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Chapter 2

SOCIAL CONDUCT AND THE NEW SOCIETY

Sa ikauunlad ng bayan, disiplina ang kailangan (For national development, what we need is discipline). The founding motto of the New Society, which citizens were to learn by rote upon the declaration of martial law, encapsulated the Marcos regime’s concerted efforts to place social conduct within the purview of state policy.¹ In his Notes on the New Society of the Philippines, Marcos explains the martial-law state’s abiding interest in national discipline. Like its counterparts in the decolonizing world, the Philippines, Marcos averred, was a “transitional society” preoccupied with the intertwined problems of fostering a national identity and achieving rapid social and economic development. Contradictory values and institutions undermined these goals, thus underscoring the importance of regimenting social conduct.²

Marcos, whose countersubversive performance blurred the boundaries between U.S. foreign policy and his own personal political agendas, yet again subjected the Philippines to the discourse of U.S. political demonology. This time, however, he assumed the voice of U.S. social theorists whose Washington-funded research “analyzed a foreign world in ways that stressed their own nation’s historical virtue, continuing superiority, and right of benevolent intervention.”³ Modernization, the grand narrative of the Cold War, posited the United States as the model society that Third World nations should seek to emulate. It was believed that the replication of the “consensual” framework of the United States—its capitalist economy, “liberal” media and modern values—could drive “traditional” societies through the difficult transitional process.

As a former U.S. colony, the Philippines was in fact one of the earliest laboratories of modernization. It was touted as the “showcase of democracy” in Asia. It had five television stations, 190 movie theaters, and twenty-six daily newspapers in Manila alone—placing it well ahead of most Southeast Asian countries in terms of mass media outlets. Unlike its Asian neighbors, which had responded to threats of political disunity and social chaos in the postindependence period by nationalizing or socializing their mass media, the Philippines had earned the reputation for having the “freest press in Asia.”⁴ But rather than bolster a genuinely participatory democracy, an oligarchy-controlled media fed en elite-dominated political culture characterized by political violence and electoral fraud. And while capitalism was firmly in place, it was overrun by the rent-seeking practices of the oligarchy. In every respect, the Philippines presented a distorted portrait of modernization.

With Marcos’s declaration of martial law, the Philippines seemed poised to follow in the footsteps of late-industrializing countries where the modernization thesis was being radically rewritten. In these states, authoritarianism was increasingly recognized not as an aberration but as a prerequisite to modernization and development.⁵ U.S. support for dictatorial regimes dramatically increased at this time, with a concomitant slackening of concern about the defense of democracy.⁶ Constituting a new domino effect, the turn toward authoritarian rule may be traced back to a fundamental weakness in modernization theory: rather than bolster democracy, the extension of electoral politics to the decolonizing world produced volatile political situations conducive to military regimes, ethnic conflict, or civil war.⁷

Harvard University political scientist Samuel P. Huntington was among the earliest modernization theorists to point this out. In his influential treatise Political Order in Changing Societies, Huntington took the theory to task for paying insufficient attention to the problem of building political order in the so-called transitional states. Commenting on the social upheavals plaguing these states, Huntington argued that such manifestations of political instability were “the product of rapid social change and rapid mobilization of new groups into politics coupled with the slow development of political institutions.”⁸ Later known as the Huntington thesis, this refinement of modernization theory argued that in the Third World the building of political order must take precedence over the exercise of procedural democracy.

The Huntington thesis corroborated U.S. support for martial law in the Philippines, underscoring the need for national discipline. As Bonner points out,

Americans demanded law and order, at home and abroad. They also expect the people of other countries to govern themselves as Americans do; when they don’t measure up, the reaction is to assume that they are not capable of the responsibility that democracy requires and therefore not worthy of the freedom that it allows. . . . That is precisely what many American leaders and journalists thought. The Philippines just wasn’t ready for democracy.⁹

The notion that the Philippines “just wasn’t ready for democracy”—a striking instance of colonial infantilization—is indicative of the continuity between modernization and colonial thinking. In his political treatises concerning martial law, Marcos claimed that the Philippine experiment in modernization had failed because of the profound incompatibility between liberal democracy and the cultural values generated by the nation’s colonial past. Marcos’s uptake of the Huntington thesis was in fact based on an internalization of an imputed lack—a cultural and moral deficiency that rendered the nation unfit to govern itself as a democracy.

