Let me begin by telling you two stories which I think are worth pondering as you stand on the cusp of a new phase in your lives.
The first is an Arab tale that has been around in various forms since the 9th century.
There was a certain merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to the market. The servant came back trembling with fear. Master, he said, when I was in the market I met Death who threatened me. Lend me your horse so that I may flee this city and go to Samarra and avoid my fate. The merchant willingly agreed and the servant galloped away. Later that day, the merchant went to the market and there confronted Death. Why did you threaten my servant this morning, asked the merchant. No, no said Death, I did not threaten him. I was merely startled to see your servant in Baghdad because I have an appointment with him this evening in Samarra.
The second is an old Chinese fable.
There was a man who lived on China’s northern frontier. One day for no particular reason, his only horse ran away across the border. The other villagers tried to console him for his ill fortune. But the man replied, what makes you think this is not a blessing? A week later the horse returned accompanied by a splendid nomad mare. All the villagers congratulated him for his good luck. But the man replied, what makes you think this is not a curse? The man’s son delighted in riding the new mare but one day fell and was crippled. Again the villagers tried to console him. But the man replied, what makes you sure this is not a blessing? War came. Every able bodied young man in the village was conscripted to fight the nomads. Nine out of ten were killed, but since the man’s son was crippled he was not enlisted and survived.
Destiny and contingency — what has been indelibly written in the stars and the unfathomable vagaries of heaven — are not rivals. They are co-conspirators forever sporting with your lives. This is not just an abstract thought.
Twenty years ago on Saturday 11th December 1993, at about one thirty in the afternoon, a twelve storey luxury high-rise apartment complex in Kuala Lumpur called Highland Towers suddenly collapsed. Forty-eight people were crushed to death. A very good friend of mine lived there. He was never known for early rising and would usually still have been in bed on a weekend. However, on that particular Saturday for some inconsequential reason – I think it was to sell his car – he got up much earlier than usual and left his apartment about an hour before the disaster. So he was spared. But a few years later, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and died a lingering death.
We cherish the illusion of being in control of events. But in every decision, however trivial, the seeds of a thousand futures are sown. In an instant a world of hope shatters, even as life continues with insolent normalcy around you. In another instant infinite possibilities may flower. Joy and grief are inextricably intertwined. An ancient Roman philosopher once wryly observed, the most unhappy sort of unfortunate man is one who has been happy.
As you try to elude the stratagems of fate and chance and pursue a career, what you studied in the university will be of limited relevance. At least that has been my experience, perhaps because I studied political science and international relations. Politics, whatever else it may be, is certainly not a science. And having spent the last thirty-four years practicing the craft of diplomacy, I have come to the sad conclusion that any resemblance between what I studied about international relations and what I did for a living was purely coincidental.
I doubt my experience was exceptional. I know of no successful businessman who became successful just because he or she had a degree in business administration or management. Nobody ever become a leader by taking a leadership course.
Social science is an oxymoron. At best the social sciences provide metaphors that allow us to dimly glimpse an impenetrable reality in which nothing is ever ceteris paribus, an assumption which is a conceit of the most conceited of the social sciences. But those of you who have already enrolled in the faculty of social sciences, need not despair. All is not lost. I stand before you as living proof that the study of the social sciences will probably do you no permanent harm, provided you do not take it too seriously.
The world – or at least that part of it made up of human interactions and human institutions – is far too complex to be comprehended in a holistic way by the human mind. It is an intricate, chaotic and dynamic system characterized by so many feedback loops that its behaviour becomes more and more unpredictable. Ironically, our general answer to unpredictability is to develop ever more complexity: new technologies, new institutions, more regulation and more information.
To teach, to write, even to speak, is necessarily to simplify. We cannot opt out of the world. To deal with it we, consciously or unconsciously, resort to mental frameworks that simplify reality in order to enable us to comprehend it. The purpose of a university education, indeed all education, is to enrich our stock of these mental frameworks, the better to navigate the treacherous waters of life.
But we should not forget that these mental frameworks are only human artefacts. They are ideologies; social and political constructs that inevitably distort the reality they try to comprehend, or at best capture only a tiny and ephemeral sliver of it. But it is seductively easy to confound our ideas and opinions with ‘facts’. The highly educated, highly intelligent and highly successful are the most prone to this type of error.
