The Filipino Family in an Age of Complexity

The Filipino Family in an Age of Complexity

(Professor Randolf S. David’s acceptance speech upon being conferred the Doctor of Humanities degree, honoris causa by the Ateneo de Naga University, March 24, 2007)

My dream as a young boy growing up in Pampanga was to study in Ateneo someday. But, although my father was a lawyer (himself an Ateneo alumnus), what he earned was not enough to send any of his children to high school in Manila . Since there was no Ateneo in my province, the next best thing he could do was to send all of us to a Catholic high school in Pampanga.
Ateneo was still on my mind when I was about to enter college. But as the eldest child in a brood of 13, I was conscious at an early age that I should not be a burden to my parents. The free tuition that UP offered to high school valedictorians at that time made up my mind for me. That is how my life at the University of the Philippines began. But my yearning for an Ateneo affiliation persisted. So, one summer in my undergraduate years, I commuted every day to the old Ateneo campus on Padre Faura to work as a student assistant to the legendary Ateneo teacher Onofre Pagsanghan in a short term course on Filipino culture for foreign missionaries and executives. In exchange, I was given free tuition that summer at the school’s English language laboratory.

I hope you can imagine how fulfilled I am today. With this honor you have conferred on me, I can now call myself, finally, an Atenean. I thank you, Fr. Joel Tabora, and I thank the Board of Trustees of the Ateneo de Naga University, for this great and rare honor. I do not mind telling you that, despite the awards and recognition I have received over the years from various organizations, today is the first time I have been honored in this manner by an academic institution. For this reason alone, I felt entitled to ask my wife Karina and our only granddaughter, Julia, to come with me to witness this precious moment. I will treasure this day for the rest of my life.

Fellow graduates of 2007, and dear parents, honored guests, ladies and gentlemen – thank you for welcoming us to this great institution. As a sociologist and public commentator, I am expected to have an opinion on almost every issue deemed important. One question that I am often asked is particularly not easy to answer: What’s happening to our country, and how do we begin to get out of the rut in which we find ourselves?

This question is usually asked in a tone of vague uneasiness, of somehow being caught in the eye of a storm, where nothing moves despite the turbulence outside. Our fears, born of past encounters with disaster, prod us to take action, to brace ourselves for the worst, to hang on to our faith.

It is difficult to know what is happening to our country, or what we should do, unless we can answer a prior question: Who are we who belong to this country? This is a question of identity and of values – the very things that are rapidly changing in an age of complexity. Like the rest of humanity, we Filipinos find ourselves having to embrace the modern, whether we like it or not, in response to the challenge of complexity and globality. In the process, we give up so much of what is familiar to us. We lose our bearings, and in our desperate attempt to navigate our way in an increasingly complex environment, we draw strength from our inherited instincts and find ourselves falling back on the most basic of our institutions – the family.

For, above anything else, we Filipinos belong to families. We may change our citizenship, our religion, our occupation, and trade in the language of our ancestors for something globally spoken. But we remain first and foremost loyal members of our families. If there is one stabilizing institution that has kept Philippine society more or less coherent through its successive crises, it is the Filipino family.

It is this concern for the future of their families that drives millions of our people to leave their loved ones and seek employment in strange lands. Ironically, this trend is also what is dramatically transforming the Filipino family, and, by extension, Philippine society. Allow me to elaborate.

Modern communications and extensive travel in the last 30 years have made it possible for today’s Filipinos to experience a world that previous generations, except those who lived and studied abroad, never encountered. This global experience has allowed them, as it were, to step out of the skin of their culture, and to view their own society through the prism of another culture. Precisely for this reason, it is easy to understand why the single most important development that has shaped Philippine society over the last 30 years is the OFW phenomenon. But, of course, it is not the first time Filipinos have left their country to live abroad.
In the 1880s, scores of Filipino students went to Europe to study. A number of them, like Jose Rizal, were sent abroad by their parents to keep them from getting into trouble with the Spanish government in Manila . But most of these young Filipinos went abroad to obtain professional training they could not get in Manila because higher learning was reserved to the Spanish elite and members of the clergy.

