Family, kinship, and redefining corruption

The Philippines is considered one of the most corrupt countries in the world. This sounds like a broken record. 

 

Transparency International, in its estimation of the Corruption Perception Index (CPI), defines corruption as “the misuse of public power for private benefit.” I have a fundamental problem with this.  

 

My problem lies with the conceptual groundings of the word itself, as defined, and as applied to our country. The argument that our country is corrupt simply because there is a prevalence of public actors using their power and privilege to benefit their private interests has serious operational problems when taken in our context.

This is because we are in a society where the term “private” does not really mean an individual, but a family or kinship, and where the divide between “public” and “private” is not as firmly established and, in fact, is extremely porous.

 

In Western worldviews, what “private” means is very much an individualized construct. You see this firmly entrenched in hard boundaries that enclose those that are considered deeply personal.

 

My Hawaii neighbor

 

When I was living in Hawaii – a place already very Asian in its outlook but still a society where that privacy boundary is well-defined and should not be crossed – I did not even know the name of my neighbor, and wouldn't dare ask him for fear that I would cross that line. I was afraid I would be accused of invading his privacy. So, everytime we rode the elevator together, we did not talk about our names, our jobs, where we came from, where we studied, or our families. We just talked about the weather, which by Hawaii standards would be pretty much the same for the greater part of the year.

 

This is not the case in the Philippines. Here, our neighborhood is a collective where exchanges occur not only with food during birthday celebrations and during Christmas, but even of family information, from our origins to our personal problems and even to our deep, dark secrets – which end up not being secrets anymore.

 

There is a class dimension to this. The boundaries between public and private on that level becomes more blurred among the ordinary people living in crowded communities, compared to those who are privileged to live in gated communities where fences, walls and spacious lawns have somewhat created a sense of isolation among their members. Still, one can also see in these well-to-do communities the tenacity of family information and secrets spilling over public spaces. All this while playing tennis or golf in a club, at a mah-jong session, or while having one’s hair and nails done in parlors. 

 

This would mimic the flow of information in sari-sari stores, in community artesian wells among women doing the laundry, and among men at a drinking session on the street corner. Hence, though differently manifested, physical boundaries are breached and social spaces are opened for a flow of family secrets that's much more free.

 

Why we don't have Charles Mansons
 

Seriously, this is precisely why we may not have seen serial killings in our country. Serial killers usually live double lives – the meek geek by day and the monstrous rapist-murderer by night. 

 

Also, they would need physical space to bury their victims. This is a luxury that our constrained physical and social spaces would not allow. Consider how to bury a body in our crowded living areas. It would be difficult to live a double life in a community with nosy neighbors ready to ask questions and gossip about odd nocturnal behaviors of others in their neighborhood.

 

In the Philippines, “private” is not firmly defined, and is not to be equated with individual privacy. Our private spaces are populated not by us, alone in our own world, but as part of a family – which is also not limited to our immediate relatives but could be extended to a whole clan, or to a whole community.  

 

We are a country that puts a premium on the family and our kinship ties.

 

In fact, we may be the only country in the world where TV networks have carved for themselves their own boundaries of kinship and loyalty, by using terms of affinity like “kapuso,” “kapamilya,” or “kapatid.” And these are not even synthetic constructions but find organic roots in and penetrate the psyche of the viewing public, seen in the near-fanaticism that prevails among them.  

 

We value loyalty to a family, and it is this loyalty that is cultivated by TV networks to fuel this sometimes childish idolatry, finding its way in vitriolic exchanges on cyberspace between fans of rival networks, and in making a big issue of actors and talents moving from one network to another, effectively turning a pure career move on their part into unforgivable acts of betrayal. 

 

Loyalty and TV

 

My mother is a fan of Eddie Garcia, but refuses to watch his shows that are shown on the “other” TV network. I have taken bus rides where passengers would quarrel over which channel should be shown on the bus TV. 

 

In fact, in some instances, the kinship mode upon which TV network loyalties are grounded has threatened to override the kinship mode based on blood relations. I have attended family gatherings where debates about the TV ratings of rival networks ended up spoiling the reunion.

 

These are things that you don’t see in countries whose TV industries I have closely examined, such as Korea, Thailand, and the US. In Korea, where we have sourced many of our imported soaps, actors and like talents are free to move from one network to another.

 

It would be rare for the public to fight over network ratings in Thailand, and there is no such thing as a loyal fan base for the competing TV networks in the US. Instead, the TV viewers gravitate towards networks on the basis of their political leanings, where Fox, for example, draws a lot of the conservatives, and MSNBC is the network the liberals would prefer to watch.  

 

It is in this context, when the private and public divide is blurred and the private goes beyond the individual, where we need to problematize the claim that we are a corrupt society. We should begin to re-examine if we really have to self-flagellate ourselves for having a culture that breeds corruption.

 

While it is indeed possible that some political actions would constitute as corruption in the vocabulary of Transparency International, when persons occupying public positions use their powers to sequester resources and privileges and allocate these for their own individual interests, there are also instances where such is allocated to a larger community of affinity and kinship. Family obligations become paramount consideration to an ordinary citizen, and such is not lost when one takes up a role in the public sphere.

