Category: Society

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Politics & government Society

[2847] We care because we are capable of empathy

It’s a big, big interconnected world out there. And that interconnectedness, ironically, makes the world smaller is a non-physical sense. Economically, socially and politically. Our lives are no longer affected purely by domestic matters. To some, the foreign affairs segment in the newspapers is an abstraction but for some others, the lines demarcating domestic and foreign concerns are blurry.

These remain the days of globalization still, however the Trumps, the Le Pens, the Farages and all those who long for a smaller world are trying to rewind the clock. They may yet be successful but for now they have a lot to undo. In the meantime, many have multiple homes and multiple affiliations with friends traversing national boundaries, opposing such undoing and rewinding.

For Malaysians, the war in Ukraine so far away across the Asian continent painfully proves the fact foreign affairs are home affairs too. Many Malaysians could not find the country on the map, but it still has an impact on the Malaysian psyche. And Malaysians did care for development in Bosnia during the Balkan War and in Kosovo. They do care about the conflicts in Palestine, in Syria and in Iraq. And to take a trivial example, there are Malaysians who care about the fate of foreign, English Premier League teams, despite not being English themselves.

The refugee crisis in Myanmar is also a Malaysian concern, because these oppressed men, women and children are coming to or passing by Malaysia. Whether we like it or not, we have to act in one way or another. Pretending the imaginary lines on a 2-dimensional map as an impregnable wall ensuring that is not our problem will not help by one bit. And to turn back the boats is not just an illiberal policy, it is heartless.

In the several years after the 9/11 attack, I became a victim of profiling at US airports, just because of my nationality and my Arab-sounding name. Security personnel would put me under extra security measures and screening. That discouraged me from leaving the US for home for the next four years for fear I would face immigration troubles upon reentry at the airports. I knew of other international students who needed to report to the Homeland Security office regularly, and I feared being subjected to the same requirement as an entry condition.

And so, I spent my entire time as a student in Michigan travelling throughout the US, reaching New York, DC, Miami, San Francisco, St Louis, Chicago, Sioux Falls and more. I remember how it felt like to drive the car through the Great Plains from the Great Lakes, or how peaceful it was staring into the night sky from the bottom of the Tuolumne Canyon just north of Yosemite in California. I learned to love America for the wonders it brought to my young mind.

Indeed, my political beliefs to a large degree were shaped in the US. However flawed the US is with all of its hypocrisies, it is still the greatest liberal democracy that the world has. It is the Athens, the Rome, the Baghdad, the Cordoba and the Delhi of our time. Just because of that, I looked up to it. Because of this and because I spent a significant portion of my early adult life there, if I had a second home, the US would be it.

When Trump and his followers do what they do, and among others equating the US to Russia, I feel that is an undoing of what the United States of America is supposed to be in my eyes, a foreigner, who looks kindly to the east across the Pacific. Trump is killing the US that I know, and by that, threatening the idea of liberal democracy all around the world (even in Malaysia where our democracy is becoming increasingly flawed and more authoritarian). That makes me angry.

The Trump’s ban, now challenged in the courts, adds further to the anger. My alma mater, the University of Michigan, is celebrating its 200th anniversary this year. And I am entertaining thoughts of returning to Ann Arbor to catch the festivities and walk down the memory lane. Trump’s ban, could potentially affect me. I still remember my experiences at various US airports during the Bush era. I thoroughly dislike the discrimination and I do not wish on others what I went through.

So, I do care for things that if happening in the US. The world is interconnected enough that I have real attachments to the US. Needless to say, I have friends in the US too.

But one does not need to have personal ties to the US to be worried about development in the US. It is just like how some of us are concerned about the oppression in Xinjiang, or in Iran, or in Egypt, or in the Philippines or anywhere else without the need to have any personal connection.

Even if we cannot think of ways which a reclusive, protectionist US could affect Malaysia — it will by the way: HSBC economists think Malaysia will be one of the top four economies to be worst affected by a protectionist US — we can still care because we have empathy for other human beings. Injustice or discrimination anywhere is still wrong and we can take a position on the matter. We can make personal judging based on our values. We have enough room for empathy those near and far beyond our shores.

Because of our capacity of empathy and because of the interconnectedness of the world we live in, it is outrageous to think we have to choose between caring US-based or Malaysia-based issues. Both are causes for concerns. I care for the deplorable things happening in the US, and at the same time, I care about the 1MDB corruption scandal, or the blockade in Kelantan, along with other injustices in the Malaysian society I am living in.

Indeed, it is a false dichotomy having to choose the US or Malaysia. There is no reason why a Malaysian needs to choose between the two. We can be concerned for both, and more.

