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

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

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

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.

E-mail: Tonylavs@gmail.com
Facebook: Tonylavs@gmail.com
Twitter: tonylavs

*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

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.)

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

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

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