Pilosopo Tasyo

Notes From the End Of Life as We Know It 13: Stewardship and Evolution

2012-01-16T08:58:00.004+08:00

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

Scientists say that the universe was born of a great release of energy from one particle that was densely packed with matter. The matter from that single particle is the very stuff of the stars and the planets and the atoms that form us. The energy that broke that particle up is the very energy that allows stars to blaze into being, the earth to revolve around the sun, and for a multiplicity of complex beings to emerge and flourish. The very matter and energy of that first big bang led to the birth of life in a small, blue planet; and from life emerged consciousness, then self-consciousness from one of its weakest and most naked creatures.

Beginning with the creative explosion of the big bang, to the precise formation of stars and planetary systems, to the coming to fore of a planet that allowed for the flourishing of life, to the birth of homo sapiens, one can draw a straight line that seems to lead inevitably to the emergence of the human person. However, the emergence of the human person, not to mention life and a life sustaining planet, seems like such a long shot from the big bang. The road of evolution from cosmic dust to spirit capable of willing and thinking seems so improbable. And yet it is so, and we who are able to wonder ask if, accident upon accident, the blind movement of creative drive in the universe intended us.

Whether accidental or intentioned, here we are in the universe. Philosophers have always wondered about our mysterious presence in the universe. They have always wondered why, among the myriad creatures, one had to emerge with an awareness of itself as existing, as bearing a value, as being toward potential nothingness. Why was it necessary, when life was able to grow in abundance for millions of years without humans, for one being to emerge that could question its own value and the meaning of its existence? Was self-consciousness just the best strategy for survival of a weak naked mammal? Was it just the best tool to build social formations that would allow us to dominate the food chain and so it just continued to develop from its first accidental manifestation in a mammal? Some archeologists believe so. Still, we persist with wondering about ourselves and what we are about—the only beings in the planet, and perhaps the universe, who can look at themselves and their world and wonder what existence is all about.

What is the human place in the universe? Without the human person, no creature would articulate the coming to presence of the universe; no being would look upon its existence and the existence of others with a deep awareness of their value, the symmetry of creation, and the potential eternity of finite reality. Only we appreciate the beauty and tragedy of the end of a day. Only we can appreciate the fragile and enduring joy of a child walking hand in hand with her mortal father. Only we can articulate and immortalize the magnificence of a birth and a death. The human being seems to have emerged from the dust of stars in order to be able to look back at her own existence and the existence of all things around her and articulate their eternal value. And we do articulate the eternal value and truth of all things through our creative acts. When we shape the earth to be a better dwelling for the flouring of life in its infinite richness, when we nurture life and participate in its flourishing, we participate in the constant creativity of evolution. When we bring nature to its potential as true and beautiful, we bring a value added to nature that no other being will ever be able to bring.

It seems that this is the reason the creative drive in the universe pushed toward the creation of the human being: it needed a creature with enough inwardness to affirm its existence as meaningful and valuable. Our being here is a standing before the evolution of nature, before the gift of what need not be but is. It can be argued that the creative energy that created the universe brought us forth to witness its miraculous becoming and to articulate its meaning, to narrate its history and celebrate its passing with our creative work.

Ironically, we who were brought forth to witness and cooperate in the unfolding of the creative energies of the universe are the creatures primarily at the fore of the earth’s degradation. Despite our capacity to participate in the creativity of the universe, we are the cause of global warming, environmental destruction, and the loss of much of life’s variety—not to mention the suffering of our fellow human beings. Most of these destructive acts we realized without thinking, without reflection, and without self awareness. It is as if we shut off our most essential gift when we built unsustainable and destructive civilizations. Instead of realizing our gift of creativity and self-awareness, we still persist in acting unmindfully against the world’s creativity.
Today, more than at any time, human beings are being called to restore their proper relationship to the universe. Millions of years of evolution brought forth this creature that could purposely articulate why there is anything, and to celebrate that there is with their acts of creation. We are called to remember this role and dwell more mindfully upon the earth in order to properly celebrate what is unfolding.

We are at the end of life as we know it, and we are called to pursue our being in the world with more mindfulness. We are called to participate in the cosmic becoming as person’s able to bring this becoming to fullness through our contemplation and our celebration of it, on one hand, and through our creative and respectful self-realization in the earth, on the other. We are at the beginning of life as we have yet to imagine it. We are being invited to realize our potential as thinkers, as creatures of imagination and will, as spirits of great compassion and wisdom. We are called to realize our potential as evolution’s youngest offspring.

An Unsettling Impeachment

2011-12-28T09:12:00.007+08:00

by Agustin Martin G. Rodriguez

Before I begin, and before you read this, I would like to make this disclosure. My wife was a court attorney at the office of the Chief Justice for 6 years. However, I only met him once and that was when CJ Corona swore my wife in as a judge. I do not know him as a person or as a Chief Justice except for what most people know from the papers and some amusing office stories I hear from my wife. I am writing this not because of any loyalty for him but because I voted for the Liberal Party and I had high hopes that this party would be the traditional party that could rise above traditional politics. If you think that my thoughts here will be biased because of any of these things I disclosed, then you should skip this piece.

The impeachment of CJ Renato Corona shocks me and leaves a hollow feeling at the base of my stomach. I know that the way I am thinking about this issue and how I am reacting to it places me squarely on the other side of the fence of people I have campaigned for good governance and democratic reform with, but I can’t help it. I have been trying to make sense of my own reaction to this whole event because it bothers me to be thinking so differently from the people I so admire and struggled with for the marginalized, and so far this is the most I can make of how I feel.

I believe that my unease is multi-layered and so I will begin by exploring the layers of it. The first layer of disquiet is this: everyone is so angry at the Court for having shot down the truth commission idea. Truly, I was one of those people who wanted so much to have a truth commission to unearth the perceived evil that the GMA people accomplished. More than that, I wanted her to pay for the evil if indeed it can be proved. However, the truth commission was not so well conceived that it could arguably shown to violate the constitution. In ruling that the executive order (EO 1) creating the Truth Commission is unconstitutional, the Supreme Court’s majority declared the EO violated the equal protection of the laws clause of the Constitution when it singled out the GMA administration as the subject of the Commission’s investigation. The majority believed that there are no substantial distinctions between the GMA administration and other past administrations to justify being singled out in the EO. The dissenters, however, disagreed and believed that it is reasonable to say that the GMA administration is different from other past administrations and can be treated differently. There is no definitive answer either way, and it would have taken a minor revision for the order to be approved by the Court. The Chief Justice sided with the Court’s majority. It is difficult to see why he should be condemned for his stance on an issue which is contentious or for a majority opinion he did not even write. If we wanted that Commission to unearth the evil that GMA Inc was and is, then why didn’t the government lawyers do their job well? Shouldn’t something like this have been crafted with such impeccable legal logic that it could not be faulted for its unconstitutionality? And yet it was so easily shot down, and when it was shot down they didn’t just go ahead and do the revision. I don’t think we should fault the Supreme Court for the administration’s sloppy lawyering. And yet we did—so much that we want CJ Corona to fall for it. Even if the Court was acting out of misplaced loyalty to the fallen ring master, why are they being blamed for the administration’s shoddy work?

I think this is true too for the latest crisis that sparked this unsettling impeachment. When the Court issued a temporary restraining order against the DOJ watchlist which would have allowed GMA to travel, she was not yet charged of any crime and, in fact, the DOJ was still in the process of investigating her for possible prosecution. Unquestionably, the right to travel is in our bill of rights and may be impaired only “in the interest of national security, public safety or public health, as may be provided by law.” Others opine that the there should have been a hearing first before the TRO was issued. But there is no law or rule requiring that. Again, this is not the decision of the Chief Justice but of the En Banc. It cannot be said that the majority of the Court which includes the Chief Justice had no basis in law for its ruling as in fact they were upholding a constitutional right. And yet since the dominant voices in society have determined that they decided wrongly then the Court is wrong and biased despite having legitimate bases for its decisions. Wouldn’t this whole crisis have been averted if the cases against the ex-first couple of corruption had been filed properly and earlier? It had been how many months already since the government was supposed to have prioritized this case, and still they could not come up with a properly filed case. Even if they say, as they do, that it was a difficult case to put together, still they were able to file it over the weekend after the TRO was issued. Why were they so slow before that if they could produce a case instantly when the TRO was issued? Wasn’t this another case of bad lawyering? The administration lawyers just have to admit that they were almost out maneuvered. What could have been their excuse for the delay? And why blame the Court for having decided a case in a way that could arguably have upheld a constitutional right? I am no lawyer, but I am a citizen and I would rather that the Supreme Court err on the protection of a citizen’s rights, no matter how evil, than for it to bend to the will of those in power or the popular sentiment. We cannot violate enshrined rights just because we want to make a person pay for her crimes: that is the slipperiest slope we can slip on. Just remember how our parents allowed Marcos to take liberties on our rights just to defeat the threats to social order.

The second important layer to my unease, and I believe it may be the unease of many others, concerns the very process of how we impeached the Chief Justice. As we now know, the impeachment complaint was passed around blitzkrieg fashion to make sure that the administration party mates and allies in the persecution of GMA signed the document immediately without having to subject this to discourse or deliberation. Classic railroading or bulldozing is what this was. And tactically, this move is extremely admirable. However, what the administration is doing with this impeachment is to accuse one of the leaders of the pillars of our government of corruption and of acting in a way that undermines the will and welfare of the people. Actually, what it is doing is accusing the majority of the Court of being corrupted by GMA Inc as seen in its collegial decisions. Whether the administration intended it or not, such a serious accusation undermines the credibility of the Supreme Court, because at heart we are saying that the Court’s most recent decisions were defined by the undue influence of the immediate past president. With such a serious accusation, one that would set in motion a process that would paralyze the Senate and start another media circus, the accusers should make their accusation with some seriousness grounded on deliberation. Otherwise, this just looks like the vindictive act of one section of the elite against another.

image from wikispaces

A colleague of mine thoughtfully suggested that perhaps the Liberal Party and its allies took on this tactic because they were responding to the very tactics of the enemy. I agree that this was perhaps a response to the perceived reprehensible tactics of GMA and her cohorts to which we were subjected in the last 10 years. She did seem to use the tyranny of her majority to undermine our economic and democratic systems. However, I heard from Secretary Rocamora, a reformer in the administration who heads the Anti-Poverty Commission, that this administration wants to realize reforms profoundly enough so that they cannot be undermined even by a non-reformist government. I admire that sentiment and goal, however, I see this impeachment strategy as a tactic so grossly low, something on the level of GMA herself, that it only furthers the cause of non-democratic governance. I agree with the administration reformers’ strategy that every act that the government accomplishes now should be a precedent as to how we should govern. This makes it doubly disturbing that we will persecute GMA and her allies through the tyrannical acts of an undiscursive and vindictive majority. Just because we are on the side of the good and reform does not justify our means which clearly exhibit the worst of process railroading. Of course, this is allowed by constitutional procedures, but it kills the discursive quest for articulating the just and the good.

The last layer of this controversy that disturbs me is this: ultimately, this whole process is all about the exercise of political power by those who have it. One of the LP traditional politicians actually said on TV that Corona should resign because they have the numbers in the Senate and he should just spare himself the embarrassment. That is just the most crass statement made on the impeachment and it reveals how this whole impeachment is a bullying by the administration of the persons who are an obstruction of their agenda. No matter how just one’s agenda is, one cannot and should not thoughtlessly move to destroy one’s enemy—especially when this destruction could destabilize our already fragile governance system. The recent attacks on the Supreme Court, with their virulence and lack of nuancing, have truly planted the seeds of doubt in the minds of the public. With such an intense accusation, I as a citizen would like to know if the Supreme Court’s decisions are grossly biased for GMA and if indeed they are a hindrance to our quest for justice and reform. In the end, this is what the impeachment is about. The administration feels that the Supreme Court cannot function as the supreme arbiter of the meaning of the laws and ours acts in relation to these—that is their message to the public. I for one, as a member of that public, a citizen who voted this party into power, would like to know if indeed this is true. And so the Chief Justice should not resign! The citizens need to know if they can trust their Supreme Court. Of course, all this hinges on the hope that the Senate will remain fair and just in the impeachment trial. And or course they must, because now more than ever we need to know.

I should be rejoicing during this time. Now that people who have the same reform agenda as I have are in power and they can get things done—and hopefully the right way. But I am not rejoicing. I am very unsettled. And of course, the more political among us will say that I am being naïve again. That in the real world, we need to act in any way that will push forward our reforms—and to a level that reform will be difficult to dismantle. However, we have seen how their zeal can actually damage procedures of good governance. These tactics could actually further entrench the ethos of injustice, corruption, and the tyranny of the majority.

I know that those pursuing GMA feel that they are doing all they can to fulfill their moral duty. And I agree: making those who have wronged us pay is a moral duty. However, to do our moral duty, we must do it properly—with attention to detail, respect for procedure, impeccable lawyering, and utmost respect for the spirit of the rule of law and democracy. The moral crusaders and reformists must remember that they are standing in for a majority whose genuine will and aspirations they do not really understand or know. And as they try to build a world that they imagine does respond to the will of the majority, they should not destroy the processes that will allow this majority to one day represent themselves.

Notes from the End of Life as We Know It 12: Breaking the Pod of I

2011-12-15T23:30:00.000+08:00

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

Why the World Mourned Steve Jobs

When Steve Jobs died, and his profile appeared in apple bites around the world, I was taken aback. So many people genuinely mourned his death. It was as if he was John Lennon or Princess Diana. The world was in mourning and apparently it was a little emptier without him. As they moved from shock to fond farewells and I wondered who it was that they felt they lost.

This is as much as I can figure out: Jobs was like the Beatles. His coming to the world pop culture taught us a new way of being in the world and he made our lives seem richer and more exciting. This he did by making the interphase between human and computer easy—even sexy. Through those solid, white machines that looked so clean and elegant to the equally elegant pods on which we dock and which have become our constant companion, Steve Jobs made us all cyborgs. Jobs and company taught us how to enhance our humanity by being attached to our computers. They were able to do this because they created systems where anyone with a simple capacity to understand symbols, has a deep enough pocket, and has a rationality that can navigate the rudimentary operations of computers can instantly connect to a digital world where communicating with anyone and accessing any information is simple. Users didn’t have to know much except to point and click, and to know what to point at and why.

In the old days, before these computers became popular, one had to be a low level expert in computer languages to be able to make these machines do more than rudimentary computing and word processing. Because of the mouse and the simplified commands for making computers do things, most people can now engage the internet with its web of relations, use all forms of communication technologies that reduce great distances, and compile massive amounts of information from the most sublime to the most shallow. These world shifting innovations served us well indeed. They allowed us to be more informed, creative, productive, connected, and engaged. They allowed us to globalize production and tighten the global factory system. It also democratized the creation, distribution, and acquisition of knowledge. At least it democratized it among people who shared Western rationalities and incomes. (Of course, the down side of this is that it could have furthered the marginalization of the others of global civilization. But that’s another story.)

The ease of computer use served the Filipino spirit well. Filipinos have an intense need to keep in touch with each other. We need to know what all our relatives are up to, how much their children are earning, who married whom, who made it to America, and who is the most unfortunate. We need to know where are classmates are, if they’re earning more than us, if they made it to America or even Singapore, and whose kids are better than ours. The computer and information systems have intensified this need and magnified them to almost obsessive proportions. The public access computers in the Ateneo library are occupied with people checking their Facebooks walls or Twitter accounts. Almost every minute there is some comment on life, some gushing about food, some sharing of some poem, or some linked article read that we have to be updated with.

Pinoys need to reach out and touch others and be affirmed by those others. Because of our connectedness to our computers, this need has become extremely intensified. We constantly have our phones in our hands and forward badly constructed quotes or text inanities just to be able to say something and incite a response. Some obsess about keeping people updated about their present activities such as “enjoying my expresso in Starbucks” or “sad because I missed my class.” Almost constantly and without rest, we are asking for affirmation. Here is my cupcake that I ate the other day. See the picture! Here are a hundred pictures of me sitting with my friends in a restaurant. Here! Read my thoughts on cupcakes with friends in a restaurant. I heard this. I read that. I liked this. Like it too! Here I am! The computer and information technologies we now have made it easier for us to obsess with ourselves and present ourselves instantly to our cyber publics.

These examples of what computers have done for us shows how tools really expand our capacities and serve our needs. We have the need and capacity to communicate. Computers expanded these capacities beyond the face to face. They even modify space and time for us. Space and time are relative now to the speed of transmission and the capacity of the technology to accommodate users.

Technology Enframes

We thank Steve Jobs because his technological innovations made so many things possible: love at a distance, massive barkadas, and intercontinental collaborations—not to mention our almost limitless self-promotion. These innovations seem to show how technology is responsive to our needs and that they exist to serve us. After all technology is only supposed to expand or extend our capabilities. However, we don’t realize that technologies also frame the way we realize those capabilities. For example, how we communicate and how we handle knowledge—the content of it and the meaning of it as much as the means of it—is computer framed. Today powerpoint determines how we lecture. It is linear, visual, and simple. Everything you have to say is all there and you do have to go too deep. The same is true with reflections, sharing information, and campaigning. These happen on webpages on the internet. But to share this information you have to be picture-filled, not text-heavy, uncomplicated, and simplistic even.

Research and knowledge sharing have also been changed. For one, there is the democratization of knowledge. Anyone who can type and upload can share anything they want and make people think they are worth reading and quoting. We can also share our talents and make stars of ourselves without having the imprimatur of the controllers of music and entertainment. This certainly opens up the realms of art and culture, but it also floods our world with distractions that may not be worth spending much time on. And many people do spend time watching Youtube videos of babies bumping into walls or monkeys sticking their fingers in their anuses. For another, we have access to truly great things worth dwelling on such as the Apu Trilogy, early Greek music, the complete works of Kant, and scholarly commentary about all these things.

However, the nature of the technology does not encourage dwelling and deepening even of the most profound things we can acquire from it. For instance, because we can download the whole discography of Santana or every quartet of Beethoven, or the filmography of Fassbinder or Tarkovsky, in a matter of a day, we tend to acquire and acquire and flood our hard drives with so much stuff that we feel compelled to just to through everything. When we used to acquire one album at a time, and then it was difficult to acquire more than one at a time, we tended to dwell on those singular things we acquired. After all, one tends of savor the one thing one worked to get. But this cacophony of sound, this wealth of great art, tends to reduce the work to just another thing to consume on the level of the Youtube video of the monkeys dancing and that blog about cupcakes you just have to read.

In this way, we are enframed by the technologies we have. With the advent of these new systems of communicating, sharing, knowing; with our attachment to the computer and electronic systems; we are caught in a way of being that, if we are not careful, can utterly transform the way we engage the real. How we think, how we know, how we process and deepen our knowledge, are profoundly being shaped by the new electronic media. Even our construction of self is being shaped by this. The fact that you have to posit yourself in Facebook, Twitter, or blog fashion determines how you project yourself. After all, there is a dominant rationality that controls these systems and formats the self-presentation that we are allowed to make. The limitations of space and style, shapes what we want to share and how we should share it. You are a different self in your diary than in your blog. Your posted self follows a format often already shaped by the Western users of that system. If we are not aware of any other way of presenting ourselves, we may just start believing what we project to be the very depths of our selves.

No Time To Think, No Time To Sleep

After the spread of communications technologies as we know them, we are left in a state of restlessness and sleeplessness because the rhythm of opening and retreating has been transformed to relentless exposing. We are called by our computer to always be online because there is always someone online doing something. We can’t really shut the computer anymore because we need to get the new thing, the latest scoop, the currently obsessed about thing. The movement of receiving and processing or reflecting has been disrupted by the bulk of things we have to process and the constant stream of shared information that floods our screens. There is no more time or inclination to be quiet and take things in. And the private spaces where the self can be formed and grow without being continuously bombarded with external noise is lost. We sit in front of computers constantly shifting our attention from task to task, clicking from page to page, processing, digesting, at the speed of digital transfers.

I was talking to a young person, a particularly smart and reflective writer, about the speed at which information was being transferred and accessed and how that robs many young people of the quiet time to reflect. And she said, And why is it so important to reflect? This is what Steve Jobs and the other computer revolutionaries have sold us. This is the new normal of human engagement and interaction, of coming to knowledge, and becoming ourselves.

The new normal is good because it makes things easy. However, it is also makes us accept these ways uncritically. Without too many people realizing that it was happening, meetings were organized through cell phones, people stopped updating each other personally but through Facebook, protests were brought together through Twitter, and discussion groups were done through YM. Not too many people realized either that although you could gather people through Twitter, you could not educate them on the intricacies of issues through that. Sharing one’s life became less personal because one merely posted on a wall rather than communicating one’s feelings and thoughts to friends. Meetings and discussions over YM had to be superficial because the space constraints determined that we could not explore too deeply our thoughts in that space. But that was the new normal and everyone accepted that.

image from http://southinkucannance.blogspot.com/2011/11/parking-garage-peep-show.html

However, things are happening too fast, and the new normal is being marketed too forcefully for the young to be able to critically reflect on the value and truth of these things. In fact, they no longer see any alternatives to this normal. Before most people realized it, we were bought into a way of being that we have not decided on nor have we reflected on its value. We just have to have a cell phone because otherwise our community will be limited. We have to have a Facebook account or we will be left out of the loop. We will have to have internet because we will be capability deprived on so many levels.

Today, because of these technologies, we are forced to express ourselves uniformly in ways constructed by others who have more access to us because of the internet. We feel we need to keep presenting ourselves and engaging our publics because otherwise we will be left out. We no longer have time or space to withdraw from the stream of images, information, and ideas. We are forced to be always with our machines and have almost forgotten what it means to be other than machine connected. We have become infolded. We have been pushed to present ourselves and obsess about what we are incessantly but as framed by the formats of the new media. We have also been led to frame the presencing of others such that we can only see them as they present themselves to us in the form of the enframing media.

A New Unfolding to a Generation Infolded

As life as we know it comes to an end, we are called by the play of the real to be more mindful of what comes to presence. The end of abundant food, the end of petroleum, the end of fertile soil, the end of free flowing water, and the end of consumer driven civilizations calls us to be open to the presencing of the end in order for us to articulate what is given to begin. In our time, the play of Being is being given otherwise than how we have framed it. A new way of realizing human presencing is being challenged from us and we must rise to the call of it. But how do we respond to the call of presencing when we are already framed as the beings who are the masters of and mastered by enframing. We are already framed to let others presence as framed. We even frame our presencing as presentable as posts on a wall or tweets on a screen. We are self-absorbed totalities obsessed with presenting ourselves and consuming the self-presentation of others.

However, from the stasis of our self-absorption, we are being called to open to the advent of the play of eternity. How can we open to the eternal call of Being in play if all we can see is our selves and all we can accept is always already framed? We need to be able to realize an opening which demands a kind of thinking that is able to engage the play of what come to presence in the complexity of its play, in the complexity of its presentation. Only in this way can we be persons who are able to contemplate the play of being that gives presencing. If we are enframing and infolded, we cannot begin to open to what calls us forth to opening.

Unfortunately, the new technologies make us believe that being infolded is the only normal. We are i-pods. The pod of an I enclosed in itself, unable to open freely, to be given freely to what comes calling in presence. We are the plugged pod that cannot break open even when the time of ripening comes because we cannot even begin to sense the invitation to ripening in the air. But we cannot afford to be these petrified pods as we come to the end of life as we know it. Already, the earth is moving to eject us like destructive parasites in the fever of global warming. We will only survive this trying time if we can image new ways of being in the world that are genuinely responsive to the giving of the play of the earth’s presencing and make atonements. But how can we delicately respond if we are I pods—self contained, self-involved pods who interphase with each other in ways determined by enframing systems? We need to break the pods, and relearn opening.

We need to choose to cultivate the capacity to genuinely contemplate the play of presence. This means weaning ourselves from the obsessive distractedness with our machines. It means being able to withdraw from being plugged into the machineries of enframing and being able to contemplate, to reflect, to withdraw into our quiet. Only then will be begin to sense the stirring of rebirth at the end of life as we know it. Only then will the nourishment of renewal coax our pods into new birth.

Moralists vs. Institutionalists: Arguing about Corona's Impeachment

2011-12-15T15:06:00.002+08:00

by Rowie Azada-Palacios

My social network feeds are aflame with squabbles about whether the impeachment of Justice Renato Corona was a good thing or not.

I've been trying to make sense of the issue. In particular, I've been trying to understand why the two sides interpret the impeachment events so differently. One side sees the impeachment as a step towards the fortunate ouster of a partial, perhaps corrupt chief justice who, in their view, is willing to coddle a former president to whom he owes favors. The other side sees the impeachment--or at least the events immediately preceding it and the rhetoric surrounding it--as an attack on the very foundations of democracy.

image from http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/files/2011/12/aquino-corona.jpg

I presume, here, of course, that both sides are honest, thinking, rational, and moral in their assessment of the issue. And I grant that what I'm about to describe is an oversimplification of views which are probably much more complex or nuanced, but I present these as an initial framework to begin thinking about the public debate that has ensued.

How can the same events be interpreted so differently? My hypothesis is that we have here a difference in paradigms. One camp, I'll call the "Moralists." The other camp, I'll call the "Institutionalists."

