Double-edged
ANOTHER viewing lens I use is what structural social analysis has taught me is culture's role in society. Culture, the complex web of beliefs, values and practices that governs the way a society conducts its everyday life and copes with its challenges.
It is now the post-structural era but I still find valid the structural view that culture's role is to provide stability to the existing social order, ensure its continuance and protect it from destruction either from within or without.
Theoretical societies, however, do not exist. Only real historical social conditions give rise to the culture that also sustains them. Concretely, therefore, it is those who are favored by existing conditions, society's leaders, who promote the culture that allows them to be undisturbed in their privileged positions.
For tribal Filipinos the main elements of their coping mechanism (culture) were folklore and primitive religion. Spain got us to accept our fate as colonial subjects by steeping us in Catholicism's faith in God's will and that of those who represent Him on earth. The Americans used formal secular education to encourage us to go more for an earthly American dream than for the other-worldly heaven Spanish friars offered as reward for accepting the colonizers' hell on earth.
Today one of these three factors dominates the culture of Filipinos depending on their status in society.
Religion is still powerfully influential in determining the average Filipino's reaction to reality. But there is a growing secularism among Filipinos who are steeped in formal education, science and technology. Among the poor and obscure, primitive religion/superstition and unscientific practices continue to dominate the way they cope with their dire social condition.
Culture is a double-edged sword in the hands of society's top personalities, economic, political, religious or otherwise. One edge protects their respective positions of control while the other makes people accept that control without question.
If change agents, therefore, be they from the top, middle or bottom of the demographic pile, want an overhaul of the existing social order they must work to develop and promote a countervailing culture.
Hence, while a part of me condemns whatever violations of human rights I know are undoubtedly occurring, another part is constrained to expose and condemn a most likely truth that a privileged few are riding on cultural sensitivities in their drive to regain power and continue their plunder of this country.
They mock democracy by flaunting wealth and abusing power yet they now scream for respect of the human rights and the rule of law that they have routinely trampled in their march to the top of Philippine society.