Singapore

The State and the Culture of Excess

Souchou Yao

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134115396
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economia
• Subtopic: Politica economica

Taking ideas and frameworks from philosophy, psychology, political science, cultural studies and anthropology, this book tells the larger 'truth' about the Singapore state. This book argues that this strong hegemonic state achieves effective rule not just from repressive policies but also through a combination of efficient government, good standard of living, tough official measures and popular compliance.

Souchou Yao looks at the reasons behind the hegemonic ruling, examining key events such as the caning of American teenager Michael Fay, the judicial ruling on fellatio and unnatural sex, and Singapore's 'war on terror' to show the ways in which the State manages these events to ensure the continuance of its power and ideological ethos.

Lively, and well-written, this book discusses key subject areas such as:

• leftist radicalism and communist insurgency
• nation-building as trauma
• Western 'yellow culture' and Asian Values
• judicial caning and the meaning of pain
• the law and oral sex
• food and the art of lying
• cinema as catharsis
• Singapore after September 11.

1 The magic of the Singapore State

[For the moral] act to be everything it should be, for the rule to be obeyed as it ought to be, it is necessary for us to yield, not in order to avoid disagreeable results or some moral or material punishment, or to obtain a certain reward; but very simply because we must, regardless of the consequences our conduct may have for us. One must obey a moral precept out of respect for it and for this reason alone.

Emile Durkheim, ‘The Science of Morality’

Nation and the Sick Father

In 1965 Lee Kuan Yew – Singapore’s Founding Father and first Prime Minister – had what one writer describes as a ‘minor breakdown’.¹ It happened after Singapore’s expulsion from the Federation of Malaysia, a political merger that Lee had hoped would build a common economic union and realize his vision of a ‘Malaysian Malaysia’ based on meritocracy rather than ethnic – Malay – preferences.² The separation was for Lee personally and politically traumatic. He had broken down in tears at the press conference where he announced the news. The collapse of the merger left him ‘drained physically, emotionally and mentally’ and he had to seek six weeks’ retreat in government barracks in Changi to recover.³ But personal disappointment was not the only reason for his breakdown. In the preceding months, he had worked feverishly in negotiating with the sensitive Malay leadership in Kuala Lumpur to secure a viable future for the Chinese-dominated city-state. For a man given to emotional restraint and tough-mindedness, the separation of Singapore from the Federation nevertheless ‘opened the flood gates’ that had been walled up for years.⁴ He was, in his own words, ‘emotionally overstretched’ and ‘close to physical exhaustion’; and the separation ‘weighed [him] down with a heavy sense of guilt’ for having failed his supporters and allies.⁵ To help him sleep his doctor had prescribed sedatives, and pep pills to keep awake to face the day. Taking these drugs in a condition of nervous exhaustion had a debilitating effect and left Lee in a dark and volatile mood:

Some in Lee’s circle . . . felt that commonsense advice had been neglected because of a pharmacological bias to his doctor’s training. The drugs had an innocuous enough effect when Lee could see his way through situations, but under the enormous strain of recent events their impact was curious and unpredictable. One moment Lee could be smiling, offering Tunku a brittle picture of acceptance, even some sort of pleasure. The next moment when he was near people with whom he could allow himself to relax – colleagues, selected foreign journalists, subordinates – he would burst into tears or pour forth a torrent of emotion-laden words, recollections, predictions.⁶

To Lee’s outbursts of tears and emotions, one writer would add fear of assassination.⁷

For all that, it was not in Lee’s character to succumb, either to his enemies or to what he himself might regard as ‘personal weakness’. During his recuperation, and having given up his heavy work schedule, he continued to travel from Changi to attend weekly cabinet meetings in the city. On the night of 30 September he received news of a military coup in Indonesia led by General Suharto; it triggered another bout of sleepless brooding. As he remembers:

I did not sleep well. Choo [Lee’s wife] got my doctors to prescribe tranquillizers, but I found beer or wine with dinner better than the pills. I was then in my early forties, young and vigorous; however hard and hectic the day had been, I would take two hours off in the late afternoon to go on the practice tee to hit 50–100 balls and play nine holes with one or two friends. Still, I was short of sleep. Late one morning, when the newly arrived British high commissioner, John Robb, had an urgent message for me from his government, I received him at home lying in bed, physically exhausted.⁸