Let me say, at the get-go, that both camps make valid points.

The Moralists believe that the chief problem of the country is immoral personalities. The first order of business in reforming the country is getting rid of immoral personalities who are in power, and replacing them with moral people. This is more important to them than the meticulousness of institutional process, and if forced to choose between the meticulousness of procedure, and the ouster of an immoral leader, they will choose the ouster. Institutions are merely a tool towards a moral order, and if the institutions fail to uphold morality, then the institutions can be bent or reshaped.

The Institutionalists believe that the chief problem of the country is weak institutions. For them, the first order of business in reforming the country is fixing and strengthening democratic institutions. To this end, they are willing to tolerate the presence of a few "immoral" officials if they think that that is what is necessary to strengthen and maintain the integrity of institutions. In fact, Institutionalists might even dismiss the notion of "immorality" altogether, viewing moral quarrels instead as accidents of pluralism. Institutions are the remedy to pluralism: they are what allow us to work harmoniously despite our differences, and thus, they must be protected at all costs, to prevent society from descending into chaos.

Moralists look at the country in terms of personalities, and distinguish them from each other according to the categories of "moral" and "immoral." Institutionalists look at the country in terms of institutions.

An insistence on morality and a belief in institutions are not mutually exclusive, of course. Most Moralists also value institutions, and most Institutionalists also shun immorality. The difference, rather, is one of prioritization.

Moralists believe that institutions are useless if they are not led by good people. Institutionalists believe that strong institutions can help a country weather the effects of the worst leadership.

Let's take the Chief Justice as an example. Moralists look at Corona and see a PERSON, an immoral one, someone who has been partial in his decisions. They are happy to see this immoral person ousted, and are willing to tolerate a certain degree of "railroading" if the end-goal of ridding the government of immoral persons is achieved.

Institutionalists look at Corona and see the INSTITUTION he symbolizes, the Supreme Court. Whether or not they like Corona, they see him primarily as the leader of the Supreme Court, and attacks on him (not just the impeachment, but also the rhetorical attacks) as an assault on the Supreme Court. They are upset that the Supreme Court is being attacked, and worry that this could weaken the institutional order that was created by the 1987 Constitution.

Who is right? Each side has a justifiable point. But it's easy to see why the two sides will never agree on this particular issue.

Seedling Banks to Reverse Global Warming

2011-12-06T11:23:00.009+08:00

by Rainier A. Ibana*

Two weeks ago, the Rev. Fr. Cezar M. Echano, beloved Parish Priest of St. John the Baptist in Daet, Camarines Norte, sent some seeds from the fruits that he consumed while in Davao City. Since I was not around, our helper placed them on the drier in preparation for planting. As soon as I arrived, I immediately inserted some of the durian seeds into the soil since they might accumulate molds from the left-over pulps which were not peeled by our helper. One week later, roots began to come out of the seeds. I then brought them out of the shade so that leaves can spring out from them.

The best part of planting is when leaves sprout from the shell that has long embraced its kernel. I usually visit our backyard in the morning to look for seedlings that might need help in coming out to the world of light, air and water. I sometimes forget my temporality during these morning rituals as I bend down to unwrap these sprouting gifts of creation. Taking away the shells and allowing the sprouts to spring out into the air remind me of Michaelangelo’s painting that depicts God the Father touching the tip of Adam’s pointing finger during the early moments of creation.

It takes a while before these seeds can come out of their shells. Sour sops (Guyabanos) take more than fifteen days to emerge and sometimes one already feels the verge of disappointment before their fragile stems awkwardly push out the head-shaped seeds from the soil. It will take another week before the empty shells are pushed out and one is tempted to intervene by peeling the pods from the emerging buds. But an early intervention might damage the plant while a later one might no longer be needed as the leaves will naturally spit out the shell that has enslaved them for too long.

Cacao and santol seeds, on the other hand, spring out like water fountains that have long been suppressed by large and heavy rocks from the soil. They sprout in a matter of days and they grow on their own for as long as the cacao seedlings are not over-exposed to the scorching heat while santol stems become sturdier the more they are struck by the sun’s bright rays. Each type of seed has its own peculiar needs in order to flourish.

Papayas, I discovered, are very delicate. One cannot merely throw them anywhere for them to grow on their own. They need a special place where the rays of the morning sun can penetrate the darkness that engulfs them and their roots can rot and wither from too much water. I found out that they grow best under the window sill where the morning light can bless them while the roof protects them from the rain. They can be transplanted only when their stems have become firm and their roots have not yet penetrated the soil too deeply. One has to dig carefully in order to keep the main roots’ grasp on the soil that has nurtured and nourished them.

I have recently consumed many kinds of fruits and planted their seeds depending on the seasons: malig-ang, mangoes and santol in the Summer; avocados in July, rambutans and lanzones in October and November; chicos, mabolos, atis, chesas, jackfruits, pomelos, mangosteens, sampalok, and other endogenous fruit-bearing seeds during particular months of the year. I have even ventured into growing exotic species such as longan, lychees and dates in order to someday relish their succulent pulps. Helping them grow has become a part of the morning rituals that daily energize my body and spirit. Instead of merely jogging or doing calisthenics, I discovered that engaging the earth by putting soil in bags and carrying seedlings to spaces where light dawns on them are more fruitful ways of getting some physical exercise.

At the background of these gardening activities is the awareness that I am positively doing something in favour of the environment by creating more carbon sinks that will help cool down the earth and thus mitigate climate change and perhaps even reverse global warming. I would like to believe that these seedlings are growing much faster than they would normally do because they are also trying to catch up with the excessive carbons that have been released to the environment by our modern lifestyles. These oxygen producing organisms can indeed contribute to our efforts to cool down the earth and enhance the chances of survival for oxygen-consuming animals like ourselves.

If more people, like Fr. Echano, could deposit the seeds from the fruits that they have consumed in seedling banks like the one we have in our backyard and if we can institutionalize more of these seedling banks in our schools, parishes, town plazas, seminaries, homes and other vacant lots, then we can have a tremendous multiplier effect in preserving the integrity and sustainability of creation in our God-given corner of the planet.

We can perhaps better appreciate our daily contribution to the mitigation of climate change and our hope for the reversal of global warming trends if we view it within a larger planetary vision wherein our survival as Earthlings is intertwined with the future of Gaia, the mother Earth on whom we stand as she revolves around the sun and traverses our universe. As astronaut Michael Collins wrote about his experience of stepping on the moon:
“.... I looked back at my fragile home – a glistening, inviting beacon, delicate blue and white, a tiny outpost suspended in the black infinity. Earth is to be treasured and nurtured, something precious that must endure....”

*Rainier A. Ibana, a native of Daet, Camarines Norte, Chairs the Environmental Ethics Committee of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Science and Technology and currently serves as President of the Asia-Pacific Philosophy Education Network for Democracy. He has recently been reappointed by the President of the Philippines as a Member of the UNESCO National Commission of the Philippines wherein he serves as Vice-Chair of its Human and Social Sciences Committee. He is on leave as Full Professor of Philosophy at Ateneo de Manila University.

Notes From The End Of The World As We Know It 11: Education at the End of Life as we Know It

2011-10-24T11:41:00.003+08:00

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

The other night, my children were having the most delightful and intelligent conversation. My son had not seen his sister in a while and he was so excited to be sitting at the table with her again. And, as usual, when he is excited or happy, the words flowed at a torrential rate. He was telling her about his latest favorite thing, which was to be read Greek myths to. As he was sharing various points of interest, he blurted out: “And you know, ate, how silly this Pygmalion was? He fell in love with his own statue. His own statue that he made! How ridiculous is that?” This was my just turned six year old son who, later on, with similar explicatives, explained how sad it was that Prometheus had to be punished for stealing fire for the people. With this, my son and his 20 year old ate engaged each other in a conversation on the tragic and ethical issues explored by these myths. In truth, that conversation wasn’t as profound as I’m making it sound. Most of it sounded more like: “I know! That’s so sad right?” and “Why would anyone open the box? That’s so dumb!” But the reason I thought that this conversation was so intelligent was not because my son knew his mythology. That’s not a sign of intelligence but of exposure to a certain culture because of one’s class. Rather, the reason I thought that this conversation was so smart, was because my six year old was able to pick up on and analyze the elements of high tragedy in the myths and comment on them from his own perspective.

I am starting with this story because my son is not so manifestly smart in school. You see he goes to a traditional pre-school where they are made to sit on a desk and follow a rather fixed curriculum. It’s a wonderful curriculum, mind you. But it is a very traditional one and pushes all the children to learn standard things according to a standard plan and does not really allow them to explore learning with their various intelligences. This is why my son, who can discuss Greek mythology and argue against the necessity of hell if God is a loving God, is not one of the smartest kids in school. For the longest time, they were even reporting that he did not complete sentences when at home he would be using words like “ridiculous” correctly and as part of complex sentences. Thus, my son hated school even if he loves seeing his teacher and classmates.

I remember when I was in school how I too was not very happy. More so than my son because, in the old days, teachers thought that threats and fear were their best tools to coax learning. So I always felt like a dunce because, despite the threats and the fear, I could never get the lessons as quickly or as rightly as the other kids. I was always in the middle, insignificant and never feeling particularly bright or capable. The kids on top had tutors, driven parents who either drilled their students constantly and/or brought food to school for the teachers on an almost daily basis. I was there to passively get knowledge drilled into my head. My happiest time in school was play time or, later, illicit smoking breaks. I don’t think traditional school suited me because one was either one of the herd who was asked simply to receive information and skills, or one excelled because one was driven and tutored to empty excellence. In the end it was never about discovery.

When I got to the university, all of a sudden, learning was so much fun and was so wonderful. It was so because, by this time, I had learned not to care about grades. I never actually did care about grades when I was in primary and secondary school because grades only made me feel mediocre and worthless. But when I reached college and started studying literature and philosophy, I was allowed to forget about grades. The less I cared about grades, the more I learned to learn and the higher my performance was evaluated—a fact that seems ironic to most, but not for people who know what learning is genuinely about.

I remember how it felt when I first discovered learning. It was when my literature and philosophy teachers first started talking about literary and philosophical works as living works to think about, to engage with, and build upon. Parmenides’ poem was a living testament that invited you to immerse in the first articulation of Being. Brilliantes offered a world of symbols and feelings that allowed you to explore your own. Later, my history teacher taught me that the pasyon was a framework for a whole revolution, and we could sift through the thought of Bonifacio and Jacinto for its traces. For the first time, we were invited to think and not to repeat. For the first time, dead people stopped being dead and we could see with them, feel with them, love and hate with them, imagine new worlds with them, and then we were invited to think our own thoughts in response. How wonderful was that? If study time in my youth was spent crying over homework that didn’t mean anything to me, this time I could not get enough of reading assigned texts in college. I believe that my daughter experienced the same kind of liberation when, from a traditional school, she was allowed to experience creative learning in a UN high school and later in the university where I teach. Learning, all of a sudden, was exhilarating because it was discovery and liberation. I was truly led out of the cave and I was basking in the living light. Certainly, this was not all the time because we had our share of uninspired teachers. But when the teachers were good, we soared.

Because of my own experience of liberation, I want to tell my son when he comes home from the school where he is not so smart not to worry. “
High school and grade school are meant to be like that—a cave of dark learning. There’s no other way to learn the basics but to sit and memorize and give back what your teachers want you to learn. Ate had to go through that and now she’s learning better things in college.” But then, I am beginning to hear about progressive schools. They say that in these schools, there are no grades and children are taught in a way that does not put a premium on what they can memorize but on how they can discover knowledge on their own. They are not stuffed into large classrooms where they are anonymous and uniform, but each one is encouraged to discover and realize their own special talents. In these schools, their learning rhythms are respected.

Just last month, my wife and I visited the open house of one such school. And we were so surprised to meet the children there. They seemed like such nerds. Not the annoying kind who were in your face because they needed to let you know what they knew so that you would think they were special, but the kind of children who were so obviously smart because they had learning and were excited by it. The kids did presentations on things they discovered in school and as they did, they spoke like a different breed from the children herded into traditional schools. They had knowledge that they genuinely understood—knowledge that empowered them because they knew how they got to it and why it matters. They seemed like products of a system that respected their creativity and capacity to participate in their own education. Because the school does not run according to competitiveness and the measure of grades, the students seemed to be into learning for the sake of wanting to know and to understand. They were independent learners that early. They obviously came to knowing because it was fun or it was important to them or it fascinated them and, therefore, they could and wanted to share it. There on the tables and floors of the school were eager children able to explain why ocean currents run the way they do, how plants depend on their roots for sustenance, and how proportions can be derived from a circle. A friend whose son studies in that school told me how her grade five son and his friends once obsessed about explaining the Euclid’s theorem and ended up spending some nights and days working on it.

I am excited for my son to study in a school like this after three years of dwelling in the cave. I can’t wait for his mind to be set free not just at home but also at school. I can’t wait for his independent, inquisitive, brave and adventurous mind to be affirmed by someone other than philosophy professors and his family. But more than this, I am excited for my son to be in a school where he will learn to be a leader in the age of the end of life as we know it.
As we come to the end of life as we know it, we will have to re-imagine civilization. Things we took for granted will no longer be the same. How we eat, how we manufacture, how we plant, how we are sheltered, and how we earn our living will have to change. We will have to rethink the meaning of development, of success, of the good life, of comfort, and of affluence. Who will lead us in this dreaming, this recreating? Will it be the children of the cave who were taught that learning is pleasing and conforming? Or will it be the children of the light who were taught to explore the wider world according to their passion and imagination? Will the children who had to be driven by competition, pressure, and the need for affirmation lead us? Or will it be the children who were empowered to discover, taught to cooperate in birthing knowledge, and inspired to challenge themselves to break boundaries?

My friends say that traditional schools are good for some children because strict structures make them flourish and progressive schools for others. I believe that. I am just glad that there are alternatives that will nourish the other children whose minds are dying to be set free because they will be facing a time when the structures we know will break down and better worlds will need to be built.

Notes from the end of life as we know it 10: Solidarity Economics or Spending for a Better Worldl

2011-10-10T09:45:00.002+08:00

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez, Ph.D.

One of the most economically stagnant and impoverished sectors of the Philippine economy, and even of the world economy as a collective, is the agricultural sector. Here we always find the worst poverty. Often, the rural poor are in a world of economic stagnation where there are no roads leading to a life of stability: to a life where people are able to provide for their most basic needs. If you live in the areas where farming is the main source of income, it is most likely that you have no access to affordable credit. Most probably you are in debt with local traders or informal lenders and that every planting season you sink deeper into debt because the prices of input continue to rise up to three fold and the prices of your produce continue to fall up to one half of their value. Most probably you live in areas where fields flood when it rains and they dry up completely when it doesn’t. Surely you do not have crop insurance so that, when the crop fails, you dig yourself even deeper into the debt trap. You may not have access to electricity and you may need to spend much time and energy to access potable water. When you need to plant, you have to pawn your harvest in advance to a trader who will dictate the price of your produce aside from exacting a steep interest rate, and when you harvest, income is never enough for household expenses and food for the whole year. Thus, your children whose schools are far away, have difficulties completing primary school—not to mention the higher levels. The life of the farmer isn’t a joke as the old song says. It may not even be sustainable. For someone who is outside the reality of their lives, it is almost impossible to imagine how they navigate from day to day. But they persist despite the odds stacked against them by a world that has deprived them of opportunities for building a good human life.

The people of the soil are neglected by our economic support systems and yet it is from them that we derive our sustenance. They are also the keepers of our deepest traditions and the bearers of the wisdom of a life bound to the earth. It is in our interest to ensure that they flourish. However, governments do not fund them enough to respond to their needs and businesses are too short sighted to relate to them beyond exploitative and extractive relations. In order to genuinely help the farmers develop, they need to be assisted in ways that aim to reform the exploitative systems that keep them poor. We have to have relationships with these farmers that can give them a sustainable and livable income and provide them opportunities for them to build a good life. We have to be able to engage them in a way that restores justice and dignity to them. This is not because we want to be charitable in the usual condescending sense of the term. Rather because we want to do right by them who are providers of essential goods and services. If they are providers of the food that keeps us alive, we should want to ensure that they flourish. To ensure this, we will have to pay them a fair and sustainable price for their produce. We want to do right by them because as human beings, it is difficult for us to rest knowing that our lives are purchased at their expense. And it is true that our lives are purchased at their expense. We have food because they continue to plant for us even if they don’t earn a livable income from this. Because we want our food to be cheap, we overlook the fact that we don’t pay the full cost of production, i.e. that we don’t shoulder the cost of a living income for the farmer because they are too powerless to make us. The farmer bears the brunt of rising costs of fuels and fertilizers and the unpredictable weather because we insist on cheap food and the traders insist on keeping profit at a level that serves them. If we can stand in solidarity with farmers and do right by them, they can begin to build better lives. And when their lives improve, our lives improve because when the income of the poor improves, all other industries and services grow. It is in the interest of our flourishing as human beings and as economic actors that we stand in solidarity with the poor.

Social enterprises aim to rectify this exploitative relationship with the marginalized by realizing fair and just practices in their enterprises. Some practice fair trade which ensures that their trade with the poor assures these people of a fair price for their produce. There are enterprises that allow for capital from the mainstream economy to fund businesses that empower communities at the margins of the mainstream economy. One such economic enterprise is the Good Food Company.

This business was started by young Christians who belonged to a prayer community and felt the need to translate their faith into concrete acts of social responsibility. They decided that they should engage in a social enterprise that both supports the farmers in their quest for a good, human life and to support the organic farming movement—the latter for economic and environmental reasons. This they would do by providing the farmers access to capital, organic farming technology, and a sympathetic, enlightened market. They would help the organic farming movement along by adding to its adherents. They would also serve their supporters in this endeavor by creating an enlightened market composed of people who do not just consume but understand where their food is coming from and who are producing their food. Their subscribers would be introduced to the health benefits of organically produced vegetables and they will be given the opportunity to support environmentally responsible food production systems. Not only the farmer will gain from this arrangement by the consumer as well, because through this system they will be transformed from consumers who unwittingly exploit farmers. The enterprise will liberate their subscribers from being supporters of unjust economic and environmentally destructive practices and will allow them to become active participants in the building of an economic order that this ecologically sound and just.

How they do this is simple. A partner must subscribe to their vegetable delivery service for 12 weeks. For Php 400 a week one gets 3.5 kilos of vegetables that are organically grown. One is also invited to community events where one can meet the farmers, listen to their stories, and see how the farms are run. The partners of Good Food are also asked to make certain sacrifices. For instance, one has to pick up the produce every Saturday at certain pick up points. They have to temper their desire for shinny , extra leafy chemically treated vegetables and accept that organic and healthier vegetables look skinnier, duller and less crisp looking. Also, they must be used to getting the vegetables in season. Usually, one gets the same vegetables on a regular basis and one cannot dictate what one gets. The reason for this is because, if you follow the rhythms of nature, and do not pump the land and water systems with artificial fertilizers and pesticides, you cannot force off season vegetables to grow pretty and shinny. But in this way, one is able to become a more just consumer who can rectify one’s relationship to the earth and to one’s fellow human person.

It is without a doubt more difficult to be a just, earth friendly consumer. This is because the existing systems are set up to be unjust to the producer and to treat the consumer as an unthinking cog in the consumption machinery—a machinery that destroys our shared home and our capacity to engage each other as caring beings. But actually, companies like Good Food Co. should make it a little easier. The enterprise is already set up in such a way that it makes the consumer a person who can be just and responsible to the earth and to one’s fellow persons. The only sacrifice is having to pick up your vegetables, to be ready to eat less pretty vegetables and less variety of vegetables, to pay a higher, but fairer, price and to sometimes bear the costs of natural disasters by not receiving vegetables. A small price to pay for being allowed to take part in the rectification of unjust systems and improving lives—the farmers’ and one’s own.

So far, this enterprise has been sustainable but barely so. It is a struggle for them to get a sizeable number, something like 60, of subscribers per 8 week run. I though it would be easier for them because this group belongs to a nationwide Catholic movement which claims to espouse the values of justice and environmental responsibility. However, there are not getting substantial support from this community and are still relying on friends and family to commit to supporting their good work. People still prioritize what is convenient even if it means maintaining systems of injustice and destruction.

We are facing some of the gravest crises that our species has ever brought upon itself. Massive poverty and inequality do not only cause untimely deaths and unnecessary suffering, but also worldwide violence and instability. The environmental catastrophes we are facing are going to cause massive shifts in where we live, how we live, and how well we live. The work of social entrepreneurs like the Good Food Co. give us feasible alternatives to our exploitative and destructive economic systems. They also offer us alternative systems of production and distribution that not only preserve the earth but also build community. If we are to emerge whole from the end of the life as we know it, the more enterprising among us should explore even more ways to justly, environmentally, and creatively produce our needs. As for the rest of us, we should support these enterprises so that our spending and consumption becomes a means of rebuilding civilizations and rediscovering our better selves.

Notes from the End of Life as We Know It 9: The Church at the End of Life as We Know It

2011-08-19T19:49:00.001+08:00

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

It is a difficult time to be a Catholic. I find it hard to identify myself with the Church because of the way its apologists are conducting themselves these days. Firstly, there was the whole debate on reproductive health. I believe that many of the people who were advocating for a reproductive health bill, Catholic or not, were acting out of a genuine desire to preserve life. Many of the people I knew who felt so strongly for a reproductive health bill were men and women who spent decades of their lives helping poor women find ways to realize their potential as persons despite the crushing weight of unjust poverty. They are fighting hard for the passage of some kind of reproductive health system because in their conscience, in the very depths of their reason, they judged that such a system would enable women to be come better persons and mothers—if not wives.

Thus, I found it so painful to see how official and unofficial defenders of the Church attacked the persons who, in their best judgment, thought that the reproductive health bill was the best way to save the lives of suffering women and children. Instead of engaging these men and women of good will, the outspoken apologists of the church launched an attack against the proponents of the RH system. There were veiled threats about excommunication. Those who believed in an RH system were labeled haters of life, of families, of children. Lines were drawn so harshly that dialogue was almost impossible. Clearly, this antagonism was first created by the angry Church apologists because they made so many venomous statements. And of course I understand where they were coming from. In their own conscience, they saw that the bill could propagate a prophylactic mentality, promote casual sex especially among the young, and cause the deaths of innocent, unborn children. And they could very well be right. All this time of conflict, they have been projecting themselves in the media as angry, intolerant, self-righteous hounds of heaven who are ready to condemn and excommunicate anyone who did not agree with them.

And then this CCP exhibit comes into the public sphere. It was meant to be offensive and so it did offend. Personally, I agree with the CCP board member who said that the exhibit was aimed not to offend God or to desecrate the Holy but to reflect on the kitschification of iconography. However, I do understand how the placing of a penis on the cross may have been an unnecessary crossing of some line. And often shock art can be adolescent and lacking in profound insight. But again, the reactions from the protectors of the Church are so rabid. There was the immediate labeling of people as blasphemers and anti-Christs. (One logic went like this: They are the anti-Christ because they are anti Christ.) However, the CCP board clearly acted with the best intention to promote the best art. Bad judgment or not, they did not deserve to be labeled the anti-Christs (if a plural could be made of that) or intentional blasphemers out to desecrate all that is holy. Was there no room for dialogue between people with the best intentions and good will on this issue?

Why were the Church defenders so rabid and violent in their hearts? Perhaps it is because they feel that God is being hurt in all this. But this is what we are perhaps forgetting in all these debates: God is bigger than all of us. If the RH Bill is wrong, God will find a way to make it right no matter the outcome of the debates and the passage of the law. If the controversial exhibit did offend God, God can absorb more mud than any iconoclastic artist can fling at him. We shouldn’t worry so much about God and His agenda that we resort to the ways of hate and violence. Because more hurtful to the building of the kingdom than the passage of a potentially dangerous, life-threatening law or the blaspheming of Jesus’ holy image is the losing of faith of the people of the building the kingdom in love. Today, more and more, the people of the Church are presenting themselves as a rabid, intolerant, reactionary, and spiteful. They are coming off as desperate to keep their influence and power over the people—so desperate that they will use the tools of anti-love to achieve what they believe love calls them to do.

People of good will are now being turned away from the Church as a home of their hearts or as a partner in their service to the people of God who are suffering much from pain and sorrow. How can people of good will desire to partner with the Church or draw energy from her if her energy is so negative and draining? Instead of being the beacon of love in the world, the people of the Church have been projecting a harsh, unappealing light.

This is very unfortunate because I remember that it was the Church's face of love that made me want to remain a Catholic. Until I was in my third year of college, I was an agnostic. I wasn't sure if there was a god and I couldn't reject the possibility outright because I had all this Catholic guilt and fear in me. I'm sure most of us remember how we were made to believe in God—there was always a mixture of “believe or be condemned to the fires of hell and Mama Mary loves you so much she'll cry if you don't love Jesus.” However, there came a point in my life when I realized that much of the evil around me was perpetrated by Catholics. The hacienderos who stole land or paid their kasama's an unfair and non-living wage were Catholic. The politicians who supported Marcos and were even the backbone of his dictatorship were the best friends of the Church. The businessmen who broke-up unions and denied their workers their just wages were the ministers of the Eucharist. Even the leaders of the Church seemed to support these perpetrators of injustice and suffering by turning a blind eye to the evil and even gaining in wealth and luxury from this evil. For the longest time, I did not want to belong to this Church and was just waiting to gain the momentum or strength of will to actually reject it and transcend the guilt and fear that this rejection would entail.

