Lee Kuan Yew the decent man is dead.
But his integrity is alive. It inspires.
His ideals; values; passion for building a community of intelligent,
morally responsible, self-reliant individuals, all alive.
In death, he still speaks for the silent human beings who go
about
quietly building goodness in themselves.
These contribute their share of diverse gifts
for the common
good of the community they are in.
They understand that Lee Kuan Yew continues
to speak for all decent human beings.
Key features of what he tried to contribute to Singaporeans
are appreciated by kindred spirits all over the world.
These features are developed
in an excerpted portion of an interview
conducted by Farid Zakaria in March/April 1994.
It was part of a conversation with the late Lee Kuan Yew on CULTURE IS
DESTINY:
Lee Kuan Yew is unlike any politician I
have met. There were no smiles, no jokes, no bonhomie. He looked straight at me. He has an inexpressive face but an intense gaze -- shook hands and motioned
toward one of the room's pale blue leather sofas (I had already been told by
his press secretary on which one to sit). After 30 awkward seconds, I realized
that there would be no small talk. I pressed the record button on my machine.
FZ: What, in your
view, is wrong with the American system?
LKY: It is not my
business to tell people what's wrong with their system. It is my business to
tell people not to foist their system indiscriminately on societies in which it
will not work.
FZ: But you do not
view the United States as a model for other countries?
LKY: As an East Asian looking
at America, I find attractive and unattractive features. I like, for example,
the free, easy and open relations between people regardless of social status,
ethnicity or religion. And the things that I have always admired about America:
a certain openness in argument about what is good or bad for society; the
accountability of public officials; none of the secrecy and terror that's part
and parcel of communist government. But as a total system, I find parts of it
totally unacceptable: guns, drugs, violent crime, vagrancy, unbecoming behaviour
in public -- in sum the breakdown of civil society. The expansion of the right
of the individual to behave or misbehave as he pleases has come at the expense
of orderly society. The idea of the inviolability of the individual has been
turned into dogma.
FZ: Would it be
fair to say that you admired America more 25 years ago? What, in your view,
went wrong?
LKY: Yes, things
have changed. I would hazard a guess that it has a lot to do with the erosion
of the moral underpinnings of a society and the diminution of personal
responsibility. The liberal, intellectual tradition that developed after World
War II claimed that human beings had arrived at this perfect state where
everybody would be better off if they were allowed to do their own thing and
flourish. It has not worked out, and I doubt if it will. Certain basics about
human nature do not change. Man needs a certain moral sense of right and wrong.
There is such a thing called evil, and it is not the result of being a victim
of society. You are just an evil man, prone to do evil things, and you have to
be stopped from doing them. Westerners have abandoned an ethical basis for
society, believing that all problems are solvable by a good government, which
we in the East never believed possible.
FZ: Is such a
fundamental shift in culture irreversible?
LKY: No, it is a
swing of the pendulum. I think it will swing back. I don't know how long it
will take, but there's already a backlash in America against failed social
policies that have resulted in people urinating in public, in aggressive
begging in the streets, in social breakdown.
But there is grave
disquiet when we break away from tested norms, and the tested norm is the
family unit. It is the building brick of society.
There is a little
Chinese aphorism which encapsulates this idea: Xiushen qijia zhiguo
pingtianxia. Xiushen means look after yourself, cultivate yourself, do
everything to make yourself useful; Qijia, look after the family; Zhiguo, look
after your country; Pingtianxia, all is peaceful under heaven. We have a whole
people immersed in these beliefs. My granddaughter has the name Xiu-qi. My son
picked out the first two words, instructing his daughter to cultivate herself
and look after her family. It is the basic concept of our civilization.
Governments will come, governments will go, but this endures. We start with
self-reliance.
FZ: What would you
do instead to address America's problems?
LKY: You have to
educate rigorously and train a whole generation of skilled, intelligent,
knowledgeable people who can be productive. I would start off with basics,
working on the individual, looking at him within the context of his family, his
friends, his society. But the Westerner says I'll fix things at the top. One
magic formula, one grand plan. I will wave a wand and everything will work out.
