Transcripts
Transcript of “A Crude Look at the Whole” by Murray Gell-Mann
Transcript of "A Crude Look at the Whole" by Murray Gell-Mann
18 July 2018
Murray Gell-Mann
Trustee, Science Board and Distinguished Fellow, Santa Fe Institute
This talk was given on 4 March 2013 at the conference, “A Crude Look at the Whole,” at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
It’s a pleasure to be able to discuss with this distinguished group the idea of a “Crude Look at the Whole”. I gave the talk with that title some years ago, under the auspices of the Pardee Centre for the study of the longer-range future at Boston University. There was a conference on looking ahead, and I was asked to give the keynote talk at the dinner. I would like to begin today by expanding on that the title, “Crude Look at the Whole”. Many of the points that I treat here, were discussed in my book, “The Quark and The Jaguar”, which I’m glad to say is still mostly relevant, even 19 or 20 years after publication.
Over the years, I’ve organized some meetings devoted to aspects of the longer-range future and I’ve seen how difficult it is to get most intellectuals to discuss future situations that are significantly different in some way from what we’ve already seen in the recent past or the present. As an example of reluctance to consider big changes, we might take the widespread failure to believe that the Soviet Menace came with an early expiration date. Usually the intellectuals to whom I refer end up talking not about major departures from present conditions but rather about relatively small ones now that’s not a bad thing to do but it’s not what we mean by peering into the longer-range future. Despite my limited experience, I was able to share some ideas with the scholars at that meeting and I’ll share a few of them with you.
Until now, a great deal of research and teaching in the sciences and the humanities, especially in universities, is confined to individual departments representing particular fields of knowledge, while specialization and then some specialization are inevitable and necessary desirable they need to be supplemented by research and teaching to transcend those sometimes narrow disciplinary boundaries. There are a number of institutions inside and outside of universities where such transdisciplinary activities are carried out. The Santa Fe Institute which I helped to found 20 years ago and where I now work is devoted entirely to such activities. There, the study of transdisciplinary problems by self-organized teams of people, originally trained in many diverse specialties is the rule rather than the exception. Similarities in connections among topics in very different fields are recognized and exploited. The participants may have started as experts in subjects from the physical sciences, life sciences, social and behavioral sciences, history, or the other humanities. They take part in discussions of all sorts of topics each team does include of course at least one real expert in the particular subject matter under consideration. If nobody knows anything, you don’t get very far.
I’ve often spoken in public about the need for such research and about institutional arrangements for getting it done. What I have to say this morning may sound similar, but it concerns a very different topic, so one has to listen very closely to hear the difference. That topic has to do with broad policy studies concerned with the whole future of the human race, and of the biosphere of our planet including the other species with which we share that biosphere. Here is the point the difference in considering any very complex system.
We naturally tend to break it up into more manageable subsystems, or aspects defined in advance, and to study those separately. Looking at the longer-term future we might divide the various issues into such categories as, take a particular list; military and diplomatic issues, foreign affairs, political issues, ideological issues, environmental issues, human health and wellness issues, family issues, demographic issues, economic issues, etc.
In each of these categories, there are experts who have built their careers around the issues involved and there are NGOs and government departments devoted to these. As a citizen you might join one of the NGOs. It’s natural and common to try to break up the world problematique, as some people call it. The difficulty is that understanding a nonlinear system, by putting together descriptions of various parts or aspects will work only if they interact weakly. So that the system, as a whole, is what’s called decomposable and that’s not true of the world problematique. It’s very far from being decomposable, and studying various aspects and trying to put those together into a complete picture is it’s not possible.
So in that sense there’s truth in the old adage, that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, which sounds on the face of it to be wrong but, it’s not. Look at the list of categories we discussed; can we really separate environmental issues from those involving population growth?
I’ll answer it, no!
Can we consider these in isolation from technological change or from economic policy? No!
Can we think about the attempts to alleviate extreme poverty, without considering the unwise environmentally destructive projects, that are sometimes carried out in the name of that worthy cause? Can we discuss issues of global governance, without considering politics in the various countries and regions, well without treating the competition and conflict among different ideologies? If military and diplomatic policies fail, and mankind is plunged into a hugely destructive war, perhaps involving thermonuclear weapons, can our other objectives be attained? Of course not!
Isn’t economic growth threatened by the widespread prevalence of fatal or debilitating diseases? Can we separate questions about democracy and human rights? Again, no! And what if democratic processes bring to power elements of society hostile to human rights and to tolerance, or ones that favor environmental destruction or aggressive war happen? Think how Adolf Hitler took power legally before destroying the whole democratic political system in Germany, or think of Klement Gottwald in Czechoslovakia. Remember some people make fun of naïve idealism about elections with the slogan “one man, one vote, one time.”
While separate considerations of the various aspects of the world situation is necessary and desirable, it very badly needs to be supplemented by integrative thinking, that not only puts together the studies of various aspects, but also takes into account the strong interactions among them.
We have to get rid somehow of the widespread idea that careful study of a problem in some narrow range of issues is the only kind of work to be taken seriously. It’s really a widespread impression. Integrated thinking is relegated to a cocktail party conversation, and that really has to change. We face that situation in a great many places in our society including academia, and most bureaucracies.
