A DAMAGED CULTURE : A NEW PHILIPPINES?

A CRITIQUE OF JAMES FALLOWS’ ARTICLE

By Angelita B. Resurreccion
UP Diliman, 9 October 2013
Submitted To Dr Michael Tan
In Partial Fulfillment Of Requirements For The Course On Anthro 282,
Culture And Personality

Introduction
I remember reading this article one evening sometime in 1988 after I had put my two-year old
boy to bed. My husband had brought home a photocopy from his graduate class at UP, and I
remember the outrage I felt within me. How dare this Fallows guy kill my dream of a changed
Philippines? Our family was away in the Netherlands during the People Power Revolution and
we had come back full of enthusiasm to take part in rebuilding the nation. In fact, I had started
a small school in Old Balara, an urban poor settlement across Tandang Sora behind the UP
Campus, as an expression of our family’s romantic notions about helping the poor.
Today, 25 years later, I am glad I can read Fallows more soberly, having experienced a seesaw
of feelings, from excitement to disappointment, within months after election of presidents who
followed after Cory. Informed by formulations encountered in graduate courses in education,
psychology, and anthropology over the past few years, I see that Fallows wrote from a
perspective that viewed culture, power, history and education as discrete analytical categories.
While his views seemed valid on the face of surface events he had written about, his article
failed to help readers (particularly Filipinos) understand what was going on. Instead, he
managed to infuriate Filipinos enough to be declared persona non grata. By laying the blame
on culture, it was like him saying the problem with people was they were human. Fallows was
like saying the problem with Filipinos was that they were brought up in the Philippines by
Filipinos.
Why blame Filipinos for their culture? Is culture a cause? Or an effect? My thesis is that it is
both a cause and an effect, just like much of life. It is produced, and reproduced, in all of life,
particularly in schools. People like Fallows, and his country America, who introduced their
brand of culture, were very much a part of the whole process.

All about Fallows

Fallows as author
I think Fallows, and any other author, is entitled to his own opinion. That is what makes
democracy work, and that was the objective of our resistance to Marcos for a long long time
during our youth. As President, Marcos declared he was the only one who had the right to say
what was good for the country and everyone had to agree on the pain of disappearance from
the face of the earth. In the Freedom Constitution of 1987, ratified shortly before Fallows wrote
his article, opinions even of people such as those expressed by Fallows is guaranteed. As I
engage myself in discourse with his article, I note two points about him.
First, I note that Fallows writes as an American. I believe those who want to know about our
culture should read articles written by Filipinos. But if the reader wants to know what
Americans think about our culture, then s/he should read one such as this one written by
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Fallows. For instance, Fallows’ understanding of the ethic of delicadeza seemed wanting from
my emic perspective. I think his etic equivalents, which include saving face or vague sense of
guilt, do not totally capture “delicadeza”. But if those were his understandings of the term, he
should have applied them on himself, or at least apologized for his lack of kagandahang asal.
In the context of Philippine culture, if you really need to say something bad, nagpapaalam ka
muna, magpasintabi ka muna. As the saying goes, “Bato bato sa langit, ang tamaan wag sana
magalit.” So he should have exercised delicadeza and asked permission from his Filipino
readers that he was going to hurt their feelings, and whether that was all right.
But as I said, he writes as an American. So he did not seek permission. I wonder if he even
informed his Filipino friends, or at least those he had bothered when he went about his data
gathering, that he was going to write disparagingly about them. If he did not ask their
permission, he could have suggested ways by which local readers could use what he wrote to
improve their lives. So, again, he writes as an American. If his behavior is not even American,
let me say that he definitely did not write like a Filipino would. We want to be of value to
others, even by the way we give negative feedback. Ayaw natin makasakit ng kapwa, lalo na
kung bisita lang tayo. May delicadeza tayo. As an American, Fallows probably wrote for
Americans, not for Filipinos who I suspect were kind to him.
Second, as an American, he was an outsider writing about Filipinos. We were an Other, and
expressed himself from a position of power. Given the historical events, it was the US that
had unplucked the dictator from the country, it was their Senator Lugar whom the dictator had
called by phone to consult about what to do when he was rammed into a corner by people in
the streets outside his Palace. It seemed Cory Aquino was in power because of them. You
immediately see Fallows’ positionality in his very first paragraph:

