Autonomous Phenomena
Out of the Well
By Jolene Tan
“How did you get into this?” Anyone involved in civil society in Singapore has probably heard this question. I’ve rattled my own answer off many times, beginning with “Oh boy—do you want the long version or the longer version?” It seems a natural enough exchange; so much of ordinary conversation is swapping biography, and why not? We are interested in one another, we humans.
Coming to a written version, though, I hesitate. The only drama here is the intellectual drama of finding that one’s mind has changed. This is a story about escaping the foundational tunnel vision that for a long time constricted my understanding of the society I grew up in and how its members can shape it. But to return to the tunnel, to fix attention on it and obsessively measure its dimensions, can look more like another aspect of the trap than any kind of escape. I fear I am like a frog, a small green bumpkin who, years after leaving the well, still can’t get over the exoticism of the world outside.
Yet there must be something in my road to activism that bears examining, or the question wouldn’t get asked. The first time was in 2009, when a journalist was covering a campaign some friends and I had founded for the reform of rape law. Our effort, which sought to scrap the legal defence of “I was her husband,” would succeed only ten years later.
In recent years you can’t move for bumping into online petitions, but in 2009, they were still rare. It was also quite rare then for anything born on the internet to make its way to print media. The journalist interviewing us seemed to be less interested in the law’s grotesque misogyny or the complicity of lawmakers in injustice, and more in the mystery of the three individuals fronting the campaign. “Why are you doing this?” she asked. We gave our reasons: women have a right to protection from violence, and suspending this based on marital status is demeaning.
She looked unsatisfied. “But why do a petition?”
Well, because the government justified the law as an expression of societal values, but we were confident that most people had simply never heard of it, and would disavow it completely if they did. The petition was a way to evidence our claim.
This answer again fell short. There was clearly an unvoiced question behind the question, and it returned—but why…? Later, the journalist tried to narrow it down: were we personally affected by the law? Well, yes, it embodied total disrespect for every woman in the country. This part I even delivered with some feeling, but it still wasn’t enough. I sensed she was probing for a tragedy behind the curtain, an action-movie origin story. There wasn’t one.
“It’s not so strange, is it?” I exclaimed at last, by which I think I probably meant, “It’s not so strange, is it?—that belief is a reason to act?”
I think she understood me. “But it is,” she said. “Most people wouldn’t do this.”
**
I am interested in the question behind the question, and to make sense of that, I think we need to look, literally, at the environment.
Singaporeans sometimes sigh that we miss out on seasons. This isn’t really accurate—the lament is steeped in a temperate story, ignoring our own variations in heat and monsoons, fruit and wildlife—yet the claim holds some truth. Our prevailing modes of life downplay natural rhythms. Working to an urban timetable, or increasingly a virtual one; getting around in concrete tunnels and metal capsules; eating air-flown or container-freighted food. Of course, humans everywhere and everywhen have modified our environments to meet our needs, and as a species we are hardly alone in this. As a matter of degree, though, on this island, we enact routines especially distant from any self-sustaining equilibrium, requiring a high frequency and intensity of intervention to maintain. Moment-to-moment we strain against competing tendencies: cooling the air heated by the equatorial sun, cutting the grass and trees that grow, clearing away homes set up by animals. Autonomous phenomena are cut off over and over. And we mobilise a staggering amount of material, from incredibly far away, to fuel the Singapore machine—to feed, clothe and supply its peoples every day.
And all that is merely to maintain a status quo. We also build, non-stop: literally ingesting large chunks of our neighbours, siphoning sands that form part of the basis for life in Cambodian villages and Indonesian islands.
Many thinkers have traced metaphorical and ideological links between this physical state and our political order. Consider Cherian George’s Air-Conditioned Nation, or the beautiful essays of Feroz Khan and Al Lim.[1] I take from them this recognition: when we compare relations between our humans on the one hand, to our collective relations with the non-human world on the other, we find remarkable commonalities. One party positions itself as a central authority, an organising intelligence, asserting control over the conditions of existence. This dominator seeks to move all other pieces around to meet its own ends, rather than adapting for co-existence with independent processes.
Feroz Khan and Al Lim also take this lens—of the values underpinning Singapore’s approach to the environment—and use it to consider how Singapore approaches one particular group of humans: children, who are likewise constrained within a rigid system which venerates control and rejects open-ended exploration. Having grown up in an earlier version of this system, and now, as a parent, I feel this keenly. Children’s hours and movements are now ever more minutely structured. Our childcare habits promote the competitive performance of defined tasks; so confident are we that adults already know what human excellence looks like, and seek only the right regimen to generate it. Sometimes this is sugared with a tolerant nod toward multiple pathways or differing paces of development, meaning we build a few more preset tracks to follow, and graciously refrain from saying “laggard” too loudly if the most ambitious timetables are not met. Yet fundamentally, as a society, we struggle to respect children’s separate and independent realities: to give weight to their perspectives, their judgments, their choices.