The British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, was informed of his condition and expressed concerns. Lee wrote back to assure him:

Do not worry about Singapore. My colleagues and I are sane, rational people even in our moments of anguish. We weigh all possible consequences before we make any move on the political chessboard. . . . Our people have the will to fight and the stuff that makes for survival.⁹

The reply brought a certain normality to his conditions. For Lee had always worked at a high-pitched pace, impatient to get on with the task at hand, and intolerant of sloppiness and the weak-mindedness that he encountered in the administration. In his public speeches, he tended – as he still does – to ‘lecture’, to test his ideas before the audience and to cajole them with his compulsive insights. In the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s, both the Singapore nation and the People’s Action Party (PAP) under his leadership were fighting for survival. It was scarcely the time for calm repose and reconciliatory gestures. Confronting the radical labour unions at home and critics abroad, Lee was in a combative mood. He was ready to strike at his enemies and to engage in the kind of brilliant rhetorical jousting for which he is renowned. Passionate and full of urgency, Lee’s speeches in the period were a mixture of political resolve and moral anger. In the attempt to keep one step ahead of his enemies, and in pushing himself – and the nation he led – to the limit, a certain ‘excessiveness’ in his speeches and actions became the trademark of Lee’s political style.

Thus in the early years of ‘national struggle’, it soon became clear where Lee’s restless mind would take his listeners. In 1962 Lee spoke to the Malayan students in London:

If we lose, fritter away the next decade that we have and not make preparation for our take-off into the industrial age, then we may well have to regret it. . . .

We have got to make sure that the capital we have accumulated is put to good use, that in ten years we take one stride forward, in twenty years we enter the industrial age and in thirty years definitely, we are an emerged nation, not an emerging one. Because, definitely in thirty years, we are going to have an emergent China.¹⁰

The lesson is clear: people must forever try harder, for all strivings are haunted by their potential failure, just as they risk being sabotaged by the complacent among the ranks and by foes out to dismantle the State. And the chilling vulnerability in Lee’s view of things would have him imagine the emergence of powerful competitors who would cast a dark shadow over Singapore’s future. In 1964, a year after the formation of Malaysia,¹¹ he expressed his fear:

One day, God forbid, not too soon, in [Indonesia] . . . some order will be restored in place of chaos, and they will begin to move forward. Any time now, it is estimated that the Chinese government can explode a nuclear device. Any time now, the Indians are going to set up jet fighter factories. . . . The moment one of these countries outstrips Malaysia in the human material comforts of life . . . [Malaysia] must go asunder.¹²

In a speech to Malaysian students a month later, he gave the same warning:

One day, I don’t know when – 10, 15, 20 years – one of these three countries will overtake us in terms of material wealth and power; either Indonesia or China, or India. And if before then, we have not yet welded the three communities into a national identity, then I say we must come unscrambled. . . .

Time is not on our side, as far as this crucial issue is concerned.¹³

If all this sounded like something of an overwrought imagination, nonetheless Lee’s near-apocalyptic vision carried, as always, a great deal of political realism. In the two decades after the end of the Second World War, the ‘wind of change’ sweeping across European colonies in Asia and Africa heralded the call for decolonization and nationalist struggles. Lee, once assured that the war-weary Labour Government in London was ready to grant independence, turned his energy to confronting the problems facing the young Malaysian Federation of which Singapore had become a part in 1963.¹⁴ ‘An Indonesia in chaos’, a ‘jet fighter-manufacturing India’ and ‘a China with a nuclear exploding device’ warned of the prospects of regional conflict brought about by the arms race, ethnic violence and economic rivalry, a conflict into which the young Malaysian nation (and the Singapore State) would be inevitably drawn. It belongs to the geopolitics of the time to want to express one’s concern with such deep pessimism; and in this sense Lee’s excessive imagination is more than a product of his pathological condition. He was at the time facing a ‘nation in crisis’; his passionate responses signalled a mode of action that went beyond what was normally expected ‘under ordinary circumstances’. But neither Lee – his personality, intellect and political instincts – nor the circumstances facing Singapore were ‘ordinary’. The demands of radical labour unions and Chinese students, the sensitivities of Malay leaders in Kuala Lumpur, Malay–Chinese racial tension at home, and economic uncertainty created by the eventual British military withdrawal all called for tough measures, just as they created a great deal of anxiety.

