The FV project

The birth of Filipino Voices is a sign of great hope for Filipinos and democracy.

Personally, I view FV as, on the whole, an indigenous platform that poses varied challenges to certain traditional structures in our society that have stagnated the country. Within FV however serious dialogues or dialectics, if you will, pervade to guard the collective against one-track mindedness.

I stand to be corrected but let me cite a few examples.

For instance, the views in FV of our colleague Benigno can be encapsulated as representing the necessity of technocratic solutions to attain efficiency and thereupon the good society. My own views are quite the contrary. I hold that people-powered social movements are the most potent agents of change that could lead us to a just and democratic society. While I consider FV as one form or manifestation of such movements, Benigno is wont to dismiss them as barriotic “ocho-ocho” pursuits.

Benigno and I are nonetheless both critical of the system in place. But, again, whereas Beningo basically places the blame for the lack of relative progress in the country on the supposed small-minded attitudes, beliefs and values of the Filipino masses, I attribute the responsibility for such an unfortunate state of affairs to the lack of a sense of country and the lackadaisical entrepreneurial spirit on the part of the economic elites.

On another breadth, I find Bencard and DJB, who don’t see eye to eye on many issues (still fresh was their exchange on Darwinism which somehow also drove a wedge between the vocal secularists and sectarians in FV) as more or less partial to the political and legal systems we have borrowed from the Americans. In that sense, I consider them as “conservatives” (meaning, they are deferential rather than testy with those systems). On the other hand, I take the stand that Filipinos should be flexible in their attitudes to our existing institutions and open to opportunities of liberating themselves from those fronts and facets that don’t work or fit (if because of it I get the tag of being a “liberal,” I won’t mind).

Only recently, Madonna thought that one analysis I have shared in FV is Marxian perhaps because of the suggestion that the critique that we do of our society should embrace emancipatory goals (from power and other forms of domination). I took exception to Madonna’s keen observation (which was not wholly off on a tangent) by saying the post in question was rather about “legal realism” (alluding to the legal movement in the U.S. in opposition to the “classical legal thoughts” which supported big corporations against American workers and consumers).

Now, exchange is ongoing in FV about whether anonymity should be discouraged. On this prickly issue, Bert weighed in with the Jeffersonian axiom that government is best which governs least. Renato Pacifico was quite adamant in his opinion that any threat of ex-communication without due process (shades of presumption of innocence?) is hypocritical for a blogsite like FV. The exchange was triggered by DJB’s call for regulation of the “bal masque” (the masquerade ball) because he “resent(s) being attacked, or even merely being replied to, from the shadows of anonymity,” which is a “matter of personal honor, not only for me I think, but for many others.”

I have had my take on the issue of anonymity and the question I then found relevant was: “. . . couldn’t blogging and posting anonymously be preliminaries to more intelligent conversation with others? Unless the use of anonymity is motivated by pure ill-will, doesn’t the exercise allow us somehow to vet first our ideas internally from a different perspective before venting them outside into the realm of social intercourse?” And then, this rhetoric: “On the other hand, sermonizing and other forms of didactic speechifying (we do fall to it all too often, don’t we?) can be very solitary. So, when we exclaim “Goddam America,” “mind your manners, people” or “grow up or screw up” without expecting or welcoming a conversation (in the hope of coming to a consensus), can’t “trolling” be far behind?

BrianB once sent a post to FV’s Letters to the Editor to claim that he is a “paid blogger” and therefore to him blogging “is a livelihood”; he wrote that he manages about a dozen sites and plans “to go sailing” after a year. BrianB’s idea of blogging I thought is antithetical to the conception of FV which in other posts I have described to be engaged in “solidaric” and “uncommodified” production where what’s produced are relationships rather than goods and services and where communities could be built through collective knowledge and Bayanihan efforts.

The hallmark of FV if we go by what Nick, FV’s Editor not Chief, has in mind is “collaboration of a dysfunctional family” (in which, if I may add, the core is the family, not the dysfunction).

Let me go back at this juncture to Benigno because I like what he said here:

Just like a love affair that will go stagnant if it does not evolve and grow, FV needs to be constantly seen as a project. There are only so many movie and dinner dates, beach trips, and nightclubbing binges that can be had. Fun and carefree as that stage may be in a relationship, truly strong bonds endure when all parties at least see a possibility to evolve and grow beyond and upon what it’s currently achieved.

Indeed, the excitement has been on the rise from the get-go. But as if a paradox, the hope that’s expressed at the outset is somewhat tempered for the angst is always there that what’s begun as a self-generating vehicle for change towards the good Philippine society might end up being absorbed into the same mold FV may be trying to refashion.

The anecdote, retold by Nick citing James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, goes that the crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the weight of the ox better than any of the separate estimates made by cattle experts.

Is the Filipino Voices up to the task of weighing in the county’s many (splendored) problems?

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