Some of my remarks on this subject were quoted by Tom Friedman near the beginning of one of his books, I think it’s the one called The Lexus and the Olive Tree. He came to a similar conclusion through his career working for the New York Times. He was assigned to cover one set of issues, and then a different set, then a third set. Each time he was reassigned, he observed that what he was covering was intimately connected with what he had been studying earlier. No one had told him that that would be so. So besides the work on the separate categories, we must have in addition, the work of teams of brilliant thinkers, many of them specialists devoted to considering the whole ball of wax, the whole thing. It can, of course, be argued that this is too big a job for any group of people, no matter how talented, or erudite to do really well and that’s true. Of course, such an ambitious aim can be accomplished crudely, and that’s why I refer to it as taking a crude look at the whole. If we insist on perfection the whole thing is doomed from the beginning.
Now the chief of any organization—say, a head of government, or a CEO—has to behave as if he or she is taking into account all the aspects of policy, including all the interactions among those aspects. Remember, I’m saying “as if”. It’s not so easy, however, for the chief to take a crude look at the whole if everyone else in the organization is concerned only with a partial look. Even if some advisors to the chief are assigned to look at the big picture, it doesn’t always work.
Here’s an example, some years ago the CEO of a gigantic corporation told me that he had a strategic planning staff to help him think about the future of the whole business, but then members of that staff suffered from three defects; One, they seemed largely disconnected from the rest of the company; Two, no one could understand what they said; Three, everyone else in the company seemed to hate them. I checked with several people high up in that company and got the same response. For an integrative effort to succeed, some kind of simplification is naturally required. Certain things have to be treated in a cursory fashion, and others in more detail. But that process, what physical scientists like to call coarse-graining, cannot be accomplished through the categories established in advance. It has to follow from the nature of the world system itself.
Rather, the necessary coarse-graining should be discovered, than imposed. Think of the relation between weather and climate; it’s a fairly common consideration, but I’m not sure that people are aware of what they’re saying when they talk about weather and climate. No clear results will follow from trying to examine the weather at each little place on earth with short time intervals, while neglecting the strong interaction with other phenomena. But much can be learned from a study of weather, suitably averaged over space and time, and treated along with such things as ocean currents; the nature and quantities of atmospheric pollutants; and the variations in solar radiation. Such a study can be immensely rewarding, but it’s essential to find the right coarse-graining of the weather, and the other phenomena for obtaining a useful definition of climate.
We didn’t talk only about policy studies. Integrated thinking can be promoted by thinking about history in similar ways to what has just been recommended for policy studies. In fact, they sort of go together, and reflections on history can be very useful in considering what to do about policy. One trend that’s encouraging is the increase in popularity of big history. Instead of laughing at it being ridiculously over-ambitious. One can try to show some sympathy with people who try to study big history. When Arnold Toynbee just after the Second World War published a study of history, many of his colleagues were not very impressed with the 12-volume book. He could, of course, be criticized for making a mistake here and there, and describing the rise and fall of some 21 civilizations. And he could be lampooned for implying that it was all leading up to the founding of the Anglican Church. That’s perhaps going a bit far, but wouldn’t it have been more constructive to help correct his errors, large and small, and try to build on his pioneering effort, rather than merely making fun of it. I don’t mind making fun of it, but one should be able to do something else as well. I think I’d like to think that nowadays some critics might be more charitable.
Another encouraging trend is the increased tolerance these days of contingency, what-if history or counterfactual history, as respected historians are now engaging in the study of counterfactual history. Alternative scenarios for the future are like a branching tree, with major branchings at the special points, where chance has a huge effect or important transitions occur. One can try to estimate probabilities at the branchings. What are the possible situations and, roughly, what are their probabilities? Does thinking about such structures help us to identify occasions of great policy leverage with respect to the future?
Well, I like to discuss many of the issues facing the world, under the rubric of sustainability, one of today’s favorite catch words. It’s rarely defined in a careful or consistent way. So perhaps, I can be forgiven by attaching to it my own set of meanings. Broadly conceived, sustainability refers to quality of human life and quality of the environment not purchased mainly at the expense of the future. Sustainability is not restricted to environmental demographic and economic matters, but it also refers to political, military, diplomatic, social, institutional or governance issues. Ultimately, sustainability depends on the ideological issues and lifestyle choices. As used here, sustainability refers not only to sustainable population economic activity and ecological integrity, but also to a considerable extent to such matters as sustainable peace and global security arrangements, sustainable preparedness for possible conflict, sustainable democracy and human rights, and sustainable communities and institutions. All of these are closely interlinked in the presence of destructive war. It’s hardly possible to protect nature very effectively, or to keep some important human social ties from dissolving if huge and conspicuous inequalities are present. People will be reluctant to restrain quantitative economic growth in favor of equality of growth as would be required to achieve a measure of economic and environmental sustainability.
Very often, I claim that sustainability is intimately tied to the notion of restraining quantitative growth in favor of qualitative growth. We see that in mostly in wealthy countries, a lot of resources are devoted to quality, and that’s different that you a different situation from that of countries with very large impoverished populations, where the poverty cries out for quantitative growth. It’s hard to recommend a future in which growth is all qualitative when so many people are poor, but as countries achieve a certain degree of economic success, they can better afford to divert resources from quantitative growth to qualitative growth. At the same time, great inequalities may provide the excuse for demagogues to exploit or revive ethnic or class hatreds, and provoke deadly conflict. In The Quark and the Jaguar, I suggested studies should be done on possible paths toward sustainability. In this very general sense, in the course of the 21st century, in the spirit of taking a crude look at the whole, this goes beyond trying to estimate the probabilities of various likely scenarios in the future. Rather, one would look for more sustainable futures, even if they seem to have low probabilities. As we think of them as desirable, it’s worth studying desirable situations, that to which we can’t assign very high likelihood, but somehow, we can make them happen. I like to employ a modified version of a schema introduced by my friend James Gustave Speth. Gustave Speth who was president of the World Resources Institute and was later the head of the United Nations Development Program. He was, for a long time, the Dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale. The schema involves a set of interlink transitions that has to occur, if the world is to switch over from present trends toward a more sustainable situation. Well then, I have long comments on these various transitions, which I don’t think I should repeat here, but I can mention some of the names of these transitions. The demographic transition to a roughly stable human population worldwide and in each broad region; technological transition to methods of supplying human needs; and satisfying human desires with a much lower environmental impact per person at a given level of conventional prosperity that depends on technology.