So Lee had fallen ill under these harrowing circumstances. But to the young nation his infirmity did not signal bodily weakness so much as offer unmistakable evidence of his wilful determination to overcome the odds stacked against him and the nation he led. Besides, a nation in crisis is an opportunity to demonstrate the iron resolve of ‘men of destiny’. Lee, highly strung and too restless for sleep, calls up the figure of one fallen ill from worrying. In those difficult years, Lee’s breakdown spoke to the people with an ineluctable message. Not of feeble constitution or personal weakness, the National Father had fallen sick by taking the burden of the crisis-ridden world on his shoulders.

This moral attitude, this ‘culture’ of sacrifice that puts the national community above oneself, is indeed the Father’s gift to his people. Over the following decades, in the massive social and economic transformation of Singapore, a crucial moralism – a probity of values and actions – was carefully guided to coalesce into national culture and the dominant ethos of the State.

Like the Father, the Singapore nation must cultivate a robust moral sense in its enterprises. As Singapore builds wealth from industrial capitalism, prosperity and the freedom of the market are also seen as posing a danger in producing self-possessing national subjects who care only for themselves and their private enjoyment. In the State’s current view, economic richness also carries moral lassitude, which has infected the West, but is now coming dangerously to the Eastern shore. There is a distinct postcolonial gesture in this: since capitalist modernity tends to nurture self-willing individualism in the West, an Asian state like Singapore must avoid such ill by single-mindedly embracing ‘the community’ as the national ideal.

Communitarianism, for that is the word for it, urges that people should find their happiness and fulfilment in the larger social body – in the family, the ethnic community and, at the apex, the nation-state.¹⁵ Indeed right from the beginning, Singapore’s pursuits for better living have gone hand in hand with an equally urgent ‘social project’, one that aims to discipline Western-type capitalism by modifying its unfettered freedom and moral callousness. Lee’s personal conduct, so full of ethical import, is a perfect reflection of the strenuous effort and sacrifice that have created the modern Asian city-state.

And in Lee’s infirmity we see too the magical apparition through which Singapore appears before the world: a one-party-dominated state that delivers employment, quality housing, health care and education to its people; a country with an efficient market economy and a ‘Confucian-style’ paternalistic rule; an oasis of social and economic stability in a region of political and ethnic tension. Communitarianism arguably helps to achieve all these things. The policy also enables the Singapore State to continuously fashion itself anew. The process gives life to the idea of the State as a moral order or, even more evocatively, a ‘moral being’ that devotes itself to the care and welfare of the people. Communitarianism allows the State to take on a political ambition for comprehensive rule, as it assumes for itself the role as the final arbitrator of all things in society. Whatever the social consequences, to its conservative admirers this is indeed the magic of the Singapore State: a peaceful, prosperous nation that offers its citizens material security and a community of existential meaning shorn of cankerous, self-seeking individualism.

Magic and mask

To ponder on the nature of the Singapore State is to eventually take us to a singular fact: its social peace and economic success, and the prestige it enjoys among its international admirers, have risen from the ashes of liberal democracy. Certainly Lee and the PAP leaders are reluctant liberals who are quick to amend the social-democratic ideals on which Singapore was founded. Yet for all its tough policies and tight political hand, the PAP State does not make us think of the regime of a Marcos or a Mobutu. On the contrary, for many Western admirers Singapore clearly illustrates the possibility that an independent state freed from European colonialism need not succumb to political chaos, personal corruption and economic decay as witnessed in parts of Asia and Africa. A fine progeny of British rule is found in an Asian postcolonial state of evident prosperity. Even with its liberal failings, Singapore is nonetheless a story of economic and political successes, successes achieved by no less than artfully ‘fine-tuning’ for its own purposes the Westminster parliamentary system it has inherited.

