Passionate Revolutions. Talitha Espiritu

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      Chapter 2

      SOCIAL CONDUCT AND THE NEW SOCIETY

      Sa ikauunlad ng bayan, disiplina ang kailangan (For national development, what we need is discipline). The founding motto of the New Society, which citizens were to learn by rote upon the declaration of martial law, encapsulated the Marcos regime’s concerted efforts to place social conduct within the purview of state policy.¹ In his Notes on the New Society of the Philippines, Marcos explains the martial-law state’s abiding interest in national discipline. Like its counterparts in the decolonizing world, the Philippines, Marcos averred, was a “transitional society” preoccupied with the intertwined problems of fostering a national identity and achieving rapid social and economic development. Contradictory values and institutions undermined these goals, thus underscoring the importance of regimenting social conduct.²

      Marcos, whose countersubversive performance blurred the boundaries between U.S. foreign policy and his own personal political agendas, yet again subjected the Philippines to the discourse of U.S. political demonology. This time, however, he assumed the voice of U.S. social theorists whose Washington-funded research “analyzed a foreign world in ways that stressed their own nation’s historical virtue, continuing superiority, and right of benevolent intervention.”³ Modernization, the grand narrative of the Cold War, posited the United States as the model society that Third World nations should seek to emulate. It was believed that the replication of the “consensual” framework of the United States—its capitalist economy, “liberal” media and modern values—could drive “traditional” societies through the difficult transitional process.

      As a former U.S. colony, the Philippines was in fact one of the earliest laboratories of modernization. It was touted as the “showcase of democracy” in Asia. It had five television stations, 190 movie theaters, and twenty-six daily newspapers in Manila alone—placing it well ahead of most Southeast Asian countries in terms of mass media outlets. Unlike its Asian neighbors, which had responded to threats of political disunity and social chaos in the postindependence period by nationalizing or socializing their mass media, the Philippines had earned the reputation for having the “freest press in Asia.”⁴ But rather than bolster a genuinely participatory democracy, an oligarchy-controlled media fed en elite-dominated political culture characterized by political violence and electoral fraud. And while capitalism was firmly in place, it was overrun by the rent-seeking practices of the oligarchy. In every respect, the Philippines presented a distorted portrait of modernization.

      With Marcos’s declaration of martial law, the Philippines seemed poised to follow in the footsteps of late-industrializing countries where the modernization thesis was being radically rewritten. In these states, authoritarianism was increasingly recognized not as an aberration but as a prerequisite to modernization and development.⁵ U.S. support for dictatorial regimes dramatically increased at this time, with a concomitant slackening of concern about the defense of democracy.⁶ Constituting a new domino effect, the turn toward authoritarian rule may be traced back to a fundamental weakness in modernization theory: rather than bolster democracy, the extension of electoral politics to the decolonizing world produced volatile political situations conducive to military regimes, ethnic conflict, or civil war.⁷

      Harvard University political scientist Samuel P. Huntington was among the earliest modernization theorists to point this out. In his influential treatise Political Order in Changing Societies, Huntington took the theory to task for paying insufficient attention to the problem of building political order in the so-called transitional states. Commenting on the social upheavals plaguing these states, Huntington argued that such manifestations of political instability were “the product of rapid social change and rapid mobilization of new groups into politics coupled with the slow development of political institutions.”⁸ Later known as the Huntington thesis, this refinement of modernization theory argued that in the Third World the building of political order must take precedence over the exercise of procedural democracy.

      The Huntington thesis corroborated U.S. support for martial law in the Philippines, underscoring the need for national discipline. As Bonner points out,

      Americans demanded law and order, at home and abroad. They also expect the people of other countries to govern themselves as Americans do; when they don’t measure up, the reaction is to assume that they are not capable of the responsibility that democracy requires and therefore not worthy of the freedom that it allows. . . . That is precisely what many American leaders and journalists thought. The Philippines just wasn’t ready for democracy.⁹

      The notion that the Philippines “just wasn’t ready for democracy”—a striking instance of colonial infantilization—is indicative of the continuity between modernization and colonial thinking. In his political treatises concerning martial law, Marcos claimed that the Philippine experiment in modernization had failed because of the profound incompatibility between liberal democracy and the cultural values generated by the nation’s colonial past. Marcos’s uptake of the Huntington thesis was in fact based on an internalization of an imputed lack—a cultural and moral deficiency that rendered the nation unfit to govern itself as a democracy.

      As Marcos would have it, colonial rule created a “Filipino personality” marked by “indolence, docility, passivity, a pervading consciousness of racial inferiority, shyness and resistance to being enlightened.”¹⁰ Having bred “habits of subservience,” colonial rule was supplanted by a “western democratic system,” which was adopted, Marcos argued, “unexamined” by the postindependence state. The cultural inertias of colonial rule, Marcos claimed, undermined the nation’s uptake of democracy, such that, rather than revolutionize Philippine society, it had “bred corruption, subversion, and sectarianism.”¹¹

      To legitimize authoritarian rule, and to co-opt the rhetorical suasion of the Huntington thesis, Marcos provocatively claimed that the Cold War created a false choice between democracy and socialism. Third World nations, he argued, should opt for a third alternative:

      The exigencies, the conditions, and the crises in the Third World are peculiar to the Third World and must, consequently, be met with tactics suitable to the temperament СКАЧАТЬ