Decades ago, some of us pointed out the obvious fact that a measure of environmental impact, say in a given geographical area, can be usefully factored into three quantities multiplied together so you get an identity. The three factors are; population, conventionally measured prosperity per person, and the environmental impact per person per unit of conventional prosperity. So the last factor is the one as we just said that depends particularly on technology. Its technological change that has permitted today’s giant human population to exist at all. While billions of people are desperately poor, quite a few others manage to live in reasonable comfort due to advances in science and technology, including medicine. The environmental costs have been huge, but nowhere near as great as they may be in the future, if the human race does not exercise some foresight. Technology, if properly harnessed, can work to make the third factor, the one that depends on technology, as small as can be practically arranged, given the laws of nature. How much the prosperity factor can be increased without damaging the environment depends to a considerable extent on how much is squandered on the first factor. Mere numbers of people are evidence that the beginning of the technological transition has started to show up in many places.
The economic transition to a situation where humanity is not living on nature’s capital, but mainly on the interest on that capital is very important. Let’s live on nature’s interests, not nature’s capital. Imagine a visitor to a little New England village who notices an old man walking down the street, a man whom everyone shuns. Children run away at his approach, people cross the street to avoid meeting him. The visitor asked his host who is that and, why is he treated that way. The answer is “Oh, that’s Eustace Barnwell, he dipped into capital”. But the human race is using up capital and not just dipping into it. We are mining fresh water in places like the Ogallala Aquifer in Nebraska. That’s, by the way, why President Obama insisted on changing the route of the Keystone pipeline, if it is ever to be approved, because it was running right by the Ogallala Aquifer. We’re wiping out gigantic forests at an almost unbelievable rate. We’re depleting many of the world’s fisheries. We’re using up clean air by polluting it. The economic transition, I said this already, can be described as one in which growth in quality gradually replaces growth in quantity, while extreme poverty which cries out for quantitative growth is alleviated. By the way, analysts are now beginning to use realistic measures of wellbeing that depart radically from narrow economic measures, by including mental and physical health education, and so forth. Happiness has become a serious subject of study by scientists, philosophers, and medical practitioners. In fact, many different kinds of people are seriously studying happiness. You remember that the former King of Bhutan talked about how his government was interested in was gross national happiness, not some narrow economic measure. Some of us are thinking of sponsoring a conference here in a year or two on happiness looked at in the modern way. It may be that some holy new insights can emerge.
Well I think I will leave the rest of these transitions to our discussion. What I wanted to do with this introductory talk was simply to get us into the general field. The rest of the transitions need to be thought about, but we don’t have to enumerate them here. Well, what we should do though, is look around the world for some examples of people trying to study aspects of a “Crude Look at the Whole”. What kind of progress is being made on that important task? Are there places? Are there schools of thought? Are there universities? Are there businesses? Are there arenas somewhere, where the crude look at the whole is being taken? Are there groups of people who are taking a crude look at the whole seriously, especially in connection with sustainability in the broad sense?
I think we have to look carefully for signs of this kind of thinking. It is too early for it to show itself in a dramatic way. We’ll have probably have to dig it out from amongst the various things that people are considering, but it might be worthwhile it might have a really worthwhile effect to, to start to do that. Are there places where the “Crude Look at the Whole” is taking seriously enough, so that people are making progress on it? There are a few examples of at least lip service to it. For example, people who think about what’s called world systems analysis such as Emmanuel Wallerstein who spent some time at Yale. Another man named Richard Robbins. Their works do not impress me particularly because it starts out from Marxist criticisms of capitalism, and goes on to criticisms of Marxist criticisms, but it keeps its roots somehow in the soil of Marxist critique, and I don’t find that particularly illuminating. But at least they’re trying to do something that’s integrative. Are there other examples? What about world modelers? I understand there’s a whole class of people who are thought of as world modelers, but I’m not really familiar with what they do, but here in this distinguished gathering, I’m sure there are several distinguished people, who can help us with this search to see what kinds of look crude looks at the whole are being taken today that might indicate something about the practical courses in such thinking for the future.
Thank you.
Bilahari Kausikan: Why Small Countries Should Not Behave Like A Small Country
Bilahari Kausikan: Why Small Countries Should Not Behave Like A Small Country
27 March 2018
The following is an edited transcript of a talk by Bilahari Kausikan, Ambassador-at-Large at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Singapore. It was delivered on 11 October 2017 at our monthly Singapore Platform for East-West Dialogue.
After all, Singapore has, as a sovereign and independent entity, only existed for 52 years. That’s just a blink of an eye in the long sweep of history.
