Rent

Pinoy Kasi : Rent

First posted 01:30am (Mla time) April 28, 2006
By Michael L. Tan
Inquirer

Editor's Note: Published on Page A15 of the April 28, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

MY father was a journalist, and my mother a teacher, before they went into business. So I grew up with their constant hectoring: Don't become a journalist, don't become a teacher, you'd starve. Ironically, they were even more dead set against my going into business, and their reason here was that I was "too honest" and "too soft-hearted" to survive in the dog-eat-dog environment of businesses.

As you can see, I wasn't a very obedient son. For years now, I've been teaching, and writing for the Inquirer. I'm not making millions, but I get by comfortably, without subsidies from my parents.

In fact, I get by well enough to now help some people to start small businesses. These are people who used to work with me in an NGO but have decided it's time to move on. Their salaries were actually quite good, with one of them getting P28,000 a month, more than I get at the University of the Philippines with my rank of professor, but I could understand why she felt she had to go into business, since she had two kids in high school and one in grade school.

Venturing into the business world, through these friends, has been traumatizing. Yes it is a jungle out there, but what make it so tough aren't so much businesspeople preying on other businesspeople than the high costs of doing business, mainly the astronomical rents.

Gold mine

I had a vague idea of some of these costs from family reunions, where relatives in business would whine about the high rents in malls. Regular store space running into six figures a month while the small kiosks, like the ones selling nachos and drinks, go for around P50,000 a month. Those “tiangge” [bazaars], where makeshift stalls are put up and dismantled after a few weeks, aren't cheap either, costing around P25,000 a month.

My wise NGO friends had decided from the beginning that the malls and tiangge were not going to be options for them. They thought maybe Farmers' Market in Cubao and the San Juan public market, and came back to me totally dejected. The quoted rents went from P30,000 to P100,000.

So the search continued, and I found myself drawn into it as well, driving slowly and stopping every now and then if I saw a "For Rent" sign. All the places I saw were above P15,000 a month.

One night, I got a call from one of my friends. She had found a place in Sta. Mesa, Manila, and she was worried someone would get the place if she didn't. I went over to find a tiny makeshift shack held together with plywood and corrugated sheets. I could see the commercial potential, not from the nearby motels (which, when you think about it, also earn through short-time rent), but from the large number of jeepney commuters. There were already several stores in the area, serving food and selling trinkets and prepaid cell phone cards.

So how much was this three square meters of space? The landlady wanted P8,500 a month. She wouldn't budge. I felt it was too high and said no. Two days later, driving past the place, I could see someone had taken the place and was fixing it up to become a “carinderia” [eatery].

To make a long story short, my friend eventually got a place in the Kalentong area, in one of the side streets, to set up a sari-sari store. The tiny place, measuring 1.5 by 1.5 meters, costs P6,500 a month.

My other friend has left for Cagayan de Oro City, where I thought the rents would be cheap. I was wrong. She's thinking of putting up a carinderia in a place opposite a school, with a floor area of about 6 sq m. The rent is P10,000 a month.

When you think about it, the richest gold mines in the country are found in our cities.

Feudal

"It's the landlord who earns," said the father of one of my friends in exasperation. But that, precisely, is what Marxists mean when they say our economy is "feudal." The fastest way to make money in this country is through rent.

It used to be rural landlords collecting rent through a share of agricultural harvests. These days, the windfalls come from renting out urban space.

Note I use the word "space" rather than "land." I've been working among urban poor communities and realizing how much rental activity is going on, even among "informal settlers" (the politically incorrect term is "squatters"). They don't own the land, but will still collect rent on every last centimeter of space. I've found people leasing out the street space in front of their shack to someone to sell barbecue, while the interior of their shack will be carved out into tiny cubicles to rent out to entire families. (They also rent out electricity, but that's another story.)

There are, of course, legitimate landlords. Even a small lot can bring in considerable income. I mentioned my friend paying P6,500 a month for sari-sari store space. Well, her landlady also has 12 bed-spacers, students in a nearby college, paying P1,000 a month each. I estimate the landlady's home has a floor area of about 100 sq m, for which rental income comes to P18,500 a month.

