wyngman

What are Footnotes?

2012-02-15T18:00:00.000+08:00

An anachronistic waste of time, because who ever enjoys reading in an up-and-down manner?
A parallel conversation with idiots you know who will disagree (but for whom you won't give the space in the main body)
A c.y.a. maneuver ('cover-your-ass')
A political space to 'reward' friends
An opportunity to imply you've read the 800-page book when all you've really looked at is that 8-word line on p.34
A chance to look more scholarly than is actually the case, also known as window-dressing
A method to push the book along to its 90-page minimum

Žižek & Social Change, Pt.1 (at New Mandala)

2012-02-13T10:28:00.000+08:00

Thanks to New Mandala for letting me begin a potential seven-parter on Žižek and social change Malaysia.

First instalment relates to "traversing the fantasy".

Prayer-wise, We Are All Open Theists

2012-01-17T09:35:00.000+08:00

When Christians pray, they usually pray with an implicit assumption that the future remains open and unknown.

One never says, "God, I hope that from eternity you have already decided and therefore 'seen' that our family will arrive safely in Paris". C'mon. Surely we can agree that everybody will pray, "God, grant us journey mercy!" and nobody in their right mind will whisper quietly (or say in their heart), "But only if you know for sure that we'll arrive safely..."

Of course, no Christian ever prays for safety and adds, "But, God, I'm praying all this knowing that you don't know the future". Nevertheless - and this is crucial - all prayers implicitly assume the future remains open, even to God!

Every Christian accepts the risk that bad things can occur without the need to blame God. This risk is built into our intercession even as it inevitably finds its way into our feelings. But in our theologising we blanko it out? What sense does this make? Open theist or not, all Christians "trust" in God, ask Him for guidance/strength, whilst accepting the possibility of evil without believing that should bad things occur that God was responsible i.e. all Christians are open theists in their hearts.

Put simply, there is nothing in our prayers which suggest we believe God knows the future in every detail (i.e. exhaustively), which would suggest something faulty with a theology that holds to total divine foreknowledge of the future.

Which brings up the im-potence of God to prevent the tragedies He knows. Because if we believe God knows the ACTUAL future what are we saying if not the fact that He cannot impact the future anymore? So, from eternity, He's already seen the particular rape or murder which is about to happen on Sunday and all the prayers in the world can't change the fact of what He's seen. Then why pray?

The even worse perspective is that God has Himself determined that certain tragedies occur i.e. the tragedy was His call. This view of God seeks to absolve God of all risk and ends up absolving humanity of all responsibility (because if humans can act freely independently of anything God does, then wouldn't this mean there are 'areas' of life that God doesn't control? And wouldn't this leave God 'in the dark' somehow?)

If, however, we believe the future remains as yet un-determined and therefore un-knowable (not because God is any less omniscient but because the future is in its very nature un-knowable) then there is ALWAYS the possibility that it can be more aligned towards God's intentions, there is ALWAYS the chance that prayer can make actual the good out of the possible good or evil, there is ALWAYS the probabiiltiy that bad things can be avoided. The fact that bad things continue to happen says nothing about God's intentions or impotence but rather it affirms the complexity of the world itself, the fact that creation is a project of co-creation, co-loving which brings the risk of suffering and evil (even severe amounts of it).

There is also nothing inconsistent with open theists claiming that God - whilst not knowing ALL the future - nevertheless "holds the future" in His hands or still remains sovereign. The claim that sovereignity entails full foreknowledge of the future is a baseless assertion and reflects more our human insecurity at what God "should" be like. We are the ones which long to know everything failing which we feel less than fully in control, but why should God be like that?

The view that God knows - or has 'decided' - everything in time (and the future) is, from the perspective of prayer and human action, logically incoherent.

Did We Over-Enjoy RPK?

2012-01-04T16:17:00.010+08:00

(This post also uploaded at Free Malaysia Today and Malaysia Today)

For starters, the Raja Petra Kamaruddin u-turn episode should forever caution the rakyat from giving unequivocal support to anyone, even the darlings of anti-government rhetoric/commentary unjustly jailed for their stance. Today it's RPK, tomorrow Jeyakumar or Karpal Singh or Anwar himself (who - lest politically enthusiastic Malaysians forget - skipped from ABIM to UMNO in 1982 which as we know is kinda like Ryan Giggs jumping to Liverpool...)?

The second thing is how RPK's recent comments expose the politicization of truth itself, how we respond to truth-claims, the level of lee-way or suspicion we grant to remarks made by the politically connected (and why we do so), etc. A critical question is what would happen if RPK was to make another U-turn back to being his super-anti-BN former self? Would we have learnt our lesson and be less eager to swallow his articles virtually whole-sale? Surely the basis of our reliance on a certain individual's perspectives cannot be so fickle i.e. if he's anti-UMNO, we celebrate him; otherwise, we burn him in effigy?

Yet assuming RPK's credibility is forever ruined, another question arises: why is it forever gone? Have his recent opinions be proven to be less reliable? Are his assertions now lacking in proof (really, have they ever been proven at all?) Or is his credibility finished simply because he's now goring an ox we'd prefer he not touch?

Doesn't RPK now, in fact, represent political commentary at its purest i.e. bold statements supposedly based on truth yet which serves to obscure a ominous framework of lies which, in turn, offer fantasmatic support for the truth-claims made?

A quick note that the accusation that UMNO has 'gotten' to RPK - like the charge of corruption within the Selangor government - requires this small thing called proof. It's not that I deny the intuitive plausibility of, say, RPK being blackmailed on account of his son (or some such rumour) but, c'mon, a mature democracy first needs to behave like grown-ups, no? That means - at the pain of having nothing to say - we only hurl charges which can be substantiated even if the other side does otherwise.

So UMNO likes to make wild accusations - should the DAP do the same? So MCA blasts people without proof - should PAS follow suit? Hell, no. The buck's gotta stop somewhere. Furthermore, these suggestions serve to deflect two key issues 1) RPK's integrity from the very start and 2) the basis for our previous support of his work yet present berating of it. Perhaps the critical question is not why RPK has 'turned to the dark side', but why the rakyat extolled him to the light side in the first place?

Here's my take on why we liked RPK. It's quite simple: He made us enjoy cursing the government. Before RPK, people had things to say but they didn't have the 'secret data' to drive Barisan fellas into panic mode. Before RPK, people were 'small' and without influence but whoo now there's a prince(!) who tells the government to screw themselves. Before RPK, in short, anti-government commentary was like playing a board-game; now it's X-Box with sense-surround speakers in your face.

Blasting the government the way RPK did was something Malaysians were officially disallowed and (until recently) unable to do - these prohibitions INTENSIFIED our delight when the opportunity (and 'leadership' in the form that RPK provided) emerged. To put it crudely, we - political voyeurs to the full - were freed to vent our hatred of The Man in a manner which not only did not get us reprimanded but occasioned quiet snickers of satisfaction from everyone else.

In a word, enjoyment - of reinvigorated political criticism, of high-def exposés, of rhetoric, of RPK's "fist of the people" themes - was the critical 'category' which so endeared us to RPK's work. RPK was obviously enjoying himself. And we enjoyed ourselves watching him enjoy - and he/we knew it. And loved it.

But wait: what about RPK exposing the injustice and corruption and oppression and all those anti-democratic evils of Barisan? Aren't those important? Of course they are. But RPK gave us all of it and that little extra. He allowed us to sound patriotic and civil-minded whilst secretly (or not so secretly) indulging in gratuitious anger, insults and mockery. (To take this point further, try reading the scholarly material on Malaysian's political problems and abuses e.g. try digesting Clive Kessler, William Case, Bridget Welsh, Edmund Gomez, etc. they're far more reliable, 'scientific' and rhetoric/distraction-free, but you can bet you won't get any t-shirts with their name and 'C4' next to it and, besides, who are in the world are these people anyway?)

What's even more problematic is how (eventually) many people simply equated RPK's writing with political truth itself. To this day many still believe that Najib was responsible for the murder of Altantuya and would credit their belief to RPK's exposing the PM's involvement when in fact RPK did no such thing. All RPK did was make a statutory declaration based on information supplied by some seriously dodgy dudes who appear to be the frontmen for some plot possibly hatched by Tengku Razaleigh to bring down Najib. You can read it all from RPK himself - then again, do you trust him anymore? (Note: without doubt, there are serious injustices involved in the Mongolian woman's murder and it's not impossible that it goes all the way to the highest echelons of government but, damn, don't accusing someone require hard proof beyond a personal story of a night-out?)

The point here is that enjoyment, whilst fun, can be dangerous. It makes us lose objectivity, it makes us addicts, it makes us crave for the Fun at the potential expense of the Good. Hell, it even makes us very selective about the notions of the Good we accept.

For all the insights and news RPK have brought to Malaysian politics, therefore (and Kua Kia Soong is gracious enough to list them), the enjoyment he brought about has vritually transformed the quest for socio-political justice into a publicly disavowed ignorance of some of the criteria for justice: truth, patience and a good heart for others (even, yes, the bad guys). Instead, he's given us a preference for only certain kinds of truths, made us impatient (and lusting for about more or the same) and we're hardly more compassionate readers as a result - see what we think of him now?

In the final analysis, then, maybe the question is not why did RPK make such a drastic u-turn, but when is Malaysia going to make a u-turn from the kind of pleasuring that RPK offers?

Project Below-$4

2012-01-04T12:45:00.001+08:00

In a work-week, it helps to keep lunches to below RM4 (not including drinks; c'mon let's be real, although tap water is always available). Especially for students or poorer-than-students executives, what follows is a recommended five-day diet for folks in KL/PJ.

Sure Martha Stewart may object to the lack of nutritional value but 1) she's not Malaysian and so doesn't realise that 'nutrition' doens't mean the same thing here as it does in the West and 2) the 'general rules' below should keep eaters from dropping dead (for now). Here we go:

Monday - yam/banana balls at Indian shop (filling as hell)

Tuesday - popiah, 'oil-fried ghost', etc.

Wednesday - roti pisang / telur

Thursday - economy mee/rice (just veg, no meat, or just an egg perhaps)

Friday - char-siew pau (2 can bloat you)

General rules:

eat veg and fruits like there's no tomorrow
skip meat (you'll appreciate it more when you do take it)
take rice and bread to fill hunger pangs (and make sure you jog later)
kuih-muih, dumplings, kesiri and the like are aplenty in KL/PJ ('utilise' them!)

Resolved?

2012-01-03T00:00:00.002+08:00

Never say no when my daughter asks me to tie her hair (believe it or not, I'm getting better)
Keep lunches to not more than RM4
Read at least 3 books a week (as opposed to watch 3 DVDs' within the same time - wait, how about in addition to watching 3 DVDs' in the same time?)
Stop buying books for self (either e-read or borrow from the library) - now THIS is gonna be tough...
Jog at least 3 times a week (I initially wrote 4 but let's not push it, **grin**)
Cut down the monster movies
Quit the 'mental lepak' mentality; if in doubt, act.
Stop the $$ over-calculation - it ain't worth it
Limit FB time, 5 mins per 'session' tops (and learn to 'like' other folks' statuses more)
Check the car, regularly (duh)

Bale

2011-12-11T01:10:00.002+08:00

Flashing Amber

2011-12-10T06:29:00.006+08:00

In countries like France, Australia and the United States, the traffc lights are programmed to flash amber at night. I recall that in Germany the official flashing time was midnight.

Let's work with midnight. Notice what the message is when the lights flash amber: Before midnight, follow the explicit and specific rules. After midnight, the only rule is "make your own rules with others in mind" - how non-Hobbesian, eh? Before midnight the law is absolute. Even if you're the only car on the street it's still (technically) illegal to go when it's red. After midnight, you are the law (and pray you don't have two hundred cars at an intersection at 12.01am).

The debate goes on. Should people be regulated regardless of context or situation (or 'the time') or should we give a lot of space for personal judgment (i.e. an institutionalisation of 'let them decide')? This is no trivial matter; road safety, limbs and lives are at stake. Wouldn't it be better, really, simply to be prudent, to prioritise the avoidance of danger and make a blanket rule? Red you stop. Green you go. Amber you stop unless you've crossed the line or if stopping might result in an accident.

But the 'flashing lights' tell us a less authoritarian story. It says that suspending the law is a function of the law. The law can stand aside and tell people for 'think for themselves', almost even be a law 'unto themselves'. The law is, by its very nature, non-absolute, circumstantially exceptional, 'open' to change. This implies that we live in a non-absolute, non-monochromatic world and it's always possible to rethink what was previously considered dogma - in fact, the dogma is that we may at times be allowed to reconceptualise dogma.

In other words, traffic lights can suspend their own existence in a kind of temporary self-erasure. "After midnight, pretend we don't exist but act responsibly." One may even say that the period midnight to 7 am (or whenever) represents a glimpse of a perfectly free yet other-centered world, where rules give way to personal discernment, where mediation is not required anymore. Where true democracy reigns (if only for a while).

We can think this way when it comes to traffic safety. What about sexual orientation?

They're both of life-and-death importance. Imagine someone who doesn't "know" if he/she is male or female, wouldn't that be almost as life-threatening as someone who couldn't tell if a traffic light was green or red?

They both require individual decision-making and choices (i.e. substantial elements of our sexuality are within our sphere of control, just like how slow/fast/reckless we drive near a traffic light) and part of the law involves disallowing the ability to use personal discretion (i.e. I can't simply treat Sandra like a guy, likewise if the light turns green I should move - failure to do both would put my actions on a spectrum ranging from the anti-social to the illegal).

They both deal with community and are impacted by culture (i.e. sexuality is diverse, almost as wide-ranging as the brands, makes and models of lights and shades of colour) yet possess a veneer of the universal and absolute (i.e. red is red across countries, just like the female/male distinction).

But in sexuality when do the lights flash amber? When is the time when folks can say, well, let's "play it by ear", pretend the rules don't exist but behave responsibly? When can people be free to live and move and enjoy 'being' beyond and without disruption? When will sexual laws, albeit helpful and safety-preserving, make room or give way to a space/time without the need for them? Perhaps Seksualiti Merdeka is one reminder / whisper, not so much of immorality or ungodliness, but of a world where sexuality is less about rules but more about freedom? Of a world where folks who have trouble acquiescing with the rules can nevertheless 'carry on' in peace and fulfillment as long as public well-being is foremost on their minds?

And what about other domains like politics, religion, education? When does the world flash amber?

[It's also worth highlighting that lights flashing amber could also mean another thing: The system's mal-functioned. So an element which signifies more liberty may also suggests ERROR. But in both cases, the same maxim applies: Be responsible, care about others and act freely]

GoGo Brothers

2011-12-03T00:09:00.002+08:00

Intensifying Deleuzoguattarianism in M'sian Politics

2011-11-17T12:53:00.005+08:00

Deleuze & Guatarri's focus is on how pattern-reinvigorating and category-creating power of the virtual, of intensities, of flows - of desire. If the world is what it is, it's because of the infinite possibilities buzzing and hummbing 'all around', 'beneath' and 'alongside' the Actually Existing structures, concepts and ideas.

D&G are anti-Oedipus, as Oedipus represents the crystallisation or 'hardening' of categories. Oedipus - which Freud and Lacan takes as almost a starting point in his theories of the self/subject, hence D&G's complaints about psychoanalysis - represents a primordial form of individuality and selfhood, an understanding which D&G rejects as a false genesis. D&G see the subject as the result of the personalisation, 'molarisation' or the 'becoming' of virtuality, an assemblage or desiring machine formed by the convergence of flows. For D&G, adopting an Oedipal view of the world entails a dismissal of the rhizomatic and molecularity of existence.

Without adopting it wholesale, it may be fruitful to use D&G's concepts in looking at Malaysian political life. Simplistically perhaps, a Deleuzoguattarian take of Malaysia would:

view the concepts and institutions we take for granted (e.g. UMNO, the Constitution, democracy) in a historical and futurist sense; we'd more greatly appreciate the fact that these concepts are a result of intensifying and self-codifying of desire and how open they may be to change, re-categorisation, de-territorialisation, etc. We focus the mutability (as opposed to the fixity) of constituents, people, events and ideas
detect the helpful 'flows of virtuality' inherent in the institutions we detest (e.g. UMNO used to consist of 70% teachers, yet somehow business and political elites eventually took over - what happened and what may happen later? Anwar went from anti-government ABIM to UMNO stalwart to Opposition Leader - what 'flows' are present here?) and be wary of the dangerous elements which inevitably help 'make up' those we adore (e.g. to what extent do Pakatan parties rely on capitalist support and what potential concerns could this imply for the democratic agenda?)
construct fresh political perspectives which reflect not a linear-oriented kind of thought but thinking itself i.e. create a short-circuit between cinematic techniques and activism. This may not only open new angles for analysis, it could also suggest third, fourth, and fifth alternatives to the present BN-vs-PR polarisation in Malaysian politics
view events from a broader holistic 'ecological' sense, e.g. how will the General Elections be affected by the expected floods, by the explosion of 3D movies, by the 2012 Olympics, by the iPad phenomena, etc.?

What if Education was Independent of Industry?

2011-11-02T14:57:00.004+08:00

What if parents didn't consider "ability to earn" as a primary factor in their kids' schooling? What if learning was more or less divorced from the financial system (other than those who truly want to learn about the system itself)? What if lessons, assessments, classroom activities and so on were motivated by the sheer love of learning instead of some projected ability to boost one's bank account?

A few consequences might follow:

Students would (actually!) learn what they love; latent talent and "mulitple intelligences" would flourish; and excellence would stop being synonymous with an all-As' report card
Students may quit comparing the number of top marks obtained and begin appreciating quality in individual areas (e.g. Bobby the tap-dancer would be as highly valued as Brahman the Maths wizard, Ah Kow the poet needn't malu because he didn't score high in Science, etc.)
Subjects like Philosophy, Anthropology, Art History, Sociology and so on would be treated less like ancient diseases (classified as esoteric but no one wants to have anything to do with them...); the Arts would grow and we'd never get cases where selected departments get closed down because the university doesn't have a 'competitive advantage' or 'strategic interest' in sustaining them
Business organisations would adjust their product/service offerings to university student profiles rather than the other round; marketing and products sold would also have to meet higher aesthetic and/or philosophical/social standards (because, among other reasons, consumers have leant the value - and not merely the price - of purchases?)

Also, the PPSMI issue wouldn't be so determined by "the needs of globalisation" and more by the respective mediums the students can learn best in; this is to say that English can be recognised as important LESS because it's the world's commercial language (so folks keen on making money better learn it, duh) but because it brings about a richer learning experience and, in inter-disciplinary pedagogical partnership with Bahasa, may even nurture stronger personalities, more confident mind-sets.

Am I saying that money isn't important when thinking about how and what to learn? Of course not. Yet, in the spirit of good education, it often helps to hypothetically suspend that which we cannot live without in practice. Wasn't this what John Lennon was singing about? Imagine? Ultimately, we should TRY to stop classifying subjects and learners according to who's marketable and who's not, because everyone could be proud of who they are and what they can do. Imagine if.

Spurs Top 10 Goals (2010-2011)

2011-10-15T06:13:00.001+08:00

Valedictorian Speech from The Beaver

2011-10-02T23:48:00.000+08:00

“Good afternoon, graduates, dead poets, painters, future Einsteins, and all those in between. Today I’m here to warn you that you are being lied to. Our parents, our teachers, our doctors, have lied to us. And it’s the exact same lie, the same six words. ‘Everything is going to be okay’. But what if it isn’t? What if some of human experience is just something you inherit like curly hair or blue eyes. What if pain is just in your DNA, and tragedy is just your birthright? Or what if, sometimes, right out of the blue, when you least expect it, shit just happens? Shit just happens."

Developmentalism & Post-Materiality in Malaysia

2011-09-20T12:30:00.002+08:00

(Also uploaded at Micah Mandate)

This sounds a bit corny, but the struggle for the soul of Malaysian political governance may turn on the battle between two notions, one well-known and another increasingly familiar: developmentalism and post-materiality.

Developmentalism is about my ability to earn and thus appeals to my greed and pride. Post-materiality is about my capacity to yearn for more justice in the country, spurring me to make appeals on behalf of those for who may have too much poverty thus not much time for greed and pride. Developmentalism is about encouraging economic development so everyone can augment their material status and in return ‘forget’ about political injustice – a form of pleasurable distraction. Post-materiality is about looking beyond the material in order not to treat injustice as immaterial.

Developmentalism represents the trade-off the Barisan Nasional government made with the Malaysian middle-class in the late 20th century ("We make you rich; you leave the politics to us"). Post-materiality is the early 21st century awakening of all classes to the inhumanity and even illegality of an arrangement whereby a few cronies become super-rich, many folks make enough money to waste too much, most folks go into debt and some folks remain impoverished and others thrown into Kamunting for asking too many questions. Developmentalism represents Barisan 'protection' against 5/13/69-like events; post-materiality reflects the civic-minded attack against Barisan's extortion.

Developmentalism is about the rights of the rich to erect barricades around their housing areas; post-materiality is about those whose rights are forcibly taken away. Developmentalism is about mega-malls, macho cars, Big Macs' and i-Macs'. Post-materiality is about disabled-friendly facilities at the mall, better public transportation, food for the hungry and social networking to spread the message of justice (i-Politics, if you will).

In developmentalism, the consumers sell votes in return for more warehouse sales. In post-materiality, the people want to buy freedom - of religion, of speech, of organisation, of information - and they'll pay only with resources, prayers, conversation and votes, not a few nights (or years) imprisoned without trial.

Barisan Nasional won the 2004 elections with a 9-goal margin on the basis of developmentalism (among other things, like leashing key opposition leaders, dubious constitutional landscaping, etc.). In 2008, due to increasing post-materiality (and Facebook), the match went to Barisan 5-4 but their players (and the management) suffered blooded noses, broken legs, a host of red and yellow cards, and they even lost their favourites status in the Parliamentary Tournament.

Developmentalism uses rhetoric about democracy (especially 'the best democracy in the world') as a means to political ends; post-materiality means an end to un-democratic politics. For developmentalists, democracy is a much-touted but never-intended finish line. For post-materialists, democracy is the starting line, the track, the finish line and even the referee.

Developmentalism seeks to depoliticize everything (especially the economy) and thus politicizes the mind of the nation; post-materiality problematizes whatever is construed as 'non-political' or 'natural' and thus exposes the mind of the powers that be.

But this is not to say that sometimes the two notions aren't often confused or mixed. The same citizen who slams the BERSIH crackdown may also be the same shopper who secretly (or not so secretly) wishes she could spend like Kimora. The dude who signs a petition against illegal detentions and pushes his buddies to do the same could be the one and the same fellow who complains about rising food prices right before blowing a few hundred bucks on alcohol i.e. he whacks ISA but worships XO. The Kuala Lumpur executive who chides Barisan for ignoring human rights can, on a daily basis, ignore and revile the presence of Bangladeshi, Indonesian or Nepalese non-executives who wash his car, serve him coffee, cook his restaurant meals (they will also be the first culprits on his mind should his house be broken in).

If we over-eat, if we over-spend and if we overlook those who under-eat and can hardly spend, then we're in a poor position to demand, let alone create, political transformations.

This could be the biggest lie in developmentalism: That the people can create social change by remaining personally unchanged. The government wants us to believe that real action belongs to the domain of the governing, not the governed. And especially since the economic booms, privatisations and deregulations of the 80s' and 90s' (with a few recessions notwithstanding), Malaysians (especially the middle-classes) has been encouraged to focus on making money and leave the realm of politics to Barisan.

How, then, can post-materiality be nurtured and brought forth? There are quick-fix superficial ways and there are more painful substantial ways. The low-impact way would be to engage in Robin Sharma-ish meditations on "living in harmony" with the world, buying green products, dropping coins into the donation boxes near the cashier, and sharing FaceBook links on alternative music with "life-changing" messages.

The tougher but more permanent approach would be to design, engineer and implement a reorientation on a personal / communal level what we claim we wish to see on a national level. It could mean deciding once and for all that certain companies or industries should be lobbied against and popularly banned (if we could allow this oxymoron for now). It could signal prolonged actionable conversations with parties we've never spoken to. It certainly means making more moral/ethical demands of our elected representatives, especially those we suspect are behaving like nothing more than technicians (or PR consultants) for the constituency. It also could mean taking some firm corporate steps towards new priorities or ways of thinking (e.g. "How would we look like if our profit motif was subordinated to social concerns?") and burning the bridges afterwards (e.g. “No more contracts with XYZ Company until they publicly apologise for bribing their way into previous contracts”).

