Uniformity is not unity

In this journey of life, we are all fellow passengers, even though we come from different backgrounds.

I HAD occasion to fly on three very bumpy flights recently and had a macabre thought: even though everyone on the flight was a stranger to me, my destiny then was tied to theirs.

If we arrived safely at our destination, our shared destiny was to survive. If not, then… well, I would not be here writing this.

It got me thinking that however briefly, all the passengers on the flight, and on any flight, are united by this shared destiny.

Whatever happens, will happen almost equally to every single one.

If an accident happens, different people may have different fates but none of them can actually avoid going through the accident and none of them can be privileged enough to ensure a better outcome.

For instance, no one on the plane can insist on a different fate because they are of an elite class or race or religion.

Just because you’re seated in first class doesn’t mean that you will be spared any injury in the event of a crash.

I’ve never heard of anyone escaping unscathed just because they belong to any particular faith.

So basically, all passengers on the plane, regardless of who they are, where they are from or what they believe in, are united by their shared fate.

Our country is like that plane too.

All of us are on the same plane and our destiny is a shared one.

Some of us may be sitting in the front of the plane and most of us will be at the back.

But we’re all hopefully going to the same place.

If the flight gets bumpy, all of us will feel it. If it is smooth, we can all take a snooze.

The concept of unity espoused by some people, however, puzzles me.

First, they think that all the people on that plane should be entirely the same.

I suppose you can charter a plane to take you somewhere but if something happens to that plane, it leaves behind lots of people who aren’t the same as you.

Secondly, if everyone is the same on that plane, what could possibly be new and different to talk about on the flight?

One journey would be all you would need and then you basically remove any need for any more flights ever again.

Whereas if you had lots of different people onboard, then there would always be something to talk about – where to go, how to get there, what to do once you’re there – so you give yourselves many opportunities to fly to all sorts of exciting destinations.

Some people seem to mistake uniformity for unity. Everyone would not only look the same but also think and act the same.

I don’t know of any country where everyone is forced to be the same that also develops in a forward-looking way.

North Korea would be the best example.

Other countries like Japan or South Korea may look homogenous but in fact they are not.

That’s why they can be very creative. They also have no qualms about borrowing ideas from other countries and improving on them in their own way.

Their people, however, do understand that they’re all on that same plane together.

But over here, some people’s idea of unity is for half the country to come together and the other half to dumbly sit back and wait for scraps.

Or to belabour that airplane analogy, half the plane is first class while the rest are in cattle class.

But I read somewhere that the front of the plane isn’t necessarily the safest place to be if anything should happen.

What’s more if you have an unskilled pilot, or one who is asleep in the cockpit, then everyone’s fate depends on what he does or doesn’t do.

Even if the most advanced jets today can virtually fly themselves, they still need human brains and hands to land them safely.

So the passengers can argue all they want but none of them will be able to fly that aircraft.

So we need to be clear about what unity means, and that the reason we need to have unity is because we have diversity.

That diversity is a given and we can’t wish it away no matter how much we want to.

But diversity is actually an asset because it is in managing our differences that we learn how to negotiate, compromise and respect one another. No innovation ever came out of uniformity.

We, therefore, have a choice. Get onboard the flight together and accept our common destiny. Or fight over where you’re going to sit and who’s going to get the best food.

Buckle your seat belts please!

The views expressed are entirely the writer’s own.

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Lessons from the animals

The difference between the violent chimpanzees and the peace-loving bonobos appears to be linked to the role of their females.

I’VE just watched a fascinating lecture on whether animals have morals. In various laboratory experiments, it’s been shown that capuchin monkeys and dogs do care about how their friends feel.

If they see a friend in pain, they will try and comfort them.

If they see that getting a food reward means that their friend will suffer from an electric shock, they will forego food rather than subject their friend to such pain.

They will help one another to get the same rewards, although they won’t help someone they don’t know.

And they seem to have an inherent sense of fairness, rejecting attempts to being differently rewarded for the same tasks.

So in many ways, they are the same as human beings.

What’s different of course is that they don’t tend to sit around and analyse why all this happens.

The other big difference is that they also don’t tend to punish those who transgress these rules. So they might protest at unfair treatment or go on a hunger strike in support of a friend, but they don’t seek to punish perpetrators of such unfairness.

The experiments also found that capuchin monkeys are quite willing to support other capuchin monkeys that they know and can see, but not those they don’t know and can’t see.