Now, what do we mean by small? I mean physically small. This is essentially one city and, in some context, not a very large city. In a Chinese context, you are a second-tier city, about five to six million people. Now, of course we are not going to disappear, but your sovereignty and independence can be severely compromised. And that is actually the case of most small states today. There are about 196 sovereign states, and 193 members of the UN. Most of them have a seat at the UN, a vote at the UN, a flag, a national anthem, but that’s about it. Their autonomy and their ability to carve their own destiny is, more often than not, severely compromised. Now, I said physically small. By some other matrixes, we are not so small. As a port, a sort of logistics centre, a financial centre, or a trading hub, we are not that small. But physical size does matter.
Why do I say that? Well, let’s take your role as a logistics hub and trading centre. We have performed that role, according to some accounts, since the 14th century. We have certainly performed that role as a British colony, and as part of Malaysia. Of course, the manner in which we perform the role has evolved, but it’s essentially the same role. So you don’t have to be sovereign and independent to do these things. You cannot take your relevance as a sovereign and independent country for granted.
Relevance for a small country and a small state is an artefact. That means something created and maintained by human endeavour. How do you create relevance? Relevance is a contextual concept. What makes you relevant today may be quite irrelevant in a week, in a month, in a year, or in a decade. What makes you relevant vis-à-vis country A, may be quite irrelevant vis-à-vis country B. What makes you relevant on issue X vis-à-vis country A, may be irrelevant vis-à-vis issue Y. For the purposes of this talk, I’m not going into the details of that, but you can ask me questions about that later.
That said, the bedrock of relevance is success. Before I retired from the foreign service, I used to tell our junior officers that if Singapore’s foreign policy had any success, it is not because—or when I’m in my kinder moments, I say “not only because”—of their good looks, their natural charm, and the brilliance of their intellect. It’s because Singapore is a successful country, and you represent a successful country. Therefore, what you say is taken with some seriousness and some credibility. If you serve in the UN, as I have, you will find many individual diplomats from many countries who are absolutely brilliant, but they are not being taken seriously. Why? Well, it’s simply because they are representing countries that are not taken seriously.
Hence, you have to be exceptional. You have to be extraordinary. It doesn’t always make you loved, by the way, but that is the existential condition of being Singaporean. To survive and prosper, you have to be exceptional; in being exceptional, it sometimes creates resentment. You just have to deal with it and manage it. It follows, therefore, that you cannot take the advice of my former colleague, who advocated in a rather stupid article that small countries should behave like small countries. If Singapore had behaved like a small country in 1965, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking to each other, or we would be talking in a different language. At least it wouldn’t be me addressing you all, because I am not a bumiputra.
Now, that does not mean we should not be aware of the constraints of being small. Of course, you should be aware of the constraints of being small, but you should not allow yourself to be limited by those constraints. You should not allow your ambition to be bounded by your mere size because that is precisely what when we had independence thrusted upon us. Don’t forget that Singapore is quite unique. We never sought independence, we had it thrusted upon us. And, in fact, the late Mr Lee Kuan Yew is on record as saying small island states are a political joke. That’s why he sought independence within Malaysia. It didn’t work out, and we had to make it work. If at that moment of anguish, when we were thrown out on the perilous seas of independence, we behaved like a small country, we won’t be speaking here because that is precisely what the Malaysians wanted us to behave like. They had three powerful instruments. I won’t go into details, but the first instrument was the armed forces. During the crucial years of 1965-1969, we do not have an armed force worth talking about. Second, the economy. Singapore was still largely an entrepôt, whose hinterland was Malaysia and Indonesia, and both were out to replace us in that role. The third instrument was water. Essentially, the assumption was these three things would either bring us crawling back or keep us as a small country tamely to heel. The story of Singapore since 1965 is how we overcame those challenges by being exceptional.
Now, one element of Singapore’s exceptionalism is the organising principle of Singapore, which is multi-racial equality and multi-racial meritocracy. I’m not saying that we do it perfectly. In fact, we are far from perfect. But there is no perfection to be found outside heaven, if there is a heaven. I don’t quite believe there is a heaven, so there’s no perfection to be found. But even if you believe in heaven, at least the Christian heaven, there is also no equality, there is hierarchy; there is God, there are angels of various kinds etc. And if you look around Singapore, as imperfect as we are in implementing the organising principle, it is nonetheless unique and exceptional. Look around Singapore, not just in Southeast Asia, but from Northeast Asia to South Asia. Most countries are organised whether explicitly—in the case of Malaysia, where the principle of Malay dominance is enshrined in the constitution—or implicitly. It’s bumiputra over non-bumiputra; it is ethnic Thai Buddhist over Muslim Rohingya; it is Sinhalese Buddhist over Tamil; it is Han over non-Han. Even in a very liberal democracy like Japan, it is ethnic Japanese over Japanese-Koreans or Ainu; it is Hindu over non-Hindu; it is Buddhist over non-Buddhist; there is no end. You just think about what’s around us.
Even beyond that, in Western liberal democracies, there is a reassertion of hierarchy; it should be white Christian first. That is the meaning of the Trump phenomenon; that is the meaning of Brexit; that is the meaning of these right-wing movements that have arisen on continental Europe. They don’t always say it so explicitly, but when they are anti-immigration, for example, that’s what they mean. And this foundation which makes us unique is under pressure. It’s under greater pressure today than it ever was before because part of the backlash against globalisation is a cultural backlash. It is the assertion of identities of various kinds as superior over identities of other kinds. Now, there are many such assertions. There is the assertion of an Arabised form of Islam as more authentic than other forms; and there’s an assertion of various kinds of evangelical Christianity as more authentic than other kinds. Similar ideas have crept into Singapore such as radical Hinduism and radical Buddhism. If you think about the fundamental tenets of these religions, it’s an oxymoron, but it exists. Even in a secular way, you have the assertions of different kinds of political identity as more authentic to the exclusion of other kinds. What has that got to do with us? We are exposed to these things, and you can’t insulate yourself from these things. You can perhaps mitigate those things, but you can’t insulate yourself, because the cost of shutting yourself off is to try and become North Korea, and you know where that leads to.