As Marcos would have it, colonial rule created a “Filipino personality” marked by “indolence, docility, passivity, a pervading consciousness of racial inferiority, shyness and resistance to being enlightened.”¹⁰ Having bred “habits of subservience,” colonial rule was supplanted by a “western democratic system,” which was adopted, Marcos argued, “unexamined” by the postindependence state. The cultural inertias of colonial rule, Marcos claimed, undermined the nation’s uptake of democracy, such that, rather than revolutionize Philippine society, it had “bred corruption, subversion, and sectarianism.”¹¹

To legitimize authoritarian rule, and to co-opt the rhetorical suasion of the Huntington thesis, Marcos provocatively claimed that the Cold War created a false choice between democracy and socialism. Third World nations, he argued, should opt for a third alternative:

The exigencies, the conditions, and the crises in the Third World are peculiar to the Third World and must, consequently, be met with tactics suitable to the temperament and character of its peoples. We can no longer inordinately and gratuitously adopt western political models. We have seen, at an enormous cost, their failure to advance our national goals. . . . [Third World] leadership must possess an authority that is both tough and flexible, realistic and visionary.¹²

For Marcos, the “third alternative” was strong leadership (i.e., authoritarianism) tempered by nationalism. Loosely referencing Peronism and Juan Perón’s “third way,” Marcos’s statement also appropriated the anticolonialist perspective of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon had argued that the Cold War battle between capitalism and socialism obscured the true struggle faced by Third World nations: decolonization. Always a violent phenomenon, decolonization, Fanon argued, necessitated “the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men.” National liberation entailed the material eradication of colonialism; but more fundamentally, it required the psychoaffective transformation of the colonized subject. It is in light of this overriding imperative that Fanon exhorted Third World nations to reject the colonizers’ definitions of their values and identities and to seek instead to “find their own particular values and methods and a style which shall be peculiar to them.” Fanon is emphatic on this count: “Let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions and societies which draw their inspiration from her. Humanity is waiting for something from us other than such an imitation, which would be almost an obscene caricature.”¹³

In his Notes on the New Society of the Philippines, Marcos paraphrases Fanon: “It is important . . . that we extricate ourselves from the mental conditioning of ideologies foreign to our experience.”¹⁴ Clearly sharing Fanon’s views on the psychic wounds inflicted on the colonized subject, Marcos likewise prescribes the eradication of colonial subalternity. He advances his notion of a third way as nothing less than the symbolic slaying of a colonial father figure: “By choosing to take up a third alternative as other Third World nations have, we are conducting not America’s experiment but our own, free, independent and unfettered. Anti-American, one may say, because it involves the slaying of the great white father’s image; but more Pro-Filipino, on closer look, for the slaying of the father image means liberation for the brown son, his coming of age, his passage into full manhood in the community of nations.”¹⁵

Marcos’s allusion to the brown son’s coming of age is indeed consistent with Fanon’s theorization of the new man born out of the struggle for national liberation. As Fanon put it, “the ‘thing’ which has been colonized becomes man during the same process by which it frees itself.”¹⁶ By invoking the slaying of the great white father, Marcos gestures toward the racial politics of modernization, which, in the Philippine context, could be traced back to the American colonial policy of benevolent assimilation. Indeed, a long historical thread linked modernization to this policy, which saw (white) U.S. citizens as the moral superiors, hence political exemplars, of America’s “little brown brothers.” Marcos’s third way was anti-American to the extent that it outwardly rejected this racist bias masquerading as cultural paternalism. However, in valorizing his third way as a “pro-Filipino” experiment, Marcos nonetheless borrowed the great white father’s rhetoric. His third way bore an ambivalent relation to what Vicente Rafael has described as puting pagmamahal (white love), the love of whiteness that has “come to inform if not inflict the varieties of Filipino nationalism that emerged under American patronage.”¹⁷

