By Asad Latif
When Plato posed at the beginning of the Symposium the question, “Is not the road to Athens just made for conversation?” he made companionship the measure of the destination.
Two-and-a-half millennia later, when I turned up at Rasa Sentosa Hotel for the final session of IPS Prism, the argumentative journey to Athens was still on.
There was the inimitable Chua Beng Huat, who grappled almost physically with ideas. His pugnacious energy made him perhaps the angriest young man in Singapore even in exalted professorial age.
There were other young people there as well. Among them was the contemplative Valerie Koh, a recent post-graduate. Like many of her peers, she is known to wear vintage-framed glasses in a defiantly retro-avant-garde declaration of identity. But she had abjured her retro glasses this time, in possible deference to the perspicacity of the audience, which could see Athens ahead without the aid of anything as nouveau as retro.
Then there was the irrepressible Rachel Chang, whose bubbling energy spilled into the discussions as if overflowing from an inexhaustible glass of champagne.
Decentred by the youthfulness of such companions, I felt communicative again. I remembered my student days in Kolkata, sitting with my friends at the street-corner and indulging in adda – polemical conversation among consenting adults carried out in Bengali over cigarettes, snacks and tea. Our enemies were bourgeois philistines everywhere and their minstrels, intellectual impresarios whose concerts sang of the world’s glories in eternal falsetto.
Singapore is not India but impassioned conversations are important everywhere. Thus, at Prism, it was good to be talking again.
There is much to talk about.
Ms Chang is a participant also in Our Singapore Conversation, which the Government has initiated. She underscores the value of a conversation in which people step outside of themselves when they are “forced to engage with someone else’s personalised perspective.” They learn to see as well, she writes in The Straits Times. “Perhaps in coming face to face with people who have chosen different paths, we see human beings where once were only cautionary tales or statistics.”
Looking ahead takes some doing, though. Ms Koh has described, in her article here, how uncomfortable it is to be challenged on our political views because they could form significant parts of our identity.
However, she adds, what ameliorates the discomfort is an environment in which participants enjoy equal access and opportunity to influence outcomes. That enabling environment undercuts the intellectual tyranny of orthodoxy and facilitates radical reasoning.
In fact, she notes, discussion promotes the possibility of inclusive relationships even among those divided by age, ethnicity, religion or political belief. The respectful interrogation of value systems, inherent in genuine conversation, is a value in itself.
Yes. Conversation allows us to engage others as we would wish to be engaged by them. As Socrates says in Phaedrus, “I tell you, Phaedrus, if I don’t know Phaedrus, I’m a stranger to myself too.” Conversation re-introduces us to ourselves via others.
This is what is occurring, I believe, as Singapore moves from an era in which the state built the nation to one in which that nation is rebuilding the state.
In the era of the state, conversations took place as if within a ring. The state laid down the permissible parameters of public discourse and determined the extent to which Singaporeans could spar with one another in pursuit of political goals.
In the era of the nation, there is no ring but a road. Little except the ultimate sanctions of the law – and those, too, invoked only in extreme situations – dominates the ebb and flow of conversation on the spontaneous journey to Athens.
Re-Imagining Singapore
The transition from the necessity of state-building to the mentality of nation-building is nothing less than an act of re-imagining Singapore. Its scope is captured elegantly in the words of Edward Said. Inviting us to see things “not simply as they are, but as they have come to be that way”, he proclaims in Representations of the Intellectual: “Look at situations as contingent, not as inevitable, look at them as the result of a series of historical choices made by men and women, as facts of society made by human beings, and not as natural or god-given, therefore unchangeable, permanent, irreversible.”
One concrete way in which this could be done in Singapore would be to revisit the unfinished project of democratic socialism. As one thought-leader put it eloquently during the IPS Prism discussions, all visions of the good life are versions of the Left. Another participant declared outright that poverty was not a financial but an ideological problem in Singapore. Both drew attention to the need to sustain the inclusive possibilities of democratic socialism in the face of the wild disparities that global capitalism creates among and within nations.
Democratic socialism, the founding ideology of independent Singapore, had presided over the most spectacularly-successful phase of nation-building, before it was superseded by pragmatism and communitarianism, ideologies whose contribution to the national idea is debatable at best. Looking back to the future, Singaporeans could re-examine the agency of democratic socialism, which ensures that the primary relationship between citizens and the state is not subverted by the irresponsible power of the market.
To re-imagine Singapore would be to recover visions of the good life that have been waylaid and dispersed by the wild march of change. For example, sepia-tinted photographs of the poor 1960s portray a veritable children’s republic of laughter, abandon and play. Those children would be in their 70s today. When they see their grandchildren competing with one another to carry schoolbags possibly heavier than themselves, the grandparents surely must ask themselves why their own innocent times were disbanded, how the natural solidarity of childhood was scattered, and how a nation at play may yet be reassembled today.
The national pastime of fighting over entry to so-called good schools, where the bags tend to be even heavier, detracts from re-imagining Singapore as a country of happy childhoods which enable children to believe in the lifelong value of trust and sharing. Such beliefs are far more important to the collective future of Singapore than the paper chase that could breed a generation of neurotic achievers torn between the warring states of scholars and farmers.
Caution
I would add a word of caution here, however. There is a profound sense in which Singapore will not be able to outlive the legacy of 1965. By this, I do not mean that Singapore’s existence is tied to the fate of what sometimes is dismissively called the PAP State. The People’s Action Party (PAP) was the vehicle of Singapore’s independence, but it does not have a timeless lien on Singapore’s future. However, independent Singapore’s founding rationale as a multiracial meritocracy – the greatest contribution which a single group of individuals gathered together in the party has made to the island’s 700-year history – will remain crucial to the sovereign existence of the city-state, whatever the longevity of the PAP or its rivals.
Singapore is too important to be left to a future that is no more than a rejection of its past. Much more must go into its rebuilding.
The road to Athens is made for conversation. But there must be an Athens for anyone to undertake the journey at all.
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The writer,a former Straits Times journalist, is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
IPS Prism is the institute’s public scenario planning exercise focused on the question: “How will Singapore govern itself in 2022?” For more information, please visit www.ips.sg/prism .
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