Cultural despots in our midst
By Antonio Montalvan II
Inquirer News Service

IT amused me no end that, at the height of the American electoral campaign, friends were incessantly asking whether I was for George W. Bush or John Kerry. Not being an American voter, my answer was always a curt "Neither!"
Whether it was Bush or Kerry, America will still be the policeman of the world. If there is any transgression by any nation in this global 21st century we live in, it is the trampling of the sovereignty and dignity of nations under the guise of primus inter pares (first among equals). It is a role-a gross anomaly-that America will always play, no matter if it has a Democrat or a Republican in the White House.

Paradoxically, however, the result of the US presidential vote is a lesson in transgression. Given what pundits have analyzed as an indication toward a growing trend for conservatism on the issues of abortion, birth control, stem cell research and same-sex marriage, it hinted at the core of what liberal advocates have long missed out. One cannot simply impose these liberal lifestyles in a wholesale manner upon a people. It is a lesson on cultural sensitivity that American voters made use of as a political capital.

That lesson is transferable to the Filipino experience, more especially in recent years as the bitter debate on the matter of artificial birth control between pro-life and anti-life advocates rages. It has become trendy -- and cheap -- for many to say that the Catholic Church is to blame for our overpopulation because it does not favor artificial birth control. Aside from its mono-causal illogic, the argument is actually a form of imposition that denigrates cultural sensibilities.

The problem is not the Catholic Church -- and the countless other churches that stand alongside it on the matter --imposing its will on the populace. The problem is the few liberal advocates that continue to see the world in a them-and-us paradigm. If there is anything that is worthy of celebration in globalization, it is the growing wonder of cultural diversity that needs to be respected. Apparently, anti-life advocates still operate in the archaic Malthusian and two-world system. The imposition, in fact, stems from their side.

Legislating artificial birth control and imposing penalties on parents who do not use contraceptives to limit the number of their children are a form of despotism and show lack of sensitivity to Filipino culture, not to mention strong family ties. One cannot legislate against religious and familial sensibilities.

Some people in the media, especially in broadcast, apparently do not appear as monolithic as they claim to be. One female talk show host, who harps unabashedly against the Catholic Church on the issue of contraception in her laboriously halting English, was in fact taken in as emcee in the last Catholic Mass Media Awards. Which makes it the more complicated because such doble cara stance only goes to show that her ranting against the Catholic Church is a fair-weather choice. It is people like her who imperil us with their cultural imposition. Inconsistency, in fact, is a mark of such liberalism. And the organizers of the CMMA had better learn their lesson the next time.

If there is anything distasteful about the growing trend for "neo-conservatism" in the last American elections, it is the predisposition to wage war in the name of "democracy." By whose democracy is that measured? There can be no one policeman in a global multi-cultural world. And neither should there be cultural supercops who think that their world-view is the only cultural norm that all must adhere to. What painful lesson that must have been for Kerry who is a Roman Catholic. Sadly, many in our own backyard must now take note.

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The latest scam on textbook errors is just a small parcel of a whole package of education sham. Just as there is a need to weed out of the educational system such sloppy instructional materials, it is about time that we also look into the integrity of many of our textbook writers.

Recently, a new book, presented as a "pedagogy" in socio-anthropology, was sold to higher education institutions. Reading through the curriculum vitae of the writers, none of them turned out to have been trained as an anthropologist. How they came to be authorities on anthropology -- and imparting to our young people in college their expertise on the subject-on which they had no training at all -- is a real puzzle. Pretension cannot be a substitute for scholarship. Perhaps the book is just one of the many which has for authors people of questionable credentials or records. That one cannot teach what one doesn't know is a maxim that must not escape the Department of Education, the Commission on Higher Education and these so-called textbook writers.

No wonder, we continue to produce "substandard" graduates. But there is a solution: discard books that do not educate. This is a step that schools may opt to take, if the DepEd and CHED should choose not to address this mess that they themselves had a part in creating.

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