Nation, Self and Citizenship: An Invitation to Philippine Sociology

Introduction

Randolf S. David

The quality of mind that C. Wright Mills called the sociological imagination consists in the ability to view social reality as it is projected from three coordinates—history, society, and biography. The individual who possesses a sociological imagination, Mills says, is able to understand her personal circumstances in relation to the structural features of her society. She does not regard these structures as static, but as evolving in time, shaped by innumerable contingencies, and following no discernible telos or destiny.

The present volume takes off from this wonderful insight of Mills. It invites the student to learn sociology by looking at her own formation as a human being, growing up and living in a society that time incessantly shapes and organizes in a specific but ultimately unpredictable way.

Instead of talking about society in the abstract, we give it names—our families, our communities, the Filipino nation, or the vast planet that we must share with the different nations of the world. Instead of talking about just anybody’s biography, we refer to one’s own life-long project of building, negotiating, and asserting a self. We look at the projects of nationhood and selfhood as ongoing achievements, subject to the blind imprints of the past, the contingencies of the present, and our individual and collective strivings for a better future.

The point at which society and biography intersect is for us an opportunity to explore the interplay between citizenship and personal autonomy, and between social responsibility and individual perfection.

American sociology hardly talks about citizenship and nationhood, perhaps because the American nation is secure in its moorings. It is the fate of the individual in society that is consistently problematized. In contrast, the discourse of nationhood and social responsibility pervades almost every area of Philippine social science. The Filipino nation is unfinished business, and therefore it is understandable that in public discourse the nation’s needs take moral precedence over individual fulfillment. Thus, the book takes up the troubled quest of the modern Filipino for autonomy and meaning in the bosom of his own society, a young nation that is itself aspiring to grow into full modern nationhood in a globalized and, some say, postmodern era.

The book is divided according to the three perspectives from which we view the evolving realities of our society: the project of nationhood, the project of selfhood, and the dialectic of citizenship and personal autonomy.

This book was crafted and is here being offered as an introduction to Philippine sociology. Integrative essays individually written by the three coauthors introduce the three parts. These introductions seek to provide the theoretical lens through which the various articles selected for the present book may be viewed.

The short articles that appear in this book were originally written as essays for a Sunday column titled Public Lives that I have maintained in the Philippine Daily Inquirer for the past seven years. Writing this column has been for me an opportunity to reflect on many topics using a sociological and sometimes philosophical vocabulary that can be appreciated by anyone who loves ideas. Without any deliberate plan on my part, these essays have neatly fallen under two general categories, namely, those that deal with national and global problems, and those that have a more personal focus. In 1998, I played with these categories and compiled some of my columns into a book published by Anvil with the title: Public Lives: Essays on Selfhood and Social Solidarity.

The decision to anthologize some of these columns came mainly in response to frequent requests by many students and teachers for copies of past essays. I came to know that many of these articles were being used as discussion starters for social science classes. They were brief and typically current, and the language in which they were written fell somewhere between the popular and the theoretical.

My greatest satisfaction, of course, comes from knowing that my own former students who are now teachers in various schools allover the country have been faithfully compiling these columns and incorporating them into their course outlines. It was suggested to me that I would be filling an important need if I could make my own careful selection of these essays, organize them into sections within a coherent outline, and preface each part with an extended theoretical introduction. After careful thought, I decided that a better alternation would be for my younger colleagues in sociology to take a look at the entire harvest of seven years, and from this select those articles that they think would best serve the needs of their students.

I consider myself very lucky to have been able to work in this project with three of the best students that I have had in the course of my 35-year career as a sociology teacher. I was their professor in more than one course and both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. I can safely assume that they know by now how my mind works or does not work, and that they would be familiar with the broad theoretical perspectives and debates from which the columns I wrote sprang.