I was serious when I said every last centimeter of space counts. I found one man who was "renting" driveway space near a recruitment agency to offer instant ID photos. The agency itself had offered him a corner inside their office, but wanted P400 a day. In the end, he found a building nearby whose owner charges him P250 a day for the use of the driveway.

Capitalism

I could do a whole book on rents and landlords and tenants. Next time you buy pearls or pirated VCDs in Greenhills, look closely and you'll realize that each stall has at least two, sometimes as many as four "tenants" sharing space. You'll find, too, that the distinctions between landlords and tenants are blurred, as tenants sublease (often in violation of a rental contract) spaces.

And yet we're talking here about the more fortunate middle class. For poor Filipinos, the only option is to sell out in the streets or in the sidewalks. And you'll find people buying from them because without rental overheads, their prices are lower.

But what a life that is. The vendors can't have too many goods because they're illegal. So they always have to be ready to pack up and run when the police come by.

With so much of business income going into rent, I'm not surprised capitalism is so stunted in our country. Capital can't grow this way.

And that's not the end of the problem. To survive, businesses jack up the costs of commodities, and pay very low wages to their workers.

We keep hearing the President and other officials talking about how we should support small and medium-scale enterprises. They should start by tackling this problem of high rentals and offering public spaces at affordable rates. It's obscene that even public markets now charge almost as much as private malls.

Since I've learned about how high rents are, I've found myself bargaining much less when dealing with smaller businesses. My parents were right when they said I don't have the heart for business. But I have to ask: Is this the way to economic development?

Sunflowers

Pinoy Kasi : Sunflowers

First posted 11:34pm (Mla time) April 25, 2006
By Michael L. Tan
Inquirer

Editor's Note: Published on Page A15 of the April 26, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

"GO AND appreciate our sunflowers."

That was the way Frances Mae Ramos ended her speech, delivered on behalf of new graduates, during recognition rites of the UP College of Social Sciences and Philosophy last Saturday.

I was feeling particularly proud as the anthropology department's chairperson because Frances Mae was graduating with a BA in Anthropology, summa cum laude, the first in our 89-year history. But amid the jubilation, I was also feeling a bit of malaise.

That was the word used by our guest speaker, Juan Miguel Luz, to begin his speech. The college had chosen Luz as guest speaker because of his honesty and integrity. As education undersecretary for finance, he had refused to accept three government checks for a congressman's scholarship program. That did not please the gods (and goddesses), and last Friday, Luz resigned from the Department of Education. The problems he named were a mixed lot, ranging from the lack of a sense of shared history to the rigidity of religion. But in this season of graduations, I wanted to zero in on one of the problems he mentioned: miseducation.

Inequitable
Luz explained what he meant by miseducation: an inequitable educational system. He pointed out how for most Filipino children, the only option for basic education is the public school system, where they will get six years of elementary and four years of secondary education. That 10 years is far from adequate, compared to most countries of the world where the young get at least 12 years of education. (China, for example, has six years of elementary education and another six of jung xie or middle school.)

Our private schools do offer more years of basic schooling: preschool and nursery and kindergarten, up to seven years of elementary education, four years of high school. It's not cheap to go for these alternatives; just last Sunday, I was talking with a friend who told me she was going to shell out P38,000 for her daughter's preschool tuition.

Even the middle class will invest large amounts for preschool and elementary education, hoping that their children will have a headstart that will get them into a government science high school or eventually one of the state universities, preferably the University of the Philippines, with its low tuition.

Mismatch
This problem of inequity is amplified many times over. The poor get only a few years of basic education, and of dubious quality at that. We produce high school graduates with not much more than some degree of functional literacy. They enter the labor force but are often underqualified for the few jobs that are available, so they find their way overseas where they will get $250 to $350 a month, not much more than what they would get in the Philippines if they had a bit more skills.

Meanwhile, what happens to those who could afford a better quality of basic education? They get into UP, and if the families still have money, into one of the better private schools. But these graduates don't necessarily have it better either. They're well trained, and end up, too, mismatched to the job market. I am amazed at the number of jobless "computer science" graduates. Many will leave, which has led Dr. Sergio Cao, UP Diliman's chancellor, to tell UP graduates last week: "Wherever you go, remember that we did not teach you just to be exported."

