Pagpupugay sa Kanila

Hindi ba't katatapos lang ng Ramadan? Bigyang halaga natin ang kontribusyon ng mga Muslim sa lipunan natin ngayon. Kung paano nila isinasakatuparan ang landas patungo sa naiibang makabagong mundo. " Kung iisipin, sa gobyerno na nga lang nakadepende ang mga kapatid nating Pilipinong malayo sa kalunsuran, ngunit ganito na nga ang nananahang sitwasyon sa kasalukuyan kung saan ang gobyerno ay tila kakampi na rin ng mga mapanlipol na adhikain. (At mas pinipili kong hindi magbigay ng pangalan, dahil aaminin kong minsan rin, ay nagiging mapangmata ako sa kanila. Ngunit, kahit papaano sa pamamagitan nito, mailalarawan ko ang tunay na kinakaharap hindi lamang ng mga Muslim kundi maging sino man sa mundo na nararamdaman ang pagkakawalay sa estado, separatismo at ayaw yakapin ang mundong hindi nakagisnan).

Paano ba nila napapanatili ang kanilang kultura sa kabila ng "McDonaldized Society" sa "Globalization of Politics" na tila pati ang mapanakip na gobyerno ay masasabing "participant Paano nga ba? Tingnan natin ang kapahamakang dulot nito sa ating demokrasya kung saan tayong mga Pilipino ay napakapartikular.

Narito ang isang komentaryong aking binuo mula sa katha ni Benjamin Barber mula sa kathang Jihad and McWorld in the New World Disorder.

THREATENING DEMOCRACY

“Still, democracy has always played itself out against the odds. And democracy remains both a form of coherence as binding as McWorld and a secular faith potentially as inspiriting as Jihad.”

There is an obvious mark between Jihad and McWorld that made these two perceptions contradicting – carrying a sort of political conflict. This conflict elevated the current matter to the new world application and classified it as blueprint hauling a kind of confusion.

Culture generally refers to patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give such activity significant importance. Different definitions of "culture" reflect different theoretical bases for understanding, or criteria for evaluating, human activity. And mostly, culture can be manifested in various ways.

Jihad merely pictures out not only the way Middle East community hold permanence in light of their self-fashioned political process but gives us a big picture of how other groups struggle to maintain the primitivism of their culture, the ethnic identity and the tribalism. On the other hand, McWorld offers us the proposed play of the new culture. This earned a degree of possibility for some of the countries as McWorld attempts to revolutionize even the small traces of cultures and to try stitching them as one. McWorld gives rise to the post-modern concepts as consumerism, globalization, homogeneity and capitalism which simply leave us words of promises. Basically, the author caters the idea of realizing that the new world is actually in a state of odds between the projected engagement of contemporary rationality and the preservation of religious primitivism, which are both functional in the current world.

We have just observed again how an assemblage of people practiced their culture as Ramadan ends. This exemplified that there remained to be uncorrupted traditions that needs to be respected until now. They have shown their own style of faith and Muslims are just one of the many groups who largely live out the ethnicity of their race. But due to the fast phase of exchange, societies are undergoing social dynamism and therefore continually innovate in their own flight. This dynamism is inevitable, as the saying goes, “the only thing that is permanent in this world is change”. In straightforward words, culture modes change and so do not confine societies. Seemingly to converge, one could clearly spot the conflict on which the government’s role is desired or at most needed.

As I see it, this is the cyclicality of the perspective prearranged by Barber. Governments served to be the participant of the globalized world or one could think of the so-called “McDonaldization of the Society” or the “Globalization of Politics”. Critics assert that fast food chain restaurants such as McDonald's are critical towards many aspects of the native, home-grown cultures in countries where they have been introduced. Government in itself is a product of belief system that is knotted in its distinct cultural template. While political institutions (author’s term) are entrenched in the matrices. On the same line, political institutions embrace schemes that made them the enemies of the state. Having this encounter, institutions with their initiatives, search for an alternative belief system. It should have been anticipated that both actors catch up with each other.

Looking for enough reasons why this situation happened is reinforced by the constant increase of incidence involving radical religious movements such as the emergence of cults, individualistic groups and other religious organizations advocating for cultural refinement. As mentioned, government is a participant of McWorld and political institutions look forward to them for a sense of security. But momentarily, political institutions cannot jive on the planned intrusions of McWorld creating a crate that bolstered other belief systems to be accustomed once and for all. Muslims and other groups experiencing separatism felt that they are dehumanized. The humanization in all fairness crafted both by the government and social forces is not enough to satisfy these political institutions enough to finally decide to live in virtue of McWorld’s newly-built lifestyle. Taking into account the function of government, the whole cultural logic is truly dependent on it.

Speaking to deep, there are at least two fates that may happen given this decisive situation. The first is for these political institutions to finally surrender and allow retribalization process to occur but of course, this statement is easier said than done. It can actually trigger humankind to war and bloodshed. And to ponder on history, the effort to Lebanonization of national states resulted too much extent that culture is pitted against culture, people against people, tribe against tribe, “a Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence, every kind of artificial social cooperation and civic mutuality”.

The second is being instinctive for us to let the onrush of economic and ecological forces that command incorporation and standardization of the world with all being “fast” – (fast music, fast computers, and fast food—with MTV, and McDonald's) urging nations to weave complex webs of arrangements into one commercially homogenous association bombarded or tied together by technology, communication and other factors.

According to an essay authored by Benjamin Barber, there are four imperatives that make up the dynamic of McWorld: a market imperative, a resource imperative, an information-technology imperative, and an ecological imperative. By shrinking the world and diminishing the salience of national borders, these imperatives have in combination achieved a considerable victory over factiousness and particularism, and not least of all over their most virulent traditional form—nationalism. (Atlantic.com) It remains that in all high-tech commercial world there is nothing that looks particularly democratic. It lends itself to supervision as well as independence, to new forms of manipulation and concealed control as well as new kinds of participation, to tilted, unjust market outcomes as well as superior productivity.

The seemingly “magnetism” of these clashing ideas of tribalism and globalization are unrelated to democracy. What Barber pointed out is that, neither McWorld nor Jihad is remotely democratic in impulse and neither needs democracy; neither promotes democracy.

But in either way around, these two just principles of the modern age may both be threatening to democracy. Immediately away from the sphere of current events, these two ideas are neither inviting/appealing nor democratic. If we resituate this phenomenon in the Philippines, this clash threatens democracy in which Filipinos are very particular!

Hindi ba, totoo naman?