/199/ Aufhebonus Bonus (June)
Added 2021-06-22 06:01:01 +0000 UTCWe take your questions, comments & criticisms.
On this Aufhebonus Bonus, we discuss whether unions are still capable of fighting for their members; the Arab-Israeli conflict at the End of History; a lot more on the 'PMC debate'; plus: whether Phil is "reductionist in the service of his own prejudices".
Comments
Hey thank you for your response to my pseudo-question! I’d written out a comment but it got deleted, but I’ll try and rephrase it succinctly. One thing that I think Singapore has done very successfully is that it has given people a feeling of civic participation - through the means you outlined (housing, people’s associations, etc.), but also more overt instances of institutional reincorporation. I think what sets this apart from somewhere like Hong Kong in particular is institutional ‘reincorporation’ includes young people the most, and avoids the antagonisms between institutions and youth who may well feel they don’t have a future. You see this in the institution of National Service (which, although a foreigner myself, my experience serving here suggests it’s just as much a civic rite of passage as a defensive posture), which certainly solves the problem of disaffected and unemployed young men for at least two years. This also acts to quell antagonisms between civil society and law enforcement to a significant extent (given say, how much of the police force is made up of conscripts, which for a young person in a small country may very well be your neighbours, classmates, and friends). Another means is a rigorous education system that theoretically channels at least a portion of “the best and brightest” into the civil service and broader public sector, via a particularly generous system of scholarships and awards. Government scholars, after going abroad to study PPE at Oxbridge or the Ivy League or whatever else, will return to Singapore and be bonded to the public sector for a fairly lengthy amount of time. While this is a privileged and small group, the more radical class vanguard of change you saw in Hong Kong was, broadly, pro-democracy, western-educated, university students. Young people in Singapore for a host of other reasons (but primarily a lack of any sort of material urgency), feel that they have a future here in a way I suspect most young people in Hong Kong don’t.
Nicholas CLARK
2021-07-09 02:40:01 +0000 UTCMany thanks for commenting on my comment about the Endnotes Collective episode. I have to say I thought there were several moments in this episode where I perceived the outlines of the ten points from a ‘Bungaist Manifesto’, although I don’t think this is the space to synthesise this. The one thing I would say is that from those moments it seems a long-term project, one that at my age I am unlikely to see many fruits from. On my mentioning AJP Taylor, he came to mind because the Origins book Phil talks about covers the same events as Carr’s Crisis, but written at a further remove and with less basis in direct participation. However, at least for the older layperson it might have been the more familiar text owing to Taylor’s televised celebrity, and I was curious about an expert’s possible comparison of the two.
Paul Brewer
2021-07-04 10:47:03 +0000 UTC