The other reason I did not leave the Church so easily was because I wanted to give myself a chance to find God if God indeed existed. In my heart I thought that if there was indeed a God and believing was such a good thing, why is it that the people who believe in him are the worst people I knew? But still, there might be a God and if there was, it was worth finding out. So I stayed in the Church and went to mass because if there was a God, He would probably manifest here.

I had the good fortune of going to a Jesuit university where good Jesuits worked. Here, I met Fr. Ferriols who showed that being a Catholic and being wise were not necessary contradiction in terms. He showed me that the wisdom of the human person ought to lead to an awakening to the Holy and that the gentle quest for truth could lead to the opening to God's presencing. I met Fr. Green who taught me that you ought to call God love for that is what God is. Then (then) Brother Danny Huang taught me that you cannot call yourself a Christian if you did not love God's poor and fight for justice—that being a Christian means establishing the kingdom of God in all you do. Fr. Joel Tabora taught me how to live that loving struggle for God's people and what it meant to concretely build God's kingdom on earth. These were the men of the Church who in my youth taught me that the Church is about love and justice, that it was about wisdom and hope. These were the men whose loving presencing told me to stay—to follow and see.

Because I stayed, because they taught me to look for God where love lay, I found God. Quietly, undramatically, but certainly, I found God in my silences as the embrace that overwhelms, as the joy that wells up, as the calm that says all will be well. And even today, when God is more silent, less presencing, I cannot but believe that Love is for Love was too real to deny.

If the Church genuinely believes that it is God's presence of earth, it must be the presence of love—not vindictiveness, or hate, or anger, or desperation, or violence, or pettiness, or venom. The Church must be love for God is love. Does it want more unborn children to be saved, then it must go among the people who sleep in the streets, who scavenge in the city's decay, who try to harvest in fields that alternate between flooding and drying. They must be there in love’s listening and witnessing so that men will not force their wives to have more children than their wives’ bodies can afford and those that oppress the poor learn to serve God in justice and not just through donations and the sponsoring of Church events. If it wants the lay persons to venerate Christ and honor Mary then its priests and nuns should invite them by showing how such veneration brings forth people with hearts who open to embrace all who dwell in sorrow and loneliness and despair.

In my son's school, every special Mary day, the kids are all made to pray the rosary. For about 45 minutes, 3 to 7 year old children are made to sit and recite words that they seem not to understand or appreciate. The point of course is to teach them to pray and instill the love of Mary in their hearts. In every single one of these sessions, my 5 year old son cries, or he needs to sit with one of the helping misses so that he doesn't feel too disturbed by the proceedings. I thought that my son only acted this way with during rosary days because he was bored or became restless out of his wits. If I were five and I had to sit through 45 minutes of words that did not mean anything to me recited in a toneless monotony, that is probably how I would react. However, I think, aside from that, there is another reason why he gets this way. One day, out of the blue while we were driving somewhere, he asked me if there really were fires in hell. I asked him why he asked. Because , he said, he wanted to know if he would be sent there. My poor son, I thought, his early education into God is through the fires of hell and the valley of tears when it should be love and joy. He continued, where are the people who killed Jesus? Are they in the fires of hell? Because he said, if God is in our hearts and everyone is in God’s heart, why are there people in the fires of hell?

This is not exactly what I told him. But it went something like this, and this is what I learned sitting in attendance to the Love that is in the universe. There are no fires of Hell if the fires of hell means that there is a place where bad people are punished and made to suffer unspeakable horrors by a vindictive god. No one is separated from the love of God. We will always be in God's heart as He will always be in ours. Sadly, some people choose not to love God and turn away from God's love. Despite that, God never turns these people away or rejects them. And He always invites them in love. But if because of the hardness of their hearts they insist on living selfishly or destructively, and they refuse to open to God's love that is flowing toward them, then that is hell. To be in hell is to be in a state where one can see God is all his splendor and love reach out to you and you cannot open your heart to be touched by him because you chose to be that way. That is the suffering of the sinner. And none of it is caused by God because God does hold us in His heart in love even if we are sinners who refuse God's love.

And I ask, if God is so much love, where is all this anger and condemnation from the lovers of God coming from? Are the defenders of the faith channeling God's love by their violence against the other persons of good will? Did they not consider that people who don't agree with them may be acting for the greater good and that the Church may benefit of the insight of others whose hearts are likewise embraced by God's love?

This is why I am so bothered by the way the Church (through its leadership) is projecting itself in public: to know love, you must be opened to love. The only education, before the memorized prayers, before the worship in sacred shrines and the falling before images, before the memorization of the complex doctrines, is the education of the heart to open to love—to see love where it shows, to feel love where it touches, to hear love where it calls, and to dwell in love where it blossoms. A rabid and vindictive Christendom can only overwhelm the delicate presencing of love. Instead of leading confused and doubting hearts to love, they may be sowing doubt with regard to the transcendent presence of love. I almost missed the call of love having grown up with a Church that focused too much on telling me how sinful I was and how I was at the precipice of the fires of hell. This approach hardened me to the love that seemed so contradictory. This angry, self-righteousness projected by the Church against over the top shock artists and men and women of good will trying their best to empower poor women and children and their denying baptism to the children of unwed parents and their calling women without children incomplete is certainly the noise that counters love.

My education in God, the proper education that opened me to God, was an education in love. Memorized doctrine, the repetitious worship of saints, the contemplation of the fires of hell did not lead me to God. They filled my heart with doubt. The passionate witnessing of men and women of love led me to love and then to embrace the doctrine. Perhaps our bishops should lead us in that kind of education.

We are at the end of life as we know it. We need to learn to build a new order of love because we will face civilization changing crises. Who will lead us in this task of rebuilding? This is a terrific opportunity for the Church because it can influence the new world that is emerging so that this mirrors the Kingdom. But who will flock to it when it is so uncomforting? Who will partner with it when it is so bitter? Who will build with it when its words tear down? The Church can and the Church must for it can lead by gathering the energies of charity for the tasks of the Kingdom. The Bishops called for days of prayer and penitence. That is so apt for we must really repent our ways as a Church that has forgotten that Love calls us to presence love and to have faith that love will overcome. This does not mean that we should be complacent in the face of potential evil but it calls us to use the ways of love in faith for only love will save us.

Aquino, Murad, and Levinas

2011-08-09T22:11:00.009+08:00

The great thing about being trained in philosophy is it has equipped me with conceptual frameworks that help me quickly understand complex events, especially those that may seem naïve or foolish but are actually profoundly groundbreaking and game-changing. This was my experience last Friday when I first heard (read actually—as I saw it first in Twitter) that President Benigno Aquino III traveled to Tokyo, Japan to meet with Chairman Al Haj Murad of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. Being intimately familiar with the Mindanao peace process, I immediately saw the serious implications of the President’s gesture and, for a fleeting moment, I wondered whether President Aquino had lost his mind.

This moment of doubt came and went very fast because right away the Tokyo meeting reminded me of a philosopher named Emmanuel Levinas. I have been reading and teaching the philosophy of this Jewish thinker for 25 years now, including mentoring seminarians who have chosen to write on his philosophy for their masteral theses. But never had I seen as concrete an illustration of his philosophy as in the encounter between Aquino and Murad. In particular, I was reminded by the emphasis Levinas gave to the Face-to-Face encounter, that moment when human beings see each other as Other—not to be hated, mutilated, or killed, but to be compassionate to, in fact to love and serve.

Two weeks ago, I attended the doctoral dissertation defense of a good friend and philosophy classmate Angelli Tugado, who wrote on “The Proximity of the ‘Third’ as the Ethical Basis for Levinas’s Idea of Culture”, and in her opening statement, she quoted from Levinas: “The third party looks at me in the eyes of the Other—language is justice. It is not that there first be the face, and then the being it manifests or expresses would concern himself with justice; the epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity.”

The above-quoted words capture the essence of the Aquino-Murad encounter. Tokyo was a meeting not just of leaders but of two human beings. While they represent big constituencies and play political roles, in that moment of their encounter, Aquino and Murad became two individuals reaching out in conversation, opening their humanity to each other, and weighing each other’s sincerity and good will. As a veteran negotiator and mediator of many social and policy conflicts, here and abroad, I know there is no better basis for future agreements and relationships than the Face-to-Face encounter that Aquino and Murad had in Tokyo.

The Tokyo meeting came at a time when there were already questions about the government’s sincerity and political will in pushing for permanent peace in Mindanao. The government was already delayed in delivering its peace proposal to the MILF. President Aquino was silent about the peace negotiations in his State-of-the-Nation Address, leading many to wonder if there was an impasse. While I have a very high level of trust in the government negotiators (especially its chairman, Dean Marvic Leonen) and in Aquino’s Peace Adviser, Secretary Teresita Deles, I was worried, too.

The fact is that achieving peace in Mindanao would be difficult. From the Tripoli Agreement in 1976 to the Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain fiasco in 2008, the peace process is a long history of betrayals and failures. There have of course been advances that should be appreciated: (a) The 1996 peace agreement with the Moro National Liberation Front, while faced with many implementation issues, has not been abrogated; (b) The MILF has abandoned the goal of separatism and independence, a non-trivial development; and (c) The MOA-AD experience yielded many lessons, including the limitations of what the government could offer in the negotiating table and the importance of consultations with all Mindanao stakeholders.

The Aquino-Murad meeting is a breath of fresh air, a shot in the arm to the peace process. The President’s gesture is not a treasonous act as an unnamed diplomat supposedly called it, or an ill-advised move according to one senator. Tokyo was a pragmatic and sensible attempt to move the process forward by establishing an environment of trust and confidence between the parties. Leonen, defending the President’s decision to meet with someone who is not his counterpart, said: “The President will meet with any Filipino anywhere in the world, in the planet, especially if he is serious enough to talk about an agenda which is important for the country.”

There are of course tough negotiations ahead. Even for someone like me, who believes constitutional change is good and necessary to address some MILF demands, it is clear that a change in governance systems (e.g. a creation of a sub-state as demanded by the MILF) targeted only at Mindanao or some parts of it have no chance of being accepted by Congress or in a national or Mindanao-wide plebiscite. The better option is an overhaul of our national governance system to allow local governments everywhere in the country to freely affiliate each other in whatever way they want, including up to the level of states. I call this federalism “built from the ground up” and not imposed by legal prescription from above. But this is probably not doable in the next five years, and certainly beyond President Aquino to commit as it requires congressional concurrence and a national plebiscite. The vast powers of the Philippine president, however, allow the government to offer many concessions in the negotiations. I hope that the MILF, whose negotiators are brilliant and practical idealists, acknowledge the hard facts and negotiate on this basis.

As a Mindanawon, I consider the Mindanao peace process a personal matter. In fact, the Aquino-Murad meeting helped me remember a forgotten childhood memory. When I was growing up in Cagayan de Oro, when I was in grade school in the 1960s, there used to be an apartment block a street away from our house. That block, painted in white (“balay puti”), was occupied by Moro families. Throughout my childhood, a happy one I must say, I was afraid of that house and the people, including children my age, who lived there. There were even a couple of times when my friends and I had stone-throwing fights with our Moro neighbors. I was already a teenager and on my last year of high school when I summoned the courage to approach balay puti and say hello to those neighbors. I have always regretted waiting that long, conscious of the friendships I never had because of my bigotry. But once I had that Face-to-Face encounter, never again did I fear engaging with my Moro brother or sister, and I am definitely the better for it.

A peace agreement that leads to a divided Mindanao and country is not the result we all want. Indeed, as in all peace negotiations, ultimately, the process should end with what is doable, pushing the envelope, yes, but not too much that it tears it apart. In the next five years, for the remainder of Aquino’s term, why don’t we just work together to achieve exactly that? And let us start as Aquino did with Murad, and as I experienced when I was a teenager, by engaging with each other Face-to-Face.

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*all pictures are taken from the net and are assumed to be in the public domain.

Notes from the End of Life as We Know It 8: Repentance and Rebirth at the End of Life as We Know It

2011-07-05T10:56:00.002+08:00

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

I once heard from a report my students gave that there is such a thing as the autogeddon theory. They said some scientists did the math and believed that we have reached a point of no return with regard to bringing about destructive changes to the earth because of rising population, massive demand for energy and water, the strain of our consumption on natural resources and habitats, and the destructive changes in the climate we are causing. It was never clear to me where they got this autogeddon theory because they were not sure themselves. However, in the subsequent years, it became clearer to all of us that no matter how much we conserve, no matter how much we reduce our population growth, we have irrevocably damaged the earth and we have already brought about massive destruction to nature. It is also clear that we will continue to do so in more massive levels when the full effects of global warming kick in.

As it stands, we have caused the extinction of more species than any natural event. We have raised the volume of CO2 in the atmosphere by 100 times since the start of the industrial revolution and there is no end to that increase in sight. It seems that it will take centuries “for global processes to reach equilibrium.” Even if we cut GDP by 2% per developed country today, we will still raise the amount of CO2 produced by industrial processes. Scientists already estimated that we have overshot the world’s capacity to sustainably support our existence by 120 percent and still we keep growing by about 200,000 people per day. It seems clearer now more than ever that we are destroying our habitable world at unprecedented rates and that we have long passed the point of no return. This means that no matter how much we conserve, reuse, recycle, reduce, live responsibly, consume less, and live with the least impact on the earth that our present state of development affords, we will never be able to restore the world to its prior state when it could sustain human life seemingly indefinitely. It’s just too late. We have eaten and polluted ourselves out of a nourishing home and created this fragile habitat.

How did we get here? There are simply too many of us and a rich minority of us are living grandly wasteful lives. A simple fact from biologist Walter Dodds. Each hamburger requires 3028 litters of water to produce and a full meal requires 5591 liters of water. Imagine how much water that is when you multiply those thousands of liters to the billions of hamburgers Macdonalds and the millions Jollibee have served. Now imagine how many millions of people actually get to eat full meals. Certainly they are not the majority of the world’s population but they are a considerable minority. Now imagine the hectares of land used to grow the corn that feeds the cows and the hundreds of species that had to give up their habitat for our burgers. To think, most of our meals and all of these burgers aren’t even good for us. And because these things we consume aren’t good for us, imagine how much governments and pharmaceuticals spend on research and development, production and distribution of the pills and teas that try to burn away the burgers we shouldn’t have eaten. Yet, his is but a fraction of our impact on the earth. Our continuous production of electronics, low and high end consumer goods, fashion, and luxury items at every level of the social strata has caused us to destroy, pollute, and deplete habitats and resources. Because we produce so much waste and require so much material to sustain us, and because there are simply too many of us, we are destroying the nourishing rock that brought us to life.

So what do we do? The more clearly the data emerges, the more clearly it seems that we have to enact radical changes in the way we live just to make sure that our home doesn’t become too hostile to us. To put it quite simply, we must repent and reform. For those of us who have realized our being in the world in such a way that has been hurtful to society and to our fellow citizens, we expect some kind of remorse—we expect some king of awakening and realization that their way of being in the world has to be reformed or realized in another way. Well, we have acted badly. Therefore, we must be expected to rethink the way we are being in the world. The way we have been for the last century, we have lived like selfish, inconsiderate, demanding, greedy, self-absorbed, arrogant, needy, and gluttonous brats who have an exaggerated sense of entitlement. It’s as if everything in this world existed for our sole pleasure and that our sole purpose is to exploit everything that will let us. Only a few of us even wonder if we were hurting other species, if we have a right to destroy their worlds, or if we should make amends for our boorish behavior. We have lived on this world like parasites without a capacity to regulate our consumption thereby causing the death of our host. We have behaved badly and have come to the end of life as we know it.

As I have always said, this moment is a tremendous opportunity for growth. However, we can only begin to grow and realize our better selves when we first acknowledge that we have realized a way of being in this world that is careless and destructive. However, most of us aren’t even close to recognizing our failings. In Barack Obama’s inauguration speech, the great American hope of this generation, the world leader who people thought was genuinely progressive and understood that significant changes had to be realized in their country’s way of living and dealing with the world and the environment, said, “We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.” Of course he was delivering his required rhetoric against terrorism. However, I am deeply offended by this notion that the Americans will not apologize for their way of life. Why not? It is their mad consumerist dream that filled our shared atmosphere with more than their share of greenhouse gases, that caused the floods that destroyed the lives of many people in my city, that has caused and continues to cause environmental degradation in their quest for oil, that has bullied my nation into an unfair world economic system that keeps my people poor. They won’t repent for any of that harm? They won’t apologize for their way of life that makes my children’s future uncertain and clouded over by the darkest clouds we can imagine? I think they and those that created this world order do owe us an apology. And we should repent our complicity in their destructive self-realization.

The sad and seemingly hopeless fact is that only a few people understand that the way we live is not good for us. It is a lifestyle that treats the world as a resource to use and consume as, what Martin Heidegger would refer to, as standing reserve. We look at the world as a thing waiting to be used. Its various habitats and myriad life forms are but mere resources to tap as we think of more complex ways to feed and amuse ourselves, to make our selves feel alive and immortal. Nothing, not even our fellow human beings, are thought of as individual and separate beings who have an existence that bears its own value other than that we confer. Nothing exists for us unless it is something useful or amusing or consumable. And because we have seen the world in the light of its status as standing reserve, we have refashioned it in such a way that it exists according to our demands. Our jungles are no longer primordial, our animals no longer wild, our skies no longer a transcendent sheltering dome, our seas no longer an impenetrable depth—all are touched by men with a heavy hand that cannot help but alter and destroy what it touches. And so, Mr. Obama and all the rest of humanity—especially man-kind—we have much to apologize for and much to be sorry about. We have treated our world and our fellow living beings with such utter disregard that not only have we fouled our own nest, we have driven other beings to extinction. What kind of species does that make us? The kind that no one with any sense would want to move into their neighborhood. Unfortunately, we have taken over the planet.

It is time then to admit that we have somehow come to a point when our drive to a more successful way of being in the world has become a bane to others and to ourselves. We have realized our human potential in such a way that it has become harmful and dangerous to others. We only have to admit that our way of being has not been desirable so that we can move on and become better persons. Unless we can come to that realization, we will continue to be the bad neighbor, the stupid parasite, and we will drive ourselves into extinction.

How then do we repent? Max Scheler explores the experience of repentance in his essay “Repentance and Rebirth.” Here he shows how repentance is an act born of the realization that one has concretized oneself in a way that violates the order of values, or in a way that violates or fails to realize the highest potential of my self. Somehow, perhaps because of the presence of a model person that allows me to intuit my fullest potential, or more simply because I am confronted with the pain I have caused others with my way of being, I realize that I have realized my worst possible self and that I need to renew my commitment to a more creative way of being in the world that values myself and others. According to Scheler, and I believe this is true, there is an aspect of grace in repentance.

All of us, in our finitude, can only see the world according to our own system of values, according to our own rationalities. The reason we do what we do is because we think that this is the good thing to do based on our own way of understanding and valuing ourselves and others. We engage in this orgy of consumption because we thought it was the best for us—we still do. No one set out to foul the nest. We only wanted to improve our lives by getting the most while paying the least, to gain the most pleasure with the least pain. We set to have children because it was a joy and an assurance of continued existence. We built our cities because it felt like the safest way of living. We are structured by the prevailing systems of valuation that define an ethos. This ethos tells us that our way of being in the world is the most beneficial and the truest way of realizing our humanity. To realize that our way of seeing and engaging the world is actually perverted is not easy because we can only see things through our own system of values. It takes the coming of another who bears another way of being or seeing, the advent of disaster, or even just the quiet moment of sudden insight to awaken us. Best of all, it takes the miracle, rare but not unheard of, of seeing myself for an instant through the eyes of the transcendent source of the good to shatter my certainties about who I am and awaken me to the need to realize my better self. That is a rare act of grace, but every day we are challenged by others to rethink our priorities, to reevaluate our desires, to reexamine our certainties. If we are open to that grace, we can awaken to our possibilities.

In our time, in this suitable time, we are confronted by our own folly. There is no greater mirror to our souls than our ravaged world. Thusly, we are forced to confront our false conceptions and valuations of reality. The main reason for this is because we will not survive otherwise. So we can say that we are being pushed to repent our destructive way of being. Global warming is the grace that prods us to repentance. The only proper human response to such an awakening is to embrace it. Without embracing this and without repenting, we will always be caught in the ethos of our destructive selves. A destructive way of being is like a rail that keeps us running in a particular direction unless we can break from it. Thus repentance is like a disaster of sorts—a derailing that wrenches us out of our destructive self-realization so that we can reevaluate our being in the world.

Of course there will be the sorrow one feels for having to see one’s self this way. It can never be pleasant and can even be debilitating. One can feel hopeless about one’s self and fall deeper into one’s destructiveness because one may not have the will or imagination to see one’s self other than this negative realization of personhood. However, only when one embraces one’s brokenness, when one accepts that he has lived for so long according to this distorted realization of the self, can one begin to pick one’s self up and realize one’s self otherwise. Until there is no reevaluation, acceptance of one’s shortcomings, and repentance of one’s patterns of concretization, there will be no potential for rebirth. But the first step is humility.

Humility calls for our acceptance of our finitude and our brokenness in our capacity to realize our potentials as persons. If it is grace that awakens us to awaken to our destructive selves, perhaps it is also grace that will draw us to our greater potentials as persons. This time at the end of life as we know it, there is a call for rebirth. There is an urgent call for humanity to collectively awaken to more authentic ways of being in the world. What can realize such an awakening? Perhaps if there are enough of what Scheler calls model persons, i.e. bearers of systems of values that will shape a more creative way of being in the world, then we will be able to understand how we can achieve our potential. Perhaps, if more people are engaged in the task of reimagining our civilization, we will be able to pull ourselves together and build more just and less consuming economies. Perhaps, if it is not too late and if we are not in the early phases of our autogeddon.

But whether it is too late or not, we must repent and find ourselves reborn to a new way of being in the world.

Let's Talk About Sex. And Women. (Thoughts on Issues Related to the RH Bill.)

2011-02-25T11:38:00.004+08:00

by Rowie Azada

I'll start by sharing three insights that struck me at different times in my life.

Insight number 1. When I was in college, we studied the Catholic doctrine on contraception, marriage, and sexuality for a Theology class. I remember thinking to myself that it was very difficult to follow the Catholic doctrine on contraception, but at the same time I was also struck by how much faith it had in the kind of love a husband and a wife could have. The only "Church-approved" methods of family planning--natural "birth control" methods--were entirely dependent on open communication lines between husband and wife, and on a husband's respect for his wife's body and her sexuality. There was also a strong concern that "a man ... may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection" (HV 17, encyclical given in 1968). There were other parts of the doctrine I had many questions about, but I thought that the emphasis on a man's respect for a woman's body was quite cool.

Insight number 2. When I was a fresh graduate, I was hired to translate for an American journalist who was doing a story on contraception in the Philippines. We visited a number of urban poor areas in the Philippines and interviewed women who had eight or more children. We asked the women why they had so many children and their answers were often along the lines of, "E kasi madalas umuuwi ang asawa ko nang lasing, kaya alam mo na ...." Many of the women we interviewed said they had tried the pill but didn't like the side effects they said the pill gave them; when asked why they didn't use a condom instead, they often said, "E ayaw kasi ng asawa ko."

Insight number 3. I read a statistic a few years ago that showed a correlation between a woman's level of education and the number of children she had: the more educated a woman was, the more likely it was that she would have less children. I don't know for certain what the cause of the correlation is, but I'm guessing that maybe a more educated woman has a surer sense of self, and therefore feels more empowered to make decisions about her entire life, including her sexuality.

========

Why do so many poorer families have so many children--often far more than they can afford? There are probably many answers to the question, but based on those interviews I did several years ago, it seems that for some families, part of the reason is the dynamic between the husband and wife, the communication--or rather, the lack of communication--about sexuality. My guess is that many women cannot say no to their husbands/sexual partners, or cannot assert their own opinions and views about sex in the bedroom.

It is a shame that in this debate, the Catholic bishops and religious have been focusing only on the issue of contraception, because I think that there is much more in Catholic doctrine that can contribute to the discussion on reproductive health. Reproductive health begins, not in public clinics or barangay health centers or in school, but first and foremost, at home, in sexual relationships. Of course, the State cannot legislate respect between sexual partners (other than prohibiting domestic abuse), but by framing the issue of reproductive health mainly as a debate about contraception, the current participants in the debate are missing the opportunity to draw attention to what I think is at least an equally important issue: the power relations between sexual partners.

Why are women in our culture unable to be frank about sex? Why are men in our culture more vocal about sex? Both are equally misinformed about sex, yet in the power relation between man and woman, the woman acquiesces to the man. Despite all theories that ours is a matriarchal society, this is one area where women lose out.

I remember the last huge art-related controversy in school, around a decade ago. A theater group wanted to stage the Vagina Monologues. However, some administrators (not priests), reacting to the play's strong language, refused to endorse it as an official school activity, and banned it from campus. The group went ahead and staged it, off campus, but the banning caused a huge uproar.

I watched the play and loved it. The next day I talked about it with some friends. "In one of the scenes," I began, "where a character started talking about her 'puerta' ..."

