THE PROBLEM OF ASSIMILATION OF MINORITIES
The ultimate answer to this question of unassimilated
minorities, Muslim and Chinese, is fairly simple. They must be assimilated – or, more
precisely, integrated – into the national community. The problem is how. The problem is the process.
Whatever shape that process may take, it will take consensus
on a least two points
.
First: on the
part of the national community, an effective willingness not only to accept but
to welcome pluralism. We should make it
perfectly clear to all that in this national community, historically Christian,
there is today, if there was none yesterday, a secure and honored place for Islam. At the same time, we should make it perfectly
clear to ourselves that our indigenous culture has been modified by techniques,
attitudes and insights derived from cultures other and older than our own;
specifically, from the Chinese culture; and that this contribution is truly an
enrichment, not a negation or distortion, of our national values.
Second: on the
part of the minorities, an effective willingness, not only to suffer but to seek integration. They must realize that the only way to win
full acceptance in a national community is to swear allegiance to it, an
allegiance as irreversible as the vows of marriage: “for better or for worse,
for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us
part.” And to make good this oath by deeds. And to be convinced that by this oblation,
they do not diminish but, on the contrary, enhance their particular cultural
personality, since they make it contributory to a culture still in the making;
a civilization that may be (who knows) the equal of that which began as a small
settlement in a fertile bend of the Yellow River and became in due course,
China.
If there is a problem as to how the Philippines became
Christian, there is equally a problem as to how it became a nation. The Philippines may be a natural group of
islands, an archipelago – but only up to a point. For whether or not this or that outer island
would be included in the group was certainly a Spanish decision. Colonial rule, not a geographical necessity
or sociological incongruity, established the national territory. True it is that with the small exception of
the most ancient migrants, the food gatherers of the jungle, the people are of
the same racial stock. But they share
this same racial stock with the peoples of Indonesia and Malaysia; by itself,
therefore, it cannot be a basis for a distinct nationality. Neither can language; a rough but serviceable
mnemonic that the Philippines comprises (or comprise?) 7,000 islands, 700
dialects, and 7 major languages. These
languages belong to the same linguistic family, but are mutually unintelligible
to a large extent; so much so, that we have to choose one of them arbitrarily
as the basis for a national language.
Tagalog is by no means the lingua
franca that Bahasa Indonesia is.
What, then, do we Filipinos have in common that is
distinctive of ourselves, enabling us to lay claim to a separate
nationhood? The name by which we are
called, the Philippines, Filipinos – may suggest one element of that shared
distinction. We are called after a
Spanish king, Philip II, and our shared experience of Spanish colonial rule may
be one of the reasons why we have a national personality different from that of
our neighbors.
We share the experience with Spanish America, yes; but with
considerable reservations. For one
thing, we have not had the same large infusion of Spanish blood as the Spanish
Americans. Dr. Domingo Abella estimates
that while the Spanish (Peninsular) population of Spanish America averaged 30%
of population over the colonial period, it was never more than 1% of total
population in the Philippines. That is
one reason, incidentally, why Spanish never became among us the generalized
language that it is in South America.
The other reason is the decision of the first Synod of Manila (1582) –
inspired by the Holy Spirit, surely – that we should be taught Christianity not
in Spanish but in our own languages.
Moreover, we Filipinos have had an extension of shared
colonial experience which was denied the Spanish-American republics: the experience
initiated by Commodore Dewey’s soft-voiced command as the squadron steamed past
Cavite Hook and Admiral Cervera’s unready ships: “You may fire when you are
ready, Gridley.” The experience of half
a century of Yankee rule, Yankee ideals, and Yankee economics.
One gets the impression that what Spanish-Americans think of
the United States is based on an experience for the most part negative, an
experience, direct or vicarious, of marines storming into banana republics to
protect the investments of fruit merchants, or of multinational companies stripping away the mineral resources of
continent, aided and abetted by their superpower government. Our experience is somewhat different. In the Philippines, if the North Americans
took, they also gave; and what they gave has become part of our nationality
personality.
One of these values is the idea of citizenship; of popular
participation in government; of government by consent. This was, of course, the central insight of
the Revolution of ’96; we rose in arms because we were no longer willing to be
mothered by Mother Spain. The point,
however, is that if Uncle Sam frustrated that revolution by taking us over from
Mother Spain, he did not extinguish the insight that produced it.
One wonders what might have happened, what we might have
become, had Uncle Sam not taken up the White Man’s Burden; had he left the
Little Brown Brother alone. We might
have fallen into German or British hands; both these collectors of colonies had
warships in Manila Bay and were narrowly watching Dewey’s every move. But if these, too, decided that we were not
worth the effort to subdue us, or if we had been able to fight them off – what
then? Would we have fashioned a nation
for ourselves?
That we would have fashioned some kind of nation is surely
not in doubt. To call our Revolution a
mere “Tagalog insurrection,” as it was called in official and unofficial
reports to the American people, is like calling the French Revolution a Paris riot just because Paris was where the Bastille happened to be. No, indeed; “Tagalog insurrection” was not
reporting. It was propaganda. Propaganda to make its suppression look like
a walk-over to the boys who volunteered to come and “underneath the starry flag
civilize ’em with a Krag.” Propaganda
that wore pretty thin through the four years it took to make the little brown
brother cry “uncle”. The little brown
brother in Abra who spoke not Tagalog but Ilocano, the little brown brother in
Samar who spoke not Tagalog but Visayan.