Post-materiality reflexively reminds the community of its 'here-ness' in the world and therefore its belonging in it. It's new, or least less entrenched than the lies developmentalism has been telling. It's also funky and thus may inspire more action than what conventional wisdom has delivered. Finally, it exudes a spit-shiney cool factor, thus giving something extra for the young in body, mind and heart to live for.

Reflexive, new, funky and cool. Needless to say, there's nothing to stop post-materiality from being Malaysian as well.

What is Victoria's Secret?

2011-09-07T11:17:00.001+08:00

Victoria's secret is the secret that there is no secret but it's worth believing there is. It's the secret that people long to convince themselves there's something more, that something mysterious resides in deep places and the mere appearance of a veil ignites a passion to discover and possess. Bulls are infatuated with the colour red. People are infatuated with infatuation itself.

Victoria's secret is the temptation to search for something in human sexuality beyond lingerie and sex appeal. It's the secret that the siren call to look PAST seductive clothing makes the apparel itself even more seductive. Victoria's secret is the power of the signifier 'secret'.

Victoria's secret is that feigning the appearance of something (which may be nothing) can drive folks wild with want. It's the secret that at the core of modern subjects, we long for nothing, we are caught in the drive towards an abyss. This is not to say that if asked people will reply that they want nothing - it's not that simple. It means that positive and actual content never truly satisfies us and that therefore we are always longing to long.

Victoria's secret that thinking about a secret - in strict opposition to revealing or divulging a secret - is the secret to the power of a secret. It's the secret that secrets work by remaining secrets.

Victoria's secret, in a word, is the secret of desire.

Atonement's Ending

2011-09-04T00:02:00.003+08:00

So I finally watched Atonement the movie, a good three years after I read the book. After reading the novel, all I could think about was the Stukas, but now all that matters is that awesom-ic ending (for one of many discussions related to McEwan's literary technique, check out this one by Linda Cruise).

The novel explores, among other things, the creative forms which atonement can take, not least of which is fiction i.e. Cecilia and Robbie have been separated for good and have died tragically, so what better way for Briony to make amends by immortalising an alternative (and certainly more happy and fulfilling) account of their lives? This brings up questions about the institutional memory of those we don't know personally and how their biographies can be changed so - whatever the truth is - the world remembers them in a positive light and that - i.e. the memory - is what matters.

Oliver Stone's Alexander also played with this theme of fictionalising those whose lives (and deaths) we'd prefer others to remember fondly or proudly. In this movie, though, the 'truth' was presented first - that of Alexander dying from a mosquito bite whilst trying to conquer India - with the scribes changing the story later. The key issues here would be the validity and value of fantasy's role in not only masquerading as history, but in performing atonement (of whatever kind).

Given how history has often (if not always) been written to preserve and sustain vested interests and power, perhaps Briony's act may be seen as redemptive and subversive, opening the doors to future fictional re-writings which at least have altruistic and other-centered purposes in mind (cf. Foucault's deliberate 'distorting' of history to make a point). Re-writing the past may be more than a childish imaginary act; it could be an act of imagination that aims at a transformation of the present, the counter-part of the many direct lies told by insidious parties.

If the power of the memory of Cecilia and Robbie's relationship can be compared to the actual relationship, then perhaps the tragedy of the latter can be swallowed up in the triumph of the former. This kind of atonement, therefore, seeks not to stop at atonement, but pushes all the way towards a sort of redemption, too.

From a literary perspectives, of course, I'm assuming the 'reality' of all that Briony wrote other than the parts she said she made up. Of course, the wonder of McEwan's (as opposed to merely Briony's) novel is that this can hardly be taken for granted.

If Briony made the final portion up, then maybe she made up some critical parts of the earlier sections i.e. it's impossible to delineate some acceptable level of fantastical 'contamination'. And besides, how could Briony know about some of the private conversations between Cecilia and Robbie? More importantly, what else could Briony have missed from the start and how much of it has been re-written or re-imagined or re-imagined yet believed to be true? And therefore doesn't this render the very nature of the 'facts' being presented suspect in its very constitution? Since everything was from Briony's point-of-view from the very beginning, are we even entitled to ask the question of what 'really happened'?

Standing back even further, what about life, history, the world and reality themselves? Who tells these stories? Why do we believe the truths we believe? And - just like how realising that one of the characters was telling the story from the start - would our understanding of our world change with the recognition that it's we ourselves doing the story-telling? And if not us, then who?

There is a God, Sigh

2011-09-02T11:59:00.001+08:00

There is a God, so we don't need to think much anymore.

There is absolute truth, so we can play down contingencies, contexts, cultures, localities. There is categorical non-negotiable reality, so let's not set our minds to synthesizing, to construction, to integration, to anything remotely resembling plurality.

There is absolute Right & Wrong, so we needn't worry about discourses, about degrees of morality, about the sinner (and their pain), about relative right (and its absolute importance), about the (socio-political) construction of the good and bad. We must say that Love matters but far be it we prioritize this, because we know what happens when love disturbs truth and violates our dictates of justice.

There is Us and there is Not-us, so our primary concern is making more of us and keeping not-us at arms' length. We have our identity and to compromise on its protection represents the intrusion of difference, only a notch below the destruction of our very selves. This is not to say we don't smile and say nice things in the others' presence.

There is our Scriptures, so let's not read anything else too seriously. Or if we do we must never forget the hierarchy of epistemology. Let's also look past the numerous hermeneutical divisions within our own community, how we secretly rely on one tradition or academic history, how the sacred page is often a sacred arena for profane theological warfare.

Sigh.

Lady Gaga & BN's Welfare Aid

2011-08-25T12:15:00.003+08:00

(Also uploaded at Free M'sia Today and Micah Mandate)

Lady Gaga and Elton John recently produced a song about unexpected encounters. It was part of the sound track for the animated movie Gnomeo & Juliet and goes something like this: “Hello Hello! My My My, What have we here?! What a surprise, what a surprise!”

It's almost the first thing that came to mind when I saw the government's allocation of funds for the needy under the 1Malaysia People's Welfare Programme. This RM1.4 billion distribution will, as we all know, meet with opposing reactions.

Pro-Barisan folk would see this as proof of yet again how much Crew Najib actually cares for the country, how the government is doing its utmost to tackle poverty and inequality, how 1Malaysia isn't merely fluff, how Barisan is the champion of social justice and so on. The Anti-Barisan group will point to how this is not even 10% of the amount allocated to the PM's Office, how it's grossly insufficient, how it's an obviously pre-election ploy, how it does not address structural injustices in the country and that overall something stinks worse than a particular anus being examined in court.

All this ping-pong-ing is familiar; everyone more or less knows and expects. What very few know of (let alone care about) is how the trajectory of this debate actively assumes one main element - what the government is or isn't doing - and quietly represses another i.e. how the people (also known as the 'demos', the root of that famous word I know I don't need to repeat here) can and should act.

Hello Hello - there could be something unMalaysian here.

Distributing goods to the poor is a noble act and one which any compassionate government cannot ignore; sadly it also could be a way of removing any discussion as to why certain parties have the power to distribute and others merely to receive. Giving money and aid to combat inequality is never a bad thing; it's however also not the best thing if it further cements the most unequal divide between those who can choose to give or not and those who must rely on such gifts. Challenging the lacklustre (and politically motivated) subsidies by the Federal Government is a necessary dissensus by the Opposition; yet it's not as powerful as the dissensus which questions why the people need to rely on hand-outs by a faulty and insidious form of representation by a supposed 'elite group' in the first place.

Najib, as part of his donation speech, said that “The underprivileged represents a large group of the community and without government intervention, they will remain marginalised and we will have failed to uphold social justice” - My my my, what a surprise.

Even more surprising though, is why such a large group are called to accept a system in which they are reduced to the role of passive recipients and rendered (largely) invisible until either an election is forthcoming (which is once in about 3-4 years) or a Tan Sri needs to include more tax-deductible items in their business accounts (which is anytime they don't have less self-centered things to do with their money, which is rare) or - Hello Hello – until a system emerges in which everybody takes responsibility for each other.

This would be a system in which we have true equality with one another. I mean a kind of equality in which every husband can afford to buy his wife and children a good meal - instead of what we have now where some husbands need to beg to feed their kids whilst others can get their wives diamond rings with price-tags that rival Air-Asia's quarterly profits.

This would be a system in which charity representatives don't need to go from restaurant to restaurant asking for donations (and mostly being dissed) because the community would've made a decision to include the orphans, the homeless and the physiologically challenged as part of the people and therefore will more than effectively provide for them. This would be a great improvement over a system where people taking care of an abandoned Down's syndrome girl need to suffer the embarassment of disturbing hungry lunchers digging into their chicken rice in order to ask for donations; God forbid I must endure pictures of cerebral palsy children when a dripping drumstick is four inches away from my lips.

What kind of system would this (for now) imaginary one be? Would it be democracy? I doubt it, but even if it is it would be a very different kind of democracy than what Malaysia has now. Malaysian democracy is about various groups making demands about what they're not getting, what they don't have enough of, what other groups are depriving them of, what they should be getting, and so on. All of which gives the lie to '1Malaysia' or the idea of being "Malaysian first and something else second". Perhaps being Malaysian should be about transcending race but about including everybody, especially those who are “a part of no part” i.e. we will never be - and should never be - fully "Malaysian" until as a community we take care of the "least" of those among us?

Maybe it's that we 'normal' folks don't truly see the 'abnormal' folks as part of us, members of the national family. If a boy is spastic this is unfortunate but, well, it's a fact of life, a social problem - which is another way of saying it's not our problem. And if it's not our problem, it will never be a 'political' problem, a problem which makes demands of the system.

We are not fully Malaysians until there are no more 'homes for the disabled' because the category of "DISABLED" would be abolished, not for lack of compassion but for lack of classificatory relevance. We are all part of the family. Some can walk faster, hold a pencil more easily or learn more things, but every one of us is one of us.

For this to happen - to return to an earlier theme - the people may have to choose to act instead of choosing other (supposedly more enlightened) people to act on their behalf. True democracy may requires us to gradually problematize the distinction between the governed and the governing, to challenge not simply the motives and amounts of distributions, but the very power to distribute.

Impossible? Lady Gaga doesn't seem to think so. We can take her words to heart:

"Never gonna find...anything to change my mind?

Famous last lines of a fool."

My Country

2011-08-23T21:20:00.001+08:00

An Evening With Ron Choong

2011-08-22T15:20:00.005+08:00

I attended my first Ron Choong lecture/seminar last Thursday and whatever else I say below, I'm glad I did. Ron is one of the best scientific-theological minds in the world who's also an ordained minister with a vibrant Christian apologetics ministry. He's extremely well-read and a major component of his oeuvre includes the sharing of many stories about science, history and literature. In about an hour and a half, I learnt so many new things about Louis Pasteur, Mary Shelley, Watson & Crick, Sir Alexander Fleming, Isaac Newton - I mince no words when I say that listening to Ron is like tuning in to a high-speed radio program on 1001 Fascinating Facts About The World.

The wonderful thing, too, about Ron's stories that he uses them to weave in ideas of God's providence, love and action. I don't think I've ever heard someone connect Frankenstein to the Bible's view of us and God (in a nutshell, Frankenstein's monster went on a killing spree because Frankenstein failed to love it - compare this to the account of Christ loving us despite our on-going killing sprees throughout history...).

Also, his brief account of the debate between Stephen Jay Gould and Simon Conway Morris on the quasi-theological significance of the Burgess Shale was deeply moving as it illustrated how two perspectives on the existence of God may arise from viewing the same scientific data. In a sense, this event encapsulated for me Ron's overall approach to apologetics: Ron doesn't focus so much on providing compelling scientific evidence for the truth of the Biblical position of how the world began and prefers to highlight the personal struggles of the key players within these debates. For Ron, the human dimension is a non-negotiable and, having a pastoral heart, I suspect he sees little value in abstract argumentation which doesn't convict the soul.

From his talk, too, I learnt that every year many new species are discovered. From this fact, Ron brought forth the theology of creatio continua i.e. continuing creation. This follows from creatio originalis - the original creation - and precedes creatio nova i.e. new creation at the end of days. (I didn't get to ask about creatio continua and whether this meant that new species 'popped into existence' regularly, how this can be proven scientifically and where in the Bible this is discussed - cool topic, no doubt.)

On the topic of Natural Science 'versus' Biblical Creation Accounts proper, Ron's position appears to be that Biblical accounts of origins cannot be said to be rendered incoherent by natural cosmogony chiefly because those sciences (i.e. physics, bio-chemistry and biology) deal exclusively with measurable phenomena whereas origins is about metaphysical speculation and un-repeatable events. Whilst Ron has specifically said that he's seeking a convergence of theology and science, he's also declared that, "good theology is not science and good science is never theology".

I look forward to finding out more (from his book, perhaps) about Ron's views regarding what scientific evidence he would offer to challenge the claims of folks like Dawkins, Gould and so on. This is important because if there is NO counter-evolutionary evidence which aligns well to the Biblical data then this would in a very real sense render the Christian account incoherent by scientific standards; on the other hand, if there IS evidence which puts the lie to existing evolutionary takes on origins, then this would imply that the question of origins is not exclusively metaphysical in nature and that good science is sometimes good theology too!

Such scientific evidence for the Christian account of origins would also, in my view, strengthen the Christian narrative vis-a-vis the non-monotheistic religions like Buddhism, New Age, etc. Because failing publicly verifiable proof or confirmation that "God created the world", there would appear to be no compelling reason why an atheist scientist ought to accept the Christian's position on origins as opposed to, say, the Hindu one.

Thus I confess I found problematic Ron's view that the opening chapters of Genesis should be more or less rejected as scientific truth and that their main objective was to engineer a mindset-change for the Hebrews, so soaked in the religions of the Ancient Near-East cultures with their pagan gods of nature. So, as Ron puts it, the purpose of the Genesis 1-2 was not to write 'factual history' but to tell the Hebrews who God really was and to subvert the other deities. This sounds all fine to me but it's in this context that Ron also stated his not-uncontroversial view that Adam could NOT have been a historical person because 1) Genesis 1-2 wasn't a historical record and 2) if Adam was a specific person this would entail universalism from the text of Romans 5:12-18. He also notes that we could justifiably deny that Adam was a specific person in the same way that we don't seriously expect David to have killed ten thousand men in 1 Samuel 18.

I would argue that Ron is right in what he affirms but stands on shaky exegetical grounds in what he denies. Granted that Genesis 1-2 was not written for exclusively historical reporting reasons, are we justified to render everything it says 'mythical' or non-literal? Assuming we don't declare everything in Genesis nothing but myth or poetry, how would we delineate between what is - for lack of better terms - 'spiritual fiction' and what's 'historically true'?

Ron is certainly right in that we needn't believe that David literally slaughtered a whole army - although here I suspect we only need to compare it to the statement that "Hitler killed six million Jews" to see how such phraseology works without rendering it entirely 'mythical' or merely poetic - no, the statement isn't literally true but it's STILL true. Then again, just because we may doubt if David physically killed an entire stadium's segment, this doesn't entail doubting that he killed Goliath in the immediately preceding chapter of the same book, 1Samuel 17.

The critical task, therefore, is to tease out the literal from the non-literal and I wonder if Ron may have been too hasty with Genesis creation accounts, particular that concerning Adam who, in his view, probably referred to a community of hominids i.e. instead of Adam being one man (with one rib missing), 'he' was really a group representing early humanity (and who could've numbered up to 10,000). To briefly restate the (largely evangelical) argument, I believe it's unlikely that the writer(s) of Genesis held to Ron's view of the non-literal-ness of Adam given, among other arguments, the very specific account of Adam's lifespan and family details in Gen 5:3-5:

"When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image; and he named him Seth. After Seth was born, Adam lived 800 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Adam lived a total of 930 years, and then he died."

Needless to say, it doesn't appear that a community of hominids is in view here.

Am I then saying that if we accept that Adam was a literal one-man dude, that he probably was missing a rib? Yes or No and It Doesn't Matter. I could argue Yes, Adam could've been a rib down and lived the rest of his life that way but in no way can we conclude that therefore every male human also has one less rib! Or I could say No because, as per Ron's example, hyperbole in ancient literature is certainly acceptable to make a point, especially a deep one. In this case it could be the juxtposition of the idea of human sexuality and that of being 'one flesh'. Finally, I could state that it doesn't matter because nothing heavy 'rides' on it i.e. I needn't overhaul huge amounts of textual evidence simply to fit either the Yes or No view - unlike the case of Adam-as-one-guy which does have ramifications should we deny what the text clearly says.

The point, again, is not to insist that Genesis cannot have a figurative dimension but to more vigorously ground our separation of what was meant to be taken literally and otherwise. This bold faithfulness to the face-value of the text (a term that Ron endorses no less) can helpfully spur the demonstration of how the Biblical accounts of origins are not merely 'religious' but also scientifically valid where they are intended to be so and ALSO to convince scientists working in the origins fields of the value of what the Bible says.

Promoting the Creation hypothesis, therefore, as opposed to (merely) the Creation statement-of-faith / dogma, would involve investigating instances in the natural world which:

suggests evidence of a Designer (e.g. complexity, information levels, pattern-making, etc.) - it's interesting to note that writers like Steven Pinker (in his book How The Mind Works) invoke 'reverse engineering' to understand the human mind yet reject the idea of a Supernatural Engineer; are we Christians going to let him get away with that? (grin)
entail contingency and thus logically a beginning, and therefore require an entity 'beyond' itself to get things going (e.g. variations of the Kalam or cosmological argument)

(Note: Somehow I suspect Ron is already involved in the above and much more. He has, however, implied to me in private conversation that he's disinclined towards the Intelligent Design way of doing science - I look forward to understanding more from him why and what other alternatives there are for making public the truths of Biblical creation...)

I suppose at the end of the day non-Christian scientists can be challenged by Christian ones to ask whether the world 'makes sense' more with or without God as the one who created it from the start, continues to create and will create it anew when Christ returns. To this question, I know Ron would say that - from his vast experience and knowledge - that nature only works and is so beautiful because God is her Maker. And, if nothing else, I thank him for reminding us of this truth.

PERKASA's Unknown Knowns

2011-08-15T14:34:00.012+08:00

(A slightly revised version uploaded at The Malaysian Insider)

August must be a banner month for Ibrahim Ali. After taking some time off following his near-disappearing act at the July 9th BERSIH rally, our fiery defender of Malay rights has re-emerged. This time he makes some unusual claims about PERKASA being the defender of Islam, burns some copies of The Star, burns some rubber snakes representing the Indian community and threatens Anwar, Ambiga and Team Najib itself for not paying reverent homage to PERKASA concerns.

Basically, everyone from MIC to PAS to BERSIH to Barisan itself comes in for a roasting by Ali and PERKASA. However, it's getting unclear whether the group's actions and statements, which are meant to be political, have not in fact taken the route to destination Mental.

Take the burning of The Star for its promotion of non-halal food in a 'Ramadhan' supplement. Slap the newspaper editor's wrists - sure. Extract a sincere apology - absolutely. Demand to see a few heads rolling - unnecessary though helpful and fun. But brand the newspaper anti-Islam and anti-Malay? Is this not to confuse incompetence and stupidity with hatred and malice? And, conversely, could we not characterise PERKASA's actions as hatred manifesting itself via stupidity?

The offense occured in a section called 'Ramadhan Delights', a segment meant to appeal to The Star's Muslim readers (so of course paper is anti-Malay/Islam, right? The paper MUST hate the religion so much since it devotes an entire section to recommend popular break-fast outlets for Muslims, no?). The fact that one writer ate far too many pork chops that he should have and that the editor needs a new set of glasses is no indication that the newspaper hates Malays and Islam. Again, insensitivity borne of blindness is no proof of contempt.

On the other hand, what could be proof of prejudice and venom (and not entirely mild psychosis) would be to burn toy animals - in this case, snakes - which purportedly represent an entire community - in this case, Indians. I wonder why PERKASA members don't see the absurdity of them subjecting the country's entire Indian race to symbolic abuse simply because an MIC division leader is disgusted with the party-hopping antics of Ali himself. Is this not idiotic? So if I'm insulted by ONE Japanese guy I'm then justified to demean the ENTIRE Japanese nation by getting a group of friends to throw bucket-loads of rotten sushi against a wall?

In the light of this, Ali's publicly branding of BERSIH as an 'emotionally unstable' organisation and declared his own members as 'peace warriors' sounds like an inverted bad joke - like the sausage calling the rooster dead meat.

The Malaysian public should thus takes Ali's calls for punishment against Ambiga, Anwar, BERSIH and DAP's "Christian Conspiracy" as seriously as they should take his proclaimation that PERKASA is 'losing faith' with the Federal government should our peace warrior's demands not be met. Because whatever Ali's grand concerns are, it cannot be fundamental change he cares about since he's implied that he still HAS faith in Barisan - which is another way of saying that he approves of the status quo after all (then again if he's really serious he's always welcomed to smash and burn the heads off a few more synthetic serpents...)

In March 2003 U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, when giving a press conference on the conflict in Iraq, talked about what he called 'known knowns', 'known unknowns' and 'unknown unknowns'. The first term refers to variables and factors the U.S. is fully aware of (e.g. the key military targets, number of soldiers on both sides, etc.); 'known unknowns' refer to issues which are significant yet for which not much information was available (e.g. the location of Saddam Hussein's hide-outs); 'unknown unknowns' are those entities which the U.S. doesn't know they don't know i.e. elements which cannot be planned for and which may come as a complete surprise.

What Rumsfeld forgot to include was the critical fourth term: the unknown knowns. These are things which have been repressed, ignored and generally disavowed from consciousness because to know or be reminded of them would invite severe trauma. Like a highly insecure person who refuses to talk about his insecurities or a person who's always angry but never more so when her peers imply she's an angry person, a group (or even society) with 'unknown knowns' will always be lying to themselves because they have a psychical stake in dis-believing and thus denying what's inside them.

In the case of the United States and its 'War on Terror', the Abu Ghraib scandal (in which Iraqi prisoners were tortured in humiliating and shocking ways) exposed a dark flip-side to American talk of peace, universal values and human rights. In the case of PERKASA, two questions arise, one straight-forward and another somewhat less clear.

The first question : What are PERKASA members, not least Ali himself, repressing about themselves? This one is easy and here's a list of what PERKASA doesn't (but should) know that they know:

That it's a racist/supremacist group which gives Malays a bad name and which, more than any other group, is guilty of sedition
That the long-term effect of their posturing will lead to less respect, less resources and less influence for its members
That, contra Ali's frequent declarations, PERKASA is cowardly and that it should be blamed for continuing racial tensions in the country

The second question, the one which this piece will conclude with, is somewhat more disturbing: Is PERKASA that very element that Malaysian society refuses to recognise in ourselves? What within Malaysian society has bred the likes of Ali and his 'peace warriors' and what else is about to follow?

The DUMC Raid: Are We Forgetting Someone?

2011-08-07T13:48:00.003+08:00

(Also posted at the Malaysian Insider)

The on-going crisis regarding the police-led JAIS raid on DUMC last week could be viewed as an event signifying collective blindness.

JAIS sees only the illegal prosyletizing of Muslims, without seeing how a faith-community is trying to help and better the lives of other folks (which may include Muslims); also, why JAIS don't see any occasion for gratitude here will, I suppose, remain a national mystery.

Hassan Ali sees only the words 'Quran' and 'prayer' used in a non-Islamic setting, without seeing that 'James Bond' and 'gun' being uttered in the same location within 2 hours doesn't necessarily mean anyone's about to become a British spy. Thank God (no specific religion specified) that PAS is now over-seeing him.

MCA sees only how the Selangor government has messed up on the issue of human rights and that of other religions, without seeing how this is like Coke complaining about the sugar levels in Pepsi.

Pakatan Rakyat sees only the failure of Najib & Co. to prevent the gradual fading (or hacking) away of the rights of non-Muslims, but frankly I wish they'd see and say more than just how "it's not their fault".