Their first priority is their kith and kin and not strangers, especially anonymous ones. This also differentiates them from humans who will extend a hand to total strangers such as we did during the tsunami and Typhoon Haiyan, with no expectation of reward.

These studies show that although sometimes we claim that morality in humans is determined by culture and religion, some things are probably hard wired into us.

We all have an innate aversion to harm, an inherent sense of fairness, respect for authority and care for our young.

Studies on babies and toddlers have shown that they will cooperate and help others without being asked.

This tends to dissipate though as they get older, though never really disappears since we do see the same traits in adults too. One explanation is that, if we stopped cooperating with one another, pretty soon the human race would simply die off because we do need one another to survive.

The lecture also compared not just morality in animals and humans, but also immorality, specifically violence against others.

I presume violence was chosen because it’s a bit difficult to assess lying and cheating in animals since we don’t speak their language.

And in some things, such as sexual behaviour, we can’t really impose our human values onto them.

The best comparisons are with our closest genetic relatives, chimpanzees and bonobo monkeys. These two groups of animals may seem similar, but behave in very different ways. Chimpanzee society is an extremely violent one.

They not only fight each other within their own community, but also others in other communities and are prone to physical abuse of the female members of their community and infanticide.

The primate expert Jane Goodall studied two communities of chimpanzees in Gombe, Tanzania, which engaged in a four-year war which ended with all the males in the smaller community being killed and the females absorbed into the larger community.

The war was not limited to skirmishes when the two communities chanced upon one another.

The larger one would actually send out raiding parties to seek out and viciously attack members of the smaller one, especially those seen as weak.

Bonobos, on the other hand, are an extremely peaceful society, preferring, literally, to make love and not war.

They never attack each other or outsiders and seem to spend most of their time being very affectionate with one another.

The explanation for this is that female bonobos, unlike chimpanzee females, bond with one another very tightly and stand in solidarity with one another.

As a result, they are able to temper the male instinct for violence and this results in an overall peaceful society.

There may well be many traits we might recognise in ourselves in our primate cousins. It’s worth noting that the only two species that actually wage war on others are chimpanzees and humans.

But there are some differences. For while chimpanzees rely only on their own strength for warfare, humans go on to develop very sophisticated weapons that can kill thousands of strangers thousands of miles away, often without even leaving home.

And if we learn anything from our bonobo cousins, it’s that a society that gives their females a big say in how things are run tends to be a more peaceful one. Easy to see which type of society is likely to advance.

Given the recent monkey-like behaviour we are seeing in our country, we should ask ourselves: are we chimpanzees or bonobos?

> The views expressed are entirely the writer’s own.

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Choose the way you make choices

We often put far less effort into forming an opinion than into choosing what we eat, buy or even wear.

THESE days if you walk into a coffee bar, you find yourself faced with an overwhelming variety of choices. You can have strong, weak, with milk, without milk, several different types of milk and in several sizes.

It can be confusing but eventually you make a choice, even if it is for the simplest version possible.

The point of the modern coffee bar is that you have choices and you can decide for yourself, even if it is to finally just walk out without ordering anything.

But how to do you make these choices? For a first-timer, the variety can be just too much and some guidance from someone would be helpful. But as you get more educated about the coffee, eventually you become confident enough to know what you like and make your own decision.

These days we are faced with choices in almost every area of our life.

We can choose to do many things or to do nothing. We can choose to do useful things or waste our time. We can choose to wear bright colours or dull ones. Every single waking minute we make choices on where to go and what to do.

We can also make choices in what we think about things. And yet somehow when we make our choices about our thoughts, we put less consideration into them than we do for choosing coffee or cars.

When we are in a situation where we have to make a choice, we consider many things.

If we need to choose a mobile phone to buy, we’ll read up about it, ask friends for their opinions and eventually decide on one which both suits our needs and our wallets.

We will take our time to make the decision that is right for us.

Whether we are making choices about where to eat, where to go on holiday, what insurance to buy or whom to marry, we think a lot about them.

Yet when it comes to having an opinion about something, we spend much less time. We read headlines and short articles and already decide that we know what to think about something.

The media tell us what to think about some issues and we accept their directions with very little questioning.

It doesn’t seem to occur to us that like everything else, we have a choice in what we think about many things and the choices can be as varied as coffee.

But there are so many of us who believe that we have no choice in our thoughts. Whether out of laziness or fear, we follow the way others, or our leaders, say we should think because we don’t realise that even in this we have choices.

