Following are excerpts from the keynote address delivered by Dr. Paul A. Dumol in the Final Congress of the 50th UNIVersity Congress held in UA&P on February 25, 2017. The congress carried the theme “A World in Movement.” Banner photo by Max Nelson on Unsplash.
The world indeed is in movement in an exceptional way today; it is in the grip of change. The most dramatic example of this is the first few weeks of the new American president: suddenly, we saw the global model of democracy in the throes of the most un-democratic reaction to the results of their own electoral system. Our president was right after all: “Who are you to lecture us on right and wrong?”
The Philippines herself has not been spared movement literally and figuratively. Thousands of OFWs travel every year, flying in and out of the country. Within our boundaries, we have our own war on drugs, the problem of police criminality, and the tenacious problem of corruption. Our own president has many with their teeth on edge, and just as many chortling with delight.
What should we do with this double spectacle here and beyond our shores? What should your generation do, you who will inherit this piece of earth, this string of pearls we call the Philippines?
Watching isn’t enough, of course: we must learn. If we take the perspectives of the present pope and the two who preceded him, then the present moment is quite dramatic indeed. The situation in Europe thirty years ago moved St. John Paul to convoke a new evangelization. Did things improve since then? Unfortunately, what a new saint wrote forty years ago applies equally now: “An entire civilization staggers, impotent and without moral resources” [Josemaría Escrivá, Letter to the faithful of Opus Dei, 1974, no. 10 (“La tercera campanada”)].
The rise of contemporary liberal America in the twentieth century may be viewed as a vast social experiment, in which traditional Judeo-Christian-classical culture has been upended. “Everything we were taught was wrong is now right—except smoking.” Is that an exaggeration? Probably. Abortion has been justified; so has vice; Satanism turned respectable; and so with much that was considered morally repugnant for centuries. So is this a battle between Christianity and its enemies? Not quite. All popes since Blessed Paul VI have said it is a battle between humanity and its enemies.
Whatever lessons we learn from the historical changes going on today, however, we must apply to our own situation here in the Philippines. Top of the agenda must be how to avoid their history repeating itself on our shores. Would erecting a wall around the minds of Filipino children and youth work? I think it would make the forbidden fruit more attractive. In today’s world, there is no avoiding confronting the enemy, knowing exactly how he looks.
If the world in movement is something we can only watch for the most part, this is not the case with the Philippines in movement. We should not merely watch; we should participate in the changes going on, whether by promoting or blocking them. There are, in fact, at least four radical changes going on in the Philippines at the same time. One is the formation of the nation… A second radical change is the transformation of the Philippines into a genuine democracy…. A third radical change is the formation of multi-ethnic communities in our cities…. And then there is the spread of new ideas among the university-educated and from them to the rest of the country, ideas marked by modernity, some of them coming from the “Cathedral,” which is what the Trump camp calls the “whole liberal media-political-academe-entertainment complex.”
As with the changes occurring in Europe and America, we must first try to understand these changes. And this may turn out to be not easy. There are four reasons for this. The first is that most Filipinos are not well-versed in their own history, but how can you understand a change without knowing what something is changing from? That implies a knowledge of our history. The second reason is that when Filipinos are well versed in Philippine history, it is usually in a mistaken, because outdated, version of Philippine history…. Third, most Filipinos are ignorant of ethnic groups outside of their own and presume that the former are like them. Fourth, many Filipinos from the middle and upper classes do not usually know much about the lower classes, who make up around 89% of the population. By “know much” I mean to know their aspirations, their way of thinking and feeling, the way they reason out, the life their families live.
There is a role here to be played by university students. They could be and should be bridges: between those in the old, even the ancient, native cultures and those in the new. But before they can play that role, they must realize that, in the century and a half that native Filipinos have filled university halls, the Filipino university student has often ended up an alien, partially or totally, among those of his own people unable to go to college.
Rolando Tinio, one of the few masters of English and Tagalog, has a thought-provoking description and explanation of this phenomenon [A Matter of Language: Where English Fails (QuezonCity: University of the Philippines Press, 1990)]:
…many of our educated opinions make sense to many of the educated but no sense at all to ordinary people…
If the ignorant masses are alienated from the learned bourgeoisie, it is because the two groups see their common world differently. The learned answer questions the ignorant do not ask; thelearned propose solutions to problems the ignorant do not live. [p. 4]
Tinio blames language—English, to be exact.