Berita Harian and Harian Metro see only how Christians want to bribe Muslims into believing in Jesus Christ, without seeing how Christians may in fact be concerned about the very poverty of some communities (including Muslims, obviously) and how the fact that some Muslims end up being Christian may reflect less some odious scheme to convert Muslims and more the natural sense of gratitude humans have when people show compassionate love.

In a word, the politically motivated see only what they want to see. But what they can't see is that segment which they must be most responsible for i.e. the least of ‘the people’. I'm talking about the homeless, the AIDS victim, the drug addict, the retarded, the orphan, the widow, the handi-capped i.e. the very people for whom the DUMC dinner was thrown - who sees them? Only, it seems, DUMC and Harapan Komuniti.

The drug addicts and homeless are those which society doesn't enjoy seeing, so all the more reason why our leaders must take a good hard look at how they came to be. The orphans are the ones for whom GE13 will make hardly a whiff of difference, so it's critical that voters make a difference at GE13 bearing these children in mind. The handicapped are the ones who will continue to suffer after the media shit's been cleaned (off the fans and the surrounding 'areas'), so we need to bring them to the top of our political priorities lest it makes our talk of justice and a 'high-income society' full of shit.

It's pretty ironic when we remember that the people being served by Harapan Komuniti represent the very definition of 'marginalised'. And yet when an incident involving them sprouts up, the last thing we think about is them. Because after the political parties and analysts have finished their speeches and back-patting, after we've finished convincing ourselves that the bad guy remains as bad or even worse than before and that our good-guy party isn't an iota responsible, the abused wife who has to feed three kids still has to fight back the tears every day to ensure her kids don't have to fight back their hunger.

We need to see the less privileged in our community as part of us and not merely as pawns in political ploys to get people to tick a preferred square on a piece paper come election day.

I'm glad Selangor MB Tan Sri Khalid Ibrahim apologised for the incident but I'll be gladder if his commitment towards justice doesn't end with reprimanding JAIS for their conduct and if, overall, Pakatan Rakyat is defined less by their criticism of Barisan and more by their efforts to bring joy and hope to these individuals.

This is not, though, to say that Barisan and their PR machine shouldn’t be slammed. The ‘reports’ by Berita Harian that Christians are bribing needy Muslims to become Christians sound only slightly less ridiculous than the suggestion that the Second Coming has happened.

Rev. Father Michael Chua wisely said that such sensitive issues cannot afford to be given 'trials by media' which only perpetuate half-truths, prejudices and lies. Well, there's some bad news and some horrible news following from this. The bad news is that in a world suffocated by social networks 'trials by media' are even more pervasive than they already were. We know no other kind of trial not because we reject authentic non-media trials but because we no longer have the ability to distinguish media from non-media. The word 'media' nowadays makes as much sense to an average Malaysian as the concept of 'water' would to an average fish. We won't be able to recognise 'non-media trials' if they jumped out naked from a giant birthday cake.

The worse news is that even if DUMC were to produce a top-secret document listing out ways the Church planned to convert every Muslim within 5 miles of Dream Center, this would in no way cause a re-arrangement of the locked-in battle lines. When it comes to political discourse, the establishment of the objective facts of a case or event is often irrelevant in changing political attitudes.

How DO political attitudes change? Probably the same factor which caused some Muslims to make a decision for the Christian faith (or vice-versa). You can bet a Chinese 10-course dinner it's not because of better arguments or anything they heard or read in a political speech.

Chances are, they decided to live a new kind of belief because they experienced a new kind of life. When a group of people meet your needs, give you a fresh sense of belonging and share their story, there's a really high probability you'll want to be a part of that story too.

JAIS and Berita Harian don't quite understand this right now and maybe never will. Here's hoping things will work out in our country such that they won't have to. Alternatively, some of their directors should consider attending a cross-cultural dinner one evening?

Surprise Word

2011-08-05T13:00:00.004+08:00

Najib's 1Malaysia: Not Meaningless But Not Easy

2011-08-02T08:37:00.002+08:00

(An older piece revisited; this also uploaded at Malaysian Insider)

If you’re to excel in politics, you can’t always be dodging difficult questions. Or if you absolutely must, you certainly can’t seem too outright in doing so. Our dear PM, Datuk Seri Najib Razak, recently appears not only to be too eager in deflecting a question, he also seems to be deflecting responsibility. Someone asked him if he was prepared to state that he was “Malaysian first, then only Malay” in direct contradiction to the DPM, Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin. Najib’s by-now-famous reply, “I don’t want to respond in a way that will divide me from my deputy”, followed by, “1 Malaysia is our guiding philosophy. It does not matter what you say, just as long as you follow (the 1 Malaysia concept)” deservedly ignited condemnation on what can only be political double-speak.

As DAP sharp-shooter Tony Pua has pointed out, it does matter what you say. Or even if Pua had kept silent, others would’ve surely pointed out to Najib that it’s not enough to say that it’s okay “as long as we follow” because the very issue at hand is WHAT EXACTLY to follow!

And yet perhaps the more interesting issue isn’t whether or not Najib and Muhyiddin agree (for even if they did, of what great value would this amount to?). Rather, we should in fact ask ourselves what it even MEANS to be “Malaysian first, Malay (or Chinese or Indian) second”. Can there be a truly 'Malaysian' identity that transcends ethnicity?

The idea that we should be "Malaysians first, Chinese/Indian/Malay second" may be symbolically empowering, but it sounds conceptually hollow. Even Opposition giant, Lim Kit Siang, appears to skirt the issue of what a Malaysian is in his interview with Nut Graph. This is his reply when asked what his Malaysian identity means to him:

"I’m a Malaysian, first and last. I’m proud to be a Chinese, and as I’ve said in Parliament, I’m proud to be a Chinese, but a Malaysian, first of all. Nobody is suggesting that anyone should give up their ethnic identities, but we should have this common bond where we agree that we are first of all, Malaysians. I will accept the definition of 1Malaysia as being Malaysian first, then race, religion, or geographical origin second."

This reminds me of a joke about a guy who visits a doctor for medical advice. The doctor examines him, thinks hard, then tells him, "You need medical advice!"

In short, Lim doesn't have a definite answer. Then again, do we really need one?

The term 'Malaysian' could be what some wickedly smart (and a little crazy) Continental philosophers call an empty signifier, a pregnant negativity, a positive void i.e. it's a term which names a space to be contested politically. Filling in the word 'Malaysian' with positive content thus becomes LESS IMPORTANT than the battle for the RIGHT to do the filling in.

When activists like Hannah Yeoh and her husband fight for the right to register their child as 'Anak Malaysia' instead of either Chinese or Indian, it's the gesture itself that counts. Yeoh, Lim and others wish to carve out an empty space not because they value emptiness in itself but because in times of injustice, we need an "liberating/open negative" to challenge the "oppressive/closed positives". We need to keep certain symbols - in this case, the word 'Malaysian' - ripe for redefinition, free from propaganda and dripping with enchanting possibilities.

Should we then accept that no definition is forthcoming and/or stick with defining 'Malaysian' by what it is not (or should not be)? Maybe not. The liberating vacuum that 'Malaysian' stands (in place) for should invite engagement even as it resists monopoly by any group. We must throw in our lot with hammering down a clear meaning of our Malaysian-ness whilst simultaneously recognising that for the good of the term itself, our nails will never be completely banged down.

So, here's one take: We can see the word "Malaysian" as an emergent symbol which draws it integrity and meaning each time ethnic harmony and cultural cooperation happens. This is to say that my Malaysian identity is simply the name for the compassion and concern I have for people of other ethnicities, with whom I share this nation-state. Paradoxically, this means that I am a (Chinese) Malaysian to the extent that I let my neighbour grow and flourish in his Indian-ness or Malay-ness (or Nepalese-ness) and vice-versa.

If we take the above definition, then when leaders wave a keris to symbolize the (possibly violent) supremacy of one ethnicity over others, that’s not being ‘Malaysian’. Likewise, if certain races are singled out for punishment in the form of reduce budget allocations because, presumably, they didn’t support the ruling regime, then this isn’t being ‘Malaysian’. Also, to the extent that the sacred books of other religions are treated with disrespect, to this same extent is the name of ‘Malaysian’ also defaced.

The term 'Malaysian' therefore is not so much propositional as it is performative - less of being than becoming. The Malaysian identity would therefore focus more on WHAT I DO rather than WHO I AM. It's certainly ethnic in character but it's not defined via antagonism but is instead grounded in constructive multi-ethnicity.

1Malaysia, then, should be a principle that promotes the actionable truth that my ethnic identity is fulfilled only in my care and service to those of other ethnicities. So perhaps our PM should have issue the following reply:

“Yes, I’m Malaysian first, then Malay. I know this isn’t what Muhyiddin said, but in the very SPIRIT of 1Malaysia, let’s listen to each other, be clear about our differences, rejoice in our shared visions and goals, and work to build each other up. 1Malaysia is bigger than our contradictions and antagonisms, greater than political statements and, for the sake of its true nature, should always be a work-in-progress. So I’m curious now: what are YOUR thoughts on 1Malaysia and being Malaysian?”

Tian Chua vs the PDRM

2011-07-31T01:15:00.005+08:00

(A revised version is posted at The Malaysian Insider)

The police said that the group charged them - without explaining the gratuitous nature of their use of tear-gas, both in the KL Sentral tunnel as well as other places. Tian Chua said it was police brutality from beginning to end - without explaining how running at the police is a solution. The police imply they only fired the tear gas after the BERSIH group ran at them. Tian Chua says that the police always intended to fire and the running (or 'charging', depending on who's talking) is irrelevant.

The truth is, I suspect, far simpler:

1. The police wanted the crowd to act rowdy and they wanted to fire. That's the thing about a group of young men wearing riot-police helmets, brandishing gas-guns and batons and facing a defiant crowd: you'd be disappointed if you didn't get to kick some ass.

2. Tian Chua wanted to be fired upon. The supreme irony is that BERSIH's success is propelled by the very violence its organisers say they do not want, such that if the police were to actually behave peacefully, then BERSIH the peaceful movement would fail!

So you have the case of two parties disavowing their true desires, claiming they wanted differently and accusing the other side of the very kind of behaviour they're HOPING the other would deliver thus justifying what they wanted to do all along. This is to say that from the start the police wanted to fire tear-gas and from the start Tian Chua & Co. wanted to be fired upon.

It's lies all around. But that's the political game the players play and the crowd loves. Very few, though, are saying it's a game. Because once you do that, you have to acknowledge that winning and losing may be all that matters - independently of the truth, of justice and what people truly need.

So the game is all pretense and posturing, yes, but politics knows no other truth. It’s not so much that politics only works when it denies its very nature to the world. It’s that politics is simply the name for that domain of human interaction made up of half-truths and falsity, in which disavowal and denial are needed failing which we’d be dealing with something else entirely. The people and media must be ‘played’ or else it’s not politics anymore - it’d be an ant colony.

Breivik, Norway and the Politics of Non-Recognition

2011-07-30T01:19:00.007+08:00

(This is also posted at Malaysian Insider and FMT)

Last week's tragedy in Oslo, where Anders Breivik shot and killed almost a hundred innocent people, will for some time be a case-study in how one of the most progressive countries in the world, Norway, 'produced' a murdering psycho-path who hated a certain group of people (in Breivik's case, Muslims) so much he was willing to kill his own people for being more tolerant than him.

How can we explain the emergence of a figure like Breivik? Is he reflective of Norwegian society and if so, where did the country go wrong? Or, if Breivik was an exception, was it something 'forced' upon him or chosen by him and, most importantly, what can Norwegian society do to prevent the (exceptional) creation of future Breiviks'?

What follows are three possible explanations:

1. This is a more or less isolated act and we can understand the tragedy entirely by examining the psyche or personality of Breivik. This would put the blame entirely in the mind of Breivik with the good news being that we should be glad that very few think - let alone act - like him. To take this route would be most unfortunate because to argue that this was a tragic fluke of personality would be, in fact, to argue that nothing can be done on a socio-political level. It's all in Breivik's mind.

The Malaysian corollary would be to suggest that a racist like Ibrahim Ali is in principle either a psycho or an evil person and it's really no one else's fault. The logical steps forward would be bring down the rain of punishment, isolation or forced silence on him and that's that.

There is light and only this pervert was full of darkness.

2. We can look at the negative influences on Breivik's life and emphasize how these influences run AGAINST the grain of Norwegian culture and society. This is less 'comfortable' than putting the sole blame on Breivik and some work would have to be done to ferret out these negative messages and deviant themes which have so tragically impacted at least one citizen's mindset.

Malaysia-wise, this would involve questioning the subversive messages spread behind closed doors, looking at hidden messages in school textbooks, reading between the lines of various media and political parties communiqués' and so on. This second paradigm continues to hold to a 'true' way for society and believes that people like Ali come about as a result of something counter to an original good.

There is still light and racism is a product or symptom of darkness.

3. Finally, the third more disturbing option, we could view Breivik's violence as a manifestation of what was already and always there in Norwegian society. The bomb and the shootings were a sudden exposé of a dark underside, a side which was hidden yet necessary for a nation which wanted to nurture one of the most open and politically participative societies ever. This is to say that the violence witnessed last weekend is that which sustains the harmonious society witnessed for so long i.e. Norway the calm and prosperous nation is simply the flip-side of Norway the nation of potential mass-murderers. A peaceful multi-cultural democracy, according to this view, cannot persist for long without betraying the elitism, bigotry and totalitarianism inherent to and constitutive of this same democracy.

If this was true in Malaysia it would suggest, for example, that racism is the very desire that spurs its own condemnation. It would mean that someone like Ibrahim Ali is not only not exceptional, he possibly represents the repressed expression of those who most vigorously oppose him. It would mean that May 13 is not so much an external evil we must fight against, but an internal demon we must identity in ourselves order to avoid loving too much.

Light and darkness are one and the same.

To acknowledge that our good society may be a façade hiding more furious elements is no simple act. The way 'forward' is an uncomfortable one of opening ourselves to our most shameful wants, so shameful that most have pushed it to an unknown corner of their minds. It would require a drastic breaking, a radical self-interrogation for which no 'solution' is guaranteed. At the very least, though, we would be seeking to unveil self-deception at its purest i.e. that which we tell ourselves others believe about us.

Norway, if the nation be the very paragon of democratic ideals it perhaps has the right to claim it is, could only benefit from further exploring the implications of this third paradigm. Isn't democracy itself, in one sense, about avoiding any absolute political closure, about the drive to continually question and doubt any attempt to fill up that void which is political space itself? In a word, isn't democracy the blood-type of a people who have decided to always search for - and thus forego the need to absolutely know - what they are about? Such a people would keep their eyes out for symptoms and signs of that which is in them which is more than them, more than they can bear. If nothing else, isn't the recognition that we don't know ourselves and the malignant forces within us, this politics of non-recognition, the very essence a politics of humility and thus the force to never stop learning?

The wonder of human language is at one and the same time the terrorism of a symbolic system which has 'chopped' the world up according to its categories. That avatar who enjoys pedophilic online conversations could very well be the kindest and most generous person in the office. Life-giving soil cannot be separated from the death-bringing magma. If we would have life, we need to understand the destruction which sustains it. And brace ourselves when it explodes.

(Oh of course, there's always an easier way out and this is to tell ourselves I'm not so bad, I'm certainly not evil. It's those guys...those people...their crimes, their hate...me, I'm just normal...)

Ahmad vs Ambiga

2011-07-27T15:06:00.002+08:00

Other parts also available on YouTube.

Communism, Socialism and Barisan Nasionalism

2011-07-22T10:31:00.001+08:00

(This is also posted at Free Malaysia Today and the Micah Mandate)

In Communism, EO6 would be the name of a highway; in Socialism, an affirmative action policy. In Barisan Nasionalism, EO6 is the symbol of both injustice and resistance to it, the creation and yet scourge of the boys in Putrajaya and Bukit Aman.

It's not enough that six innocent individuals are wrongfully detained, the government has to justify itself by conflating Communism with Socialism. It's bad enough these good folks are being held in sub-1 star hospitality and forced to be separated from their family and friends against their will. Minister in the PM's Department Nazri Aziz - instead of promoting justice - has to underscore the injustice his bosses have committed by invoking the absurd boogeyman of Communist insurgents. It would appear, then, that the Federal Government comprehends neither Communism nor Socialism nor, unsurprisngly, the right thing to do.

So I hope the below helps set a few things straight. I don't want the next government dude making public statements to look stupid because he can't seem to get his theoretical categories right:

Communism is Marx's understanding of the next logical stage after Capitalism. Socialism is Lee Kuan Yew's understanding of every stage in Singapore. Barisan Nasionalism is Mahathir's understanding of whatever he and his successors are staging in Malaysia.

Communism happens when the means of production are no longer a factor for exploitation by one class of another. Socialism directs the manner, direction and intensity of the means of production to minimize exploitation and promote national growth. Barisan Nasionalism spokesmen often sound mean and meaningless, don't know what the means of production means and promote demeaning policies.

Communism targets the resolution of the class struggle. Socialism aims for the State doing most of the resolution in a country. Basian Nasionalism hopes to resolve the problems faced by cronies, racists and leaders who don't like people to wear yellow and march downtown.

Communism is ultimately about self-governance by a nation already sufficient in resources. Socialism is about State-governance to ensure sufficient resources. Barisan Nasionalism is wasting resources producing pointless Facebook pages.

Communism is Capitalism superseded. Socialism is Capitalism weeded. Barisan Nasionalism is just sad.

Communism wants to make everyone rich by instituting that everybody shares equally in the abundance of their resources. Socialism wants to un-make the mega riches of some so more people can have a slightly bigger share. Barisan Nasionalism is about promising a ‘Developed and High-Income Nation’ but making selected filthy rich parties get even filthier, except during election time when it's time to hand out the rice and poster-sized cheques.

Communism hopes to regulate and equalise a community's desire so that inequality can be curbed. Socialism uses regulation to directly bring about equality regardless of what people desire. Barisan Nasionalism desires super-expensive towers which are sure to make some people unequally wealthy.

Communism involves a theoretical utopia meant to inspire the oppressed classes towards working together as one. Socialism is about one State enforcing practical conditions such that all classes in the country fall in line, get along and don't eat each other up. Barisan Nasionalism is hopeless, whether in practice or theory.

In Communism, there is no Right or Left because all would be Good. In Socialism, the State is suspicious of the Right, hence its leaning to the Left. In Barisan Nasionalism it's all Wrong and the Good is all but Left Out.

Communism is about freedom for all. Socialism restricts the freedom of some so more resources can be freed up for the public. Barisan Nasionalism is about refusing freedom to those they want to scare and using dodgy resources (like tear gas) for their ends.

Communism addresses the alienation inherent in a profit-driven society. Socialism redresses some of the stratification, poverty and moral hazards caused by profit-making. Barisan Nasionalism simply has people with ill-gotten addresses worth more than RM6million.

Communism wants to let profits serve people. Socialism wants to channel profits to some of the poorer people. Barisan Nasionalism wants certain already-rich people to profit even more from bribes, hand-outs and over-priced contracts.

Communism is a worthy and compassionate ideal which went horribly wrong due to the evil of certain leaders. Socialism is no ideal and with good leaders more things are made right. Barisan Nasionalism would only be ideal...if voted out.

So I hope this clears the air for Nazri. Next time he and his buddies shouldn’t fire tear gas in the public square. And they’d better let the six people go home. What does he think the EO6 is – a highway?

I Want Your Sex and Politics

2011-07-16T17:57:00.009+08:00

(This was also uploaded at the Micah Mandate)

George Michael, to put it mildly, always has sex on his mind. In 1987 in his hit single I Want Your Sex - a song which was banned in Malaysia for unsurprising reasons – he told the world that:

Sex is natural, sex is good, not everybody does it but everybody should,

Sex is natural, sex is fun - sex is best when it's one on one!

Now this is strange. One one hand, he says that sex is 'natural', which implies some kind of biological essentialism. On the other hand, he says it's 'best' when it's one on one which implies some culturally constructed standards to judging what kind of sex is better or worse i.e. sex cannot be entirely natural because in nature there are no 'better' or 'worse' kind of flowers, is there?

So we've got two groups. First are those who see sex as purely natural and biological - the essentialists. The second group views sex as fluid and sexuality being whatever the world says it is i.e. sex as socially contingent.

The first group would express surprise at why anyone would question the ingrained natural-ness of sex, as in, isn't it OBVIOUS that as mammals we were 'built' to copulate? The second group would point to things like foreplay, like courtship, like group sex, like dressing for sex, like 'making love without sex' (or the opposite, passion-less intercourse) and dare the first group to deny that culture is a critical component of sex.

If it's complicated for sex, politics is worse.

There is a view of politics, the popular one, whereby it's nothing more than power-plays, manipulative rhetoric, money games and damned lies. Politics here is viewed as entirely contingent upon vested interests, completely without principle and there are in a sense no truly sincere, caring and Other-centered political acts. This is usually the stance taken by those who, for instance, refuse to vote or want to have anything to do with politics and political parties.

This first view also hints at why it's often difficult to get people 'involved' in civil activism, political rallies or even voting. These folks believe that politics is nothing but 'hot air' i.e. without substance and concerned ultimately about the self-indulgent gratification of individual politicians. Do these people, then, not care about issues like ISA prisoners? I submit that it's unfair to claim they don't. I believe they are not indifferent to suffering lives - they are simply indifferent to political channels as a means of dealing with this suffering. If called upon to help, they'd be faster in giving funds to the families of the prisoners than casting a vote against the incumbent government that jailed them.

The second view, on the other hand, sees politics as being sustained by genuine principles. Political action is a fight for true justice, real human rights and so on. This view sees its members as being involved in something real, something irreducible to pragmatism and partisan strategies. Paradoxically, this view is self-consciously adopted by both civil activists and partisan groups i.e. both sides (even when berating the deceptions and lies of their political enemies) will never cease affirming that they themselves are doing something of true substance, that they represent rock-hard fundamentals of the good and that it's not crap and turtles 'all the way down'.

So here we have it. Politics as sheer contingent, tactical manoeuvring. And politics as a representative of universal absolute truth and goodness. Politics as fancy facade versus politics as firm foundation. (The paradox of Malaysian politics is that almost everyone who cares believes that View #1 is dominant but we tell each other View #2 will win somehow...).

But how about a third view? What if we recognise that in politics, there is a criss-crossing and overlapping between purity of ideals and the contingency of action which gives rise to something BEYOND the first two views? This is to say that the first and second views are always and already tainted and 'haunted' by each other and that therefore politics is a continually failed attempt to negotiate this fundamental deadlock.

What if politics is just the name for the fracture arising from any attempt to resolve principles to pragmatism? What if the truth of politics is that we are dealing with a domain that is constituted by distortion and failure? That non-resolution of the universal and particular, of Universal Good and Particular Selfishness, not only resides within politics but that politics is this very non-resolution itself?

This way of thinking politically can be helpful in a few ways:

One, we can give up the idea of 'absolute justice' and anchor political efforts in the act(ion)s of constructing justice. These could involve keeping serious conversations alive about what justice consists of for the community and how best to achieve these i.e. the act of construction always involves "building from scrap" which is a difficult job and hopefully will take away attention from parties constantly playing up their nobility and slamming the failures of their competitors.

Agreeing that the idea of the Good is a radically contingent thing also facilitates discussions on when, for example, street rallies are good, when it should be curtailed and the conditions whereby people can decide. It also helps us to be honest about why secret video-recordings of politicians are bad without entirely removing the need to 'spy' on conversations which are fostering personal gain at the expense of the community.

All this is another way of saying that if we recognise the futility and pointlessness of debating about ‘fundamentals’ we can get to work on the here and now. If we stop window-dressing party concerns, we can let Yes be Yes and No be No.

Secondly, we can be honest that our favoured political parties simply aren't as non-partisanly pure as they claim i.e. we can drop the facade (of non-partisanship) without fear because we could recognise that there was nothing to hide anyway. This way attention can be put on the issues themselves independently of whether it's partisan-related or not. This would both relieve and challenge political parties. E.g. Pakatan spokesmen needn't waste their breath divorcing BERSIH from being linked to their agenda yet at the same time they must take seriously BN concerns about the rally and put aside (the usually instant) accusation that it's nothing but party talk. Likewise, the government can come clean with cases like the PSM6 and drop the outrageous charges of sedition or conspiracy and stop acting primarily to derail the opposition.