The fine introductions that my co-authors, Gerardo Lanuza, Josephine Dionisio, and Arnold Alamon—now my colleagues in the UP Department of Sociology—have written may be read as informed engagements with the arguments of the columns. Their individual essays are more than summaries or syntheses of my columns. Indeed, they extend, clarify, and interrogate the articles, but more importantly, they provide the crucial framework by which these columns may be read as traces, I would like to think, of a sociological imagination at work.

PART ONE

NATIONHOOD

Introduction:

The Project of Nationhood

Josephine Dionisio

We can resolve to come together

In the new beginning, start all over

We can break the cycle, we can break the chain

We can start allover in the new beginning

We can learn, we can teach, we can share

The myths, the dream, the prayer, the notion

That we can do better

Change our lives and paths

Create a new world.

–A New Beginning

Tracy Chapman, 1994

Achieving the Filipino Nation

¹

None of us is born nationalist. As we grow up, our first identification is not with the nation but with our families or our tribal communities. We only come to know about the existence of the nation in concrete terms when we attend school—where we are routinely shown the symbols of our nation and where we are initiated into the ritualistic display of nationalism. We are taught, for instance, to sing the national anthem or to recite a pledge of allegiance to the flag, even before it becomes clear to us what the words in the anthem or in the pledge actually mean. So although the nation is something remote and abstract, its existence is something we take for granted because it refers to a particular type of memory that we are obliged to have because we are all part of the state.

But this taken-for-granted reality of a unified Filipino nation within the territorial boundaries of the Philippine state now faces serious challenges. Recent patterns of large-scale migration, for instance, have made traditional territorial boundaries more permeable, and have made it possible for a lot of Filipinos to change their citizenship without necessarily giving up their identity as Filipinos. At the same time, Muslims in Mindanao continue to fight for their right to self-determination as a separate nation. To many Filipinos, the existence of a Filipino nation is not only remote and abstract, it is also being questioned.

These are probably only some of the reasons why most young people today find it hard to confidently answer the question: Who is Filipino? In an attempt to give a definitive answer to this question, many of my freshmen students often cite the constitutional provision on citizenship declaring that Filipinos are those who are citizens of the Philippines. Some disagree and insist that being Filipino cannot simply be defined in terms of citizenship. A debate usually ensues—a classmate shares the story of a cousin or a friend, who are American citizens or have become naturalized Australians but still embody what we may identify as distinguishing characteristics of a Filipino.

In some instances, my students would give a visual representation of the distinguishing characteristics of a Filipino. They would mount on the board a collage of brown skinned men and women wearing barong tagalog and baro’t saya, who in most cases are either in church or in a rice paddy. Words like close family ties, bahala na, pakikisama, crab mentality, or ningas cogon would dominate the collage of descriptions of their values. But when asked to place themselves in this collage of the Filipino, they would soon realize that although they are sure of themselves as Filipinos, they do not resemble any of the images they have chosen to identify the Filipino. The discomfort would become more intense as they realize that not all of them go to a Catholic Church or have seen a rice paddy before; none of them would consider themselves as fatalistic or having a crab mentality. I would then assure my students that their current uncertainty about their national identity should not make them insecure about themselves as individuals and as Filipinos. Instead, this realization should make their generation feel freer to create their own collage of the Filipino nation.

The first part of this book walks us through some of the many possible collages of the Filipino nation. The idea that the nation is neither a destiny nor an end in itself but rather a continuing work of creation for the fulfillment of individual happiness is the dominant theme of this book’s Part One: Nationhood. The articles in Section 1 invite us to situate the Filipino nation by reexamining our nation’s history, assessing its coordinates in a globalized world environment, and, in the context of a postmodern society, revaluing the virtues and meanings that we hold dear. In Section 2, we are asked to reflect on the contingency of our solidarity as a nation, and to accept that there may be other sources of identities. Affinities and identities based on race and ethnicity, gender, or class should be made to flourish in a reconceived Filipino nation, where nationalism is only one among the many respected expressions of social solidarity. That the task of nationhood includes the challenge of reinventing our institutions so as to justify to the current generation the continued existence of the Filipino nation is the organizing theme of the articles in Section 3. Part One of this book is an invitation for us to invent ways of achieving the Filipino nation. It argues that for the current generation, the more exciting adventure is to find out, why Filipino?

