Category: Society

Categories
Books, essays and others Politics & government Society

[2992] Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message

Those concerned with the world would likely take Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me as an important work about racism in the United States. I could only believe the book’s importance would only rise further as the white identity politics entrenches itself in the western world. Coates there reveals the societal hypocrisy that exists in the United States with regards to racism vis-à-vis his experience as a black person. While the subject of Between the World and Me is grim, the language used by Coates across all its pages is beautiful.

Cover of Ta-Nehisi Coates's The Message.

When The Message came out in October this year, I was quick to pick it up. The controversy surrounding the book made me all the more curious about Coates’s latest work. That controversy involved him equating Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as apartheid. He had visited Israel and Palestine (and a few other places) and the book was published as Israel continue to commit horrendous killing not just in Palestine but also in Lebanon, while proceeding with its illegal land grabbing exercise in the West Bank.

Coates’s latest is beautifully written, no doubt, but equating Israel’s behavior to apartheid is hardly a new groundbreaking point. That message and other criticisms he lobs in Israel’s directions are only controversial because pro-Israel readers (and non-readers) consider any criticism of Israel as racism/antisemitism. To the wider world, there is no controversy but only a nod to Coates signifying the lack of moral authority Israel has in order to make such accusation.

Israel is not the only subject of the book. He speaks of his visit to Senegal to explore the history of slavery in the US and his own roots. It is here I think where the language is at its smoothest, hence my favorite section of the book.

In both parts of the book, the seeds are quite clearly the points on racism discussed earlier in Between the World and Me. Realizing this, I feel The Message is an extension of Between the World and Me. The former is expands the reality perceived by Coates in his earlier work with the wider world in mind.

But the act of expanding older points does not make The Message unimportant. Sometimes, profoundness of points made is not the point itself. Sometimes, the point is the realization of something had to be done. In justifying writing The Message, Coates writes:

…The figure is you, the writer, an idea in hand, notes scribbled on loose-leaf, maybe an early draft of an outline. But to write, to draw that map, to pull us into the wilderness, you cannot merely stand at the edge. You have to walk the land. You have to see the elevation for yourself, the color of the soil. You have to discover the ravine is really a valley and that the stream is in fact a river winding south from a glacier in the mountains. You can’t “logic” your way through it or retreat to your innate genius. A belief in genius is a large part of what plagues us, and I have found that people widely praised for power of their intellect are as likely to illuminate as they are to confound. “Genius” may or may not help a writer whose job is, above all else, to clarify.

And so he traveled and wrote.

Categories
Economics Politics & government Society

[2989] Eroding our commons will erode our togetherness

The Malaysian government faces tight fiscal space and the runway to keep going on as we do now is not too long or wide.

The population is still young but it will not be so much longer. This suggests growing needs for healthcare services. In the meantime, education is somewhat underfunded judging by less-than-favorable learning outcomes, compounded or caused by pandemic disruption. Defense is underfunded at a time when the world is becoming a more dangerous place; previous wasteful spending on this front does not help. Climate change requires new kinds of public infrastructure investment. Petroleum revenue is highly like to go down permanently due to rising provincialism, while an aging society means income and consumption tax revenue will struggle to rise in the next 10-20 year period. This has yet to take into account pension liability that the government faces in the same period, which is also underfunded. And, a lot of Malaysians do not have enough savings and in their old age, they will depend on public services more.

The list goes on and on to tell us that under business-as-usual, public spending requirement is rising while there is every reason to suspect that the pace of government revenue growth will not match the former.

The current government understands this and there are efforts to move away from the current business-as-usual scenario. Diesel subsidies has been partly removed (but not in Sabah and Sarawak). There are plans to abolish or at least lower petrol subsidies but that has not happened yet. Recently, the Health Ministry announced it would expand its full-paying patient scheme.[1] This is largely in line with a high-level suggestion made last year that public healthcare should be more targeted to relief fiscal pressures caused by the public health services.

And even more recently, the Prime Minister said education subsidies enjoyed by the rich is to be cut.[2] It is unclear what the actual policy is but that is for us to find out soon when the government tables its 2025 Budget later this month.