In this sense, honesty of such a radical kind is a double-edged sword which raises the bar for all parties and which can only create long-term benefits for the people, who no longer need to second-guess what's fluff and what's substance.

Thirdly, votes and winning election seats can be put into perspective as hardly the be-all and end-all that many make it out to be without jettisoning it as significant for the future. It can be graciously recognised that, despite the non-participation or non-registration of eligible voters, the common good isn't being ignored and that non-voting does NOT equate to apathy. The obvious corollary here is that both pro- and anti-election groups can work together to serve their community rather than hurl judgments at each other.

Like George Michael's steamy insistence, I Want Your Sex, perhaps politics can be the domain of pure willing and desire (towards a helpful vision of a caring and just community) which leaves aside unfruitful categories or perspectives which claim an illusory higher ground over everybody else. When our public foundations and private interests are exposed and rendered unstable, maybe then we'll focus on something else: a hopeful vision of the future spurring action in the now. Surely this can’t be a bad thing for those of us who have good things on our minds, be it sex or politics.

MJ & Learning

2011-07-15T13:20:00.001+08:00

10 educational ideas from This Is It:

1. Learning is an event

2. To know is to move

3. Rehearsals are non-negotiable and it's okay to act weird whilst practising

4. Love is part of the deal

5. Teacher (or in MJ's case, the director) isn't always right

6. Sometimes you need to feel the answer

7. Everybody sees what you're doing - if not now then sometime eventually.

8. Don't miss the trees for the forest, every little bit counts

9. There is no 'old' or 'new' subject; if something is good it's worth learning no matter how long it's been around

10. Live and love the NOW, and remember for every class, THIS IS IT.

Rocket Science Isn't This

2011-07-11T15:42:00.003+08:00

Man - All the same with one exception

Woman - No exception, but all are exceptional

Father Figures

2011-07-08T09:12:00.001+08:00

Batman's father was murdered and he still finds it hard to shake off his guilt over the murder of his parents.

Iron Man is only who he is because of the resources and legacy of his father, who also saved his (Tony's) life many years after he passed away.

Spiderman's father figure, his uncle, was murdered. His identity and vocation was shaped by his guilt over how Uncle Ben died.

Superman's parents were killed when their planet was destroyed.

Hercules and Zeus doesn't exactly have a 'normal' father-son relationship.

The Incredible Hulk is persecuted by his girlfriend's father.

Thor has a stormy relationship with his father and half-brother (whose villainy stems partially from the favoritism he felt his dad gave Thor plus the realisation that Odin ain't his real dad...)

TRON is all about disappearing enigmatic fathers.

John Connor (the world-saviour from Terminator) has a dad from the future who died trying to save his mum and who will also be his subordinate(!!).

Roky Balboa had a bad relationship with his dad and the tension continued between him and his son from Movie no. 5 onwards.

Tom Cruise's real father left him when he was young and half a dozen of his movie characters are built around a traumatic father figures who either didn't love him enough or died too early or both e.g. Top Gun, Rain Man, Days of Thunder, A Few Good Men, Magnolia, The Firm, and Far & Away. Two even have him playing a struggling father : War of the Worlds and Minority Report.

Magneto turned absolutely dark in trying to avenge the death of his parents.

Kungfu Panda lost his parents when he was young and grew up with a goose for a dad. But we all know Part III will witness a reunion (smile).

Dr Mahathir doesn't wish to talk much about his grandfather lest PERKASA decides he can't be their patron saint.

James Bond? He doesn't seem to have a father...or a mother, for that matter. Maybe that's why he's barely a real person.

I don't know about you, but you think there's a pattern here? ;>)

Mike Would've Been Proud...

2011-07-06T23:04:00.001+08:00

BERSIH 2.0, Violence & Alternatives

2011-07-06T16:17:00.009+08:00

(This has been uploaded at The Malaysian Insider)

At the start of the Mel Gibson movie, The Patriot, Benjamin Martin tried to dissuade his sons from fighting against the British in the American Revolutionary War. Despite being called a coward and a man with no sense of patriotism, national pride or justice, he persisted in not granting permission to his oldest son to enlist. When pushed as to his stubborn pacifism and how this may imply that he lacked solid principles, Martin replied, "I am a parent. I haven't got the luxury of principles."

Martin so feared for the lives of his children (even those who were grown up) that he went against the mood of the day...

So BERSIH 2.0 is called off the streets and into a stadium. Was it a victory for Barisan Nasional because public places are preserved as sites of control/influence and the rally that was supposed to take place is 'displaced' somewhere else? Or was it a victory for BERSIH because the protest that was meant to take place still “takes place” regardless of place? Was it a victory for the Agong because he ensured everyone knew his all-superior place and theirs?

Relevant questions, but one another keeps coming back: Was it necessary to hold the rally in the streets in the first place?

Let’s consider three outcomes should BERSIH 2.0 have continued into the streets:

Outcome 1 – BERSIH supporters meet and march to the palace and there’s minimal or no disruption, no disturbance or violence

Outcome 2 – BERSIH supporters get involved in minor clashes with other groups, the police use batons, tear-gas and water-cannons, some assets are destroyed, some limbs wounded but no lives are lost

Outcome 3 – BERSIH supporters clash heavily with other groups and police, and people (maybe even children) die.

Now here’s the rub : Everybody knows that Outcome 1 isn’t going to happen, that Outcome 2 will most likely happen and that the dreaded Outcome 3 CANNOT be meaningfully ruled out. Consider:

There is no way PERKASA or UMNO Youth will simply stand by and let the BERSIH supporters through – this would go against the firmly declared reasons for joining the rally in the first place
There is no way the Police will make it ‘easy’ for BERSIH folks to march – this would be against the spirit the Fed Government has displayed thus far
There is no way BERSIH supporters will stand down – if so, why bother marching?
None of the above groups have ANY intention whatsoever to ‘negotiate peacefully’ or hold friendly dialogues with each other on July 9th – if this was so, why wait till they hit the streets?

Add these four together and you get virtually GUARANTEED physical violence on July 9th in the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The level of the violence is a separate matter, but the fact of violence itself is hardly in doubt(especially with the ‘surprising’ discovery of Molotov cocktails, parangs and petrol bombs – in the context of this discussion, the most important thing about this “unearthing” is not who the probable culprit is but how it attests to the certainty of extreme violence happening).

At BERSIH 1.0 a few people suffered minor injuries, many eyes had a chemical bath but fortunately no lives were lost. This time things are different. You have two groups getting in the mix, one which defines itself in racial supremacy terms and another which has shown itself more than capable of mob-like actions.

So granted that people might die on July 9th, the pertinent question (especially as BERSIH 3.0 looms a few years from now) becomes: Is it acceptable to risk human lives when there are other options available to make the case for clean elections?

Marching in the streets is a bold reclaiming of public space for a righteous cause, but is that worth risking lives, and are there not other ways to 'take back' public space for the people? A multitude in yellow walking for free elections sends a strong message to the government, but is this worth putting this same multitude at risk and is there not another way of speaking to the powers that be?

Even now, more than a few folks are proclaiming how great things will be in the stadium, how the BERSIH continues online, etc. All this is grand, because the risk of physical violence is virtually zero. But they also expose the dangerous ‘under-side’ of BERSIH in that everybody has conveniently ignored the possibility of a ‘safer’ option in fighting for a cause, in favour of courting extreme violence for the same purpose.

The issue is not whether BERSIH threatens the peace (I don't believe so and folks like Rama Ramanathan have made this more or less clear) or whether another party is trying to frame them (more likely the case, IMO). The issue is if there is more than way to speak out on a cause, why choose an avenue which will beget violence? Why doesn't the prospect of people losing the lives and limbs spur us to seek less violent (or less probably violent) means of expressing a political point?

Finally, to be very clear:

This is not about going against the principles BERSIH stands for - it's about asking if the principles of avoiding violence (and potentially preserving life/limb) is just as important
This is not about 'middle-class capitalism' - it's not the disrupted flow of traffic and damaged property which are of main concern, it's the flow of blood and broken heads being higlighted
This is not about being afraid of the Federal Government (or PERKASA or whoever) - it's about finding alternative ways to ensure that all parties remain safe

Like Benjamin Martin, perhaps we should seriously evaluate the courses we take as a community and whether or not certain violent consequences can and should be avoided. Because Martin was ultimately wrong : He did have principles, the chief one being that of love for his kin, a love which seeks to keep them as far away from violence as possible.

Jacob the Wrestler

2011-07-05T13:05:00.000+08:00

The Gen 32 incident is bizarre in that it depicts God (or His Angel) challenging a man, Jacob, to a wrestling match. The battle lasted from dusk to dawn and many commentators suggest that the physical struggle itself was a symbol of the need to prayer-wrestle, to 'stay in there' when we're interceding and pleading with God.

In other words, wrestling mirrors prayer (i.e. prayer is the unfathomable experience and a wrestling match gives a hint of it).

But I wonder if the inverse is also true: That prayer mirrors a physical struggle. This is to say that the physical world and all our trials are the unknown and that prayer is an attempt to represent this mystery.

Material existence, pain, existential crisis, trauma, heart-aches - THATS' what we can't get a grip on. But speaking to God...could this be the easy part?

Financial Planning X

2011-07-01T08:56:00.003+08:00

Someone was hoping to convince all of us that planning for retirement is a critical and urgent matter. How much do we need/want when we retire? Given that number, how much must we save now to 'hit' this figure when we reach that age? As expected, the longer the discussion continued, the more anxious people got.

"OMG! How can I save 20% every month when I can't even survive with what I have?",
"Oh no! And these numbers are only include me - what if I have to pay for someone else as well?",
"Aiya! What about holiday travelling plans?!",
"Die la!",
"Sigh, this means I need to earn about 2k more!"

The phrases may vary in content but the mood is the same i.e. mild controlled internal panic bordering on emerging hysteria and severe discontent with one's financial status quo.

To suggest that God will "take care of me" and that therefore I needn't worry about the future would -paradoxically - be tantamount to heresy. To further note that it's our own spurious and environment-killing spending which have created our financial problems, and that therefore we should as individuals and communities revolt against the system of spiralling consumption, could even invite a quiet form of social execution.

To suggest that one's commitment towards others in the form of regularly giving away a portion of one's income is an even more important responsibility precisely because it subverts the cycle of greed and accumulation, would be to invite the label of either being old-fashioned, psychotic or, worst, that one is 'different and so noble' (which is another way of saying that one is so unique that one needn't be taken seriously).

To issue the reminder that there are more than a BILLION people living in slums and that therefore the obsession with financial security (which is the obverse of personal in-security) seems a tad bit 'un-plugged' from the rest of humanity, is to court rolling eyes.

To note that the birds, dogs and cats hardly lose any sleep over whether or not their assets will be devalued or if they'll be fed and that therefore the human mass anxiety associated with not having enough at retirement puts us at a lower rung than the animals, may even provoke hostility.

Maybe what we need isn't more "planning for retirement", but planning for simplicity, planning for anti-consumption, planning for generosity, planning to be more socially responsible.

The next mass rally, then should not be BERSIH 3.0 - it should be PUAS 1.0.

Update on Being Disturbed

2011-06-28T10:21:00.000+08:00

Last November I was offered a place at Nottingham Uni to a PhD (Theology). Whilst I accepted the offer, I could only begin my program if I had sufficient funding for both a) tuition and b) living expenses for me and my family (no way José I was going to spend 3-4 years away from a great wife and two hyper kids).

And as we all know, staying in the Kingdom ain't cheap.

The Nottingham plan is more or less over. Reliable sources tell me that my name doesn't appear on the scholarship list and it's nearly impossible to raise funding for both tuition and living expenses. At this point I've got enough to last about a year and a half in the UK with my family but, again, if the £11,000 per year tuition must still be paid, it's simply more responsible to stay home.

So what now?

About two months back, out of a sheer morbid sense of contingency, I decided to re-apply for a place at Monash Sunway's PhD (Arts) program. As good fortune would have it, the department was enthusiastic and helpful and just a few days ago I was informed that my proposal would be formally submitted for consideration (with my potential supervisor's endorsement). The whole process could take between 3 weeks to 2 months.

If given an offer, the arrangement would be far less disruptive and financially constraining than Nottingham. And of course the food should be better.

This is where I stand with respect to my plans to be inducted into the PHilosophically Disturbed category. I thank everyone for their prayers and support (of all and any kind).

How to Deal with BERSIH 2.0

2011-06-22T09:28:00.015+08:00

(This has been uploaded at The Malaysian Insider and Free Malaysia Today)

Dear [Unnamed],

I am very disappointed in the way the BN regime is handling the BERSIH 2.0 rally. What in the world are you doing, stating the obvious and calling it an Opposition ploy, "politics all the same", etc.? Can't you see that's what the organisers want you to do? When you mention the glaringly evident and bring in the 'partisan' category, you are in principle legitimising any and all future complaints that your policies and your programs have an agenda(!).

You are calling a bluff on a position which is sustained by two paradoxical opposites: internal disavowal and external critique. C'mon, you think the Bersih people don't know it's "political"? Of course they do! But they keep telling each other and the world that it's not partisan. Likewise, if YOU complain that Bersih is more pro-Pakatan than pro-justice, it only strengthens their commitment to maintain that it's not!

Let me repeat: The trick is NOT that you should publicly expose Bersih as partisan, but to get the members themselves(!!) to admit they have a political agenda.

How do you do this?

First, let the rally proceed with minimal or zero intervention. No, I'm serious. The best way to derail such events is to refuse it the dignity of being objected to. By all means, do ensure public safety (lest the organisers blame poor public infrastructure for some collapse of some wall or awning). Of course, put some policeman around to keep the peace (lest some Dato's assets are smashed and he sues the government). And certainly do make one or two bland statements about your commitment to clean and fair elections but by all means you must put up a show of actually LISTENING to the protesters.

Second, get your most popular (or handsomest) spokesperson - I would personally choose N himself, but I'll leave this to you - to state with a generous and sincere smile that you "fully understand the concerns of Bersih 2.0" and that "the government is doing everything in its power to ensure that the next GE will be fair and square." You may even wish to get Puteri UMNO (or some other department which breeds less hostility) to set up booths in the street, ostensibly because you care about the well-being of the protesters and peace / harmony are your top priorities. I can't recall who said it but if you treat with kindess those who would challenge and defy you, the tide turns your way (Gandhi used this principle for good, so make sure you use it for your own purposes).

Third, by all means, change some things. Go through their list of demands, pick one or two items they claim are most important and act on it. Make a public show of either 1) showing that you have always been faithful to their priorities or 2) doing something.

We all know that most likely nothing fundamental will change because for that to happen, we would need to be like Egypt or Libya - cases whereby the economic, political and social domains had to undergo violent transformation - and the best way to PREVENT this is, ironically, to accede some specific requests of the protesters.

Remember: Granting particular demands is often the best approach to deny universal recognition. Can't you recall this is what we did and are doing to the orang asli? We give them (slightly) better housing and food and education, thus enabling us to reject as 'preposterous' any claims on their behalf to deeper national rights and privileges. Likewise, remember that Bersih gets part of its power from the mass dissatisfaction with the economy. So get your act together there if you want to remain in power!

At this point, may I say that getting Ibrahim Ali to do your dirty work was a bad move. This is because almost everybody believes it's a BN ploy and nobody buys his slogans about Perkasa promoting a 'Gerakan Aman'. This is the problem with "fighting fire with fire" - when you use the enemy's methods, you are inevitably playing the same game.

Learn from the other power boys. Starbucks, far from objecting to protests about how their coffee supply-chains create inequality for (already) poor South American farmers, made these very protests part of their corporate image. Nike, instead of issuing counter-statements against the street culture that challenged their role in nurturing joblessness and poverty, assimilated the 'cool' and 'street-wise' ambience to capture the dissenting segment itself.

Can't you see this is what you must do to Bersih? Instead of challenging it, you should absorb it and thus completely neutralise it. Play a different game from your enemies and you, almost literally, cannot lose.

Finally, if all else fails and if you need an excuse for the police to move in and clamp everything down, using 'violent' Perkasa members to instigate a scuffle is the last thing you should do. Instead, next time activate your sleepers within Bersih itself - I assure you that many 'real' members are already on the verge of moving beyond verbal violence to physical acts of destruction. Therefore, no one will suspect you have planted insider men in the movement (or even if they do, proving it will be their burden) and if you get these guys to create violence, it'll be much harder to convince the public that Bersih is completely bersih and that the violence isn't primarily their fault.

Absolutely. Blame the physical violence on the Opposition, on Bersih (when are you going to learn that water-cannons and sticks are NOTHING compared to making the enemy confront his own ideology, self-deception and inconsistency?). Wield a different kind of violence, the kind of violence nobody suspects is violent, the kind of violence which appears as its opposite, the kind of violence the masses won't object to and will in fact defend using violence : the rules of the system itself.

Zizek Against Deleuze (Pt.2) : From Ontology to Politics

2011-06-20T23:50:00.003+08:00

(Part 1 here)

To quickly recap, Zizek (like many others) distinguishes two ontologies (ways of understanding Reality) in the early and late Deleuze which could be summarised as follows:

Early D - Becoming as quasi-related in an aberrant way to Being, the virtual 'atoms' of life co-exist awkwardly and mysteriously with the organisms, structures and institutions of our world
Late D - Becoming as productive of Being, the virtual 'atoms' of life beget the organisms, structures and institutions of our world

What's the political significance of the above? Why did Zizek see more promise in the early framework and lamented Deleuze's "compromise" in the form of his later collaboration with Guattari? Zizek writes:

"(This) tension between the two ontologies in Deleuze clearly translates into two different political logics and practices. The ontology of productive Becoming (late D) clearly leads to the Leftist topic of the self-organization of the multitude of molecular groups which resist and undermine the molar, totalizing systems of power - the old notion of the spontaneous, non-hierarchical, living multitude opposing the oppressive, reified System, the exemplary case of Leftist radicalism linked to philosophical idealist subjectivism. The problem is that this is the only model of the politicization of Deleuze's thought available: the other ontology, that of the sterility of the Sense-Event, appears "apolitical." However, what if this other ontology also involves a political logic and practice of its own, of which Deleuze himself was unaware?" (extracted from article at Lacan.com, emphasis mine)

Zizek, in other words, is skeptical and dismissive of the consequences of later Deleuzian theory i.e. the view that effective political resistance can arise from the spontaneous creation of activist groups 'on the margins' which gradually subvert the 'main State apparatus'. Imagine an oppressive government being like a table. According to Zizek, late Deleuzianism leads to political action akin to the table's legs and board gradually re-arranging themselves and re-thinking their role as constitutive of the table, thereby undermining the power of the table itself i.e. the government.

But Zizek doesn't like this way of thinking politically - why? A few reasons:

this paradigm ignores the Lacanian Real which is more easily reconciled with the early Deleuze
this paradigm usually refuses the active seizure of State power, preferring instead to incite change 'from below', at the margins, and so on
this paradigm ignores class struggle, by privileging other sites of contention / discrimination e.g. feminism, ethnicity, (homo)-sexuality, environmentalism, etc.

In contrast, Zizek holds to the Lacanian idea that true change comes by focusing on the symptoms of society i.e. those aspects which cannot be smoothly integrated into the existing order and are thus usually discarded or dismissed as the 'part of no part'. In this sense, the (early) Deleuzian Virtual is the gap, the wound, the abyss, the exception, the crack of the Actual and NOT merely its productive genesis. In a word, the virtual is the symptom of reality.

And, socio-politically speaking, Marxist themes come to the fore here because Zizek would hold that ultimate emancipation comes NOT spontaneously 'from below' but only when the society becomes identified with the symptom - when that group of people who are seen as 'not belonging to society' yet whose destiny and objective is inseparable from it takes power and re-identify themselves as that which characterises society. Zizek is of course insinuating nothing less than a political revolution in which the (new) proletariat take power and thus redefine the world they were formerly not a part of yet which this world couldn't do without.

This was like the cracks in the table actively rising up to destroy the existing table and building new one in its place!

To conclude, according to Zizek the later Deleuze could never incite a political revolution because of its spotlighting of natural flows and fluxes, the inherent creativity of the micro-conceptual units of life with its virtually directionless play of de-territorialisation (i.e. the 'loosening' and shaking up of existing concepts, institutions and ways of thought) and re-territorialisation. This Deleuze was more concerned with creativity than transforming the world order, a task better facilitated when reflected upon in conjunction with the earlier Deleuze of pure difference and absolute immanence which hinted at a shadowy (but potentially revolutionizing) side to reality.

Next: What of Malaysia?

Zizek Against Deleuze (Pt.1) : A Tale of Two Ontologies

2011-06-19T22:44:00.009+08:00

Part 2 uploaded

Zizek's complaints about Deleuze pertained more to the 'later' Deleuze (especially his collaborations with Guattari, in particular Anti Oedipus which Zizek declared is Deleuze worst book) than the 'earlier' one (that of Difference & Repetition and the Logic of Sense).

Zizek claims that Deleuze 'chickened out' and turned away from his earlier insights on how the virtual (also identified as sense-events, flows, intensities, affects, etc.) existed without existing and only secondarily and partially impacted the actual world. The virtual was thus a pseudo-world of pure difference, not connected to some One Big Idea (e.g. Life) and NOT necessarily begetting of reality as we know it although certainly containing the potential to transform our world.

"The starting point (of Deleuze's earlier work) is that there is always a hidden virtual aspect to any given determined/actual object or process: actual things are not ontologically "complete"; in order to get a complete view of them, we must add to it its virtual supplement. This move from an actual given thing to its virtual conditions is the transcendental move, the deployment of the transcendental conditions of the given. However, this does not mean that the virtual somehow produces, causes, or generates, the actual." (from Deleuze's Platonism)

Put simply, the earlier Deleuze philosophised about (and thus acknowledge) a non-reality which this reality couldn't quite symbolize to which it couldn't be reduced to but without which it couldn't arise. In popular Zizekian terms, it's as if this Deleuzian "pure difference" was a spectral component which exists by insisting i.e. it EX-ists on the actual.

Now comes the critical part. Zizek claims that the later Deleuze (especially in his work with Guattari) inexcusably negated this earlier radical view by replacing it with a bland duality between Being and Becoming. This is to say that Deleuze forfeited the promise of a reality which possessed a ghostly component by settling for the straight-forward Idealism-in-disguise philosophy whereby reality is generated by and is composed of a flux of events, forever in the flow of becoming.

The earlier Deleuze believes that what IS (Being/Identity) will always be "haunted" by, yet ironically reflects, what MAY BE (Becoming/Difference). On the other hand, the later Deleuze states that what IS is nothing but the result of what MAY BE. The earlier Deleuze, in other words, respected and refused to dispense with an element within reality which couldn't be explained away. But the later Deleuze "settled" and simply subordinated our reality to the flow of reality-forming sub-realities.

To use a chemical example, the Deleuze of Difference & Repetition held that molecules revealed (ghostly) traces of atoms, which both had the capacity to transform molecules even whilst they depended on their pseudo-existence on the molecules themselves. The Deleuze of Anti-Oedipus, however, took the easy way out by stating that molecules were simply the products of atoms and atoms were united by a common drive towards, well, life.

What's the relevance of this dispute on the nature of reality, this tale of two ontologies? Why does Zizek bother? It all boils down to the political significance of the two views....(To Be Continued)

Zizekian References :

Organs without bodies: Gilles Deleuze (from Zizek's pages on Lacan.com, this is a five-part summary of Zizek's book on Deleuze of the same name)
Deleuze's Platonism: Ideas as Real
Deleuze and the Lacanian Real
In Defense of Lost Causes (esp chapt 7, "The Crisis of Determinate Negation", which contains the political context of Zizek's concerns with the later Deleuze; the section on Deleuze comes after a discussion on Toni Negri's Euro-centrist post-modern-ist Marxism and before some paragraphs dealing with Mao's insistence of State-power, Heidegger's World/Earth distinction, etc.)

The Real "Man in the Iron Mask"

2011-06-15T16:24:00.002+08:00

(Non-)Market (In)Commensurability

2011-06-15T15:08:00.002+08:00

From Gibson-Graham (2006), A Post-Capitalist Politics, University of Minnesota Press: Minnesota, p.61.

