From immigrants to self-exploration

The Singapore government is proposing a 'national integration council' to bridge the gaps between locals and foreign immigrants. Sometimes, I really think we need to reconsider our 'committees and panels' style of governance that is already becoming a 'naturalized mindset' most Singaporeans don't think too much of. In HK, the public and members of the LegCo often question the composition and effectiveness of consultation teams. In a case like integration of immigrants, one should wonder if a top-down approach is the best way forward.

One trick of the government, though, that I discovered recently is that it always tries to prevent stark dichotomies by shaping a third 'field' of identity - a centre that all parties have to move towards. However such a strategy tends to fail when the gravity of that centre is not strong enough, or when there are visible, immutable traits present in any one of these parties. In the case of immigration, the core - Singapore citizenship - is not strong as it is not well-defined and is plagued by accusations of economic pragmatism and instrumentality i.e. foreigners come because they want the money, and they will leave when the pot of gold is finished. At the same time, the local community has already developed some features that define us as 'local Singaporeans', including the Singaporean accent that is often hard to reverse. This sets up a mentality that can be expressed by Nietzsche term 'resentment' in his On the Genealogy of Morals. Resentment is conceptualized as 'the specific practice of identity displacement, in which the social actor consolidates his identity by a complete disavowal of the merits and existence of his social other'. So, one becomes 'good' by constructing the 'other' as evil. No matter how hard the government tries to highlight the necessity of immigrants so as to prevent a 'COMPLETE disavowal of the merits' of foreigners, some traits never change and so the foreigner, no matter how hard we try, will still appear as an opposing existence to us. And because some collective memories such as colonialism, backwardness of China and India etc has yet been totally erased from our genes, even within foreigners that we see collectively as 'the other', we tend to impose different stereotypical opinions and see foreigners in different light depending on their colors, nationalities and social classes.

Now, a 'pragmatic' Singapore may not talk about all these, but we all know these distinctions exist - we feel the undercurrents, and occasionally see waves. And come to think of it, 'pragmatism' itself as a national discourse is in fact an attempt to prevent us from conceptualizing and understanding all these underlying differences, isn't it? It tries to stop 'cultural politics of differences' from arising, but while it's worked since Independence I wonder how much longer such a rhetorical stand can withstand the tides of globalization and call for self-expressions, particularly with P-65 politicians who are increasingly losing the tactfulness of the Old Guard. The thing is, all these issues will sooner or later surface with the resistance towards over-prominence of government rhetoric portrayed by the mainstream media, globalization as brought to us through the Internet, and increasing individualisation in which everybody strives to 'know oneself' so as to try to control every part of one's Being. Is this not the case with most of us today, regardless of whether we do have a conscious idea of the influences upon us? I have always been wary not to be fall into the fallacious traps of post-modernism and post-structuralism, and I acknowledge that there is much we can draw from past traditions and present practices. Nonetheless I just think that our mindset of escapism from facing up to all these issues has to be corrected. It is in us not to think deep into what the Western societies are going through, presumably because we have grown up in a web of discourses that make us believe that talking about all these issues is 'bad' and 'detrimental' to the functioning of society. But ideas are infiltrating into our society, and youths are catching on, so it is time we reacted as well. The present state of affairs please us, but if we see potential problems then we need to get to the root of things and try to formulate ways to pre-empt the sweeping degradation of social values. That is one thing I learnt from Chinese educated youths of the present and the past. At the end of the day, I still believe in governance by a core group of politicans, but it is only when we live as individuals with a sense of responsibility to the collective that we break free from Asian culture of suppression (of expression, of ideas, of the right to THINK freely) for control, but also do not end up like the ultra-individualist West.