The adult goals that our systems cherish push continually against the neurological facts of human brain development. Small children are wired to move and fiddle, not to sit still poring over drab markings on paper, let alone recreate them. Young minds tend to play with all kinds of patterns and schemas—mixing and matching, sensing rhythms and structures by watching things come together and fall apart. Supported in free inquiry, they do arrive at linear reasoning and deductive logic, though it may be later than demanded by current curricula. To force the accelerated fruiting of selected qualities, we squeeze their bodies and brains into corsets, we leave them no space and time for the percolation, the noodling, the learning to learn, that is part of natural growth. We also exploit their yearning for connection: perform for me, recite the sequence, recognise the character, fill in the blank, and I will show you my approval.
We do not see what we are losing. We do not acknowledge that we are losing anything: that we are erasing what children could become—what all of us could become—if we worked with them, instead of working on them. We pave over with concrete, rather than try to sync with, the jungles of our selves. Autonomous phenomena cut off over and over.
**
I began forming a picture of the world in the 1990s. In hindsight, I wonder if the PAP’s political terraforming peaked during this period. Independent press and student movements tidied away, civil society spooked into submission, and the internet still only a curiosity: politely critical blogs, never mind social media, had yet to arrive. Alternative voices did exist (Chee Soon Juan, for instance, kept a small candle lit in hostile winds), but they were everywhere bookended by derisive editorialising. They didn’t stand a chance.
As a child and then a young person, I was steeped entirely in narratives that exalted the status quo as not just desirable but morally inevitable. The PAP way was understood to be the only defensible outcome of basic reason, almost a metaphysical truth encoded in the building blocks of the universe. Disagreement was not just rare but objectively irrational. Even when I reached a nominal adulthood—18, 19—I was still oblivious; a state no doubt facilitated by my personal comfort—a child from an upwardly mobile Chinese Anglophone family, with an aggressively academic temperament. What objections would I have to things as they were?
But I am not misremembering, am I, if I tell you that when it came to understanding nation and society, there were very many like me? I certainly recall no particular voices of dissension among my peers. Tut if you like at the child who believes that animals belong in zoos and food is a factory product, but if adults clear away all evidence to the contrary—if every natural competing tendency is nipped in the bud—is it a surprise that the child draws logical conclusions from the bowdlerised data they are presented with?
Anyway, I was a familiar type. Highly educated, knew jackshit. In school, I aced essays on the marginal product of labour, but if you asked me what a union actually did, I could not tell you, I knew only that they were Bad. I fancied myself liberal-minded, because I liked the concepts of free expression and individuality, but this theoretical sympathy ran up against a terrible conformist snobbery: I judged anyone who actually stood out as an embarrassing fool.
Looking back, I see that the embarrassment was mine. As an undergraduate in England, discussing the right to assembly and grappling with whether protestors should be prevented from blocking roads, I scowled in superior incomprehension: “Why can’t they just say whatever they have to say in a calm, rational way?” My classmates who’d grown up with democracy rolled their eyes, but my tutor responded patiently. “Expression isn’t just about forensic argument,” he said. “There are other elements.” I didn’t get it right away. But it planted some seeds.
**
As I said, no real drama in this story, just the gradual removal of blinkers. During my degree I also took a course on the penal system. My first contact with sociological thinking blew my tiny technocratic mind. As a debater, I’d learned glib instrumental justifications for prison and other punishments, wherein the state acts to achieve certain public welfare goals; means logically connected to and tailored for desirable material ends. Thus we punish as moral payback (retribution), to warn people off crime (deterrence), or to stop them from doing it again, by fixing them (rehabilitation) or getting in their way (incapacitation).
All very pretty and yet little to do with punishments that actually happen. The stories we tell ourselves about punishment have evolved—no longer are we placating dissatisfied spirits or purifying a polluted community—but the acts grow from the same root. The lofty rational aims set out in the debaters’ rationales are largely unable to account for the way that punishments are currently designed and deployed. There is scarce evidence that prison (never mind caning or hanging) produces the effects that we supposedly aim for when we use it. If we were truly interested primarily in reducing crime, the main tools would be social support and redistribution.
When humans act—even through advanced industrialised states bursting with bureaucratic documentation—sometimes we just do stuff, for unarticulated reasons of emotion, habit or ritual, and we make up elaborate stories about why after the fact. Large bodies of solemn practice can grow and sustain themselves without anyone having the slightest clue what they are in fact achieving. This was a novel perspective for me, very far from the Singapore state as the perfect expression of managerialist rationality.