Thus for thousands of foreign workers Singapore is a Mecca of incomparable wealth, offering employment with wages unmatched by what they receive at home. Having achieved a First World economy and standard of living, the country invites admiration and envy from its neighbours. Internationally, it enjoys a world standing unmatched by its physical size and the volume of its economy. From the Vietnam War to the volatile environment of post-September 11, Singapore has been the oasis of stability in the region. If only for this reason, few Asian political leaders enjoy greater prestige, just as few Asian statesmen are received more warmly in the White House and Downing Street, than Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, to give his current official title in the cabinet. Nonetheless the magic of the Singapore State has to do not only with its economic success and political stability, but more so with the nature of its political rule over the nearly five decades since self-government in 1959. And the enthralment with which Singapore offers itself is a mixture of wavering apparition and awesome power, an intimate union of appearance and effect, that anthropologist Michael Taussig calls ‘State fetishism’:

By State fetishism I mean a certain aura of might as figured by the Leviathan or, in a quite different mode, by Hegel’s intricately argued vision of the State as not merely the embodiment of reason, of the Idea, but also as an impressively organic unity, something much greater than the sum of its parts.¹⁶

The state is a figure of Leviathan might; it is also an idea that captures the ineluctable meanings of moral reasoning and commanding authority. The state is always two-faced. It is an awesome endowment of power brought to bear on its subjects, as much as an abstraction – an elusive ‘thingness’ with an uncertain ‘quality of ghostliness’.¹⁷ The trick is how to separate the two, so that we may confront its real power, yet recognize it as a shadowy being without substance. Taussig approvingly alludes to the thinking of Philip Abrams for whom the state is a mask that both conceals and confronts:

The state is not the reality which stands behind the mask of political practice. It is itself the mask which prevents our seeing political practice as it is. It is, one could almost say, the mind of a mindless world, the purpose of a purposeless condition. There is a state-system [and] and state-idea. . . . The state comes into being as a structuration within political practice; it starts its life as an implicit construct; it is then reified . . . and acquires an overt symbolic identity progressively divorced from practice as an illusionary account of practice.¹⁸

State fetishism then must stage the realities of power and legitimate violence on the stage of a spectacular legerdemain. As such the idea of the state has to be taken seriously, but we must also in a sense not believe in it, not give in to the allurement of its (empty) existence:

[We] should recognize that cogency of the idea of the state as an ideological power and treat that as a compelling object of analysis. But the very reason that requires us to do that is not to believe in the idea of the state, not to concede, even as an abstract formal-object, the existence of the state.¹⁹

For the state, the practicalities of power must need disingenuous ‘masking’ so that they come across as something else, as tools for realizing its deep commitment to the well-being of the people, as the point or symbol of national identity, as a mirror of the moral credentials of the leaders, and more. Involved in all the things the state does and says, this ‘masking’ is an important source of its mesmerizing appeal. The mask conceals the state and brings it to ‘life’; it is like the one Jim Carrey puts on in his 1994 film before his nightly prowl, transforming him from a lifeless nerd to a smooth-talking, sure-footed dandy – a mask that is seared on to his face.

This book is about the elaborate legerdemain of the Singapore State. With the major public media under its control, the State is ever present on prime-time television and in the papers, explaining the one thousand and one things that it does and proposes to do, and cajoling people into accepting them. A garb of reason and solicitude is draped on the busy, aggressive posturing. Nonetheless it would be wrong to think of the State’s action on these occasions as merely for creating, in Abrams’s phrase, the ‘triumph of concealment’. From the fight against the morally polluting ‘yellow culture’ to the judicial ruling on oral sex and the caning of an American teenager for vandalism charges, these events are remarkable for the spellbinding ideas they are made to carry. However improbable, and even as people sometimes see through them, these ideas embellish the appearance of the State before the world. The state-idea and the state-effects join in perfect union; each gives life to the other. Not only the opening of a community centre or the Prime Minister’s visit to the housing estates, but the caning of the socially recalcitrant, for example, is ‘for the public eye’ even when held behind...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1 The magic of the Singapore State
• 2 Trauma and the ‘culture of excess’
• 3 ‘Yellow culture’, white peril
• 4 Pain, words, violence: The caning of Michael Fay
• 5 Oral sex, natural sex and national enjoyment
• 6 ‘Talking cock’: Food and the art of lying
• 7 I Not Stupid: Localism, bad translation, catharsis
• 8 The nation after history
• 9 Epilogue: Useless pragmatism
• Notes
• References