Basagan ng Trip: Complaints About Filipino Culture and Politics

Part 1

Pedagogic pedantry

or

Reflections from the

classroom and archive

The humility of the archive

I THRIVE IN archives and libraries. One time when I was leafing through old education magazines with a friend in Ateneo’s Rizal Library, I cracked a joke about archival research being like thrifting. The ukay-ukay thrifter, like the historian looking for documents, scans through stacks of old material to find one or two items of note. It is a tedious process. But both recognize that half the fun is the search, and both know that success demands patience.

Archival work is a humbling and grounding experience. It is a way of communing with people from a distant culture (the past, even of one’s own country, is a different culture) and letting them speak in their own terms. Since your respondents are dead, you cannot talk back, so you have no option but to listen. Alone, either in the scorching rooms of the National Library or in your grandfather’s old study, you think, you anticipate, you absorb. The process becomes a form of meditation, an externally aware practice of introspection.

Over the years, I’ve seen archives and libraries as sanctuaries for ethical as much as intellectual discovery. Since I started working at Kyoto University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies earlier this year, I’ve tried to schedule weekly dates with either my beloved microfilm reader or the volumes of Filipiniana in our special collection. These dates have allowed me to learn a lot about my favorite topics: early twentieth-century Pinoy intellectuals, Pinoy Marxists, and the milieus that animated them.

The dates have also allowed me to look into my own ethical weaknesses. As a former college debater, I was used to shooting my mouth about any topic, even those I knew nothing about. Ironically, as I’ve done more research, my know-it-all tendencies have waned. After all, there is no better way to remind yourself how much you don’t know and how much you will never know than by looking at stacks of old books you will never get to read. There is no better way to remind yourself how fleeting knowledge and certainty are than by reading old texts that no longer make sense.

The nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke famously remarked that a historian must extinguish the self. Ranke was not referring to suicide (although I have met suicidal academics), but the process of taking one’s biases out of historical research. Many contemporary historians see this injunction as passé, correctly noting that any act of interpretation is filtered through one’s personality.

None of this, however, means we should stop grappling with our biases. Maybe historians—and anyone seeking to discover provisional truths for that matter—shouldn’t extinguish the self but wrestle with it, know it, and rework it the way sculptors form layers out of rocks. This process is perhaps what Michel Foucault and Friedrich Nietzsche meant when they referred to ethics as aesthetic.

When uninformed polemic informs everything from our politics to our personal relationships, quixotic quests for objectivity become radical. And while these quests may be less exciting than grand claim-making for un-grand times, the humility that informs them may inspire others. Take the example of Jesuit historian Fr. John N. Schumacher, who passed away last May.

Father Jack wrote his works on nineteenth-century Filipino nationalism roughly at the same time radical nationalist historians from UP like Teodoro Agoncillo and Renato Constantino were working on similar topics. His works were always restrained, cerebral, and sober—bereft of the agit-prop value of Agoncillo’s or Constantino’s tomes. While the Diliman historians looked at the drama of the Philippine revolution as a working-class, militant struggle, the American Jesuit priest from the clerico-fascist university in Loyola never romanticized, because, as his footnotes show, he spent too much time crawling through stacks of documents in Madrid (Disclosure: I am an Ateneo historian). Many activists from the ’70s claim Agoncillo and Constantino fomented the militancy of an entire generation, while Schumacher merely wrote facts. But who was correct?

As historians do more research on the Philippine revolution, we are starting to discover that the old Jesuit was more accurate than the radical polemicists (see, for instance, the introduction of Michael Cullinane’s new book Arenas of Conspiracy). Perhaps what prevented many in my profession from seeing this was the modesty of Schumacher’s claims: He never tried to define the essence of Filipino identity (although he was a Filipino citizen), nor did he claim to have the political blueprint for a radical future. He simply wrote what he saw.

I never had Schumacher’s modesty. As a writer trained in the age of cultural theory, I’ve made grand claims of my own, regretting some and relentlessly defending others. But I drag myself back to the archive when I’m full of myself. The dust may sometimes give me allergic attacks, but it is worth the rewards of knowledge and humility.

Another humble and rigorous historian in the mold of Schumacher, Resil Mojares, reminds us that the word archive derives from the same word as archon—the ruler who watched over Greek city states. Archives watch over our political and cultural life by reminding us of past lessons. What I learned, however, is that archives and written texts also allow us to watch over ourselves.

The simple wonders of dusty paper.

GMA News, June 19, 2014

Dear Graduates,

the real world is fake

I SAID GOODBYE to my graduating students today. The farewell was visceral. Five years ago, I was in their shoes, excited about starting a career while anxious about leaving behind the comforts of university: Fifteen units, org time, college romance, perennial grade consciousness, blockmates, etc.

Graduation, as the cliché goes, is when you begin the hard transition into the real world—a concept I never really understood. In my mind, only MTV has defined this world adequately, fleshing it out in all its trashy grandiosity for twenty-six seasons. In that case, reality was actually fake, revealing the inherent flimsiness of the concept.

The idea of a post-graduation real world is offensive to academics. If the real world lies outside university halls, what do teachers do? Play? Act? Dissimulate?

