ALL IN FAVOUR OF CRITICAL THOUGHT, SAY, “AYE!”

- A Review of Air-Conditioned Nation Revisited: Essays on Singapore Politics by Cherian George

By Carolyn Oei, 26 May 2020

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Cherian George in Hong Kong in 2016. Photo: Marc Nair

 “…revisiting my older essays should indeed have discouraged me from proceeding with this project. Not because their ideas are no longer in fashion. More because they never were.”
Cherian George, February 2020

This is an updated version of Cherian George’s 2000 volume entitled, Singapore: The Air-conditioned Nation - Essays on the Politics of Comfort and Control, 1990-2000.

Whether this one or that, George’s work encourages readers to think. Critically.

Moment, please. Who would read this or any of his books anyway? The proverbial choir? Most likely. And so, they will happily indulge in their thinking and discourse and liberal progressive ways and continue not to change the world.

But, maybe – just maybe – some right-wing evangelical Christian (and Chinese) person who’s on the fence about God and power and the policies of the Families for Life Council will pick this book up at the library. Or they’re at a dinner party and see the book on the coffee-table, pick it up and flick through its pages. And exclaim, “Oh, shit! The story of my life!”

As George so aptly puts it, “hope never goes out of style.”

I don’t think that George sets out to answer any questions or to unravel any knots. Rather, I think he just puts the thing – whatever that thing may be; freedom of speech and the press, ethnic inequality, Asian values – before readers and then goads them to, well, think about it.

I’ve tried several times to make sense of the ruling party’s proclamation that Singapore is not ready for a non-Chinese prime minister. To be fair, Finance Minister Heng Swee Kiat has said that it is the older generation of Singaporeans who aren’t ready for a non-Chinese prime minister. In the same breath, however, the Minister added, “The more open we are, the more international we are in our outlook, the better it is for Singapore (and) the world. Because you don’t want a world where people build walls around themselves.”

Cannot compute.  

Perhaps the chapters Guarding The Chinese Ground (2000) and Justice And Equality (2017) in George’s book could help people like me decipher this little stumper. The two essays were written 17 years apart but continue to be so relevant to each other and to our current state of affairs. The former deals with the importance of being Chinese – but not too Chinese, please; thank you very much – and the latter bubbles to the surface matters relating to being something other than Chinese and Christian.

Cracks or fault lines, so to speak.

Crises accentuate cracks that might have been previously plastered over. More significant, crises highlight just how deep those cracks run. To me, this monumental coronavirus pandemic has laid more bare issues in Singapore including inequality and systemic prejudice.

My anecdotal observations have been that, for one, online lessons aren’t convenient for everyone. Several of my students don’t have comfortable or even safe home environments in which to attend an online lesson. And for another, jogging in the Robertson Quay expatriate enclave one time showed me that if a person isn’t local, they don’t need to adhere to the regulations; no need for masks or social distancing. By the same token, where do foreigners go to for help, especially if they live alone?

That said, coronavirus or no, these issues continue to nag at us.

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Photo: Mackerel

Reading Cherian George always reminds me to read more. Just generally. And more of everything. He reminds me that it’s important to be informed. I’m not obliged to agree with anyone, not even him, but I am obliged to be responsible for how I process information.

If I haven’t read enough by the time I’m reading one of his essays, he, mercifully, puts enough detail in them to ensure that readers like me aren’t totally lost.

Importantly, George keeps his writing accessible. Academics can and do write in a language that commoners don’t understand. I’ve grown weary of sentences that run into three lines or more and the use of words like ‘interrogate’ and ‘obfuscate’ and the seemingly functional ‘operate’. In his preface to Singapore, Incomplete that was published in 2017, George writes, “I wasn’t hurt by my mother’s underwhelmed expression when I told her last year that my latest scholarly book, Hate Spin, would be out in a few months. Somewhat apologetically, she said she wished I would write a book she could read, like my 2000 volume, Singapore: The Air-Conditioned Nation … My mother’s request was a timely reminder that I shouldn’t get totally sucked into my academic research that I forget my roots as a Singaporean journalist.”

It is crucial that George writes in a manner that everyone can understand because his subject matter of choice isn’t easy to understand. Politics, in general, is a quagmire of personal agendas wrestling with national interests and veiled attempts at exercising unfettered control.

At best.

Singapore politics are no different except that the inherent untidiness of politics is compounded by two things: Singaporeans have heard only one tune blaring from the PA system (pun intended) since the 1960s; and the message we’re receiving is, “Go about your chores and leave the thinking to us.”

Which is precisely the elephant in the room that George tries to shimmy around without getting his feet stomped on and broken; nay, crushed. His title essay, The Air-Conditioned Nation: Lee Kuan Yew and the politics of comfort and control, directly tackles the point. In the process, possible reasons for the choice of political apathy over engagement come to light.

“So, think of Singapore instead as the Air-Conditioned Nation – a society with a unique blend of comfort and central control, where people have mastered their environment, but at the cost of individual autonomy, and at the risk of unsustainability.”

Has anything changed since 2000?

Yes; think, indeed.

LINKS

Air-Conditioned Nation Revisited: Essays on Singapore Politics is published by Ethos Books and is available to buy online. 

For more on Cherian George, visit his website.

To read our 2016 interview with George, it's here.