A male friend who had also watched it responded, "A oo, kadiri talaga yung scene na yun ...."

"Kadiri?" I said, surprised. "I thought it was so powerful, so moving ...."

"See, the thing is," I continued, "men have porn and locker room jokes to talk about sex. Women have nothing. When men talk about sex publicly, it's funny. At least, it's funny. When women talk about sex, it's 'kadiri.'"

If we want to increase reproductive health awareness, giving condoms or pills for free at health clinics might help a little. But it won't be enough. Let's go beyond this contraceptive talk. Let's talk about people. Let's talk about relationships. Let's talk about women in relationships and how we can help women speak up.

*picture from http://www.marieclaire.co.uk/

The Nativity and Public Space

2010-12-14T12:10:00.003+08:00

by Remmon E. Barbaza

As Christmas nears, many of us feel oppressed by the madness of road traffic, long gift lists, and endless parties and reunions. But we also relish the joy and peace of Christmas in the quiet of our homes. These opposing experiences point to a tension between private and public spaces.

The story of the Nativity is itself a struggle involving private and public spaces. The God who chose to insert Himself in human space and history, who “pitched tent among us”—the same God who made space for the heavens and the earth in loving acts of letting-be (“Let there be…”)—now finds Himself without a space to lay His head. There is no room for Him in the inn.

*image taken from The Biblical World

So there He is to be born, in a manger, marginalized from the very beginning. He knows these margins very well, these edges of human society and history. This God will begin from the margins, live in the margins, and die in the margins of our human spaces. His earthly life is a story of reaching out to those who live in the margins, those who are marginalized, and hence out-cast. We want them out of our spaces. But God wants them back in.

Although not couched in the socio-political language of “private and public spaces,” the teachings of Jesus do point to something that speaks of such distinctions. He would, for example, exhort people to transcend the selfish confines of the family. The family is a kind of private space. We feel at home in it. But Jesus says that we cannot be called children of God if our love was limited to our families. For indeed even the cruelest evildoers among us love their own families.

We Filipinos pride ourselves in having close and tightly knit families, which indeed is a wonderful thing in itself. But as in any other good thing, when corrupted it can degenerate into something destructive.

That our state is run mostly by families and clans—and often with the same names over and over again—tells us not only that the family is stronger than the state, but also that, on the fundamental level, we have not yet learned how to recognize the public space that lies beyond the narrow and often selfish confines of the private space.

The Ampatuan massacre is an extreme example of the violent imposition of the self in public space, where the will was not satisfied with simply marginalizing people who challenged the legitimacy of its power, but went so far as to brutally and physically wipe them out altogether from our shared space.

Violating laws with impunity can thus be seen as an illegitimate appropriation of public space. But before we fall into the illusion that the impunity claimed by the Ampatuans is something extreme and remote from most of us, we would do well to think again. For we might discover that there are degrees of acting with impunity, and that each one of us acts in one degree or another.

Gone may be the wang-wangs, one of the loudest and most disgusting examples of the imposition of the self in public space. But we still get subjected to the tasteless self-promotion of public officials who force the ugly sight of their names and faces upon public space, or car owners who seem to demand entitlement by announcing that they are “LAWYERS” or “PMA CLASS so and so” (yes, in screaming capitals), or doctors who are not necessarily responding to emergency calls but seem to demand special treatment through their “Doctors on Call” stickers or plates (thereby perhaps preventing other doctors from actually responding to life-and-death situations).

How many times did we get stuck in traffic because some selfish driver stopped right at the street corner, totally unmindful of others whose right to unobstructed roads was not respected at all? And when such a thing happens, how many times do we see traffic enforcers look the other way? (One need only observe what happens at the corner of Kamias and EDSA, for instance, on any given weekday, to see how disorder has reached insane levels.)

How many times have we heard of a friend or a relative die in an accident because a couple of buses or trucks engaged in a mad race, or else “encountered brake failure,” indicating that their drivers and operators did not recognize that the right to drive a vehicle is exercised in public space and therefore comes with the serious responsibility of ensuring public safety? Did not the Vatican itself identify reckless driving and road bullying as two of the modern sins?

In gated villages (itself a phenomenon of spatial segregation), we also witness how some supposedly educated, Mass-going and rosary-reciting residents usurp upon the public domain, disregarding common space by blocking fire hydrants, street corners, and driveways, while being the first and loudest ones to complain when their own spaces are blocked by others.

But we need not look further and outside ourselves. The Nativity invites us to enter into that most sacred space, from within which alone we can take a hard look at ourselves, and see to what extent we have violated the common good by unlawfully usurping upon public space, and all because of our illusion of being the center of the world.

Simone Weil tells us that to love is “to give up being the center of the world in imagination, to discern that all the points in the world are equally centers and that the true center is outside the world.” Such love is the love that the Nativity invites us to receive.

Our spiritual life demands that we pass the social and political test of recognizing and safeguarding public space. After all, we pray that His will be done on earth as in heaven. Failing this test will only belie all claims to religiosity and spirituality, and unmask them as nothing but sheer hypocrisy.

And so as we slowly enter into the heart of Christmas, we are invited to behold the unfolding of this wondrous story that is the Nativity. It is the story of this ultimate act of displacement, when God willingly divested Himself of His divine nature, displacing Himself in order to bring everything back to its proper place.

Among the first ones to witness the unfolding of this wondrous story were those who lived in the margins, too. We must learn from them then, these shepherds. Like them we must approach the manger, quietly and without any expectation, with hearts open and ready to wait.

There, in the manger, where the true center is.

Statement Regarding Administrative Matter No. 10-7-17-SC and Its Definition of Plagiarism

2010-11-16T11:31:00.002+08:00

On October 15, 2010, the Philippine Supreme Court declared in Administrative Matter No. 10-7-17-SC that Justice del Castillo did not commit plagiarism in his ponencia in Vinuya v. Romula (G. R. No. 162230, April 28, 2010). In the Ethics Committee's decision, the justices mention the argument presented by the petitioners of the case that the question of intent is immaterial in deciding whether or not plagiarism has been committed. They counterargue, however, that "plagiarism is essentially a form of fraud where intent to deceive is inherent."

The justices' description of plagiarism, however, contradicts a widely-accepted understanding of plagiarism in the academe and in the community of researchers. In the conventions of scholarly work, unintentional plagiarism is still labeled "plagiarism." Whether or not the person responsible for the plagiarism intended it, the fact remains that the original source of the ideas or words used in a text was not cited, and the result is that those ideas and words appear to belong to someone else. In some cases, the meaning of the original text is distorted and the reader is not given the chance to verify the plagiarist's reading of that text. Regardless of intent, when a person plagiarizes, a wrong has still been committed against the community of truth-seekers, against the individuals to whom the ideas were not attributed, and to the value of truth as a whole.

To be a researcher, whether in the academe or in any other endeavor of knowledge generation, is precisely to be among a community dedicated to the defense of truth. One of the primary responsibilities, then, of a researcher, scholar, or academic is to safeguard this value by vigilantly, meticulously and honestly paraphrasing source material, crediting one's sources, and representing ideas as original authors intended them.

There is no question that intentional plagiarism is a graver offense than unintentional plagiarism; nonetheless, even without an intention to commit fraud, a person who commits plagiarism might, at the very least, be guilty of irresponsibility or neglect.

The decision fails to acknowledge that an offense is committed as well, even when plagiarism is unintentional. As worded, the decision may be misconstrued to mean that no wrong at all occurs when a researcher fails to deliberately identify the original sources of borrowed words or ideas. In the case involving Justice del Castillo, there must be some acknowledgment, at its simplest, that one did not do what one was supposed to do, and that is something that must be rectified.

It is possible that some in the legal community view the law primarily as prohibitive, where notions of "wrongdoing" and "burden of proof" are limiting principles. We are grateful, however, for Justice Sereno's dissenting opinion that implies that the Supreme Court does not only have a disciplinary authority, but also a moral authority and the ability "to positively educate" the people. Morality is concerned not only with preventing and punishing the commission of wrong, but more importantly with a positive pursuit of the good, and with honing sensibilities of character and virtue.

No one should deny the complexity of the issues involved in the case and thereby the difficulty of making judgments about the rightness and wrongness of the act in question. And indeed complex situations require that finer distinctions be made. But in that case we must also make distinctions about distinctions, for there are distinctions that are legitimate and necessary, and there are others that only serve as an evasion of the issue and thereby of responsibility. The recognition of such complexity and the need to make distinctions should not mean that we should do away with clarity of principles as well as the firmness of our convictions about those principles. What is at stake here is the principle of veracity, and ultimately of truth, which cannot be violated without harming the human community as a whole as it can only be founded on and sustained by that principle. We are therefore unsettled and morally offended by the decision of the Supreme Court whose definition of plagiarism in relation to intention goes against widely accepted norms and standards and, far more seriously, presents a danger to our shared commitment to the principles of veracity and truth. We are hoping that with the presentation of this perspective, the court in its wisdom will better clarify its decision for the community of truth seekers that will be affected by it. The court's decision sends a message to all of us regarding the value of care and integrity in truth seeking. Its demand for accountability too explains to us the value of honorably taking responsibility for whatever mistakes we have committed in order to heal the wounds our acts have inflicted.

Signed,
Individual Faculty Members of the Department of Philosophy, Ateneo de Manila University
Rowena P. Azada-Palacios, MA
Remmon E. Barbaza, PhD
Oscar Bulaong, Jr., PhD
Mark Joseph Calano, PhD
Louis Catalan, SJ, PhD
Manuel B. Dy, Jr., PhD
Jacqueline Jacinto, MA
Michael Ner E. Mariano, PhD Cand
Pamela Joy Mariano, MA Cand
Jesus Deogracias Principe, PhD
Agustin Martin G. Rodriguez, PhD
Andrew K. L. Soh, MA
Roy Allan Tolentino, MA
John Carlo P. Uy, MA Cand

On Why This Catholic is Campaigning for State Support for Reproductive Health

2010-10-25T22:45:00.002+08:00

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

I am one of those professors from Ateneo that the media branded as defying the Church on the issue of the passage of House Bill 5043 on “Reproductive Health and Population Development.” I’m not really sure if by making the stand we made we were defying the Church, for whom were we defying when we were acting out of Christian love and our informed consciences. And if we were defying the Church, we were doing so in order to respond to the call of love’s conscience. Now that the controversy over the Reproductive Health Bill is raging, I would like to explain my position in lobbying for state support for reproductive health. I don’t want to speak on behalf of my colleagues who so carefully crafted our statement or the signatories who supported our statement with passion and conviction. But I would like to explain why I myself stand so firmly behind our call to pass a law like this.

*editorial cartoon courtesy of The Manila Standard Today

Let me begin by saying that I do, as a student of philosophy and as a person who has grappled with the mysteries of parenthood and human sexuality for most of my life, understand the position of those members of the Church who look at this bill with fear and disapproval. I agree that the emergence of artificial contraceptives has made it easier for us to engage in careless sexual activity. The fact that there are contraceptives that minimize unwanted pregnancies and the spread of disease has probably made it easier for many of us to be promiscuous and this has certainly had an effect on how we give meaning to and value the sexual act.

It’s also possible that some of the contraceptives that are being sold have an abortive effect. It is possible that the pill or the IUD allow implantation to occur and might actually cause a fertilized egg to die. I don’t deny that this is possible and tragic.

I also can sympathize with their hesitation to allow a law to pass that will potentially interfere with how their schools will handle sex education. I also understand their distrust of the government officials’ capacity to design an effective and appropriate syllabus for sex-education. We in the education business know how government bureaucrats can impose short sighted and ill-designed programs that tend to be ineffective if not outright harmful in the formation of young people. And in such a delicate matter such as human sexuality and love, it takes a great act of faith and hope to imagine that the bureaucracy will not mis-educate our children.

However, those truths and possibilities aside, we are faced with the hard and terrible tragedy of millions of women and children whose lives are put at risk everyday only because they do not know many of the basic facts of human reproduction and are unable to access existing technologies that can prevent unwanted pregnancies. It is painful to witness how the undoing or further undoing of countless lives continues when proper information or the availability of effective methods of contraception are denied them. I need only to think of the countless children who grow up facing the violence of poverty that is compounded by the lack of care and nutrition imposed by the sheer size of their families; of the violence inflicted on the bodies of women by the unabated proliferation of their children due to the lack of knowledge and the lack of access to methods that could help them decide the number of children best for their family’s welfare; of the countless people whose creativity and joy is sapped by the constant pressure to find the resources to nourish themselves and their children in a world that can no longer sustain their numbers—and thinking all this, I asked myself how we could deny people a chance to rise from tragedy. Because this bill gives them that chance. It will ensure that young people understand the nature of human sexuality and reproduction so that they can make intelligent decisions about the risky behavior to which they are prone. It will give poor women access to contraception that will give them a fighting chance to have families the size of which can sustain love and care. It will give oppressed women a chance to say no to the abuse on their body and psyches of having large families. And it will give children a chance to develop with a chance at health care, education, and focused parental love. So you see, I and my colleagues are calling for the passage of this bill, not as an act of defiance but as a call of love. We know these parents, we know their children, we weep in our hearts to see how their chance at a decent human life is eroded by what society has denied them. We aren’t saying that responsible parenthood will solve poverty. It won’t, justice will. But this law will give them a chance to live more human lives as they wait for the reign of the Kingdom of God.

In my heart, I understand what the Church fears when it thinks of contraceptives and birth control—it is thinking that the contraceptive mentality is a symptom of a mindset that is not open to grace. For the Church it signals a kind of heart that has no hope and cannot trust in the good will of a loving God. I can see how that can be true and how the propagation of the culture of contraceptives might lead to the degradation of our capacity to be people of faith. It can also lead to the degradation of human sexuality as it will permit sex to be used as a drug to ease the ennui of modern life. I see how the reduction of unwanted pregnancies can do that. However, we do live already in a sinful world where the truth of sexuality especially between loving couples is an unfathomable mystery. Why does sex have such a power on our will such that it draws people to act beyond reason and good sense? Why is it that people think that sex could resolve their malaise, give them a higher esteem of themselves, make them happy, and give them a sense of completion? I don’t think there are easy answers to these questions and much of human existence is involved in trying to understand this mystery. In the meantime children are being born to impossible circumstances and women are being made to suffer preventable hardships.

In our broken and sinful world people are looking for answers and may be acting beyond their better wisdom in their search. Until we come to our wholeness and holiness perhaps we can provide ourselves the tools of prudence so that our search for intimacy and fullness does not have to end in sorrow and greater tragedy. State support for reproductive health will provide us these tools. And so with love for those like us who are broken, but unlike us are deprived of the means to regulate the effects of their tragic fate, we propose that some such bill be passed. Perhaps the Church will want it passed with revisions—but we should not touch its capacity to help people control reproduction through the access to knowledge and safe means. We should especially not water down its mandate to provide support for mothers who care for their children.

And as the secular state passes its laws for the secular good of all its citizens, perhaps it is only right for the Church to redouble its efforts in the education of its people’s hearts. For only a profound and effective education of the heart will bring her people to their good. No amount of intervention in state law will teach the people love. Only a Church that acts as a beacon of love can ultimately teach us what our intimacy is about. In the meantime, let us leave the state to its means to save its poor.

Musings on the RH Bill

2010-10-05T19:44:00.002+08:00

by Rowena Anthea Azada-Palacios

First of all, let's get two things straight:

(1) Even if this bill gets signed into law, induced abortion will still be illegal.
(2) Even if this bill doesn't get signed into law, artificial contraception will still be legal.

So let's get rid of the straw men crowding the issue. The supporters of the bill are not, in this instance, calling for the legalization of abortion. The critics of the bill are not, in this instance, calling for the banning of artificial contraception.

==========

Yes, this is an issue of choice. I argue, however, that BOTH sides of the debate are arguing for choice.

Those who support the bill argue that the bill is about giving all Filipinos the choice to personally and privately decide for themselves which form of contraception they wish to use, if any. It is a freedom that is currently afforded to the segment of the population that has more access to information--the most educated and most literate--who have wider access to information.

I think many (most?) of those who support the bill are, in effect, saying that the same choice should be made available to everyone in the populace. They are saying that since there are many in the population who do not have access to information in the way that the most educated do, the government ought to fill in that space by mandating that the information be included in the curriculum, through Family Planning offices (to be created by the bill), and through the Commission on Population (also to be created by the bill).

To extend the issue further. While the bill reemphasizes the illegality of induced abortions, some proponents of the bill argue that the bill will actually LOWER the numbers of illegal abortions by lowering the numbers of unwanted pregnancies.

==========

Those who criticize the bill are also arguing for choice. The bill does make very clear value statements: it considers population control and birth spacing to be desirable, and it associates contraception (both natural and artificial) with the goal of lowering the country's population. It prohibits both private and public doctors from refusing to perform voluntary ligations and vasectomies. It also adds artificial contraception--including pills and intrauterine devices--to the list of "essential medicines."

I think many (most?) of those who criticize the bill are arguing that they do not want these values and viewpoints--which they do not hold--to become "official state policy." Those who criticize the bill might disagree with the views expressed therein regarding birth spacing or population control. The critics might also object to many of the kinds of contraception being promoted by the bill, and they may not want their tax money to be used to purchase these forms of contraception for others (which becomes a strong possibility, if these will now be considered "essential medicines").

On the issue of abortion, then. There are those who argue, then, that the passage of the bill will push the State to promote and possibly subsidize potentially abortifacient forms of contraception (such as pills and IUDs), using taxpayers' money.

==========

Note: This is based on HB No. 5403, AN ACT PROVIDING FOR A NATIONAL POLICY ON REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH, RESPONSIBLE PARENTHOOD AND POPULATION DEVELOPMENT, AND FOR OTHER PURPOSES.

Oversimplifications

2010-09-03T19:45:00.003+08:00

by Rowena Anthea Azada-Palacios

In the aftermath of Monday's hostage-taking tragedy, a TV station asked its viewers the question: should there be a media blackout during hostage crises?

The question grossly oversimplifies the issue. The public outcry is not for a total news blackout, but for media outfits to exercise greater restraint in choosing which details to air and when to air them.

The best way, in fact, for media organizations to avoid further legislated media regulation, is for them to prove to the public that their self-regulatory mechanisms are sufficient.

ABS-CBN's statement, released on Thursday, enumerated ways in which their news team exercised self-restraint. However, of the nine examples they gave, five of them are not examples of self-regulation, but rather, of either complying with the law (e.g., not tampering with police evidence), or following commands from the police. Whether or not news organizations should follow the law and heed police's instructions is not at issue; that should be the minimum expected of all media groups in such situations.

In contrast to ABS-CBN's statement, the Poyner Institute, an American journalism school, published on its website in 1999 a list of self-regulating guidelines for journalists covering a developing law enforcement action, such as a hostage-taking situation. Among the guidelines are for journalists to "always assume that the hostage taker ... has access to the reporting," to avoid releasing information "that could divulge the tactics or positions of SWAT team members," to "strongly resist the temptation to telephone a gunman or hostage taker," and to "have a plan ready for how to respond" should a hostage taker call a newsroom. Links to these guidelines quickly spread online last week.

In response, Maria Ressa, ABS-CBN's head of news and current affairs, argued that the Poynter guidelines are culture-bound, and that our country's context is different from that of the Western audience for which the guidelines were written. Be that is it may, the ethical principle behind the guidelines is universal. In a hostage situation in any culture, the safety of the hostages should be paramount. When lives are at stake, media institutions ought to err on the side of too much rather than too little caution. News organizations can keep the public informed without jeopardizing the safety of the hostages nor aggravating the situation.

Moreover, the culture-boundedness of the Poynter guidelines does not exempt local organizations from the responsibility of making their own guidelines and assuring that these are followed. The argument has been made that in the heat of the moment, it is difficult for journalists and media executives to decide how best to regulate their own coverage. However, this argument simply affirms the need for pre-established protocols. With such guidelines, the journalist and the media executive need not spend too much time in an internal struggle over what to report or what to air. They just have to comply with rules they have already drafted.

It is unclear whether news organizations had definite protocols prior to this incident, but it is clear now, more than ever, that such guidelines are necessary. GMA News has promised to revise their rules for situations where the public or their personnel are at risk. ABS-CBN is inviting its colleagues in the broadcast industry tp undertake an industry review. These steps are welcome, but they are also long overdue. Journalistic behavior during crisis situations was debated in the aftermath of the 1990 earthquake, the 2002 hostage-taking incident at a Pasay bus station, and the Ducat hostage-taking incident in 2007.

Finally, some media practitioners, including opinion columnists, have criticized the public for blaming the media. It is not the media's fault, they argue, but the police's, as it was they who failed to control the media. Again, this is an oversimplification of the issue. No reasonable person is laying the blame entirely on the media. Of course, the PNP and the civil government also made costly missteps. And of course, most of the responsibility rests with Mendoza himself.

The question, however, which all people involved ought to ask themselves is this: what, in my capacity, could I have done at the time to make the situation better? And did I do it?

Only if all of us learn to be accountable for our actions, even when we are only partially responsible for the outcome of a situation, can we prevent a tragedy like this from ever happening again.

Exercising Freedom for a Free Press

2010-09-01T22:38:00.001+08:00

by Agustin Martin G. Rodriguez

In the face of the tragedy of the hostage taking last Monday, many Filipinos are quite clearly disappointed with the media’s handling of the matter. It seems clear that the lack of restraint that the television and radio stations exercised contributed to the terrible outcome of this crisis. Many viewers felt that the broadcasting in real time of the dramatic arrest of the hostage taker’s brother and the broadcasting of the movements of the SWAT teams would further disturb an already disturbed hostage taker. Why didn’t the networks go with this instinct? What were the network executives thinking?

The issue is complicated for certain. Television and radio news serve the public as much as they serve big business interests. Their business is not only to report the news and inform the public but to generate enough income to make their vocation viable enterprises. Thus, sometimes their instincts are muddled.

The more thoughtful among us asked why couldn’t they shut off the live feed? Was their desire to fill every second of air time with chatter and video of the crisis really fueled by their awareness of their responsibility to keep the public informed? If they had delayed the reporting on the arrest of the hostage’s brother and the disclosure of the movement of the SWAT teams, would they have deprived the public of vital information? What, aside from the drama and the circus, did the live feed give us? No doubt we were all glued to our television sets because we wanted to know what would happen next. But we really didn’t need to know. Our need for drama did not override the hostages’ right to a safe resolution to this crisis. However, it was vital for the networks to keep airing their live coverage.

From the ABS-CBN statement on their soul searching, they asked their fellow industry members to “…unite and work together to put in place measures to collectively decide when we stop live coverage in the absence of government presence of mind.” This collective decision to stop live coverage is essential because if only one station decided to play it safe and stop the live coverage, then they would have lost in the ratings game. Maria Ressa justified their airing of the hostage drama by saying that if they had stopped the live feed “we would have been criticized by the viewers or what viewers would have done is switch stations.”[1] This is what is so dismaying about their response: after the whole tragedy and the criticism, their justification lie in the ratings.

After all the criticism, there has still been no acceptable expression of culpability from the television and radio networks. Of course we shouldn’t expect a full expression of culpability that is not couched in language that will protect them from lawsuit or criminal liability. However, from their own attempt to explain what they did, it is clear that they didn’t feel that they could on their own decide to control their actions. It was as if their executives were driven by a transcendent machinery with motives beyond their own capacity to discern the good and which kept them from deciding what the best, most compassionate, and responsible thing to do was. Maria Ressa said “When there are no rules, we push for what we can get.”[2] That is true and perhaps it is the most responsible journalistic thing to do, i.e. go for the story. But is it not also their responsibility—they being the head of the news desks who are away from the action and not being driven by the reporter’s instinct to get as much of the story as they can—to decide on their own what was responsible and irresponsible to broadcast in the heat of the unfolding drama?

It is worth looking at ABS CBN’s statement of self examination. In that statement they implied that they were acting responsibly by being this way:
1. After the police tried to arrest the hostage taker’s brother, our team physically stepped back to comply with police request.
2. After the assault began, we tried to limit our shots to avoid showing police movements. We stayed with extreme close-ups or wide shots.
3. We immediately complied when police asked us to turn off our lights explaining the grainy shots viewers complained about.[3]

They did say that these measures taken were not enough but they are implying that nonetheless they were acting quite responsibly given that they were acting according the some instinct within themselves that they could not regulate. And it seems the instinct here is the need to please the viewers, not in order to respond to their right to know but to respond to their need for entertainment. Because they did step back but they still showed the arrest close-up, they limited their shots and took these shots wide but they still showed clearly where the police were, and they did turn out the lights but we all could see what was going on quite clearly. And someone from outside will wonder how essential all these shots were for the public's right to legitimately know the truth and be informed of vital issues—remembering all this while that lives were at stake.

Surely, the government should have acted better in all of this and exercised their police powers to regulate the networks whose concerns are always colored by the need to entertain and provide information to their viewers. But the networks should also remember that they are a public service and should be able to act more responsibly. After all a free press should be able to act with a free will for the good. This means being able to make better decisions for the good of society. And to do this, they must examine what forces drive their instincts to keep the screens filled with images that may have led to tragedy.

