Pragmatism as a way of life

People may still mouth the necessary platitudes, but they now live mostly by whatever works regardless of how it works. Actions are assessed in terms of what they are able to effect, not the principled contexts that comfortable moralists, naive do-gooders, manipulative hypocrites and a few truly noble souls insist actions must be located in.

For a fairly long time, perhaps no more than a small minority of Filipinos subscribed to pragmatism as a way of life. The most powerful oligarchs suffering no effective check to their rapacity arrogantly practiced pragmatism. They raided and plundered the resources their governance extracted from the people. In both the public and the private sectors, their crony collaboration efficiently divested legitimate oligarchs – conjoining political and economic power – preceded Marcos and despite his rhetoric of democratic revolution and a New Society, Marcos ingeniously fortified the oligarchic tradition, creating new oligarchs and displacing many of those who failed to collaborate with him in his martial rule.

There was unavoidable pragmatism too from the most desperate poor – those who saw themselves as kapit sa patalim and could not pause to bother about questions of good and evil, right and wrong. Homeless and threatened by the elements, they squatted wherever they could. Jobless and confronting hunger, diseases and mounting hopelessness, the desperately poor did anything and everything to materially survive. For many of these people, dignity-robbing mendi-cancy, thievery, prostitution and even violent crimes became the only possible options. Desperate people do not anguish forever, taking forever to make their difficult choices in life. Historically, the truly destitute in this country – those who are not only mahirap but dukha – pragmatically took all the available survival option. Indeed, poverty and pragmatism are inseparable Siamese twins.

Until the oligarchs learned to more systematically and efficiently plunder the nation, destitute Filipinos were not so numerous. A good number of the citizenry might already be poor, but they were not reduced to being dukha yet. To effect this abject impoverishment, the brightest and smartest of oligarchs had to wield despotic power and this was precisely what Marcos’ proclamation of martial rule achieved. Mass impoverishment an massive pragmatism was the predictable result of the tyrant’s nightmarish administration.

Since Marcos’ fall, the numerous crises of economic depression, widespread criminality and political instability had intensified even more. More serious than any of these crises, however, is the present anarchy resulting from the combination of arrogance by the powerful would systematically run red lights, grab other people’s land and treat the law as no more than the gentlest hint of what one might consider doing, now the ubiquitous dukha act much the same. Where before corruption was primarily the powerful people’s turf, now the powerless and desperate are just as comfortable here as the powerful.

The pragmatic mindset of these two groups undermines all foundations of civilized society and falsifies any claim for the existence in this country of a Filipino nation, a collectively "imagined community". This may be too harsh a reality for people here to acknowledge but recent surveys confirm it. People might recoil from gorgonic truths, yet it appears from these studies that not only the adults but even more critically the youth are unable to seriously believe in entities and cause beyond their little selves.

There are, of course, Filipinos who do not belong to the two groups of pragmatists identified so far. Neither powerful nor dukha, many of them are decent, law-abiding and community-centered people. In the past two decades, they have found it increasingly difficult to function as human beings in a country where the law might be elegantly-lettered but remains unspirited and unobserved, where society’s numerous institutions might be easily named but are no more than nominal entities, and where the vocabulary of the authorities requires much facility in doublespeak for reliable understanding.

These Filipinos too are driven to a tragic kind of pragmatism. Unable to contemplate losing their humanity by remaining in an uncaring country, they increasingly train their sights abroad and often – with the greatest reluctance and deep sadness – do migrate with their families. To date, far too many of the Philippines’ truly best and brightest people have had to leave. Their exodus continues.

Pragmatism currently beggars everyone in this country. This is only too clear when a recent opinion survey reveals that Filipinos would trust a foreign leader vastly more than their own president. Equally revealing is the finding that neither their highest political leader nor their most eminent religious caretaker gets to be trusted by a majority – even the slimmest majority – of Filipinos. When a pragmatic people are unable to trust their own leaders in times of deep crisis, it must be that their pragmatism had taken so much away from them.

How sad for a people to lose so much of their ability to trust each other, to insist on what simply works for oneself or one’s family, to be so mercilessly pragmatic that human compassion becomes rare and ultimately disappears.