Benedict Anderson Suggests Social Innovation Tools 136.0

Benedict Anderson’s imagined community powers nationhood

In Chengdu, at Du Fu's Cottage

“In Fuzhou, far away, my wife is watching
The moon alone tonight…
When will we feel the moonlight dry our tears,
Leaning together on our windowsill?”

In 1983, way before the Internet, a special friend implored me to gaze at the moon while at the same time she looked at it in Taipei. This was to be a fleeting bond in a separation that sadly became permanent.

I did not know then that she was staging a scene from a poem by Du Fu, the 8th century Tang dynasty poet. This poem is also beloved by older huachao (overseas Chinese) in the Philippines. It binds them and many Taiwanese to the faraway bosom of China.

(Note: This post is a rewrite of 32.0 and 33.0 from early April in the new SYNTHESiST style.)

The Insight. Professor Anderson saw the insight and defined it as the key ingredient of nationhood in his book, “Imagined Communities.”

The good Professor’s insight on nationhood:

“It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”

I believe these images define nations – i.e. not states – more than citizenship, location, physical borders or ethnicity.

But what does a left-of-center historian named Benedict Anderson have to do with innovation and Du Fu?

Simultaneity. The good professor says that what defines these images is simultaneity. This is described when Dr. Jose Rizal starts the novel “Noli me Tangere” with the party at Capitan Tiago’s house in Binondo that “immediately conjures up the imagined community.”

Among Filipinos today, Luneta also quickly calls to mind pasyal na walang pera from Rico J’s song or Rizal’s monument – shared imageries.

Unisonance, another mode of simultaneity, occurs when the Lupang Hinirang or Bahay Kubo is heared. Myths and folklore, as Du Fu’s popular poetry binds the Chinese together, bind nations together.

For younger Filipinos, the wake after Ninoy’s death or the moment of Manny Pacquiao’s left hook felling Hatton are also shared experiences. For me, these evokes a keen connection.

The poem that is part of Chinese culture is a perfect example of simultaneity. It has the same comforting power as hearing from another Filipino, “Pare, akong bahala sa ‘yo,” anywhere in the world.

The Nation as extended family. Professor Anderson further says that the test of simultaneity is disinterestedness given that the “ties are not chosen.” This feeling of belonging is unconditional. The idea of “national interest”, for most people of whatever class, the whole point of belonging to one nation is that it is ‘disinterested’. Just for that reason, the feeling of belonging can ask for sacrifices.

“The family has traditionally been conceived as the domain of disinterested love and solidarity.”

In fact, in an inspired use of imagined community, Ho Chi Minh used the idea of Vietnam as extended family to defeat two intruding superpowers, France and America.

Anticipated history. States use Professor Benedict’s concepts in nation-building, for good or for bad, through emblems like cenotaphs and tombs of the unknown soldier. He says they are empty symbols that, in classic marketing, can be filled with desired facets of nationhood.

I ask, can these concepts be used with anticipated history for community-building? For example, can the need for unity to have better bargaining power to stand up to powerful neighbors like China and India be enough for ASEAN to come together? Or can the looming reality of climate change affecting the littoral areas of ASEAN – who already “share a love for fermented fish and mollusks” – force the nations together into a supra-national embrace? The good Professor implies yes and uses a similar phrase, “historical destinies.”

There seems to be a tipping point when these imaginations overpower self-interest in getting a community together. When Chip Tsao shamed Filipinos by falsely calling the Philippines a “country of servants,” the collective response was just to get him to apologize. Those of us who have worked in Hongkong and Singapore experience behavior like Chip Tsao’s quite often. Nobody raised the true issue, “what ought Filipinos change in the country’s political economy to avoid the circumstance of being called so when confronted with a larger issue like territory, the Spratlys?” Maybe the tipping point is still to come.

A new historiography after the fall of the Berlin wall (1989). To help us acquire shared community towards nation building, we ought to re-read our history.