*picture courtesy of BBC News

Notes from the End of Life as We Know It 7:

2010-08-01T12:11:00.009+08:00

These Are The Fundamental Beliefs That Define Our Lifestyle

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

Once I was asked by the university to share with the faculty some points about simplicity of lifestyle, I took the occasion to sit down with my wife and articulate the fundamental beliefs we live by. Here I share with you the fundamental beliefs that shape our lifestyle:

1) We believe that there is a being of great Love in the world who governs our existence. This is a fundamental certainty that is grounded on existential experience for us. This just means that we have felt this Love’s presence and cannot but respond to it.
2) This great Love calls us all to share in their act of love for all being.
3) The great suffering in the world caused by human beings is painful for this great Love to see. And if we do participate in their Love, we cannot live without orienting our lives toward the alleviation of this suffering.
4) The task of serving the suffering and the poor is not an incidental task but the very central task of our lives.
5) There are many ways to serve the suffering in every arena of our lives. But our work only becomes an act of service when it is centered on serving the other and not our egos or our need to be needed or our reputations.
6) A life centered on service is the only path to finding yourself and to finding your potential as a person. It is the only way because a life lived only for the self keeps you from recognizing the call of love that calls you to your potential as a person.
7) Our lifestyles—that is the way we consume, entertain ourselves, engage in leisure, and work, or the way we maintain ourselves in existence—must not be exploitative. Although we have a right to maintain ourselves in existence, as workers building the kingdom, we have no right in causing the greater suffering of others in these acts.
8) We must in fact try and build up the lives of others in our acts of self-maintenance. This is perhaps what they refer to today as solidarity economics. Examples of this are acts that affirm the right of the marginalized and deserving to make a living: buying from neighborhood informal sellers rather than big stores, actively supporting alternative or non-mainstream artists, or choosing to pay a just wage for the services of those who help us.
9) We must not focus our lives too much on acquisition, consumption, and luxury for the sustaining of such desires often requires us to engage in the accumulation of wealth which in our world cannot be done without others paying for it. I believe the realities of global warming and worldwide poverty are clear proofs of this. Sadly, those who pay the sins of our excesses are always those who did not even choose to live or desire to live according to these excesses.
10) We are required by Love to make sacrifices in big and small ways for the marginalized—on the level of structural change and on the level of small acts of deliberate affirmation and support. Thus, we are called to live simpler lives or even sacrifice some or much of our own income to empower the disempowered.
11) Ultimately, we are all called to take part in realizing the revolutionary structural changes that will ensure that the suffering of others is ended. I use revolutionary here in the Christian and Marxian but not Marxist sense. The Christian sense still demands the changing of social structures but demands a transformation of self in love and justice.

Of course we don’t live this way of life perfectly, but we try to live it as much as possible. It’s not always easy. It means resisting a consumeristic lifestyle. That for us is the hardest aspect to accomplish because we are in a sense programmed to find consolation for our hard work or for our difficulties in buying things. We also try to find affirmation for our value or self-worth by what we own. So it’s sometimes hard to resist being consumers or even losing sight of our values in trying to engage in activities that will make us earn better in order to live more luxuriously. But we try to live according to our convictions even in simple ways like engaging our neighborhood service sector and paying them more than exploitative wages. We don’t ask for discounts from poor vendors. We buy our supplies from local, informal sector merchants even if it costs more. We consciously buy Filipino as much as possible. We take vacations only in the Philippines. And we have committed to professions that will pay us less than we could potentially earn in order to focus on service.

We have also chosen to raise our children ourselves as much as our professions will allow. In this way I believe we can raise persons of love and service who will themselves grow up to serve. Concretely, this means we have no stay-in yaya. In this way we have raised a 17-year old who I am proud to say is at least aware of the suffering of others and hopes to serve them through her writing. Now we are still raising a 4 year old and I must say it still requires great sacrifice on our part. I find it particularly important to raise my son so that he will grow up to understand how fathers themselves need to be persons of service in very concrete ways. He must understand that men must know how to cook, clean the house, and serve the people around them in order to break the sad tradition of spoiled, useless boys in our country.

On a personal note, it is difficult to continue this lifestyle without any structural support. It is hard to be a just consumer when most businesses are structured unjustly. It is hard to raise one’s own child when there are no day care centers in your work place and when you can be left out of so many things because you did not choose to prioritize your career over your fundamental responsibilities.

Sometimes it’s painful to see the outcome of your own choices. Sometimes it hurts to see others advance in the world who have chosen to live otherwise. It is a little more poignant now as sometimes I watch the world proceed without me as I chase a little boy around our little world. Clearly the successes that the world recognizes are not always for those of us who have chosen to live in service, except perhaps for a few happy exceptions. But the rewards of a life justly lived are found in the living of it. For living such a life keeps us closer to our truth, to our potential as creative human beings, and to the Love that bears us in their heart so that we remain focused on what is most important and find ourselves in the end made whole.

van Gogh and the Real Thing

2010-07-18T07:52:00.005+08:00

by Michael G. Aurelio

As with many passionate souls,
the moment had come when his faith in life was faltering.
—Albert Camus, Notebooks

The turning point in the Ridley Scott film A Good Year finds the protagonist Max Skinner (Russell Crowe), a successful trader who just inherited from his deceased uncle the vineyard he grew up in, given two choices by his boss: “money or your life.” He had just come back from his unplanned and poignant visit to his uncle’s vineyard in Provence, France to arrange its sale. In his short stay there, however, he was also able to revisit his youthful years and remember the happiness he once had and now could no longer afford.

To be on a “holiday,” unfortunately, is unthinkable in the unforgiving world of trading. Wanting to know what he was committed to and where his heart lies, the owner of the firm, the no-nonsense German Sir Nigel, asks Max to decide on his own fate. Either he leaves with a discharge settlement “with a lot of zeros,” or stay and accept an offer for a full partnership.

Before their short, straightforward dialogue, Max had noticed, among other pieces of art, a beautiful painting showcased on the wall. It was Van Gogh’s Road with Cypress and Star. He inquires about the work of art, and his boss says that the one on the wall was a 200 grand copy—but the original, he nonchalantly adds, securely sits in a vault in the basement of his house. This strikes Max profoundly and images of his youth and his vineyard rush back to him again. Now certain with a decision, Max goes back to Sir Nigel and asks his gray, efficacious boss: “When do you ever see it, Nigel? The real one? When do you look at it? Do you make late-night pilgrimages down to the vault just to see it or . . . ?”

Asked about what he meant, the scene is cut and the next one shows the retired successful trader back in Provence taking back the woman he loved and the life he all along wanted to live.  

When Vincent van Gogh submitted himself to an insane asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in southern France on May 1889, the artist was in the middle of his late period which saw the beautiful Starry Night Over the Rhone and his famous The Starry Night created. The thick swirls and dark strokes of night skies splashed with hopeful stars—and these would increasingly grow thicker, darker, and brighter—would distinguish not only some of his later works but, as held by most, also symbolize his deteriorating mental state toward the end of his life.

Starry Night over the Rhone, September 1888

The Starry Night, June 1889

Bouts of debilitating depression, psychoses, epileptic attacks and delusions had been plaguing the genius, requiring several hospitalizations. In one unfortunate instance in December of 1888, he threatened the life of Paul Gauguin, a fellow artist he had befriended earlier, with a knife. That night, seeing that he was yet to effectively use his knife, he cuts off his own ear, wraps it up and gives it to a prostitute who we can presume was anything but delighted.

Unbalanced, condemned to be a lone artist, though still one of the most gifted painters of his time, van Gogh would continue to yield the only weapon he possessed to ward off his demons in the sanatorium. He would do there what he did best: he would paint, and paint, and paint at a furious pace. Cut off from the world he had retreated from and which wearied him so, van Gogh would there take inspiration from what he would see in his supervised evening walks around the asylum.

What particularly caught the eye of the artist during those times, along with olive trees, were cypress trees. I imagine his awe and fear of those natural towers, ones which are usually found in cemeteries, lording it over the moonlit paths he took at night. Shaped like a candle, straight as an arrow that shoots to the heavens, cypresses have since ancient times been referred to as both the tree of life and the tree of mourning. The paradox, while clear, is amusing.

Vincent would later confess his fascination with cypress trees to his brother, Theo. Referring to cypresses, he wonders in a letter penned in the asylum:

It astonishes me that they have not yet been done as I see them . . . It is a splash of black in a sunny landscape, but it is one of the most interesting black notes and the most difficult to hit off exactly. (25 June 1889)

Road with Cypress and Star, May 1890

Road with Cypress and Star, completed a year later in May 1890—around the time he finally left the asylum in Saint-Rémy—would be what he later on called his “last attempt” in depicting his beloved cypresses on canvas. In another letter accompanied by a sketch of the painting, van Gogh describes the work to Gauguin, who had since forgiven his one time knife-carrying friend:

I also have a cypress with a star from down there. . . . A last attempt—a night sky with a moon without brightness, the slender crescent barely emerging from the opaque projected shadow of the earth—a star with exaggerated brightness, if you like, a soft brightness of pink and green in the ultramarine sky where clouds run. Below, a road bordered by tall yellow canes behind which are the blue low Alpilles, an old inn with orange lighted windows and a very tall cypress, very straight, very dark.

On the road a yellow carriage harnessed to a white horse, and two late walkers. Very romantic if you like, but also ‘Provençal’ I think. (17 June 1890)

On July 27, at age 37 and two months after giving up on breathing life into the dark cypresses of his nights in Saint-Rémy, Vincent van Gogh would walk into a field of wheat with a revolver and shoot himself in the chest. While he would survive from the blow, he would die two nights later. To a mourning Theo by his side, Vincent’s last words were “The sadness will last forever.”

Road with Cypress and Star may initially confuse the viewer who may not be familiar with its name. Two different heavenly bodies hang on the ultramarine sky. While the moon betrays itself with its crescent shape, the other, much brighter body on the left, with its yellow and green radiance, may be mistaken for the sun. That said, van Gogh’s stars and moons are more difficult to distinguish from each other in earlier works such as The Starry Night and Starry Night over the Rhone where more stars light up the night sky.

But in Road with Cypress and Star van Gogh only gives us a lonely star, which is then accompanied by a redundant moon “without brightness.” The world at the same time looks brighter and darker for the melancholy. The scene below is nevertheless lighted sufficiently, and even more so than the earlier works. The light from this single star, deceptive at first, should then be more brilliant than van Gogh’s earlier, more numerous stars.

Dominating the painting is van Gogh’s beloved cypress tree. Its tip exceeds the top of the frame, its blacks and dark greens contrast the blues of the sky and the browns of the canes, and it stands right in the middle—something which is counter-intuitive because the eyes find it harder to focus on the middle of a painting or a photograph, and because it delays the viewer from attending to the other elements in the work. The cypress’ odd placement cuts the canvas in two and separates the effulgent star and the shadowed moon. The cypress reveals its two faces here, one that celebrates the brilliance of life, the other that mourns nightfall and death.

The contrast in the sky marked by the cypress is replicated in a more evident manner below by a divided road. The bypath on the left is constricted and narrow as it begins, while the path on the right is easily accessible. On the wider path on the right we see two “late walkers” enjoying the cool and “romantic” night. Behind them a horse with a carriage, presumably following their direction, has just appeared.

Van Gogh is telling us something here, that these late-night pilgrims have chosen the easier yet less illumined way; and that while they may have in the day persisted on seeing things as they are, or things as they should be, they have by the dead of night resigned themselves to what may be counterfeit and mere copies of the real thing.

The moon waxes and wanes, fights and gives up, as stars may light up the skies or altogether hide—as does our love for this earth. Love gratuitously bestows black evenings with glow and hope, and sustains the breath of the artist who despite many failures still believes that the world’s beauty could be attained and real happiness could be reached. Love of life is the counterweight of the enigmatic darkness and eternal sorrow of the world, and the artist is the balance on which truth and happiness are weighed.

But no amount of love can ever match the weight of an indifferent world. The colors on his canvas inevitably fade because the artist can only use paint diluted with tears.

Melancholy, December 1883

June 30, 2010
For Arnel Reniedo

Notes from the End of Life as We Know It 6: Some Acts of Hope in the Face of the Darkness

2010-06-04T09:37:00.000+08:00

The climate crisis that faces humanity is so immense that if one takes it seriously it would be easy to embrace despair and wait for the heat to smother us. I feel exactly this way some of these days. With the sun raging through most of our waking hours and our nights blanketing me in the proverbial blanket of oppressive heat, I cannot imagine better days although I know they are coming. They are, aren't they? They always have before. But then, it has never been this hot before. So, as I toss and turn in the long, long summer days, I cannot think past this oppressiveness—especially because I know the phenomenon is rooted in the undoing of our planet's mechanisms. As I languish in the birthing of the new world that is the fruit of our spiraling consumption, I wonder if there is anything that can be done.

As most of the accepted studies point out, there is no longer any way to stop global warming. Even if we are able to reduce greenhouse gases to those of the year 2000, global temperature will still increase by 0.6 degree Celsius. But at the rate, we are going the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts a rise of up to 2.5% by 2050. The best we can do is prepare for it and, with great collective effort, we can still mitigate its effects. There is no fix. What can we do? Re-trap the carbon in the sea or earth? Revitalize denuded forests? Find some technological fix that will allow us to consume as much while expending less carbon? All these fixes are only going to mitigate the effects of the warming that we have already initiated. According to Mark Maslin, “Scientists believe a cut of between 60 and 80% [of greenhouse emission gases] is required to avoid the worst effects of global warming. And what are these worst effects? The expected 2.5 degrees already spell unpredictable flooding, droughts, deaths of coral reefs, increasing rates of extinction, reduced water supply, drying up of rain forests, melting of glaciers, increased spread of disease, the deaths of hundreds of thousand of people and the displacement of millions more. How do we stop this? What can we do when the very mechanism of our planet has somehow been misaligned? How does one fix a mechanism which is so complex that one purported fix could effect countless devastating side-effects?

And so here I am in my helplessness while I watch the world I love turn inhospitable to the deadly, ungrateful parasite that calls it home. Maybe global warming is the fever that is meant to purge mother earth of parasites like us—if there are any others like us, which is unlikely. I want to think that there is hope and most writers on the environmental crisis seem to think so. But from where I swelter in earth's rising fever, pest that I am, I can only feel that my host is determined to rid herself of my kind. I cannot think of a fix in this heat, and the more I learn about what is going on, the more I feel that I should give up in utter atonement for my sins and the sins of my fathers and my colonizers.

Still, because I intuit a good in the universe, because I am bound to this good in love, and because I intuit the promise of indestructible good in my fellow human beings—undesirable parasites though we have become—I am called to hope and do the good if only as an act of fidelity to the love that calls us to be. And so we must hope by being steadfast in our goodness and in our desire to do good by the world that is still so good to us despite our ingratitude. Remaining steadfast in the face of the darkness, despite the fact that the world as we know it is ending while others dance mindlessly into the night, is important for it keeps the presence of good and love in a world dying from mindlessness and greed. Love being realized is love presencing. Ahimsa being lived by its adherents is ahimsa presencing in the world. In its presencing, love is able to touch the broken heart that knows only to take and consume and destroy. The presence of love could build hearts capable to opening to the love that presences and the value of the world that is seen as commodity and resource could shine forth as a truth and beauty other than just that for the eyes of the awakened.

How then do we save the world? With little acts of love. Think of conservation through the prism of love and you will figure it out. Because little people committing little acts of love can channel the transforming powers of love, the very power that runs through countless stars, to the transformation of parasites into creative persons. What is needed is fidelity among those who love the world, that is fidelity to the source of love and faith in its power to restore by staying true to one’s goodness and creativity. This could mean doing the simplest things that almost seem like nothing:

• Cut down on consumption of everything from electricity to meat. Consumption is the number one problem of the earth. Because there are so many of us consuming so much, we have strained the earth's carrying capacity. Reducing one's consumption no matter by how much is an act of cleansing one's self of one's excessive and unnecessary violence. Everyone has to commit some act of violence to survive. Eating of anything is a reduction of an other being to your self. By reducing consumption, we reduce our acts of violence to the necessary ones and thereby reduce our acts of violence to the minimum necessary amount. But also, by doing that, one learns the joy of living lightly without too much baggage. The less one needs, the more one has opportunities for happiness unsupported by artificial supports, and the more one is free to be generous to others.

• Eat less meat mainly because it takes so much petroleum, land, water, and basic cereals to raise them. Cows also contribute much to global warming because their farts are methane and because we kill so much rain forest to raise them. On top of that, raising more meat deprives more poor people of food. Meat is only accessible to the well off. The more land is used for meat, the less land is there to use for the food accessible to the poor. The more meat is grown, the more grain is used by meat growers and the more expensive grain becomes for those who rely on grain for their energy. In effect, the more meat we produce, the more the poor are deprived of affordable foods. Consider your reduction of meat consumption an act of generosity and solidarity.

• Buy more from the market and less from the grocery. By doing that, you lessen polluting packaging. If there is a small market of informal sellers near your neighborhood, try to buy from there. This way you will save on carbon emissions and you will support small entrepreneurs who need your support. Of course, this may cost you more but if you can afford it you should because you're paying to support entrepreneurs from the marginalized groups.

• Look for products that are organic (because they are less polluting). Better yet, buy local organic products because they are more simply packaged without too many frills (thus without too much cost on the environment), they don't release all that much carbon to transport, and they support local labor. Even more importantly, buy organic products that are local and are committed to supporting marginalized communities.

• Buy simple products that require less packaging or processing. It may be prettier but the more packaging something comes in, the more materials it uses up, the more natural resources it consumes, the more it pollutes, and the more energy it takes to make. The prettier it is, there is also a greater possibility that it came from some first world country which means that it was made in a fellow developing country where workers are exploited before it was shipped to us.

• Try to be less fancy about your tastes. When you have highly developed palates that demand the best from the world like coffee from Africa, cheese from Switzerland, and beef from Japan or Australia, it costs more carbon points to get it the way it is and to get it here from there. I know that it makes a world of difference to acquire and consume these highly developed meats, that its worth dying for and killing for those spices, but your highly developed tastes could be forcing African farmers to enter into a trade economy that forces them deeper into debt or for cows to live in ways that are violative of their good or for vast tracks of badly needed rain forests to be destroyed.

• Try to ask for simpler things: less packaged, less processed, less fancy, less expensive. Try to not live expensively because the higher your lifestyle the more people, animals, plants, and minerals you have to exploit to generate a sufficient income.

• Avoid eating in big fastfoods chains. They grow their animals cruelly. Chickens are packed in cages without light and without enough space to move. All livestock are fed antibiotics to stay alive because they can't move. They also use a lot of Styrofoam to pack food which is very bad by way of solid waste because it takes forever to degrade and it releases toxins into our food and water when used.

• Avoid wasting food. Too much food ends up in the trash. If you don't eat and waste too much, you don't demand too much food and more of it will be available to the poor. Less demand, lower prices. Lower prices, more affordable food available to the starving millions.

• Try not to travel too much. I know we all need a break from our surroundings-especially when we live in the city which is really not built for creative human habitation. However, our getaways have an environmental cost—especially air travel. On top of that, we create an artificial strain on the local population and natural environment as tourists. Notice how in tourist spots life changes for the people and animals around these places.

• Don’t waste. Only use as much as can be justified. Everything, even water, is scarce thus every time we use something we end up depriving others of a resource that could have been put to better or more essential use. So before you spend on something expensive, or rare, or fancy, or high tech ask yourself will this excessive expenditure allow me to function better? Will it allow me to serve others more effectively? Will it make me more able to bring about a better life or a better world for humanity even if I accomplish this in a small way? Will consuming or owning things make me a better person such that despite everyone else’s sacrifice (the farmers in Agusan, the laborers all over the world who are not paid just wages and are victims of contractualization, the animals who had to die for this, the children who may not have clean drinking water for this) is worth it?

• Quit the upgrading habit for electronics. Try to use your old applicances as much as it is efficient and still working. E-waste is very destructive. Try to buy things that last.

• Better yet, stop accumulating stuff and stop needing to have new things.

• Find your peace as much as you can. The deeper you are at peace with yourself, the less you will have to shop, to eat, to travel, to golf, to entertain yourself at such a high cost to everyone and everything. It’s hard but let’s try for all our sakes.

These are the simple and not so simple acts of love we can do to generate hope or to invigorate the forces of love that can transform this fevered world and this sick species that is spoiling its own nest. But let’s all start small with the love we can do. The capacity for love and generosity is one that needs to be exercised. One should not aim too high too quickly but build on what is possible and fruitful. But we must also never be content with staying where we are.

Soon, more will be asked of us. Greater acts of love will be called for as the greater effects of our self-involved lifestyles will threaten our species and every other form of life on earth. If we exercise our capacity to open to all that is now, perhaps then we can respond according to the measure we are called to. And maybe we can rise to the occasion of the catastrophe we have created.

The Embarrassment of My Yellow Vote

2010-05-05T00:29:00.000+08:00

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

The real title of this essay should be “Why, Despite My Commitment to the Effort to Build a Just Nation for the Marginalized, I Will Vote for Noynoy.” But the title above is shorter.

I try not to tell anyone that I will vote for Noynoy. I am deeply embarrassed by that fact because it could really be seen as a betrayal of my commitment to the marginalized and oppressed for whose liberation I have committed my adult life. I do believe that anyone who considers herself not just a liberal but a committed worker for the liberation of the marginalized from their marginalization should have serious qualms about voting for Noynoy Aquino. This is because he doesn’t genuinely understand the travails of our people and he is too entrenched in his class’ world view to ever understand or desire to genuinely liberate the downtrodden.

I say this mainly because of his attitude and non-action in relation to the Hacienda Luisita issue as much as anything else. What he says every time this issue is brought up is something like their family does not own a controlling share of the hacienda; or that his family is not involved in the management of the hacienda; or that it is a complex issue. What is this complex issue? It seems simple enough from the perspective of justice and fairness. That land was supposed to be distributed to its tenants because it is morally theirs anyway. The family patriarch Jose Cojuangco “acquired the plantation from Compania General de Tabacos de Filipinas in 1957 on a dollar loan guaranteed by the government ‘with the view of distributing the hacienda to small farmers.’”[1] Therefore the land does not genuinely belong to the family because the hacienda land was purchased in bad faith and clearly the tenants should long have been its owners. Now that the Cojuangco family has built an empire and a vast fortune from the land meant to be distributed to small farmers, maybe they can do right by way of the farmers and the government that backed their acquisition of the land. They also owe that land to the farmers because the Cory Constitution recognized, as a social justice principle by which this nation stands, the need to redistribute land to the landless because it is what justice demands and it is what long term development for all needs. But when it was their turn to do right by the people, the family subverted land reform by imposing some Stock Distribution Option (SDO) and Land Use Conversion scheme thereby further depriving these farmers of the opportunity of controlling productive assets that they have been systematically deprived of all their lives. The family and corporation not only immorally deprived their own tenants of their constitutional right to land reform, but they also converted so much of the land that was supposed to be distributed into highways, golf courses, and subdivisions so that there will be so much less to distribute. That’s simply bad faith and could be interpreted as malicious disregard of what the tenants are fighting for. And then there is that hard to ignore matter of the massacre and the systematic murder of the grassroots leaders who were fighting for workers’ rights and were trying to break the family’s desperate hold on the land. It seems a little too coincidental that these leaders were killed when they were about to engage in some significant action against the interests of the Luisita management. They say that the organizations of the far left are mainly responsible for these assassinations but the coincidence is just so uncanny that it makes me wonder if this family isn’t too caught up in the traditional haciendero role.

All that said, what does this have to do with Noynoy? If indeed he didn’t have anything to do with these incidents, and it seems that he didn’t, and knowing that there are people in his family that are determined to keep their wealth even at the cost of justice and the well-being and development of many other lives—why hasn’t he completely divested himself of their family interests in this vast reminder of the continuing injustice that keeps this country so poor? Why doesn’t he say something like I’m powerless to change my family’s ways, that corporation is beyond my control, but it has caused so much bloodshed and continues to cause misery, it was acquired in bad faith and was maintained through a system of oppression and deception, I want nothing to do with it. I will not gain from it, and I will as a man of some influence and power work to restore that land to right. Why can’t he do that? Why hasn’t he said anything like that? Maybe because he thinks that his family and his class do have a right to their riches and the national resources that they monopolize. I think he doesn’t see the social justice issue with regard to Luisita because he is blind to the way the elite have built an economic system that allows them to utilize national resources for their own benefit and a political system that supports their right to monopolize. He doesn’t seem to get it at all. He thinks that our nation’s poverty is mainly caused by corruption and if we eradicate corruption, we will eradicate poverty.

Anyone who has studied poverty and development in this country understands that our lack of development and massive poverty is rooted in injustice. The reason the poor are poor is because they have been marginalized by those who control the nation’s resources from effectively using these resources to build good lives according to their own aspirations. Haciendas are the clearest examples of this. For decades, the Filipino elite, not to mention foreign corporations, have systematically deprived small farmers of their land, sometimes of their ancestral domains, through illegal titling of pasture lands or forests, by aggressive occupation, through outright coercion, and mainly by deceptively trapping them in a cash economy they did not understand nor were they interested in engaging in. The ancestors of many of the marginalized today come from communities of people who were deprived of the land where they cultivated the kinds of lives that allowed them to flourish as people. But because they stood in the way of the elite’s need to acquire and consume, they were deprived of the site of their human flourishing and their children and their children’s children have been used as ill-paid and exploited generators of wealth.