We may well come to the same conclusion but we never think that we should go through the same decision-making process as we do for all other choices in our lives.

And yet we think of ourselves as autonomous human beings with the faculty to make independent decisions.

It always astounds me how many people use the same words to talk about things as our leaders and media use.

Few people seem to realise that they actually can use a vocabulary that is bigger than what is given to them.

Instead they limit themselves to the same words, which in effect means they also limit their own thinking about the issue.

This is why when people disagree with something, their arguments are often so limited.

Despite facts that can prove otherwise, they continue to use the same arguments over and over again, as if continued repetition will one day make it come true.

To find new facts or to be more creative with what they already know is too hard for some, or they think there is no other choice but to think the way they always have.

Perhaps it is a consequence of our less than stellar education system where our children are told that their choices are limited to only whatever their teachers tell them.

It is a system that insists that the only right choice is to obey authority regardless of whether they are doing the right thing or not.

So our kids grow up not realising that there are many more choices in the world, and that the best ones are perhaps the ones they are never told about.

Fifty-seven years after independence, our people live in this mistaken belief that they have the agency to make all the choices they need to make. But in fact every single day their choices are narrowed, instilled mostly by fear.

We blind ourselves to this situation because we think our leaders are making the right choices for us.

But what if they aren’t?

The views expressed are entirely the writer’s own.

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The fine art of Malaysian debate

IN light of recent events and with the lack of guidance from up top on how to conduct ourselves in an argument, I thought I would volunteer some tips on How to Win an Argument in Malaysia.

1. Decide what stance you want to take on something. It doesn’t have to be based on facts or logic, just what you felt when you woke up this morning, especially if you got up on the wrong side of the bed.

2. Don’t consult anyone on the facts of the matter. What matters is how you feel about it. The grumpier it makes you feel, the better.

3. I take that back. Do consult your boss about it. If he looks doubtful, persuade him that he doesn’t have to do the arguing, you will do it. It’ll make him look serene, if somewhat vacant.

4. Pick on a target. Ensure that they are people who are unlikely to be able to fight back. The best targets are those whom most of us would never have noticed until you point them out. This is what makes you a pioneer.

5. Fire the first salvo and make sure the media hears it. Don’t write it down, just shout it out. If they look blank, it’s only because they don’t understand what you’re saying. If anyone says you don’t make sense, it’s only because their brains are in the wrong place.

6. Watch the ensuing hoo-hah. With glee.

7. If anyone says you don’t know the law, ignore it. You are not concerned with the laws of mere earthlings. Even though occasionally, you do aspire to be an earthling lawmaker.

8. Get your mates to shout out variations of the same thing you just said. This will make it sound as if a lot of people agree on the same thing. They don’t have to sound nice and polite. That’s for wimps.

9. While you’re at it, take a swipe at any other group that has the temerity to look askance at what you say. Women, for example. Women really should just shut up and put out. Whatever did we give them the vote for?

10. Meanwhile, assure the boss that everything’s being taken care of. The media and everyone’s talking about it every day. You could never get this many column inches by doing the same old, same old, make nice stuff.

11. If anyone has the cheek to say you’re talking nonsense and are not worth commenting on, try to act as if you don’t care. But make sure the media knows what you think about it when you don’t care.

12. If the public thinks other people make more sense than you, tell them they are confused. Confused is what everyone else is. You, on the other hand, are crystal clear. They are wrong.

13. Make sure none of the voices that sound different from you get heard. Who needs such cacophony anyway? Yours is the only harmonious one there is. So, make sure that the papers and TV only air your views. They need to sell anyway, the poor things.

14. Never enter into a debate except through statements in the media. And try not to get on the liberal colonial language media, even the one owned by Arabs. That was a muff-up, sending that young fellow who doesn’t speak very well to that TV station. Who knew that they would send some slick, smooth-talking chap up against him?

15. Grand media gestures, especially if they’re TV-friendly, are the way to go. Those bum-shaking dudes a few years ago were really inspiring.

16. If anyone outside the country dares to complain about what you’re saying, tell them to butt out. This is Malaysia. We are different. Never mind if we still want to have the same mobile phones, TVs, handbags and cars as anyone else in the world. Get it right, we are different.

17. That doesn’t mean that anyone within the country is allowed to be different though. No way. How can we have harmony if everyone is different? No, we must all be on, how do you say it, the same sheet! In fact, if we can all look the same, even better. But we’ll start with thinking the same first.