But as the government seeks to improve its fiscal conditions, it is crucial to remind Putrajaya that not all fiscal consolidation actions are of equal measures. While fiscal pressures are important and must be addressed urgently, it is not the only things that matter to this country. When it comes to cut or rationalization of public service, it is good to take a step back and reassess what we would lose in return for what we would gain not just in the short Parliament terms, but also in the long-term. After all, most of us save the unfortunate ones, live beyond the 5-year parliament term.

What we would lose from reduced access to public education and health services (and other similar services provided by the government) is the commons. It is the space where we Malaysians theoretically—really, actually for many people—come together regardless of our origins in terms of geography, class, gender, ethnicity, etc. That togetherness allows for the creation of shared lived experience or even shared identity. In an age where technology and quirks of history are leading us to live in our little bubbles, it is our public service that attempts to connect these bubbles into a larger common.

Without these commons, we Malaysians will lose connection to each other, losing whatever left of our shared values and shared identity. Erosion of these commons necessarily lead to the erosion of our togetherness.

I do not think these commons should be eroded by concerns over fiscal pressures, especially when these pressures could be alleviated through other more effective means. Instead of applying the knives to public education and public healthcare systems, other policies could be jettisoned first, like outdated incentives and reliefs provided to private healthcare service providers or private insurance, or outdated subsidies for electric vehicles. And of course, cutting petrol subsidies would go a long way too (although with crude oil prices are low these days, one wonders how long it would go).

And really, Malaysians are able to pay much more taxes. But we refuse to do so.

Our refusal points to another problem: our reluctance to make short-term sacrifices to ensure larger long-term gains and sustainability. It seems that we rather avoid the short-term pain and instead lose something valuable in the future.

Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reservedHafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reservedHafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

[1] — Health Minister Dzulkefly Ahmad is standing by the government’s proposal to expand private wings at public hospitals as part of a hybrid model termed “Rakan KKM” (Health Ministry Friends). [Health minister defends private wings at public hospitals plan. Malaysiakini. September 24 2024]

[2] — Menjelang pembentangan Belanjawan 2025 tidak lama lagi, Anwar Ibrahim menghantar ‘isyarat’ yang menunjukkan kerajaan sedang meneliti pengagihan subsidi pendidikan kepada rakyat negara ini. Berucap di Putrajaya hari ini, perdana menteri berkata, kerajaan mahu memastikan subsidi sebegitu disalurkan kepada golongan yang benar-benar layak saja.[Golongan kaya mungkin tak lagi dapat subsidi pendidikan. Malaysiakini. Accessed March 31 2024]

Categories
Books, essays and others Pop culture Society

[2987] Outsiders, disruptions and mainstreaming

The central theme of Michiko Kakutani’s The Great Wave is simple. It is written on the cover: outsiders drive innovation and they have been the cause of various disruptions in human history. It is not a groundbreaking argument to make.

The unremarkable observation would have made the book an uninteresting read for me, except she manages to pull me back in with her comment on arts and culture, an area where she is clearly an authority. Kakutani formerly worked as a book critic at the New York Times.

She tells how those living on the margin of US society—blacks especially but also immigrant communities generally—were cultural innovators who eventually dictated mainstream tastes in music, movies, literature and comedy. They were innovators because they were less bounded by orthodoxy of the (white) majority and that the dual nature of their identity (that as a member of a minority community and as an American) allowed them to reach out to multiple sources for inspiration.

Kukatani cites a long list of authors and artists to show just how prevalent the outsider-turned-insider phenomenon is in the US. The list feels like a long must read recommendation that reminds me of another book of hers, Ex Libris, which is a list of 100 or so modern-time books that she believes worth reading.

While going through that cultural section of The Great Wave, my mind wanders to another book I read earlier this year. Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties also has the outsider-insider theme, although it appears more implicitly within the context of the 1990s. Klosterman’s discussion is specific to the the evolution of the rock genre, which began as the favored noise among youth with marginal taste in music (in the 1950s if I recall correctly) and then turned into billion-dollar megabusiness that Kurt Cobain’s Nirvana rebelled against.

So, I find The Great Wave interesting in the sense that it is a companion to The Nineties. Kakutani provides a generalized theory that explains Klosterman’s specific cases.

Categories
Books, essays and others Politics & government Pop culture Society

[2986] Maybe it was Klosterman’s The Nineties

Klosterman’s generation may believe in something or they may not. But they more likely to believe in it, if not by too much.

