7

The History and Moral Identity:

The Challenge of the Philippine
Centennial
We Filipinos often complain that our grasp of history tends to be too
inadequate and our memories too short to enable us to live sensible and coherent
lives. We take to heart George Santayanas dictumThose who cannot remember
the past are condemned to repeat it believing that the key to the present and
future lies in a profound understanding of the past. We expect history to teach us
lessons, as if the past contained self-evident meaning that are just waiting for any
reader to unlock.
But I would argue that the past is always selectively revisited, that history
offers no intrinsic messages, and that any reading of history is always conditioned
by present concerns and future hopes, regardless of the extent to which these are
conscious, I would also argue, following Nietzsche, that in fact, not all remembering
is good for life, and that a person who is incapable of forgetting would be just as
crippled as on who cannot remember anything. Remembering is problematic. The
art of remembering must be combined with the art of forgetting. That which we
cannot subdue we must learn to forget, said Nietzsche. If it is true, then deciding
what to remember and what to forget might be the greatest challenge a nation
would face once it decides to celebrate a milestone like a national centennial.
I do not think it was easy for the National Centennial Commission to decide
which historical events, places and persons to highlightand which to ignorewhen
they were planning the program for the year-long centennial celebration. There was,
first of all, the questions of which date was more important: June 12, 1898 or August
23, 1986? Should we be celebrating a revolution that failed (Bonifacios), or a
declaration of independence (Agunaildos) that was ignored by another foreign
power, America, only month after it was made? And which hero was most pivotal in
our national history: Rizal, Bonifacio or Aguinaldo? Questions like these were not
easily resolved by the Centennial Commission, which only goes to show that a walk
into the past is possible through many different routes. As Samuel Butler put it:
God cannot alter the past, but historians can. This is not the fault of historians
however. For there is no single historically correct approach to the past, no single
account which best captures its meaning and messages.
In the 1970s, the historian Renato Constantino published this version of
Philippine History and called it a history from below, history as it would have been
told by the inarticulate masses; an account of what he termed a usable past in
contrast to a past burdened by so many myths, a way of reading history so that it

may provide a basis for present tasks and future goals. Such a view is not popular
among conventional historians, who can only think of any account of the past in
terms of whether it is true or not, rather than in terms of whether it is useful for any
purpose. To view history from the perspective of present goals is, for such historian,
to engage in propaganda rather than scholarship.
But Constantino never conceals his partnership; the values he espouses, that
pf nationalism and democracy, are the same values that inform his reexamination of
our past. The betrayal by the elite of the national interest at almost every crucial
stage in our countrys history was, for Constantino, an abiding theme. One
American historianGlenn Anthony May, accused him of inventing a heroic past in
order to produce nationalists in the present a thesis restated by the same author
in a recent book entitled Andre Bonifacio: Inventing a Hero. Historian like May
assume that it is the function of rigorous methodology to ensure that historical
research gets the past right, as if the past were something that spoke for itself and
all that was needed was to represent or record it in its own language.
Yet we know this is not the case. The past yields itself most fully only to those
who come to it with conscious purposes, with their feet firmly planted in the
present, and their eyes turned to the future. Only thus cab the past be a source of
illumination. To ask therefore what challenges a review of the last 100 years offers
to us today is not to look for ma moral destiny hidden in layers of history; rather, it
is to ask what visions our heroes, the poets and revolutionaries among our
ancestors, spoke about, what dreams they had, and what every generation has
done to achieve these dreams. For in the words of Richard Rorty, we are what we
are, possess the morality we have and speak the way we do not because it
approximates the will of God or the nature of man, but because certain post and
revolutionaries of the past spoke as they did.
Bu the Centennial Commission took for granted what messages the last 100
years should bring to our present generation. It spoke of national freedom as though
we were still in the age of colonialism. It spoke of social justice as though we were
still living in feudal times. It spoke of nationhood purely as patriotism. In the name
of national unity, it chose to gloss over the controversies that divided the forces of
the revolution instead of addressing and putting these to rest once and for all. The
death of Bonifacio, for example, or the conflicts with the Katipunan; or the
collaboration of the elite with the America forces; or, closer to our time, the whys
and wherefores of martial law.
The main reason for this omission in my view was the erroneous assumption
that history is good only for the enhancing love of country or pride in ones heritage.
Which probably accounts for why in June, there was a brisk sale of flags and the
barong tagalog and the saya, the visible trappings of identity, but little analysis of
where we stand in the world today. What was sorely lacking was an orientation to
the past as service to the future and the present. The Centennial would have been
far more significant if it became the occasion for debating national purposes or for
highlighting the features that have characterized our peoples life in the last
hundred years and analyzing these in the historical and critical terms.