The tenants of Hacienda Luisita are the progeny of these peoples deprived of the place of their human flourishing. They are the inheritors of the unjust marginalization of their ancestors. The owners of Luisita, those who amassed great wealth from its consolidation and exploitation, are the inheritors of the fruit of the injustice inflicted upon the people. By their continued ownership of this land, they are depriving generations of hard working farmers of the opportunity to regain a place to possibly rebuild sites for their human flourishing where they determine what they are working for and what good it will serve, not to mention whose good it will serve. By insisting that they have a right to the land, the tenants are only affirming a principle enshrined in the Constitution and the CARP law. They are only trying to get past the hacienda’s owners’ skillful legal and political maneuverings in order to restore to them land that needs to be restored to the marginalized in order to begin the long task of uplifting the exploited and making them productive and empowered citizens of our nation.

By allowing the land to be reformed, to be restored to the deprived, the beneficiaries from injustice will be able to restore themselves as well to their potential as creative people. They will free themselves from being participants and captives to a destructive and unjust system that conditions them to be unjust people who can easily cause the death and suffering of others. Thusly, they will be freed to realize their potential for heroism, self sacrifice, and justice. This family has amassed wealth beyond what is just, what is healthy for them, and what is necessary for many lifetimes. The wealth they have amassed can be invested otherwise. They should free themselves from this evil from their past and move on to a clean start or to actually serve the nation.

When Noynoy speaks about the hacienda and their holdings, there is no hint that he understands why the farmers have a right to this land. There is no sense that his family’s wealth was amassed through injustice. There is no indication that he understands that the poverty of the marginalized is the fruit of acts of violence committed upon them by an aggressive and exploitative class of Filipinos to which he belongs. This is why he believes that corruption is the major cause of poverty. It makes it seem that we only need to rid our system of parasitic politicians and so much money will be freed for good government programs to help the poor. But corruption is only one symptom of the problem. If you rid the system of corruption you will only make the nation a better site for the goings on of mainstream business, much of which deprives the poor of their capacity to be genuinely productive participants in economic development. We will not have been able to ensure that the marginalized are empowered to engage society creatively because the elite will still have the monopoly of the resources and opportunities to shape this nation as it serves them. Thus, if Noynoy becomes president, I have no hope that he will understand the roots of poverty and that he will be able to address this effectively and decisively. And that’s why I say that anyone who has a deep concern for the liberation of the marginalized will have a hard time justifying their support for Noynoy.

However, there is this. His closest competitor has even less sense of the plight of the poor and it will be even more doubtful that he will do anything significant for them. Villar, despite his deceptive claims to be of the poor, was clearly not. They were probably even one of those families in Tondo that exploited their poor neighbors. Worst of all, he is a predatory businessman who will probably work to strengthen the position and interests only of the business class at best and strengthen and propagate his own interests at worst. Plus his style of being a politician leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth. Good grief! How badly handled was that Noynoy is psychologically “sablay” campaign? Gibo seems to be a good technocrat but I have my doubts about the integrity of a man who was able to serve under such a corrupt and blatantly self serving administration. Perlas gets it but doesn’t have the political suave to push reforms through. The leaders from the religious right don’t give me confidence that they understand democratic and plural systems. Gordon is a manager but he has too much of a middle class sensibility to understand the injustice of poverty. The rest are not worth seriously considering.

So what does Noynoy have that wins my reluctant vote? Simply this: there are people in the Liberal Party who do get it. With my vote for Noynoy I am casting a vote for the progressives in the Liberal Party who now seem to have the upper hand over the majority of trapos who populate it. Although the Liberal Party is still a traditional political party that is held together mostly by the self-interest of politicians whose sole interest is their political flourishing, there has been a group of rather progressive—very progressive by way of the standards of traditional politics—who have been leaders in recent moves to reform the political and electoral system. In the last decade, the Liberal Party has actively worked to build itself a functioning policy arm and tried to organize some of its constituents into active participants in formulating policy. They have tried to build the party membership. This group has also been active in pushing for reforms in our laws to ensure that political parties build actual constituencies, that they be more policy and platform oriented, and that they have adequate sources of funds so that they are not beholden to any interests during elections. Leaders of the party also worked hard for crucial social and economic reforms such as CARPER and the strengthening of local autonomy as well as people’s participation in governance. Mar Roxas was even an important leader in the WTO negotiations representing the interests of the developing world. Of course there are still the majority members who are mainly aligned with the LP and Noynoy because they can smell Malacañang on him and the party. But the significant minority that defines policy and spells out the agenda for reform do get the need to go deeper into the country’s ills than merely rooting out corruption.

So, the long and short of this is I give Noynoy and Mar my vote because I have hope in the Liberal Party. Don’t get me wrong, I still think they are too much oriented toward the traditional political view of politics and society to be able to take us to the just and sustainably prosperous nation that we aspire for. However, for a traditional party with enough good people, they could just bring about significant reforms and open the space for the work of genuine empowerment and liberation to flourish.

[1] http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/inquirerheadlines/nation/view/20100310-257749/Agrarian-reform-Long-on-promises-short-on-performance. accessed 29 April 2010. PDI MARCH 10, 2010, I-TEAM REPORT: THINK ISSUES
Agrarian reform: Long on promises, short on performance, By Fernando del Mundo, Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 05:11:00 03/10/2010

Notes from the End of Life as We Know It 5: Afternoon Interlude

2010-04-07T09:18:00.000+08:00

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

As I sit on the ground under the tree that is extending itself in every direction to meet the explosion of sunlight, my son runs in the field with a kite dancing, fluttering, taking height, crashing, being wildly dragged, and dancing, dancing, dancing behind him. The day is structured for joy. The wind is set to match the rapid rush of feet barely touching ground. The abundance of space holds up the joy of vibrant life asserting itself in stillness. The light that comes as an unending smile reigns upon us all. The architecture of the day makes me well from inside. Yet, while dwelling in all of this, I am sitting on the brown grass. I am on a dry carpet of dead things. The grass is so dead that it feels like it would kill the cow that would devour it.

This moment in the joy of the day feels like eternity. Joy is precisely like that—a still day swelling with sunshine. One does not feel the day in the shade as moving—especially as something moving toward something else or to sometime better. It does not serve a better time nor is it intending a future or past. The joy of this moment is that there is nothing else than this moment—nothing further. There is nothing past this moment, there is only this event of the dancing kite, the flying child, and the man in the shade given to himself as the blessed one to whom the day is given. I do so love the pleasure of this day despite the fact that I am nested on the remains of dead things.

Sitting on the grass, watching a boy find joy in the wind his running generates, I being grateful in the shade—how can one not beam back at the sun? And still I am very aware that the ground beneath me which a few months ago was so saturated with water is today beginning to turn into dust, and soon it will be cracking. It is cool where I am. When the wind blows it is refreshing. Still the grass has stopped growing and further north in this country, crops and livestock--more truly plants and animals--are drying up unto death. Here in the shade I cannot see this but I know and cannot help but know. Despite this I am happy and content and my heart cannot help but murmur joy, joy, joy!

At the end of the world as we know it, joy is tempered by the oncoming changes—changes that will touch the boy with the kite more than the middle aged man happy in his day. How dare I be happy? This bright day could signal the hard times to come—just as the beautiful sunsets we have witnessed in the last years bring to vision the pollutants we have scattered to the sky. At the end of the world as we know it, how do we face the joy of today when it is tainted with the potential of future catastrophe? But is this not the reality of life, however we know it? Isn't every day's joy tainted already with the ultimate catastrophe of death and perhaps the even more catastrophic reality of suffering? Mostly, we embrace our joy and value it by averting our eyes and forgetting about what is to come. Most of us live each moment piling stimulation upon stimulation to simulate joy and effect forgetfulness. But not all of us open to joy in this way. There are those among us who can see the joy of joy because they can see past suffering and death into a greater life. The joy of a day can be honestly embraced because it signals what existence connotes beyond the contingency of this particular joy.

I sit on the dead grass, I let the sun seep into my psyche, I soak up my son’s joy and all is well in the world whatever the next moment brings because what it all boils down to, what it all ends up being, however all things in time end, there is this joy that promises that all time begins and ends in this joy. Sitting here, the day that embraces me bursts with that certainty. There is this moment’s joy and every moment will find its perfection in it. Every other pain, every other sorrow, every other horror in time is but a passing moment in the unmoved and unmoving day that we will all awaken to.

And so this day at the edge of the end of life as we know it signals both the difficulties to come and the joy to come. The difficulties will have to be faced and endured and surpassed to a better day. The joy to come will be embraced and it will fill all the dark difficulties we will endure with the light of this day, with its peals of joy, with its shade and comfort—and it will be the final moment. It will be the last moment and it will not be an ending but an enduring. The fullness that is this joy will gather every moment to its fullness.

Thus, although I know that this time will end—that I will have to rise from the shade, I will reluctantly call the boy in, that we will gather our things, the sun will set, and perhaps the drought will worsen—I revel in it knowing that it is a hint of the final moment when the troubles will finally be lifted.

Notes from the End of Life as We Know It 4: It’s the End of the World as We Know It and We Ought to Feel Fine

2010-03-04T08:27:00.001+08:00

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

When the world ends, we can begin to speak about hope. The world as we know it is ending…at least I think it is. Perhaps I should say at least I fear it is and I also hope it is.

I like the world as we know it. I have a comfortable position in it. I earn enough so that I have health insurance, I can send my children to school, I can buy enough good food to keep me healthy, I can maintain a nice house, I have a car that works well, my children have what they want and a lot of what they need, I have leisure time, and I can buy stuff that I like. I can live this way because I belong to the class that benefits from civilization as we know it. Thus, I am worried about the end of the world as we know it. I just actually got where I am. I am an upwardly mobile professor in a school that pays people like me well enough. I can purchase luxuries that make my life comfortable and make me feel pampered. And so, thinking that this world will end and that we will have to give up most of the luxuries that I have just began to be able to afford makes me feel sad. But more than that, thinking about what is to come and how we will have to face it also scares me. How will we deal with the scarcity of food when global warming hits hardest, petroleum runs out, water becomes difficult to come by and topsoil is depleted? What adjustments will we make when we can’t rely on mass production? How will life be when we can’t buy new toys and gadgets and we can’t rely on the constant novelty of consumer products to make us feel that existence is interesting and leading somewhere?

Certainly, compared to many people of my class and capacities, I don’t spend that much. What I earn is a mere pittance compared to what I could earn if I worked in a corporation. However, I began my adult life as a teacher with teacher’s aspirations and with most teachers’ modest dreams. So now that I earn as much as an associate professor who is occasionally able to engage multilateral organizations for modest projects with decent fees, I feel on the top of the world. I don’t have a really nice car. The one I love is already 20 years old. My bikes have always been second hand and never exactly fit my frame because I can’t really spend too much on them. My family’s computers are always the cheapest, most decent things that work and never cost more than Php 24,000. These gadgets are also always paid for in monthly installments. My books are mostly second hand or bought with grants. I have two pairs of formal pants that are at least 10 years old, my work shirts don’t usually cost more than Php 500, and my family doesn’t usually go on expensive vacations, and we rarely eat out in expensive restaurants. A Php 500 a plate place is really swanky for us and we haven’t left the country together at all. In fact, only one of us goes abroad for vacations. So, although I benefit from this world that we know, I don’t really need that much from it and we are even trying to lessen our impact on it.

In the last year, my family, with the leadership of my wife, has reduced our consumption of beef because it takes so much water, so much land, so much grain, so much fuel to raise cows. On top of that cows’ burps and farts significantly contribute to global warming. (Look it up!) We use organic shampoo and soaps because these are gentler on our water and the making of the products we buy support local communities. We compost in our home to cut down on solid waste and we grow vegetables in our tiny yard just because it seems like the right thing to do. We do these things because we like to cut down on our impact on the world. We really don’t want the earth or others to pay for the lives we live. So as much as we can, we try to support our local community, to put our savings into a small farming enterprise to help in food production, increase employment (for two people sad to say), and try to find betters ways of raising livestock. But it’s a real struggle because the world as we know it does not support lifestyles that consciously aim to serve nature and our neighbors or at least to mitigate our effects on it.

Although we have decided to live with a somewhat lighter carbon, water, and whatever you call the footprint that is left on your neighbor’s back because of your high cost lifestyle, I find myself still walking heavily on the earth. I use up perhaps enough electricity to power three households in Daang Tubo (and that despite living in an airconless home). I spend on entertainment a year as much as a family of five would for food in Esperanza, Agusan del Sur. We spend enough on food a year to house four urban poor families in Payatas. How do we earn this money? Thankfully without having to exploit anyone directly: my wife lawyers for the Supreme Court and I teach and do poverty research. But in the end, despite our desire to serve others with out work, live without exploiting those we serve, and not to destroy nature we are moved by our world to do so. How? My salary is probably sustained by people who may have earned their profits through the contractualization of labor, through the under pricing of produce of small farmers, or the overpricing of farm inputs. The affordable food on my table is probably produced in farms where pigs and chickens are bred in cruel conditions and seasonal workers are paid non-livable wages. If I wish to engage in leisure activities, it is easiest to spend time in a mall buying items that will end up as clutter in our home and to waste it on unfulfilling activities. It’s cheaper to eat junk than fresh and healthy food. It’s cheaper and easier to watch insightless films than to watch well-thought out, well produced theatre.

Our societies are structured in such a way that mass produced junk is made more accessible and more desirable than things that are healthy and perhaps more suited to human flourishing. Not only that, the way our societies are structured, we are taught to desire what is more destructive and more violent to the earth and fellow human beings than things that have less impact and are more creative. For instance, I could be easily drawn to obsessing over a computer game that will give me a headache and perhaps make me ill-tempered than to do some other thing more suited to me and can, on the whole, give me a greater sense of well-being: in my case working on my garden, reading a book, or writing. Eating junk that I don’t need to eat because I don’t really need to eat but can is easier than just being content with the nutrition I am able to ingest fruitfully. Making huge amounts of profit without having produced anything of lasting value is easier than long term investments in activities that will produce better food, sustainable development, or opportunities for human creativity. The world as we know it exists to amuse us, to feed into our need for accumulation, to stimulate our consumption, and to keep us busy with empty activities that leave us bored and restless. At the same time, it makes it difficult to live in a just way, to consume in moderation, and to tread lightly on the earth.

You might say, well then, isn’t that all about choices? Stop blaming society for the choices that we make. Just choose otherwise. However, more often than not, the choices for a better life are taken away from us. A destructive game of mass consumption and accumulation has been set up as the paradigm of modern economies and civilizations such that the default mode for living in the more “civilized” areas of our world means buying into mass farming, encouraging polluting processes of manufacturing, and being involved in enterprises that tend to exploit the exploitable. It’s not so easy to choose otherwise unless you choose to live in the margins of our civilization. Many people are doing that—most not out of choice. But that isn’t the answer because the world as we know it, the civilization that dominates our planet, has caused global warming, the scarcity of food, pollution, the destruction of nature, and it is just not sustainable for most of us, or even a significant minority of us, to live this way. But then, the world as we know it is ending. History is presenting us today or will be presenting us with a chance to rethink and rebuild our civilizations according to other values, other ways of being.

And so, scary as it seems, it’s the end of the world as we know it, and I’m sad and scared but it should be fine. After all, just as I am beginning to cash in on a life of hard work and saving, I realize that even with my modest dreams I am destroying my world and causing the hardship of others who are with me now and to come. And this is because the world as we know it, life as we live it, is structured in such a way that we are violent to our world, to each other and to our selves. And so it has to end—just when I got to the top of it. However, I can say that despite the cataclysmic shocks that will signal the need to transition to a better life, I am glad for it.

"Showtime!": Not Just Entertainment

2010-02-15T14:08:00.000+08:00

by Geoffrey Guevara

The fairly new noontime program, "Showtime!" is rating high in the viewership polls. It's a simple show--group performances are evaluated by a panel of judges. The group with the highest score wins and advances to the weekly finals, then to the monthly, until the grand finals. It's not very different from old school TV contests such as those in Eat…Bulaga!, the defunct MTB and Chowtime Na! There's nothing new in its mechanics either—the style of judges rating (or berating) contestants is stolen from American Idol and America's Got Talent.

I initially had doubts about this program’s success. With the many ABS-CBN programs that have come and gone, I thought that this would be just another program that was bound to die as soon as it learned to breathe. However, tuning in to the show, I can't help but be glued to the screen because of the promise of more surprises from the production numbers and the candor of the hosts’ and judges’ comments. But more than its production values, there is something in the show which engages the audiences both in the live studio and in the homes. Simply put, the show is entertaining.

When the show was just starting (and probably when it still wasn’t clear what it was about) Vice Ganda, one of the judges, was able to articulate what the show is about. He said, "This is not a talent show! We want to be entertained." And so began the entertainment. It came from the contestants’ acts, the diverse reactions of the judges, and the energies of its audience and hosts. And although the contestants are serious about their performances—they perform in the spirit of fun. The show is not stressful even to the contestants. That is the appeal of the show.

"Showtime!" came at the time when we were all dead tired from the successive disasters of floods, typhoons, capsizing ships, and, currently, confusion of our political situation. People just wanted to be entertained—they wanted not to have to worry about anything anymore, to just be hedonistically happy, to be free. "Showtime!" provided that entertainment. No contestant needed to be saved through text votes (the viewers though can get rid of heartless judges). The audience is not kept at the edge of their seats worrying if their favorite is going to win or not. Nothing is at stake—not even the contestants’ dignity. "Showtime!"promises nothing but raw entertainment.

Despite its clear entertainment value, we have to ask what is new about the entertainment this show is offering? Wowowee! and Eat… Bulaga! offer the same kind of entertainment. However, there is one difference –Showtime!’s entertainment isn’t tied to its prize money. Sure, it has a 50K prize for the daily winner but the hosts don’t harp on this fact as if it were the end all and be all of the show. Money is not used to make the participants act like fools on stage divulging every bit of drama in their lives. Neither is it used to make them exaggerate their own infirmities and bad traits. Their jingle hits it right on the mark: "'Di namin nais yaman sa mundo para sumaya... basta't kasama kapamilya..." What the contestants seek is their two minutes of fame, two minutes of realizing their dream to perform on stage, on national TV. Even contestants themselves validate this, "Gusto lang namin magperform. Mapakita ang kaya namin. Kahit hindi kami manalo." And that's enough for them. Hence, no dramatics and theatrics are involved. Just entertainment. Just fun stuff.

These days, it seems that the measure of success and happiness for the mainstream and elite culture is the accumulation of wealth and power. Greatness in politics and success in governance is measured by the number of projects and benefits thrown to the masses and the growth in GNP/GDP. The “fulfilled” man is measured by the number of degrees, honors and amount of cash he has at hand. Though these are also important, if we're going to take it from the success this new show, it seems that the ordinary Filipino has other ambitions. The basic value of communal fun ("sama-samang saya") and having an avenue to showcase local raw talent is enough.

"Showtime!" gives hope to the underrated, unnoticed and unnamed talents out there. Hope comes not in the money they will win by displaying their talents on TV. The act of being seen and being heard is their signal fire--they refuse to remain nobodies. That is their motivation.

The success of "Showtime!" is its ability to reconnect and rearticulate this basic Filipino desire. The success of the Filipino is that it was given an avenue to be part of the mainstream forum again.

Requiem for Red Poinsettias

2010-01-20T19:36:00.000+08:00

by Michael Aurelio

The green leaves of our poinsettias are back.

The curious plant’s more predisposed color reluctantly began returning one leaf at a time shortly after Christmas Day. I had then thought in passing that that was less than what my mother had bargained for: she had purchased, with some degree of perceptible excitement, ten pots of the most promising (and thus more expensive) red poinsettias from an overpriced wayside garden shop in Tagaytay early last December.

However, what has been for me a little miracle every Christmas season—what with the magic that, without fail and always on schedule, leaves of an otherwise indiscernible plant turn rich red to announce and remind us the coming of what would be the greater miracle—has recently been an indicator of the brevity of our attention and a sign of the transience of happiness.

The red poinsettia’s phenomenal trans-coloration, which I had long ago decided to never Google why so as to guard the few things of which I am still in awe, formally commenced its reversal early this January on the way to its inevitable dis- or re-coloration. I think this time I know why.

Our poinsettias had accurately noticed that the praises we initially would throw on them became fewer and fewer by the end of December. Showing their sulky side and proving that plants have feelings too, they were also quick to point out that the gardener, who had faithfully and tediously propped them up before the night family and friends came in their new dresses to celebrate over wine and hams and cheeses the birth of the Christ, has as of late forgotten an alarming number of times to attend to their required daily allowance of water, sun and sky.

The poinsettias’ anxiety only became worse when they surmised (after patiently waiting for a reasonable amount of time, of course) that their tall mummified friend, which was brought down the basement after being unceremoniously undressed from its gown of sparkling lights and glistening gems and hastily chopped into three equally short pieces, was not coming back anytime soon.

After finding themselves dismissed out of the house (that was the last straw, all concurred), they continue to be snubbed by the stoical bonsai every morning and have been left with no choice but to entertain no longer guests bringing good cheer but the frequent complaints of the blades of grass which are too sensitive for their own good. The red poinsettias began to suspect the end was near: they were lined up against a wall a few days ago to join a rust-crusted trash bin and a worn-out wooden bench that only reminded them of the fate they shared with their once leafy brothers.

Afraid of attracting too much attention or be regarded as out of fashion or last year’s news, more and more green sprouts urgently push their way out of our poinsettias’ branches everyday. Meanwhile, the leaves which have turned dark magenta—once so red, so proud and so merry—in the same regularity disappear when no one would be looking and without even waving goodbye.

Notes from the End of Life as We Know It 3: The Cube

2010-01-20T19:26:00.000+08:00

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

I have a confession to make. Our department, an institution that we would like to think of as a center of teaching on social justice and environmental ethics, an institution working to place itself at the cutting edge of philosophizing on the environment and the roots of the environmental crisis, is in love with our cube.

What is our cube? It is a neatly constructed, metal and plastic coffee maker. Its lines are very neat and precise so it is like the iPod of coffee machines. What does it do? It makes coffee that is meant to wow even the most moderately trained, civilized, white or pseudo-white palates. I must say, it does make wonderful coffee. It is the kind of coffee that makes one want to rush to the office because it delivers a well-being inducing aroma and a full bouquet for your taste buds. The cube offers a complex and complete experience to your every sense involved with taste and wakefulness. This is why we love our cube.

This quality of coffee is produced by a very special process. Properly ground coffee is packed in pods made of pretty plastic and foil. It's like a little bullet of joy. We load the bullet into a chamber, close the chamber and almost instantly flows the light brown, bubbly liquid and the warm aroma of a cozy day. The cube allows us to access the joy of coffee with such a simple process: all you do is load a bullet and liquid comfort emerges. What does it cost? The cube and its coffee pods were a gift, but if we paid for our cube coffee, it would cost 50 pesos a hit. More than that, our coffee leaves a trail of spent pods that are not reusable or biodegradable if they are at all recyclable. When I brought up this fact over coffee, we joked that we could get the pods and make them into Christmas ornaments.

So here we are, professed lovers of the environment, believers in the need to reduce, recycle and reuse, shamelessly producing non-biodegradable waste only for coffee that could be made in a less costly way. But, some will say that it is the most wonderful coffee that we could have on a daily basis! Why deny ourselves this simple joy? Isn't it worth the cost? After all the higher things in life have a greater cost. These costs are just things we have to live with. Besides, how much of this wasted pods do we produce in a day? Ten or so? And we can't even afford to buy the pods ourselves so we only have it now and then when our pod patron donates them to us. But the point is this—the pod is a product of a lifestyle and mentality which is convinced that the best things in life are worth the cost on our environment and our fellow humans. Even if it's the only wasteful thing we do, it betrays a kind of mentality we have, i.e. we are willing to produce waste for our comfort and perhaps to be blind to the possible effects of the technology we use if its gift is pleasurable enough.

If one thinks about it deeply enough, the cube’s coffee may cost much. Aside from the waste it produces, the cube also calls its users to sustain a moderately high level of income. In order to use and sustain the operations of the cube, we have to earn enough to spend fifty pesos a day for coffee. Plus, we have to be the kind of people who occasionally go to Singapore to get the pods. That's actually why we just wait for the donations of our pod patron to be able to use the machine. Most of us have chosen vocations that do not support such an income. But what vocations do support such an income? Does one need to use casualized labor, suppress the incomes of others for one’s bonuses, or avoid taxes to earn this income? We also have to wonder if the coffee that goes into this pod is acquired justly. To produce it, are farmers exploited? And we have to ask how much carbon is emitted for the coffee to be planted and then brought to the processing plants and then to Singapore and then to us.

Coffee is a simple but intense pleasure—and the cube makes it simpler to acquire and more intensely pleasurable for us. But how simple is that pleasure, really? Don’t we know by now that something as simple as coffee drinking can have repercussions on our environment and the well-being of the vulnerable people in the world? It is a simple machinery of joy but symbols much of why we have come to the end of life as we know it.