The real dichotomy in our society is not between the learned and the ignorant or between the bourgeoisie and the masses…; it is between the English users and the English non-users…
The mistake is in assuming that we are superior because we see the questions and problems that we see. Prisoned in the English world of the English language, we are not even aware that the real questions and problems exist beyond the field of vision of our unreal eyes. [p. 4]
Tinio identifies the world of the university-educated with English because English is the key to enter it today; money is not the determinant. It is a world the university graduate may decide to live in physically: it is not unusual to see the upper and middle classes migrating to the US, even if they have no serious economic reason for doing so, simply because they feel more at home there, until they realize when they finally live there that they are not…. A conversation I had with an Indonesian senator is apropos: He pointed out that Indonesia, like the Philippines, has many OFWs, all of whom send home appliances and gadgets, but, he pointed out, Filipino OFWs bring back something more. They bring back values, he said, because they know English. Like OFWs, many university graduates acquire new values through English, and values affect the way we perceive things. Values engender attitudes, and attitudes shape perceptions. Values affect the way we perceive society and our opinion of how society should be. For the upper and middle classes, the Philippines is a dysfunctional democracy; for the lower classes, the Philippines is a thoroughly feudal society. For the upper and middle classes, we are now suffering from a plague of EJKs; for the lower classes, EJKs and many other unpunished crimes have been part of their lives way before Mr. Duterte held office. And so they are not upset by EJKs.
A language opens worlds. We are privileged by the Internet to understand that today in a very graphic way. If you understand English, the Internet becomes an alternative universe. Because the university-educated tend to work with and for one another, to socialize with one another, to live and play with one another, to have their own media and entertainment, they soon create their own world, distinct from and blind to that of the lower classes. But even before the present age, already at the time of Rizal (the period of the first generation of student activists), the book served that purpose, and so did newspapers and magazines. The books, the newspapers, the magazines did not merely open new worlds to their readers, so that now Filipinos could read about Africa or South America or Asia; they also proposed a different way of looking at the world—precisely, a European way, which could also be called “sophisticated” or “educated” as opposed to what was “native” or “primitive” or “ignorant.” The worlds opened were (and are) not only geographical, but mental, attitudinal, cultural.
…What both Rizal and Tinio witness to is a fact: the radical change that university education can make in people and subsequently in society, so radical that one may have the impression of having been uprooted from his own people.
We must not allow that to happen. If we wish to participate positively in the changes occurring in Philippine society, we must be connected to our own people. Because of our university education, we have an idea of what shape Philippine society should ideally take. That society would be the end of a journey, but where the journey begins—that is a different problem. And that is the problem I am referring to. We have to begin where the people are…If we are unable to see exactly what the problem is in the world of the majority of Filipinos, if we see the problem as a New Yorker might, we will not able to play the role of bridges.
But do we know what shape Philippine society should take?
The crises the first world is suffering from are at least partly the doing of their own universities. The “Cathedral” is full of university professors and students. When students talk to me about studying in America, I usually ask them, “Why do you want to study in America when their universities are to blame (at least partly) for the mess America is in?” The same is true for Europe. This mess is economic, financial, managerial, political…the fields many Filipinos want to enter and which the previous pope and the present one have criticized sharply. The problem, however, is that if you decide to do graduate studies here instead, your teachers probably studied in those very same universities you want to avoid. Which brings us to a deeper problem: our universities tend to echo what American and European intellectuals say, even joining their discussions in conferences without bothering to consider if what they say has any significance outside of their own societies.
This is a serious problem, and Jose Rizal, 125 years ago, already foresaw it. He talks of Philippine civil society, which was non-existent at that time, as a bride that the Filipino people have to deserve; otherwise, its civic institutions will be twisted to serve tyrannical aims and rendered useless. Today, the tendency to echo the latest intellectual trends from America and Europe continues in the fourth change I mentioned earlier—the change from traditional ideas to modern…. The adoption of ideas from other cultures is not bad in itself, but if done without thinking, it makes us vulnerable to what Pope Francis calls “ideological colonization.” I am obviously calling for a deep self-examination on the part of my colleagues in the university. But I am also calling upon university students and graduates not to accept unthinkingly what is taught in the university. We must always sift what we have learned and are learning in the sieve of our history and our culture.
Let me end.
The world has always been in movement, but today the impression that it is may be stronger than before because we may be in the middle of a seismic shift in the world order. My advice is to watch, learn, and apply the lessons from the spectacle unfolding before our eyes to our own situation in the Philippines. Similarly, the Philippines is in movement; it is in the throes of quite radical changes since the middle of the nineteenth century. I believe you should be actively involved in these changes. But you should participate in them not from within a bubble. You must make the effort to see how those changes are actually playing out in different parts of the country. This condition is vital, considering that we tend to analyze situations as we have been taught to do in university, but our universities have tended to merely echo American or European universities, which are themselves an important reason for the collapse or chaos occurring in the first world. In short, we may be putting on eyeglasses that obstruct rather than enhance vision. We must get to know our own people as they really are.
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