Lobotomized nation June 15, 2006

I REMEMBER again something Oliver Sachs wrote. Sachs is the famous neurologist whose writings have inspired a number of movies, including “Awakenings,” “At First Sight,” and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat.” His case that I remember reading about had to do with an ex-hippie who could not remember anything after a few minutes. He was living completely in the present, having no memory of things that had just happened to him.

The man was diagnosed to have suffered a trauma in his frontal lobe -- possibly the result of psychotropic drugs -- and was exhibiting the same symptoms as patients who had undergone lobotomy, or the removal of the frontal lobe of the brain. In the past, lobotomy had been prescribed for excessively violent criminals, which succeeded in pacifying them. But only at the equally criminal price of robbing them of their memories. The reason they became pacific was because of that -- they had no past, they had no future. They had nothing to bother them, they had nothing to look forward to.

I did say in a couple of columns in the past that I thought we were a lobotomized nation, a nation that lived pretty much in the present. It’s as if we too had the frontal lobes of our brain removed, rendering us unable to remember even more recent events. We have no past and no future. We merely drift by in the present.

Last Monday offered fresh evidence of it. Interviewed by reporters after the flag-waving ceremonies in Kawit, Cavite, several kids who participated in the pageantry of Independence Day were at a loss to answer questions the reporters posed to them. One knew what the symbols in the flag represented but did not quite know what the importance of Kawit, Cavite was. Another knew June 12 marked the day when the Philippines declared its independence from Spain but did not know when that happened. Still another said they were just required to be part of the celebrations.

The mayor who appeared quite embarrassed lamented that, true enough, many Caviteños were not greatly aware of the history of Cavite. But God in heaven, this wasn’t just the history of Cavite, this was the history of the Philippines. I myself wasn’t entirely surprised by it. Many Filipinos can’t even remember the two Edsas anymore. The martial law babies can’t remember martial law, or want to know about it. And heaven knows if we still remember the War.

I suspect that even if the reporters had posed their questions to our public officials, elected and non-elected, including the non-elected holding elective office, many of them might not have been able to answer. If we have declared independence at all, it would seem to be only from our past.

Of course, like morality or the sense of right and wrong, history or the sense of continuity is bound to be dismissed in these cynical times, particularly by a cynical government, as of little practical importance to the nation. “You can’t eat sovereignty,” as the people who demanded the retention of the US bases said then. They eventually ate their words.

The consequences of being a lobotomized nation are pretty much the same as the consequences of being a lobotomized individual. You have no past, you have no future. You have nothing to bother you, you have nothing to look forward to. “Let’s move on” is today’s equivalent of “You can’t eat sovereignty.” What it really means is, let’s drift aimlessly.

I’ve repeatedly written about the importance of emphasizing History in classrooms. Its practical value is immediate and immense. The reason we have a poor sense of country is that we have a poor sense of history, if we have one at all. We have no sense of belonging, we have no sense of rooted-ness, we have no sense of home. It’s not true that we are no better or worse than other Asian countries which also have a great number of their people leaving for other shores. Quite apart from the sheer difference in scale, there is the difference in attitude. Other people leave the land of their birth as a last resort, we do so as a first resort. Where is the sense in raising the quality of local education -- even if that were possible in these corrupt and inflationary times -- if you will only produce graduates who metamorphose into caregivers and hop on to the next plane to Canada?

But history has an even more immense practical value, even it isn’t as immediate and patent as the one above -- that is, you have no past, you have no present. You won’t be able to make sense of the present, having no signposts or landmarks to recognize the surroundings and know where you are -- which is often just back where you started.

June 12, 1898 isn’t unlike where we are now, for those with the eyes to see it, or the frontal lobe to remember it. It was the hiatus between Spanish colonial rule and the American one, between an old and moribund tyrannical rule and a new and resurgent one. A couple of months later, Intramuros would fall, but the Spanish would surrender not to the Philippine insurrectionary forces but to the nascent American occupational forces led by Admiral Dewey. By February the following year, the Filipinos would be waging another revolution, against what would prove to be a worse, if subtler, tyranny.

Not unlike what we’ve just gone through in the last five years or so, toppling an old and decaying tyranny only to fall under a new and far more vicious one.

Talk of the importance of history and most everyone will quote George Santayana’s famous aphorism -- that those who do not read their history are bound to repeat it. That is not a blithe platitude, that is a shrill warning. Repeating history isn’t just bad karma, which will condemn us to endless reincarnations as insects.

Repeating history is, well, having Marcos and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo for life.

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