Again let me borrow Nietzsche to illuminate what I am saying. History, he

says, pertains to the living man in three respects: it pertains to him (first) as a
being who acts and strives, (second) as a being who preserves and reveres, and
(third) as a being who suffers and seeks deliverance. This threefold relationship
corresponds to three species of historya monumental, and antiquarian, and a
critical species of history.
A nations monument history would tell us about is great heroes, the great
moments and accomplishments in its past, and the virtues that these heroes and
accomplishments exemplified. Confronted by such a monumental past, says
Nietzsche, the man of the present learns from it that the greatness that once
existed was in any event once possible and the doubt which assailed him in weaker
moments, whether he was not perhaps desiring the impossible, has now been
banished. On this score at least, I believe that the Centennial has registered its
most important successes. By reminding us of our heroes and their deeds, and of
the crucial moments when they chose immortality over mere existence, the
Centennial showed up us a legacy of greatness and worthy emulation. Such a
history always inspires, even if at times, to do so, it has had to mythify.
It is in the antiquarian and the critical mode of remembering that I feel the
Centennial proved to be most weak. History serves its antiquarian function when it
gives us a sense of our rootedness in a place, surrounded by the ancestral goods in
which our souls may find a home. For the man who remembers, landscape becomes
the resting place of memory. In Nietzsches words: The history of his city becomes
for him the history of himself; he reads its walls, its towered gate, its rules and
regulations; its holidays like an illuminated diary of his youth and in all this he finds
again himself, his force, his industry, his joy, his judgement, his folly and vices. Here
we lived, he says to himself, fir here we are living; and here we shall live, fir we are
tough and not to be ruined overnight.
We have not seen much of the antiquarian sense in the Centennial except in
the ironic attempt to construct replicas of historic buildings in the so-called
centennial village in the reclaimed grounds of former America base in Clark.
Meanwhile our old buildings everywhere have lain in ruin, unable to project even a
glimmer of their ancient glory. Our National Museum is only now about to find a real
home. Traces from our past are rotting in dusty warehouses. Many historical
documents remain bundled in shoe boxes, awaiting the gentle caring hands of
librarians and archivists with a historical sense. Old photographs fade into dust in
humid storerooms even before they could be re-shot for the appreciation of future
generations. The finest antique collectionsartifacts of a peoples creativityare no
longer found in churches or cathedrals or public museums but in the private homes
of the wealthy; where they surrender their pious significations in favor of their
decorative functions.
The treatment of historic buildings and monuments has been even more
miserable. There is no conscious policy to preserve or even just to re-insert the old
into the new, except when they are neededlike the Barasoiain churchto lend a
touch of solemnity to an official function. We have become a nation of philistine

developers, a crazed people engaged in the relentless erasure of landmarks from

the past. Which is why, unlike in Europe, geography in our country is seldom an
incitement to remembering. Outside of their relatives homes, balikbayans find
really little to come home to which would remind them of the contentment they had
felt in the homeland of their youth. All around them they find only the grim
reminders of the desolations and poverty from which they sought to escape.
But more than this, the Centennial has had no critical value. It has failed to
provide the occasion to criticize and condemn aspects of our past on which some
surviving institutions or practices worthy of being junked might still be anchored.
Critical history examines what we have become in the hope of freeing ourselves
from the chain of past errors. It is through this that history performs as
emancipatory or liberative function.
A good example is the place of our national minorities in the nations life.
Critical history would have told us how the aberrations and crimes of the past
produced the minoritization and inferiorization of Mindanao and the Cordilleras. If
done well, such an exorcism of an episode in our history would have permitted us to
condemn past deeds and free ourselves from their living residues. It would have
enabled us to take the first real step towards correcting a historic injustice, and thus
pave the way to forgiving ourselves as a nation.
Bu the celebratory character of the Centennial overshadowed any concern for
rectifying collective errors and crimes whose effects continue to haunt us to this
day. For it was decided early on that the centennial should not reopen old wounds or
resentments. It was partly for this reason that the Centennial expressly avoided any
discussions of the circumstances surrounding the assassination of Andres Bonifacio
and of Antonio Luna. Some organizers suggested that his might embarrass some
families or even entire provinces, or pit one ethnic grouped against any other.
In view of all this, it is no longer surprising that the Centennial celebrations
came and went without creating lasting impressions on the national consciousness.
The past failed to teach us its lessons for the simple reason that we forgot or
refused to raise the right questions. Therefore, it was natural that the centennial
would leave no challenges. Its exploration into our past had been cursory and had
explicitly avoided controversy.
But I think it is never too late to interrogate the past, to root our past crimes
and errors in the hope of rectifying the living marks they have left behind. It is true
for individuals and institutions; it is true for nations. I believe it is not too late to
examine what we have become in the last one hundred years in the light of the
moral identity that our ancestors had helped forge through decades of struggle. For
this is what history is all about. As Milan Kundera puts it: The struggle of people
against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. That which stubbornly
resides in our memory against the vicissitudes of forgetting forms the core of our
moral identity.
Moral identity is an interesting concept for it signifies the principles that
animate a countrys progress into the future. It summarizes the hopes that we