There was more to come. Later, I stumbled upon To Catch a Tartar, Francis Seow’s account of Operation Spectrum. Even forcing myself into the most sceptical reading, I could not make it add up that Cold War-era Marxist revolutionaries had conspired with a lawyer who in turn conspired with the US government to something something destabilise Singapore something something. I put the book away, rushed to meet fellow Singaporean students for pizza and spent the lunch banging the table in distress. “They put them in jail and there was no reason at all!” My uncomfortable compatriots leaned away.
I’d already learned that authorities sometimes do things for unexamined reasons other than the functional rationales commonly proffered. It now penetrated my green bumpkin skull that authorities sometimes do bad things just for the sake of their own power.
For a few years I reeled about in my own alienation, lurching furiously from source to source, trying to decipher these strange new propositions. At a similar time, the internet began to enable a partial flowering of accessible information about contemporary Singapore: in 2006, for instance, Alex Au posted a picture of a crowd at a Workers’ Party rally, and from then on, the cardboard caricatures drawn by the government-dominated media were blown topsy-turvy. They could no longer pretend non-PAP politicians were all simply marginal cranks. Reality was growing through the cracks.
My process of self-education had no particular direction. I was lucky: my rice bowl did not depend on refusing to understand Singapore or trying to trim my understanding into some manageable topiary shape. I was free to accumulate knowledge for its own sake and follow it down any mental alleyway that appeared. But then in 2007, the public campaign to repeal 377A of the Penal Code appeared, connected to a parliamentary petition. It was the first time I’d really noticed such a group effort in Singapore: openly naming an injustice, joining the dots to levers for change, and holding out a hand to the public, inviting us to take part. By virtue of being a human among humans, these actions said, you should have a say.
When I saw this, another vital piece clicked at last: wait a minute—gears turned slowly in my froggish brain—it was possible to do more than absorb news and complain fruitlessly… even in Singapore, it was possible to band together with others and act…! The sensations of frustration I had bottled up to no end could finally find not just release, but purpose.
**
I am a bookish person, so it should be no surprise that my story consists primarily of “…and then I read this essay and then I read that book and then…” I make absolutely no claim that this kind of reading—or forensic argument—is necessary for anyone else’s civic participation. Beliefs come in as many forms and through as many routes as there are believers.
The only broader claim I wish to make is this: if it seems strange to any of us that beliefs about ethics or society are reasons to act, it is only because we live in a profoundly skewed landscape, where the autonomous phenomena of human inquiry and connection have been cut off over and over. Indeed cutting them off has become a reflex for many, we will censor ourselves and one another without any specific threat of reprisal. Any strange new tendril of possibility is alarming. If you have only ever lived in sterile conditions, every plant looks like a weed. But we do not need to live and die in the narrow confines of anti-democratic and nationalist myth, mistaking the high walls of the well for the wider world.
The natural inclination of humans—the mode of being that emerges anywhere it is not actively suppressed—is a search for knowledge and engagement, to understand those we live among and to negotiate better arrangements between ourselves. This sort of pursuit, I contend, is fundamental to the type of creature we are, as much as the hive is for the bee or the dam for the beaver. It is not always done well, but the more we come to know its rhythms, rather than shunt them aside, the better we can seek harmony in its outcomes. Listen to the rain. We do have seasons, and the season for change has come.
[1] See Feroz Khan and Al Lim. “Connecting public and planetary health: Transition virtues for a green COVID-19 recovery.” Academia.sg. 7 July 2020; and “Learning to Thrive: Educating Singapore’s Children for a Climate-Changed World.” Eating Chilli Crab in the Anthropocene. ed. Matthew Schneider-Mayerson. Singapore, Ethos Books. 2020.
An earlier version of this essay was sent by Ethos Books to readers who pre-ordered Jolene Tan's second novel, After the Inquiry, in March 2021.
Jolene Tan is a writer and editor from Singapore, who lives in the UK. Her published work includes the novels After the Inquiry (Ethos Books, 2021) and A Certain Exposure (Epigram Books, 2014), as well as short fiction in the Manchester Review. She has written numerous articles on equalities and human rights for publications such as New Naratif, The F Word UK, The Straits Times and Channel News Asia.
If you’ve enjoyed reading this article, please consider making a donation. Your donation goes towards paying our contributors and a modest stipend to our editors. Singapore Unbound is powered by volunteers, and we depend on individual supporters. To maintain our independence, we do not seek or accept direct funding from any government.