Rewriting the Narrative of the Filipino Nation

We have always perceived of ourselves as lacking in a virtuous national character, and have always blamed this perceived weakness as a people for the failure of our institutions. The articles in The Nation and Its Past were selected to highlight the historicity of the Filipino nation’s unfinished business of forging a collective identity. They offer a fresh perspective in reviewing the nation’s journey through successive rounds of colonization, and the challenges that it confronts as an independent nation. They argue that the formidable task of nationhood requires us to first rethink our history from the point of view of the future.

The articles The Centennial that Was, and Why We Remember dare us to revisit our past as a nation using Nietzsche’s notion of critical history, and Renato Constantino’s pragmatic concept of a usable past. History from these perspectives is not merely the practice of digging up the hidden truth of the past that will enable us to understand ourselves better. History is seen as a tool with which to write and rewrite a memory for a people who are constantly reflecting on the ways to achieve nationhood.

Nietzsche’s critical review of history allows us to do away with images of our past that make us resentful and desperate. For instance, as our national hero Jose Rizal has pointed out with indignation, the indolence of the Filipino is simply a label pasted on us by our colonizers. We need not think of ourselves nor live our lives as such. Critical history dares us to be brave enough to remember all those painful and shameful episodes in our history with the intention of gaining an understanding of ourselves as individuals and our goals as a nation. It shows us how the act of recounting even the darkest moments in our history can cleanse our spirits and help us see that grieving needs to stop at one point to give way to the act of reclaiming our lives.

The article Language, Nationalism and Identity, reminds us that the Filipino nation is in part an invention of European-educated Filipino intellectuals who we know now as our heroes. Inspired by the upheavals in Europe in the 1800s, the ilustrados helped spawn a revolution that catalyzed the emergence of what we now refer to as the Filipino nation.² They started to aspire for an identity other than simply being subjects of Spain or of the Catholic Church. Jose Rizal dared to imagine that the name Filipino may also refer to all those who were born in the Philippines and not exclusively to Spaniards born in the Philippines. "Kalayaan, Vol. I No. I" recounts how print media using the native language as a tool of resistance disseminated the narrative of a people being denied their right to a national identity. The powerful image inspired a people to take up arms to claim the identity that they strongly felt was theirs. Thus, the Filipino nation as an imagined community was born.

However, the narrative of a glorious history of Filipino nationalism has not been compelling enough to sustain acts of heroism for the nation, or spirited citizenship, on a daily basis. Filipino nationalism suddenly comes alive from time to time to rally the people in booting out authoritarianism or incompetence in government. But these brief celebrations of unity and resolve quickly dissolve into apathy as life in these islands proceeds with its daily round of tormenting pettiness, anarchy, and corruption. Obviously, it is not enough that one is able to recite her duties as a citizen to become a dutiful citizen. Spirited citizenship can only be harnessed if one is able to enjoy the rewards, and to understand the significance to nationhood of her small acts of conscientiousness.

That solidarity based on national identity remains weak in the Philippines is probably best articulated by the state’s failure to provide its citizens with an acceptable reason to remain Filipino. The euphoria of people power did not linger long enough to inspire successive government administrations to develop inventive ways of forging the great Filipino nation that our heroes envisioned. Abject poverty pushes countless Filipinos to leave the country hoping that they could secure a more livable future in another country. The unresolved conflict in Mindanao threatens to rip the nation apart. In spite of the fact that the curriculum of public schools in this country requires a heavy load of courses in Philippine history or civics and culture, school children are still ambivalent about retaining a Filipino citizenship.³

