It's easy to get the sense these days that you've stumbled into a party where the punch is spiked with some powerful drug that dramatically alters identity. The faces are familiar, but the words coming out of them aren't. Something has happened to a lot of people you used to think you knew. They've changed into something like their own opposite.
There's Bill Gates, who these days is spending less time earning money than giving it away--and pulling other billionaires into the deep end of global philanthropy with him. There's historian Francis Fukuyama, leading a whole gang of disaffected fellow travelers away from neoconservatism. And in the back, humming Give Peace a Chance, the new Nicaraguan President, Daniel Ortega, former head of the Marxist Sandinistas. The comandante has come around on open economies and free trade and is courting foreign investment as the way out for his nation's poor.
From modest recants--Oprah Winfrey on James Frey, NBA commissioner David Stern on leather balls, Rupert Murdoch on global warming--to full-on ideological 180s, reappraisal is in the air. The view long held by social psychologists that people very rarely change their beliefs seems itself in need of revision.
To flip-flop is human. Oh, sure, it can still sometimes be a political liability, evidence of a flaky disposition or rank opportunism. But there are circumstances in which not to reverse course seems almost pathological. He's a model of consistency, Stephen Colbert said last year of George W. Bush: "He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday--no matter what happened on Tuesday."
It's still too early, post 9/11, to get an accurate bead on how much that day actually affected people's lives in a concrete way. But what you can say with confidence is that those slicing jets pierced the bubble of privileged optimism that many Americans had been enjoying. It changed the perception that there was an inside detached from an outside you could voluntarily avoid.
Over the past three years, while researching a book on what I call secular epiphanies, I found people who had pulled a big U-turn in their lives. There was a slaughterhouse worker who became an animal-rights activist, a venture capitalist who quit to found a high-minded nonprofit, a death-penalty advocate who became a leading death-penalty opponent. Often the insight came in a forehead-smiting moment in the middle of the night: I've got it all wrong.
It looked at first like a random bunch of data points, a sprinkling of outliers beyond the curve of normal human experience. But when you stepped back, a pattern emerged. What these personal turns had in common was the apprehension that, well, we're all connected. Everything leans on something, is propped up by something--is both dependent and depended on.
Sure, there were folks who didn't don the love beads but buried them: ex-Greenpeacers who morphed into industry apparatchiks, utopians who left their kooky social experiments for banker's hours. But these aren't typically the kinds of journeys one makes suddenly--and in that sense they didn't count as epiphanies. There are lives that one slowly acquires, like a carapace. And sometimes these are the same lives that, in one deeply private moment of dead reckoning, get shed.
"The difference between you and me," a visiting Chinese student told University of Michigan psychologist Richard Nisbett not long ago, "is that I think the world is a circle, and you think it's a line." The remark caught the professor off guard with its size. It prompted him to write a book, The Geography of Thought, about the differences--culturally encoded over a few hundred generations--between the Western and the Asian mind.
To Western thinking, the world is linear; you can chop it up and analyze it, and we can all work on our little part of the project independently until it's solved. The classically Eastern mind, according to Nisbett, sees things differently: the world isn't a length of rope but a vast, closed chain, incomprehensibly complex and ever changing. When you look at life from this second perspective, some unlikely connections reveal themselves. You're forced to retreat from the den of libertarianism and sniff the wind, to wake up when someone in Khartoum or Mogadishu twitches in his sleep.
I realized this was what almost all the U-turns had in common: people had swung around to face East. They had stopped thinking in a line and started thinking in a circle. Morality was looking less like a set of rules and more like a story, one in which they were part of an ensemble cast, no longer the star.
Bruce Grierson is the author of U-Turn: What If You Woke Up One Morning and Realized You Were Living the Wrong Life?
Ketuanan Melayu: A Risky Experiment
by Mariam Mokhtar@www.malaysiakini.com
I was born Malay and was hardly conscious of my race, either at school or at home. Race hardly cropped up in conversation except when we had form-filling to do – like applying for an identity card. Religion was something sacred and the only time we’d be aware of our racial and religious differences was deciding what to wear for a wedding or whose open house to visit, during the various festivities.
Thus, the recent clamour for “Ketuanan Melayu” is destructive and damaging – not just for Malaysia but more so for the Malays, the very people that the “ketuanan Melayu” concept is supposed to protect. It is wrong because “ketuanan Melayu” is a dangerous experiment in social engineering.
Our neighbours were both Chinese and Indian. As children, we studied and played with each other, even
hitched lifts to school when necessary, whilst the adults shared garden produce, swopped certain special dishes for the various ‘open houses’ and practiced their own version of ‘neighbourhood watch’.
Today, the Wongs are living out their twilight years away from their children, who have now settled overseas. Their children were willing to pay for them to live in a gated community, but they refused. In gated communities, they said, people hardly know one another and lives are conducted behind high walls and electric fences. The Wongs are unwilling to trade their relative freedom for living in secure isolation.
