Megatrends of madness, Part II

Megatrends of madness, Part II
by Azly Rahman


I have often been asked what I think of the concept of ‘1Malaysia' of which I have written a column-long thought on this when it was first propagandised.

What lies behind the slogan is a rotting culture of political socialisation, enculturalisation, and participation on a post-colonial ideology of maintaining a false sense of pluralism so that exploitation can be engineered via the divide-and-conquer strategy and the people can be given circuses, funfairs, and goodies.

The pathos lies in education as social reproduction and a conveyor belt of racist formation - that schools and institutions are to maintain the ideology of ethnic separation by de jure' or de facto, via formal, informal, or hidden curriculum so that the leaders of the ‘apartheid regime of the modernist mould' can be sure to sustain power via neo-feudalistic strategies of control, containment, and co-habitation.

And thus, we have the continued existence of schools and institutions that are used as breeding grounds of racist ideology detrimental to the aspirations of this nation in need of education for peace, cultural understanding, and social justice.

Must we not dismantle this ideology, and with immediate effect, integrate all schools and now allow the ideology of "one race, one school" to prevail? Should we have done that before Mahathirism took power and charted the direction of command and control to promote this ‘maddening multiculturalism' to take root?

Why are many highly-educated Malay professionals of this generation essentially seem to be parading this sense of sophisticated racism they carry as a badge of honour to design and implement policies detrimental to the evolution and realisation of ‘truly sensible and human sense of multiculturalism'?

Wherein lies the problem in multicultural education? How do we rectify this?

This brings us to my last thought on what a maddening megatrend of ours constitute - religion as an instrument of irreligiosity in our politics of race and ethnicity. (I wrote about this in my forthcoming book "The ‘Allah' Controversy and Other Essays on Malaysian Hypermodernity" which will be available soon.)

Corrupting religion
Has not religion been abused lately?

Ironic and paradoxical a statement this might be, if religion, still, is to be made a central moral compass of the nation after the coming elections, must it be thrust into public sphere and its discourse dominate reason and rationality? Or must it be kept at home in the hearts of men and used to first and foremost build the family without the pomp and pageantry of public display of faith and spirituality?

Which religion must be made dominant and not to overwhelm others whose notion of truth must be held as equal in matters concerning the meaning of divinity?

How do we separate religion and the state if, comes a time, we find this a necessity?

These days, I wonder why there is a disjuncture in the moral make-up of societies. We have more houses of worship built, more religionisation of programmes engineered, more models of religious life architectured, yet politics remain as primitive, predatory, pathetic and animalistic as ever. Even worse, the more there is a display of religiosity in public life, the more we read about the manifestations of corruption.

People these days swear publicly on the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, the New Testament, etc, but cases of corruption in high places abound and some even covered up for decades. The public can never find out all these Watergate-styled scandals in regimes that take secrecy as its ethics of governing, framed under dubious names such as the Official Secrets and Internal Security Acts.

Much worse than these, times when a public official gets caught swindling people and embezzling funds such as building condominiums for cows, in Malaysia, we see the accused quickly repent by going to the holy land to cleanse the sins and come back looking fresh as a baby just born sinless. "The devil made me do it," many would say, putting the blame on the poor soul on everything except the self and the system that encouraged such devilish behaviours.

If each devotee follow closely to the tee of what is taught, I suppose every nation will turn out to be benevolently socialist - the check and balance of desire, the prioritising of basic needs versus wants, the creation of worker and artisans who laboured with their own hands rather than profit big time from the blood, sweat, and tears of fellow men, the curbing of desires of building useless objects for the glory of the self and the ego - all these will become the commanding heights of society's moral reasoning that will guide action.

The Bhagavad Gita asks us to seek "detachment from the fruits of our action" and to think of the larger self in this wheel of life, the Quran taught its readers that this world is merely a "maya" or an illusion and a playground for the rich such as Croesus ("Qarun" - hence the Malay word harta/arta karun) and Pharaohs/Firaun, and the teachings of Jesus point us to the idea that the rich is cursed and will be the last to enter the kingdom of Heaven.

Siddhartha Gautama "the Buddha" taught the world that in order to end suffering, one must detach oneself from worldly pleasures and understand the meaning of suffering so that we can stop the cycle of rebirth - the cause of human suffering. Jainism and the teachings of Lord Mahavira are even more radical in telling us what a human being is - that we can't even wear clothes in order to signify our purity...

But in a hypermodern society such as Malaysia, why is there such a marked disjuncture on all these - killings, politically-motivated killings, volumes upon volumes of cases of fraud and embezzlement unresolved and the perpetrators unpunished, kidnappings, thefts of all kinds, the sustenance of a casino-capitalist economy operating under the most vulgar and immoral of all the capitalist umbrella?

Why is this so? Is the soul and the spirit now totally detached from the realism of material life? Or, is the Prada-wearing devil now in total control?

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DR AZLY RAHMAN, who was born in Singapore and grew up in Johor Baru, holds a Columbia University (New York) doctorate in International Education Development and Master's degrees in the fields of Education, International Affairs, Peace Studies and Communication. He has taught more than 40 courses in six different departments and has written more than 300 analyses on Malaysia. His teaching experience spans Malaysia and the United States, over a wide range of subjects from elementary to graduate education. He currently resides in the United States.

His latest book, The 'Allah' Controversy and Other Essays on Malaysian Hypermodernity, published by SIRD/Gerakbudaya is now available in major Malaysian bookstores.