But Frances Mae gives a new twist to the problems, when she reminds us it's not just a matter of salaries: "I am not going to complain about unequal opportunities, for unbeknownst to some of us belonging to this college, not all social scientists starve. If we would be willing to sacrifice principles along the way, we could actually cash in on dictated research commissions from huge profiteering corporations. Or allow ourselves to be obscenely paid consultants to traditional politicians."

Frances Mae talked about how, as an anthropology student, she had gone off for fieldwork and learned to appreciate how that kind of work can help to build the nation. In her speech, she fretted about how our government, unable to recognize cultural differences, is bent on imposing "uniform and linear plans." She also criticized the way these plans are "trapped by the standards of economically powerful states whose socio-political and cultural landscapes are far from identical to ours."

But what will happen to Frances Mae and others like her? After the recognition ceremonies, Dr. Zosimo Lee, our dean, asked me if I knew of Frances Mae's plans. I said she wanted to do graduate work. The dean was ecstatic, but I was feeling, well, that malaise again, because UP really has very little to offer our graduate students by way of scholarships and grants.

Fighting chance

Out in the sun, after the recognition rites, I found Frances Mae and her family. I went to congratulate her, to encourage her to push through with graduate work.

By coincidence, our guest speaker came over as well. He congratulated Frances Mae, commenting how their speeches had such similar themes. His advice to Frances Mae was to work before going on to graduate school.

My feeling is that for someone like her, it might be possible to combine both options, to find some way to have her begin working in the real world, even while continuing to pick up skills as a social scientist.

It all boils down to leveling the playing field, to giving a fighting chance to our young. Many other countries offer high quality basic education and then make the students--rich and poor--compete for college. Just recently, I was talking with an Indian friend and he told me about an additional 2 percent income tax they're now paying. He wasn't complaining, as he explained how this added revenue was to be allocated specifically for basic education, to include programs like nutritious meals for the students.

A fighting chance also means giving options to the ones who do make it through college, whether through UP and other good schools. We beg them not to leave, but are we offering enough to get them to stay? As we see with Frances Mae, it's more than a matter of salaries.

As I left UP last Saturday, I paused briefly to look at the sunflowers, as Frances Mae had suggested. UP plants them each year right before graduation, an appropriate metaphor for education. Like our young people, the sunflowers look deceptively sturdy, but they get to bloom only with intense nurturing: lots of sunlight, water and nutrients from the soil. It's hard work, but when they bloom, as our graduates do, the sunflowers bring such cheer and joy.

The sunflowers will disappear after they bloom. Our graduates will need more nurturing so that maybe, eventually, they'll get it right with their children and we won't need more speeches about national malaise.

Pasintabi

Pinoy Kasi : 'Pasintabi'

First posted 01:16am (Mla time) April 21, 2006
By Michael L. Tan
Inquirer

Editor's Note: Published on Page A15 of the April 21, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

IN MOST languages in the Philippines, we say "Tabi po" or "Tabi-tabi po," with a few variations such as the Ilokano "bari bari." The message is the same: "Please step aside." It's a way of excusing ourselves as we intrude into someone's territory.

What's so intriguing is that we are addressing the "unseen" here, supposedly spirits inhabiting the place. We can't really tell where the spirits are and so to be safe, we excuse ourselves just to be sure we don't anger the inhabitants disturbed by our intrusion.

Filipino males are especially vulnerable, with their penchant for seeking instant bladder relief anywhere. Failure to excuse oneself might lead to the unseen getting drenched, followed by vengeance in the form of the shower-giver getting sores and wounds that don't heal or, worse, a swelling of the offending anatomical part.

In Jesus' name

The practice is called "pasintabi" in Tagalog, sometimes translated as an "apology." But it is really more of an "Excuse me, please." It's a way of acknowledging that certain places are sacred, requiring some respect. Places that elicit this feeling of sacredness tend to be the more pristine, such as thick forests, a river that still runs vigorously-in other words, any place that inspires awe.

The practice is slowly disappearing. One contributing factor is life in the urban jungle, where nothing's sacred anymore, although I do know quite a few males who still excuse themselves out of habit even as they use one of Bayani Fernando's pink urinals. "You never know," says one friend, while I fret not so much about the unseen spirits than about the electrical post possibly having stray live wires.