What a "Malaysian" Identity May Mean

2011-06-15T11:07:00.004+08:00

(This post has been re-posted at The Micah Mandate)

Can there be a truly 'Malaysian' identity that transcends ethnicity?

The idea that we should be "Malaysians first, Chinese/Indian/Malay second" may be symbolically empowering, but it sounds conceptually hollow. Even Opposition giant, Lim Kit Siang, appears to skirt the issue of what a Malaysian is in his interview with Nut Graph. This is his reply when asked what his Malaysian identity means to him:

"I’m a Malaysian, first and last. I’m proud to be a Chinese, and as I’ve said in Parliament, I’m proud to be a Chinese, but a Malaysian, first of all. Nobody is suggesting that anyone should give up their ethnic identities, but we should have this common bond where we agree that we are first of all, Malaysians. I will accept the definition of 1Malaysia as being Malaysian first, then race, religion, or geographical origin second."

This reminds me of a joke quoted by Slavoj Zizek about a guy who visits a doctor for medical advice. The doctor examines him, thinks hard, then tells him, "You need medical advice!"

In short, Lim doesn't have a definite answer. Then again, do we really need one?

The term 'Malaysian' could be what some wickedly smart (and a little crazy) Continental philosophers call an empty signifier, a pregnant negativity, a positive void i.e. it's a term which names a space to be contested politically. Filling in the word 'Malaysian' with positive content thus becomes LESS IMPORTANT than the battle for the right to do the filling in.

Should we then accept that no definition is forthcoming and/or stick with defining 'Malaysian' by what it is not (or should not be)? Maybe not. The liberating vacuum that 'Malaysian' stands (in place) for should invite engagement even as it resists hegemony and monopoly. We MUST throw in our lot with hammering down a clear meaning of our Malaysian-ness whilst simultaneously recognising that for the good of the term itself, our nails will never be completely, uh, banged down.

So, here's one take: We can see the word "Malaysian" as an emergent symbol which draws it integrity and meaning each time ethinic harmony and cultural cooperation happens. This is to say that my Malaysian identity is simply the name for the compassion and concern I have for people of other ethnicities, with whom I share this nation-state. Paradoxically, this means that I am a (Chinese) Malaysian to the extent that I let my neighbour grow and flourish in his Indian-ness or Malay-ness (or Nepalese-ness) and vice-versa.

The term 'Malaysian' is therefore is not so much propositional as it is performative, less of being than becoming. The Malaysian identity would therefore focus more on WHAT I DO rather than WHO I AM. It's certainly ethnic in character but it's not defined via antagonism but is instead grounded in constructive multi-ethnicity.

The 'Anak Malaysia' thus can be a living and embodied recognition that the other is what makes self possible.

Toothaches & Politics

2011-06-15T08:57:00.002+08:00

Don't we unconsciously desire tooth-aches? Don't we like to run our tongues over the cavity or 'damage area'? And when we do, doesn't that burning (yet perversely pleasurable) sensation arise? And, sometimes, don't we 'push the pain limits' by exerting more pressure despite knowing FULL WELL that it'll hurt slightly more (even to the point of us moaning a bit)? Don't we repeat this many times throughout the day? And for what? Isn't it because in a sense we are taking pleasure in the pain and we simply can't help ourselves?

Likewise, with all due respect to many out there who long to break free of their chains, persecution and oppression, isn't it true that some folks seem to revel in their victimisation by others? They can't seem to stop talking about it, complaining without end and - this is bizarre - behaving in ways which exacerbate their situation?

It's like a vicious circle, isn't it? The more they act like victims, the more they 'see' themselves as being victimised, which gives more reason to speak and behave like an oppressed group, which...ad infinitum.

Take groups like PEMBELA and PERKASA - don't they appear to enjoy the spotlight that comes with their claims of being unfairly treated or not being given what they deserve or what their causes merit? Don't their very identity arise from what they perceive as a gap in government policy? Yet isn't it true that the more they seek to fill this abyss, the more society sees them as hollow?

By no means not every voice of protest is guilty of this, but here's a question: Wouldn't it be absolutely DISASTROUS for them if their targets of beratement actually begin to behave in manner acceptable to them? Wouldn't this signal the disintegration of the sense of purpose these parties have, if (or since) their work is almost exclusively defined by criticism and complaints?

Therefore, isn't it in their interest - and can it not be detected in their actions and communications - that the sense of victimisation is essential in sustaining their identity and mission? And that every threat they make masks an obscene underside of sheer ecstasy at being able to be seen as falling short of something they (supposedly) deserve?

Just like those who love war will never find peace with peace, those who love being seen as the injured party will never be appeased with appeasement. As with toothaches, so with politics.

Particular Insult, Universal Character

2011-06-11T07:58:00.004+08:00

What happens when we're very frustrated with a friend or acquaintance because, say, they stood us up? Or failed to deliver? Or slighted us? Or ignored a request? Or insulted something of value to us?

In such particular cases, how do we usually (and angrily) relate the incident to others and to the internal audiences in our minds? How do we tend to describe such events? Do we not usually use the language of universality? E.g. "He always does this", "That's him", "This kind of character cannot be tolerated", "I've suffered one too many times", etc.?

The same goes with our corporations, our governments, our ideals, our religious bodies. What's deemed characteristic of said institution is always in formation and, therefore, risks being transformed by one-time events.

It could be a huge gap between two occurrences (or offenses), but our experience and subsequent beratement of this person more often than not takes a kind of 'ever-lasting' and generalised form. The momentary always stands to be morphed into the permanent, the on-the-fly into the absolute, the particular into the universal.

The universal - all-encompassing, totalising, all-defining - because of its waiting to be usurped by any one thing or incident, is thus the subject of a continuing inquiry: What is our universal? Is it a space open to be filled in, or a permanent gem yearning to be carved out and rendered visible? How do we decide?

“For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal." (James Joyce)

The Leo Club

2011-06-06T22:22:00.002+08:00

7 Habits of Highly Effective Foucauldians

2011-05-27T11:58:00.000+08:00

Take care of yourself; untie ethical self-formation from scientific knowledge and moral codes;
Do not be more true to what you are now (gay, a woman, Hispanic, Serbian), but detach yourself from your identity and become someone other;
Do not be overwhelmed by the unbearable heaviness of your humanist present, but look for its disarticulations, the points where it is a little out of joint and provokes excesses that resist it; but do not be tempted to seek life without limits, a subjectivity without any identity, or a society without power.
Foreswear the dream of a perfect world in which all has been done and all is safe, but cherish the agonism of open strategic games in which everything remains to be done.
Love your liberty, which you have when you can act and do so.
Take care of yourself; know ‘yourself’ by transgressing your limits;
Practise liberty.

(adapted from Simons, Jon. Foucault and the Political. London, , GBR: Routledge, 1995. p 125)

Rapture - A Wright Doctrine?

2011-05-22T16:25:00.003+08:00

N.T. Wright has argued (though not very extensively) that the two most popular Biblical passages used in support of the Rapture do not, in fact, promote the case for some supernatural 'removal' of Christians prior to some final apocalyptic end-of-world judgment.

First is Matthew 24:36-40,

“But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left."

The critical thing to note here is that in the context of Noah's flood, the people who were 'taken' were taken in judgement. And it's in fact those who were left behind(!) who are saved from the flood. It's the flood (the very opposite of a divine rescue plan) which "took them all away."

The second passage is 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17,

"According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever."

Wright notes that this verse parallels the situation in the ancient world where subjects go out of the city to meet the returning king halfway and escort him into the city, hence, the point about meeting the Lord "in the air" and in the midst of the clouds. The key thing is that God's people, having played the role in transforming the earth, will then welcome and invite Christ back as part of a triumphant final scene.

I've also noticed that most people who read the 'caught up together' verse LITERALLY somehow do not read the 'loud command' verse likewise i.e. do we really believe that before the rapture we'll be treated to a super-loud trumpet blast plus the voice of either (arch-angel) Michael or Gabriel booming from the heavens?

Exegetical Preaching - 4 Options

2011-05-21T23:49:00.004+08:00

Assuming the passage is a narrative one, retell the story in your own words, aiming to relive the original 'scandal' or impact of what was written or heard, drawing our learning points as you go along - the STORY matters most
Find 2-3 points in the text (Leonard Sweet terms this the 'club sandwich' route); probably the most favoured method - the PRINCIPLES are the main thing
Find one main idea from the text and let the message 'grow' from there; it may eventually end up looking quite 'alien' to what the text was talking about but this is fine as long as a line of sorts can be traced back to the text... (I reckon this to be the 'organic' approach) - the DOCTRINE is key
Preach on a topic, bring in the verse for elaboration / clarification, then move on (the text is thus used as 'flavour' or an add-on and not much else) - the CHRISTIAN VIEW of the TOPIC is primary

The Practice of Peace-Making (Pt.1)

2011-05-10T12:20:00.000+08:00

(This series focuses entirely on 'practical' steps to effect (what I call) the politics of peace-making and radical reconciliation. For those keen on the so-called theory underlying these ideas, go here...)

“Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everybody…Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” (Romans 12:17-21)

“Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you…If you love those who love you, what reward will you get?” (Matthew 5:44-46)

Let the FIRST AND LAST WORDS out of our mouths be full of respect and kindness even in the face of oppression
Since we expect the police and authorities to do over-the-top things, instead of preparing to ridicule them, we should plan in advance to creatively communicate a message of hope, forgiveness and reconciliation; this necessarily requires TRAINING and DISCIPLINE as it’s “only human” to retaliate when slapped or insulted.
Leaders and participants can decide beforehand to balance comments about forgiveness and care with comments of disagreement and dissent ; with the goal that even the mainstream media begins to see and report a ‘difference’
Leaders can regularly preach forgiveness and the dignity of all i.e. state clearly whilst they decry the unjustified arrests, they also care about the integrity and dignity of the police and for that reason civil enforcement should be reformed
Events can be organized to redefine political ‘strength’ as not merely the ability to ‘stand up’ against bad guys but to do what the bad guys cannot do i.e. actively seek reconciliation
Blogs, twitters, and media should be used to nurture communities of forgiveness, support and reconciliation, NOT create demanding communities of condemnation, un-forgiveness and sarcasm (Eph 4:26). Perhaps a website on "10 Creative Ways to Love our Political Enemy" can be put up?
We can plot events of gentle "PROTEST WITHOUT PROTEST" which look hard for the good in people, even the ‘bad guys’ (e.g. on May 13th everyone should say one good/kind word to a BN person or a policeman or an FRU member, and make that a movement)
What else can and should be done to inaugurate a "new kind of politics"?

Police Story Playground Scene

2011-05-10T06:25:00.002+08:00

If I ever go for psycho-therapy and I start talking about playgrounds, this is probably why...

Facebook Factors

2011-05-07T01:05:00.000+08:00

I tell my students that after I've added them as friends on Facebook, there are usually a few criteria I look for failing which I will very likely remove their posts from my home page. People whose status-updates I enjoy looking at normally have posts which are:

intelligent or provocative
humorous (dry or wild, it don't matter)
personally significant (as opposed to, "I ran out of toothpaste today")
informative or insightful (esp for politics, theology, philosophy, etc.)
inspiring or helpful (like a good tip for the office)

RBS 2011 : Apologetics & Basic Beliefs

2011-05-03T11:43:00.000+08:00

View more presentations from Alwyn Lau.

Thank you so much for being part of the Basic Beliefs & Apologetics class. I hope you found the discussions helpful. Do continue to grow in your journey as thinkers after God's heart and mind.

Below are some links to some of the topics we discussed - please review them and think through the questions you have:

Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus (Peter Kreeft)
Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? (Greg Boyd)
How Christianity "did everything wrong" : Resurrection Faith from a Social History Perspective (JP Holding)
Jesus was Resurrected: So What?
The Anthropic Principle (Henson Family)
If Christianity is true, why does it need so much defending?! (Glenn Miller)
Is Faith Irrational? (Greg Boyd)
Is there Evidence for the Existence of the Soul? (Gary Habermas & JP Moreland)
How was the New Testament formed? (JP Holding)
Why does God often fail to respond to prayer?
If Jesus didn't STAY dead, could His death have been a REAL sacrifice? (Glenn Miller)

Recommended websites:

Stand to Reason
Christian Apologetics & Research Ministry
Tekton : Education & Apologetics Ministry (incl. responses to 52 alleged Bible contradictions)
Christus Victor Ministries
Answering Biblical Contradictions (from Answering-Islam)
The Christian ThinkTank

You are absolutely encouraged to post comments, ask questions, share your thoughts, etc. Also, don't forget the "Are You A Heretic?!" quiz!

In His Warmth,

Alwyn Lau

Was the March Tsunami God's Judgment on the Japanese?

2011-05-03T11:35:00.001+08:00

(An add-on of sorts to the God & Tsunami series began earlier...)

A quick answer is No. Or, rather: We have no Biblical basis to believe so. Take the paradigmatic cases those of Noah's flood, Sodom & Gomorrah and Egypt's 10 plagues. We can see that divine judgment of the mega-disaster kind share a similar pattern and similar characteristics:

1. The judgments were explicitly declared on very 'public' crimes

The people living during the time of the flood, in S&G and certainly in Egypt were informed over and over again of God's coming judgment. And except for S&G, even the mode of judgment was made explicity. In other words, the judged had clear and direct access to what was coming.

Furthermore, for all the three Biblical cases, the crimes were of an 'international', public nature and of such high severity that virtually nobody could deny the guilt of these communities.

In northern Japan, none of the above applied.

2. There was a lengthy period of time for people to repent (and a fair amount of 'bargaining' allowed)

Noah took more than a hundred years to build the ark, during which he must've preached thousands of sermons and sermonettes on God's judgment. S&G's judgment came about 25 years after Lot tried to persuade the people to change their hearts. And Pharoah? C'mon, the dude didn't WANT to see or listen to Moses in his palace anymore!

For Japan, the tsunami warning gave the inhabitants at best an hour or two.

3. There is always a righteous remnant (rescued at the 11th hour)

In the case of the flood, it was Noah and his family. For S&G it was Lot. In Egypt it was the entire twelve tribes. This third criterion virtually requires the above two factors to be in place, which makes the case of Japan as one of divine judgment even more unlikely.

My 'Metaphor' for Teaching

2011-04-27T23:01:00.000+08:00

Go here to see what my colleagues chose as their metaphor(s) for teaching.

On Doing Research - Targeting and Questioning

2011-04-26T10:11:00.000+08:00

Research can be exciting if you've targeted on an issue and everything you read or skim has that issue in mind; this makes reading even previously 'dull' works a thrilling affair. E.g. I almost slept the first time I read Graham Ward's chapter in his Cities of God entitled The Displaced Body of Jesus Christ.

That time I read that chapter as part of a (very unwise) plan to simply finish his book. But when I read him as part of a study on the carnality of the human body in the context of Christic enmattered flesh, things 'felt' different. There was an urgency not previously there, the text had a new 'pull' to it.

It also helps if you've layed out all your research questions and sub-questions, and you can see the answers/responses emerging (albeit, inevitably, in a slow manner). Critically: if you don't have a question, then you won't have any research to do. Reading will be aimless and, thus, tedious.

3 Thoughts on "The Rite" and Demon Possession

2011-04-22T09:26:00.003+08:00

Caught the movie a few nights back. Anthony Hopkins & Pal vs. Bad-Ass Demons. It seems like a strange pick for Lent season. Then again, maybe not too strange. It was, after all, about good defeating evil through the strangest of means.

The artistic merits of the film aside, what 'lingered' with me (not exactly a positive pun, *shudders*) were some thoughts on demon possession which, IMO, the movie helped to make clear:

1. Demonic possession is not an 'all-or-nothing' affair, there are grades

I suspect the common view of demon-possession is that its a sensational / dramatic occurence which happens in one big tragic event. So if you're possessed then all the symptoms will be manifesting all or most of the time. Under this scenario, the usual procedure is to have a priest do a one-time exorcism and if it works the demon's out and hallelujah.

But the movie highlights the fact that demon possession could be seen as occuring along a spectrum, almost like a cancer i.e. there are early stages, there is development and worsening stages, there are periods of 'dormancy' and, most importantly, healing can take up to months and years. Father Lucas, the veteran exorcist in the movie, even talks about early signs of possessions (e.g. social withdrawal, persistent tremors and so on), the main take-back for me being that it can be quite indistinguishable from non-posession!

In some sense, then, demonic possession is simply the extreme expression and manifestation of a fallen world with fallen angels inhabiting human individual spirits in addition to influencing / controlling human institutions.

2. The innocent are affected too, not merely the 'very sinful'

Another possibly commonplace view of demonic possession is that it only happens to the very corrupt, very sinful or very evil. I suspect many believe that no good-hearted person (let alone God-fearing Christian) can ever be possessed. Somehow, so this position goes, demon-possession unquestionably involves the fault or compliancy (however unaware) of the one possessed.

Yet even in Jesus' times there is no suggestion that the possessed were thus afflicted (see Matthew 8:28-34, Mark 1:23-27, Luke 9:37-42, etc.) because of some personal or even corporate guilt. Jesus never rebukes the person for his life which invited the demon. Jesus doesn't lay any blame at the feet of the person. Neither, interestingly enough, does Father Lucas in the movie.

The movie, in fact, showcases three victims of possession. One a pregnant girl who was most likely raped by her father, another a young boy and, finally, a practising exorcist. All of these people are hardly guilty of any extraordinary sin or evil. Ergo: Possession can happen to anyone, even the (morally / spiritually) best of us.

This point is a particularly scary, though necessary, one to make. Far better to know a frightening truth than continue believing a lie. This is not, though, to say that humanity has no protection against marauding spirits - Ephesians 6: 10-17 lists quite an arsenal and 1 John 4:4 basically reaffirms to whom power turly belongs. It should, however, fill us with greater compassion for the afflicted and higher caution in an age where the powers and principalities seem to be controlling everything from politics to media to culture to religion itself.

3. Gratuitous evil is real

In one key scene, the exorcist-in-training, Michael, questions the demon about why it inhabited the girl. The demon's answer was: Her suffering is sweet.

This is an important theological point because it counters a popular view that all evil must happen 'for a reason'. People who believe this usually believe that God 'allows' evil - and not just some evil, but all of it - to happen for mysterious reasons of His own, usually related to His glory. It is not usually considered that evil happens simply because evil agents delight in performing evil, they take pleasure in the suffering of others. Period.

The passion and suffering of Jesus of Nazareth is a grand example. We could ask if every kick, every beating, every whiplash, every spit, every punch was absolutely necessary for the divine plan of redemption. Or, as is more likely the case, could Jesus' suffering reflect the sheer glee and pleasure that evil forces and evil people took in hurting an innocent man?

As a close, perhaps Romans 5:7-8 can be complemented with an additional line, quite timely as today is Good Friday: "Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners who delighted in the suffering of others, Christ died for us."

Voting Out Barisan - Why It's Not So Simple/Obvious

2011-04-21T09:19:00.007+08:00

Many people argue that since BN is so obviously the bad choice, then even though Pakatan may be imperfect as responsible citizens we still have the responsibility to vote out Najib and gang. To those who would choose not to vote (or to cast a protesting non-vote against both parties), a common response is to insist that to not choose (against BN or for the Opposition) is in a way to already choose for BN, since we are not doing anything to stop their evil and crimes.

In a word: The decision is so simple! To even discuss whether or not to vote against Barisan sounds absurd!

Whilst I may agree that BN has commited 'more injustices' than Pakatan, I hope to make the obvious point this does not necessarily entail that Pakatan will do a better job leading the country or constituency - and THAT could be what people vote about.

In a word, justice issues are simply ONE factor. There is also efficiency of administration, party unity, economic acumen, foreign contacts, familiarity with the MP or candidate, grassroots experience, ethnic issues, etc. So, for example, a voter may choose not to vote for Pakatan because she feels that their disunity will destroy the community; who's to say that this is a lesser or greater 'evil' than BN politicians bribing voters or using police brutality?

And aren't there many folks who, whilst acknowledging the draconian attitudes of the Singapore government, nevertheless commend Lee Kuan Yew on creating such an efficient state and who wouldn't mind migrating across the causeway to grab that Sing dollar?

This is NOT about 'justifying' what Barisan or any questionable regime is doing; it's about pointing out the complexity of deciding who to vote for and how sometimes a non-vote may be an acceptable option.

I also find it ironic that the same people who will insist on how politics deal with the not-so-black-and-white 'real world' will also be the same folks who declare that the right choice is SO simple! A no-brainer! Put charitably, this closes the debate on whether justice issues should be over and above everything else (unfortunately, also, to the point of blotting all faults of the favoured party). Put less cordially, this is uncritical and unthinking favouring of candidates or parties, which could be another name for irresponsible voting.

Michael Jackson in Chinese School

2011-04-19T16:32:00.000+08:00

Melody's Prayer

2011-04-18T22:20:00.002+08:00

It's time for bed. My daughter comes to me with her hands together, I ask her "You want to pray?" and she goes, "Preh!" I then say a few words of prayer, thanking God for her, asking that God will bless her sleep and give her sweet dreams and that she'll wake up tomorrow feeling fresh and happy. Then I say Amen and she goes, "Ah-Meh!"

And she quietly laughs at me.

A few minutes later, after rolling around a few times on the mattress or hugging her soft-toy, the cycle begins again. She comes to me, gently demands a prayer, listens patiently whilst I say a few words, confidently says Amen (in her own words, of course) then laughs with delight.

And after a few more minutes, you guessed it, she wants to do it another time.

Prayer as game? Only the faith of a child could 'see' it like that. Compared to the way grown-ups think of prayer - how we often feel unmotivated, how we don't "really" believe anything good will happen, how we feel shy, how we're quite glad when the prayer sessions ends - my daughter's little good-night game almost reflects the most faithful kind of discipleship and has much to teach me.

Melody's kind of prayer:

derives sheer joy and wonder from the act (not the kind of 'plastic happiness' we often see in corporate settings, but an unrestrained, full-hearted over-flowing of it...)
longs to share the activity with a loved-one
is filled with anticipation and fulfillment (it's like she can't wait...she's FULLY convicted this is a special event)
doesn't focus on the doubts and problems of life
wants to do over and over again ('nuff said!)

This kind of prayer, like the best kind of love, always trusts and always hope.

Truly, I'm very blessed among dads. If I ever forget that, I'm glad my little girl's always around to remind me.

Can Church Preachers Recommend Members to Vote for a SPECIFIC Party?

2011-04-13T23:03:00.003+08:00

A quick/cautious answer is Yes.

If Rev ABC, as a key part of his pulpit message on national justice and political liberation, preaches that in light of the evidence and the present socio-political context it may be in accordance with the civic-conscious Christian's actions that she/he votes for Party XYZ, I frankly cannot see how this contradicts the narrative and spirit of Scripture.

In my mind, there is precious little in the Bible which would mitigate against a Church encouraging (not commanding) its members to either vote out an oppressive regime or vote in a much better (though certainly flawed) alternative.

Would this mean that the Church has sold out to political partisanship?

No. I would see such arguments as committing the fallacy of equivocation i.e. it's equated "recommending a party at a selected election" with the church "forsaking its calling and purpose in Christ". Yet I feel this makes as much sense as accusing a church of playing "business favourites" with Yamaha just because, say, the Church Council recommended that all its audio equipment be of that particular brand. As if a Church is less Christ-like simply because it prefers to use one MNC's products over another.

IMO, a 'partisan' church is one which speaks, thinks and acts like a political party. Such a church would have given up her divine calling and time and time again be seen to:

uncritically take sides with the party on virtually all political issues and refuse to even consider the possibility that certain politicians are wrong
ceaseless criticise the party (or parties) it does NOT favour and refrain from speaking against the 'preferred' party

As such, such a (truly 'partisan') church would be a virtual 'Christian mouthpiece' for her party of choice.

But this is not what I have in mind when I suggest that churches can, on a case-by-case basis, "throw her lot in" with specific partisan positions, as long as certain conditions hold:

it should never be said that the party we're recommending is "anointed by God" or is the one divinely chosen and so forth; there's simply no justification for such dogma
it's about recommending and encouraging a vote, NOT commanding that the congregation votes for a certain party!
this "moderate advocacy" approach would be part of a general habit / characteristic of the Church which would included such radical 'non-partisan' actions like speaking gently and respectfully to those the nation prefers to hate, active peace-making, serious (though certainly flawed) attempts at enemy-loving and forgiving, serving everyone, etc.