More importantly, there are liberal values and among them are that we all are created equal and all should have the same fundamental rights. This applies all around the world, not just in and around your small neighborhood.

In time when anti-liberal populists are turning national policies inward, it will be most disappointing to have liberals retreating to a small-world cocoon as well. Such inward retreat would be a betrayal of liberal belief, that liberal values are universal in nature and not provincial. We fight racism, discrimination and everything bad out there by staying true to our liberal values, not by abandoning it.

Categories
Conflict & disaster Society

[2839] Syrian refugees on Jalan Bukit Bintang

Part of Jalan Bukit Bintang has been transformed into a mini-Arab town over the past 5 or 10 years. It has been quite an intriguing trend.

Arab restaurants and tourists are not uncommon along the stretch between the Pavilion and beyond Jalan Raja Chulan. They like Malaysia for various reasons and it is easy to see that they are a wealthy bunch, fitting the general stereotype assigned by the locals to those originating from the Gulf quite nicely.

But in recent weeks, something extraordinary has been happening. I am beginning to spot Arab women and their children begging on the streets on Jalan Bukit Bintang.

The first time I noticed them, I found myself feeling incredulous, feeling that this must have had been some kind of a prank. Many beggars all around the city are linked to some kind of syndicates. Some are manipulating public sentiment for disagreeable personal gains while others are truly desperate in need of help. The prevalence of syndicate-related beggars and the second group of people make me suspicious of these Arab beggars.

But yesterday, I spotted a woman in her black purdah without a face veil sitting on the floor just outside the newly renovated Isetan store in Lot 10. He held a small placard, telling passerby that she was from Syria and she needed money.

I do not how true her claim is but my heart melted nonetheless.

 

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Society

[2838] The cheapening of utopias, and failure of imagination

How would you imagine a utopia? What is that utopia?

These are hard questions to answer. It is hard because it requires deep reflection. It cannot be answered on the spot.

In this age when pessimism against liberal values grows day by day, to me, the need to imagine a utopia becomes greater than ever. It is either to criticize these ugly forces fueling Brexit and the Trump presidency (or Malaysian racism and corruption), or to convince the masses it is worth staying the course on the liberal project.

And so when I spotted an event called “Imagining Utopia” at the Kuala Lumpur Literary Festival earlier today, I decided to drop by hoping to find the seeds to my utopias. The liberal order is retreating and so I need my rally.

But as I sat in the front row listening to the panel members, I felt growing dissatisfaction against the majority’s view. Instead of a session imagining utopia, it was a discussion criticizing utopias for being out-of-touch/unconcerned with human nature, and then became a session praising dystopias.

I was mad at the direction of the discussion. In fact, when I took up the microphone to express my dissatisfaction, I sounded unreasonably confrontational, to which I had to apologize after.

Utopias and human nature

As a libertarian, human nature is tried and tested line of argument I used against socialists and communists out there, and to defend the liberal market orthodoxy. Greed, self-interest and other darker sides of us are harnessed by the market to do something good as the argument goes. We have to acknowledge these darker sides of us before we can go on to do good, typically the defense goes. Communism does a bad job at incorporating human nature, as the knife strikes into the heart of the anti-market belief.

Unsophisticated to say the least, but hilariously hard to counter at entry-level discussions.

But yes, utopias have trouble dealing with human nature, as human nature is now, to a realist. Utopias ignore, reject or assume heavily modified human nature to create a paradise on earth in our head.

However, the link between utopias and human nature should not be an excuse to dismiss utopias in the first place. Yet, the majority on the panel refused to imagine any utopia, dismissed the roles of utopia without assessing it and then hastily worshiped dystopias instead.

Roles of utopias and dystopias

The majority view is more interested in dystopias. Dystopias to them are of more value than utopias. Why? Because dystopias readily deal with current human nature. Boo!

Utopias and dystopias have their values in criticizing reality. Brazil, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Fahrenheit 451, The Wanting Seed and other dystopias take a development in the author’s reality and then project it forward to show what is wrong with that reality. Showing what is wrong with our (or somebody else’s) current society is one of the major functions of dystopias.

What the majority view fails to realize is the function — or as Zedeck Siew, the only one defending utopias on the panel, puts it, the utility — of utopias with respect to human nature.

The function of utopias is to imagine a different world where we can do better. Be it communist, liberal, religious, materialistic or whatever adjective there is out there to describe whatever philosophy, it is the imagining of a better world, a better way of organizing society or perhaps more importantly, a better or even different human nature. Indeed, it is a criticism of human nature, as it is, itself.