What these Filipino expatriates acquired in their adopted countries turned out to be more than just a university education. There, in Europe , in a climate of freedom and tolerance, they imbibed the Enlightenment values of liberalism and equality, of belief in reason and scientific progress. They became the first Filipino moderns – young intellectuals who consciously thought of themselves as the nervous system of a new nation being born. In this self-assigned role, they became obsessed with showing the world that Filipinos were the equal of any race.

When they returned to the Philippines, these Indios Bravos, as they proudly called themselves, brought home not only new skills and new knowledge, but an entire world-view that enabled them to see their society from the standpoint of what it could be if it had the freedom to decide its own destiny. It was natural that they would become the leaders of the new nation, and the agents of a new way of life. Rizal became the model of this first generation of modern Filipinos.
From the start, Rizal decided that Europe would not be his permanent home. He was in a hurry to return home, where he felt he had a mission to achieve. He had great ambitions for his people. He became a curious observer of everything European and modern, and his encounter with 19th century Europe allowed him to frame his concept of what Filipinos could be if they were given the same opportunity to develop themselves. He envisioned a nation that was as progressive, as disciplined, and as confident as Europe – but one where the nurturing gift of tenderness for which our people are famous would survive.

In the 1970s, roughly a century after the generation of Rizal, Filipinos began to leave their motherland for destinations in Europe, the Middle East, North America, and East Asia . They left not just by the hundreds but by the tens of thousands. Unlike the ilustrado generation of the 19th century, these 20th century Filipinos were not escaping political persecution; they were fleeing from poverty and lack of opportunity. They went abroad not to study, for indeed many of them were already highly educated, but to earn a living and to start a new life. But like those first Filipino travelers of the 1880s, they too remain loyal to the country -- regularly sending money to their loved ones, and avidly watching the nation’s journey from turmoil to turmoil, as if they never left home. With modern communication, they are able to witness the political and economic storms that hit the country of their birth, applying to the nation’s politicians the same criteria of accountable governance by which Europeans measure their leaders. In more ways than they can imagine, they have become influential agents of change in the nation they left behind.

They download the electronic version of Manila ’s major dailies, and watch the early evening news beamed across continents from our local television networks. They comment on issues, publicize their views, grumble about corruption and incompetence, and instruct their relatives to reject unfit candidates during elections. They are often more informed about events taking place in our country and certainly in the rest of the world than the average middle class Filipino living in the Philippines . Like Rizal, they tell their families at home what life is like in modern societies governed by accountable leaders. They form a view of what states in mature democracies are like, how citizens behave when their freedoms are threatened, and what civil liberties mean when people have the capacity to assert them. Their prolonged separation from their families and culture gives them an insight into their own personal needs and inner selves, which modern culture allows them to recognize and express.

The net effect of all this is that Filipinos living abroad have become the most demanding constituency of the Filipino nation. They know how the nation’s economy has become very dependent on their remittances. Like Rizal’s generation of émigrés, today’s OFWs know their power, even if they are still groping for effective ways to use it.

Overseas work has become the most powerful stimulant to the economic life of our country. OFW remittances have funded the education of millions of young people from poor families who would otherwise be excluded from our society’s obsolete structure of opportunity. Consumption patterns throughout the country have changed overnight because of the steady flow of remittances. Television sets, DVD players, mobile phones, and personal computers have become ordinary fixtures in many Filipino homes, serving as channels for new and varied forms of information. Truly, the OFW phenomenon is revolutionizing our way of life beyond our imagination. Its overall impact, I believe, is to pull our political system toward greater democracy, greater transparency in governance, and more accountability in public life.