But what welded these isolated islanders into a nation? Was it the novels of Rizal? The editorials of La Solidaridad? The state papers of Mabini? But most of those who died at Zapote Bridge
and Tirad Pass could not even read. Was
it oppression? But there was even worse
suppression earlier in our history, yet they did not generate more than local
uprisings – “insurrections” in the true and proper sense. At what critical threshold does the shared
endurance of oppression bring to birth a consciousness of brotherhood? What happened in the late 19th
century to make these little brown brother brothers? We have barely begun to clear a path into
this dense problematic; yet part of our national identity lies at the heart of
it.
This at least is sure: we were resolved to be a nation even
before Uncle Sam stepped in. We cannot
give him credit for that. What we can give him credit for is that he
recognized that resolve. Congress
admitted (with a mumbled apology, one
hopes, to the signers of the Declaration of Independence) that we had a right to
be free; immediately adding, however (with grateful nod to Rudyard Kipling),
that we were not yet ready to be free.
On the basis of this assessment the United States adopted a policy
toward the Philippines which was perhaps exceptional in that high tide of
imperialism. It introduced a form of
colonial rule deliberately intended to be self-liquidating; a responsibility
progressively to be shared with the colonized in the measure that they were
able and willing to assume it, and to be handed over to them whole as soon as
“a stable government shall be established therein.”
This, at least, was the intent. With what success it was put into effect is
another question. That the success was
partial, as with the laid plans of mice and men, may at once be admitted. It was successful to the extent that it strengthened our
commitment as a people to the ideal government by consent. Bataan, Corregidor, Capas, and the stubborn
resistance to Japanese occupation, even in those dark days when MacArthur’s “I
shall return” seemed an empty boast, provide ample proof. On the other hand, American economic policy
toward the Philippines seems to have retarded rather than promoted the
development of a society that would provide a solid base for the popular
democracy aimed at by American political policy.
At any rate, it is clear that we are not yet a fully
participatory polity, with citizens governing themselves instead of “masses”
being governed by their “betters.” But
with the world as it is now is, a global village riven by family feuds, we must
face up to the question of whether democracy is an attainable, or even a
desirable, ideal. Is this system of government invented by the Greeks before Christ was
born, and given currency in the Western world by a bourgeoisie educated in the classics, of any relevance to an
underdeveloped Asian nation under the shadow of Communist China, a shadow that
lengthens over our region as the shadow of the United States recedes? That is what we must now ask ourselves.
Even prescinding from
power politics, we are internally confronted by a dilemma – that between rapid,
planned development and popular government.
Rapid, planned development calls for a highly centralized authority with
the brains to formulate a single strategic plan and the power to execute
it. The trouble with such regimes is
that they are invariably managed by cold-blooded technocrats and enforced by
equally cold-blooded men in military uniforms – with the result that civil
rights like the freedom of speech and human rights like the right to life tend
to sink to a very low priority in the scale of values.
In a system of
popular government, obviously, these rights have a high priority. But such a system – or at least – our
experience of it – does not seem to permit development that is planned, much
less one that is rapid. And without
rapid, planned development what are our chances, as the world now is, for
survival as a people, let alone as a nation?
But perhaps it was not popular government as such that
failed us but our experience of it, our clumsy way of of making it work. Perhaps we should dare to say of democracy
what Chesterton said of Christianity; that the trouble with it is not that it
failed, but that it has never been tried.
Can we, then, make democracy work better, sufficiently better to enable
us to escape the horns of the dilemma? Can
we set up a third option between an oppressive authoritarianism and a
disoriented democracy? The is now what
we must bend our brains – and purify our hearts – to discover.
This was supposed to be an essay at defining the Filipino
identity. It has clearly come a
cropper. Even as an identikit, a police drawing of a wanted man who has no available
photograph, and whose appearance must be approximated by means of verbal
descriptions extracted from frightened or inattentive bystanders, it does not
even come close. Not, I think, for lack
of trying, but because of the nature of things.
It appears, from what has been said, that the Filipino identity is a
diversity, and thus defies definition.
If I may repeat what I said to this point on an earlier occasion, we
must steel ourselves against the shock of finding ourselves in a part of the
world a nation of Malay stock, socially structured on a basically Indonesian
pattern, obviously the recipient of a large infusion of Chinese blood and
attitudes, yet with a cultural heritage in part Spanish, in part Anglo-Saxon;
for this nation will be ourselves.
But even if we accept diversity as being of the essence of
our culture, this still leaves the problem of identity unresolved. For the diverse are not identical, and hence
identity can be achieved only by synthesis of them. It may well be that we cannot now define the
Filipino identity because we have not yet achieved it.
We have not yet brought our diversity to the point where a
new thing emerges that is nevertheless continuous with the old. To make a living identity out of our historic diversity:
that lies our hope. #