Singapore is not just a small country, it is also unique in another way. Singapore is the only ethnic Chinese majority country outside greater China, by which I mean the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. That poses particular challenges, particularly with relations with China.
But that’s not the only track. China is not just a state, it is also what I would call a Leninist state. I don’t use the term “Communist” because I don’t think there’s anybody in China that seriously believes in the Communist ideology anymore. You might find a few people in Brown University or Harvard who still believe in Communism as an ideology, but you won’t find anybody in China, and certainly not in the Chinese Communist Party. However, they do believe in the Leninist structure of the state, in which the party is dominant, and that prescribes certain tactics, methods of control, and foreign policy techniques. For want of a better word, I would call them “united front tactics”. That means the use of other than state-to-state channels, cultural associations, business associations, literary associations etc., to gain influence—all Leninist states do this. The former Soviet Union did it up to the 1930s, when it was relatively isolated. By the 1950s, they by and large abandoned this because it was no longer isolated.
Now, post-Maoist China is certainly not isolated. But it still has United Front Work Department, which is under direct control of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. And you have seen in recent times, for example in Australia, where they tried to subvert politicians and political parties. You saw it in New Zealand where—bless the souls of the Kiwis—a new citizen who became a member of parliament was found to have been an instructor in the PRC’s spy schools. I don’t know what their vetting process was like, but there’s possibly a reason why the Kiwis are an endangered species. And there are many other examples around the world. China is not just a normal state or a Leninist state. It also has a third identity of being a civilisational state—China is a civilisation, as well as a state, and that prescribes the third track. It’s a track that is of particular relevance for Singapore, and that is the overseas Chinese track. They also have a very elaborate institutional apparatus devoted to this track under party control.
The purpose of this track is best encapsulated by a speech President Xi Jinping made in 2014 to a conference of overseas Chinese business associations in Beijing. And the title of that speech was The Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation is of Importance to all Chinese. In other words, the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is of importance to all Chinese means that overseas Chinese are expected, on crucial issues, to define their interests in terms of China’s interest. That is something a multi-racial country like Singapore can never accept. It is an existential issue. That’s why when a former senior civil servant says that a small country should behave like a small country— which is what the Chinese meant because you are a majority ethnic Chinese country—he has to be put down quite brutally, and not just by me, but by more important people than me.
By the way, I don’t think China is out to destroy Singapore. In some ways, they do admire Singapore because several Chinese and some Singaporeans who are very familiar with China have told me that the Chinese admires Singapore because it shows what the Chinese people can do after 100 years. However, they fundamentally do not understand why we are successful. That’s why they have a lot of problems with the Uyghurs and other minorities. No matter how good our relationship is on the first track (state-to-state relations), from time to time, they will try the other tracks, and they have never stopped. Sometimes it’s high-key and public, while at other times, it’s low-key and private. We have to resist such attempts even if it means roughing relations on the first track. That’s what happened over the last year or so. Now, they are playing nice again for a variety of reasons.
I will make two more points. The first point is, I said these kinds of things have never stopped in the 30 odd years I have been in the foreign ministry. Sometimes they are public, sometimes they are private. The last time it was public was in 2004. Why was it public? When then Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsein Loong went to Taiwan, all hell broke loose. Now, that’s not the first time a Singapore leader has gone to Taiwan. They’ve gone many times, and the Chinese know well that no matter what, we know how to handle the One China policy. They do trust us when it suits them because some years ago, they came and asked us to do a free trade agreement with Taiwan because they were trying to prop up Ma Ying-jeou at that time. We don’t want a free trade agreement with Taiwan because it’s of no economic use. They asked us because they are confident that we know how to handle it without compromising the One China principle.
So what was their fuss in 2004 all about? It’s because it was quite clear, by that time, that Mr Lee Hsien Loong would be the successor to Mr Goh Chok Tong. One of the lies that the Chinese like to propagate on track two (united front tactics) and track three (overseas Chinese being for China’s interests) is that relations were so much better under Lee Kuan Yew, and these new people don’t know how to handle China. Mr Lee Kuan Yew did have good relations with many Chinese leaders including Deng Xiaoping. But why did he have good relations? There’s another fact that track two and track three of Chinese diplomacy never emphasises. Mr Lee Kuan Yew and the PAP is, as far as I can determine, and I have tried very hard to find an exception, the only non-Communist leader and party that went into a united front in the 1950s and 1960s with a Chinese Communist-supported party, the Barisan Socialis, and won. Every other non-Communist leader that went into the united front lost. And so, they had absolutely no doubt of Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s resolve, and that however friendly he is, he will be for Singapore first. But when there is a leadership transition, they wanted to see whether the son is made of the same mettle. They also tested Goh Chok Tong, by the way, in a less public way.
And this time, the last year and a half, there were many proximate causes for the tension. But it is also a time of succession because about a year ago, Mr Lee Hsein Loong announced that after the next election, he’ll step aside, and let the fourth generation of leaders choose who the next Prime Minister would be, and it is also meant to test them. They had no doubt about Mr Lee Kuan Yew. They put some pressure on Goh Chok Tong; didn’t work. They didn’t put much pressure because they probably thought he was the interim leader. They have a rather dynastic mindset which you can see, because there’s a category of Chinese leaders known as princelings. They tested Mr Lee Hsein Loong, it didn’t work. So now they are testing the fourth generation. The test isn’t over; they have paused for a variety of reasons and decided to play nice. Prime Minister had a very good visit to China, but that’s not the end of the story.