In the United States the coming of the Aquino government seemed to make
the Philippines into a success story. The evil Marcos was out, the saintly
Cory was in, the worldwide march of democracy went on. All that was left
was to argue about why we stuck with our tawdry pet dictator for so long,
and to support Corazon Aquino as she danced around coup attempts and
worked her way out of the problems the Marcoses had caused (Emphasis
mine).
and in his last:

America knows just what it will do to defend Corazon Aquino against

usurpers, like those who planned the last attempted coup. We'll say that we
support a democratically chosen government, that this one is the country's
best hope, that we'll use every tool from economic aid to public-relations
pressure to help her serve out her term. But we might start thinking ahead,
to what we'll do if the anticoup campaign is successful--to what will happen
when Aquino stays in, and the culture doesn't change, and everything gets
worse. (Emphasis mine)
His writings contrast to my view that the ouster of Marcos was the collective achievement of
our people. America decided to benefit from our struggle by stepping in, rather than the other
way around. America’s stepping in likely saved Marcos from being murdered by the people,
not saving the people from Marcos. That is my opinion, and obviously, from where I write and

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who I am, mine is from a powerless position. In the corridors of world power, my voice and
those of thousands who marched in EDSA, were probably not heard because America loomed
large in Fallows’ article, and he saw events as an American accomplishment, in the global
march of democracy. Of course, in 1987, America was still powerful. The democracy rhetoric,
then and now, is what would appeal to an American reader (given their notions of being the
greatest country on earth). Fallows chose to remain silent on the people of the Philippines
rejecting Marcos as their democratic icon. I am not sure if he was ignorant of us, but as I said,
we are powerless and so we did not matter. Instead, he and the US promoted the idea that the
new icon Cory Aquino was theirs, after they rejected the previous one. Fallows was just being
American. Every leader on the planet needed to blessed by America.
In writing about Filipinos, Fallows presented us as an Other. People like Fallows who come
from a position of dominance consider it normal to take or give the right to determine what is
valuable for a people, and label those in subordinate positions (Filipinos in the Philippines) as
defective or substandard. Culture is a tool for making Other ( Abu-Lughod, 1991).
What Fallows may not realize is that an outsider never really stands outside, but is actually
positioned within a larger political-historical context. What he has written about the
Philippines are but partial pictures of Philippine society, and should be seen in the context of
socio-cultural-political-historical forces which his own country and people helped produce.

Fallows’ perspectives
Static view of culture
In his article, Fallows’ view of culture seems to be static. Culture is reified, and made capable
of causing underdevelopment, of bringing out the “the productive best in the Koreans (or the
Japanese, or now even the Thais),” and in Filipinos, their “most self-destructive, self-defeating
worst.” But culture is not static. Anthropologists view that culture as a social structure that
powerfully impinges on people’s behaviors (for instance as a set of behaviors, customs,
traditions, rules, plans, and programs, to name a few), it is nevertherless learned and can change
(Abu-Lughod, 1991). Hence, it is dynamic rather than static (Hytten, 2011).
Ignoring role of history and power
Even as Fallows lays the blame for Philippine underdevelopment at the feet of culture, he
could have interrogated the way history and power relations in society intersect in people’s
everyday lives so that he might better understand Filipinos rather than resorting to moralizing
or blaming. To do this, he could have examined how schools produce and transmit the damaged
culture he wrote about. In this context, it is useful to refer to Nader's (1997) conceptualization
of the term “controlling processes” to understand why Filipinos seem to be behaving in ways
that are contrary to their own interests, hence suggesting a damaged cultural frame.
Controlling processes refer to the transformative nature of central ideas (such as Marcosian
New Society ideology and development rhetorics) that emanate from institutions (the State, in
the case of Marcos, and schools/industries, in the case of globalized US interests), operating as
dynamic components of power.
Schools have been a favored site for the shaping of Philippine culture ever since the US sent
the first batch of Thomasites to “educate” our people. In the case of Marcos, schools and
teachers were favored intruments for implanting his ideologies for a New Society and imposing
docility and acquiescence among the people.