An exciting group of modern FIlipino historians who were graduate students of Professor Anderson at Cornell University have taken a fresh look Philippine history. They have written glimpses under the lens of fresh historiography less tainted by materialist dialectics – discredited after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

These authors are given below with my quick take on some of their notable work (the books are available at Fully Booked):

Patricio “Jojo” Abinales, a townmate from Ozamiz, Making Mindanao – and hints at possible approach for resolving the present conflict;

Filomeno Aguilar, Jr, Clash of Spirits – a different view of Negros’ history; Datuism as alternative explanation for the ‘bosses’ in modern Philippine politics ;

Caroline S. Hau, Necessary Fictions;

Reynaldo Ileto, Pasyon and Rebolusyon – the possibilities of Pasyon as continuing substrate for social change;

Vicente Rafael, Contracting Colonialism;

• Ambeth Ocampo, whose books are many – brings the past to life and shows many of our forebears especially in the revolutionary period to be enlightened; and

• Jose Eliseo Rocamora, Nationalism in Search of Ideology, a classic book on the Indonesian transition pre-1965, notably Sukarno’s time.

Updated on March 13, 2010. Joel Rocamera of the Institute of Popular Democracy now works full time through the elections as Ideologue for the Liberal Party of two national elite members, N Aquino and M Roxas.

Some parties, who I think do not agree with Joel, have told me that he developed a concept of the “noble national elite” out of this book, his dissertation from Cornell as suggested by Professor Anderson.

The book is out of print and not available even in second hand bookstores on the Internet. The National Library of Australia, which has a copy, had downloaded to me the first 12 pages of the book and I did not read an inkling of the national, noble elite in these pages. I am asking a friend, Hendri, to rummage through second hand book stores in Jakarta or the University libraries there.

Idealist Wang Yang Ming's inspiring classic.

There is actually a stream of “activist centrism” that starts from the natural idealism of Wang Yang Ming, a favorite author and neo-Confucian scholar from 14th century China in Instructions for Practical Living, who inspired Yoshida Shoin in Japan and Sun Yat Sen in China. This stream of thought passed through Max Weber, with his charisma and love [of country] as enough motivation for activist action.

This stream was cut-off by the simpler appeal of Marxism in the mid-1800 that was afterwards bolstered by the statism and realpolitik of Lenin as practically implemented later in proletarian Russia by Stalin and Mao in peasant China.

Pure Marxism, without the one-party adulteration of Lenin, was a big influence in Europe with Germany’s social market economy as the exemplar in a pluralist state. The success of social market economy came about because of a balance between welfare for the nation while keeping incentives for innovation. For example, the Scandinaian countries like Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden – while small – are global leaders in certain technologies.

Countries who adopted Leninism collapsed, like the Berlin wall, due the failure of central planning to cope with the difficulty of coordinating all production efforts in an economy.

China which decided to discard much of central planning in favor of private markets will, I believe, adapt successfully to its unique form f social market economy.

It would be interesting if J Rocamora can make nobles, and not traditional politicians, out of the elite running the Liberal Party to run the nation. As it is, issues like election spending can put a lot of pressure for corruption to emerge.

Finally, it may be worthwhile to see if this old stream from Wang through Weber can be revived for a center-led, but pluralist, reform movement in the Philippines, being Asian, to modify the check-and-balance pragmatism of American democracy.

Most of the young historians above teach in other countries like Tokyo, Singapore and Australia like ‘sages in hiding’, a Chinese indicator of big problems in the home country. All have been touched by Professor Benedict and have touched him in turn.

Updated March 13, 2010. One can sense in their works a reboot to the emerging and enlightened Filipinos of Mabini’s time (Cesar Majul’s Mabini in the navigation bar above, evokes strong emotion but is of the pre-1989 historiography).

Like the generation of Mabini and Rizal, these modern historians are also directly connected to the thought threads of the wider world and thus see the Philippines and its history through a bigger lens . All of them are Professors and thinkers. With their thinking hats, most have drifted away from the extreme left after 1989. While seeking, they stay loyal to the nation by keeping close and always smelling the flowers.

Other books on intellectuals and the middle class of the revolutionary period by Resil Mojares, Brains of the Nation (2006) and Michael Cullinane, Ilustrado Politics (2003) – thanks Sol A. for the introductions – also reflect a shunning of Marxist historiography.

It may seem contradictory to talk about the nation and ASEAN in one breath. Yet, it is precisely because of my anticipation of the need for a regional supra-community from the threat of dominant China and India and of climate change that this call to distill our own nationalism becomes important.

It is only with a strong imagined community that a nation can accomplish their dreams while working together.

Note: Du Fu’s poem above is paraphrased from Vikram Seth). “Imagined Communities” and the other books above are available at the Filipiniana section of the major local bookstores.

Incidentally, Amado Guerrero’s PSR is also available but it takes for tough reading – peeling off the verbiage – this time around.