I told you state-to-state relations will always go up and down. There’s nothing to get too excited about. But it is conceivable, not very probable, that one day, as did the Soviet Union, China may give up the united front track. But China cannot give up the third track, the overseas Chinese track, without ceasing to be China, because it stems from the civilisational nature of the Chinese state. So we will have to learn to deal with this. How do we deal with this?
Here, I have to acknowledge that there is something of a quandary. I can educate you in this closed group, and because I am a pensioner after all, I can say anything I want. I have a title that is meaningless. Don’t ask me what Ambassador-at-Large means because I have no idea. In the colloquial sense of the term, “at large” means not-yet-called. But I am a pensioner, I have no authority, I have no official position. So I can say what I just said to you. It’s very hard for a government to say these things because you don’t want to go and roil the official track unnecessarily. If it is necessary, of course, we have to hold firm to this fundamental bedrock of what makes Singapore, even if it causes tensions in the first track, and that’s what we did over the last year-and-a-half and 2004. A few months ago, Mr Chan Chun Sing was asked a question about foreign influence in politics in parliament. He had to give a very circumspect answer. So circumspect that, unless you already knew, you won’t know what he was talking about. I can’t blame him, you know? But in small groups like this, I can try to educate you.
The second big factor is to have a very clinical view of what’s happening in the world. One of the other Chinese lines is that China is rising. Therefore, your best friend, America, is declining. So you are the wrong side of history, and you better jump on this bandwagon. Now, that can’t be denied. I told you that you must be blind, deaf, dumb, and living on another planet to deny that China is rising. But it is wrong to look at China’s rise in simplistic and binary terms. There will be a more symmetrical strategic equation between the US and China sooner or later, but that doesn’t mean that the US is going to disappear from the world. It doesn’t mean that the US is going to cease to be a substantive country. And not just the US, but Japan as well. It doesn’t make much substantive difference if you are the biggest, second biggest, or third biggest economy in the world. You are all still going to be important players, and you all are going to be strong military powers. You all are going, in that sense, to deter, check, and balance each other. That gives small countries like us manoeuvre room.
Whether or not you’re going to be agile and clever enough to take advantage of the manoeuvre room is, of course, another matter. Nobody says we got to be clever, we can be stupid too, but the possibility exists. In other words, you can be small, and not behave like a small country, and preserve your autonomy. It is up to us.
Bilahari Kausikan is an Ambassador-at-Large at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA). Prior to this, he served at the MFA as Permanent Secretary from 2010–2013.
Sharon Siddique: East-West and the Post-Colonial
Sharon Siddique: East-West and the Post-Colonial
8 March 2018
It was delivered on 15 November 2017 at our monthly Singapore Platform for East-West Dialogue.
Although the rewriting of the historical narrative is vital, my perspective on post-colonialism is present-oriented. I am interested in the impact of post-colonialism and how it colours our view the present. Much of this, as we will see, is unconscious. I will focus on the implications of the term, “post”. The dangerous ideological assumption implicit in the term “post-colonial” is that we are “done” with colonialism and is therefore no longer relevant to how we perceive our present lived-in environment. Post-colonialism only helps us re-evaluate our perception of the past.
We in the East are supposedly post-West. “Post” implies a break; a turning point; a new beginning. We assume that the post-colonial narrative began at the end of WWII culminating with the birth of many new nation states in the 1950s and 1960s. We thought then that we were initiating a new era of independent nation-states in the newly fashioned Third World. We assumed that we were in a post-colonial moment between what was (the colonial empires), and what was being created—a succession of former colonies progressing from Third World, to Second, and eventually, if we are very optimistic, to First. But it has not really turned out that way. To put it bluntly, after seven decades, we are still stuck in the post-colonial.
What does this mean and why? We begin with the term “post-colonial”, and ask the question, have we truly left the ideological dominance of the West? I think It is false to assume that we can stop the clock at post-colonial and reset it at independence. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the process is not so simple.
If we had arrived earlier, we would have caught the beginning of the movie. The characters and their motivations are introduced. The storyline unfolds. If we enter the movie halfway, we are disoriented, and we sometimes lose the plot because we are ignorant of what has transpired. This is important because it makes it much more difficult to understand the nuances of plot and motivation.
Our movie—the one we will be screening tonight—is titled, Singapore and Its Neighbors.
We could choose many beginnings, but arguably, with reference to our postcolonial narrative, we will choose to begin in 1824—a natural beginning for our story. The Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 was designed to solve many of the issues that had arisen because of the British occupation of Dutch properties during the Napoleonic Wars, as well as issues regarding the rights to trade that had existed for hundreds of years in the Spice Islands. The treaty between the Dutch and the British addressed a wide array of issues surrounding the expansion by either side of the Malay world. The British establishment of Singapore on the Malay Peninsula in 1819 exacerbated the tension between the two empires, especially as the Dutch claimed that the treaty signed between Raffles and the Sultan of Johore was invalid, and that the Sultanate of Johore was under the Dutch sphere of influence. The questions surrounding the fate of Dutch trading rights in British India and former Dutch possessions in the area also became a point of contention between Calcutta and Batavia. In 1820, under pressures from British merchants with interests in the Far East, negotiations to clarify the situation in Southeast Asia began.