Mrs Pillai is now a widow, living on her own. Both her son and daughter have emigrated and she is loathe to leave Malaysia. She tells me, her children saw no opportunities in Malaysia. Her daughter is particularly bitter at having to leave her mother and especially angry that she was denied a place at a local college, and denied help by a local political organisation who refused to recommend her for a study loan.
Several thousand non-Malays have left, but many Malays have also gone. Families are torn apart or wrecked by a false belief in so-called superiority. Our country has not benefited from the wasted talent.
Where’s the sense of equality and justice? When will Malays understand that the call for “Ketuanan Melayu” creates antagonism at best, and violence at worst? There is open hatred toward non-Malays. The Malays have become arrogant; and non-Malays have been forced to be compliant. But for how long? Perhaps, it is the Malay who has more need of change. Where is their sense of equality and justice?
If “Ketuanan Melayu” is supposed to benefit the Malays, why are the majority of Malays poor? If politicians had genuinely wanted to help Malays, the majority of Malays would now be wealthy, after 53 years of UMNO rule. But this is not the case. The majority of Malays are poor.
Former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad warned that the Malays will “lose their power” if Pakatan Rakyat were to come to power. He labeled Pakatan leaders as a bunch of self-serving and racist politicians.
What “power” is he referring to? Is he referring to UMNO’s potential loss? Will the loss mean no more abuse of power and enrichment of family, friends and cronies? Is he lamenting the lack of control over the media, police, judiciary and the parliamentary rights and privileges committee? Did he also mean the inability to detain those who dare speak out against injustices?
Malay extremists claim that Pakatan’s alternative call for “ketuanan rakyat” goes against the Malay rulers. However, no one objected when Mahathir clipped the wings of the royals.
Mahathir (left) and Najib Abdul Razak have sought to suggest that UMNO/BN is a caring party, but despite 1Malaysia, Malaysians probably feel less united today.
Perhaps, the Malay extremist politicians promoting “Ketuanan Melayu” can rightly be called “Children of Mahathir”.
Former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad said today he believed that the Malays in the country can succeed without the government’s help one day.
He said now many Malays had succeeded because of the New Economic Policy (NEP) and this had led to claims that without the “crutches” they would not be able to cut it on their own.
“As a result of the NEP, today, many Malays have become successful, including in businesses.
“The NEP is a success. Some people say successful because of the NEP, but the government is gradually reducing aid to the Malays and will continue to reduce further.
“So, soon we will see Malays becoming successful without the aid of ‘crutches’,” he said at the opening of The Danna Hotel here tonight.
The hotel was opened by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak.
Dr Mahathir added that before it was never thought of that a Malay could own a hotel chain, but today a few bumiputera entrepreneurs had done it. — Bernama
Why will the extremists not deal with the social ills that beset the Malay youth – drug abuse, abandoned babies, under-achievement, and Mat Rempit? They have been fed propaganda and expect instant rewards but soon become disillusioned. They then fall further into the trap that ‘non-Malays are robbing them of their rights’. Is it any wonder they are bitter and have little aspiration?
The same group of extremists expects other faiths to respect Islam – but they fail to reciprocate this. It is alleged that in some mosques, the sermons preach unbridled hatred.
Last Saturday, a 14-year-old girl and a 23-year-old teacher were married at a mosque in Kuala Lumpur, after a religious syariah court approved the union. The teenager said, “It has been hard trying to juggle two rôles – as a student and a wife – but I am taking it in my stride.”
Can no one else see that this is wrong? How does the state protect children from paedophilia? Has the child’s health and maturity been considered? What about her mental and maternal health, when she undergoes repeated childbearing at a young age? What about her education?
Muslim men can remarry easily. So who will support her should her marriage fail? Or if her husband leaves her for a younger woman or fails to support her when he remarries? Our syariah law and welfare system has many loopholes and obstacles. Some women claim it works against them.
Look at how Malay men perceive of their women. Despite equality in Islam, women are given short shrift. Nurul Izzah Anwar’s (right) request for a debate with Ibrahim Ali was rejected. He called her ‘small fry’ and told her to contact the head of Wiranita, the Perkasa women’s organisation, instead. This demeaning attitude towards women is replicated in many Malay households.
When will the champions of “Ketuanan Melayu” talk about success, progress, innovation, creativity, harmony, sharing and excellence instead of alluding to the “only my rights matter” mentality?
We Malays must face up to our insecurities so we can live at peace with ourselves. The non-Malay is a convenient scapegoat for our failures. We need to admit we have problems and face up to them.
Our religious leaders must make a clear stand against polygamy, paedophilia, child-snatching and intolerance of other faiths. Our Malay leaders must learn to respect other non-Malay Malaysians and treat them as equals. Only then do we have the right to ask others to respect us. We must stop the hypocrisy and madness that is called “Ketuanan Melayu”.
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