White Love, Modernization, and Marcos’s Third Way

To understand the operation of “white love” in Marcos’s third-way discourse, it is perhaps necessary to take a short detour into the history of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines. After the Spanish-American War, some seventy-five thousand U.S. troops were dispatched to the Philippines in 1899 to crush an indigenous revolutionary struggle. It would in fact take the United States almost four years of brutal warfare to wrest its booty from Filipino nationalists, a conflict that has since been tagged by revisionist historians as the forgotten war.¹⁸ Popularly regarded at the time as yet another “Indian war” in America’s expansionist history, the brutal conflict saw political demonology in action: American observers arriving in the islands in 1899 claimed that the indigenous leaders of the Philippine revolution were illegitimate representatives of the Filipino people. In fact, they claimed that there were no Filipinos as such, only a mixed collection of polyglot savages lacking a common culture and prone to impulsive and irrational behavior.¹⁹ Given the “absence” of a Filipino nation, the new colonizers rationalized U.S. presence in the islands, not as an act of imperialist aggression (since after all there was no nation to usurp), but as a benevolent act: they were in the islands to defuse the political instability unleashed by “deluded peasants and workers” led by a gang of mixed-race leaders.²⁰

The fourteen-year conflict was thus paradoxically perceived as a humane war. Despite the thousands of Filipino deaths, it was characterized as a valuable learning experience for Filipinos and Americans alike. David Prescott Barrows, head of the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes, wrote in 1901 that the conflict was a blessing, “for without it the Filipinos would never have recognized their own weaknesses; without it we would never had done our work thoroughly.”²¹

It is well worth reiterating the racial politics underpinning the U.S. policy of Benevolent Assimilation. President McKinley, who coined the term, argued that the “earnest and paramount aim” of colonization was to “win the confidence, respect and affection” of the people.²² In William Howard Taft’s view, Filipinos were orphaned children, “little brown brothers” abandoned by their Spanish fathers. It was therefore imperative to enfold them within the compassionate and protective embrace of the United States. It was, in short, an instance of white love. As Rafael puts it, “As a father is bound to guide his son, the United States was charged with the development of native others. Neither exploitative nor enslaving, colonization entailed the cultivation of the ‘felicity and perfection of the Philippine people’ through the ‘uninterrupted devotion’ to those ‘noble ideals which constitute the higher civilization of mankind.’”²³

Such has been the colonial thread of white love: the allegorical projection of a great white father whose love for his wayward children is served by creating a reciprocal relationship between a civilizing love and a love of civilization. Cultural paternalism clearly underpinned the policy of Benevolent Assimilation, which “required making native inhabitants desire what colonial authority desired for them.”²⁴ It also involved the enforcement of constant surveillance, for the Filipino, it was believed, was incapable of self-government. This fundamental incapacity—something we have seen repeated in Marcos’s time with the Huntington thesis and the view that Filipinos “just weren’t ready for democracy”—was in fact the official reason why U.S. colonial rule lasted until 1946. Benevolent Assimilation projected U.S. colonial rule as merely a transitional stage; self-rule would be granted as soon as the natives, in Taft’s words, “have been elevated and taught the dignity of labor . . . and self-restraint.”²⁵ In other words, self-government can be achieved only when the subject has learned to colonize itself. In Woodrow Wilson’s words, “Self-government is a form of character. It follows upon the long discipline which gives a people self-possession, self-mastery, and the habit of order and peace . . . the steadiness of self-control and political mastery. And these things cannot be had without long discipline. . . . No people can be ‘given’ the self-control of maturity. Only a long apprenticeship of obedience can secure them the precious possession.”²⁶

