Singapore would be enriched by a little poetry

ONE day in 1964 Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding prime minister, looked out of his office in City Hall and was horrified to see several cows grazing outside. A few days later, a lawyer driving on a nearby road hit one of the cows and died. Lee decided to act. Owners of cows and goats were given a few months to pen their animals. Stray beasts would be slaughtered.

The incident is typical of Singapore’s founding father, and of the city state itself, which has mostly eschewed ideology in favour of practical solutions to practical problems. In a chapter on “greening Singapore” in From Third World To First, Lee detailed how he cleaned up unhygienic hawkers’ stalls, led anti-spitting campaigns, banned dangerous fireworks at the Chinese lunar new year and started a methodical tree-planting and maintenance effort that has left Singapore one of the greenest cities in the world.

Lee, who died in March aged 91, knew that even centuries of custom could be nudged or bullied out of existence.

What comes across most strongly in his memoir is how practical and nonideological he was. For Lee, a former socialist who became an enforcer of state-guided capitalism and even more guided democracy, the main preoccupation was not to create a utopian society but one that worked and prospered.

The Singapore he helped build, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this weekend, is above all a pragmatic state.

To adapt a phrase coined by Lee, who said the young nation could not afford the luxury of poetry, Singapore is a creation written in prose.

Its dogged practicality was not typical of the 20th century. At one extreme were totalitarian states, both communist and fascist, that pursued ideology at any cost. At the other were liberal democracies, or “open societies”. Somewhere in the middle were kleptocracies and crony capitalist states. Singapore, along with a few other mostly Asian states, pursued a genuinely national project aimed at lifting the living standards of its people.

Kishore Mahbubani, a professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, says pragmatism, meritocracy and honesty are the keystones of Singapore’s transformation. In the mid-1960s, when its per-capita gross domestic product (GDP) was $500, he remembers a school feeding programme where he drank milk from a pail using a ladle shared with other children. Today, GDP per capita is $55,000.

“Pragmatism is a dirty word to Western intellectuals,” he says, but it can be an ethical principle if it improves people’s lives. At its simplest, it means learning from others. Singapore’s administrators scoured the world for practical solutions.

They modelled their port on Rotterdam, their army on Israel’s and their government housing schemes on Europe’s.

There has been much debate about whether Singapore holds lessons for bigger countries. In its philosophy of pragmatism, it surely does.

Even a country of China’s scale was able to loosen its ideological shackles and pursue more practical policies. Mahbubani argues that excessive adherence to ideology is not limited to dictatorships or theocracies. The US’s refusal to admit it could improve its “disastrous” healthcare service by learning from others is evidence of a blinding ideology, he says.

Pragmatism comes with costs. Insofar as it seeks to shape people’s behaviour and values, it is an ideology in itself.

Lee picked bad policies as well as good ones. He encouraged small families and pursued a mild form of eugenics, discouraging less well-educated couples from having children. Today, Singapore is stuck with a disastrously low birth rate.

He also hounded opponents, using libel laws and the courts to silence critics.

The resulting “air-conditioned nation”, in the words of political analyst Cherian George, purrs like a machine.

It also lacks a richness of debate, divergence and dissent.

Ho Kwon Ping, chairman of Banyan Tree, a hotel company, calls Singapore “first world-minus”.

In an extraordinary series of lectures, he asserts the need for a “second act of this great Singapore miracle”.

Renewal will mean the development of a more holistic society where the social, cultural and political realms flourish.

It will also mean that the People’s Action party, which has ruled since independence, will have to contemplate ceding power to forces outside its self-ordained priesthood.

Ho sees cause for optimism in a young generation that is prepared to question and probe — and one that, above all, believes it has the agency to exact change.

Lee and his generation made Singapore work, and work spectacularly well. What is now needed, in Ho’s phrase, is “a flowering of the Singapore garden”. © The Financial Times Limited 2015.

The resulting ‘air-conditioned nation’, in the words of political analyst Cherian George, purrs like a machine. It also lacks a richness of debate