That something could be almost anything and that is the attitude taken throughout The Nineties, a 2022 book written by Chuck Klosterman. That is not to say he takes no position on an issue. He does and I feel he understands the 1990s (from Gen X perspective) exactly through this prism: a prism that suggests disagreements during the decade (in the US) was never too big to matter by too much. This idea is repeated several times throughout the book but the point achieves clarity at the very end when he discusses the competition between George Bush and Al Gore during the 2000 US Presidential election.

Klosterman argues that in the run up to the election, both candidates were really standing on the same policy platform and that made it impossible for many voters to decide who should be voted in based on substantive matters. So difficult it was that Klosterman highlights that voters were deciding who to decide based on whom they prefer to have a beer with. The answer is Bush, who was more affable and less aloof than Al Gore. So similar were the two that a third candidate—Ralph Nader—became the credible second candidate, as Bush and Gore merged into one candidate in the mainstream consciousness.

Of course, things changed after the election and definitely after the 9/11 attacks. And that was really the last time politics were taken so unseriously by US voters, or so Klosterman argues. Differences since began to become so big that that kind of ambivalence during the 1990s could not exist anymore.

But the book is not primarily about politics. The Nineties mostly tries to capture the mood of the decade and that means multiple references to hit songs and major movies. While I regularly refer to Wikipedia or YouTube to immerse myself into a book, this the first time I went through Spotify to listen to songs while reading. Nirvana’s Smell Like a Teen Spirit gets an early mention as the author explains how the band from Seattle changed everything we understood about rock music. Yes, Nirvana is more grunge than rock, but Klosterman rationalizes songs such as In Bloom evolved as a rebellion against the overcommercialization of rock, which itself was pioneered by unruly teenagers in the 1950s. When rock stars of the 1990s wanted fame and wealth, Nirvana (and Kurt Cobain especially) represented a new breed of artists who despise those. It was uncool to be famous and wealthy. Feeling so guilty of his success, Cobain took a gun and shot himself in the head. There are several other songs that Klosterman goes in detail. Alanis Morissettte’s You Oughta Know. Tupac Shakur’s is another. Each has an outsized influence on the 1990s US.

Reiterating the ambivalence of the 1990s, Klosterman discusses Seinfeld in a segment of the book. It is a comedy sitcom famously about nothing. What follows is a discussion on television programming, on how many sitcoms received high ratings only because they were aired in certain prime slots and that those slots were in high demand because many viewers were too lazy to switch channels after watching something earlier. People were watching only because, to paraphrase Klosterman who in turn quoting George Costanza, “because it’s on TV”, in reply to the question why would anybody watch it. Not because it was good or anything else.

But not all fell into that logic. Some drove the market and were ‘Must See TV’. Friends did that. Here, Klosterman describes Friends in the ambivalent contradictory way: “None of the characters were supposed to be cool, so the audience didn’t need to be cool in order to understand why they were appealing.” And there is Frasier, described as “a white-collar show openly obsessed with intellectual sophistication. Characters casually joked about Jungian philosophy, Sergei Rachmaninov and Alfred, Lord Tennyson… But its dynastic grip on critics and Emmy voters galvanized a paradox: Frasier was seen as brilliant television because it focused on characters who would never watch television.”

Again, later on the author’s commentary on the Star Wars prequel that came out in 1999: “Movie critics disliked The Phantom Menace, but diehards hated it more… Lucas tried pretty goddamn hard to satisfy an entire generation of strangers who likely wouldn’t have been satisfied by anything he delivered. Did such a mean-spirited categorization bother him? Maybe. But not really.”

You get the drift.

I find the yes-no-maybe noncommittal construction as slightly offputting. Yet, beyond the noncommittal statements are brilliant assessment of the 1990s. Maybe, the decade was that complex that it is difficult to be sure what was really going on, unlike the decades after that seem to be governed more by black-or-white logic; either you’re with us or against us even in the face of ever more complex world.

Maybe, the possible lesson here is that in order to solve our contemporary divisions, we just need to be less sure of ourselves.

Categories
Conflict & disaster Politics & government Society

[2984] A list of challenges for Malaysia

I have been thinking about how fragile Malaysia could be lately after remembering episodes when the country looked brittle. The 1965 breakup when Singapore became independent is an example but there are other times that fit the bill: the Emergency, the 1969 riots and possibly even the crises of the late 1990s.