The Cross of Christ would have to remain the key symbol and theme of the Church. Yet, in the same way that Christians can be Jesus-like whilst joyfully preferring Panasonic air-cons' over LG ones, there's no reason why Christians can't cheerfully and seriously encourage each other to elect these folks over against Najib's team this weekend (smile).

My first (published) baby

2011-04-08T17:06:00.000+08:00

Article pdf available here.

Tsunamis and the Love of God (Pt. 2) : Did God Cause the Tsunami?

2011-04-07T08:57:00.002+08:00

In previous posts, I looked at the objection to God's existence and/or His love (which, to me, amount to the same thing) stemming from the tsunami and the fact that it resulted in:

Now I want to address point-blank the question of whether God was the one who caused the tsunami to happen (John Piper seems to think so, but I have a different take). Whilst I may accept there may be mysterious reasons why God may have wanted, and thus set in motion, the tsunami (which killed thousands of people), I am of the view that God's love is better defended by seeing the tsunami as a macro-example of the problem of freewill.

A quick note on this 'classical' issue. Assume Jack and Jill are arguing (as they go up the hill). Jack, from sheer frustration and hatred, then takes a rock and hurls it at Jill. The rock strikes Jill, causes a brain concussion and within a few days Jill dies. The key question is: Whose fault was that? The only answer I want to highlight is: Not God's!

It was clearly Jack's capacity for self-determination - the more 'sophisticated' way of saying Jack's freewill - that 'made' him throw the rock at Jill.

Could God have stopped Jack? Sure. But what kind of world would we have if all our actions are 'divinely regulated' such that each time I'm about to do something not-exactly pro-community like, God steps in?

So the minute I exhibit even a hint of dangerous driving, God turns off my engine? Shouldn't He also then have given Henry Ford a heart-attack (or, at the very least, a brain-drain) the moment Ford thought about inventing his T-model? Shouldn't God, in fact, have blocked the entire Industrial Revolution, given how 'dangerous' the world became after that?
The moment I consider even a word of harsh language, God freezes up my tongue? Should God also then blot out every published word of profanity?
The second every bullet targeted at a 'good guy' (and how would we define even this aspect?) the gun misfires? Shouldn't then God have blocked the invention of guns in the first place?
On the morality front, so the minute I plan to click on a 'dodgy' website, should God jam up my computer, block my broadband? Should He remove private Web surfing altogether since people tend to visit 'questionable' websites whenever they're alone?

The point is clear. Human freedom, to be genuine, requires an element of irrevocability. We cannot demand that God 'removes' the capacity to act freely each time something 'bad' may happen.

What does all this have to do with the tsunami? Who were the moral agents acting freely yet disastrously last March? Here's a criteria list:

Agents intent on wreaking havoc on human society and delights in global suffering
Agents hostile to God's plan of peace, goodness and holiness
Agents capable of influencing nature towards destructive ends i.e. of using nature as a weapon

I'm talking, of course, about demons, angelic beings with super-human (to say the least!) power created originally to serve/love God but who 'fell' from grace by choosing to go against God (not unlike humans, except with worse consequences).

In the same way that Jack threw the rock at Jill, demons can 'hurl' a tornado (or a landslide or a sandstorm) at a populated area. In the same way that sex-starved dudes can rape helpless victims, devilish forces can 'violate' the harmony between nature and human society by raising 50-feet high waves and causing them to surge into coastal habitats.

The question, then, of why God would allow supernatural beings to cause so much destruction is more or less reducible to the question of why He allows ANY of us to commit self- and community-damaging actions. It's a risky (yet love-prioritized) condition for the kind of world we live in, a world which has so much pain and yet is undeniable filled with love and nobility and truth and wonder in abundance. The only alternative would be a world of automatons, a Stepford Wives-like existence where, sure, there is no 'evil' but no authenticity either. Pure plastic, mere surface.

In contrast to the robotic picture of the world, (at least some!) Christians believe that God is love, that His idea of creation needn't be one where everything is fully controlled, without surprises, openness, tenderness and genuine interaction.

This 'project', this world, of creative love came with an all too apparent risk: that God's created ones may choose to reject His affections, His goals and His ways. One effect of that is a tendency to 'aim' our actions towards the detriment of others i.e. Man vs. Man. In the case of tsunamis killing thousands, it's Fallen Angels vs. Humanity.

In summary, this approach of addressing the problem of evil - i.e. by tying it strongly to the problem of free agency in the context of a divinely initiated project of love - is far better than positing "God's all-controlling will" in the tsunami, because:

it takes seriously the reality of moral agency, volition and self-determination, especially taking into account that belonging to supernatural beings
it doesn't face the dilemma of having to pray against that which God has ordained, e.g. if God wants the disaster to happen and will ensure the disaster happens, why intervene to ask God that it doesn't happen? Also, rescue efforts and relief agencies can be truly said to be working with the will of God, rather than in opposition to it
it protects God's integrity and personhood as being centered on love; we needn't appeal to the 'mysterious' will of God in choosing to wreck havoc on coastal areas via tsunamis'

Why Do Christians Continue Sinning? (4 Views)

2011-04-06T15:49:00.000+08:00

Lutheran view - this simply shows our radical dependence on and falling-short of the grace of God; our continuing to sin is a normal characteristic and fact of human existence and offers even more reason to continually cling on to the grace of God. On-going sin is only to be expected.

Reformed view - we are genuinely new creations yet not totally new! our continual sins reflect our not-finished-yet status; nevertheless we have all the resources we need in Christ to live a victorious life so obedience it the way to go. No need to despair, you can do it in the strength of God!

Keswick view - our flesh fights against the Spirit of God inside us; if we continue to sin seriously, it shows we have yet to encounter the Spirit of God in a life-transforming 'crisis' moment. Rest in Christ, surrender everything to Him and God will give you near-total victory over sin.

Wesleyan view - God's saving grace naturally leads to the sanctified life (i.e. justification is not merely forensic); believers can become sinless if their hearts are surrendered to Christ. On-going sin suggests non-surrender of our hearts.

Casey Abrams' Georgia

2011-04-02T22:41:00.001+08:00

On Contextual Theology

2011-04-01T17:16:00.001+08:00

Contextual theology is increasingly becoming a "universal signifier" (i.e. an absolute non-contextual container) to exclude principles and norms which don't fit our case/agenda. What is in principle a much-valued attempt by theology to think with, in and along a context and community (i.e. asking the community's deepest questions, using the cultures' voice and symbols, appropriating their models, historical horizons and ways of thinking) can, however, lead to a restricted and rigid perception of both the context itself and the redemptive responses available.

Contextual theology is wonderful if it forces us to focus on issues we never may without a prompter (e.g. whether or not Biblical inerrancy is 'as big a deal' in the East as it apparently is/was[?] in the West). Yet being sensitive to local concerns is not by itself a guarantee of anything truthful or right. The Pharisees, the Qumran community, the Zealots, the Sadducees, even Herod and Pilate themselves(!) could certainly claim to be acting 'contextually'. If so, how does one arbitrate between all these varied responses to the socio-political crisis of Israel? How did Jesus himself do it?

Ironically, the justification provided by all of the Hebrew groups (including Jesus no less!) was to claim the 'higher ground' of an absolute norm which is binding on all i.e. faithfulness to the idea, faith and praxis of being the true people of God. In other words, the contextual horizon is a given - what's contested is the best alignment of any specific contextual response to that which is ultimately common to all and thus beyond the "unique value-proposition" of any one group's position.

Contextual theology's concerns should be primarily about method or medium, not about message. Jesus' disagreements with his contemporaries (and to this you could add Paul, Luther, etc.) was not that these competing groups weren't contextual enough but precisely that they had failed to see how God was doing a 'new thing' within the context.

Judith Butler, to bring in an idea from a non-Christian feminist, suggests that cultures "are not bounded entities; the mode of their exchange is, in fact, constitutive of their identities." (Butler, Zizek & Laclau, 2000). If context can be more or less synonymous with culture, then it may also be worth reflecting on how one context deals with something external to it is also A PART OF what it means to be 'of that context'. This is to say that in an increasingly connected world, we've reached a point where everything is contextual to everything else(!), all of which makes it largely errorneous to separate one context too tightly from another.

As such, this would imply that the terms "contextual" and "non-contextual" may be more blurred than initially imagined and to the extent that it is, the entire edifice of contextual theology may be worth some serious rethink.

Pembela and the Alkitab Defacement : What Would Zizek Say?

2011-03-31T11:29:00.006+08:00

The Malaysian government's recent desecration of the Malay Bible, the Alkitab, provoked not just Christian protests but also fundamentalist Muslim protests against the Christians. The Islamic Defenders Organisation (also known as Pembela) have accused Christians of deliberating hurting the feelings of the Muslim community by its repeated demands for the government to not restrict the freedom of religion and to revoke its stamp.

The Pembela reaction - using thinly veiled threat and insinuations - is typical of the fundamentalist mindset, which is different from the non-fundamentalist in that only the fundamentalist claims direct un-mediated knowledge to the Real. The fundamentalist has lost his proper 'distance' to belief i.e. they do not believe the way people normally believe. Non-fundamentalists believe mainly because other people believe and their beliefs are usually held at arm's length (which always elicits the possibility that one can say, "Well, yes, I know we should be behaving in XYZ manner, but we must be practical, but we have to be realistic, but let's check other opinions first, but things aren't so clear-cut, etc.).

The fundamentalist, because he has (in his mind) a full and true encounter with that which others have only an indirect encounter, has shorn himself of the need for other considerations. It's the Truth in all its blazing glory - something impossible to deny, something which compels, which ignores everything else.

Still, the Pembela reaction remains bizarre, because when Christians protest so vehemently that the stamping of the Allkitab constitutes a desecration, there is no logical reason why any Muslim (especially in Malaysia) needs to fear. Islamic insititutions and rules and guidelines and policies are everywhere. Furthermore, the Alkitab 'threat' appears moot : There are already many Internet sites which present the Bible (and various commentaries and hundreds of articles) in Malay. A few thousand Malay Bibles, far from presenting a threat, may in fact expose how weak the influence of Christianity is on Malay-speakers compared to Islam (at least in Malaysia).

So why the Pembela reaction? It's surely not too radical to suggest that the reason Pembela is behaving the way they are is because when Christians raise the issue of desecration, this presents Pembela with a traumatic side of themselves. They know how they would react should a secular govt officially limit the scope of their holy book. They are fully aware that, should the shipment of Qurans' be blocked or delayed (not likely in Malaysia?), that their reactions may far exceed on the aggression-index anything the Christians are doing. They realise that should the double-standard and/or violation of the freedom of religion be applied to them, that they would consider protestations against their protests as highly unjust and uncalled for.

They have known this all along, yet this knowledge remains repressed only to threaten to bubble to the surface when adherents of other religions begin to mirror what Pembela knows all too well they are capable of in vastly greater degrees.

In a word, whilst the fanatic claims absolute knowledge of the Real, this is by and large a disavowal and repression of knowledge of the self! The proper way, then, to shake up a fanatic who believes he has direct access to the Source is NOT to force him to look elsewhere or, God forbid, to tell him that his gaze is misdirected or even that he should 'stand back' a little. On the contrary, the proper tactic is to give him a mirror.

Is there not a parallel here with the case of Superman and his ultimate weakness, green Kryptonite (which, as every comic fan knows, is mineral debris from Superman's home-planet, Krypton)? The greatest danger to the man of steel is NOT missiles, bombs or other super-villains but a very fragment from his place of origins. The site of one's scariest traumas could be home itself.

The Pembela fear is NOT that Christianity will begin 'seeping' into Muslim society; the fear is that fundamentalist Muslim society will begin to be exposed for the shallow vision and ethic that it secretly feared it always was.

Crowe's Quote

2011-03-29T00:04:00.000+08:00

"We spend a lot of time trying to organize the world. We build clocks and calendars and try to predict the weather. But what part of our life is truly under our control? What if we choose to exist purely in a reality of our own making? Does that render us insane? And if it does isn't that better than a life of despair?"

Must-Read Missional Theologians?

2011-03-26T20:12:00.000+08:00

Need some help. Please suggest some good 'missional' theologians which meet at least one of the following crtieria:

Must not cater too much to 'popular' crowd (Boyd, Piper et al and even Peter Rollins may have to be removed on this account...)
Must engage (or show familiarity) with 'continental philosophy of religion' (and I don't mean just a mention here and there of Kierkegaard and Kant - this knocks out most of the Old Testament dudes)
Preferably British / Continental (what to do, sigh, studying at Nottingham...)
Experience writing on psycho-analysis and politics will help (and I don't mean Tony Campolo!)

My names so far:

Graham Ward
Philip Goodchild
Miroslav Volf
James KA Smith (virtually the whole RO gang)
Paul Fiddes
Colin Gunton
Alan Lewis
N.T. Wright (obligatory mention...)
Rowan Williams
Stanley Grenz
Bryan Walsh (ok, no, but yeah, uh, well, alright...)
Roger Olson
Leslie Newbigin (as a favour to Sivin Kit!)
Walter Wink
Anthony Thiselton
John Milbank
Clayton Crockett
Marcus Pound
Leron Shultz

Why the 'Defacement' of the Alkitab NEED NOT be Desecration - A Response to Dr. Ng

2011-03-25T17:34:00.003+08:00

Dr. Ng Kam Weng's piece on why the defacement (notice the loaded word) of the Alkitab is desecration is now a very popular Web post. To me, the best parts are his detailing of the historical background of the government's treatment of Christians from 1981, culminating in the recent stamping of the Alkitab. This alone, IMO, makes his essay noteworthy. One of the not-so-good parts, though, is his argument on why Christians should consider the Alkitab-stamping by the Malaysian Home Ministry as a defacement.

Dr. Ng first defines ‘holy’, ‘sacred’ and ‘desecrate’, then proceeds to argue that in general all Christians consider the Bible ‘holy’, thereby preparing the way for the conclusion that since the Home Ministry treated the Alkitab - considered by Christians as a 'holy thing', right? - with contempt, it is therefore desecration.

The key question for me is: What if Christians do (or should) NOT treat the Alkitab or Bible as a 'holy thing'? Let's look at a key paragraph in Dr. Ng's argument:

"From these definition I shall say that when Christians refer to “The Holy Bible” they are commending it as something set apart or dedicated to religious activity and thus to be held in reverence. There is some diversity among Christians in the way they approach the Bible. Some devout Christians approach the text with veneration. Other Christians feel they do not need to revere a printed book, but they will still consider the text to be indispensable in leading them into the presence of the Holy God." (emphasis mine)

Reading the above, it's easy to miss the fact that Dr. Ng at first IMPLIES that not all Christians would consider the Bible a holy thing only to - within the space of a few words - STATE that all Christians consider it a holy thing!

On one hand, Dr. Ng states that Christians differ with respect to the Bible. Yet he mentions this diversity only to dismiss it by asserting that all Christians "still consider the text to be indispensable in leading them into the presence of God". What Dr. Ng misses out is that a Christian's personal view of the Bible will affect his very understanding of whether or not desecration has occurred. In his own words, not every Christian reveres a printed book. Yet he doesn't follow through from that to conclude that therefore not every Christian would believe that desecration has happened if this printed book has been stamped on, even if it's "indispensable in leading them into the presence of the Holy God."

Dr. Ng’s critical assumption is that if I consider the Bible to be indispensable in leading me to God, I must therefore consider it a desecration if the Home Ministry stamps it with, well, whatever they stamp it with.

But this is precisely what I believe every Christian must question.

If the printed book is not itself ‘holy’, if we have a richer theology of the Word of God (one that the world cannot 'deface' in any meaningful sense of the word) then there will be less temptation to get politically and personally hot under the collar over incidents like the Alkitab one.

If it's not the document itself which is "sacred" but the Person, Love, Truth and Community spoken of within the pages of the book which is "of God", then we would not so easily ‘see’ the Home Ministry’s actions as a ‘violation’ or a treating with contempt of a holy thing because the printed pages of a Bible was never a ‘holy’ thing to begin with (or at least not in an important sense – this is significant, but like Joshua Woo pointed out, Dr. Ng has employed a minimum criterion of, e.g., the understanding of a ‘holy thing’, to establish his case that desecration has occurred. My concern is why Christians need to tie ourselves to such a low and even ‘non-Christian’ standard of a holy thing?)

We would be free to reconsider the situation REGARDLESS of the Home Ministry's actual objectives(!). The Home Ministry may have intended a desecration, but we don't need to behave on cue the way any other religious person would react if their holy thing was spoilt.

In a word, we are liberated to choose a different, more Christ-like response.

If Christians WANT to get angry over this issue (to the point where all thoughts of mercy, forgiveness and peace-making are ignored), nothing I or anyone else will change anything. In this sense, we Christians merely prove our humanity (which isn’t a compliment, ok?). Yet it’s sad that by sticking to our guns in the name of ‘democracy’ and ‘religious freedom’ we are in danger of losing our NEW humanity.

We can choose NOT to let our anger and judgment rule over our actions and our love (for even our worst persecutors). We can choose to be free to deliberate on fresh responses, to show the world we’re not like any other group who gets heated up each time our ‘rights’ are denied (which is not to say we won’t fight for the rights of other less-privileged groups; in fact, we should). We can choose to show our politicians a different way to be human, to match persecution with blessing, wrong with good and, especially in times like this, evil with love.

Note: This is not to say that Christians should actually LIKE it when physical Bibles are treated thus. Again, it’s ultimately the Christian godly response to bad times which sets us apart – i.e. makes us holy!! – not our ability to point out, no matter how accurately, how bad we’re being treated.

Desecration? Really?

2011-03-19T00:32:00.004+08:00

I confess I don't get it. So the Home Ministry with all its political agenda and vote-mongering decides to (finally) release more than 30,000 bibles among which include 5,100 Malay Bibles which they then 'stamped' with " This is for the use of Christians only. By order of the Home Minister.” - how does this translate to a desecration of the Bible?

Bishop Ng of the Christian Federation of Malaysia (CFM) says (among other things), "This means that the Bahasa Malaysia Bible is now treated as a restricted item, and the Word of God has been made subject to the control of man."

I confess I went: huh? So without the stamp we can conclude that the Bible has NOT been made "subject to man's control"? Do churches want to distribute all the Malay Bibles to Muslims at the local pasar malam or what? Given our national context, obviously not - so does that mean that we have "treated the Bible as a retricted item" by not freely giving it away to anyone and everyone? Do Christians want all the "closet Christians" (who are Malays) to come out and declare their spiritual allegiance to Christ and openly read the Alkitab? Again, given our national context, this won't do, so are we subjecting Scripture to human control by restricting it?

The point is : we're living in Malaysia, a Muslim country where like it or not, any religion other than Islam is a restricted item. And if that's not enough, this is the human race we're talking about so virtually EVERYTHING falls under the scrutiny and control of the human mind and our institutions.

Furthermore, that important person which keeps showing up in the New Testament called Jesus? He said in almost categorical terms that we're to LOVE OUR ENEMIES AND PRAY FOR THEM. Now I'm just guessing here but I'm strongly suspect that we Christians are going to find a LOT of ways 'around' this statement / command, aren't we? Would we then be guilty of "subjecting the Word of God to our control"?

Back to desecration. If we Christians are so concerned that the Home Ministry has committed such a crime against our 'holy book', would we also consider the following as desecration?

Reading the Bible about once a week, skipping those weeks we skip church, but forgetting everything we read almost the moment the reading ends
Using the Bible as deco (a much nicer way of saying 'letting it collect dust'...)
Using the Bible to swat a mosquito
Disobeying, misinterpreting, ignoring and explaining away those portions of the Bible which don't fit our world-view

Now, if we DON'T consider any of the above points as desecrating Scripture, that'd be mighty convenient. Because then we could rip our cloaks and bury our souls in ashes about official stamps at the front or back of the book (portions which we hardly look at anyway), yet sweetly and casually treating the 'holy book' like any other document we possess. Sure it's important but we don't imagine the physical book and the actual pages itself are glowingly sacred such that we'll be struck by lightning the moment we mistakenly put our coffee mugs on it.

And, of course, if we DO consider any of the points as a desecration then we should say to the Home Minister, "Welcome to the Church of Jesus Christ! You're just like one of us - sinning to the max but still loved by God! Yahoo!"

The thing is, if I may make the obvious point, is that the Home Ministry's stamp has nothing to do with desecration because the term hardly applies to the Christian Bible. It's never the document itself which was "sacred" but the Person, Love, Truth and Community spoken of within the pages of the book which is "of God" - HOW CAN BORING INK-STAMPS DESECRATE THAT??!!

And yet the document as divinely employed reveals this God, His Word and His Church in a way so unique that the power and love yearns to BURST OUT from mere paper pages and onto the very lives and mind-worlds of the community in which the Church resides. This is to say that the God of the Bible would have precious little care about what happens to any physical page of the Bible-as-document and cares SO MUCH MORE that His people show the world the presence of Jesus Christ through their love for all, even and especially the worst among them.

Note: The Romans and Jews already beat up and crucified Jesus and yet through this ultimate desecration (if God was ever desecrated this was it), He yet sought the forgiveness of God upon his torturers and killers. And today the Church is raining down condemnation on a group of officials dirtying one page of the Bible? Huh?! What's wrong with this picture?

So what I'm saying to my fellow Christians, if I'm saying anything at all, is we...got...to...chillax. It's Lent. A time to reflect on the suffering of God for us, for those we hate, for those who hate us, basically for every critter who ever had a single thought.

Let's thank God the Bibles have been released. Let's quit the condemnation. Let's pray for the bad guys. Let's take the Alkitab and let God do His magic with them. He could feed 5,000 hungry people with five loaves and two fish - you can bet He'll bless a starving-for-justice Malaysia with 5,100 Malay Bibles with a cheap stamp on them.

Chicken & Egg Redux

2011-03-17T11:52:00.002+08:00

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Slavoj Zizek : Both!

Ernesto Laclau : The universal form of 'chicken' and 'egg' are empty signifiers which are constantly filled in hegemonically invested content...the key question is: whose interests do existing definitions of 'chicken' and 'egg' serve and what lies have they been telling to generalised their version of emancipation to the rest of society?

Michel Foucault : The concepts of 'chicken' and 'egg' are insidious ideological trappings to create subjectivation to the powers that be...we must break free from the subjective imprisonment engendered by our acceptance of the concepts of 'chicken' and 'egg' as part of our world!

Judith Butler : I don't know, but we must challenge the heterosexuality of the 'chicken' and constantly engage in performative contradictions on which present power-systems rely...the way forward is to STOP thinking male and female chickens!

Open Theist : Not even God knows...

Calvinist : It's God's sovereign will that the question was posed, that people ask it (and receive numerous answers), that most get the wrong answer and only some get it right (though - through divine decree - not many are sure if they're right) and it's His will that this question will be continually asked over time. For His glory, of course - it can't be for anything else.

Gilles Deleuze : Before either of them, there were experiences, connections and molecular units which, over time, crystalized themselves - via concepts and social convention - into 'chicken' and 'egg'...

Chinese : Can eat or not? (no further questions)

Pentecostalist : Hallelujah! Now what does this have to do with the power of the HO-ly Spirit??!!

Barisan : The government has been working hard all these decades to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to discover the answer and we will continue to serve the people to ensure harmony, productivity and growth and, uh, do so as one nation, one Malaysia...

Pakatan : The government has been deceiving and betraying the people all these decades to ensure that only a selected few have the chance to discover the answer; just look at how they're raising chicken prices, egg prices, food prices - it is up to the people to send a strong message to the government that the Malaysian people demand a change!!

Dr. Mahathir : I'm not afraid of possible lawsuits following my answer, but the real question is whetherthe Malay chickens and their offspring have a greater claim to national legitimacy than the Bumiputera ones...

Rosmah : I don't know the answer but if the Japanese can't find the answer it's probably their irresponsible development and lack of investment in green-technology...

Martin Luther : We have to take it on faith.

Wittgenstein : What kind of game are you playing?

Sivin Kit : We must engage in healthy civic dialogue and discussions in order to explore and construct new models of integration. It's important to understand the world-contexts of not only the two terms - 'chicken' and 'egg' - but also how various people perceive them. And btw here's a link which I found interesting...

