Read Prof. Randy David's articles below and get enlightened.
A big year for verity
By Randy David
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 02:22:00 03/01/2008
MANILA, Philippines -- Just about everybody in our country these days is looking for the truth—senators, bishops, the media, students, professors, spin doctors, and street-corner pundits. Truth is the most sought-after commodity, yet its nature and uses are also the least understood. But, it appears we are not alone in this sport.
Vanity Fair calls 2007 “a big year for verity in film” and quotes the marketing tag lines of seven of this year’s big hits—“Atonement,” (“You can only imagine the truth”); “Michael Clayton,” (“The truth can be adjusted”); “Gone Baby Gone,” (“Everyone wants the truth … until they find it”); “In the Valley of Elah,” (“Sometimes finding the truth is easier than facing it”); “Redacted,” (“Truth is the first casualty of war”); “Reservation Road,” (“To find the truth, you have to find who’s hiding it”); and “The Number 23,” (“The truth will find you.”)
Almost all of these can suitably describe the Filipino’s experience with truth. But the last two are especially relevant to us. Sometimes indeed, we don’t actually have to see the truth to know it; we only need to find out who’s hiding it. In 2001, the public clamored to know the contents of the infamous “second envelope.” When it was blocked by Joseph Estrada’s 11 senators, everyone became sure of what it contained, and thereafter lost all interest in determining what it really contained. It was all that was needed to bring out EDSA People Power II.
One could sense that we are today quickly moving in the same direction. When Romulo Neri, former director general of the National Economic and Development Authority, suddenly invoked executive privilege in the middle of his testimony at the Senate inquiry on the national broadband network (NBN) deal with China’s ZTE Corp., it became clear to every reasonable person who was listening that he could not say what he wanted to say because it would incriminate President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. But this concealment was not enough to make the public form a judgment of what was being hidden.
Rodolfo Noel “Jun” Lozada’s testimony made this possible. He provided crucial information, and the public’s imagination filled the gaps. Today, there is almost nothing that Neri can tell us that we don’t already know after hearing Lozada. Neri’s truth has thus become redundant. If it has any remaining uses at all, it may only be to secure a conviction or acquittal in a court of law. But the public does not need this level of determination to be able to act with confidence in the political sphere.
Truth is anything but simple. “A mobile army of metaphors” is how the philosopher Nietzsche calls it, rather than as the accurate representation of reality that many assume it to be. Because of its complexity, modern society has parceled out the search for truth into many specialized quests. The quest for truth about the physical world is assigned to science, while prophetic truth remains the province of religion. Outside of these two spheres, the quest for truth is subordinated to specific goals. In modern politics, what matters is not so much what is true, but what one can invoke to legitimize one’s rule. If it were otherwise, liars would never be in power. Similarly, in law, the applicable code is not so much what is true or false, but what is legal or illegal. Judges know that not every truth is worth knowing, but only those facts in a case that are relevant to a determination of legality or illegality.
To understand these distinctions is to be able to appreciate the parallel inquiries that are going on in the different institutional spheres of our society. They may all be about the same subject—the ZTE-NBN deal—but their objectives are different.
As I see it, the object of the Senate inquiry is to know how and by whom the deal was put together, how and by whom it was assessed, and how it was finally approved. The goal is not so much to determine criminal culpability as to identify weaknesses in the law and existing procedures, possible lapses in judgment, and implications for legislation and governance. Because the Senate is a political body, the inquiry also becomes inescapably a moment in the ongoing contest for power between the majority and the minority.
It is true—politics is not exactly the best site to look for the truth. But then, neither is the justice system a privileged site for finding the truth. Indeed, a refrain we often hear from lawyers is that not all truths are admissible in court. It is clever for Malacañang to argue that the proper resolution of the ZTE-NBN controversy rests exclusively with the courts. Treating it as a purely legal matter is a way of suppressing the many other faces of truth.
What is at stake here is not just the legality or illegality of a contract. More than this, what is at stake is the power of citizens to hold their leaders accountable for decisions that are made in their name. Have these leaders been transparent and faithful to their oath of office? Or have they misused the powers and prerogatives entrusted to them? Such questions are decided not in court or in church but in the public sphere of politics, not by judges or prelates, but by a nation’s citizens.