Constantino’s pragmatic view of our past, a view that cares to solve the problems of the present, will make us accept the contingencies of our past and our existence as a nation. As mentioned in Remembering Martial Law, American pragmatist William James urges us not to treat our description of events as representative of truth and reality. A nation needs to continuously redescribe its historical milestones as it attempts to use history as a guide to the present. The simple act of moving our Independence Day celebrations from July 4 to June 12 permitted us to cut the psychological umbilical cord that linked our souls to America and enabled us to imagine ourselves as a truly independent nation. The confidence we gained from this act should be used to assert our interests as a people especially when dealing with our former colonizers.⁴ In Looking Back At EDSA, we are reminded that a usable past will … never leave us disgusted or demoralized about the future, because it is seen only ….from the clear vantage point of someone who has figured out the road to the future. Viewing important events in our national history from this angle allows us to reflect on meanings that we need to assign to historical events to make them more instructive of how to pursue our tasks for the future.⁵

By situating the nation in its past in this manner, we will be able to see nationhood not as the search for a destiny, but rather as an attempt to create our own destiny. A nation is an imagined community, says Benedict Anderson, because the members of even the smallest nations will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives an image of their community (Anderson, 1991: 6). Mass communication serves as the purveyor of these images that ultimately become the community’s collective memory. From this perspective, nation refers to an emotional attachment to an image borne out of mediated interaction rather than to a legal, rational or even historical commonality. You cannot touch it but you can feel it. Nationalism therefore need not be grounded on primordial ties based on a shared cultural heritage or ethnic origin. One need not look for a true Filipino identity, it is enough to invent one. In this sense, nationalism can be created at will, and its contours are limited only by our imagination rather than by political entities or territorial boundaries.

Our weak sense of nationalism results from our vague sense of a national identity, and a lack of a compelling national imaginary. It is not so much because we are unsure of who we are, but more importantly because we are still unsure of who we want to become. Nationhood remains as a valid and urgent agenda for all of us who believe that we deserve and can collectively weave a different narrative for the Filipino nation.

We will struggle on,

No matter how long it takes …

Until we establish a just community

of free men and women in our land,

dancing together, working and striving together, singing and dancing together,

laughing and loving together.

—A Nation for Our Children

Jose W. Diokno

The Nation in a Changing World

Many of my students welcome the advent of globalization, and see it as a catalyst of modernization and diversity. To many of them, the ability to buy imported goods from every comer store, or the possibility of cruising the world from your bedroom through surfing the internet represent everything that is good and desirable about globalization. But the globalized order is not only about the fusion of diverse cultures, or hybridization. Globalization is also about globalism.⁶ It is also about corporations that kill-off competition (and in the process, diversity) by smothering the markets of the world with their goods (and sometimes by actually creating their own competitors) in order to fatten their bottom-line. Indeed, globalization actually limits our choices.

To defend ourselves from the homogenizing and alienating tendencies of globalization, we need a state that is able to exercise creative and effective governance. Governance is not simply the fashioning and execution of laws. More importantly, it involves solving social problems that tend to lessen the quality of our life. The article Who’s Afraid of Globalization contends that the state has the responsibility of ensuring that the breakneck pace of globalization will not worsen the already pathetic quality of life of most Filipinos. It needs to harmonize the efforts of government, the business sector, and civil society in ensuring that basic social services are efficiently delivered. It cannot simply wait for the market to do this job.

The first casualty in the globalized regime is one’s unique identity. Thus, one way of framing the urgent task of the nation in a changing world is to assert ourselves as a people against the regimentation of the new global order. We can successfully do this by creating an image of a proud Filipino for our children, and convincing them to choose it as their own identity. The state must then seize the project of nationhood, and offer it as a convincing agenda for the current generation by having a firm grasp of the aspirations and the sensibilities of this generation. This is the only way it will be able to win and deserve their loyalty as citizens as intimated in Globalization and National Identity.

