Why literature? It does not teach us how to run a business and make a fortune. The traditional function of the writer, the poet, the storyteller is that of a teacher, a recorder of history, and the infallible creator of the granite foundation on which a nation stands. In other words, literature gives a nation its identity and memory.
What is Greece without Homer, England without Shakespeare, Spain without Cervantes and Filipinas without Rizal?
Another function of the writer is to create a clear mirror of his time, emphasizing the obvious, so that his readers will then be able to see themselves as they are. Self-knowledge is the most important of all knowledge. It enables us to know our strengths, which we will then put to the test, and to point out our weaknesses, which we must vanquish.
Perhaps the least understood but most important function of literature is in its depiction of moral dilemmas. In presenting such dilemmas, it enables readers to make distinctions between right and wrong, it allows us to use our God given freedom of moral choice. No religion can do this. Nor any government or political movement. Literature, above all, teaches us ethics. Only literature can, for which reason, Jesus was also a story teller, and the Bible the greatest novel ever written.
Literature – the noblest of the arts – implies that writers are of noble bearing. It is not always so; in the recent past some of us pandered to Marcos. We can be wicked, and corrupt – and this is why I have always insisted writers must be judged not only by their pious pronouncements but by how they live. The inseparable Socratic precept of virtue and excellence, valid for the ancients, is even more our need today.
A writer contributes to the culture of his society. How important is this culture to a nation and its development? If culture determines direction, perhaps with it we can answer these questions: In the Fifties and Sixties, we were THE country in Southeast Asia. Why did we slip behind? Why have our neighbors surpassed us?
The American writer James Fallows postulated more than a decade ago that our pitiable condition can be traced to our "damaged culture." Really? Pakikisama, utang na loob, pasikat, ningas cogon? Aren’t we moving forward in spite of these?
Much as I would like to believe that our economy is doing better, several facts deny this euphoric perception. Our population increase is eating up all our economic gains. Our natural resources have been ravaged and they are not renewable. Some 15 years ago, more than 50 percent of grade school pupils had to stop at grade five; millions of adult Filipinos therefore are ill prepared for better jobs. Corruption is rife in government, our courts are discredited, and no citizen can feel safe with our police.
We know enough of our poverty – it is everywhere for us to see in our squatter shacks, our street children. It explains the migration of thousands of Filipinos so that they will have a better life. If the Filipino dream cannot be fulfilled here, perhaps – just perhaps – it will be in the gilded cities of America, in the pitiless deserts of the Middle East, and even in the yakuza brothels in Japan.
But a greater poverty afflicts us, distorts the national will and damns us with the wastefulness of cronyism and corruption. And this poverty, exacerbated by a profligate oligarchy and a leadership that has lost its ethical moorings, is the poverty of the spirit.
How do we reclaim the sense of nation, of goodwill that had in the past lifted our people and our leaders from apathy and propelled them to fight colonialism?
When I read the Noli for the first time as a child I wept over the agony of Sisa over Crispin and Basilio, her two sons wrongly accused by a Spanish friar. That early, I learned what injustice was, recognized it as an evil that can only be destroyed by truth which is justice in action.
We acquire knowledge in the university – how to make money, how to utilize the sciences, but wisdom and compassion – these are altogether different acquisitions. If literature teaches us ethics, then it follows that the literature departments of universities are the ethical centers of these institutions. It follows, further, that universities are also the genuine cathedrals of the nation where we can acquire virtue, much more than from those magnificent churches and massive religious rallies.
You will have to contend with new challenges wrought by technology, with those that my generation created.
I am truly sorry for all of you because I cannot tell you that the future is rosy. It is bleak because my generation was weak, because we created leaders like Marcos, when we should have created more leaders like Jose Abad Santos, Ramon Magsaysay, Arsenio Lacson, Jose W. Diokno. Now, the future is for you to shape.
You will encounter great difficulty finding jobs.
In all probability, within the next few years, many of you will lose your idealism if not your integrity, as indeed, so many in my own generation betrayed the ideals of our youth.
More than 40 years ago when I was finishing my first novel, The Pretenders, it came to me with great lucidity and finality this idea that we can yet get out of our deepest malaise only by accepting the necessity of a revolution – the same revolution that the masa mounted against the Spanish regime in 1896.
Revolution? Come again – isn’t one being waged now by the New People’s Army? And what about our Moro brothers who are also waging war and demanding a separate state?
Let me explain.
Our aborted revolution in 1896 clearly defined the enemy – Spanish colonialism. We must now clearly identify our enemy and it is still colonialism in its most despicable form for it is now the colonialism of the Filipino elite itself. Remember – a nation need not be a colony of a foreign power – it can be a colony of its own leaders. We are a colony of the rich Chinese who send their money to China, to Hong Kong and Taiwan. We are a colony of the rich Spanish mestizos who send their money to Europe. And finally, we are a colony of the rich Indios who send their money to Switzerland and America. They collaborated with our colonizers in the past and inherited from them their attitudes and vices.
