than not, things are not as they should be. If you look at any given society, the people with power like having power and their children tend to grow up thinking that their privilege of starting life in a certain place is a natural right.

Look at it this way, nearly everyone of us grew up understanding that the way to get ahead in life is to go to school, get good grades and then get a good job. However, the truth is that a good portion of us start out in “disadvantaged” circumstances. An ethnically white son of a real estate tycoon in Manhattan who went to University of Pennsylvania starts out from a very different place from a black kid from the Bronx who would be lucky to end up in a school where a metal detector at the door is a necessity. It goes without saying that the first kid is bound to do way better in life than the second, who, in many cases would be considered lucky if he didn’t end up doing a bit of time before his 30^th birthday.

Now, you could say this is not the fault of the first kid for being born into a well to do family (speaking as a kid who grew up well to do). However, you can’t really call it true merit if people only compete with people like themselves. Here in Singapore, we officially have a meritocracy. However, if you glance at the boards of the companies on the SGX, you’ll notice that the same names keep popping up. Why is that so? Are these people simply better than the rest of us? The answer could be yes if you look at the way merit is defined (best education performance etc). However, you need to look closer and you’ll notice that they inevitably came from the same schools, hung out in the right social circles and so on.

The problem we get is that concept of merit gets defined by the people on top. This allows them to choose the concept of merit to keep things within the circle. This allows us to develop “inbreeding.” One only has to glance at portraits of medieval monarchs to understand how damaging inbreeding can be.

So, given that the concept of merit becomes corrupted over time, it actually becomes necessary to have something to ensure that the pool of competing people remains relatively open. Call the concept of DEI a necessary step protecting the system from inbreeding.

This leads to the other point that states that DEI and things like affirmative action are about promoting incompetent minorities at the expense of competent majorities. What affirmative action says is that if all things are equal, the one who happens to have something “disadvantaged” in their background, gets the job. Let’s also remember that affirmative action was about keeping the number of Asians down in American university as much it’s been about promoting blacks and Latinos in the work place. The Old Rogue, when he was alive pointed out that “There wouldn’t be a single round eye in American universities if they were based on merit.”

Now, despite the “noble intentions” of DEI, there are faults in the system. However, one of the great ironies is that the one institution that has truly been “colour blind” in America is the military. This being the one place where the number of black people ordering white people around is sizeable.

As anyone who has been into the military realizes, you end up in situations where you care less about whether the person is black, white or purple as long as they can help you out.

Let’s put it this way, General Brown is only the second “black” man to get the top job in the military. This is a job that’s been around since 1942. Admiral Franchetti is the only woman to run the navy, a job that’s been around since 1909. Nobody has stated that either were put there by anything other than merit (for the record, General Brown got his job as the top man in the air force because Donald Trump put him there). As Nelson DeMille in his book the “General’s Daughter” points out “Blacks and Women in the military have to work harder.”

Let’s look at the fact that General Brown’s presumptive replacement is retired Lieutenant-General Dan Caine, who has a record of being a great fighter pilot but has never held a four-star appointment. Is this a case of a qualified black man being replaced by a less qualified white man?  

Yes, the possibility of DEI getting silly is there. However, as the removal of General Brown and Admiral Franchetti is not about returning the military to merit based promotions and focusing on “war-fighting.”

Little Tribes

 

It’s Valentines Day today and I thought it was time to bash out a piece on a topic that many of us don’t think about – our need for a tribe. Ironically, my “love-life” has been what you could call an opener into the topic of tribes.

Let’s face it, the word “tribe” has “primitive” connotations. Mention the word and you automatically think of “less sophisticated” societies like “native Americans” or places in the outback of Sub-Saharan Africa. However, the truth is that modern societies, like Singapore’s a in fact very tribal.

As much as we talk about diversity and the need for “unity in diversity,” the truth is, we as a species,” gravitate towards people who are “like” us regardless of whether the “like” is based on ethnicity, religion, sexuality and so on. I experienced this first hand, when I was a student. I lived in Dean Street, Soho, which was the centre of the “Gay Tribe” of Europe (I used to hang out in a Spanish bar where all the Spanish gay people who could not be gay in Spain ended up.) At the same time, I was also a stone’s throw away from Chinatown, which provided the comfort being able to speak Cantonese (or anything other English), and I got to eat familiar foods like “Dim Sum,” (Chinese restaurants in that part of London were great – the only exception being “Mr. Wu’s” which was a Pseudo-Chinese buffet and I can proudly say I never entered the place in three years of living there.)