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When Fallows came to the country in 1987, a number of ideas had been encoded in the people
as they went through life in or out of school, and these found their way into ways of thinking
and behaving that came to be considered “natural” and “logical” as good for society (thereby
creating consent). This way of thinking was described by Fallows as a damaged culture, as if
there was a perfect one that was possible. Perhaps at this time, 2013, with America having a
government shutdown, he knows for sure that he is not living in one. Theories of power
indicate how ideologies and policies emanating from social institutions download ideas that
are accepted by people (either by choice, persuasion or by coercion and compulsion). In reality,
as shown in the table below, the ideas eventually work against people’s interests, even if they
participated in the practice as Fallows correctly identified in his paragraphs.

Source of central Controlling Effect on current Adverse benefits

idea process behavior (cited by (against own
Fallows) interest)
Catholic church Goodness, patience Reverence of Cory Business: sales of
(Spain) & piety are counted as living saint Cory dolls (Religious
in heaven interests drive
economic/business
interests)
Church dogma on Having many Cannot afford to
birth control children send children to
school
(religion intersecting
economy, resulting
in poverty)
US Government, Education is for  English speaking  US and other
then Philippine progress elites rule industrialized
governments after  Schooling as countries (they
them sign of progress benefit from
 Proliferation of cheap labor, with
schools no education
 Loving US and $ expense for their
more than economies)
country
Marcos The President is Docility  Conjugal
sincere, he knows Hierarchical society dictatorship made
what is best for the possible
country. Sa “Know who” culture  Absence of
ikauunlad ng bayan teacher agency
disiplina ang and student
kailangan. agency
intensified
political &
economic
problems)

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 Business /industry Made in the USA is Buying stateside Inferiority complex,
better, White is products lack of pride in being
better Filipino, brain drain
Marcos opposition, Marcos is source of Restoration of old Crony elitism,
Cory government problems elite monopolies
later continue.

Ignoring our agency

It was Giroux (1983) who wrote that social and cultural reproduction is never complete and
always meet with partially realized elements of opposition. I think that was what Fallows
should have realized. His views were particular for a time in history, when Filipinos were still
discovering what it meant to exercise their freedoms in a suddenly equal but definitely unequal
society. By the time Fallows wrote the article in November 1987, we were not work in
progress, we were work warming up to start. The Freedom Constitution was just passed.
Being an outsider, Fallows had no way of knowing what Filipinos outside of the Marcos cronies
and the favored Cory elite groups did in order to interpret their world and exercise their
agencies to create a better culture. At the UP Psychology Department for example,
psychologists were persistently working hard to cobble a Sikolohiyang Pilipino to benefit
Filipinos so that we need not use outsider lenses to define who we were and what our future
would be like. Dr Virgilio Enriquez said as much.
It was around 1985 when my husband and I, plus a group of like-minded young informal
settlers in Old Balara, got together to find expressions for our own Community Revolution.
We put up our own school, and established a Christian fellowship that would express our basis
for resisting injustices brought about by Marcos, blind obedience to church interpretations of
papal dogma, the dictates of market forces as to the language of education or for tracking young
people in schools. We believe that culture is what we make it, and local communities should
be the ones to define what is best for their own cultures, being aware of- our heritage, our
strengths and weaknesses, our hopes as a people.
In our work with the community, we have time and again proven that it pays to listen to the
people we write about. They have a voice, they know what works for them in their world. We
need to write from a position of equality so that we understand them and be able to unpack
what it is about their lived experience that has made it difficult to see why their behaviors are
not beneficial to them. They need also to listen to others who can see, for having considered
their oppressions as “natural”, they cannot or feel powerless to access knowledge available
only to those in positions of dominance. Fallows failed to see that when he pointed out how
newspapers were available only to the few millions closest to Manila.
Instead of moralizing or blaming the poor, the goal of writers should be to understand and
empower the disadvantaged. Otherwise, writing like Fallows did about people from Smokey
Mountain made them double victims of their poverty.