A Pedagogue's Progress |
Saturday, December 06, 2008
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!
Comments:
Yes, Arafat and Mandela were terrorists who got Nobel Peace Prizes, but the key is that they got them *AFTER* they renounced terrorism and worked towards peace.
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While I don't agree with the recent Peace Prize picks (wth do tree planting, preventing global warming and microcredit have to do with peace?!), giving Deng the Peace Prize is another step to plunging it into farce. My latest retort to those who say we must be grateful to the PAP for lifting Singapore out of poverty is that we should be grateful to China for keeping global inflation low with their cheap goods. Same logic applies to Deng Xiaoping. In any case, Mahbubani is right in one thing: how "politicised the processes of selecting stars have become" and how "our minds remain colonised". He might want to look halfway across the world, though. The best bit is that Singaporeans will read it and agree. (By responses to the piece I assume you mean comments on the ST forum to the former student's letter?) |
WHO AM I? Your author graduated from Dartmouth College in 2004 having majored in History and English. From June 2007, he will be teaching contemporary Southeast Asian history at another of his former schools. SOME WEBSITES I READ The Dartmouth Observer Singapore Websites The Intelligent Singaporean Mr Wang Says So Mr Brown Singabloodypore Singapore Angle Singapore Window A Xenoboy in Sg Gayle Goh Aaron Ng Molly Meek Elia Diodati Stressed Teacher Tym Blogs Too! Yawning Bread Talking Cock Non-Singapore Websites Andrew Sullivan The Belgravia Dispatch The American Scene Oxblog The Corner Bradford Plumer Matthew Yglesias The Washington Monthly National Review Online The Weekly Standard The Plank Open University Marty Peretz Michael Totten Martin Kramer Daniel Drezner Joe's Dartblog Instapundit Christopher Hitchens Ross Douthat IvyGate Les Belles Lettres Arts & Letters Daily The Atlantic Monthly History News Network Guardian Unlimited Books London Review of Books The New Criterion Voice of the Shuttle New York Review of Books ARCHIVES September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007 July 2007 August 2007 September 2007 October 2007 November 2007 December 2007 January 2008 February 2008 March 2008 April 2008 May 2008 June 2008 July 2008 August 2008 September 2008 October 2008 November 2008 December 2008 January 2009 February 2009 March 2009 April 2009 May 2009 June 2009 July 2009 November 2009 July 2010 October 2010 |