Investments - Average, Risk-Averse, Reckless, Null and Taleb

2011-03-16T14:30:00.004+08:00

Average investor: BIG chance of winning a little, SMALL chance of losing everything invested, virtually NO chance of winning big (the 'standard' stock-player with his charts, investment portfolio, ear-to-the-market, etc. the property investor would hover between this and the next category, in my view...)
Reckless/Aggressive investor : SMALL to MEDIUM chance of winning big, BIG chance of losing everything (the more-daring-than-normal stock player with his big gambles and all-eggs-in-one-basket methods; in some circles, this would be also called gambling...)
Risk-averse investor : SMALL chance of either winning or losing a little, VERY SMALL or NO chance of losing everything and NO chance of winning big (unit trusts, investment-linked funds, etc.)
Non-investment: NO chance of winning or losing anything (FDs', government bonds, etc.)
Nicholas Taleb's "black swan" strategy : BIG chance of losing a little, SMALL chance of winning big, virtually NO chance of losing EVERYTHING (betting on market crashes and the constant purchasing of stock options).

Taleb's message to all investors is that the two most favoured options, 1) and 2), are recipes for disasters; in the long-term that 'small' chance of losing everything eventually catches up. If you've been making daring bets all your life and winning, it would not be because you have a fantastic investment strategy: it just means you've been real lucky.

Continue this way and you will, in fact, "lose everything" (or a significant amount of what 'everything' means to you). Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the biggest contributor to total busts resulting from such investments is none other than...pride. For more on this, check out Malcolm Gladwell's essay on Taleb.

Tsunamis and the Love of God (Pt.1a) : The Problem of Non-Fatal Suffering

2011-03-16T00:14:00.007+08:00

In the previous post, I focused more on the number, nature and age of fatalities resulting from the tsunamis. I tried to show how the objection requires so many qualifications of an arbitrary nature (e.g. only a certain number can die, only a specific age-range of victims is allowed, only particular ways of dying are fine, etc.) that it must be reworked lest it risks being thrown out.

Without denying the reality of suffering, I'd like to take a short excursus to look at the case where non-fatalities are created i.e. people don't necessarily die but so much suffering, damage and sorrow results. I hope to show that the suffering (caused by natural events) form an insufficient basis to formulate a clear objection 'proving' that God doesn't love us. So, again, the argument can be formulated as:

God caused (or didn't prevent) the tsunami which caused so much suffering (as distinct from deaths), therefore He doesn't love humanity or (most likely) doesn't exist...

1. Notice how this 'problem' may in fact be turned into an argument for the love of God. The fact that these people did NOT lose their lives could - in the midst of a major tragedy - be a positive factor suggesting divine mercy and providence!

Likewise, if the "argument from suffering" is to hold water, it should also be the REVERSE in the case of those who died. If the argument is that God in His love should not allow so much pain (from the suffering), then this could count as an argument for His compassion in allowing a high number of deaths i.e. the dead do not suffer and are not 'in pain' (or at least in the way we normally understand it).

Of course, one could always demand that God - in order to 'prove' His love - must NEVER let us die and NEVER let us suffering anything. Totally apart from why God is at all obligated to meet this kind of benchmark, such a demand is obviously, again, totally arbitrary and subjective. In any case, the Christian world-view would simply dismiss this 'standard' as inconsistent with the kind of characters God wants of His people and the kind of reality presented in Scripture (where evil, pain and persecution are more often than not 'raw materials' for prayer, bold acts, suffering love, etc.)

The initial point here is that arguments about 'death' vis-a-vis 'non-death suffering' have a tendency to cancel each other out. The next one's slightly more tricky, though...

2. But what about the vast amounts of suffering caused by this one event? How can God 'sit by' and let it happen?

A important (and not entirely academic) question is to ask whether we're talking about the huge NUMBERS of people experiencing suffering or the experience of suffering itself. Because it should be reminded that the actual suffering felt at any given time is absolutely limited to that which any SINGLE person feels. 1,000 people may have lost their homes but, paradoxically, this suffering experienced could be 'less than' that of one parent losing his child.

Presumably, then, the pro-atheist argument refers to level of any given suffering and NOT simply the head-count of sufferers (because in that case those in the world 'suffering' from ailments of any and all kinds would far outnumber those suffering from the tsunami, and thus the argument would break down).

The point is that one simply cannot 'add up' the number of people suffering and draw a strong conclusion about the love of God. Without detracting from the seriousness of the tragedy, it should be noted that felt suffering is always an individual matter, which brings us to an even trickier issue.

3. Whilst the issue of death seems clearly defined - e.g. there's a clear line demarcating those who are alive from those who are dead - the problem of suffering is much more vague. One man is a business mogul making billions but is tormented emotionally every day (e.g. Howard Hughes); another lives in a cell for decades but enjoys more emotional and spiritual liberty than his captors (e.g. Nelson Mandela); yet another is rich, loved by many, talented, yet appears afraid of his own body, the media, the world (e.g. Michael Jackson); and of course there are those who work among the dead, dying and filthy yet exude boundless joy, creativity and service (e.g. Mother Teresa).

If all the above four (and surely there are more!) of these kinds of people encounter an event like a tsunami, isn't it clear that the levels of suffering would not only vary but take on almost indistinguishable dimensions from person to person? This is to say that, the amount of suffering an individual feels cannot be separated from (although not entirely being determined by) how this individual responds to WHATEVER he or she encounters in life, not only the 'bad' stuff!

If events (supposedly 'caused' or allowed by God) are only one 'side' of the suffering equation, any objection to God's love cannot ignore how a person reacts and responds in order to complete the formulation of the argument. E.g. if X is Suffering and A is God's Actions and B is Individuals' Response, then based on the above discussion it's clear that X = A + B. Thus, any objection to God's love based on the alleged severity of X needs to incorporate the (highly subjective!) element of B, failing which it's just an objection to God bringing about big waves (something which is not, of course, intrinsically bad in itself).

4. The multi-lateral, multi-causal and quite unpredictable nature of suffering also creates quandaries for the argument against God's love. Should we expect God to stop tsunamis "because they cause suffering", then we should also insist that He issues a divine BAN on competitive sports, great wealth, Vegas-style buffets, property ownership, fame and every other thing which can potentially cause suffering in potentially anybody! (Surely we cannot say that God should hold back large waves, but allow a country's GDP to rise so high that the number of financial scandals rise, many families suffer from arguing about who should control the household money, social problems emerge, etc.? Should God pack up the entire Capitalist system since events like the subprime crisis created arguably the same - or even more! - lost homes than a 10-meter wave?)

The point is clear. If it's suffering we're so ABSOLUTE about, then we should be careful of what we insist God must do or undo in order to prove He loves us.

(Part 2 uploaded)

Tsunamis and the Love of God (Pt.1)

2011-03-14T14:52:00.003+08:00

(Parts 1a and 2 also uploaded)

Silence is always preferred in times like last week off the coast of north-eastern Japan (when 10-meter waves have taken - and even now put at risk - about 10,000 lives and counting). Silence, service and prayer are surely the primary action points when people are dying. And yet our silence must not be seen to endorse any and all manner of a/theological thinking about such events; it's merely to suspend the arena of intellectual debate so that the heart, hands and spirit can respond more appropriately.

It is common (and sometimes even 'natural') that when tragedies like a coast-ripping tsunami strikes and countless lives lost, people begin to doubt the existence - let alone the love - of an Almighty God. Believers who cling on to their faith are dubbed confused. Religious folks who pray for divine mercy and branded as cruel. For, so such paradigms go, in light of boiling waves tearing apart houses, lands and people, only a few conclusions can be true:

God does not exist, OR
God exists, but He does not love us (since He must've planned the destruction caught so well on CNN...), OR
God exists, He loves humanity, but He lacks the power required to protect us (since He wanted people to be safe but they were not...)

The problem for believers is compounded by the fact that nature - red in tooth and claw or plain destructive in wind and wave - is apparently exempt from any explanation involving freewill. With a rapist, one could always argue that God was respecting this person's freedom of self-determination when He allowed the atrocity to be committed. But what about mudslides? What about tornadoes? What about tsunamis? Surely God wasn't respecting the 'freedom' of the waves to 'do what they will'? Couldn't God have controlled the tectonic plates in a way which did not result in monster waves surging towards populated shores? Whose freedom would such acts be violating?

In these posts, I'll try to defend the love of God which would, duh, imply the existence of God (i.e. by defending one I'm obviously defending the other). In this first part, I'll try to show how the objection appears almost arbitrary and lacks coherence whilst in the second part I'll attempt a theological explanation of why such tragedies occur and what God has done, is doing and will do about it.

So let's start with the most obvious concern:

God caused (or didn't prevent) the tsunami from killing all those people, therefore He either doesn't love people or doens't have the power to stop tragedies or (most likely) doesn't exist.

1. An immediate response is a counter-question: Surely we cannot conclude from the fact that people died that therefore God doesn't love humanity? Even if a million people died from the earthquake, this same one million people will eventually pass away, no? And should this same one million people die of non-earthquake or non-tsunami concerns, say, from cancer or heart failure, surely we wouldn't suspect or deny the love of God? Not unless we believe a loving God is obliged to keep people alive forever?

So the mere deaths of individuals cannot be the cause of our suspicion or denial of God's love. It has to be something else.

2. Yet, even if we grant that the fact of death from tsunami is a legitimate argument against the love of God, the next critical question arises: How many people must be saved (or, conversely, allowed to die) before we cross the threshold from belief or unbelief in God's care?

E.g. if only 10 people died, would we agree that God loves us? If yes, what about 100 or a 1000? If no, then how about 5, 4 or 3? Surely, if only one person died (as it appears to be the case off the coast of Papua and California), we cannot accuse God of not loving us? But if not one, then how many? Isn't it clear by now that this figure - the number of deaths 'beyond which' God's love is put into doubt - is not only absolutely arbitrary but will vary even among skeptics! (I've expanded on this argument here)

3. Going back to the issue of people dying, my argument is that it cannot be the mere FACT that people died that causes us to question the love of God and that an "acceptable casuality number" appears entirely arbitrary, especially for so strong a view that God doesn't exist or loves us. Perhaps it's to do with how the victims died?

The tsunamis caused many people to die via drowning. Whilst I surely wish it not to happen, I should also ask myself why this is so much more 'un-loving' of God than cases where people's hearts simply stop (like my two grand-mums) or where their lungs and legs developed cancer (as per my two grand-dads). Is there an 'okay' way to pass away, the occurence of which leaves us safe in the assurance that God loves us and other not-so-okay ways to go which cause us to question Him? Who's to say? Again, are we not in the realms of the quite arbitrary and isn't it foolhardy to base a strong philosophical conclusion on vague and shifty foundations? (Or, at the very least, wouldn't it be true that such dark conclusions on the character of God are far less 'rational' than they purport to be?)

4. Next, perhaps it's the fact that surely God should've cared enough to allow the thousands of young men and women to enjoy the 'prime' of their lives, to say nothing of the children? We don't quite have the statistics in yet, but assuming that most of those who died were pre-middle-aged, doesn't God care about all these individuals who have so many more years to live?

Notice, first, how this argument almost implicitly makes it seem 'okay' if God were to kill off the older people. As if, ethically speaking, it's less tragic if the tsunami drowned a majority of older people(?). Yet, putting aside this problematic ethic, the key question still remains: What age above which it would be considered fine for God to end the person's life? If a man died at 43, is that fine? What if he died at 63 but still had an invalid wife to feed? What if he died at 23 but has been incarcerated three time already and would most likely cause trouble to the community again?

The point, obviously, is not about securing the exact details to a suitable theshold or level (above/below which the love of God becomes tenable), but to show how the complexity of life and ethics in relation to Meta-Governance renders the question itself inappropriate and almost incoherent (again, some elaboration here).

5. Then again, should the tsunami have destroyed a fleet of pirates about to invade a fishing village, no one - except maybe the pirates and their families - would be complaining about God not caring enough. So in addition to mode of death, number of deaths and age of death, one should also factor in the character of those who died in relation to the one presenting the argument, when challenging the love of God.

Ultimately, without necessarily denying the validity of the skeptical argument against God's love - and without even bringing up arguments FOR the belief that God really does love us in spite of such tragic occurences! -I'd have to insist that such objections must be fine-tuned, failing which it can be concluded that they're overly simplistic, hasty and lacking in thought.

Original Sin and Human Connection

2011-03-11T10:52:00.004+08:00

Shame, fear, trangression, the feeling of being an outcast, of 'missing the mark', of being dirty, of failing...of falling. This is sin and the acts of sin - whilst often quite unoriginal - are 'redeemed' by its grounding in original sin.

Original sin is about what all humanity has in common, what's latent and possible in all of us. Original sin keeps us humble, always aware that no matter how fallen the other person seems, we are not altogether different. Original sin goes back to our forefathers (and before) and will stretch to our great-grand-kids (and beyond). It's a reminder of that dimension of our humanity which needs a Saviour; it's kinda like pain, which can be good in a negative kind of way, as it tells you you're still alive via the reminder of how close you are to dying.

That guy who's self-ex-communicated his personhood from the church - I'm like him, so I better put aside all feelings of superiority and pride. That lady whose faculties physical and mental are failing - she comes from same place I did, so let me be merciful, helpful, caring. That leader who disgraced his community - he isn't the only one who needs grace.

Original sin is the point of solidarity, that void of need and trauma around which Man (and Woman) spins helplessly. It's a reverse-compass of sorts. Let's go together forward to the light, binded strong in the knowledge of the darkness we hailed from.

Original sin can be beautiful, like Aushcwitz is sublime. We must never eradicate those objects which stands where our greatest tragedies took place. We need the memory, the remembrance and the looking sorrowfully backwards failing which we may repeat the offense or, worse, find nothing significant in moving forward.

Alan Lewis said it best:

"The fact that sin is 'original' means that, even in our falsehood and in our brokenness as fallen, at least one essential truth about is preserved and illuminated, not hidden or destroyed: the truth that humanity is connected. We are who we are in righteousness, and fail to be who we are in sin, together, and not apart." (Between Cross & Resurrection, p. 421)

Recovering the Scandals of the Parables

2011-03-09T23:35:00.000+08:00

We've heard them so often, they've lost their hold on us. Or, rather, we've given up much chance they'll impact us in any way more substantial than eliciting a polite nod or hmmm when the preacher talks about it.

The good Samaritan, the prodigal son, the seeds sown on different ground, the talents, the king and the ungrateful servants and about a dozen more. The parables of Jesus need to be re-heard and retold

In line with Heidegger's preservation theme, where the singularity of a work is upheld in order to encourage and open the worlds of disclosure the very work insinuates, these precious Gospel texts can and must be made to speak anew to generations of Christians already 'numbed' by hundreds of messages and sermons which have utilized these wonderful stories.

The parables exist to found a new community, a new kind of living, a new state (in almost every sense of the word).

It's the kind of world/state where a Chinese (divorced) father, on the Eve of Chinese New Year, walks alone in the rain to where his prodigal son resides. This raging college kid is fuming against his dad because he wasn't given the money he asked for (not because the dad didn't want to help his son out but because the dad didn't have the money) and refuses to attend the not-exactly-Vegas-style buffet dinner the dad prepared for just the two of them, preferring to hang-out with his college friends and their families. The dad nevertheless braves the rain, walks up to the door of the house where his son is, calls out to his son, kneels and begs him to come home for dinner - for Chinese New Year's eve.

What would such an act do to the Chinese community, to Chinese culture? What world does it hint at? Could it be the same kind of world present when Jesus said that, "(The prodigal son's) father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him..."? (Luke 15:20)

Jackie Chan's "The Miracle" - the only version you need to see...

2011-03-03T14:19:00.003+08:00

Speed, Blindness and Hitler's Insufficiently Violent Violence: Zizek on (Real) Political Action

2011-02-21T11:32:00.002+08:00

In Contingency, Hegemony & Universality (a book Zizek co-authored with Judith Butler and Ernesto Laclau), he provides examples of movies on what he views as genuine political acts.

In the bus-thrilled Speed, there's a scene where a terrorist takes a policement hostage as part of his attempt to escape. The hero, played by Keanu Reeves, decides to shoot his own colleague in the leg. This makes it virtually impossible for the terrorist to drag the policeman outside, thus completely foiling the terrorist's plan. Similarly, in the Mel Gibson movie Ransom, the father of the kidnapped boy radically subverts the kidnappers' demand by offering millions of dollars for information leading to the rescue of the boy. In some sense, the father had already the loss of his son; his actions, therefore, reflected and generated a complete reversal of the situation, putting the kidnappers on the defensive. Finally, and most radically, in The Usual Suspects, the protagonist when threatened with the murder of his wife and children, proceeds to kill his own family thus removing them from the equation and allowing him total freedom to pursue his enemies.

In all three cases/movies above, the coordinates of the game were totally changed; the system no longer appeared the same to all involved. This is what Zizek hopes to see in political action - acts that bring about massive systemic crisis and a drastic subversion of the socio-political framework itself.

Another example Zizek mentioned - this time in Violence: Six Sideways Glances - is given at the start of Jose Saramago's book, Blindness, in which during an election a virtual no-show of voters dealt a severe systemic blow to whole system. Zizek claims that such an event - a mass rejection of elections which necessitated a reappraisal of the very concept of democratic elections - was 'more violent' than what Hitler did with his world wars and genocide which, so Zizek says, was a very busy and active way of ensuring that nothing really changed; the Third Recih embodied, "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose", a French phrase oft quoted by Zizek, meaning, "The more things change, the more they remain the same." Why? Because Hitler, instead of addressing social class antagonisms, chose to (mis)-direct Germany's problems towards the Jews, homosexuals, Communists and so on.

Yet the movies examples and that of Saramago's novel point to one key element of political action which Zizek and Lacan challenges us to: That true 'acts' of the Real involve a striking at one's self, a voluntary (and often desperate) personal sacrifice of what truly matters. Such actions include the radical faith that in order for something 'better' to emerge, even the 'good' at present must be vanquished if only because it continually chains to a fantasmic system constituted by and propagating a deception that there is no better system to speak meaningfully of.

Some historical milestones Zizek has considered suggestive of this (Lacanian) Real include the May '68 student protests in France, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ (and the founding of the Church), the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalin's collectivisations, the recent revolution in Egypt and Tunisia and the French Revolution. In the Malaysian context then, what could a political act of the Real look like?

Voting, the Political Process and the Non-Judgment of Outsiders (1Cor 5:12)

2011-02-18T09:25:00.006+08:00

Am having a good discussion with my (new) friend, Joshua, on the relevance of 1Corinthians 5:12 - Paul's injunction that he (and by extension, all Christians) have no business to judge the outsider - to voting. Assuming my particular reading of the verse and thus the need to refrain from judging those who are not Christians, how can the Church approach the subject of voting? Doesn't voting automatically involve judgment, and if so, should Christians stay away from elections entirely?

A few 'tentatively dogmatic' (smile) thoughts :

Judgmentalism of the kind Paul was talking about in 1Cor 5:12 refers to the attitude / actions of and like moral policing, "removing the speck of the other's eye" (a'la Matt 7:3), condemnation, punishing, cursing, telling off, lording over and confrontation i.e. virtually everything Paul was 'doing' to his Corinthian Christians. According to 1Cor 5:12, Paul would NOT do the same kinds of things to outsiders (i.e. condemn them, rebuke them, etc.) because he simply "has no business" doing so. It is, in fact, God's business to condemn/sentence the outsider (see 1Cor 5:13). With regards to voting, we can understand it as primarily the act of contributing to the collective decision of who (or which party) should govern one's community i.e. there is nothing intrinsically "judgmental" in the sense that I've just described. And whilst rare, it is sometimes the case that a voter finds it difficult to choose because the candidates are equally upright, promising, etc. (It is fine in principle for Christians to vote, because voting is not "about" judgment in the negative sense)
When Christians vote, they do not (or should not) vote 'as the Church'; this is to say that casting a vote for any one party is in principle no different from deciding which brand of detergent or sofa to purchase. As Christians, we make a decision based on what we believe is best for the country, for our constituency, and we do so without any pretensions that the party/politician we're in favour of is necessarily the 'Christian' option. (It is fine in princple for Christians to vote, because voting is not - and must not be made into - a covenant-oriented or Church-agenda/mission activity)
What about Christians who REFRAIN from voting because they have given up on the political process, believe that the major parties/candidates are equally hopeless, prefer to serve "on the margins" and independently of partisan avenues? Indeed, what about them? From a theological point of view, I'd argue that this is perfectly within their 'rights' (and even duty) as Christians, regardless of how frustrating this could be from a civil/public discourse perspective. (It is theologically mistaken and ecclesiologically irresponsible to insist/require/demand that Christians must vote and, even worse, that they must vote for a specific party FAILING WHICH they are somehow being disobedient to God).
From a contextual point of view, though, it's certainly worth encouraging Christians to participate in the socio-political conversation and process (and this may include voting), to not only to show the world (and outsiders) that the Church cares greatly for the community it's a part of but that She embodies a different kind of politics and power from the kinds the world is familiar with. The delicate balance is for Christians to do so WITHOUT falling into the temptation of acting/speaking/thinking like a political party (or NGO). The challenge for the Church is to be able to participate in a manner which subversively communicates the enemy-forgiving and world-transforming love of Christ, and to NOT blatantly disobey New Testament commandments and principles on agape behaviour (1Cor 13), non-judgmentalism (1Cor 5:12) and so on. (It is important for Christians to participate in political realities as long as Christians hold on to radical agape love and the commandments of Jesus with the hope that political players and institutions are eventually transformed into the kinds of individuals and entities pleasing to God - needless to say, this requires that we BEAR IN MIND what is or is not 'pleasing to God'...)

Recommended Further Reading:
1. God, The New Testament (smile) - read especially the Gospels on how Jesus treats 'outsiders', His Passion, etc.
2. Boyd, G. (2007), The Myth of the Chrisian Nation : How the Quest for Political Power is Destroying the Church, Zondervan.
3. Camp, L. (2008) Mere Discipleship : Radical Christianity in a Rebellious World, 2nd ed. Brazos Press
4. Clairborne, S. (2006) The Irresistible Revolution : Living as an Ordinary Radical, Zondervan.
5. Stassen, G. & Gushee, D. (2003) Kingdom Ethics : Following Jesus in Contemporary Context, IVP.
6. Yoder, J. (1994), The Politics of Jesus, Eerdmans.
7. Wink, W. (1999), Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millenium, Three Rivers Press

God's Love in Diagram

2011-02-16T15:28:00.001+08:00

God's primary characteristics are usually understood in a threefold manner: He is power, holiness and love. This means that Christians, when explaining (or defending) God, usually seek to protect and preserve these three elements. We mustn't theologise away God's power lest we end up with an impotent God who won't be able to attain His goals. We mustn't neglect holiness or we open the door towards lawlessness and a backbone-less deity. We mustn't forget love because then we risk ignoring what the Bible says about God i.e. that He is love.

Thus, sometimes Christians feel the need to hold all three in a creative tension, not unlike either a pie-chart which represents God in all His attributes...

...or a convergence of Venn diagrams at the middle of which God's character is the perfect 'mix' of the three :

We also sometimes speak of God having to 'balance' two opposing qualities, mainly it's Love versus another quality (usually Holiness):

The x/y charts illustrates the way we sometimes talk about the Cross i.e. "Yes, God loves us but He also has to deal with sin because He is a holy God," as if - to repeat - holiness was a quality which 'went against' God's love.

I submit, though, that if we take the claim that God is Love (feel free to scour 1John) seriously, the more precise diagram that which has divine Love as the dominant feature with divine power and holiness subordinated to it, as per below:

This requires that we re-think all of God's attributes, His glory, His 'concerns', His commandments and actions as flowing from His love and desire for relationality and not in competition with them.

This is further underscored by the doctrine of God as Trinity i.e. as three centers of consciousness which share a divine essence understood as ultimate relationality itself.