An example involves Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. It is a 1897 communist utopia that I disagreed with and an overly optimistic views of human nature. Nevertheless, it is a powerful criticism of capitalism and together with other experiences, transformed capitalism for the better especially after the 1930s Great Depression. It made us look at our reality clearer whereas before, we took it for granted. Really, the latest technology from computing to logistics risks making central planning more efficient than the free market, just as written in Bellamy’s utopia. This is a challenge to all modern libertarian thoughts.

I feel this is why such majoritarian dismissal of utopias based on our current human nature is highly unsatisfactory. Utopias assess our human nature more comprehensively than dystopias because of utopias’ radical imagination. Yet, the majority dismisses utopias because of human nature.

Radical imagination versus mere extrapolation

Imagining utopias, unlike dystopias, are not merely about extrapolating existing trends. Imagining utopias are about jumping to another plane altogether and projecting from that. It is the imagining of our new and better nature.

The newness requirement is why it is harder to imagine a utopia than a dystopia and why it is wrong to cheapen the value of utopias to that of common fluffy trash. This is probably partly also why, there are more dystopia than utopia literature.

More importantly, going back to the point about pessimism against the liberal order, a creative utopia creates a goal. The path towards that utopia will be the integration between that goal and our current human nature.

That shifting of plane requires radical imagination and that plane will provide contrast to the control group that is our reality.

The impermanence of human nature

And finally, human nature can change. We humans and our society evolve. There are still vestiges of cavemen inside of us but those urges have been modified by our understanding of sciences. Hundreds of years of advancement in physics, biology, chemistry, mathematics, economics, psychology, sociology, philosophy”¦ knowledge has changed our human nature and will continue to do so. I am not about ready to say Darwin, Wallace and others involved in a whole line of evolutionary thoughts from biology to economics are wrong just to defend the idea of the permanence of human nature.

And really, the modern us have been around for less than 100 years. For millions of years, we were savages. For thousands, we lived in ancient civilizations. For hundreds, in nation-states. For decades, the confused post-modern now. After the dramatic change in our lives in just decades, can we be confident that human nature is unchanging?

Victims of our reality

One of the panel members, in making a short digression, said many writings today are clichés because many authors produce derivatives. Well, dystopias are clichés. Indeed, it is a failure of imagination to hastily and prematurely dismiss utopias in favor of dystopias.

In fact, I think we are living in a dystopia. The praising of and the addiction to dystopias is us becoming the trapped victims of our reality.

Categories
Economics Society

[2836] Ethnic identification by economic function in Malaysia

Has Malaysia eliminated identification of race by economic function?

I have been thinking about this casually over the past several years, ever since that one afternoon when I wanted a cold drink and began to take notice the ethnicity or nationality of the men and women working as waiters at various restaurants and cafes. I have always taken that reality for granted, but on that day I began to think about the association of certain professions with certain nationality, race or more accurately, ethnicity.

Going back to the question, I think the short answer is no.

Has Malaysia made progress towards elimination? It is complicated.

When a politically-conscious Malaysian thinks about the racial identification via economic role, it is usually within the context of the New Economic Policy. The policy had two objectives. One, the eradication of poverty. Two, the elimination of racial identification by economic function.

If you are a supporter of the NEP, it is likely you think both goals have been achieved, directly by the policy.

At risk of digression, I have reservations about the first claim because of the simultaneous roles industrialization played with respect to reducing poverty. To excite export-led industrialization, the NEP requirements were suspended and that at the very least suggests in some parts of the economy, the NEP was an obstacle. Further technical issues involve inconsistent poverty definition used throughout the years as well as the question why similar poverty reduction happened in in neighboring countries that had no NEP. Crediting the NEP alone ignores the competing factors that achieved the same goal through opposite means. But I will not go too deeply about it here as I am more interested in the second claim.

I think the second claim can be accepted without much protest. At least, as much as the following statistics can say (if we accept over-representation of one particular group in a sector is equivalent to identifying that group with a particular economic function):[1]

Ethnic composition by economic functions

The chart shows the ethnic distribution for various economic roles has come closer to actual population demographics by 2000 and 20100 than it was in 1970 (with the exception of agriculture; I left the sales and services sector out because official definitions changed between those years. I could make them comparable but I really do not want to invest the necessary time researching for it).  There is a better representation of the population demographics within those sectors in 2000 than 40 years earlier, which suggests any one Malaysian ethnicity has become less associated with a particular role, notwithstanding agriculture.

