Politics anywhere is informed by at least three variables: collective self-interest, ideological commitment, and a deep story. The first two variables are self-explanatory. The third is enigmatic.
According to the eminent American sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, a deep story is an emotionally validated account of a person’s place in a disputed scheme of things. “A deep story is a feels-as-if story — it’s the story feelings tell, in the language of symbols,” Hochschild remarks. “It removes judgment. It removes fact.”
A deep story is not irrational: It is rational enough to the person concerned. What a deep story does is to contest the rationality of the state, the market and civil society with “evidence” based on the immediacy of personal experience.
Deep stories emerge from the hidden recesses of the suffering heart during times of acute social and economic stress. Hochschild carried out her fieldwork in Louisiana against the backdrop of a United States that had led the charge for globalisation, only to produce rustbelt economies within itself even as certain regions and social groups flourished. She chronicled white heterosexual working-class citizens’ disenchantment with the American Dream, one built on the prospects of working hard and playing by the rules. Those rules had ceased to work for that demographic.
Its discontent helped to produce Donald Trump’s ascendancy, which mainstreamed right-wing aspirations (which are elitist by definition) even among middle-class and poorer white Americans. Trump presented himself as an enabler, a teller of others’ unheard deep stories. He came to power. He could return to power.
The epidemiological economy has exacerbated emotional fault lines around the world and made deep stories bite deeper into the troubled human psyche. In Singapore, the economic and social dislocation produced by the coronavirus pandemic could exacerbate the threat to the national narrative of multiracialism and meritocracy with a new ethnicisation of economics, to which I shall come in a moment.
Deep Singapore
Consider the India-Singapore Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (Ceca). According to the Ministry of Trade and Industry, Ceca is a part of Singapore’s extensive network of 26 free-trade agreements (FTAs). They widen and facilitate the access that the Republic’s businesses enjoy to overseas markets when exporting their goods and services, advance protection for their investments abroad, and provide certainty on foreign regulations.
Ceca in particular makes Singapore a more attractive base for global companies, encouraging them to base themselves and enter the Indian market from here. This has created good jobs for Singaporeans, MTI says.
As with all FTAs, there are trade-offs. The access of foreign professionals to the Singapore labour market is one trade-off. Admittedly, that access increases competition within Singapore and puts pressure on locals at a time of economic stress deepened by Covid-19.
Legitimately, then, Opposition parties should highlight the economic and social repercussions of that external pressure. That is their job, which lies in introducing checks and balances into the Government’s case for FTAs (or any other aspect of the economy, polity or society).
However, the Progress Singapore Party (PSP) has chosen to focus on Ceca in opposing the consequences of Singapore’s foreign talent policy on Singaporeans’ jobs and livelihoods, and not on other FTAs (such as those with Australia, the United States and China) which are similar to Ceca in the matter of allowing in foreign professionals.
It would have been one thing had the PSP contested the case for globalisation, whose provenance lies in Singapore turning to the world for investment, technology, markets and security. However, it is another thing when a political party targets a particular agreement with a particular country involving foreigners of a particular nationality.
That approach creates the worrying prospects of economics being ethnicised. That is to say, the universal economic laws of supply and demand, or even the fundamental factors of production (land, labour, capital and information) will be subjectivised — they will be made part of a deep story — to include elements such as race and religion.
That deep story would contest Singapore’s national narrative of being a multiracial meritocracy which depends on the rest of the world for its economic sustenance. Once that deep story evolves, it will challenge the two other coordinates of politics: collective self-interest and ideological affiliation. Both self and ideology will be fragmented along ethnic lines. Identity politics of the ethnic kind will call into question the national basis of economic policy.
Resisting the lure of a deep story is a task that falls on every Singaporean, whatever her ethnicity.
The author is co-general editor of the Singapore Chronicles series published by IPS and The Straits Times Press.
Top photo from Pexels.