We can truly know something only after it has happened. But if we can only know backwards, we must live forwards. Herein lies the essential fragility of human endeavour wherein the best laid plans are constantly ambushed by chance. We always know less than we believe we do. And our actions; the very effort to understand, changes the behaviours we try to understand and influence. Self-deception is an intrinsic part of human nature. So the odds are usually in favour of chance.
A former British politician, the late Enoch Powell, once wrote: “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.”
Powell was writing about the life of Joseph Chamberlain, the father of Neville Chamberlain who notoriously told the British Cabinet on the eve of World War II that Adolf Hitler would not deliberately deceive a man whom he respected and proudly proclaimed ‘peace in our time’ after meeting him. That alone demonstrates the infinite capacity of the human species to delude itself and that Powell’s insight has wider applicability than any specific individual or the field of politics.
Universities are premised on belief in reason. But human beings are seldom entirely rational. And the idea that in any situation there is an objective Truth discernible by exercise of reason is a myth. Pontius Pilate was said to have asked Jesus Christ ‘What is Truth?’. The reply was a quibble. I know of no convincing answer ever since.
This is a fundamentally illogical world, or rather a world of competing rationalities and rivalling logics, the sum of which is seldom logical. There is a deep human need to impose rational explanations on events that would otherwise compel us to confront the existential horror of being at the mercy of unpredictable and inexplicable forces; a need perhaps more keenly felt by Singapore civil servants and university professors than others of the human species. But there is no logical reason to believe that any logic we happen to favour is intrinsically more rational than any other logic.
I am not arguing that any opinion is as good as any other opinion. Of what value is my opinion on, say, brain surgery or engineering or mathematics? Absolutely nothing.
My argument is only that the intensity of belief in an idea or the reach of its acceptance is no guarantee of its validity. Truth if it exists, is always situational and conditional and thus at best only partially, temporarily and contingently ‘true’. This is being obscured by the ever more ubiquitous social media. Today we can, if we so choose, happily inhabit worlds of our own creation where the only voices we ever hear are those that we already agree with.
Alas, it is my impression that more and more of us are slipping into this 21st century form of monomania. We are becoming more solipsistic and struthious. Hearing only what we want to hear, we lose sight of the possibility of error. Not recognizing the omnipresence of error, we do not learn. Judgement which rests on breath and variety of experience, including the experience of being mistaken, is being devalued. The general view is that the social media and other new communication technologies enhance human freedom. Perhaps. But it seems to me that often it is only the freedom to choose our own chains.
There is no going back. Technologies cannot be unlearnt and their benefits are obvious and indisputable. But there is insufficient appreciation of how they are also redefining basic concepts of society, community and politics. And since man is a social and political animal, what the consequences will eventually be no one can yet say. It is already making an unpredictable world even more uncertain.
Life is a series of improvisations in response to unforeseen and unforeseeable events. We can only improvise wisely if we accept the world as it is and not as we hope or fear it to be. This is harder than you think. All too often, what passes for objectivity or originality or for critical thinking is merely the Pavlovian impulse to cry black if authority should say white. Again this tendency is exacerbated by the social media which divorces opinion from responsibility and from reality. Some people of course never needed the social media. But what was once just bar talk now can all too easily go viral.
To live in society – and we cannot but live in society – we need common assumptions. Otherwise even something as basic as language would not be possible. But there is generally an inverse correlation between certainty and significance. It is totally safe to assume that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow. So what?
How to determine what we can significantly hold in common as a nation or as the human species is often highly contentious. And even if consensus seems to have been reached, it is prudent to keep in mind that the reach of assumptions or their tenacity bears no necessary relationship with their validity.
Almost a quarter of a century ago, a neoconservative American scholar, Francis Fukuyama, wrote an essay that boldly proclaimed ‘the end of history’. History of course did not listen and went rolling along. A few years later Mr Fukuyama expanded his essay into a deeply learned book that argued that History had indeed ended, although the rest of us were insufficiently erudite to notice. A few more years later, he denied that he had ever been a neoconservative, and maintaining a discreet silence over his earlier prognostications, went on to write several hefty tomes on entirely different subjects.