For coffee lovers, not all coffee is coffee. They have a deep scorn for instant coffee, and demand freshly picked and freshly ground coffee. In order to obtain “real coffee,” their suppliers will scour the world, grow the coffee in various areas to get the best results, and perhaps pay the growers prices lower than the coffee will be worth. To get great coffee, we produce much carbon transporting, if not in growing, it. To enjoy this coffee, you have to have a lifestyle that supports it—moderately high incomes to buy the coffee and the paraphernalia, the food and utensils that enhance the coffee drinking pleasure. What do we do to the world and what do we do to our neighbors just to perk up our day? There are ways to enjoy the pleasures of coffee in a manner that is less costly but coffee lovers would like to have this kind of coffee and are willing to pay the cost for it. Why is this so?

I think it has much to do with our tendency to benchmark our level of civilization with the West. I think the fact that this coffee tastes so good to us is because we have been educated by Western palates to believe that this is the best coffee. Palates are educated after all. They are not just genetically determined but are educated to understand and believe what is flavorful and what is good. Barako coffee that is boiled in a pot could have been the height of coffee drinking pleasure if we were educated to taste that. If we conquered the world too we could have set the kettle boiled barako to be the world standard of gourmet coffee. But we didn't and it isn't. Those who did conquer the world set a costly standard of coffee to be the best. We the conquered bought into their standards and have become complicit in the coming of the end of life as we know it.

Again we see how patterning our lives after the highly civilized world is contributing to the end of the world as we know it. So we have to think about how to turn this habit of benchmarking around.

The so-called developing world functions well at a third of the cost of the so-called developed world. UCLA professor of geography, Jared Diamond, notes this:

The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world.  

Or put another way:

The estimated one billion people who live in developed countries have a relative per capita consumption rate of 32. Most of the world’s other 5.5 billion people constitute the developing world, with relative per capita consumption rates below 32, mostly down toward 1.

Most of us prepare coffee without producing so much carbon and solid waste. Traditionally, the food we prepare comes without too much packaging and processing. Most of our produce comes fresh from local markets that source from local producers. We might not prepare the most sophisticated kinds of foods with the most cosmopolitan of ingredients but the food that we make has less of an impact on our world. Our impact on the world is still considerable mind you. We pour raw sewage into our waterways, we pollute our air with our fuel inefficient and excessive carbon producing vehicles, and we dump most of our solid waste in contaminating landfills. Plus our factories run without any form of environmental standards to regulate their pollution and we waste water as if it was abundant. However, in spite of this, we are still among those who are considerably less carbon polluting and resource consuming than the developed world.

The reason why we impact less on our world than the first-to-have-developed world is because our lifestyles in comparison are so simple. We don't have that much disposable income, we are not that technologically sophisticated, and we don't have easy access to resources, like electricity, that make it is easy for us to live resource hungry lifestyles. Since it isn't easy for us to waste, we don't do it as much. If we look at our traditional communities that are even less developed or civilized and sophisticated, they are living with even less impact on the world. However, they too are beginning to desire to live the civilized life like we do.

We truly need to rethink our lifestyles because if everyone wanted to live like Americans do, there is not enough world for it. There’s not even enough world to sustain European lifestyles which are considerably more considerate of the earth than the American way of being. And now that the world is warming, and we are faced with the catastrophic choices our resource hungry brothers have made, we have to rethink our pursuit of their life. We have to rethink our ways of making coffee, of transporting ourselves, and of earning a living because their ways have brought us to this. Maybe our ways can take us to our future. It is perhaps time to wake up and smell the barako brewing.

Timely Reflections in an Unexpected Context

2009-12-09T17:51:00.000+08:00

by Pamela Joy Mariano

I am writing this in the pre-departure waiting area of NAIA Terminal 2, as I wait for my noon flight to Cagayan de Oro. In the seat directly behind me is a Muslim woman and her companion—their religious affiliations betrayed by the veil that she wears—and she is having an animated conversation in Bisaya with the women across from her, whom I assume are not Muslim. My guess, which is confirmed by the snatches of conversation I overhear, is that she is Maranao. After all, Cagayan de Oro's airport is about 30-40 minutes away from Iligan, Lanao del Norte, and the hills and lakes of Lanao are the homeland of the Maranao tribe, different from the Maguindanao who come from the plains of Cotabato.

It struck me at that moment—these women exemplify the plurality and diversity in Mindanao, and of the Philippines in general, the diversity of views, of religious affiliations, of tribal and regional affiliations and of language communities. A monolithic notion of “Filipino” and “Filipino identity” is impossible to formulate, and yet, that is what both the media and the government seem to project—that Filipino is a category easily defined and circumscribed.

Not unexpectedly, the women behind me are talking about politics in Mindanao, especially in ARMM. As I sat down a few minutes ago, I caught the tail-end of an exchange about the massacre, that I roughly translate here:

“It has nothing to do with religion, and all to do with politics.”

I don't listen to the rest of their conversation—it's impolite to eavesdrop—but I can't help catching snatches of their conversation, just words and phrases at random and out of context: private armies; automated elections; voting; names of presidential candidates.

It made me think of what the events in the small town of Ampatuan have to say to us, what it tells people who live their lives hundreds or thousands of kilometers away, but still exist within the same state. The inhumane killing of 57 people in Ampatuan tells us in the most glaring terms the tenuous nature of Philippine democracy. Despite the supposed democratic nature of our government as enshrined in our constitution, and in groundbreaking laws such as the LGU Act and the IPRA, the principles that these laws are rooted in are often not manifest in reality. The politics of impunity are still prevalent, cases of electoral violence still abound. We forget that the exercise of force and violence *are not exercises of power in politics*. Because of this, many of us feel helplesness and powerlessness.

But our felt helpessness in the face of the Ampatuan Massacre does not have to lead to powerlessness. Power is not a function of how much money you have, nor the size of your private army, nor the number of “influential” people you know. The nature of democracy, in an oversimplified sense, is that power originates in and from the people as a whole. This past week can be a way for us to remember what our democracy is realy supposed to be about—acknowledging that we are the ones who govern ourselves, that our voices are the the ones that should be heard. Part of this requires us to recognize that our country, our state, is one composed of a plurality of groups and affiliations, and how it is necessary for us to giving everyone proper representation and recognition. It is in our voices and thoughts and acts that power resides.

If there is anything positive that we can gain from the heinous massacre of 57 people in Maguindanao, it is the reminder of who we are as a political community, as the democratic state called the Philippines. Our collective revulsion at the heinous acts are reminders of our commitment to respecting and honoring the dignity of every human being; our unorchestrated and yet collective outrage at the massacre is a reminder of our unity in the midst of plurality, that unity need not be confused with conformity nor uniformity; our collective efforts to spread the word and make sure that other Filipinos are well-informed about these events in Maguindanao is a reminder of our commitment to personal participation in holding our public servants accountable to us. All of these are principles that our democracy is based on.

When I first heard the news of what is now called the Ampatuan Massacre, I posted as a status update on my Facebook the following question: “How can I continue to read a [philosophy] book about cosmopolitanism in the face of such heinous acts?” Here too the women seated behind me in the airport again have something to teach me. These women were complete strangers prior to their striking up a conversation with each other while waiting for the airplane to leave. Their new acquaintance, conversation, and even friendship began simply on the basis of a common context—the predeparture area of the airport, the same flight, and a common destination—Cagayan de Oro. The commonality of their context does not erase the fact of their difference, but makes it possible for them to share themselves in each other. It makes it all the more important, then, for us to study—and not just intellectually, but in praxis—things like cosmopolitanism. The possibility of friendship and conversation, recognizing difference, initiating dialogue, and promoting peace happens also on all levels, including the level of theory.

Statement on Proclamation 1959 from Individual Members of the Philosophy Department of the Ateneo

2009-12-07T17:39:00.000+08:00

We share in the nation's collective disgust and outrage as the massacre in Ampatuan, Maguindanao was brought to light. We grieve together with the victims' families, and stand with the ordinary citizens of Maguindanao who have been treated as vassals and slaves by warlords who forget that they live in a democratic state. We, too, share in the nation's collective dismay at the growing evidence of a continuing politics of impunity in Maguindanao.

However, we question the necessity and legality of the government's declaration of Martial Law and subsequent military rule in Maguindanao. The Constitution's provisions allow for the state of Martial Law to be declared only when there is an actual rebellion or invasion that endangers the safety of the public. While we acknowledge that government functions in the province of Maguindanao have been weakened, we question whether this constitutes one of these limit cases.

In the absence of strong evidence for an actual rebellion in Maguindanao, we fear the declaration may set a dangerous precedent that could open the door to unrestricted power and abuse. That the Ampatuan massacre happened at all reveals the weakness of the state and the disregard that our own leaders and peacekeepers have for the rule of law. The continuation of Martial Law in Maguindanao based on shaky grounds does not strengthen the state; it cripples the state further. Instead of countering the politics of impunity with showing that our democratic systems can and do work for the good of the people, the government has chosen to fight impunity with impunity, violence with violence.

The Constitution provides safeguards to prevent the arbitrary use of emergency powers. Our institutions tasked with the constitutional safeguards against the potential tyranny of Martial Law are being challenged by our circumstances to fulfill their tasks as true servants of our Constitution.

We demand that Congress fulfill its responsibility to review the proclamation and revoke it if necessary. Already late, the Congress should do its constitutional duty and convene itself. We hope that in such a time as this, this Congress can act with good judgment on the matter. But if they cannot act as disinterested representatives of the people who have their constituents' welfare in mind, then they should remember that they are up for re-election and, judging from the surveys, the people are less tolerant of those who have blatantly subverted our systems for their own gain. In May, the people will speak and their almost decade long governance of impunity and continuous machinations of power will come to an end.

We ask the Supreme Court to act swiftly and justly in the resolution of any proceeding that will most certainly be filed with regard to this issue. The high court has a chance to prove its critics wrong, and show once again that a GMA appointed court can decide independently on matters of vital national importance.

Most of all, we ask the military to realize its duty as protectors of the people and defenders of the constitution. May they courageously stand by their professionalism and not allow themselves to be used by people who have questionable agenda.

We realize that many people might agree with the President's extraordinary declaration of martial law to resolve the problem in Maguindanao. But we have to remember that we would not have come to this situation if we had institutions that functioned to safeguard the people's welfare. So we should not exacerbate the problem by overriding our constitutional and legal processes.

We ask, then, that the lawlessness of the Ampatuan Massacre be countered by the lawfulness of our institutions, so that our faith in Constitutional processes and democratic systems can be restored. Lawless acts of evil can only be contained by lawful institutions that work.

Signed,

Individual Members of the Department of Philosophy, Ateneo de Manila
University

Antonette Angeles
Michael Aurelio
Remmon Barbaza
Oscar Bulaong, Jr.
Mark Joseph Calano
Sircio Chan
Manuel Dy, Jr.
Geoffrey Guevara
Jacqueline Jacinto
Michael Ner Mariano
Pamela Joy Mariano
Jovino Miroy
Rowena Azada-Palacios
Agustin Martin Rodriguez
Jomel Santos
Andrew Soh
Eileen Tupaz
John Carlo P. Uy

Mangu-danao Massacre

2009-11-27T10:03:00.000+08:00

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

When my son had his first nightmare and woke up crying, he told me that he had dreamt that monsters ate his mother. I tried to comfort him by telling him that there were no monsters in the real world—only on the computer and on TV where he saw these things. What a lie indeed, for just a few days ago on TV, we were shown the works of monsters in the real world.

Then, we were told that 21 bodies had been found—many of whom were women that were believe to have been raped. Today there is a running body count of 57—many of whom are women said to have been raped and horribly mutilated, journalists, activist lawyers, and motorists who just happened to be in the way.

*Bong Reblando

Manila Bulletin reporter

How could anyone who was not murderously insane order or commit such an act? How depraved and inhuman do you have to be to be able to carry out such a massacre? But of course there are naïve questions from a comfortable middle-aged professor from Quezon City. Who am I to say what unchecked power can do to the soul of a man and a family? Who am I to say what being without prospects except the service of a power hungry tyrant can make one do? Who am I to say what is shocking in Maguindanao where people are kept poor and without development while one family controls all the resources and political power and the national government supports and funds that family’s private army? I really can’t say. I don’t know what it’s like and what I would do if I had so much deadly power or what I might be driven to do if I was the hired gun of such powers. I wouldn’t know how my mind or heart could be unhinged living under those circumstances.

But this I know. Even if I were a powerful man with an army of drug crazed, or fanatical, or power tripping men, I would not be able to act with such impunity if I knew that there was a higher power to stop me from my acts of madness. But these monsters from Maguindanao felt they could do what they wanted without fear perhaps because they were banking on the fact that in this country, politics is still mightier a force than justice. This is the state after all where journalists and activists have been killed without consequence to their killers. Uniformed sociopaths who kidnap and torture farmers and students working for change are still enjoying their freedom while many of their victims are rotting, still unidentified in unmarked graves or trying to live past the horror of their real life nightmare.

If we had a government that could only genuinely function to protect and serve its people, we wouldn’t have any monsters in the real world. But we don’t yet have such a government. Seventy four journalists have been killed and hundreds of activists have also been killed, tortured or kidnapped in the last eight years. There have hardly been any convictions for these cases—not even the celebrated ones like that of Jonas Burgos. Governments were founded to keep the monsters among us in check—not to use them against its citizens.

Sadly for those children of the massacred in Magundanao, our government and political system failed to stop the monsters from killing their mothers.

Si Pacman at ang Matamis na Agham

2009-11-24T20:36:00.000+08:00

ni Michael G. Aurelio

Bakit mahilig ang Pilipino sa boksing?

Dahil magaling tayo sa boksing. Nariyan sina Gabriel “Flash” Elorde, Pancho Villa, Luisito Espinosa, Rolando Navarette at ang kasalukuyang pound-for-pound king na si Manny “Pacman” Pacquiao—mga patunay sa husay at galing ng Pilipino sa isang larong habang napakahirap at napakadugo, tila napakasimple pa rin at napakatamis.

Simple ang boksing. Kailangan mo lamang ng dalawang magkalaban at hayaan mo silang magsuntukan. At suntukan lang naman talaga ang diwa ng boksing: wala nang kailangan pang mga salita, at wala nang ibang layunin kundi patumbahin ang kalaban sa pamamagitan ng ating pangunahing sandata, ang mga kamaong biglang nakakasa. Pinakamadaling paraan ang suntukan upang tapusin ang anumang away. Kaya may mga nagsusuntukan sa klase o sa kalye, sa pihitan o sa Emba, tungkol sa dignidad man o babae. “Mano mano,” “square tayo,” “nang magkaalaman na tayo.” Hindi naman siguro tayo madalas makarinig ng dalawang nagkainitan na maghahanap pa ng espada para malaman kung sino ang mas magiting o chess board kung sino ang mas matalino’t malalim.

Kapag dumating na sa suntukan, walang duda, lalaban at hindi tatakbo ang Pilipino. Ngunit hindi naman ito dahil sa marahas tayo; alam ng lahat na tayo’y sa kalikasan ay marahan at mapagpasensya, mapayapa at palangiti pa—kahit pa iniisahan na, kahit nga inaabuso na. Magaling ang Pilipino sa boksing dahil magaling din tayong makipagbunuan sa isa pang napakahirap sabay napakasimpleng labanan na sa buhay naman tinatanghal.

* * *

Inilahad sa Time Magazine (“The Meaning of Manny” noong ika-16 ng Nobyembre 2009) ang ilang bahagi ng makulay na talambuhay ni Manny. Ayon sa sanaysay ni Howard Chua-Eoan at Ishaan Thardoor, isinasakatawan ni Pacquiao ang pinanggagalingan at—mas mahalaga—mga pangarap ng karamihan nating mga Pilipino.

Lumaki si Pacquiao sa hirap. Tindera ng gulay at manggagawa sa pabrika noon ang kanyang ina na si Dionisia. Nahirapan buhayin ng ina ang kanyang anim na anak. Upang tumulong pakainin ang kanyang mga kapatid, tumigil sa pag-aaral si Manny noong siya’y katorse. Tapos gumawa siya ng isang plano: lilisan siya ng General Santos at makikipagsapalaran sa Maynila, gaya ng di mabilang na mga Pilipino sa probinsya na naghahanap din ng mas magandang kapalaran.

Dahil alam niyang wala siyang ibang alam at hilig kundi boksing—lumalaban na siya noon sa Gen San at kung manalo’y kumikita ng isang daan—naghanap si Pacquiao ng iba’t ibang pagkakataon upang lumaban pagkatapos niyang subukan maging manggagawa. Nagsimula siyang lumahok sa mga palaro sa baranggay (ilegal pa nga raw, parang sabong na walang permiso). Ngunit dahil malinaw sa kanya kung bakit siya pumunta ng Maynila, pagkatapos ng higit-kumulang tatlong taon naging propesyunal na boksingero si Manny.

Sa kanyang unang laban na ipinalabas sa programang Blow by Blow sa telebisyon noong 1995, ipinakita na ng labimpitong gulang na kaliwete ang lakas ng kanyang suntok at bilis ng mga kamay—ang kanyang magiging mga pangunahing sandata na gagamitin laban sa mga mas malalaking boksingero na kanyang haharapin. Nasungkit ng baguhan ang una niyang panalo sa pamamagitan ng isang desisyon. Mula noon tutumba na ang karamihan sa mga makakalaban ni Pacquiao (50 panalo–3 talo–2 tabla–38 pinatumba).

Habang kapansin-pansin noong simula pa lamang ang mga likas na talento ni Manny, nahalata rin ng marami na wala siyang gaanong teknik o depensa kaya naman madalas rin siya kung tamaan. Magiging mahalaga sa pagpapatalas ng galing at pag-usbong ng kanyang karera ang gabay at tiwala na ibibigay ni Freddie Roach sa 2001. Pagkatapos lamang ng isang oras ng ensayo kasama si Manny sa una nilang pagkikita, pumayag si Roach na maging tagapagsanay ng boksingero na nais pang matuto.

Sa tulong ni Roach, mabubuksan ang mga pinto para kay Pacquiao sa darating na mga taon. Kanyang makakaharap ang ilan sa pinakatanyag na mga pangalan sa daigdig ng boksing. Makakalaban niya mula 2003 sila Marco Antonio Barrera, Erik Morales, Juan Manuel Marquez, Oscar De La Hoya, Ricky Hatton at Miguel Cotto—at lahat ay papanalunin niya maliban sa isang hindi malilimutang pagtatagpo nila ni Morales noong 2005. Sa huling laban niya kay Cotto, tumimbang ng 147 libra si Pacquiao—mga 40 na libra lagpas sa timbang niyo noong una siyang naging propesyunal. Si Pacquiao ngayon ang tanging boksingero sa kasaysayan na nagkamit ng pitong kampeonato sa kasingdaming weight class.

Ang palangiting boksingero na dati’y natutulog sa kahong de karton sa mga lansangan ng Maynila ay nag-uwi ng humigit-kumulang P2.5 bilyon mula sa tatlo niyang huling laban. Nagpahayag na rin ang pambansang kamao na siya’y tatakbo bilang kinatawan ng Sarangani sa darating na pambansang eleksyon upang subukan sa labas ng ring ang kanyang tapang at galing. Artista na rin pala si Mommy Dionisia.

* * *

Isang maliit na puwang lamang ang kailangan upang makalusot ang isang suntok. Isang pagkakataon lamang ang kailangan ng karamihan nating kababayan upang makaahon sa kahirapan. Isang dumadagundong na sapok lamang ang kailangan upang patumbahin ang kalaban. Isang tahimik na pagpapakita lamang ng kabutihan ang kailangan upang maparamdam sa mga nangangailangan na hindi pa rin naman natin sila iiwan. Isang laban ni Pacman lamang ang kailangan upang ipakita na kayang maghari ng Pilipino sa daigdig. Isang laban lamang ni Pacman ang kailangan upang maghari ang kapayapaan sa kapuluan kahit sandali.

Kung si Pacman nga ang tumatayo para sa ordinaryong Pilipino, hindi ordinaryo ang Pilipino kung sa gayon. Bagaman maaari nga tayong mabulol sa Ingles, sa sipag, abilidad at tiyaga naman natin malinaw na naipapahayag kung sino tayo sa mga banyaga. Bagaman maaari nga tayong masilaw sa salapi o katanyagan o kapangyarihan, alalahaning nanggagaling naman kasi tayo sa wala, at ang kayamanan lamang naman natin ay mga pangarap sa simula. Bagaman maaaring marami sa atin ang hindi nakapagtatapos, tandaan na hindi sumusuko ang Pilipino hanggang hindi naririnig ang batingaw sa katapusan.

Ang kakayahang maging malakas ang kalooban at manatiling matibay ang pananampalataya sa gitna ng mga bagyo ng suntok at sapok na itinatapon sa atin ng buhay ay lagpas sa anumang makamundong kaalaman o agham. “Hindi ako bobo,” ilang ulit na sinabi ni Pacman sa kanyang panayam sa Time. Dahil kapag dumating na sa matamis na agham ng boksing o sa mapait na laban ng buhay Pacman knows.

Notes from the End of Life as We Know It 2: Bench Marking

2009-11-16T10:06:00.000+08:00

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

When our history comes to the end of life as we know it, we have to begin to imagine life as it could be. But here we are and still we dream the dreams that brought us to the end of life as we know it.

We are at the end of the world defined by our colonizers. The dream of building a better world through conquest and consumption, mass production and massive waste creation, is coming to a point where it is getting almost impossible to deny that this path we are on is a dead end, and yet we insist on charting our course of national development by the markers of prosperity and development laid by Western rationalities.

Ever since our hearts and minds were conquered by the West, we have always marked our progress as a people by how we fare in comparison with them, more specifically the US. Ironically, in the last couple of decades, the more progressive among our leaders have began to figure out ways to benchmark ourselves among the more successful of our neighbors who were able to emulate the West and realize Western style development. We send out teachers to Singapore, for instance, to be able to learn how to teach our children to do math and science better. We send our scholars to Western nations to learn their ways of scholarship, scientific inquiry, and their skills. We mark our wisdom by how much we are accepted by their journals and their conferences.

This desire to learn from and become like the past colonial masters is very understandable. For the last 400 years, we were taught that those who insisted on living according to their indigenous wisdom and lifeways, those who wished to live the good life as defined by their native rationalities, were deprived of the ability to flourish as human beings. This is always the story of indigenous communities: a community flourishes in simplicity according to their traditional lifeways, an alien population comes to own their land and their resources in order to commodify these and bring them into the world economic order of continuous and growing consumption, and before they realize that they are poor, they have been alienated from the material ground of their human flourishing. The natives always try to avoid usurpation by the alien invaders by moving to the hinterlands but the ever expanding consumption machine follows them wherever they go until they are enlisted themselves into the alien system because the land and waters from which they drew life freely is no longer theirs to draw from. They can no longer draw life from the land because their ways are made useless in the new systems, and, even if they do not want to live according to what is imposed, they have to in order to simply live.

Having been recruited into the dominant economic and political system but not fully educated as effective or equal players in it, they are exploited by traders and entrepreneurs, industrialists and men of power who own the system as their tool for self propagation. These natives became the marginalized of our country. Our nation and all colonized nations with “low” levels of scientific and technological development, in short all nations colonized by the West that were not oriented toward western means of development and growth, suffer the same fate as indigenous people. As marginalized nations, we began with low levels of development and technology because our ethos was simply oriented towards different conceptions of a good human life. If we were inclined to build empires of consumption and conquest, I am sure our civilizations would have found their own way into building war machines and industries of mass production. But we didn’t, but neither did we have the chance to discover the flourishing of our inclinations because the Western ways were imposed upon us. So here we are, the pauper nations condemned to dream the western dreaming just to survive. The hopeful ones among us still believe that if we can learn this game well we will be able to win at it and become as progressive as the rich nations. However, I am not so optimistic about this because the game has already been at play for so long according to a paradigm of play that favors the exploiters and crushes the exploited that the game has to change in order for it to be fruitful for us. And so we have to learn to stop benchmarking by their standards and to begin to rethink the meaning of development for the good of our selves.

By benchmarking our civilizations with theirs, we dig ourselves deeper into perdition. Ever since the West involved us in their economic systems and their systems of trade, we have always had to pay for their excesses. We are poor in the not-genuinely-developing-world, or what they used to call the Third World and what they now ironically call the developing world, because they involved us in an economic system that was set up to serve their interests according to their needs. In this way, they sucked us into a vortex of exploitation which in many imaginative ways rendered us inutile to realize our preferred life ways. They barred us from living life what we knew to be a good life and forced us to buy into their dream of development so that they could draw on our resources to our detriment, and then sell us back their products to our perdition. But that’s really not the worst thing the West has done to the victims of their exploitation. The terrible truth about this whole story of exploitation is that the whole time it was flourishing, we were always at the losing side, and now that it is collapsing, we are going to have to pay for its excesses.

Our time is facing the end of life and the world as they have made it. Climate change and the end of the age of petroleum signal that. Our environment is changing and becoming less hospitable if not harsher. Many of our homes will be swallowed by the sea, our populations will be displaced and much diminished, and food and water will be harder to come by. Those who will pay most for these changes are those who were exploited by the system that brought these changes about, i.e. the global poor. Much of what is known as the global south will starve, drown, thirst, or freeze because their already hand to mouth resources will not allow them to prepare for and creatively meet the coming challenges. And so, having been unwittingly complicit in building this system that made our world more dangerous for us, we will suffer the consequences of this complicity without really having enjoyed whatever good it brought.