The disappearance of “pasintabi” reflects the way our mind-sets have shifted. We no longer fear nature, feeling we've conquered her. I thought about this angle when two of my Protestant students recently shared about a shift in this cultural practice. Evangelical pastors have encouraged a new practice: as one goes through an unfamiliar area, he should not say, "Tabi po," but should instead utter, "In Jesus' name." The evangelicals' assumption here is that there are indeed spirits, and that they are malevolent, therefore one invokes Jesus' name to tell them to step aside.

I'm ambivalent about this new practice. On one hand, it tends to reflect the way we look at our position, as humans, as being one of dominating and conquering nature, maybe even invoking the name of Jesus as we do this. But I did get another take on this practice when I shared this bit of information during a speech at a recent conference on Population, Health and the Environment. After my talk, one of the Protestant pastors in the audience came up to me and gave me another interpretation: Invoking Jesus' name is intended to be a way of dealing with one's fears.

Fear

Fair enough. But that observation did remind me again of our own collective mixed feelings about nature. I've written in the past about the way we want to think we've come to dominate nature, and yet deep down, especially when natural disasters strike, we are really terrified by nature. Unfortunately, that fear of nature is misplaced. Instead of excusing ourselves as we intrude into nature, we now try to obliterate nature.

The disappearance of “pasintabi” accompanies our growing denial about the many ways we contribute to the destruction of the environment. At the Population, Health and Environment conference, I focused on the blinders we have about the link between population growth and natural disasters. Let's look quickly at the recent tragedy in the village of Guinsaugon in Southern Leyte province. There were 1,600 people living in 40 hectares of land. I did some quick conversions and realized that meant a population density of 4,000 per square kilometer. That's way above the already crowded national average, which is 255 per square kilometer, and certainly, for an upland area, that kind of density is suicidal.

I am not blaming the people of Guinsaugon. We should be examining our conscience, as a nation, in continuing to insist that there is no population problem, that it's all right to continue to take over whatever land there is and to marginalize the poor and powerless, driving them to live in harm's way. Guinsaugon reminds us that we need to be looking at other similar areas courting disaster (the summer season makes me think of Baguio's hillside shanty colonies).

The practice of “pasintabi” reminds us that there is room for co-existence, co-evolution. We can use nature's resources, as long as we are respectful, mindful of the need to use these resources wisely, recycling and replacing whenever we can. I can even envision a new take on the use of "In Jesus' name." Rather than seeing nature as being populated by evil spirits, we need to see nature as a generous host offering us her home, with complete freedom. We may feel uncomfortable and fearful at times, visiting her huge mansion, and so maybe for some people, "In Jesus' name" might be appropriate. But wouldn't it be ridiculous now to invoke Jesus' name against the host who has offered us her home?

Eventually, we might be able to achieve a more sensible balance in the way we look at nature: less fear, more respect. Nature and her "spirits" have almost always been the ones to step aside; maybe sometimes, we too should reciprocate this graciousness.

Nature watch

Today is Earth Day, so here's a little present, a nature watch, which I hope to do regularly, with some help from readers.

I was surprised at how many of my friends commented favorably on my last column, "Quiet time," especially how it alerted them to the splendor of the trees around us. But our blindness to the flowering trees is another example of how we've lost our sense and sensibility around nature.

A friend of mine recently sent an article about how the Japanese wait, each year, for the cherry trees (sakura, sakura ...) to blossom -- a way of marking how spring has truly arrived. So concerned are the Japanese about the cherry blossoms that the government is expected to issue accurate predictions, much like the weather, on when the blossoms are due.

We don't need to be so obsessed, but I'd like to encourage the development of a sense of our own seasons, marked by blooming trees and shrubs. The yellow flame trees I wrote about lost their flowers over the Holy Week, a reminder of how ephemeral beauty can be. But we still have the golden shower trees (there are some particularly splendid examples along Hemady Avenue in Quezon City). You might also want to visit the University of the Philippines (UP) campus in Quezon City, where kapok trees near the Lagoon and the Palma Hall parking lot have been "snowing" over the last few days.

In a few weeks, expect UP to be covered by the crimson canopies of fire trees. I'll try to get the word out as soon as they bloom, and hope other readers will alert me as well to nature's other dramatic shows.

Tabi po...