Our people are changing, but our leaders have remained the same. That is the reason we have a crisis. The crisis is telling us that the old is dying, and something new is being born. Undoubtedly, this transition has been stretched too long, and is far from smooth. Yet, we can read in the growing disaffection with traditional politicians and political dynasties positive signs of new values and new expectations at work.

Our politicians, rooted in the old ways of patronage and corruption, are finding it increasingly difficult to win popular support in this emerging society. As a result, they now have to spend more money to get elected. In some places in the country today, political clans are desperately agreeing to divide public offices among themselves instead of running against each other. This development is anti-democratic, and comes from the same instinct to retain power by the easy resort to large-scale cheating during elections.

The transition is thus far from ideal. From a politics based on patronage, the country is moving towards a politics based on mass media charisma. This is not exactly how we imagine democracy to be. But this too is a passing phenomenon. Things will be different as more and more of our people become educated.

As in Rizal’s time, mass education and the spread of literacy among our people are bound to change the conduct of governance and the rules of political competition. The change may not be visible at the level of our national politics. But it is already being felt at the local level, where a new breed of politicians who have won as mayors and as governors are uprooting the old ways of patronage and introducing innovative practices. They are re-inventing local governance and re-establishing democratic practice on the ground.

That is the good news. There is however a side to the OFW phenomenon that is disturbing.
At present, an estimated 8 million Filipinos live and work in about 192 countries. We are the third largest labor exporter in the world – after Mexico and India – but our workers are dispersed in more countries in the world and are found in more varied occupations and professions. Altogether they send back to their families an estimated US$12-15 billion every year.

We may say that the OFW is to the Philippines as oil is to Indonesia . There is however a big difference between selling people and selling oil. On the positive side, while Indonesia may run out of oil in the next 25 years, the Philippines will never run out of people, since we keep producing them at a rate faster than most other countries. The downside is that a society that exports its own people on a scale that our country does today undercuts its own way of life. At the rate we are exporting our medical personnel, we will run out of health professionals in just a few years. Two hundred hospitals all over the country have already closed down because they have run out of nurses. Another 600 are severely understaffed. Today it is the hospitals, tomorrow it will be the schools, the government agencies, and the rest of the corporate system. It is not to say that we are not adjusting to the increased demand. Indeed we are. But at what cost?

Sending out people almost always means wrenching them away from their loved ones. The effects of such separations on the psyche of children and on the consciousness of the nation are hard to assess. But, more important, sending out its young educated population means that the Philippines is prevented from linking its own progress with the growth of its people.

We are a resilient nation because we have strong families. We have parents who literally give up their personal happiness so that their children may live with hope. What is sad however is that when we offer entire generations in sacrifice at the altar of overseas work so that the nation may live, we are also giving up the very resource that makes us strong. I believe there is something wrong and perverse in making the export of people a major pillar of a nation’s economic policy.

Thank God, in general, our people thrive well abroad. They work hard, are loyal and dependable, they value their jobs, and are much appreciated. The foreign companies and institutions they serve sometimes wonder how any country can foolishly dispense with the services of such a gifted people. But that’s precisely what makes us a unique nation – a hard-working people governed by unworthy leaders.

It is my belief that this bleak picture is changing, and that the political crisis we are going through is nothing but a symptom that the obsolete feudal social order is finally crumbling, and that a new, brighter future is upon us. The transition has begun, it is irreversible, but, as I said, it is far from painless. We have seen how the Filipino family is bearing much of the cost.
I am aware that many of you here today may be among those who are preparing to leave the country and build their lives abroad. My remarks are not meant to dissuade you or to make you feel guilty. I offer them only as a reminder that even as we all have personal dreams to fulfill, and families to serve and secure, we also have a nation to build. Whether we like it or not, our personal visions are intertwined with what happens to our country. It is the only country we have. We must take care of it, and learn to take pride in it. For no nation can reform itself unless it takes pride in itself.

Thank you, and once more, goodluck to all of you!