But Globalization Blues cautions us that a strong sense of nationalism is not inherently or permanently ideal. Nationalism can also breed chauvinism and xenophobia, which can have very violent consequences such as race riots or ethnic cleansing. This dangerous myth of nationalism is expressed in the insistence of many states (and even nationalist movements) that as a nation, they constitute within their territorial boundaries an undivided people with common characteristics such as language, religion, or ethnicity. Such a claim can only be regarded as a myth because, especially in this age of boundless opportunities for migration and mixed marriages, no nation can identify any single characteristic that is common to all its members. In many cases, it is an attempt to justify practices of discrimination against migrant workers who compete for jobs and services that are fast becoming limited. The fear of losing out in a highly competitive market, the basic insecurity over one’s life and livelihood provokes hatred against those who are considered as foreigners, aliens, new arrivals, different, or simply not one of us.

The postmodern world poses even greater challenges to the project of achieving a nation. It asks us to doubt our most indisputable beliefs and to rethink our most unwavering commitments. There is a need to adapt our concepts and laws pertaining to ownership and privacy, as the private domain increasingly becomes public in this age of electronically recorded files. While it is always tempting to dismiss anything different from the norm as illegal or immoral, we have to redraw the limits of what is permissible and what is not in this society. Thus, we may be more accommodating of the many novel ways of doing things that unravel each day in this postmodern age.⁷

Cyberspace and other high tech devices provide the young with seemingly boundless opportunity to achieve personal emancipation, unavailable to earlier generations. As discussed in Conversations for Sale increasing virtuality and mediatedness also give rise to worsening alienation, unbearable loneliness, and maddening numbness. Shadow Work and Necessary Interruptions help us realize how modern society’s obsession for speed makes our lives more oppressive as we helplessly race through time while we go about the routines of daily life. Nationhood in this context therefore entails the huge challenge of creating more venues for invigorating face-to-face interaction. It should provide us with more opportunities to find one’s bearing given the disorienting pace of modern life through the warmth and happiness that only human companionship could bring.

The task of nationhood in a global age is therefore a complex project that creates solidarity based on a national imaginary that is respectful of difference and mindful of common sufferings. Nationalism in a global age should not fear the presence of difference, nor should it require a monopoly over one’s identity. To be a nationalist in a global age is to be a cosmopolitan. The article Nationalism in a Global Age, says that:

To be a cosmopolitan—a citizen of the cosmos—does not mean renouncing nationalism or obliterating the memory that grounds us to the country of our ancestors. But it does mean declaring our commitments and intelligently defendingthem instead of assuming them to be right all the time or appropriate for everyone. In a world in which more and more people no longer feel bound to live or die in the country of their birth, in which cultures have become mobile and one’s identity is no longer rooted in geography, there will be no room for nationalist fundamentalism.

Imagine there’s no countries,

It isn’t hard to do,

Nothing to kill or die for,

No religion too,

Imagine all the people

living life in peace…

—Imagine

John Lennon

Nations Without Nationalism?

¹⁰

The concept of nation, says Ernest Gellner, emerged within the context of the radical transformation of Europe into a modern society in the late 1800s.⁸ Improved transportation and communication systems that came with the spread of commerce and industry brought remote and isolated regions into easy contact with markets and metropolitan centers. The birth of an industrial economy required a workforce who possessed a new set of skills that can no longer be learned within the confines of the home or of the parish. Such a requirement instigated the establishment of a secular education system that utilized a standardized curriculum and a common language as medium for instruction. Uniformity and homogeneity were needed to facilitate the training en masse of a mobile and continuously changing workforce that could easily fit into the new division of labor.

People from different places with diverse cultures and languages learned that the new division of labor now serves as their unifying community. The new division of labor and system of education thus created a semblance of equality and unity, and hid the ways through which differences were violently suppressed by the state. Nation-building became a euphemism for homogenization. The claim of most modern states that they constitute a unified nation within their boundaries can, therefore, be seen as a myth that became congenial to solidifying the emerging nation-states in Europe.⁹

For Gellner a nation is not founded on some inherent common characteristic of a group of people. He holds that nationalism is the organization of human groups into large, centrally educated, culturally homogeneous units. From this perspective, the roots of nationalism lie not in human nature or on an essential characteristic common to a group of people but in the dynamics of the modern social order that relies, for its reproduction, on a complex division of labor that demanded standardization, uniformity, and homogeneity.