Who we are

Pinoy Kasi : Who we are

First posted 00:19am (Mla time) April 19, 2006
By Michael L. Tan
Inquirer

Editor's Note: Published on Page A15 of the April 19, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

IT ISN'T just in the Philippines where the debate over the death penalty has been revived. Last week, for instance, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops issued an Easter pastoral letter calling for the abolition of the death penalty.

The United States and Japan are currently the only developed countries where capital punishment is still used. The United States is often singled out for studies because, like the Philippines, it abolished the death penalty in 1972, only to bring it back in 1976.

Not all the American states have brought back capital punishment, and debates continue with many issues. I'm summarizing some of the issues here:

The first is that of fairness. Opponents of the death penalty have pointed out that there is a certain arbitrariness to the use of capital punishment. In the United States, about 2 percent of convicted murderers are sentenced to death. Turning the tables around, one could argue that if the death penalty were truly a form of just punishment, then all convicted murderers should be executed.

That will never happen of course, and, worse, the chances of being meted out the death penalty, and of the sentence being carried out, increase if one is poor, and an African-American or Hispanic-American.

I am certain that if we looked at our own Death Row, we would find that most of the convicts are from the lower socioeconomic strata, and if we look at the ones who have been executed, the percentage of the poor would rise even higher.

Another way of discussing this fairness issue is to look at how we protest whenever a Filipino is sentenced to death abroad. Yet, using the argument of fairness, we really cannot argue against the execution of Filipinos overseas if we continue to impose the death penalty here at home.

A second issue is that of justice, which is different from fairness. Here, the issue is whether capital punishment sometimes results in the execution of the innocent. With advances in forensics and DNA analysis, more and more cases of wrongful conviction have been uncovered in the United States.

This issue often overlaps with that of fairness in the sense that wrongful convictions are more likely to involve the poor and non-whites.

The possibility of wrongful convictions is high in the Philippines. Between 1997 and 2003, the Supreme Court reviewed about 730 death sentences, and in almost 500 cases, the sentences were reduced or remanded. Sixty of those who had been sentenced to death were actually acquitted. If DNA tests were made available, I suspect many more cases would have been overturned.

A third issue is that of deterrence. Death penalty advocates say that executions bring down the crime rate. The US data show otherwise. In the northeastern states, where the death penalty is almost never used, murder rates are about 4.2 per 100,000 population. In the south, which accounts for 80 percent of executions, the murder rate is 6.6 per 100,000, the highest in the country.

In the Philippines, the role of the death penalty in deterring crime is probably even more insignificant, mainly because the biggest criminals know they are untouchable. As small-time drug pushers and kidnapping hirelings languish in prisons, waiting for the lethal injection, the syndicate heads, the politicians who plunder the economy, go scot-free. Criminals know that crime pays in the Philippines, with or without the death penalty.

Terrorism

The American debate over the death penalty found new focus recently with the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, a French national of Moroccan descent who was convicted for terrorism in connection with the terrorist attacks in Washington, D.C. and New York City on Sept. 11, 2001. The jury is still undecided whether to recommend the death penalty or life imprisonment.

Moussaoui was actually arrested in August 2001, a month before the terrorist attacks. Immigration agents apprehended him after he tried to get a flight school to teach him how to fly a commercial airliner. He was convicted on the argument that he had refused, after his arrest, to divulge information about his terrorist connections. If he had done so, the prosecution argued, maybe the twin towers bombing could have been prevented.

Public opinion seems to favor the conviction, and probably even a death sentence, because the 9/11 attacks were so heinous. It didn't help that Moussaoui showed no remorse during the trial. He described as "gorgeous" the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center, and said the attackers were now probably "in the highest level of paradise."

The defense has argued that Moussaoui is mentally unstable, probably a schizophrenic. He is the son of a violent alcoholic father and a mother who left him and his siblings with others for childcare. Al-Qaeda members themselves said Moussaoui was considered too unreliable and was being reserved for a second wave of attacks.

John Farmer, senior counsel to a special commission created to investigate the 9/11 attacks, has argued that Moussaoui should not be executed since he was not a leader of al-Qaeda, and did not actually participate in the terrorist attacks. Another angle he uses is that executing Moussaoui would be a form of assisted suicide, one that would allow him to claim martyrdom.