But there is a more insidious enemy than these native colonizers and this enemy lurks in the shadows, in the secret niches of our own psyche. We are a colony because we permit ourselves to be colonized, because we don’t ostracize or condemn our colonizers. Evil prospers when good men are silent. We marched to the tune of phony nationalists like Claro M. Recto and Lorenzo Tañada who opposed land reform. If nationalism is to be truly meaningful, it must have profound social relevance, it must be much much more than anti-Americanism or simple flag waving. What does a nationalist ideology mean to the peasant who fought the Spaniards, the Americans and the Japanese?
Listen, even if the New People’s Army wins, even if the Moros succeed in creating a Moro state – they will still fail because they are Filipinos, hostage to old habits of the mind, to the culture that has condemned us as James Fallows had postulated, to ethnicity, the barkada, the towering egos we never transcend.
Individualism carried to its absurdity. Yabang – this is perhaps the foremost reason why we have never been able to get our act together. Look at our aborted Revolution in 1896, the breakup of the Huk leadership and the present splintering of the Communist Party. And our politicians – how yabang they are, how unable they are to recognize their limitations for which reason we have movie stars, basketball players, TV personalities aspiring for positions they are not intellectually or professionally capable of holding – and all because of yabang. And look at our status symbols, the fancy mansions of social climbers, the useless expenditures for frills – all the giddy evidence of yabang that has blighted Filipino society because this yabang is not identified with genuine achievement and/or excellence. It is our educational system that will promote critical standards. Again – the Socratic precept of virtue and excellence. For without these standards, we will always have foisted before us popular politicians who have nothing to offer but hollow promises.
So Cory Aquino goes around telling the world she had restored democracy in the Philippines with Edsa 1. What nonsense – Edsa 1 was a real revolution, and almost bloodless at that. But she turned that revolution into a restoration of the oligarchy.
Yes, we have free elections, albeit often marred by cheating, we have a rambunctious free press, we have free worship. But all these are the hollow institutions of democracy – not the essence. The essence of democracy is in the stomach – as when the taxi driver in Washington can eat the same steak that President Bush eats in the White House. What lower class Filipinos eat is not the same food that is served in the mansions in Forbes Park. Listen, there is widespread hunger in our country now. Many landless workers and slum dwellers eat only once a day.
Revolution by itself is not enough unless it is first imbibed in the heart and mind, unless it is coupled with education – a long and tedious process far more difficult than mounting a revolution itself which simplifies choices.
This education is not just learning how to manufacture better and cheaper goods as did Korea and Taiwan. It has to do with our insides, remolding our minds, our guts, and instilling in us an iron sense of nation, vision and confidence.
Recently, an American visitor asked me if it was possible to liken Philippine conditions today to those in America in the age of the robber barons. I said no – there is a big difference. The Vanderbilts, the J.P. Morgans, the Rockefellers – they were nation builders. They laced America with railroads, built steel industries, they laid down the basic infrastructure of an industrial United States. And most of all, they did not squander their money abroad. It stayed in America.
So every president goes around with a begging bowl, asking for foreign investments. We don’t need those foreign investments – there is enough money in Philippine hands – if those moneys were not sent abroad. When Rafael Salas left government in the ’70s to take on the job as population czar in the United Nations, he told me that if Marcos returned all the money he had stashed abroad, our foreign debt then which was around $21 billion, would have been wiped out.
Look at our banking system – how much better if interest rates were not excessive, if our banks operated not as pawnshops but as easy sources of venture capital, if factories, not fancy condos and shopping malls, were built. How much better if our businessmen were to realize that money is like fertilizer. To do any good, it must be spread around. Listen now to the forgotten but egalitarian cliches that fired American enterprise – a Ford in every garage, a chicken in every pot. Eighty million Filipinos, 80,000,000 customers! To achieve such goals is, itself, revolutionary for a revolution need not necessarily mean the shedding of blood but more and more sweat and perhaps even tears.
As a writer, I have tried to rekindle our memory, to exalt our past even if it denigrates us, for this past defines who we are, what we can do, where we can go. Look into this past, and know that we have a revolutionary tradition, that we are a heroic people. Rizal symbolizes all of us.
In the Noli, when Ibarra returns to his hometown, he proceeds to build a school. Rizal affirmed that the way to liberty and progress is also through education. In fact, he was an educator first, then a novelist, an artist, a poet, a sculptor, a medical doctor, a scholar, and a martyr at so young an age, 35. Listen – where in the world is the country that has produced a man like this indio, this Rizal, but Filipinas. But listen again – Rizal did not compromise. Neither should we.
Today, some three million Filipinos are all over the world – I hope that they will return someday with their expertise to build this nation. It is possible that you will join them and if you do, do justice to yourselves and to our unhappy country by never forgetting her.
And remember most of all that the strongest man is he who stands alone.
I hope you will be this strong Filipino, alone though you may be.