The life of the mind may at times be solitary, and it may lead to bouts of depression, but it’s as real, if not more real, than Taylorized work. And when lived to the fullest, this life may even alter reality.

Common-sense reality refers to a specific lifestyle, rendered normal by a society that prices everything. The real world, especially for the upwardly mobile/wealthily immobile Atenistas I teach, is a nine-to-five job in a big corporation. This is a valid reality, and, though leftist, I am not crass enough to issue a blanket condemnation of this choice. But we should not conflate the choice of a moneymaking lifestyle with reality. For a lifestyle choice is precisely that: a choice, an option within an array of plural realities, each one of them wellsprings of lived complexity.

Marx—a false prophet of global redemption but a trenchant analyst of events—argued that work under capitalism is alienating. No matter how much your boss tells you to feel ownership for your brand, you will probably never own your brand, let alone the company. Moreover, seeking the bottom line every day of the week constitutes a kind of tunnel vision where profit precedes creativity and love. This is not to trivialize the need for material stability, only to point out that conventional notions of reality can be as fleeting as university life.

My heroes in academia have all experienced realities that demand real responses. Patricio Jojo Abinales continues to confront death in Muslim Mindanao—a place subjected to systematic violence by the Philippine government. Walden Bello rendered real the rapaciousness of the Marcos regime when he obtained classified documents from the World Bank. My mother Sylvia Estrada-Claudio comes home depressed because of what she witnesses as a feminist researcher: systematic rape, domestic violence, state denial of reproductive rights. All three are fiercely independent critics who tear down conventional wisdom better than moralizing op-ed rock stars on popular broadsheets. But, more importantly, they are real.

Two years ago, I began conducting doctoral research in Hacienda Luisita. I befriended farmers feeding families with wages of P200 a day. Others had witnessed the horror of the Hacienda Luisita massacre. I shared their grief. When I wept after my first visit, I felt closer to other socially engaged academics. To me, scholarship, when done right, involves sharing experiences like these to students.

The liberal arts university provides students opportunities to dream big and to pose grand questions. Unfortunately, the scale of a liberal arts education reinforces the notion that teachers place their students’ heads in the clouds. I hope I am guilty of this accusation.

If I got my students to think about a life outside their careers, if I was able to show them a different world and introduce them to people, places and ideas they would not have encountered otherwise, I would have achieved my goal as an educator. I’ve never wanted to force a reality on my students; I just wanted to show them differing ones: there are start-up companies, but there are also labor unions; there are flyovers that take people to work, but there also are poor people who sleep under them; there are women heroes who break the corporate glass ceiling, but there are also those who serve as volunteers in community health centers.

Dreaming can be real when you dream in solidarity with others, especially those who suffer.

I know that after graduation, many of my students will be caught in their individual realities, and the world of my classroom will likely recede into fantasy. But I hope some of them visit me as I grow up and grow old in my cubicle. When they do, maybe we can dream together anew.

Young Star, The Philippine Star, March 2, 2012

Why you should take

a liberal arts course

MY TITLE IS phrased positively, but it could have easily been the negative: Why you shouldn’t take a business course. The liberal arts and commerce, after all, tend to be pitted against each other, with the former implying poverty and the latter wealth (those who don’t want to sound greedy euphemize and say stability). I am, however, not asking you to be poor. I am only asking you to make college a humanizing experience.

I teach politics and history at Ateneo de Manila, and I usually crack a borderline offensive joke when a student tells me his/her course is BS Management: Oh, you’re taking BS College. BS College because Management is the course everyone in college takes—the one parents expect their kids to sign up for by default. Since studying business is becoming the norm for many students, the college experience now entails learning accounting, operations management, and leadership. It used to be reading Shakespeare. Or Rizal.

College is not vocational school. Contrary to the common assumption, the primary goal of institutions of higher learning is not the imparting of work-related skills. If you are going to a large college or university, consider yourself lucky, because you will be spending the next three to five years in a place where scholars examine multiple aspects of human life: from how we think, how we tell stories, to how we organize ourselves in political communities. Make the most of this situation. Don’t throw it away by only learning how to work. Most of the skills you’ll need for your job, you’ll get on the job anyway. Employers look for employees they can teach, not employees who already know everything.

If you really want to become a manager, you have the rest of your life to crunch numbers and balance spreadsheets. For now, spend your youth devouring literature, watching movies, and writing amateur love poems that will later make you cringe when life has made you cynical.

When else, except college, will you be allowed to consume so much culture? And when else will you be rewarded for it? Do you think your boss from your prospective soap company will give you an A for writing eloquently about Buffy the Vampire Slayer? He won’t, but a film teacher might.

College carves out a space for you to figure out what kind of adult you want to become, before the tunnel vision of careeristic thinking sets in. An operations management class, which tells you the optimal way to pack merchandise into a box, won’t tell you the optimal way to treat others. For that, you need to read Aristotle.

All well and good, you say, but how does one get a stable job with a degree in English or Philosophy? Simple: One gets high grades. An English major who graduated magna cum laude is more competitive than the nth Management graduate with a mediocre transcript. Besides, contemporary economies are driven more by creativity than technical skill. I have friends who read a lot of fiction, write elegant prose, and get paid by major advertising companies.

As countries