Thus, the narrative of the nation has always been a convincing source of identity for us individuals who are in dire need of making sense of our world and of ourselves. The belief that we belong to a group with whom we share a common memory of the past and vision of the future allows us to weave our own biographies. Choosing to identify with a nation, however, has always been like entering into a relationship with a jealous lover who demands your unconditional loyalty. Nationalism supposedly supersedes all other allegiances, and it is this myth that has justified the violent suppression of other affinities and identities that by accident happen to flourish within the territorial boundaries of the nation-state.

The history of a nation has always been entangled with the story of war and destruction. Countless individuals have been so enamored with the noble ideal of country above self as to choose the path of murder and self sacrifice in the name of nationalism. Countries in Europe used the myth of nationalism as a battlecry while waging their wars against each other. In the hands of Hitler in World War II, nationalism deteriorated into the hideous form of ultranationalism, which he used to justify the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jewish people.

In the colonies and in the hands of nationalist fighters, the myth of nationalism served as an inspiration in the struggle against colonialism and oppression, which took on an anti-imperialist form in the 1970s. Nationalist struggles in the Third World subsumed all other issues to forge a united front against imperialism, and to focus on their fight for national independence. People coming from different classes or religion fought side by side against a common foreign enemy, united by a strong sense of national identity that they believed superseded their differences.

Frantz Fanon criticizes the view that a nation is a fundamental and indivisible unit because of factors such as common language, shared history or cultural heritage. Fanon argues that after independence was finally won by Third World states, peoples’ differences resurfaced and gave birth to new struggles. Unity based on a national identity began to crumble under the pressure of conflicts arising from other cleavages such as class and religion. Nationalism suddenly lost its meaning and its allure as the only source of identity and unity.¹¹

Murtada Mutahhri agrees with Fanon and adds that a shared history, a common language, or cultural heritage, which are commonly accepted as factors that congeal nationalism, are not necessarily permanently significant to nor essential elements of national integration but are rather only accidental to it. These factors serve neither as bonds or hindrances to nationalism. At the root of nationalism he says is a people’s sense of common suffering combined with a shared dream for an alternative future.¹²

Our generation is faced with the challenge to reinvent a narrative of the nation that is conscious of the contingency of its solidarity as a nation, thus creating a nation that is less demanding and more tolerant. The task of nationhood in this sense is to allow the flourishing of individuals who nurture varying affinities and identities, and by accident, are forced to live together in a common space and time. The creative faculties of this generation need to be harnessed toward building a nation where no one is a foreigner, where the link between nation and individual can be mediated by other forms of solidarity, and whose collective hatred would only be directed toward the abhorrence of war. Nationhood should be able to recognize, tolerate, respect, and protect affinities and identities that may be based on race and ethnicity, gender, and class. Nationhood is not an end in itself. It is a continuing process of broadening the limits of our imagined community.

A New Deal

The narrative of the nation should include a new deal with the state. Citizenship or membership to a state carries with it the expectation that citizens will get their entitlements from the state in exchange for their obedience to the laws of the state. In contrast, a nation commonly refers to a group of people who believe that they share a common identity. So while statehood is a form of legal-political identification, nationhood is an expression of a socio-emotional bond. States should therefore welcome the possibility that individual citizens may nurture multiple nationalisms.

The persistent war in Mindanao and the sporadic upheavals in Northern Luzon poignantly illustrate the failure of the state to, forge a nation based on respect for difference and the celebration of diversity. Several articles on Race and Ethnicity offer an alternative analysis to this complex problem by looking at it from the point of view of tolerance and pragmatism. These discuss how successive administrations’ all-out war strategy interspersed with various programs for assimilation that were all premised on the supremacy of an all-encompassing Philippine state have only fuelled rather than pacified the rebellion of ethnic groups, especially of our Muslim brothers in the South. Instead of providing a convincing basis for nullifying the Moro people’s struggle for instance, these campaigns have ironically provided a justification for their call for secession. These articles draw our attention to an important but neglected facet of the relentless strife, which is the need to recognize the right of ethnic groups to choose, assert, and enrich their own culture and identity thus enabling them to chart their own development as a people.

