The Singaporean public "intellectual"

One of my former students, Tan Ee Kuan, is featured in today's ST Forum taking down Kishore Mahbubani by a few notches. You can read Mahbubani's original article here and Ee Kuan's response (with readers' comments) here.

Ee Kuan's criticism of Mahbubani's attack on Paul Krugman is right on the money. Mahbubani doesn't even make an attempt to engage with Krugman's contributions to economic thought, and sounds very much like your average American right-wing pundit (I love that use of "Simple!") when he claims that liberal media bias was chiefly responsible for the award. I don't think the pro-government establishment has ever forgiven Krugman for writing in "The Myth of the Asian Miracle" that "Singapore grew through a mobilization of resources that would have made Stalin proud."

Even sillier is Mahbubani's claim that Deng Xiaoping should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and recognised as the greatest man of the 20th century, based solely on the utilitarian calculus that he lifted 400 million people out of poverty. The not-so-small matters of Tiananmen and China's persistent human rights violations have been conveniently forgotten here. (Of course, the Swedish did hand out a Nobel to Yasser Arafat, so I guess anything is possible.)

"Intellectual colonialism" is a flawed argument (again, I can't help but notice that Mahbubani calls it the "simple and brutal answer" to the issue that he presents), especially when employed by employees of the state-government-party. Singapore's leaders are ever so good at validating themselves in relation to "external endorsements" selectively, like when proclaiming the achievements of Changi Airport or double-digit GDP growth. So Mahbubani's claim that "Singaporeans should stop waiting for external validations of our achievements" flies in the face of everything he says subsequently about "world-class universities, museums, performing arts centres and think-tanks." Of course, when it comes to Western standards that cast Singapore in an unfavourable light, like press freedom rankings, well then, our minds have been colonialised and all that and the standards clearly reflect Western Liberal Media Bias.

The idea of an expensive propagandistic campaign to "rebrand" Singapore as the city which launched the "Asian Renaissance," besides being fiscally imprudent, is again full of intellectual holes. Just look at his justification for it - a slender piece of anecdotal evidence, drawn from a completely different historical period, and featuring completely different "products" (razors vs. this woolly notion of national greatness). Gillette succeeded partly because it was an American company with the resources during the war to launch an advertising campaign, and the financial and cultural clout after America's victory to win over the British masses. Moreover, Gillette's advertising campaign was a private one and did not affect government spending; Mahbubani's proposal would do so, and its effects, unlike the sale of razor blades, be unquantifiable.

Mahbubani's piece features poor arguments, selective use of evidence, self-congratulation, and intellectual bullying. And he's supposedly our foremost public intellectual (just Google his name).

Update:

Some of the responses to his piece are just ridiculous!
Posted by kungfuzi at 2:39 pm |