With the world changing rapidly, I do not think the idea of Malaysia remaining as a country could be taken for granted. Whether we survive as a country depends on how we identify and navigate various challenges. These challenges do not necessarily lead to a national breakup, but could lead to the diminution of the country in terms of economics or prestige.

Many of these challenges are actually interlinked and solutions would have to be thought through multidisciplinary lens.

For my own benefits, I am listing down those challenges here:

  1. Territorial integrity.
    1. Loss of control over the waters of Sabah and Sarawak. This concern comes from China’s presence in the area. Unlike other Asean claimants, China is special due to its aggressiveness, expansive claims and refusal to abide by rules all Asean claimants largely adhere to. A significant loss of territory would involve a significant loss of petroleum revenue to all Malaysian parties, leaving revenue claims between the federal and state governments a moot point. And unlike Malaysia’s previous dispute with Singapore with respect to areas surrounding Pulau Batu Puteh, or with Indonesia with respect to the seas around Sipadan, the China trouble would likely involve the use of force and violence.
    2. The balkanization of Malaysia, with Sarawak and Sabah exiting the federation as having the highest probabilities. There has been growing secession calls based on years of unhappiness relating to unequal partnership between the federal government and the two states. One positive aspect from this is without the Borneo states, Malaysia would likely stop having serious disputes with China and that would free up the rump Malaysian state from a tricky geopolitical problem. But this would also mean that smaller Malaysia would lean towards China more.
  2. War in Asia-Pacific. A war that matters would likely involve China and the US. In this war, it would be hard to stay neutral.
  3. Foreign political influence in Malaysian society. Foreign influence is inevitable for a small, open and diverse country that Malaysia is, with a largely free and democratic environment. But with risks of international conflicts rising (prime examples include geopolitical rivalry between the China and US, wider conflict brought by Israel in the Middle East which would inflame sentiments in other parts of the world, war in the Taiwan Strait and conflicts involving non-state actors particular those relating to jihadist and adjacent groups), foreign actors would attempt to sway domestic public opinion, domestic elections and through that, political decisions that Malaysian national leadership make. There have been domestic corruption cases with links to foreign governments and high offices had been penetrated or compromised by foreign agents before. Additionally at the societal level, this could further reduce trust between ethnic groups who generally would be affected by certain international issues differently.
  4. Fragmentation of the global supply chain. This could go either way. Malaysia for the longest time has been deeply embedded in the global supply chain and this had brought the Malaysian industrial revolution of the 1970s-1990s. But it also caused the 2000s premature deindustrialization following China’s entry into the WTO in 2001. At the moment, Malaysia is benefiting from changes brought by heightened China-US rivalry (plus their respective allies) but the way Malaysia is handling it—playing both sides and creating an imperfect balance—might risk a blowback from one side or the other. We have already seen certain Malaysian companies slapped with sanctions by the US, which spells doom for those specific businesses. There are chances that Malaysia needs to choose which supply chain we want to participate in, and lose access in the other.
  5. Fiscal challenges. To address changes in the global economy and global politics (along with the retreat of the free trade consensus), the Malaysian state needs to have the necessary capacities and capabilities in various fields: education, health, defense, infrastructure, energy, various industries, etc. To develop and maintain those capacities and capabilities, the state must have the required fiscal firepower. But Malaysia has a weak-to-okay fiscal space owning to the federal government’s reluctance to address taxation issues decisively while facing growing decentralization demand along with rising expenditure requirements. This reluctance is primarily due to electoral considerations, and not so much the inability of the economy to generate such revenue. I would go as far as claiming that this fiscal challenges are partly the cause behind Malaysia’s inadequate measures in tackling other challenges cited in this list. The longer the reluctance lasts, the harder it would be to address those many challenges as those challenges do grow over time.
  6. Decentralization among Malaysian states. Many have long sought decentralization away from Putrajaya as a means to provide check-and-balance to federal powers. But recent decentralization has brought several new challenges (and amplified preexisting ones) to a small country like Malaysia. There are at least four challenges from the top of my head.
    1. Loss of revenue for the federal government. This goes back to concerns over fiscal pressures the central government faces and from there on, national capacities and capabilities. This eventually would hurt the beneficiaries of decentralization as they likely would have to pay for the same services the federal government finances, but possibly without the benefits of economies of scale.