给于拿督西蒂也Bahyah 的公开信

2011-02-16T10:51:00.004+08:00

尊敬的拿督西蒂，

我对于目前在Youtube流传，有关你在2009年谈及情人节的演讲甚为关注。

身为一名基督徒，我尊重并从其他宗教的观点上有所学习。因此，我很感激你的提醒，一个负责任的社区，不应该盲从一些常规，而是审视其历史根源。我认同你说的需要教育年轻一代有关于情人节的历史和文化内涵，与其'包袱'。

我也尊重你在伊斯兰教的立场上对情人节的看法。我也不想干涉伊斯兰教理论上何谓是‘haram’或何谓不是，抑或伊斯兰教先知穆罕默德所教导的。

不过，我必须以温和却坚定的声音反对你的声明，就是堕落行为，酒吧夜生活，和情侣们私密或非法的性集会都是基督徒社会的传统，尤其是这句，“Maksiat, disco, couple bersunyi-sunyian ialah tradisi bagi masyarakat beragama Kristian”。

我对此事有所保留，那些是经过猛烈地世俗化及自由主义化，从西方国家延伸而来的一些活动。但是，将这些活动等同于基督教的传统信仰就等于屈枉你自己的劝告，即使对于任何事情的历史背景与全球因素的认知与影响。就此事件，在于基督教信仰。

耶稣基督的教导从来没有许诺堕落，任凭自己沉溺于浪费时间的活动，犯肉体私欲的罪，甚至是不负责任的提高玫瑰的售价！事实上，你所提出的故事至少说明一个有关情人节和基督教会的积极关联：爱与牺牲，那使人欢喜的力量。

即使在今天的教会，基督教领袖不断地告诫我们年轻的一代要小心，识别使用金钱和时间的方法与地点，要纯洁和谦虚，在言行与行为上有神的样式，慷慨施给，最重要的是有爱心，宽恕，及爱人如己，如同我们的主耶稣基督爱我们一样。

最后，请明白我是与你有着同样的目的，在于保护我们幼辈的自重与人格，免予非法和婚前性行为。同样的，我敬佩你对于未婚伴侣的提醒，就是，浪漫的爱 – 之所以振奋和美妙 – 来自于重大的责任感与成熟，虽然有时候难以呈现或感受到‘浪漫’，但是，实际上乃是真爱的源头。

愿我们继续地学习对方的传统和教义。

真诚的，
Alwyn Lau

Systems & Persons

2011-02-12T23:53:00.001+08:00

If you want to bring down an unjust system, the Christian way is to show love and kindness to the persons who are part of - and even play a strong role in perpetuating - that system.

The Church must not curse or condemn the individuals as a proxy for judging the system, or do anything which suggests a role other than loving people (like policing them, judging them, etc.)

The Church is free to attack the system itself i.e. we challenge the values, the practices, the policies, the culture, the prejudices, etc. as long as we show unconditional love to all within them. Needless to say, the responsibility of being a vehicle of God's love must take firm precedence over being an instrument of judgment. Furthermore, the greatest paradox could be that the ULTIMATE WAY of taking down an unjust system is precisely to demonstrate radical compassion, love and forgiveness to the very leaders and top players of the system.

Great is the temptation to a socio-political policeman as opposed to the global Body of Christ.

Surat Terbuka Kepada Dato' Siti Nor Bahyah

2011-02-12T14:48:00.002+08:00

Dato’ Siti,

Dengan perasaan bimbang, saya ingin berbincang tentang video anda tentang Hari Valentin yang sedang disiarkan di Youtube.

Sebagai seorang penganut Kristian, saya menghormati dan juga ingin memperhatikan isu-isu sosial dari sudut pandangan ahli agama lain. Saya menghargai amaran anda supaya semua praktis sosial yang mahu dipraktis perlu dipraktis dengan was-was dan sejarah praktis itu perlu diteliti dari segi sejarahnya. Saya berpihak dengan puan untuk mengajari pemuda pemuda yang senang dipengaruhi tentang sejarah, maksud, dan sudut negatif Hari Valentine.

Saya juga menghormati pandangan Dato’ tentang status Hari Valentine dalam Islam dan saya tidak ingin masuk campur dalam pandangan Dato’ tentang apa yang haram dan apa tidak haram dalam Islam atau apa yang telah diajar oleh Nabi Muhammad.

Saya cuma ingin membangkang sudut pandangan Dato’ bahawa hal-hal sosial negatif seperti ‘clubbing’ dan seks tidak muhrim adalah tradisi masyarakat Kristian; "Maksiat, disco, couple bersunyi-sunyian ialah tradisi bagi masyarakat beragama Kristian."

Saya bersetuju bahawa amalan amalan tersebut adalah tempias sosial daripada Negara Negara yang terlalu liberal (yang termasuk, tetapi tidak semestinya, negara negara ‘western’), tetapi untuk menyamakan aktiviti ini dengan tradisi penganut Kristian menunjukkan yang Dato’ sendiri telah mengabaikan nasihat puan sendiri untuk meniliti sejarah Kristian yang melibatkan Hari Valentin.

Ajaran Nabi Isa (Jesus Christ) bukanlah untuk mengamalkan aktiviti negative seperti yang telah disebutkan (dan menaikkan harga bunga melebihi 200%!), tetapi sebenarnya untuk memastikan yang dalam semua amalam, perasaan sayang dan cinta perlu ada.

Pada masa ini, ketua ketua gereja

cuba

memastikan bahawa pemuda Kristian perlu berwaspada dan berhati-hati dalam aktiviti yang mereka lakukan, untuk tidak membazirkan duit dan mengingati tuhan kami apabila mahu melakukan sesuatu.

Silalah faham yang saya menyokong perspektif Dato’ untuk menjaga pemuda pemudi negara ini daripada melakukan aktiviti negatif. Saya juga (salute?) peringatan Dato yang cinta romantis – walaupun menarik – datang dengan tanggungjawab dan kematangan yang tidak dilihat sebagai romantis, tetapi adalah sumber kepada cinta yang sebenar.

Semoga kami boleh belajar daripada ajaran satu sama lain.

Alwyn Lau

Blake McGrath

2011-02-12T13:04:00.000+08:00

Loved the way everyone started in-sync so suddenly...

Open Letter to Dato’ Siti Nor Bahyah

2011-02-11T08:41:00.006+08:00

Dear Dato' Siti,

I view with concern the video of your talk regarding Valentine’s Day delivered in 2009 but presently circulating on YouTube.

As a Christian, I respect and seek to learn from the perspectives of other religions. As such, I appreciate your reminder that as responsible communities we shouldn't follow a particular practice uncritically and that we ought to examine its historical roots. I side with you on the need to educate the younger generation on the historical and cultural connotations and 'baggage' associated with events like Valentine's Day.

I also respect your views about the status of Valentine's Day within Islam and I don't wish to intrude on your doctrinal deliberations on what is or is not 'haram' under Islam or what the Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w.) taught.

Nevertheless, I have to gently but firmly voice an objection to your statement that vices, clubbing and secret/illegitimate sexual rendezvous by couples are a tradition for Christian societies, specifically your statement that, "Maksiat, disco, couple bersunyi-sunyian ialah tradisi bagi masyarakat beragama Kristian."

I may agree cautiously that such practices are a cultural overflow from countries which have undergone heavy secularization and liberalization (which include, but needn't be limited to, Western ones) but to equate these with the traditions of the Christian faith is to do injustice to your own advice to be cognizant of the historical and global factors of any particular event, in this case, the Christian faith itself.

The teachings of Jesus Christ was never about committing vices, indulging in time-wasting practices, committing secret sins of the flesh and even less about the irresponsible raising of rose prices! In fact, the stories you brought up illustrate at least one positive connection between Valentine's Day and the true traditions of the Christian Church: the endearing power of love and sacrifice.

Even in today's churches, Christian leaders continually exhort our younger generation to be careful and discerning about how and where they spend their time and money, to be chaste and modest, to remain godly in speech and conduct, to be generous in giving and, most of all, to be kind, forgiving and to love others in a self-forsaking manner, the very same way that our Lord Jesus Christ has loved us.

Ultimately, please understand that I am fully with you in your intention to protect the dignity and personhood of our young people from illegitimate and pre-marital sexual activities. Likewise, I salute your reminder to all unmarried couples that romantic love – exhilarating and wonderful as it is – comes with great responsibility and maturity which may hardly appear or feel ‘romantic’ but is in fact the source of true love.

May we continue to learn from each other's traditions and teachings.

Sincerely,

Alwyn Lau

The Ambassadors (Holbein)

2011-02-08T11:08:00.000+08:00

Do you see it?

Scary Story

2011-02-08T09:43:00.000+08:00

"A man visits an old recluse who, it is claimed, can satisfy people's desires by means of a drug. Before commencing with the drug, the old man advises the man to go away and think about his life, his family, his priorities, etc.

"Back with his wife and child, the man gets caught up in day-to-day family life. He works hard, spends quality time with his family and community and generally lives fulfilling and productively. Although he keeps promising himself that he will one day visit the old man and have his inner desires realized, it is a whole year later before he finally decides to go.

"At this point, however, the man suddenly wakes up in the presence of the old man who asks him if he is satisfied. The man agrees that he is. He then leaves the old man and walks out to a world...devastated by nuclear war."

Real Heroes

2011-02-02T13:33:00.006+08:00

Management is all hard facts, hard head, hard work. Management is all soft skills, soft touch, soft talk. Management is all about people. Management is nothing about people (and in between this morass of contradictions comes reality, rite?)

I re-watched the high-flying (literally) HERO. You know, the one where Jet Li does levitation stunts and chops off whole shelves of books in less than the time taken to knock a bowl of water up and let it fall down. In the movie I found it remarkable that Broken Sword (the dude who writes in sand whilst arrows fly past and around him) and Flying Snow (the lady who can repel weapons with the sleeves of her dress) were known by their arch-enemy, the King of Qin, for their valor and dignity. Imagine such a reputation! Think about such character!

One's virtue is so assured and publicly recognised that one's enemies tailor their response towards one around the virtues! (In fact, in the movie the King of Qin partially uncovers the Nameless Assassin's lies by comparing the latter's story with the personal qualities of both Sword and Snow). Our two (named) heroes were apparently known for not letting their emotions become liabilities, for not being petty and narrow-minded.

I think of marriages and relationships which have taken self-destructive to petty instances breeding dispute. I think of colleagues who've had promotions and the 'favor of management' revoked due to 'personality clashes'. I think of writers who expend huge amounts of energy banging out a rebuttal/rebuke because God forbid that the other person's email should stand unanswered.

I think of me...and how often I'm scribbling in my journal about how often I am petty, calculative, trivial and easily angered/anxious out of proportion with whatever issue I'm facing. And my subsequent actions would complicate, aggravate and antagonize the situation further.

It's easy to invoke principle when pride is (usually) the unspoken factor. We ought to invent some serum for dealing with pride...wonder if it's possible...then we'd make real heroes of everyone after all (that's a joke).

Hegel in the Hero

2011-02-01T15:14:00.000+08:00

"This scroll of Broken Sword's isn't about sword technique but about swordsmanship's ultimate ideal. Swordsmanship's first achievement is the unity of man and sword. Once this unity is attained even a blade of grass can be a weapon.

The second achievement is when the sword exists in one's heart when absent from one's hand. One can strike an enemy at paces even with bare hands

Swordsmanship's ultimate achievement - the third and final one - is the absence of the sword in both hand and heart. The swordsman is at peace with the rest of the world. He vows not to kill and to bring peace to mankind."

Desire is Desire OF the Other

2011-02-01T12:02:00.001+08:00

1. I desire what the Other desires - I'll have what she's having

2. I desire that the Other desires me - what can I do to make her notice me?

3. I desire what the Other is - she's in my place?

4. I desire how the Other desires - I like her smile...:)

Binding of Isaac

2011-02-01T09:48:00.003+08:00

The aborted sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham (in Gen 22) has aided the development of various philosophical milestones, e.g. the Kierkegaardian leap of faith (suspending all moral/ethical coordinates in an act of faith unanchored in anything other than faith itself), the Derridean stretching towards the Impossible (making a decision in the thick of the irreconciliable aporias between duty to God and the Other), the Kantian constitution of the subject via the singular expression of an unknown universal, the Zizekian/Lacanian traversing of the fantasy and suspension of the Symbolic Order.

Abe risked the ultimate encounter with the Real, that traumatic horizon/limit/threshold of reason, theory, meaning and being itself. Then again, he was the first and thus everything from him onwards changed. All subsequent Abrahams can 'take refuge'(?) from this episode; all subsequent 'bindings of the son' is a binding after the binding of Isaac.

We NOW know that God never truly intended Abe to kill his son, something which will inevitably colour any forthcoming experience of the Real in our own lives (or that of our community, nation, etc.). Was the binding of Isaac was a transcendental gesture par excellence? For if we take Abe as our model, aren't we required to include the fact of the abortion of the sacrifice itself? What if there was no angel to stop Abe's knife? Wouldn't the history of philosophizing take a drastic shift?

(Note: I'm aware that God, at the cross of Jesus, failed to abort the sacrifice. In this sense, Gen 22 was Phase 1 of a hazardous journey to the Real which culminated in the death of the Son of God Himself.)

Jouissance, Scapegoat and Christ

2011-01-21T09:40:00.000+08:00

We need identity, thus we need difference. The sustenance of this identity/difference cleavage or cycle depends on a fantasy, the very target of our nationalistic/communical/identificational aspirations. Yet because it's a fantasy, ruptures will inevitably occur. To maintain the coherence of this fantasy, hatred and antagonism must be directed at the Other who is accused of stealing away our fullness, the exact thing we need to achieve jouissance.

The scapegoat. It takes various names: the Jews, the migrants, the slum-dwellers, the terrorists, the pagans, the enemy.

And what of Christ? Instead of surrounding the Other with suspicion leading to hatred and eventually murder, he takes on the role of the despised Other - the Other supposed to be killed - and asks His people to continually take on this position of lack, to absorb death and hatred with their love and suffering, to pray in the place of pain (N.T. Wright), to be constituted and inscribed by this Other supposed to be loved.

Ultraman's Mask

2011-01-20T16:14:00.000+08:00

There's an earlier post I made on ultraman, particularly his red button. Anyway, yesterday I put this on my Facebook status:

"Batman? Wears a mask to become Batman. Superman? TAKES OFF the mask to become Superman. Ultraman? Wears a mask by NOT wearing a mask. Us? Wear OTHER PEOPLE as our masks. Some national leaders? Not wearing anything..."

Someone then asked what I meant with the Ultraman quip. My attempt to answer below:

Ultraman doesn't wear a mask; his very face is mask-like. this gives the impression that he's wholly mechanical and the TV series have this theme i.e. Ultraman always shows up ONLY to fight the monsters and save the world, he has NO political agenda, NO ulterior motive, nada, zip. and yet, could this very 'purity' of action be a mask itself for the ideology which says, "I'm just here to combat the monsters in society, I'm doing my best, sure the surrounding buildings - and people inside - suffer and die as a result but i'm just doing my job, without me society is worst off."

In a word, politicians behave exactly like Ultraman when they frame their action in purely 'administrative / economic' trajectories, when in fact there're a multitude of strange agendas 'behind the non-mask'...

"Real" Movies

2011-01-20T16:10:00.001+08:00

Want to list some movies which I believe offer a glimpse of/into the Lacanian 'real'. These are works which inevitably leave one wondering what happened, leave a taste of not merely the unknowable but also the un-representable. We know 'something' cause the pivoting point in the plot or was behind or underneath the storyline somehow, but we cannot put our finger to it. There is the temptation to explain away these unusual factors via conventional explanations (e.g. love, obsession, jealousy, insanity, etc.) but it's pertinent that we resist this urge.

We must accept that something happened within the system of the world but was not reducible to its conditions, predicates, framework, etc. Here's my (far from exhaustive) list :

Hurt Locker (Jeremy Renner) - why did James want return to Iraq, back to the danger?
Stone (Robert de Niro, Edward Norton) - what caused the 'shift' in Stone's behaviour?
Chocolat (Juliette Binoche, Johnny Depp) - we all know it wasn't about 'chocolate' or the lady selling the chocolate, it was something else...what?
Lost in Translation (Bill Murray, Scarlett Johannsen) - what was 'happening' between the two main characters
Matrix: Reloaded (Keanu Reeves) - if Neo was simply the next in a long line of would-be 'messiahs' for the human race, and all his actions have been scripted in advance, what did he do which made it all different?
The Reader (Kate Winslet) - why did Hannah Schmitz not defend herself properly at the trial? Why did she alone take the rap for her other ex-colleagues?
The Dark Knight (Christian Bale, Heath Ledger) - a little over-commercialized but I'll allow it (smile), the key question is: what were the Joker's ultimate motivations? Surely not greed? A love of anarchy? But why would anyone love that?
No Country for Old Men (Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin) - what the heck happened in the end? And how does it relate to the whole story?
Inception (Leonardo di Caprio) - same, why did Nolad end the movie the way he did?
Kungfu Panda (Jack Black et al) - how did Panda defeat Tai Lung? (yes there's a "simple" answer but the very fact that we have to work it out may suggest something deeper?)
Eyes Wide Shut (Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman) - was there a 'point' at all?

What others?

The Crazies

2011-01-15T00:12:00.002+08:00

The normal guy - believes that 1+1 is 2 because all his Maths teachers and the rest of society tells him so

The psychotic - believes that 1+1 is 4

The neurotic - knows that 1+1 is 2 but doesn't like it.

The hysteric - demands to know why 1+1 is 2.

The fundamentalist - ready to kill and die for the truth of '1+1 is 2' (or 3 or 4) because nothing else in life is equated with 100% absolute knowledge (and he's aghast at how the rest of the world is either ignorant of or indifferent to this truth)

Diversity, Democracy and Sex with Llamas

2011-01-14T17:15:00.000+08:00

Zizek always has an axe to grind with all talk about multi-culturalism, diversity, tolerance and so on. This is because, according to him, such calls for so-called 'respect' for the Other ends up denying the Otherness of the Other.

Take some tribes in South America who require their young men, as part of the rite de passage, to have sexual intercourse with llamas (which won't exactly be shown on Nat'l Geographic but I recall seeing these and similar events in those 'Shocking Asia/World' videos many years back). Would those calling for diversity support such actions? Most likely not. Most likely, we will characterise such behaviour as pre-modern, uncivilized - which then renders our entire 'tolerance philosophy' void as how on earth do we arbitrate between 'acceptable' tradition (like making cute little bags and vases) and 'non-acceptable' tradition (like bestiality, ritual clitoridectomy and so on)? Would there not also be a tendency to ignore such behaviour and gradually socialise these tribes/people to becoming 'more like us' (whilst of course encouraging them to continue making stuff we can hang on our wall).

The point is that the rather superficial promotion of 'diverse values' usually end up pigeon-holing true diversity into the shape of the ideals/norms of 21st-cent urbanites ourselves. With all due respect to Jacqueline Ann-Surin, her recent article's call for 'flexible, open and cosmopolitan' Malaysian society reflects more her own 1Utama-influenced values than any radical/real kernel of otherness which, if actually approached, might cause more trauma than may be printable in the Nut Graph.

In a word, our concern for alterity and plurality is usually distanced from true Otherness and may in fact propound an "Other without an Other-ness" - we're cool with other cultures as long as they don't strike fear and repulsion into us. This is the reality of diversity divested of its traumatic substance (kinda like coffee without caffeine, as Zizek would say).

So what's Zizek's "solution"? First, it's to recognise that today's populist call for tolerance usually hides its opposite - intolerance for anything really radical. Thus perhaps it could be helpful to peer boldly in that which offends us and ask ourselves why it does. Second, it's to (continually) question how the pro-heterogeneity movement is itself an ideological effect and expression of global Capitalism i.e. when we seem to be saying exactly what Benetton, Nike and others like them are saying, could it be that it's because we've bought (pun intended) wholesale their idea of what it means to "embrace differences"?

Is Zizek saying then that we should also get all our young man to enjoy animal sex and our young women to re-tie their feet? Not at all. Or is he saying we should be IN-tolerant and promote racism? I doubt it. Like his master, Lacan, Zizek primarily wants to explode our fantasies (and to the extent that we promote a illusory kind of diversity, we're in one) and nurture the mutual acknowledgment of doubt, tension, antagonism, serious disagreement i.e. he wants to point to the void at the heart of society, the one we all wish to ignore because it threatens our grasp on reality. In this case, it's the 'void' of true, absolute and terrifying diversity.

To publicly recognise our illusions, to facilitate encouters with the lies we tell ourselves, to smash the performative falsities we live by - this is what Lacan would call democracy. So I guess the only question now is: Is it the kind of democracy we want?

Real Falling in Love

2011-01-12T09:42:00.000+08:00

You know when you're in close proximity with someone you find irresistibly attractive? What usually happens? You end up stuttering, stumbling with words, blushing (obviously), even struggling to control your feelings. You're disoriented, 'lost' and your personality experiences a kind of strange dis-location.

What's happening is that something within you is 'manifesting' itself, something which, whilst certainly a part of you, is more than what you are able to comprehend. Sexual attraction invokes an awkward form of intra-personal antagonism. Love (or infatuation - they usually feel the same, at least for a while, no?) calls out/in to something within us which fractures our world. It makes us realise our self-control, confidence, 'reasons' - that great thing we call our 'universe' - cannot contain some deep part of ourselves which, to reiterate, is more than us (if by 'us' we mean the person we thought we know to represent our self). Put another way, love forces us to discard the fantasies our self-image relies on.

Real love, then, is a kind of self-awareness, an awareness of what we're not aware of. Maybe, as per the by now over-used Jerry Maguire line, the beloved 'completes us' both in the sense that she/he fills an aching lack in our souls and that she/he reveals (without the need to actually speak) something about us we'd never know otherwise.

The continued experience of love (and, perhaps, even saving faith and political redemption?), therefore, involves an openness to being surprised by what the Other shows us, by the new worlds and feelings this relationship can bring to light, by a willingness to imagine new categories and a constant suspicion of the un-realness of the idealistic stories we tell ourselves must be true.

Political reality and the Real

2011-01-11T18:09:00.003+08:00

"We are all one happy family", a political/partisan slogan par excellence.

The standard skeptical response is that the truth is the opposite i.e. that such slogans hide an underlying tension or repress an actual situation of strife and disharmony.

The Lacanian response, though, is that we don't really know what the truth is. However, when ruptures to society occurs (e.g. the Teoh Beng Hock tragedy, the Perak constitutional crisis, May '69 itself, etc.) which enact a dislocation and contradiction of such harmony-promising statements, it exposes the fantasy of such high-minded ideas. As a results, the political domain struggles to create new discourses and construct new realities to fill in the very lack whose voidal 'presence' was betrayed by such agonistic events.

An event like Teoh Beng Hock's death could be seen as the 'intersection' of the un-signifiable Real with the system of signification, echoes of what cannot be said or thought, hence the trauma and dis-orientation experienced by both partisan sides and society as a whole (Teoh's "suicide note", whether genuine or a fake, simply adds to the bizarre nature of the event and reflects the rupturous ambience of this tragedy; if it was a fake, the questions raised accumulate to the point where one wonders if the fakers know what they're doing; and of course if it's genuine the rabbit-hole would go even deeper...). The point to emphasize is how this event remains enigmatically beyond the categorisation of Malaysian politics and, thus, is a reflection of the fault-lines within the Malaysian political fantasy of order and harmony.

Political strife, then, is the flipside of the illusion of political harmony; they are both manifestations of the failure to attain the Real that is beyond representation. Put simply, political life is founded on an alienation / split / gap between politics (the Really Existing institutions, parties, parliament, etc.) and the 'real' of political reality. The promises of harmony approximate the fantasy required to sustain a society's existence. When such harmony breaks down, new attempts at supporting (political) reality takes it place - a vicious cycle which can only be redeemed via a traversing of the political fantasy.

The traversing takes place when a nation and its leaders - in a moment of absolute self-recognition - recognise that there is 'nothing' behind their most cherish ideals (e.g. harmony, economic growth, diversity, etc.). Such a radical move would seek to change the very coordinates of the framework of reality in which they operate. It would, in effect, be the inauguration of a new world, one "beyond (all present) signification".

Bottling up learning

2011-01-11T05:27:00.000+08:00

When students read something good, critical and almost issue/topic-defining (e.g. like an important phrase or paragraph in a reference book), the temptation is always to seek to 'capture' this understanding. To bottle it, in the form of obsessive high-lighting, under-lining and so on.

As if the commitment to memory of said phrase equates to mastery of the topic.

What a fantasy. So unreal, yet something we need to 'deal with' our very lack of understanding, not only of the subject itself but of the mechanics of learning.