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Updated Monday, August 30, 2010 8:00 pm TWN, By Randy David

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Philippines should stop judging itself on 1 incident

Treated to a blow-by-blow account of an unfolding situation, the public, as so often happens, begins to believe it has thereby acquired a factual and complete grasp of the events. Under these circumstances, we tend to judge impulsively and moralize quickly. The more difficult task of carefully understanding how an event happened, of establishing a compact relationship to the facts, does not concern us. We rely almost completely on the mass media for our definitions of reality, forgetting that media's way of seeing and reporting is driven by their own necessities.

This period of criticism and dissension will soon pass however. It will be followed, says Luhmann, by a frenzy of moral preaching. “Morality needs the obviously scandalous in order to have occasion to rejuvenate itself; it needs the mass media and, specifically, television.” Having illumined only one side of reality — i.e., “where the action is” — the mass media, writes Luhmann in his book “The reality of the mass media,” try to balance this by voicing, in “tons of regretful loss,” the moral lessons to be learned. In such ways do the mass media play the role of agent of moral renewal, a function that used to be the mandate of “sages, priests, the nobility” and other distinguished individuals in pre-modern society.

In one sense, the moralizing is unavoidable. It is through the mass media that society observes itself. And through such self-observation, “society stimulates itself into constant innovation.” But moral judgments have a limited value in guiding societal transformation. They tend to obviate the need to adequately understand the conditions that make existing arrangements the way they are. They focus too much on changing people, rather than identifying alternative structures.

We know that governance hasn't been our strongest suit as a nation. In the last four decades we have had difficulty stabilizing our political life and providing enough jobs at home for our people. The deployment of millions of our people as guest workers in affluent countries under conditions sometimes akin to modern slavery is not a source of pride for us. But we are far from being a failed state. The sooner we stop drawing perverse satisfaction from engaging in national self-laceration by judging ourselves on the basis of a single incident, the easier it will be to change our society.

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