It's an interesting theory but not a proven method.
BACK TO BASICS
FZ: You are very
skeptical of government's ability to solve deeper social issues.
LKY: No. We have
focused on basics in Singapore. We used the family to push economic growth,
factoring the ambitions of a person and his family into our planning. We have
tried, for example, to improve the lot of children through education. The
government can create a setting in which people can live happily and succeed
and express themselves, but finally it is what people do with their lives that
determines economic success or failure. Again, we were fortunate we had this
cultural backdrop, the belief in thrift, hard work, filial piety and loyalty in
the extended family, and, most of all, the respect for scholarship and
learning.
There is, of
course, another reason for our success. We have been able to create economic
growth because we facilitated certain changes while we moved from an
agricultural society to an industrial society. We had the advantage of knowing
what the end result should be by looking at the West and later Japan. We knew
where we were, and we knew where we had to go. We said to ourselves,
"Let's hasten, let's see if we can get there faster." But soon we
will face a different situation. In the near future, all of us will get to the
stage of Japan. Where do we go next? How do we hasten getting there when we
don't know where we're going? That will be a new situation.
THE CULTURE OF
SUCCESS
FZ: A key
ingredient of national economic success in the past has been a culture of
innovation and experimentation. During their rise to great wealth and power the
centers of growth -- Venice, Holland, Britain, the United States -- all had an
atmosphere of intellectual freedom in which new ideas, technologies, methods
and products could emerge.
LKY: Intellectually
that sounds like a reasonable conclusion, but I'm not sure things will work out
this way. The Japanese, for instance, have not been all that disadvantaged in
creating new products. I think that if governments are aware of your thesis and
of the need to test out new areas, to break out of existing formats, they can
counter the trend. East Asians, who all share a tradition of strict discipline,
respect for the teacher, no talking back to the teacher and rote learning, must
make sure that there is this random intellectual search for new technologies
and products. In any case, in a world where electronic communications are
instantaneous, I do not see anyone lagging behind. Anything new that happens
spreads quickly, whether it's superconductivity or some new life-style.
FZ: But won't these
economic and technological changes produce changes in the mind-sets of people?
LKY: It is not just
mind-sets that would have to change but value systems. Let me give anecdotal
evidence of this. Many Chinese families in Malaysia migrated in periods of
stress, when there were race riots in Malaysia in the 1960s, and they settled
in Australia and Canada. They did this for the sake of their children so that
they would get a better education in the English language because then Malaysia
was switching to Malay as its primary language. The children grew up, reached
their late teens and left home. And suddenly the parents discovered the
emptiness of the whole exercise. They had given their children a modern
education in the English language and in the process lost their children
altogether. That was a very sobering experience. Something less dramatic is
happening in Singapore now because we are not bringing up our children in the
same circumstances in which we grew up.
VIVE LA DIFFERENCE
FZ: Is there some
contradiction here between your role as a politician and your new role as an
intellectual, speaking out on all matters? As a politician you want America as
a strong balancer in the region, a country that is feared and respected all
over the world. As an intellectual, however, you choose to speak out forcefully
against the American model in a way that has to undermine America's credibility
abroad.
LKY: That's
preposterous. The last thing I would want to do is to undermine her credibility.
America has been unusual in the history of the world, being the sole possessor
of power -- the nuclear weapon -- and the one and only government in the world
unaffected by war damage whilst the others were in ruins. Any old and
established nation would have ensured its supremacy for as long as it could.
But America set out to put her defeated enemies on their feet, to ward off an
evil force, the Soviet Union, brought about technological change by
transferring technology generously and freely to Europeans and to Japanese, and
enabled them to become her challengers within 30 years. By 1975 they were at
her heels. That's unprecedented in history. There was a certain greatness of
spirit born out of the fear of communism plus American idealism that brought
that about. But that does not mean that we all admire everything about America.
Let me be frank; if
we did not have the good points of the West to guide us, we wouldn't have got
out of our backwardness. We would have been a backward economy with a backward
society. But we do not want all of the West.