This does not mean such association has been eliminated altogether. One instance where identification has become stronger is in the civil service (apart from agriculture as seen above):[2]

Ethnic composition within the civil service

This should be compared with the composition of Malaysian citizen population:[3][4]

Composition of Malaysian population

But that is not the reason why I feel Malaysia has not eliminated identification of race by economic function, even when some reversal seems to be happening within some fields among Malaysia. Among Malaysians, you can see progress towards that direction.

A new source of ethnic identification by economic function began in the 1990s when Malaysia welcomed a new wave of migrant workers into the country during the boom years.

The NEP focused on Malaysians citizens only and it may have achieved success within its defined limits. Yet, the Malaysian society is bigger than the population size of its citizens. Out of the 31 million population, at least 10 per cent are foreigners, possibly double that if the unofficial numbers are to be believed.

And these foreigners — the one taking the low-paying jobs — are identified by their economic functions. Nepalese for security guards. Bangladeshis for manual labor. Indian for mamak-like restaurants. Indonesians as maid, until recently. For the more expensive restaurants, the English speaking servers are Filipinos. It is a generalization, but more often than not, it will hit the mark quite frequently.

Malaysia’s migrant worker policy contributes to the strengthening of the identification problem. The government has a policy of allowing certain nationalities are allowed to work in specific sectors. And the tendency for migrant and networking effect adds up to the concentration of workers with the same racial, ethnicity or national background.

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reservedMohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reservedMohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

[1] — Jomo Kwame Sundaram. The New Economic Policy and Interethnic Relations in Malaysia. United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. September 2004.

[2] — Lim Kit Siang. Lowest Chinese and Indian representation in the civil service in the 53-year history of Malaysia — 5.8% Chinese and 4% Indians as at end of 2009. April 6 2010.

[3] — Khoo Boo Teik. Ethnic Structure, Inequality and Governance in the Public Sector. United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. December 2005.

[4] — Department of Statistics Malaysia. Population Distribution and Basic Demographic Characteristic 2010. July 2013

Categories
Politics & government Society

[2831] Corrupt patriotism will eat us all

It is September 15, the eve of Malaysia Day. As I walk out of the train station into the atrium of KL Sentral, I see rows of the Malaysian flags draping down from the ceiling. Those red and white stripes are unmistakable.

The flag-flying fervor has not been as strong as it had been in the previous years. Perhaps all those third-world corruption controversies have dampened that patriotic sentiment. As it should be. Corruption the scale of 1MDB and Najib Razak should worry many, raise questions and stop us from engaging in petty excitement.

Even in its weakened form however, displays of patriotism disturb me. Here we live in an age where patriotism all around the world is increasingly provincial in nature, and that its jingoist version functions as a vehicle for racists. These racists would be fascists the moment they are given power, democratically or otherwise.

I dream of a cosmopolitan liberal society. I have never stopped believing so even as the idea gets bashed and its weaknesses get revealed by the receding tides. And that liberal ideal does not sit well with unmitigated patriotism.

The usual kind of patriotism that goes against cosmopolitan values typically targets outsiders.

But another version eats the society inside out, whenever it is unclear who the outsiders are. And in this cosmopolitan country we live in, it is never easy to differentiate between the insiders and the outsiders cleanly. It is a mixture of everything. An attempt at nativism would divide our society.

I fear, that is what Malaysian patriotism is turning into, especially when used by the corrupt in power. It turns patriotism onto us Malaysians. Anxious to preserve power despite their wrongdoings, the corrupt are trying to distract us the population from personal crime and justify their hold to power by claiming outsiders are interfering in our affairs. And increasingly, those Malaysians who disagree with the corruption of those in power are being labelled as traitors, working in cahoot with outsiders.

Near Kerinchi in Kuala Lumpur as well as other places, I have noticed yellow and black posters pasted on walls deriding those protesting against Najib Razak’s corruption as “talibarut Amerika.” It is a strong Malay term translating into spies, saboteur, stooges and anything similar. All invested in them the connotation of betrayal.

And to be a patriot is not to work with outsiders, as the narrative goes. Outsiders are out to destroy “us”, they say, as if it is “us” Malaysians whom benefited from the multibillion dollar corruption by the men and women sitting in the desolate distant Putrajaya.

The fact domestically, the corrupt are trying to save their skin and bring everything else down, is forgotten conveniently. Purposefully distraction, digression and misdirection happen to shift attention from 1MDB and Najib Razak’s corruption. Words are being inverted and subverted the way Orwell had imagined.

And so I look at the show of patriotism warily. I wonder when it would turn to people like me who would like to see the corrupt in prison instead of in Putrajaya.

I know on the other side of that corrupt patriotic wall is fascism. I will not worship that wall. Without a chisel, I will stay away.