And yet, we still benchmark our progress and development on the systems of the West that brought us to where we are. We still insist on measuring our accomplishments against their accomplishments knowing that these accomplishments were founded on systems of valuation that allowed for the blind exploitation of this world that was so good to us. Why, I wonder, after all that this model of development and growth has done for us, do we not look for other benchmarks of genuine civilization? Or why have we not looked at our selves as a possible benchmark for their civilizations?

Notes from the End of Life as We Know It: When Calamity Hit Home

2009-10-22T07:35:00.000+08:00

Last September 30, a calamitous amount of rain fell on our city. It flooded for the first time in most people’s memories the city that seems so insulated from natural disasters. Of course we are used to man made disasters such as crime, poverty and injustice. But never has nature dealt in this magnitude such death and reversal of fortune on the people of the metropolis.

Of course, we are aware of the fact that worst things have hit more people more often in the countryside. And perhaps we are being a bit over dramatic and soft-bellied when we keep talking about how badly we were hit and how terrible the suffering in the city is, but the simple fact is that our once unaffected city has become affected. Disasters always used to happen everywhere else but not here. That’s because we’re a city and, being that, we are constructed to be less vulnerable to nature’s movements. In this age of shifting climates, we are not so invulnerable.

There was a time that human ingenuity and creativity could assure us that nature could not throw anything our way that modern technology and engineering could not protect us from. I think that what we are realizing now is that this certainty is going to be less and less true in the coming times. Whether global warming is a human phenomenon or not (some say it’s still debatable) the simple fact is that weather conditions are changing and getting harsher. Everyone it seems is more vulnerable now and we should prepare to cope with our future climate.

How do we cope with the world as it changes? How can we face Mother Nature when she is clearly showing us that she is bigger than us and bigger than anything we can do? I think one way was exhibited by our university in the last two weeks.

When the typhoon struck and we became aware of its adverse effects, we immediately responded. Thousands trooped to the covered courts, social networking instruments facilitated the flow of good will and social capital, donations poured in from everyone, and as best as we could, the university responded to the needs of communities all over the metropolis.

The university also showed how it is indeed a community—or perhaps, although this would make our friends from Europe cringe—a family. Beyond being an institution of anonymous people, we are a family where each person matters and each one should be accounted for and cared for and called to responsibility—not because it is their right or duty but because they are valued. We are a community in true solidarity that is gathered in realizing our best collective self when the call of responsibility comes. Most of all we are a family capable of sacrificing for one another.

We will need to strengthen this solidarity in the coming times because the world as we know it is coming to an end. Weather patterns are clearly changing and weather disturbances are intensifying. We had barely begun the work of rebuilding in the NCR when the city of Baguio and the towns of Pangasinan, Laguna, Cagayan, and Isabella went under in torrents of rain. Who knows if this will be followed by dry spells? If these conditions prevail we will have to redesign our farming methods and technologies. We will also have to rethink how our city is laid out and how our homes should be designed.

The weather aside, we will have to rethink our food production methods because the age of abundant petroleum is coming to an end. Almost everything in our food production system, from our fertilizers to our delivery systems, is petroleum dependent. We will also have to rethink our water supply system because although water will fall in destructive proportions, our drinking supply will begin to be depleted.

The calamities that befell us in the last three weeks could really signal the beginning of the end of the world as we know it, the end of our lives as we know it. The simple fact is that are just too many of us who live too long and consume in destructive proportions. Mother Earth cannot sustain our greedy, parasitic ways. We have come to a tipping point and at this point nature has to make adjustments to regain her balance. As she shifts, we could lose the very simple alignment of habitats that has sustained us. Like we saw in the last week, when nature has to readjust, the surest things on which we bet our lives—like how the water will stay in its place, how the air will always be breathable, how the earth is firm and well founded, and how the weather has a somewhat predictable cycle—become frighteningly unstable. And when nature moves, no one is safe no matter how well built the city.

Nature has shown us how it will move. Will we listen? We have no choice but to because our ways cannot be sustained. The basic fuel of mass consumption is almost completely sucked out of the earth. Soon we will reach the maximum carrying capacity of the earth. Whether we want to or not, we will have to make our own adjustments.

This might be a frightening time for many. Life as we know it must come to an end in order for us to build life as it ought to be. But this time is the perfect opportunity to rebuild human society in a way that is just to out better selves, our fellow human beings and the earth. It is a time for readjustments where humanity is given the opportunity to reimagine its broken self and find its fullest possibilities given how it has hurt itself and the earth.

The signs calling us to readjustment are frightening and quite wild. But in truth, it is an opportunity to come to our senses about who we are and what we can be. It is an opportunity to understand what a just economy is such that we are fair to our world and our fellow persons. Around the corner of this century could be a world order that decades of uprisings and revolutions have not been able to achieve—i.e. a truly human world build by men and women who know better because they have been through the worst that they put themselves through.

When the worst hit our city, without hesitation, our community rose to its better self and in solidarity served those who were hardest hit by the floods. We even took extreme measures to be available to those who would need us. If there is a sign of hope at that the end of the world as we know it will bring forth a better world to know, it is the fact that the seeds of a better society are in us already. Perhaps the end of the world will only spell the end of social structures that encrust our hearts and prevent us from being good people to one another. Perhaps the end of this world will serve to shatter the walls around the cities of our hearts that have gotten used to mindless consumption of the self and the other and allow to emerge a city founded on solidarity.

Special Message from the Chair

2009-10-09T08:37:00.000+08:00

*photo by Jason Mariposa

To Our Dearest Students,

With the release of your class standing this week (either in this board or in your classes), we are freeing most of you from your academic obligations so that you will be free to do your moral ones.

Last week was a time of great pride for all Ateneans. As soon as the flood waters rose to calamitous proportions, we as a community responded with great generosity. By the thousands we came, you most of all, to respond to the need for relief of those whose lives were brought to a painful halt by the floods. So many of you and so much of your energies were gathered in doing good when and where it was most needed. If there is anything that will most genuinely mark our being Ateneans in this Sequi year we celebrate, it is you passing bags and sorting clothes despite your own worries and pains. If only for that, I can say my work has a meaning.

Now that we are freeing you from your academics, we are calling you to continue that quiet heroism that you exhibited last week. When the floods rose, homes were ruined, the foundations of many lives lost, and psyches were hurt. Beyond being a time for relief, this is a time for rebuilding. Our task now is harder and costlier than relief, and that is why such a drastic step was taken by the VP and the deans. They have faith that if you are free to respond you will rise to the call of the moment.

This past week, I have heard many comments about how it might have been a mistake to let go of you this way. Some people said that not too many of our population were affected and that we should just have moved on and not lingered in this drama. I don't agree at all: 150 faculty, staff and maintenance personnel and 1000 students were directly hurt by this. Multiply that to the many more who are disturbed by their worry and concern for those among the hurt that
they love. I would say that this is a substantial number of our population.

I heard from some that if we let you go, most of you will just go back to your malls and your computers. But this is what I say to that: "I have been teaching in this university for 20 years and I know that it's probable that many of you will do just that. However, we need to free the energies of the responsible ones among you to come to the aid of our Ateneo family." Certainly we will lose many to cyberspace and the malls, but I believe that more will come with shovels, notebooks, ideas, and energies to help the wounded realize that there is life after the flood.

One remark I got was that we are babying you by absolving you of any more academic obligations. We should teach you to be tough by pushing you to persevere with your duties despite the hurting. The truth is that we are not babying you but challenging you to be strong enough to be able to rise to your higher duty the infinite responsibility for the other.

And so our dear students, with the posting of these grades we free you. Know that your philosophy teachers have faith in you--that without reluctance or doubt, we let you go to respond to the call.

Be safe and come back next semester with the wisdom you will gain in the lessons ahead of you.

Love,

Agustin Martin G. Rodriguez
Chair
Department of Philosophy

Willie Gets It Right

2009-09-21T18:52:00.000+08:00

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

The latest controversy hounding the beloved king of offensive machismo, Willie Revillame, has to do with this meltdown he had in “Wowowee!” The following words were uttered when ABS inserted a window on the TV screen showing the procession of the body of former President Aquino from La Salle Greenhills to the Manila Cathedral while his merriments were going on. This is what he said according to the article “Willie Revillame violated code of ethics – MTRCB”

Hindi siguro magandang tingnan na pinapakita niyo yan (Mrs. Aquino’s footage). Nagsasaya kami tapos pinapakita niyo yung, I don't think dapat ipakita yan.

Eh mahihirapan akong magsalita rito. Nagpapasaya ako nakikita ko ‘yung ano (cortege) ni Tita Cory. Sana pakitanggal naman muna ‘yan sa ating traffic. Kasi kung ganyan pakita nalang natin ‘yan kasi nagsasaya kami dito tapos masakit sa akin yan. Nagsasalita ako dito yan Pls, sana maintindhan niyo, nagsasaya kami dito papakita niyo sa amin yun. Diba? Hindi tama eh okay?

Hay nako. Pangit. Hindi maganda ho sa atin nagsasalita pinapakita yung kabaong ni Tita Cory. Diba? Paano kami magkakapagsaya nahihirapan kami? I'm sorry ho ah pero ako totoo ako eh. ‘Wag niyo akong papagalitan...Pagkatapos ng show pakita niyo ‘yung gusto niyong ipalabas. Kasi itong Wowowee gusto ko at alam din ni Tita Cory ‘yan kasi napasaya din siya ng show na ito na laging masaya dito. Okay?¹

What poor Willie is trying to say in his halting, perhaps annoyed, clearly caught off-guard manner is that placing the live footage of the procession for the transfer of Tita Cory's body in the same screen as his wildly undulating show is done in bad taste. Firstly, because it does not respect the grandeur of the event. There, in a small screen, dwarfed by crying gay boys being outed in TV and an audience maddened by the onslaught of distractions, was the solemn send-off procession for the best loved president of this threatened Republic. It’s just so ABS to do something like that: maximum circus with minimum consideration for potentially offended sensibilities. Secondly, Willie was unable to proceed with his usual irreverence and sacrificial-audience-member badgering while such a mournful event was taking place. Thirdly, and most importantly, the contrast in events was just too extreme that their mutual presencing would have canceled each other out.

Willie’s extravaganza is an avalanche of sights and sounds meant to dissipate the self. There is the constant dancing, the getting-to-know-you of contestants that borders on a grotesque charade of the Dr. Phil-esque exposure of psyces, the karanabal-like display of talents of contestants which prelude the games, and the prize-givings which are the creamy centers of this elaborate, over sugared pastry of an event. Willie’s show is exactly a doughnut dipped in sugar, topped with a sprinkled bed of layered frosting, and stuffed with the thickest, sweetest cream. It’s a pastry that one has to consume completely because once in your hands it keeps drawing you in until it is consumed. When you have completely consumed it, you are filled with this dizzy feeling of having taken in something that fills you but not in a good way. It leaves you uneasy and queasy, but it felt so good in the mouth that it keeps you coming back for more. It's something like the mall.

The mall is a wonderful place that is designed to allow you to disperse yourself. It is meant to draw your attention to all kinds of sensory delights designed to titillate you appetites and push your desires to their limits. In a mall, your mind and will are dispersed such that everything is supposed to draw you hither and yon, and you are meant to be so dispersed that you act and want on sheet impulse. Because you keep moving and wanting, it seems that your life, for that brief moment is full, but at the end of it, you're tired and dispersed and empty. That's why you can't wait for the next time. It's like computer games, casual sex, ecstasy, and so many of the things that we do.

Tita Cory’s funeral rites were something completely different. And, when something does come along that manages to attract our attention and gather us, something like the solemnity of a sincere, albeit slightly showbizzed, a-Dieu to a beloved person, we are silenced to self-gathering. That is I think what happened to us in the days around August 5. When Tita Cory died, the nation seemed to fall silent as if everyone lost someone who meant something to them. We all did. We lost someone who stood for our best possibilities given our finite, broken selves. Tita Cory could be seen as a model person. A model person, according to Max Scheler, is a person who bears, in her finite way, the best possibilities of being a person given a particular value system. She was our model person for she showed us how to be humble, simple, and steadfast; to be courageous and and open to the call to service; to be selfless and love one's people; and to be a good mother to one's children while being responsible for the children you have embraced as your own, i.e. all of us.

The funeral rites for Tita Cory captivated us. People everywhere were glued to their television sets watching the huge crowds of Filipinos line up to pay their respects and listening to those who knew her talk about her simplicity, great care for people, steadfastness, and great love. Listening and watching, being attentive to the expressions of love and admiration, participating in rituals of remembrance and sending-off to God—these things quieted us. The rituals of saying goodbye to one who showed us who we are and how simplicity, constancy, and courage could win the day reminded us what we as a people could be. As we remembered her in saying goodbye, we remembered our best selves, and we were gathered interiorly.

What happened in those days was the polar opposite of what happens every day at Wowowee! There, people are given the best offering of forgetfulness through layers upon layers of noise and haste. As we are immersed in Willie’s world, we are allowed to forget ourselves, or make a spectacle of ourselves, or see ourselves as bathed in the borrowed light of the showbiz world. There we don’t find our best selves, our selves that can triumph over crushing poverty, our selves that can love our children in the most degraded conditions, or our selves that can create lives with dignity and hope in the most decrepit environments. There we find our carricature selves: the stereotype gay boy televising the drama of his angst, the genuinely sorrowful widow of a dead soldier singing out of key through her tears, and the old lady with insurmountable debts dancing to Willie’s delight. These are our sorry selves that are translated to television marionets for everyone’s delight. The projections are not meant for us to know and embrace who we are but to forget how truly, potentially tragic human existence is. And for that treat, and perhaps more money that we can ever imagine, we are willing to let Papi have his way with us.

Now that Willie himself is hinting at political ambitions, he is telling everyone that he has been serving the public now for so many years. He has been serving us not as a theif but as a giver of gifts. He said in the news “Hindi ako magnanakaw, mambibigay ako.” Or something like that. But I’m not sure how true that is. For how much entertainment and money he has given, how much of our selves has he taken away?

__________

[1] GMANews.TV. Sunday, August 9, ( http://ph.news.yahoo.com/gma/20090808/tel-willie-revillame-violated-code-of-et-284c369.html), accessed 20 August 2009.

Why the World is a Little More Empty Without Her

2009-08-05T09:16:00.000+08:00

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

Before anything else can be said, this must be said. Yes I know that President Aquino could have and should have initiated a meaningful and comprehensive land reform initiative. If she did, if she was willing to sacrifice Hacienda Luisita and to distribute unjustly acquired land with her revolutionary powers, she could have truly and substantially improved the lives of millions of Filipinos and perhaps set us on a road to just development. It seems that she could have, while she was popular and well loved and enjoyed the support of her nation, neutralized the influence of the traditional elite and the military and gone about instituting real political reforms that would have allowed the opening up of our systems to the effective participation of the marginalized in shaping the new republic. But for some reason, Tita Cory quickly fell under the influence and the control of the traditional elite and her military backers. For all her love of her people, she took our restored democracy and seemed to have handed it back to traditional powers. This failure makes possible the widening gap between the rich and the poor and the continued subversion of the state by self-serving politicians who distort our democratic institutions for personal gains. However, despite this, despite her being a conservative progressive who failed to respond to the revolutionary call of her time, Cory Aquino is an exemplar and a good president who deserves all the love we give her. And now that she is gone, the country seems to be a little darker and sadder especially since it is struggling to free itself from the grips of a petty tyrant.

Tita Cory is Tita Cory because she was a genuine model person in the sense Max Scheler uses that phrase. A model person is one who bears the best possibility of our selves given the call of our times. A model person bears and realizes the best values of our humanity that the times call to surface in order to inspire a people to be their best possible selves. Isn't that what we loved about her? Despite her failures as a politician, she was the best person anyone could want to be. Her whole life was oriented toward serving her people in the best way that she knew how. She had a real concern for the systems that we restored. She inspired us to give ourselves to the higher call of our nation. Even when she was old and sick, she stood with us without any self serving motives in our struggle against those who threatened our democracy.

I personally will miss having someone in the public sphere who can speak with such purity of intentions. Not even our religious leaders can speak so purely without being suspected of some agenda, whether it is to preserve the power of their institutions or to gain some influence with the administration. When Tita Cory spoke, we listened because we knew that she spoke from the heart despite her not-completely-progressive politics and her seeming political naiveté. Perhaps it was precisely her naiveté that made us open our hearts to her, because this naiveté was rooted in her desire to find the path to the good in all things. Beyond our political strategizing to achieve the sought for liberation of our people, Tita Cory always kept her sight on the good and the ought, and thus she reminded us what ultimately we were fighting for.

There are lessons to learn from her life. The foremost of which is that the simplest people, even those who seem to be least likely to be called to greatness, can become truly great if they are able to discern the challenge of the times and respond to it as best as they can. Heroes are not the greatest persons in skills and abilities but they are those who can respond with courage and wisdom to the call of their fatedness. That is the great lesson of all our best fairy stories. Trust the cosmos when it invites you and it will bring you to a fullness you can never achieve yourself. But of course, to hear this challenge, you must be genuinely open and generous of heart. To find yourself, to find your place in history, you cannot be self-involved. You have to be listening to where life is calling you and respond with generosity.

The other lesson, a more painful one, that we can learn from Tita Cory is that no matter how pure your intentions are, no matter how you act with a passion for the ought, evil structures can always subvert the good that we do. Look at how President Aquino was unable to craft a better constitution or how her push for land reform was watered down. These were all effects of structures that limited her ability to do good. At every step of the way to reform with her revolutionary government, there were traditional politicians and powerful military men always pushing for their self-interested projects. And they won because the political structures that she operated with were always slanted against the interests of the majority and always allowed a selfish and short-sighted elite to determine the national agenda. So despite the fact that President Aquino was potentially poised to realize far reaching reforms, the structures of our state and our political systems were too infected with the rot of the traditional and new elite that the democracy she rebuilt was still rotten from within. Thus GMA and her brand of politics which shamelessly undermines the state to serve her obvious interests is still possible.

Certainly, this is a good lesson to learn, We don't only need good people, we need good governance structures in order to realize our common good as a people. We need to build solidly democratic structures so that our potentials for sustainable and just development are not always stolen away by the predatory elite that continue to dominate our political and economic systems.

There's one last and best thing I think that we can learn from Tita Cory. What she taught us with her life is simply this—if you love as best as you can, as best as your human frailty allows you—people will recognize that love and love you back. Of course it's not important that they love you back—that's not the point of loving or genuine service. But love does beget love and sometimes, with the best of us, our love is infectious and can set a nation aflame. And her love did, and we burned with good will for a while. It was such a wonderful thing to live through those times when we were a people of good will who thought we could infect the world with it.

We will miss you Tita Cory, especially now that we battle with such a dangerous evil in our government. We will miss your steadfast faith and hope for that was the light with which you led us.

Poems for Cory

2009-08-05T08:59:00.000+08:00

For Cory
by Marc Oliver Pasco

Nothing happens here.

Nothing but the cries that linger amongst the few who have seen what it means to do.

Nothing happens here.

Nothing but the cheers that resound amongst the few who witnessed what it means to listen.

Nothing happens here.

Nothing but the silent resolve of one who persevered and struggled so that something may have happened.

Para kay Cory
ni Marc Oliver Pasco

Nakalimutan ko na yata
ang pangalan ko
Matagal-tagal na nang huli kong narinig
mula sa bibig ng iba
Ang ngalang dati’y
Nililingunan ko.

Sadya ko na lamang kayang
lilimutin
ang pangalang
ibininyag lang naman
sa akin?

O hihikayatin ko kaya
ang langit
na magbuhos ng ulan
nang muli nilang alalahanin
ang ngalang inihandog
nila sa akin.

Mourning Michael

2009-07-08T21:36:00.000+08:00

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

And so the prince has passed on. The sad little prince who after he failed to grow up to be something even remotely resembling normal, who came to characterize the brokenness that we can fall into when our formative years are deprived of love, who made so many of us scream with joy and amazement when he created a new world of music on stage and then cringe with revulsion when he created a strange wonderland for him to play with little boys, finally departed the world in which he could never find a place. Finally, he made the passage to the only wonderland that could embrace him with the love he sought.

The world mourns his passing. Every media agency is focused on talking about his death and projecting their sorrow. Fans are camping out in spontaneous communities of shared sorrow. Celebrities are tripping over themselves to release the most profoundly sorrowful sound bite.

Of course everyone feels a genuine sorrow because MJ is dead. Michael was part of the soundtrack of their youth at some point of his career. I'm sure “Ben” or “Billie Jean” or “Man in the Mirror” triggers some memory of some important event in most everyone's life. But as we mourn and remember him so fondly, I cannot help but remember how he was so mocked and reviled by the western media as if he were a circus monkey fit only for the admiration of shrieking Asian girls.

If there is a lesson to his death, it is this: death makes everyone love you and makes them guilty for their terrible thoughts about you. And if you are famous and the mass media obsesses over your death, everyone will try to remember how much exactly they loved you all along. Can you therefore blame poor outcast teenagers who fantasize about being famous and about being dead?

But the other lesson to learn as everyone mourns the great child prince's death is this: celebrity culture is incapable of celebrating genuine greatness. Without a doubt, Michael Jackson did contribute greatly to popular music. He was at the forefront of the invention of pop styles from the 60s to the 90s. But in the grand scheme of things, what did his style contribute to human civilization in its quest to realize the potential of its spirit? How has his music helped us discover our potential for creativity as we face the end of world civilization and life as we know it? How does he help us discover who we are as we come to realize that the world we have built for ourselves is neither sustainable nor enriching? Because in the end, shouldn't our greatness be measured by these standards? And yet, half of the shows of most of our serious news programs spent their time extolling the life and death of one whose best lyrics were “I'm looking at the man in the mirror and I'm asking him to change his ways” and “Heal the world, make it a better place, for you and for me and the entire human race.”

On the other hand, just a few weeks ago, a great peasant leader was shot dead. Rene Peñas was a simple man from a simple background who against all the odds rose to greatness. Ka Rene was a truly great man. He led a handful of powerless peasants to fight a whole system designed to deprive the margins of their resources and won to teach his nation that hope and perseverance can sometimes triumph over systematic evil. He showed us all that we could still believe in happy endings in a history built on the deeds of petty evil and shameless, magnificent greed. Ka Rene's greatest hit was a simple march of 444 kilometers. It was not sold to a lot of people but to those who were his fans, their spirits were made to awaken to the greatness of the simplest of men. Their hearts were blown open to embrace the love in the universe that ever so subtly invites us to move with its heartbeat and bring outrageous good to the world.

But when he died, only a few nuns and priests, activists and NGO workers, peasants and students wept and scrambled to say something meaningful so that his death would not be so absurd. And so the peasant leader, the exemplar of who we could be if we were attuned to the call of the good, passed on to his true ancestral lands where he will never be hungry or threatened or killed, where he will truly be enlivened by the creative power that he felt in the land and heard calling in the suffering of his people. But the remembrance of his passing did not come anywhere close to the world's mourning for a boy who could walk backwards as if there were no gravity and had a sweet, sweet voice that could make us forget that there was a goodness to humanity beyond petty loves and glamor.

HR 1109 Denounced

2009-06-18T07:43:00.000+08:00

On the night of June 2, the administration and its allies railroaded the passage of HR 1109 with their usual impunity. As is characteristic of this administration, democratic processes and respect for the common good were sacrificed when they insisted on the realization of their
self-serving agenda.

Clearly, from the point of view of the nation's interest, there is no urgency in pushing for Charter Change in this dubious mode. Nothing can justify the trampling of deliberative processes. It is clear that the administration solely wants to ensure that it stays in power.

Such arrogant disregard for the will and the interests of the people is ingrained in the governance style of this government. From the countless appointments of unqualified allies to key positions in government to the various corruption scandals, the President and her allies continuously violate the principles of good governance because they can.

Everyone who is supposed to be able to check these violations of our national interest, but does nothing, is complicit to this evil. But, this has got to stop. This government has to be shown that it can no longer insist on its agenda for power. We are calling the key institutions in this country to say no. The Senate has to move and protect its right to decide on constitutional issues as a co-equal branch. The Supreme Court has to continue to show the nation that it
can stand against the attacks of tyrannical forces on our democracy. Civil society must continue its efforts at blocking the rise of this dark tide. And we hope the citizens of this country will be moved by the swell of the passions of opposition that say never again to GMA and the politics based on greed and abuse of power.

May the spirit of the murdered Sumilao leader, Rene Peñas, inspire us to persevere in our non-violent struggle for a humane, just, and peaceful society.

Signed,

Individual Faculty Members of the Philosophy Department,
Ateneo de Manila University

Agustin Martin G. Rodriguez
Michael G. Aurelio
Remmon E. Barbaza
Oscar Bulaong, Jr.
Mark Joseph Calano
Manuel B. Dy, Jr.
Geoffrey Guevara
Jacqueline Marie D. Jacinto
Michael Ner Mariano
Pamela Joy Mariano
Marc Oliver Pasco
John Carlo Uy