While reading Syed Hussein Alatas’s Intellectuals in Developing Societies recently, there was one question that kept popping in my head. Is the book still relevant to contemporary Malaysia?
Published in 1977 but written earlier, Syed Hussein Alatas asserted that developing countries such as Malaysia (and more generally, throughout Asia) did not have an intellectual class. There were a few intellectuals but they were so few and far between that they were powerless and could never function as a class that could exert influence on the elites and the society as a whole.
He attributed the lack of the intellectual class in Malaysia (really, his focus was Malaya/Peninsular Malaysia but the claim is also relevant to the Borneo states) to the massive colonial immigration. In his own words, “the population of Malaya was composed of immigrant groups, devoid of intellectual interest, many of them from the lower economic class in their country of origin.” Meanwhile, the colonial education system was designed by the British purely for vocational reasons and avoided the nurturing of intellectual interest. In short, the whole population was more concerned with economic and other immediate practical factors instead of intellectual pursuits.
The economic focus with limited intellectual development continued beyond the colonial period. Here, Syed Hussein Alatas blamed the Alliance/Barisan Nasional government for failing to create the intellectual class. He reasoned the peaceful nature of the country (relative to the more turbulent revolutionary history such as in Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam) had made governing a routine business. Such routines gave way to the rise of the managerial politicians and technocratic class where they functioned to keep the social machine running, instead of manufacturing new machines that intellectuals would do. The lack of need to create new machines meant the lack of need for intellectuals. Only crisis would demand intellectuals and Malaya and Malaysia had little, or so that was the claim.
While that might be true, surely there is an intellectual class in Malaysia today. Syed Hussein Alatas himself had influenced a whole school of thought that is alive and well in Malaysia. And there are other intellectuals of different persuasion who are thriving in the country now. In fact by the 1970s, it does appear to me there was an identifiable intellectual class with Syed Hussein Alatas himself a giant. Furthermore, the events of 1969 were a crisis for Malaysia and to follow his own logic, the times demanded intellectuals, which the society then did provide.
This counterpoint of mine shifted my mental mode. Instead of reading the book as something of contemporary relevance, I began to view it as a material giving insight to the 1950s-1970s society. After all, the author was fully engaged in the 1960s-1970s political debates, with commentaries/examples on less-than-inspiring results from government policy and policy implementation in Malaysia then. He reserved some venom for the Cabinet under the leadership of Tunku Abdul Rahman, which Syed Hussein Alatas described as lacking rationality and filled with unsuitable happy-go-lucky personalities. (There are several chapters on fools and bebalisma but I have a feeling this segment of the book was steam-blowing ranting against the then-government disguised as an model—essentially it is about calling other people stupid without actually doing so. Syed Hussein Alatas had a political career in opposition to Tunku Abdul Rahman and Tun Razak’s leadership.)
Perhaps, something does not change after all.
And perhaps, the existence of an intellectual class does not entirely remove the relevance of Intellectuals in Developing Societies to contemporary Malaysia.
Here, the lack of need for intellectuals during the early days of Malaysia had led to the education system focusing on developing technical expertise without inculcating a ‘philosophic spirit’, an idea borrowed from Egyptian intellectual Muhammad Abduh and a long line of other intellectuals. This gave rise to what Syed Hussein Alatas called the dualistic man where outwardly the person accepts, enjoys and wants the conveniences of science and technology but inwardly, believes in the supernatural in direct contradiction to the sciences. The person wants to be the consumer of science but the science behind the product can be magic for all he or she cares. This can easily describe our post-modern reality that might get worse with the proliferation of mindless artificial intelligence usage within our society.