Time to seek our modus vivendi
Often unnoticed by the Thai public, our politicians have been quietly laying the groundwork for elections expected sometime in 2016. They have been visiting their constituents, getting reacquainted, listening to their many grievances, making promises and
There is nothing extraordinarily improper with that side of the picture, except perhaps the mud-throwing part, which can only reopen the raw wounds in our society. What’s truly indecent is the fact that the social and political divide that has brought terrible suffering to Thailand is still part of our landscape. National reconciliation remains as elusive as quicksilver.
And that’s extremely worrisome. We cannot seem to agree on what reconciliation is all about, or how to get there.
Bilahari Kausikan, formerly Singaporean foreign secretary and now an ambassador-at-large, opened last month’s Global Movement of Moderates meeting in Singapore with words that helped shed light on Thailand’s impenetrable domestic “issues”. Heeding them just might help guide us out of this dark era of quarrelling and into the light of a truce.
Five years ago at the United Nations General Assembly, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak proposed the idea of a Global Movement of Moderates. That idea has since gained considerable acceptance not only in the region but also among the so-called non-aligned coalition of countries. The world has been so riven with disputes and violence that Prime Minister Najib’s proposal to ”take back the centre” was a breath of fresh air.
But what is the centre and how do we get there, asked Kausikan.
In his view, the “centre” cannot just be the common ground between different positions. Neither is it located in so-called universal principles enshrined in the Declaration of Human Rights and other instruments negotiated at the United Nations; nor is it to be found in protean concepts such as “democracy” or “justice” or “liberty”.
The “sustainable centre”, insisted Kausikan, can only be discovered if we first discard the myth of universality: “Diversity, not universality, is the most salient characteristic of the world we actually live in.” And that centre cannot be rigid and permanent – nor can it be a zero-sum competition between and among simultaneously incongruous ideologies, ideas and interests, he argued.
“The goal of a movement of moderates cannot be agreement or even consensus, only peaceful coexistence; a modus vivendi that allows for peaceful co-existence between ultimately irreconcilable systems of values. Such a modus vivendi is necessarily always tentative and constantly needs to be renegotiated. To seek a still, unchanging point of eternal nirvana is not only futile but it is to court an extremist response. The pursuit of a modus vivendi is not a search for an uber-value or definitive political reform. It is not the end that is crucial, but the process. The pursuit of a modus vivendi is a methodology that will have many institutional manifestations, none of which can have any more than a tentative and situationally conditional validity,” Kausikan observed.
As to the question of how we could arrive at a modus vivendi or peacefully coexisting way of life, Kausikan said that several conditions were necessary, but not sufficient in themselves. He maintained that it was a fallacy to believe that more education or understanding would necessarily lead to harmony. “The harsh fact is,” he said, “the better we understand something, the more we may dislike it or feel threatened by it.”
The answer, he proposed, may lie in the philosophy of Russo-British thinker Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997).
Berlin, said Kausikan, contended that there was not only one Good, but multiple Goods and that they often contradicted each other and so could not be simultaneously realised. It was Berlin who argued that the plurality and incompatibility of human values required us to distinguish and make trade-offs between them, rather than conflating them. Having grown up under the yoke of oppression in the Soviet Union, Berlin championed liberty. However, he cautioned that liberty was not the supreme Good, but the best means of enabling peaceful coexistence between different conceptions of the Good, “all of which may be fervently held and all of which have their own irreconcilable validities”, said Kausikan
One may want to add here that the means to a modus vivendi comprises not only such analytical realisation and acceptance of differences, but also respect for those differences. The very fine difference between acceptance and respect can be that very tiny sliver of the much-needed sufficient condition for a modus vivendi in our nation.
An American scholar recently observed that the world seems to be heading down a dark ally. We are witnessing a rise in religious extremism that encompasses Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism. We are seeing people butchering one another simply because they hold different political views or do not share the same ethnic origins. There is no answer to the question “why?”, because these people never stop to think long enough to ask it.
“Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice,” said the late US Republican senator Barry Goldwater, adding that “moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue”. That maxim could be used by the Islamic State to justify the savagery it has committed. In Thailand, we have witnessed prolonged discord that has torn the nation apart. It’s time for us to look for a modus vivendi, and quit waiting for our own version of Samuel Beckett’s Godot, the much sought-after ideal that never shows up.