associate with the social movements that have shaped our nations destiny. It is my
belief that Filipino moral identity as it has evolved up to the recent past contains at
least five elements:
1.) First is the quest for nationa freedom, the belief that we Filipinos are a
nation equal to other human beings, capable of governing ourselves, and
entitled to live in freedom within the community of nations.
2.) Second is the quest for democracy, the belief that we must establish a
republican democracy, a system in which every citizen has equal rights as
any other, where the state exists to serve and protect the interests and
welfare of its citizens both as individuals and as a member of the
collectivity, and where the people are sovereign.
3.) Third is the quest for economic self-reliance, the yearning to be a selfreliance nation, hoping to achieve enduring economic growth through the
development of its people and natural resources.
4.) For is the quest for social justice, the belief that the first task of
government is to ensure the provision of the basic needs of the people,
the elimination of poverty, and the equalization of opportunities for
advancements, even if this entails expropriation and redistribution of
property like agricultural land.
5.) And lastly, the quest for ecological balance, the belief that this piece of
earth on which our nation stands, our natural environment and all that is
has, is not something we inherited from our ancestors but is rather
something we borrowed from our children, that we are merely the
stewards of this place on the planet, not its owners. This means
acceptance of the principle that property rights are naturally limited by
our collective obligations to our children who will inherit the environment.
We do not need history to inform us about our moral identity, for those values
are very much an integral part of our present consciousness. But we need history to
remind us of the conditions that have stood in the way of the realization of these
values through successive generations. We need history to tell us about the origins
of the institutions and laws that contradict the basic values that to this day animate
our social movements. We do not need history to tell us about our supposed destiny
as a people, for there is no such thing apart from the destiny we create by our
actions. We only need history to remind us how we have come to live the way we do
in spite of what we believe in, hoping that such a realization may produce the
cheerfulness we need to goad us in the effort to achieve our country.
It is obvious that the national purposes I have laid out here as components of
our moral identity would acquire their particular meanings in relation to the times
we live in. the demands of national freedom, for instance, would have to be recontextualized in recognition of the realities of globalization. The era of colonial
conquest is long past. But there are new modes of integrating national economies
into the logic of larger markets beyond the control of nation-states. And indeed
advances in transportation and communication have made the boundaries of
nations porous and almost meaningless. Our people have become phenomenally
mobile. They have recreated the Filipino family and culture against all odds on

foreign land. Filipino identity has acquired new meanings when recast as
oppositional identity in hostile social environments. One-tenth of the Filipino nation
now resides outside the Philippines, making us truly modern diasporic people. We
cannot continue to treat Filipinos who have adopted the citizenship of their host
countries as lying outside the vision of responsibility of our nation. For they remain
very much a part of the nation we have become. All these realities we must take
into account as we grapple with the demands of nationhood and sovereignty.
I am afraid the OCW phenomenon, which originated in the 70s in a
temporary program to alleviate domestic unemployment, has not become a
permanent feature of the national life. Yet the institutions we have invented to
address this phenomenon have remained ad hocprovisional, and grossly
inadequate to respond to the complex needs of an overseas population. We have to
abandon the fiction that the OCW is just a temporary artifact of a crisis-ridden
economy. The truth of the matter is that an entire culture has grown around it;
spawning its own system of values and norms, career patterns and social
organization. It is time we awaken up to this as a nation, and assess what it means
to our institutions and the national life in the long term.
There is, too, the persistent problem of poverty, which has mocked all claims
to recent tigerhood or economic growth. The election of Erap Estrada is the
clearest and most dramatic re-statement by our people that they demand a
government that will prioritize basic needs over economic growth, social justice over
development. For some strange reason, notwithstanding the fact that ll mass
movements for change in history have always been underpinned by social justice
concerns, the articulation of political goals has consistently regarded this is only
auxiliary to national freedom. But this would not be surprising at all if viewed
historically. The most eloquent articulators of nationhood after all have always been
landed elite. Neither in Kawit, Cavite, nor at EDSA was the clamor for social justice
given the prominence it deserved.
Year after year, with every administration, the lip service paid to the goal of
elimination poverty has always been nullified by the realities of the property
system. The urban poor most squat because so much idle city land is owned by
speculators and developers. The rural poor must move to the uplands, exerting
further pressure upon an already critically threatened environment, because all
available farm lands are privately-owned, in many instances, awaiting conversion to
non-agricultural use. It as seems foolish to think that poverty can ever be
eliminated without a decisive program of asset reform throughout this archipelago.
Yet year after year, every government pretends that economic growth will soon
trickle own to the poor.
It is poverty and persistent economic insecurity that is at the base of the
many other problems of our society, from the graft and corruption to criminality,
from drugs addiction to government inefficiency, and from warlordism to votebuying in elections. Indeed so much of the environment crisis we confront today is
in large measure also an effects of economic desperation.

The problem we face as a young nation may seem intimidating, but their
roots are basic. A little criticial history would have refreshed for us their origins in
the unequal distribution of land, which spawned an oligarchical political system, and
a culture of patronage, inferiority, and dependency.
As we can see, the real challenge of the national centenary s to rewrite our
past in the light of our moral identity, or, if I may borrow the words of Nietzsche for
the last time, The best we can do is to confront our inherited and hereditary nature
with our knowledge, and through a new, stern discipline, combat our inborn heritage
and implant in ourselves a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that our
first nature withers away.