It is easy to poke fun at the folibles of the learned. But a line can be drawn connecting the assumptions that Mr Fukuyama shared with others of his ilk and policies that left the Middle East in turmoil. Hundreds of thousands dead or wounded will not find consolation in subsequent mea culpas. Nor despite the disastrous outcomes, have these assumptions been abandoned or even seriously questioned. They continue to be enthusiastically propagated by those who have become prisoners of their own ideology.
The problem of reaching consensus on significant common assumptions is more acute for young countries such as ours with limited shared experiences. Singapore is not yet even fifty years old as a sovereign and independent country. That is but the blink of an eye in history. There is no dearth of foreigners eager to tell us what we should believe. And unfortunately some Singaporeans are all too ready to believe them. They may well have good intentions. But don’t forget where that proverbially leads us.
Your generation will have to endure a world of greater than usual political and intellectual fluidity. Irrespective of their specific form and institutions, all polities, apart from a handful mainly in the Middle East, today legitimate themselves by some variant of the notion of the sovereignty of the people and the idea that the individual is at the centre of the universe. These concepts took hold in the 18th century, and have been gathering momentum ever since. Yet looking around the world, it seems obvious that the collision of 18th century political philosophy with 21st century communications and other technologies is creating a global crisis of governance.
Governance is becoming dysfunctional because a dynamic of distrust inevitably arises. Social media blurs the distinction between opinion and expertise. If individuals believe they are sovereign and that their ego is the supreme value, they will sooner or later also come to believe that their opinion is good as anyone’s opinion and the inconvenient fact that not all opinions are created equal becomes politically incorrect. Then any disagreement however mild with any opinion by governments generates resentment and resistance. Yet the fundamental role of any government is to mediate between different views for the common good. Modern communications technologies accentuate this dynamic by conflating the idea of the ‘public’ with the views of individuals or small groups and providing the means for disseminating them widely and directly.
We cannot go back to legitimation by bloodline or the mandate of heaven. We cannot abandon technology. But how and whether we can cope are still open questions. The syndrome is most acute in the highly developed countries who eccentrically consider it a virtue. But no country, including our own, is entirely spared, although ours is as yet only a very mild case of this global disease.
I do not know when the dénouement will come or what form it will take. But come it must. This is not a stable equilibrium. It cannot hold.
The problem is exacerbated by flux in the structures and processes of international politics. The geopolitical order of the last two centuries is gradually but inexorably being displaced. But the rising new powers provide no real intellectual alternative. They are rising precisely because they were the best pupils of the old order. The new powers validate themselves by their own versions of the same political philosophy – fascism and communism share the same intellectual roots as democracy – and so today struggle with their own versions of the same ills of governance.
It is unclear what the future will bring. One may darkly speculate whether the technologies that were the fruits of our ingenuity have outpaced the capacity of our current political and social institutions to deal with them. One can of course always hope that human ingenuity will eventually cope with what our ingenuity has wrought. But hope is only just that: a hope which may well prove forlorn. At very least the interregnum between the current order and whatever will come after will be prolonged, measured in decades and characterized by recurrent crises.
As you go forward into this uncertain future, console yourself with the thought that if anything is possible, then too nothing is impossible. Isaiah Berlin famously made a distinction between the fox and the hedgehog: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”. Be a fox not a hedgehog because that one big thing the hedgehog thinks it knows may well be wrong. Intellectual consistency for its own sake is foolish. And remember too that the world is infested with hedgehogs masquerading as foxes. These mimics are particularly thick on the ground in universities and in some sections of the civil service.
Face uncertainty with a stoic and pragmatic scepticism rather than with false optimism. I said scepticism and not cynicism. False optimism lulls us into complacency. Scepticism keeps us alert to the multiple possibilities that are inherent in any situation. Pragmatism because the world will not arrange itself to suit our convenience. And stoicism because despite our best efforts, we may be entrapped by the snares of fate or chance and fail. But cynicism is corrosive and blinding. To confront uncertainty with cynicism is to handicap ourselves in the game of life and almost certainly to doom ourselves to failure.
I do not expect you to believe me. Youth is always sceptical of the scepticism of experience until it has acquired enough of its own. And of course, if you have paid even minimal attention to my ramblings, there is always the possibility that I am mistaken and have been talking arrant rubbish. For your sakes, I do most sincerely hope so.
by Bilahari Kausikan
