PARADOXICAL

Is the Filipino Really Selfish?

Two Americans (white men, I suppose) gave a curt comment recently that has become some sort of a cause célèbre.

They said, "Filipinos are extremely friendly, but inconsiderate."

The reactions from fellow Filipinos were immediate and heated. You knew the foreign observers struck a chord.

The honest observation was hardly surprising. I made the same cold assessment myself when I was a lot younger, with articles titled, "We are a Selfish People" and that the behavior is all about "Family First." I wasn't very happy writing about it.

But my observations didn't turn out to be totally way off the mark. In one church talk by then Fr. Chito Tagle, he discussed at length this very lack of sense of community and civic culture among Filipinos.

To paraphrase the future cardinal at the risk of misquoting him: "We Filipinos are a religious people, or more accurately, we are a people of strong faith. But for all our high marks in personal formation, we remain personalistic. For all our high marks in family life, we also remain regionalistic. We Filipinos have a very low mark when it comes to ‘social formation,’ one thrust of the (Catholic) Church that’s been conveniently ignored by Filipino society."

"There is a need for our society," he said, "to transcend our vertical spirituality ('me and my God') and to be more inclusive and expansive by being more aware of one’s community, one’s society. We need to address the need for Filipinos to be formed in terms of the horizontal aspect of Christianity ('me and God’s people')."

What I'd like to focus on, at this point, is the puzzling inconsistency in character and cognitive dissonance in the face of our indigenous concepts and traditions.

Our "inconsiderate ways" run counter to our traditions of bayanihan around the country, and what is bayanihan but being literally and figuratively a 'bayani' to all, consciously going out of one's self for the sake of others or for the greater good?

Among the Tagalogs, there is the tugpa in which a community member “freely took over somebody's responsibilities in case of illness.”

There’s also the practice called pintacasi, which was “meant to help succor someone who was helpless or needy.”

Among peasants, there’s the pasinaya, which was understood to be an offering of “help to cultivate somebody's else's croplands.” Today, pasinaya means "inaugurate."

Then there’s atag, which was understood to mean that each community member “had a task to perform for the community's well-being.”

Among the Cordillerans, there’s the cañao (or caniao, kanyaw), which was originally aimed at sharing “one's wealth in times of crop failures or hunger by feeding the entire community for days or weeks." Imagine days or weeks of free, uninterrupted feeding, like an over-extended fiesta.

Pangasinenses and Ilocanos have a practice of communal or cooperative labor during farming season called tagnawa, and exclusively among Pangasinenses, gamal. As a word and concept, tagnawa has evolved into the Ilocano and Pangasinan equivalent of bayanihan.

We Filipinos in general also have enduring traditional values called pakikisama (which admittedly cuts both ways), pakikiramay or damayan, pagkakaisa, malasakit... Katrin Muller de Guia recently studied in depth our concept of kapwa and pakikipagkapwa as among what she believed as our core values.

Fernando Zialcita once discussed the "diaphanous" or porous nature of our culture, indicating an openness to people outside ourselves.

Furthermore, the barangay evolved as a kin-based unit, but we now have a term called kapitbahayan, which implies community beyond blood relations.

Even our concept of ginhawa implies giving pleasure to not just family but also to a larger community.

In the context of food, Felice Prudente Sta. Maria has discovered the precolonial concept of nayanaya, which is giving joy or pleasure to guests or other people. In provinces in the olden days, anyone, even strangers, could come inside houses uninvited during town fiestas, provided they tagged along with people known to the host. In a typical day, households openly shared anything edible that they had with neighbors willing to forage for food.

Historian and former NCCA chairman, Prof. Felipe M. De Leon, "There’s a reason Filipinos are such a highly connected people," as evident in how we speak, how we eat, and how our talents are formed…together." "This connectedness springs from a spiritual belief –– God connects us to one another. It’s what naturally fuels our sense of shared responsibility and care for each other as one big Filipino family."

In short, there is no short supply of selflessness in the indigenous or pre-colonial and post-colonial Filipino psyche.

***

The way out, according to Tagle

Even though he didn't dig deep at the root causes of today's obvious disconnect or dissociation with tradition, Tagle, to his credit, didn't stop at diagnosis; he actually gave a way out as guide. He said we Filipinos need to learn the following principles:

1. Primacy of persons over profit: "We live at a time when persons are commodified and objects personified. Our society often judge a person by his or her ability to impress on a superficial level. What about those who don’t have the ability to impress?"

2. Primacy of values over expediency: "We must stop preferring what is practical over what is right."

3. Primacy of communion (community) over self or group interest (personal/familial/regional): "There is systemic intolerance because we think our particular tribe is better than the others. If there’s anything that would unite all Filipinos, it is this bad sort of pride." ... "Because of intolerance, we miss out on a lot of gifts." "'Charity begins at home' but it doesn’t occur to us that we have a bigger home. What we should think about more and more is the common good."

4. Primacy of caring for creation instead of manipulating creation: "We have yet to understand that we are stewards of creation, not owners. We manipulate nature, we manipulate people."

***

Going back to the problem: how do we explain the discrepancy? How does the very Western individualism of today square with our original Asian or Oriental, community-focused orientation? Where did we begin to break apart, to the point that regulations meant to uphold the common good are routinely "treated as mere suggestion" even between and among members of the same "tribe" or ethnic group? How and since when did we become such a selfish, self-centered people?

Are we really more selfish than selfless? I think we are both. My problem is explaining our conflicted nature.

posted by Resty Odon  # 4:41 PM