Ideology as personality cults, not texts
Credit to Author: ANTONIO CONTRERAS| Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2019 16:10:14 +0000
(This is the first part of a paper I will be reading at the annual conference of the Philippine Political Science Association at Clark, Pampanga on April 25.)
WHENEVER we talk about ideology, ordinary people conjure dark images of revolutions and of enemies conspiring to overthrow the state. We imagine ideology as embodied in the writings of people perceived as malcontents like Karl Marx, whose ideas have inspired what for some are also equally notorious characters to wage their rebellions.
Ideology is defined as the belief system that inspires and justifies a political action. While the type of action has always been cast in the context of resistance, where the intent is to dismantle prevailing systems of power, it is equally valid to argue that maintaining and preserving that system is also a kind of political action. The latter is what ensures that the status quo prevails, and that any challenge to it is silenced and delegitimized. This is what is referred to in political science jargon as the dominant ideology, and this is seen in the rituals, institutions and practices that provide justification and rationality to the prevailing political system. This is usually embodied in grand narratives that are cemented not only through the laws and political institutions, but are reinforced by cultural practices that operate through what are referred to as ideological institutions. These ideological institutions are manifested not in the coercive power of the state and the law, but through the ordinariness of cultural institutions such as family and community, religion, mass and social media and popular culture.
It is the nature of a colonized country like the Philippines to be shaped by alien grand narratives that were brought to us by our colonizers. The Catholic religion, the system of democratic governance and the doctrine of a Westphalian state anchored on sovereign territories with single political identities are all inorganically positioned because externally imposed, all borne by colonial imperatives that were forced into a nascent pre-colonial political landscape of separate, distinct and independent communities called banwa or puod. The tragedy that became the burden that continues to haunt us is the fact that prior to the coming of the colonizers, we never had a unified political system that could have served as a template for what we now call the Republic of the Philippines. In fact, there was no single, unified nation. Our state is a colonial construction, even as our nation is constantly in the process of becoming, and has yet to be completed.
The absence of a political grand narrative in the form of a pre-colonial nation state found expression in the absence of grand epics and myths, further manifested in a collective identity which is an amalgamation of so many things borrowed and emulated from the West. Even our name, the Philippines, is not organic but was given by the colonizer and we had no choice but to just imagine it as if it is organically rooted. What we call Filipino, from cuisine to dances, does not bear the unifying imprint of a nation that was already formed prior to its being invaded by the West.
It is here then that we do not have a single text that explains us. Indonesia may have been colonized by the Dutch, and like us is an amalgamation of islands and diverse ethnicities and cultures, but through the post-colonial leadership of Sukarno it was able to craft a nation-building ideology called Pancasila. In the Philippines, we do not have an equivalent. The articulations by post-colonial political leaders were basically appropriations from Western texts. Andres Bonifacio’s writings for the Katipunan and Jose Rizal’s novels were not elevated into the level of unifying ideologies the same way that Pancasila was edified.
If there was any attempt to craft a political ideology that tried to provide justification to the existence of the Filipino nation, it was that conjured by Ferdinand Marcos. But his attempt to craft an ideology was diminished by what he has become — a dishonored, shamed and demonized political figure.
In lieu of grand ideological texts that emanated from the organic roots of a post-colonial project to build the Filipino nation, what we have is a plethora of colonial constructs, from our language to our religion and our system of government. The debate on the Filipino language, which until today continues to fester, is apropos to the fate of a nation that is colonially constructed and is still in the process of defining itself.
Bereft of grand ideological texts, the logic for nation-building and state formation drew its power from the organic structures that bind people into collectives. Communities are formed not by law, but by personal affinities embodied in extended forms of familial associations. We draw our social order not from the legal constructs but from the cultural institutions and processes. For example, when we drive, we establish order not by following the formal rules of traffic, but by relying on pakikipagkapwa and pakikiramdaman with other drivers. During times of calamities, we rely on our resilient communities and our neighbors for survival.
In the absence of state-sanctioned textual templates to imagine the Filipino nation, we turned towards persons and individuals as the drivers from where we drew the logic of our collective political identities. With a culture that is already personalistic and communitarian, it was but natural for us to turn to heroes and leaders. Instead of texts like Pancasila, personality cults emerged as the ground from where we drew our political ideology. We located the logic of our political community not in the writings of dead people, but in the lives of people who are alive.
It is in this context that we witness the emergence of Rodrigo Duterte as an ideological construct.
Next: Rodrigo Duterte as counter-ideology to elite liberal politics
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