Evil

The Moussaoui case should make us think hard about the death penalty in the Philippines. A death sentence, an execution, could bring some sense of justice to several thousands in the Moussaoui case. For society, the execution becomes part of a morality play, where the state can claim that it is meting out justice -- with hopes that this will deter crime.

Death-penalty advocates refer to the need to deal with evil, but John Farmer offers another perspective when he writes: "Zacarias Moussaoui is evil, and there is no doubt that he arrived here determined to kill Americans, but he was not a leader of al-Qaeda." Moreover, Farmer argues for life imprisonment so that Moussaoui can die in prison "frustrated and forgotten, embittered and anonymous."

Farmer makes a good point about the kind of justice Moussaoui deserves. When we lash out at those who have wronged us, we justify our actions by saying we are dealing with evil. That argument is being used by the US government itself, when American soldiers torture and degrade suspected Islamist militants. But an American legislator looking into alleged brutality against the suspected Islamists summarized the issues well when he said that human rights, even for those we perceive to be evil, have to be respected: "It's not about who they are, but about who we are."

US Catholic bishops put it another way: "The use of state-authorized killing in our names diminishes us all." In the name of restoring justice, we all lose part of our humanity whenever we condone an execution, whether in the lethal injection chamber or through salvaging or extra-legal means.

Quiet Time

Pinoy Kasi : Quiet time

First posted 00:57am (Mla time) April 12, 2006
By Michael L. Tan
Inquirer



Editor's Note: Published on Page A11 of the April 12, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

"PAPANIS ang laway mo" ["Saliva would turn rancid in your mouth"], a Boholano friend described what Holy Week was like for him when he was growing up. It was his way of describing how older Filipinos would impose a rule of silence around that time, and especially on Good Friday, a solemn and somber commemoration of Christ's suffering and death.

These days, I can't imagine a place in the Philippines where you still have that rule of silence. Some of the religious commemorations are still there, but by and large, Holy Week is a time for Filipinos to go off for a vacation: to Baguio City, Boracay or, for the more affluent, abroad for fun, revelry, sometimes even bacchanalian debauchery.

Across all cultures, there's always provision for some kind of holy day (or days) for silence. Particularly striking are the Balinese, who celebrate their New Year's eve with a lot of noise but for whom New Year's Day itself, Nyepi, is a time of almost total silence. All electrical appliances are supposed to be turned off; the roads have no cars, no motorcycles; even the airport will take only transit flights.

In the Philippines, all our holidays are festive except, until recently, Holy Week, and now that quiet time is gone too. Sure, in principle, some of us will still try to tone down on Good Friday, but that still means retreating to our homes ... to watch cable TV. Local stations will try to come up with some kind of semblance of religious observances by televising a church service, or showing old films with some vaguely religious theme, but these days, you can get around that watching DVDs.

We Filipinos fear silence much more than many of our neighbors. Buddhist and Hindu countries have strong traditions of meditation. Islam has its month-long Ramadan of fasting and reflection. We once had a quiet Holy Week, and that's gone now, so we just move from one noisy celebration to another in a holiday-filled year.

There's no time now for reflection, for introspection, and I wonder at times if that might be one reason we have so many problems. Without being able to take stock of our lives, as individuals and as a nation, we move around aimlessly, living, literally, for the next holiday.

Walking with trees

I'm not proposing that we move back into my friend's rancid-saliva season. Neither am I suggesting that we all meditate through the week. There are other ways to create quiet time.

We need first to filter out a rather noisy world: cable TV, stereo systems, the tricycles and jeepneys running by. You could join the exodus out of Manila and other urban areas, but I've tried that before and found the mad rush in bus stations and airports only gets everyone grumpy and cranky. Stay put in the city and you'll find it might actually be easier to find quiet-just make sure you avoid the television, the DVD player, maybe even the computer and the world streaming in through the Internet.

Then find some activity to calm the spirit. You might find it in gardening in your home. Or you might need to go out and look for an oasis. We still have a few of them even in Metro Manila. The Balara watershed area is one. Too "wild" for an urban cowboy? Then try some of our campuses, like the University of the Philippines (UP) teneo de Manila University.

I'll share a little secret here: I combine tree-walking with meditation at UP. No need to sit in the lotus position and gazing up at the trees. There's something called walking meditation where you empty the mind by just walking about. And at UP, you can actually walk with the trees.