    2. Loss of capacity caused by transfer of authority of specific issues. This depends on the power and not all transfers are negative nationally.
    3. Loss of policy cohesiveness which challenges the central authority to improve certain areas such as energy security. In other words, policies would likely see fragmentation. But again, this depends on the fields. Some fields may benefit from diversity of solutions but some others, not. I fear for many policymakers especially at the state level, they lack the competencies to see such a thing.
    4. The loss of Malaysian customs union, specifically, tax-based taxes that discourage national trade and weakens the common market. This is a threat for overall national economic growth as it would be a drag on trade growth.
    5. Weakening of the Malaysian identity, hence the loss of societal cohesiveness and further erosion to social capital.
  7. Climate change. Malaysia will require investment and spending to adapt to the new reality of climate change. These investments and spending include infrastructural like sea barriers, fresh water supply, shift of energy use, electrification and spending such as compensation for maintenance of forest cover, tree planting as well as expenditure to raise the capacity of health and emergency services. Without the necessary fiscal power, Malaysia would likely not able to mitigate some of the effects of climate change, and/or adapt as well as we need to be. This would likely need further expansion.
  8. Ageing society. Malaysia still has a young workforce, with the overall population median age at 30 years old but the situation will change in the next 20-30 years.
    1. This will require investment in health facilities made in the near future, which is dependent on the government’s fiscal strength. There is the private sector of course but it is unlikely to provide a comprehensive coverage at an affordable cost to the public that a universal public system could.
    2. The lack of a universal safety net will be a problem.
    3. An ageing society also would demand greater labor force likely through migration if the country is to grow economically further.
    4. Economic growth in such a demography would likely be weak, which raises the likelihood of social instability, given Malaysia’s low social capital that would work better with high economic growth.
    5. Pension crisis. This specifically about the government civil service’s pension through KWAP. Currently, there is a large liability gap and it is unclear it would ever be covered under business-as-usual scenario.
  9. Youth unemployment/underemployment and the danger of a growing underclass. One worrying trend is the demand for instant gratification by young adults in the form of reluctance to investment in education. They are attracted to the gig economy and they rationalize so by stating current gig income is more lucrative than going into debt for tertiary education. However in 10 to 20 years, these groups of youth would likely find themselves as an underclass as their real income stagnant and left behind by those with tertiary education rises, whose premium over those without would likely widen. The assumption of wage stagnancy for gig workers understates the problem: how would they compete with AI driven gig services? This kind of mass joblessness would create future social instability, especially as the society ages and relies on the young for tax revenue needed to fund societal needs.
  10. Political dynastic rivalry. Malaysia has only recently become a competitive democracy and we are beginning to see political dynastic rivalries that fall neatly along partisan division. There is a danger the rivalry becomes a zero-sum game as losers get prosecuted and winners get everything. In such a case, the losers would not necessarily go away peacefully or let go out power when they should. This could easily turn into a chaotic and violent equilibrium that has been witnessed in other countries.
  11. Race and religion. This is intertwined with political dynastic rivalry, but also dependent on economic growth. A weak growth along would likely raise the temperature as far as race and religion is concerned. I also think this is just a proxy to the low social capital that Malaysia has. This risk has proven to be an effective tool at derailing reforms needed to address multiple other challenges.
  12. Technological change. This is a wildcard because we do not really know how it would affect Malaysia. We still do not have a clear idea how 5G would change our lives (the way in the 1990s, we only had a vague idea how the internet would change everything). And even with AI is all the rage now, we still do not have a clear idea how it would change everything that we do. Malaysia could either ride the wave or miss the boat.
  13. Growing rich before growing old. Malaysia aims to be a high-income economy soon. Although definitionally it is easy to achieve, it might be harder to do so in a more substantive manner. It is also a race against other economies: recently China has passed Malaysia in terms of GDP per capita, which shows Malaysia is starting to fall behind.
  14. Immigration/refugee crisis. There are severe crises all around the world and the closest one is happening in Myanmar. Large waves of refugees could overwhelm the Malaysian system, which is already suffering from insufficient funding.

I would likely expand this later by putting them in timeline (to describe urgency), rough likelihood of these things happening and the degree/intensity of each problem.