The President delivers the traditional State of the Nation Address today. His supporters will applaud him. Many will heckle him as he makes his way to the Batasan. His admirers will hang on his every word. His critics will seize every opportunity to convince the nation that his address makes painfully evident his inability to govern. Congress will then go about its business, while many of the citizens will persist in their cynicism and their distrust. Bishops will continue lambasting the ruthlessness with which murders are committed and the seeming lukewarmness with which the perpetrators are pursued, while supporters of the administration will lambast the bishops by digging up stories of molestation by clerics and charges of avarice and scandalous opulence. The CPP-NPA-NDF will patrol the hamlets and villages at night, threatening, extorting, and, paradoxically, also endeavoring to win sympathy to their cause. The military will fan out through the same area by day, convince the peasants of the countryside that they mean well, and make life miserable for those marked out as sympathizers of the rebels. One faction of economists will tell that the country now wears the pallor of a nation on the brink of its demise; another will tell us that it cannot be any rosier—and neither side will really be believed by the already confounded people of the Philippines.
And clearly, the country will not be any better for this. We must pay the wages of all the bickering, and snapping, the intriguing and the scheming that have all but enervated our national spirit, and left us a divided nation and worse, one that is stubbornly petulant about this division! And while some have proclaimed themselves to be instruments of rapprochement, they have only soughed through an already despondent nation the doleful notes of discord and driven the fissures even deeper, for that fissure runs deepest that lies on the other side of a berm of pointless rhetoric.
As a member of the consultative committee formed by an Executive Order of the President, I will do what I can. I will assume that the President really wanted what was best for the country when he tasked the committee with writing a constitution for a federal republic. It is not a reckless assumption, because I have done my part to read up on federalism and am honestly convinced that it is worth a try. That it has never been tried before is no argument at all, after all, we have bravely ventured on the untried in the past. We gambled on Cory Aquino when she dismantled the constitutional order in 1986 and set in place a reordered republic through a constitution drafted by hand-picked craftsmen, and I am convinced it was worth the gamble. Let us have a thorough, no-holds barred debate on the merits or demerits of federalism, because we need such an exchange, but let us not allow what might be a salutary conversation for our country’s future to degenerate into the imputation of vile and base motives on either side. That has not helped before. It will not help us now.
The Con-Com, of which I was a willing and enthusiastic member, did not set pen to paper in the belief that the 1987 Constitution was a bad constitution. It was not. It was a very good Constitution, and so I take umbrage at those who, for reasons hardly warranted by serious analytics, sweep aside the effort of our group as “the worst Cha-Cha ever,” as if we had ever made the pretense of crafting the best Charter ever. We set mind and heart to work on drafting a constitution because we were all convinced that federalism is good for the country. If we were wrong in that conviction, we will—at least I will—willingly listen to the arguments against it and pay them serious heed, and change my mind should that be necessary. But I will not accept the indictment that my colleagues and I sat down at the bidding of a man who conscripted us to wrest power for himself. None of us in that group was willing to be used by anyone. And no matter that we may have found provisions of the 1987 Constitution inadequate for our present-day needs, that never ever translated for us into casting aspersions on the integrity and the intelligence of the noble Filipinos who crafted the post-Edsa charter.
The President has to stop all his cursing and his bullying. The calculated ambivalence and double-speak that have led many to believe that he countenances extrajudicial executions and enforced disappearances must be replaced by a clear and unequivocal adherence to the rule of law in thought, word and deed. He was an effective mayor of Davao City. He has had enough time to morph into the President of the Philippines. We should stop this nonsense of calling him “Mayor” because he is now President, and must act as President—carefully calibrating his actions so that he remains an effective Executive who submits to a constitutionally established system of checks and balances. His critics for his part have no right to doubt that he loves his country. We may object to his often uncouth ways and his inexcusably crude language, but I do not think he has ever given us reason to doubt his devotion to the Philippines.
What I am appealing for is what I have referred to often as “the benevolent a priori”—which is more than just “the benefit of the doubt.” The benevolent a priori is a constant disposition to think the best of others. This requires the President to think best of the church and of his critics in the press and elsewhere; it requires his critics to grant that he intends what is best. It requires bishops to think of Digong as one of their flock and never to exclude him from the fold as a sheep on whom the shepherd has given up. The President has so much to gain by being wise enough to rise above the harsh expressions of critics to the wisdom of the criticism. Meanwhile the media can help tremendously by learning the important lesson that it has a far more constructive role to play than pitting contending camps against each other, provoking harsh encounters of the detestable kind and being purveyors of fake news.
There is an appetite for the gory in this country, a never sated eagerness for scandal, a sickening fascination with high-drama, whether these have to do with the private lives of persons in high places or the exposés to which Congress very often treats the nation. Everybody, it is fiercely insisted, has the right to his opinion. That, I think, is the trouble, because together with the invocation of this truism must come the acknowledgement that there is a difference between “true” and “false” and that it cannot all be a matter of opinion. In fact, the most important things in life are not matters of opinion. I will echo MacIntyre here: When we reject any reference to objective standards, to objective norms, then anything goes—and we can forever debate pass each other and get nowhere. That is what is happening in the country now. When the Supreme Court voted against Serreno, naysayers told us that it could no longer be trusted. But it was very soon applauded when it ruled against the Marcoses. So, is that what it is all about now—popular acclaim? But are we not building on shifting sands, something only fools will do, says the Gospel?
It is worth a try: Granting the other the benevolent a priori—that, in the norms of discourse theory, forbids us from excluding anything or anyone outright as irrational and unworthy of our attention, and a return to a healthy respect for the objective and the real, the salutary recognition of the very useful difference between “true” and “false,” “right” and “wrong,” with sufficient sensitivity to the inevitability of interpretation and of constructs.
That is no more difficult than being rational and thoughtful.
rannie_aquino@csu.edu.ph
rannie_aquino@sanbeda.edu.ph
rannie_aquino@outlook.com