As a precondition of Filipino self-rule, white love set standards of discipline and civility that required the tutelary subject to submit to strict regimens of training and the constant supervision of a sovereign master. By mid-century, white love evolved into the Cold War technology of modernization. Replacing direct colonial supervision with the application of the social sciences to the problems of decolonizing states, modernization worked to spread the culture and values of the United States throughout the Third World. Modernization, in expanding and reconstituting the colonial project of white love, had definite, if unstated, racial overtones. Its humanistic teleology, to borrow Fanon’s terms, “invit[ed] the submen to become human and to take as their prototype Western humanity.”²⁷

Marcos strategically sidesteps modernization’s emphasis on the social replication of Western culture and values to focus instead on the theory’s normative construction of human emancipation. In his Five Years of the New Society, Marcos projects an outwardly radiating series of transformations centering on the recalibration of national “values”: first, such values will foster a sense of pride in the individual; it follows that this pride will foster a sense of belonging to a larger national community; and finally, a sense of belonging to a national community will enjoin individuals to seek “oneness with mankind.”²⁸

To “Third Worldize” this model of human emancipation, Marcos sought the psychoaffective creation of a “decolonized” cultural subject. The New Society’s cultural policy indeed hinged on eradicating colonial subalternity by restoring the dignity and self-respect of the New Filipino. But as we shall see, Marcos’s program of cultural rehabilitation nonetheless called on the cultural sphere to effect an internal colonization along the lines of the cultural paternalism of white love. Its promise of a perfect social order presupposed the citizenry’s submission to the dictator’s “paternal” authority and the consolidation of a social hierarchy through the internalization of traditions invented by, and grounded in, the martial-law state.

The Internal Revolution and Governmentality

Despite its First World narcissism, the salience of modernization theory, as far as Marcos was concerned, lay in its emphasis on the power of cultural values to shape patterns of social conduct. The New Society was indeed the first deliberate attempt ever made in the Philippines to realign the cultural values of the populace with the development initiatives of the state.²⁹ For Marcos, this process involved “restructuring mental dispositions and evolving an authentic individual and social consciousness.”³⁰

Just months after the declaration of martial law, veteran psychological warfare specialist Jose Ma. Crisol, working through the auspices of the Armed Forces of the Philippines’ Office of Civil Relations, convened an academic think tank to construct a master plan for moral reform. Their report, Towards a Restructuring of Filipino Values, gave the following recommendation: “We should treat the country as our very own family, where the President of the Republic is the father and all the citizens as our brothers. From this new value we develop a strong sense of oneness, loyalty to the country, and a feeling of nationalism.”³¹

Thus elevating the family as the principal institution for formulating national values, the report anticipated Foucault’s description of the intimate connection between the family and the science of policing, Jacques Donzelot’s term for the “methods for developing the quality of the population and the strength of the nation.”³² For Foucault, the task of policing led to the rise of governmentality via a modern state that “exerci[zed] towards its inhabitants, and the wealth and behavior of each and all, a form of surveillance and control as attentive as that of the head of the family over his household and goods.”³³ In Marcos’s own writings on the New Society, metaphors of the father’s role in a well-run household abound. Like the head of the household (in Tagalog, ama ng tahanan), the president’s primary role is to ensure that his house is in order, for this “does not only ensure the regularity of one’s daily bread; it provides the vitality that fills both the thirst for productive labor and creative contemplation.”³⁴

In matters of culture, Marcos’s ama ng tahanan blended the cultural paternalism of the great white father of Benevolent Assimilation with the anticolonial stance of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. Though he actively promoted modernization to bring about the humanist project of national development, he also prescribed a cultural liberation program that would correct the colonial mentality of the populace.