The Treaty settled several matters:
- The Straits of Malacca (and the Malay World) was split into two. All territories to the north of the Straits of Malacca belonged to the British, and all to the south belonged to the Dutch.
- The great swap: Bencoolen (located on the west coast of Sumatra) was given to the Dutch, while Malacca was given to the British. The issue of Singapore was settled; it remained British and its status was never questioned again.
- Singapore remained part of the British sphere, and gradually lost its original connection to the Malay World.
So now we have the beginning of the plot. But before I continue with the movie, I would like to give you a pop quiz. Six multiple-choice questions. If you fail, your punishment will be to listen carefully to the continuation of my movie script.
- 3
- 35
- 350
- 3,500
ANSWER: 3,500
- Less than 500,000 each
- More than 1 million each
- Johor Baru’s population is bigger than Batam
- Batam’s population is bigger than Johor Bahru
ANSWER: More than 1 million each.
- 1641
- 1598
- 1704
- 1511
ANSWER: 1511
It is worth noting that Melaka was conquered more than 300 years before Raffles founded Singapore. What happened in the region in these three centuries?
- Herman Daendels
- Albert Wiese
- Stamford Raffles
- William Farquhar
ANSWER: Stamford Raffles.
The interaction between Dutch East Indies (DEI) and the British empire was vast and interesting. The dialogue partners were Calcutta and Batavia. The DEI never attempted to recover the position of Malacca. Their seat of governance was Batavia.
- 50 km
- 70 km
- 15 km
- 5 km
ANSWER: 5 km
You can see Batam from Singapore. From Nongsa Point, Singapore’s East Coast floats like a mirage shimmering on the water across the straits—so very close physically, but a vast distance mentally.
- Batam
- Johor
- Karimun
- Melaka
ANSWER: Karimun
Karimun almost became Singapore. Today, it is a sleepy Dutch-style Indonesian town across the Straits, with Bauxite mines, beaches, and ship repair facilities. Best ferry connections are from West coast of Johor.
I have selected three scenes from the movie, each illustrating an important dimension of Singapore and Its Neighbors. The common narrative is that we, as captives of the post-colonial, are quite ignorant of the Dutch colonial worldview, which still partially dominates our frozen moment. We are still more comfortable being British.
President Jokowi is a great supporter, and has recently directed BAPPENAS (the Indonesian Central Planning Authority; the Indonesian equivalent of Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority with several other responsibilities) to complete a feasibility study by the end of 2017.
This is not the first time that Palangkaraya has been singled out. When President Soekarno, built the city in 1957, he indicated his intention to eventually move the federal capital there which, of course, did not transpire.
The reasons for this are complex and layered, but to even get a grip on what is going on, we need to know more about Kalimantan. So where is Kalimantan? On Borneo, which is the third largest island in the world (behind Greenland and New Guinea). Borneo is split amongst Indonesia (Kalimantan) Malaysia (Sabah and Sarawak) and Brunei. The entire island has a population of only 10 million, and Palangkaraya is located at the geographic centre of the Indonesian archipelago. If we overlay a map of Indonesia over a map of the USA, it stretches from Alaska to Florida.
As we began our colonial narrative in 1819, we tend to forget how much longer the Dutch colonial narrative in the Dutch East Indies actually is. Batavia was the capital of DEI for 330 years (1619-1949), and the capital of Indonesia for the past seven decades. Even contemplating a move is mind-boggling, yet we can’t simply dismiss it as impossible.
Moving capitals is a feature of Southeast Asia’s sense of place. Capitals can move to newly created cities, such as from Rangoon to Naypyidaw. They can split in two, such as Kuala Lumpur being the business centre and Putrajaya as the administrative center of Malaysia. This also happens at the provincial and state levels. In Johor, Kota Iskandar is the administrative capital, while Johor Baru is the commercial city. Suffice to say, this typical feature of Southeast Asian moving cities can either prepare us for possible change, or leave us surprised and perplexed, because we didn’t see it coming and we don’t understand why it did.
The Definition of Malay
Singapore is the most open and flexible. Anyone who considers oneself a Malay, and is accepted by the community as such, is a Malay. While it is seemingly simple, the extensive debate and discussion following the election indicates that it is anything but simple in our post-colonial frozen moment.
To understand the Singapore debate, it is necessary to examine what Malay means in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei.
To understand who is a Malay in Indonesia, one has to begin with the term, sukubangsa. It roughly translates to an ethnic group, and it generally links an ethnic group to a specific locality. Malays are natives of the Riau Islands, mainland provinces of Jambi, Riau, and South Sumatra. Other sukubangsa may live in the Riaus, such as Javanese, Minangkabau, Batak, etc., but they are not considered Malay.
The “religion” element of “Malayness” is used differently in the four countries. Indonesia and Singapore do not explicitly specify a religion for Malay, but it is assumed that Malays are Muslim. Here, the argument turns on whether or not you can practise Malay customs and culture without being a Muslim.
In Malaysia, to qualify as a Malay, one must practice Malay custom, speak the Malay language, and be a Muslim. In order to understand the status of Malays in Malaysia, one needs to understand the term, bumiputera, which literally means sons of the soil. All Malays are bumiputeras, but not all bumiputra are Malays. The term was used to include the other ethnic indigenous groups such as the indigenous ethnic groups of Sabah and Sarawak.