18. If our foreign brethren start saying that we haven’t got it right, ignore them. They may be able to read our holy texts like they’re reading the newspaper but that doesn’t mean they know anything. Why don’t they just stick to getting oil out of the ground and leave us alone?

19. And those foreign brethren who are laughing at us, obviously they’re colonial stooges and have breathed the air in the West for so long, it’s gone to their heads. It’s Malaysian haze they should all be breathing! Why do you think our brains work this way?

20. History? Who cares about history? We are making history by being the first country to create problems where none exist. Who else can claim that?

Happy arguing!

> The views expressed are entirely the writer’s own.

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Have some of us lost the plot?

As we reflect on the past year, let’s resolve to be strong and wake up to reality in 2014.

ALTHOUGH this is my first column for 2014, I’m actually writing this still in 2013. So let’s call this a transitional column with a review of the past year and maybe some hopes for the coming one.

Personally, 2013 was not a bad year for me. I made two resolutions at the beginning of it, which I have mostly kept.

One was to brush up on my French so I have been going fairly regularly to classes all year.

The other was to keep a diary and I’m happy to say that I’ve written something every day for at least 340 days in 2013.

But I can’t say the same for our beloved country.

The year 2013 was one where we became more fractious, more disunited, more angry. Some people, to my mind, have completely lost the plot.

It was a year where a regular occurrence, the general election, became the excuse for so much rancour on all sides, and afterwards, very little self-reflection.

We now have a government in power which is disliked but yet unable to understand why that is so. And it is responding by thinking that all that the people want is more religion and to be bought.

Even then, it is failing miserably. Throwing monetary goodies at people, as any fool should know, is a short-term measure. People want to feel good all the time, not just for a day or two.

There is a simple premise behind election promises and pledges: they need to be kept.

Either that or rely on people’s short-term memory. Which isn’t reliable by any measure.

It’s astounding to me that simple logic doesn’t apply to the way our politicians think.

If you want people to like you, just be nice to them. And being nice doesn’t include finding bogeymen under every rock and being nasty to them.

We don’t want our lives enhanced through the misery of others; we’d like everyone to be happy, thank you.

It’s plain to any intelligent Malaysian (and dear Government, there are more of us than you think) that all this going after small groups of defenceless people are just a distraction.

If 1,500 people are a danger to us all just because they have slightly different beliefs, then we are bestowing on them more power than they have.

Similarly with all the other dangers and insults we keep dreaming up. All it shows is that we are a weak people and “they” are incredibly powerful.

We are now being led by people who are ignorant, unschooled and yet proud to be so.

We have celebrated the Gregorian new year for ages, so how did it suddenly become a Jewish celebration?

We have wished our fellow Malaysians the best during all our festivities, so how did it suddenly become a threat to our faith? Or is our faith so fragile that it can hardly withstand anything?

The other day, I had to worry about what paper I wrapped a gift in, in case the recipient got offended. This is how ludicrous it has become.

But what is truly ludicrous is the silence from the top.

What sort of leadership do we have which only mouths platitudes about moderation and unity, yet has absolutely nothing to say about the type of extreme pronouncements made not only by so-called NGOs, but also by some parts of government? Are they oblivious or scared? And if they are scared, why?

Once upon a time, we used to say “Malaysia Boleh”, that Malaysians were capable of achieving anything.

Today, we might as well say “Malaysia Tak Boleh” because every day there are more and more things that we are told we cannot do.

We are told we cannot be nice to each other because it might endanger the faith of some of us.

We are told that we cannot talk frankly because some people, obviously with weaker constitutions than the rest of us, might get offended.

We cannot do anything without treading on eggshells because some people have paper-thin skins.

So basically, the Malaysians we are most supposed to be proud of are those with weak faith who need constant government help and have such an inferiority complex that anything and everything that anyone else does better is offensive to them.

These are the people who think that the fastest way to heaven is to oppress other people. Lovely!

And our leader would rather spend time defending family foibles than to speak up for the most vulnerable and defenceless in society. How embarrassing is that?

So my wish for 2014 is that more Malaysians will wake up and realise the danger our country is in.

That to survive in the world today is by being strong. And strength comes from being educated and in tune with the realities of the world, not living in some fantasyland filled with bigots.

> The views expressed are entirely the writer’s own.

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