 

To us, someone who refuses to grant a favor to his mother waiting in queue in the heat of the sun would simply be considered an ungrateful child. But refusing to do so would be behavior that's idealized in the rubric of Transparency International. 
 

 

 

Clash of cultural constructs

 

A native child who ends up getting a position in government who refuses to go the extra mile to help people in his hometown will be seen as a traitor by his classmates, friends and relatives; even as the act would win the accolades of the elite moralists who decry corruption using the Western template of bureaucratic objectivity, where favors to relatives, kinship and “kababayans” should not be given at all times.

 

This is where the problem lies. This becomes fundamentally a clash of cultural constructs, where on one side you have ours which considers as a characteristic of being a good person the act of giving privilege to family and kinship, and you have on another side one that considers as corrupt the act of giving privilege to family and kinship when we occupy a position of power. 

 

We love comparing our realities to those of Western countries, or those that are idealized in books and manuals of anti-corruption watchdogs, without taking into consideration the historical context within which Philippine state and society have developed. The trajectories which most Western societies have gone through is one where their political structures emerged organically from the social transformation that attended their development processes from traditional to more modern.  

 

As a colonized country, our political structures and processes did not grow organically, but were instead artificially imposed by our colonizers on us. Our social base was not yet ready to accommodate the very impersonal worldviews that were fundamental to modern modes of governance.  

 

This is precisely why our elections are still very much personality-driven, and our political parties operate as associations based on personal affinities, rather than on platforms and ideologies. This is the result when the rituals of elections, and the processes of bureaucratic governance were simply imposed on a highly personalistic and communitarian society.

 

This is also precisely why political dynasties proliferate. In a country where family ties are strong, and where professions often run in a family – as in a family of doctors, a family of lawyers, a family of teachers – one could not simply decry as dysfunctional or unexpected that one family could take up elective public service as their vocation.

 

And then, we simply expect that our borrowed political structures where impersonal rules and procedures would be the norm will eventually transform our culture. Frankly, this is a flawed assumption. It is as if we are being forced to drive a car to reach 120 kph even as we are still engaged in the first gear. You would suffer an overheated engine.

 

Lament for academics and activists

 

It is lamentable for many elite academics and social activists to be so fixated on blaming our culture, without even critically reflecting on how our culture was corrupted by the forced imposition of synthetic structures and processes on it. They have turned things that we value in us – like family and kinship, “utang na loob,” and “pakikisama” – into cultural liabilities.

 

I am not denying the fact that corruption of unimaginable proportions was indeed spawned by excessive deployment of these values. I am not also going to deny that there are corrupt politicians, and there are corrupt political dynasties. But I am not about ready to accept any suggestion that this is a norm that is inherent in our culture. 

 

I refuse to accept that our cultural constructs are a natural relative of corruption. They are not.

 

In fact, we have plenty of examples of how our strong family and kinship bonds and our strong sense of community and “pakikipagkapwa” have made us weather the storms of our lives as a nation and as a people. 

 

The challenge is how to harness this enormous sense of family, kinship, and community to become functional weapons of citizens to keep politics and public service clean and honest.  And not to celebrate the mantra that, in order to keep these clean and honest, we should silence the voices of affinity and make the family, kinship, and community disappear in the public spaces of our lives.

 

Doing so can have its social consequences. Neighbors would  stop caring for each other, people might fight a government that had the audacity to use their taxes for the welfare of others in need. You would see people robbed of their sense of affinity. Take for example, that classic image of people playing bowling alone.

 

Politics for the community as family

 

Indeed, some political acts can benefit only one’s family. But when such family is enlarged to become a larger collective, then there is nothing to lose if we build a model of public service that rests on such personal bonds, provided that an informed and politically-literate citizenry keeps watch over this, and when necessary, files the necessary cases against erring officials.

 

Indeed, there are political dynasties that serve only their own interests. But this is not a flaw of dynasties in general, but a flaw that can be corrected by electing the right people, even if they belong to a political family. Banning political dynasties with the assumption that when families rule it will necessarily lead to corruption, effectively castrates the power of an informed and politically-literate citizenry to watch over their deeds. If necessary, those literate citizens could throw them out of power.

 

I will once again emphasize the importance of what I have already belabored: the root of good governance and of clean and honest politics lies in the quality of our citizens, not in the exorcism of our political world to banish from it our sense of family and kinship.

 

And here, there is hope.

 

One of the characteristics of our communities is the porosity of the divide between the public and the private. It is here that nosiness and gossip can become a weapon to monitor the conduct of public officials. This could even lead to the unravelling of their sins of omission and commission and make these as materials for public consumption. 

 

Thus, we can translate this inherent gift of traversing the private boundaries of others into a fundamental weapon of a vigilant citizenry. And here, corruption can now be differently defined, using our own terms as a society that privileges our sense of community, and our collectiveness as a people. 

 

No, it is not how Transparency International has defined it. Corruption is not seen in the misuse of public power for private interests.

 

Instead, it should be defined as the conduct of officials who misuse their public power against their own people.  And by “own”, I mean all of us. — KDM, GMA News