Marcos’s notion of cultural liberation closely follows Fanon’s conception of cultural rehabilitation. Because colonialism distorted, disfigured, and destroyed the native’s past, it devolves on the postcolonial state to seek a national culture in the past. Thus enmeshed in the psychoaffective operations of cultural rehabilitation, the creation of a national culture is a necessary feature of decolonization, for without it, liberated peoples would be “colorless, stateless, rootless—a race of angels.”³⁵

The search for a national culture was a priority for Marcos, who saw it—in clearly Fanonian terms—as the “anchor” of a proud and noble race:

One of the most crucial tasks we faced after the declaration of martial law was to mend the tattered fabric of our society, to resuscitate the dying spirit of the nation. Clearly, the strategy for decolonization lay in a cultural liberation program directed toward an understanding, appreciation and internalization of our rich cultural heritage as a foundation for developing pride in ourselves as a people . . . meaningful and lasting change entails the reshaping not only of the existing social order but also of the consciousness of the individuals that together make up that order.³⁶

For Marcos, national discipline rested on a concept of culture as both object and instrument of social and moral reform. Such faith in culture’s capacity to effect inner transformation as a necessary step toward securing external social transformation points to what Tony Bennett describes as a different mode of government, one “aimed at producing a citizenry, which, rather than needing to be externally and coercively directed, would increasingly monitor and regulate its own conduct.”³⁷ For indeed, as Marcos put it, “We cannot permanently depend on the coercive powers of the state. We must give to the new political bond the force of our own individual discipline.”³⁸ Marcos’s cultural liberation program was a bid to “governmentalize” culture—to “use culture as a resource through which those exposed to its influence would be led to ongoingly and progressively modify their thoughts, feelings and behaviour.”³⁹

Marcos’s projection of a self-monitoring and self-regulating cultural subject bears a striking affinity with Foucault’s theory of governmentality. For Foucault, governmentality marked a radical shift in conceptions of the instruments and ends of government. Based on Machiavellian principles, earlier theories of governance gave to the state a single purpose: to secure the political obedience of the populace. This imperative was seen as the very precondition to the exercise of sovereignty, which in turn was pursued as an end in itself.⁴⁰ Obedience to the law, in other words, made the end of sovereignty the exercise of sovereignty. With the rise of the modern state, Machiavellian notions of sovereignty gave way to a new conception of governance premised on the population as objects of care of the state. Eschewing the “self-referring circularity” of sovereignty, this mode of governance was characterized by a plurality of specific aims—for example, ensuring that the greatest possible quantity of wealth is produced, that the people are provided with the sufficient means of subsistence, and that the population is enabled to multiply. And so, while sovereignty looked to the law as the principal instrument for achieving obedience to the law, governmentality looked to how things were disposed to meet specific social ends.

In his Notes on the New Society of the Philippines, Marcos echoes Foucault’s observations on the circular logic of sovereignty (what Foucault calls juridico-discursive power). He concedes that the New Society readily calls to mind a Machiavellian “command society.” But such a society, he argues, has a weak social basis—a fear of authority—and can only engender a “crude discipline . . . the kind we have been subjected to as children.” It is therefore imperative to transcend the command society’s basis in notions of punishment: “We should be afraid of wrongdoing not because of the personal consequences to ourselves but because it might destroy the ‘balance’ of our community . . . Only in this way can our covenant with one another be made into a ‘lasting institution.’”⁴¹ Marcos introduces the notion of an “internal revolution” as the key to fostering a deeper social covenant:

We should not fall into the trap of a ‘surveilled’ society: this will defeat our purpose. Happily, our recourse was prescribed by Apolinario Mabini in another revolution, when he said that an ‘internal’ revolution was necessary for the success of an ‘external’ one. What this ultimately means is that we should be able to internalize the democratic revolution, make its objectives, principles and ideals a part of our being, if we expect to succeed—and make our success an enduring one.⁴²

That other revolution, of course, was the 1898 revolution. Marcos is here channeling the hero Mabini, the nationalist leader widely regarded as one of the brains of the revolutionary movement. He argues, after Mabini, that the attainment of the revolutionary social agendas of the New Society necessarily hinges on each and every Filipino internalizing the “objectives, principles and ideals” of the martial-law state. This implies an “inner discipline that is not a response to coercion” but rather a critical engagement with, and active participation in, the developmental projects of the state.⁴³