We should wait for the next elections then, they tell us. Under normal circumstances, we should indeed. But if the electoral mechanism itself has been rigged and brazenly abused by the present leadership, shouldn’t the first step be to repair this vital mechanism of democracy and restore its legitimacy? This brings us to the key question: Do we still believe this is possible under Ms Arroyo? The truth has caught up with us. It is time to face it.
Truth and institutions
By Randy David
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:07:00 03/08/2008
MANILA, Philippines -- We may not always be successful in finding enduring solutions for our problems as a nation, but at least our attempts to grapple with these issues enrich our political vocabulary. This is good for us in the long run. An increasingly complex world requires a complex and nuanced way of talking about it. This is what makes paradigm shifts possible and new solutions imaginable.
Take a look at the semantic harvest from the ongoing ZTE national broadband network (NBN) controversy: “dysfunctional procurement system,” “permissible and forbidden zones” (of corruption), “patriotic money,” “moderated greed,” and “damaged institutions.” Add to this the current obsession to “let the truth out” while observing “due process” and respecting the “rule of law,” and one gets a fairly good picture of the present state of national reflection.
But words are tricky. They are ways of seeing, but they are also ways of concealing. As they evolve in meaning, they acquire new senses, but they do not entirely shed off their old usages. One has to be alert to the specific context in which they are used.
Two difficult words in particular have been used rather freely in current political communication: “truth” and “institutions.” Everybody in this country is looking for the truth, and yet we cannot seem to agree on the form it should take. Consequently, there is broad disagreement on where we must look in order to find it.
The government says that the only truth worth trusting is the one that can be found in courts of law. But there is no single privileged site in which to find the truth. The Senate insists that its hearings are precisely devoted to finding the truth. The media believe that their investigations and reportage are steady sources of truth. The churches speak of the higher transcendental truth of prophetic wisdom. The academic sciences—with their structural analyses and public opinion polls—are not far behind in staking their claims in this contested terrain.
As if the issues pertaining to forms of truth were not complex enough, we are also divided on whether all the truth about the actions of individuals, including public officials like the president, should be made public. We invoke the rule of law as if it were simple. Yet, how does one reconcile the individual’s right to privacy with the public’s right to know? How does one balance a president’s claim to executive privilege with the public’s right to information on decisions affecting their lives?
This is why we need institutions. Institutions are structures that simplify the multiple questions of collective living. They consist of values, roles, codes and procedures by which reality is processed and choices of action selected. Institutions therefore are instruments of order, the means by which a society stabilizes its existence in an unpredictable environment.
In early societies, truth was simple, and the last word on it typically came from the elders or the wise men of the community. Institutions were not differentiated. In modern societies, truth takes many shapes, depending on the specific function to which it is applied. Institutions become specialized. The judicial system adopts rules of evidence in determining if something is lawful or unlawful. Lawyers call it “due process.” Science develops specialized procedures for posing questions, collecting data, testing hypotheses, and drawing findings on the nature of the natural and social world. Scientists call it methodology. Politics, religion, art, the economy, etc.—each one of these spheres develops a separate system appropriate to their functions. The “truths” they yield within their respective horizons are important but they cannot claim an all-encompassing relevance. Nietzsche was right: “There are no facts, only interpretations.”
Therefore, when we say we must respect our institutions and follow due process, we have to be aware that we are not speaking of one dominant institution or one due process, but of many. No single institution can claim basic primacy over the others in a modern society. We cannot speak of judicial institutions and their rules of evidence and proper procedures as if they were the source of the only truth that really matters.
The world is much too complex to be understood as the horizon defined by legal experts. Corruption as a phenomenon is of interest not just to judges and politicians. It is of interest too to other institutions outside the legal and political system—the media, the Church, the educational system, the family, the economy. As information-processing systems, all of them have procedures for establishing what is truthful and relevant. Indeed, as human beings in society, we all make reasonable judgments about the meanings of events in everyday life without waiting for lawyers to speak—except when the issue has to do solely with legality or illegality.
This is precisely Malacañang’s problem. A privilege it claims in law looks sinister in politics. Even if the Supreme Court upholds President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s right to invoke executive privilege to keep Romulo Neri from testifying before the Senate, that victory would almost certainly spell a further loss in political legitimacy for her. Even if no one eventually goes to jail for the ZTE-NBN deal, the negative information it has generated will make it extremely difficult for Ms Arroyo to govern, or for anyone associated with her to win public office in an honest election.
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