In a way, this makes sense, particularly if you’re a migrant, arriving in a place where you don’t speak the language and you don’t know anyone. The most natural place where you gravitate towards is to the place where there are people like you and who can understand you and hopefully get you settled and started in the new place. It was your fellow clansmen who helped you get work and if you started up a business, they were the ones who would be your initial customers. The workings of how “migrant tribes,” whether you call them “Tongs” in the context of a Chinatown in the West or a “Kongsi” in Southeast Asia are best illustrated in the Netflix Series, “Warrior” which shows how Chinese communities in 18^th century San Franciso settled and tried to build a life.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5743796/

 

 It’s easy to see why and how such little tribes formed. I mean, where do you expect to go to when you’re in a foreign land, where you are effectively a fish out of water? Its natural to go to the people are understand you. The Kongsi’s in South East Asia, provided a haven for migrants and by and large, helped to build people-to-people ties between the country or origin and the host country of their communities. I think of the Khoo Kongsi in Penang, Malaysia, which I visited in November. Mum’s close friend, Uncle Teng Guan had actually traced a lot of his heritage in Malaysia through the Khoo Kongsi.

https://www.tiktok.com/@tang.li0/video/7441812326333926673?lang=en

 

 

However, whilst the Kong Si’s had their uses, Singapore’s first tribal leader, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, decided that they were an impediment to build a “united” Singapore. As such, he went to war against anything that resembled a tie to an era he did not shape. Mr. Lee, for all his brilliance, had a blind spot against Chinese dialects, which he regarded as a relic of an ugly past. As far as he was concerned, Singaporean Chinese would speak English and Mandarin. It was good to learn other things to, except Chinese dialects.

In a way, his war against tribalism seemed wise. Racial quotas in housing estates for example, meant that people of different ethnicities and religions would eventually live side by side. No community would dominate any particular neighborhood.

However, just as clamped down on “tribal” affinations of the old sort, people found new tribal associations. One only has to think of how old school networks play a part in certain industries. I think of my era when I had a Commanding Officer from Hwa Jong as well as a div-arty and Chief of Artillery from the same place. In my first case in the insolvency trade, I notice that the partner in the law firm we were working with came from ACS. No surprise where the associate came from.

Sure, with a new batch of immigrants, the old factors like race and language come about. In my 13-years with Huong, a lot of our social life evolved around Vietnamese girls and their boyfriends or husbands who were inevitably Caucasian expats mainly from the oil and gas industry.

However, its not just race and religion. One of my favourite Teddy Bears in a Chubby Boy who plays video games. His tribe is a tribe of Chubby Boys who play video games. When the focus was the neurotic angel, I discovered a tribe of “Over 50’s Party girls,” who were trying to get a tribe of little party boys. Now that I’m spending Valentines Day with the Pillow, I’ve noticed that a lot of her friends are also pillows. I look at myself. I am bald and the guy who has kept me in a job for the last decade is also bald.

Now, there are advantages of the new tribes in that there’s flexibility. You don’t have to be exclusive to any particular tribe. Some of the Over 50s Party Girls are part of the Pillow gang as well. I, for example, happen to mix with people with hair from time to time.

There is a use for tribes. Human beings need their tribes. However, as shown in the Warrior series, there’s the issue of insularity. If you watch Warrior, you’ll notice the way in which the Irish and Chinese have a go at each other because they think killing the other community benefits theirs.

So, whilst people will look for their own tribe, there is also the need for a safe guard against breeding tribalism and insularity. To an extent, its encouraging to see how some tribes do it from the ground up, like a recent cross-chamber party I recently attended, which was jointly organized by the Irish, Canadians, Italian, South Africans and New Zealanders. All these countries are relatively small. Yet, they’ve found that working together on such events does create opportunities for their members. Its something we should all remember, we may be small but when we work together, we can do great things.  

https://irishchambersg.glueup.com/event/cross-chamber-lunar-new-year-networking-celebration-22nd-january-2025-128805/