To refashion nationhood away from the arrogance of ethnocentrism is to deny the claim that there is such a thing as hierarchy of cultures. Cultural minorities exist not because of their inferior or backward beliefs and traditions. We need to remember the painful and humiliating process of minoritization that the people we now refer to as indigenous people were made to undergo under the aegis of colonialism. The articles Aetas and Bugnay Revisited goad us to reexamine our institutions and our practices that forcibly relegate large groups of people into the margins of our national life. For instance, imposing the concept of land titling that is culturally alien to the peoples of the Cordilleras who see themselves as stewards and not as owners of land have robbed them of their land, and have turned them into landless farmers. Now, the government’s contempt for agriculture continues to deny the indigenous peoples in the Cordilleras of their land and means of livelihood as their ancestral lands are forcibly converted into industrial and commercial uses. Rituals that are based on the various activities revolving around agriculture steadily lose their relevance to a people whose once powerful culture enabled them to construct the magnificent Banaue rice terraces. Formal education is equally efficient in undermining cultures. In schools, younger generations are told stories and inculcated with values that ignore and denigrate the cultural traditions of their ancestors. Slowly and invisibly the soul of a people is sadly lost to extinction. Small wonder then, that the indigenous peoples of the Cordilleras like the Muslims in Mindanao are up in arms to reclaim and defend their right to a distinct identity.

We need not fear the bold assertion of different identities within a nation since this is not necessarily the root cause of antagonism. Rather, it is the violence of homogenization and discrimination brought about by narrow nationalism or an ethnocentric globalization process that pushes us into merciless conflict with one another. Differences need not always be irreconcilable, and self-determination can also be realized even without secession.

Cultural diversity can thrive more fruitfully in a situation where everyone regardless of ethnic or religious affiliation is able to collect economic and political benefits from the state. Nationhood should therefore be antithetical to ubiquitous destitution. The articles on class remind us that the Philippine state’s failure to adequately provide for even the barest necessities of decent existence for the majority of the Filipino people has made emigration an enticing if not an only option for many of us. In many instances, renouncing one’s Filipino citizenship has become an obsession rather than a source of shame.

But any attempt to address the question of poverty necessarily starts by making poverty unfamiliar to us and by disabusing our minds of stereotypical notions about the poor. Otherwise, we will be condemned to rely on the routinized and ineffective poverty alleviation programs of an inept and dishonest government. The article The Public Career of Mang Pandoy recounts how the failure of successive government administrations to put in place structures that would ensure sustained productive and meaningful employment for an increasing population have caused the ubiquity of poverty and the worsening inequality in the country. Poverty and inequality in the rural areas cause the exodus of whole communities from the rural areas to urban centers, particularly to Metro Manila. These migrants from the rural areas only end up as squatters in the fringes of the city often without secure employment or decent housing, and live under constant fear of demolition and eviction. A state without a coherent plan and a deliberate attempt to develop a manufacturing and industrial sector, watches passively as its cities become mere service centers for foreign companies, where jobs are limited, temporary, and unstable.

A state can only convincingly justify itself to the nation if it remains tireless in its pursuit of inventive ways to improve the quality of their lives. Anything less will only make secession or emigration a necessity. Nationhood is an unending project of creation of a people who chose to collectively pursue the fulfillment of their individual happiness.

The Nation Through Women’s Eyes

We need to remind ourselves though that individual happiness or being fully human cannot have a definitive measure or essence. The articles on gender show us how society has always conceived of happiness and fulfillment from the perspective of men. For example, because most men prefer to exercise monopoly over the sex lives of their wives, society holds on to the absurd notion that a woman’s worth rests on her private parts, and that the state is bestowed with the sacred mission of protecting the integrity of a woman’s hymen. Thus, as discussed in the case of Karen, rape in this country has long been considered as an offense against chastity, rather than as an act of violence against persons; a private crime, rather than as an injury against the entire community.