No, I haven't turned New Age; no, I don't believe in levitation, or out of body experiences. I simply choose any one of UP's older buildings -- Quezon Hall, Palma Hall (AS to older people), Malcolm with its resident ghosts -- go to one of the upper floors, and walk down the corridors to take in the scenery, including quite a few trees.

I've written in the past about how the month of May produces a riot of colorful flowers. But it was only this year that I realized March and April produce their own early crop of flowers -- on trees. Too urbanized, too caught up in the din of modern life, we've forgotten to look up to the trees.

Palma Hall has all these kalachuchi trees that bloom throughout the year, but beyond the visual delight they offer, you'll find that you have to learn to be quiet enough to catch the scent of the flowers. Filipinos have mixed feelings about kalachuchi, sometimes associating it with the dead, but in many other cultures, the kalachuchi has much more positive connotations: of home and hearth, of female sustenance.

I'll save the life-giving kalachuchi for another column, but for today I wanted to alert you to a whole family of trees, the giant relatives of beans or legumes, that flower during the summer. You'll find them even in Metro Manila, from the nuanced delicate colors of the acacia, to the resplendent yellow blooms of the golden shower. This year, I began noticing another kind of yellow flowering tree, the yellow flame tree (for my biologist friends, this is Peltophorum pterocarpum).

This tree's flowers are more subdued than the golden shower so from afar, they provide an impressionist touch, flashes of yellow on an otherwise bleak urban landscape. There's a particularly awesome example in between UP's Main Library and the Palma Hall Annex (the psychology department). For those looking at other campuses, you'll find still fairly impressive examples on the Miriam College and Ateneo campuses.

Bring a digital camera and capture some of those trees for posterity. At the rate we're going with environmental pollution, we just might lose these trees in a few years, and the next generation of Filipinos may have to content themselves with the photographs.

What should be

I have the psychology department's yellow flame tree as my computer wallpaper theme right now, and friends have asked about it, some even thinking it was taken abroad. Which is telling. We associate placid and serene landscapes with other countries, rarely with our own.

Quiet time allows us to tune in to what's here, what's around us. Even in our backyards, in our blighted cities, nature struggles along, teasing us with moments of fleeting splendor: plants you never knew existed, until they flower; birds you might never see, but which try, almost defiantly, to remind us they exist by singing out.

Quiet time slows us down and allows us to savor life to its fullest. Try creating quiet time by preparing a slow meal: it may take longer to prepare, longer to consume, but you'll find the food tastes much more like, well, food that nurtures the body, the mind, the spirit.

Similarly, as we quiet down this Holy Week, realizing how restful it is to have a relatively quieter, car-free, less-crowded city, we might better appreciate the need to craft a vision of what Manila, Cebu, Davao, the Philippines should be or, better still, could be.

Guilt and shame

PINOY KASI


Guilt and shame
First posted 00:23am (Mla time) April 07, 2006
By Michael L. Tan
Inquirer

Editor's Note: Published on Page A15 of the April 7, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

IT HAS been 60 years since the anthropologist Ruth Benedict wrote "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword," which proposed that the Japanese mainly used shame for social control, while Western societies applied mainly guilt.

Many social scientists still use this "shame/guilt" dichotomy. The latest version says that Muslim societies are driven mainly by shame and honor, and that this translates into strong aggression to defend one's honor, more specifically the honor of the Islamic "umma," or community.

These propositions are controversial, especially because there's always an underlying assumption that "shame" societies (mainly "non-Western") are less advanced than "guilt" (mainly "Western") societies, but I've wondered if we might want to use that framework, and maybe test it, by looking at the Philippines. In today's column, I'm going to present some very preliminary thoughts about this. As you might have guessed, the idea for doing this was provoked by the recent resignation of Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and a deluge, in conversations and through texts, of the snide and the witty, from "Thaksinin Now Na" to "The Thais have such a powerful sense of shame."

Before we look specifically at the Philippines, let me just get the terms in place. Shame societies tend to use ostracism for social control. A person behaves well because it is -- well, the Filipino term captures it all -- "nakakahiya" [shameful] not to. Notions of shame are very much tied to concepts of face and of reputation, especially of the larger social groups one belongs to, for example, the family.