There is a further complication to the definition of Malay in Malaysia. In some states, Malays are under the protection of the Sultans, who, since British rule, are responsible for Malay and Islamic customs. One must note that Arabs and some Indian Muslims are included as Malays in some states, but are not considered Malays in others. So, in Singapore, an Arab can be a Malay if he chooses. In Malaysia, whether or not an Arab can be a Malay or bumiputera depends on the rules of the state in which he or she is domiciled. In Indonesia, Arab is a separate sukubangsa.
Finally, Brunei defines itself as Melayu Islam Beraja (MIB)—Malay-Muslim Monarchy.
Singapore is special in many ways. In the context of our present movie, the important thing to note is that it is the only Chinese-majority city in Southeast Asia; a first for the Malay world. I remember discussing this with an Indonesian friend who told me, “Yes, Singapore is a pearl. It is costly and beautiful. But we never forgot how the pearl was produced: it began when a tiny grain of sand entered and irritated us.” A variation on this is the “little red dot”, which was coined in the late 1990s by the then-President of Indonesia, B. J. Habibie. Since then, Singaporeans have claimed that pejorative phrase as a badge of honour.
Singapore is a colonial creation adjusting to its own post-colonial frozen moment. I will illustrate this by talking about Singapore and her nearest neighbors to the North and South. By freezing the frame on Singapore, we can see what we are missing. What we need is to fill in the gaps of what we have missed from the first half of the movie so that we can better understand the narrative on post-colonialism
First, we need to concentrate on rebalancing Singapore’s post-colonial frozen moment. We are strong on Malaysia, but weak on Indonesia. We are knowledgeable about Johor, but quite clueless about Riau Island Province.
Why are these questions important to us? It helps us to see the impact of tri-lateral initiatives we have had various experiences since 1965, including Konfrontasi with Indonesia. We have tried several versions of tripartite cooperation such as SIJORI or the Indonesia-Malaysia-Singapore Growth Triangle , which was not very successful. At the moment, we have again swung to an emphasis on the comfort zone of bilateral relations with Malaysia, largely via developments in Johor, and this is growing. More than half a million people cross the causeway everyday; Johoreans cross to work in Singapore, and the competitive advantage is not only higher pay, but also a favorable exchange rate.
Second, Singapore is most comfortable as a global city. In the region, it interacts as an independent nation-state and deals with the capital of the its neighbors. It has more difficulty in carving out an appropriate identity for interacting directly with Johor and Riau directly, as neighboring state and province respectively. The result of this is that most Singaporeans are more familiar with London and New York than with Palembang and Pekanbaru.
In order to improve our success rate with our neighbors, we must not be drawn into dismissing the still present legacy of colonialism in our post-colonial frozen moment. We cannot afford to remain ignorant of our surroundings in terms of pre-colonial boundaries which were so drastically altered by intervention of colonizers. In Singapore and in Southeast Asia we have been stuck in “postcolonial” for seven decades. Our stalled position means that in our present, and future, we are missing vital analytical elements.
The third issue in assessing Singapore’s post-colonial frozen moment is that we need to be more aware of the rapid thaw in terms of the impact of forces external to the region. There are three forces at play—the rise of China, the opening of India, and the diminishing role of the Western world in Asia.
There is a rupture between colonialism and post-colonialism. This implies that we are, in some fashion, post-West. In the immediate aftermath of colonialism, the rupture, and the creation of a new era, was nationalism and the nation-state. However, rather than coalescing, nationalism appears to be losing its ideological grip, and the post-colonial nation-state does not appear to have ushered in a new era. In Malaysia and Indonesia, there is currently a great deal of re-scripting of the fundamentals; things which we thought had been settled decades ago. There are many complex reasons for this, but I will only speculate on a few.
First, and this is a huge generalization, post-colonialism turned its sights inward, and became preoccupied with the introspective exercise of re-evaluating contexts of colonialism.
Second, it is worth noting in passing that this thawing process appears to be global. Most countries in the Middle East, suffered from the fundamental problems over their national identities. More than a century after the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, from which most of them emerged, these states have been unable to define, project, and maintain a national identity that is both inclusive and representative. The question is where and how the thawing of our frozen moment will proceed.
We will bequeath the challenge of answering this question to your generation. Choose to open yourselves to the many fascinating venues in our neighborhood. And I mean this personally. As a start, I suggest you take a two-hour ferry ride to Tanjung Balai Karimun and imagine where Singapore might have been. Or drive over to Forest City and see the Country Garden, a massive construction by a Shanghai-based construction company.
But if you really want an unforgettable metaphysical experience I suggest you take the 8 a.m. ferry from Tanah Merah Ferry Terminal to Nongsapura. You board the ferry at 8 a.m., and the trip takes 40 minutes. You will arrive at 7.40. That is, you arrive in Batam 20 minutes before you have left Singapore. Batam is on Waktu Indonesia Barat, which is one hour behind Singapore time. You arrive before you leave. This trip puts you in the mood to sit back and enjoy the Indonesian experience. As you tour Riau tune in to how Dutch it is. We live in a fascinating neighborhood. Don’t miss it.
At ISEAS she was in charge of coordinating regional research, and also chairman of the Institute’s Publications Unit Review Committee. At Sreekumar.Siddique & Co, she has provided customised research consulting services and private briefings for company boards, senior managers and public policy officials, with a focus on Southeast Asia (see website for more details (www.sreekumar-siddique.com).
Dr Siddique is a noted authority on Islam and socio-cultural change, and has written extensively on social restructuring and urban planning. She has degrees in development sociology, Malay Studies and linguistics from the Universities of Bielefeld (Germany), Singapore and Montana (USA).