Since we normally think of power as male domination, we have always kept that image of women as victims, and have insisted on ignoring her daily triumphs in negotiating the terms of her existence in the context of oppression and violence. Society sees women mainly as idle housewives, and remains blind to their actual contributions in managing the complexities of our mundane existence. We doubt their capabilities, hence providing them with venues to develop their other potentials as human beings is overlooked.

It is imperative for a nation that seeks to provide individual happiness to educate mothers to enable them to teach their children to hold women in high esteem. But it is equally important to remember that mothering or the task of nurturing the young should not be the sole responsibility of women based on the foolish premise of maternal instincts, or that maternal thinking is exclusive to women’s consciousness (Pateman, 1992: 21). Motherhood should not be a destiny for women, it should be an option. But if motherhood is to be reconceived as an alternative form of citizenship, which is the duty to nurture a child’s love for life and compassion for others rather than a child’s loyalty to the state and courage to die, then the nation should pose motherhood as a challenge to both men and women.

New Institutions for a New Nation

Nationhood requires the constant reinvention of our institutions. New ways of thinking should be matched with new ways of doing things. The section entitled Institutions in Flux reviews our various social institutions in light of the many changes it is challenged to undergo.

The family remains as a vital institution in our effort to reinvent the nation. We actively create our families by constantly retelling our stories to our children even through the expansive distances that separate most families today. We can therefore will our families to be transformed into preschools on culture and humanism by constantly reflecting on the stories that we choose to tell our children. Our family may be reoriented to enable it to expand its concept of kin, and to widen the mantle of its nurturing to include those who are deprived, abandoned, or exploited.

With its current orientation, the educational system in the Philippines ironically contributes to the creation of a homogenized culture that is based on consumerism and selfish individualism rather than to the development of a more civilized society that is non prudence and compassion. Educational institutions need reorientation that would enable them to arrest the spread of the disease of knowingness among our youth, or the cynicism caused by the deluge of information that technology brings. Universities must be able to assert themselves in this context by cultivating a type of liberal education that would enlarge the horizons and explore utopias, as well as inspire self-reflection and hope in every generation. They should provide every generation with the opportunity to acquire an education that does not demand the postponement of an individual’s quest for personal happiness. Instead, the pursuit of education should become part of an enjoyable journey of discovery and adventure. Creating an atmosphere that will induce the passion for learning and creativity should be a concern of the state as well. The state needs to invest in the education of young intellectuals to whom it may bequeath the task of nationhood.

In the final analysis however, a nation’s investment in the education of its citizens is measured in terms of its contribution to their liberation from powerlessness. Education is important not simply for the creation of a literate workforce. The basic skills of reading, writing, and doing simple arithmetic are important in enabling an individual to participate in various daily activities of society, and to contribute more meaningfully in solving the practical problems of the nation. Without these skills, an individual is prone to victimization and exploitation. These basic abilities may be further enhanced if individuals are provided with access to information, venues for participation, and power that could help them change their situation as individuals and as a community. Education should be a tool for empowerment and democratization rather than for homogenization.

We need to constantly reexamine the meaning of democracy as an ideal and make it more concrete in our daily lives. Our experiences in fighting for democracy should make us realize that reviving traditional democratic institutions is not the only goal or the essence of democracy. Democracy is all about empowerment and meaningful participation in decision-making for the greater majority in order to broaden their choices and options. Nationhood, therefore, makes it imperative that we democratize our political institutions to ensure the broadest participation of the people as possible.

Democratizing our political institutions does not mean that it is enough that we change our leaders. What we need is to revolutionize our political system so as to exercise from it the ghosts of Lockean liberal democracy that we inherited from our American colonizers. An elitist electoral system that screens out the participation of the majority in the political arena by focusing on personalities and material capabilities should be replaced by one that focuses on educational campaigns and a debate on issues. This should enable