Guilt, on the other hand, is tied to a realization that one has done something wrong, captured in Christian societies by the notion of "sin." I have done something wrong, I am guilty, and I must do something to confess and then to atone for that wrong. Westerners sometimes think "guilt" societies are superior to "shame" societies because it is more ethics-based: One behaves in a certain way because it is the right thing to do.

Greater good

The problem I have with the shame/guilt formulation is that it is a dichotomy. It does not recognize that there will be sharp variations among both shame and guilt societies. The Japanese, for example, represent one extreme of shame societies, where the honor of the entire nation may be invoked, and where the defense may involve suicide, as in the case of the kamikaze pilots of World War II.

In "high-shame" societies, even the slightest hint of scandal or dishonor may be enough to provoke a resignation. Japanese executives have been known to commit suicide because of financial anomalies in their company. And in South Korea last month, Prime Minister Lee Hae-chan resigned after he was criticized for playing golf even as a nationwide railway strike was underway.

On the surface, shame seems to be tied mainly to "face" and to reputations, but ultimately, they are linked to the idea that the greater good must be served. And this is where we find variations: Not all societies have such an expanded sense of the "greater good" as the Japanese or Koreans do.

We shouldn't entertain illusions here about the greater good always being noble; there are still vested interests working here. The South Korean prime minister's golf addiction was unfortunate because elections were coming up and there was probably great pressure from his political party to resign.

At the same time, it is still always amazing to consider how far people will go to avoid shame. And I feel Westerners often trivialize this shame by reducing it to a matter of preserving reputations. Shame does have its own complicated ethics, "right" being defined by the greater good. In the Thai example, no less than the king intervened to ask Thaksin to resign. In one stroke, political tensions were drastically reduced and the country started to move on. No talk here about the lack of qualified successors, or of thieves taking over from thieves like we have in the Philippines.

Westerners also trivialize shame societies by talking about aggressive acts to preserve honor. There is little recognition of a sense of atonement that exists and how this is often inwardly directed. Look at how President Bill Clinton clung to his post even amid the sex scandals; in shame societies, there would have been a resignation, or worse. Seppuku (or hara-kiri, considered a more vulgar term) literally translates as slicing open the stomach. It is agonizing atonement, even as it takes on a symbolic meaning of letting the spirit free to leave the body.

Filipino shame

So where do we fall in the spectrum of shame societies? Certainly, "hiya" [sense of shame] is a core value, tied so much to a sense of "face." We even pride ourselves with this hiya, claiming it is very communitarian, making us different from individualistic (read: "walanghiya") Westerners.

Yet I have to wonder about our claims to a communitarian orientation. Yes, we think about the family's reputation but not much beyond that. Maybe sometimes we talk about regional pride, and occasionally about Filipino pride, but we tend to rant and rage about the superficial, like branding as racist those "Filipina" cookies sold in Europe.

I'm afraid, too, that our notions of shame have mutated, grafted on to all the worst features of rugged individualism, to the point where we now equate individual good with the greater good. Politicians are especially prone to that perverted version of hiya: The country would collapse, and therefore it would be "nakakahiya" if I resigned.

Moreover, our notion of shame is often expressed in the form of aggression against those perceived to be threatening our honor. No seppuku or hara-kiri in the Philippines; instead, when threatened, Filipino politicians lash out with calumny and libel, with lies and demolition jobs, to restore what they think is honor.

It doesn't have to be that way. If we could just develop a true sense of the greater good, tied to a concept of nationhood, shame could become quite productive, as we are seeing now in Thailand.

We need to develop both an ethos as well as mechanisms that will help future politicians to recognize that there is honor in resignation, in accepting defeat. We don't need a king to mediate; civil society can do that, paying homage to those who have the decency to make a graceful exit when needed.

All that will take time, but this early, I also feel strongly that we need to moderate the shaming techniques that we think will bring down the corrupt and the dishonest. Ironically, the shaming here -- especially because it is so sensationalistic, so showbiz -- drives the stakes higher for the target of the shaming, making them more obstinate, more vicious until eventually, they begin to believe that it is actually dishonorable to be honorable.

There are many different models of shame societies. Unfortunately, ours seems to take off from a Western variant: that of the Mafia.

**************

This site is moderated by Icarus