by Eric Feigenbaum
Among the many things America is wrestling with right now is what constitutes a level playing field? What are the elements of a society where everyone has opportunity? There are certainly multiple competing answers to these questions.
Like America, Singapore is multicultural and, in their view, multi-racial – although I would call it multi-ethnic. The main three ethnicities for Singaporean nationals are Chinese (of many sub-groups such as Hokkien, Teochew, Hakka, Cantonese, etc…), Malay and Tamil Indian followed by a longtail of very small minorities who get less focus like Sephardic Jews, Bugis and Peranakans.
Power and respect between the ethnicities was one of Singapore’s earliest challenges. In fact, Singapore wouldn’t be an independent country if not for it. Initially, Singapore was one state of the Malaysian Federation – which was as a whole expected to gain its independence from Great Britain in 1965. Only cultural and linguistic issues began to sour conversations within the new government. Looking at the Malaysian Federation as a whole, Malays were the dominant ethnicity and began to strongly insist on additional rights and privileges as the Bumiputeras – Sons of the Soil.
This was problematic for Singapore with a more than 70 percent Chinese ethnic population. Singaporean leadership was fine with Malay as the official language of what would become Malaysia, but felt that all citizens deserved equal rights and privileges. In short, the country should be an equal playing field for all.
This sticking point led the Malaysian Federation to expel Singapore within a month of Malaysia’s expected independence. Many felt it was a gambit to scare Singaporean leadership into submission. But to everyone’s surprise, including the Singaporean leadership itself, Singapore did not go crawling back to Malaysia, deciding instead to go it alone.
Deciding Singaporeans were citizens with equal rights didn’t solve many of the ethnic issues and tensions remaining. For example, there were large income and educational disparities between the Chinese majority and the Malay minority that comprised roughly 13 percent of the population at that time. Then, in a twist that further complicated things, the Tamil Indian minority of roughly five percent generally had better incomes and educations than the Malays.
We could spend pages, if not books analyzing all the reasons for these disparities – but in this column, just as it was in newly independent Singapore, there’s not enough time – the issue of the day was how to create a system everyone could buy into.
Singapore had always been governed by the British. The populations of its inhabitants had largely migrated to the open port city for work and a better life – although many of the Tamils were brought by the British, often to work in civil service roles. If one group had a larger piece of the pie – it was hard to claim that group had any special privileges or power – the British had been in charge and taken all the privileges for themselves. Everyone was an immigrant.
Singapore’s leaders ultimately concluded that a form of what we would call Affirmative Action was needed for the Malay population. Only instead of it being an admission of past misdeeds and prejudices of the majority – as it was in the United States – it was a statement that a segment of the population was not poised to economically perform in the way the others did.
That’s sort of shocking….
The Constitution of Singapore reads:
Minorities and special position of Malays
152.—(1) It shall be the responsibility of the Government constantly to care for the interests of the racial and religious minorities in Singapore.
(2) The Government shall exercise its functions in such manner as to recognise the special position of the Malays , who are the indigenous people of Singapore, and accordingly it shall be the responsibility of the Government to protect, safeguard, support, foster and promote their political, educational, religious, economic, social and cultural interests and the Malay language
To an American mind – or at least to my American mind – Constitutionally singling out one group of people as needing extra protection is quizzical. It has a ring of paternalism in it and in our culture, paternalism can be seen as another flavor of bigotry.
Here’s one of the ways founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew explained it during a 2012 session of Parliament:
We explicitly state in our Constitution a duty on behalf of the Government not to treat everybody as equal.
It is not reality, it is not practical, it will lead to grave and irreparable damage if we work on that principle. So this was an aspiration.
As Malays have progressed and a number have joined the middle class with university degrees and professional qualifications, we have asked Mendaki to agree not to have their special rights of free education at university but to take what they were entitled to; put those fees to help more disadvantaged Malays.
So, we are trying to reach a position where there is a level playing field for everybody which is going to take decades, if not centuries, and we may never get there.
Now let me read the American Constitution. In its Declaration of Independence on 4th July 1776, adopted in Congress, the Declaration read, in the second paragraph:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”…
Nowhere does it say that the blacks would be differently treated.
But the blacks did not get the vote until the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s with Martin Luther King and his famous speech “We Dare to Dream”. An enormous riot took place and eventually President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act, and it took many more decades before the southern states, which kept the blacks in their position, allowed the registration of black voters and subsequently even after that, to allow black students to go into white schools.
It was 200 years before an exceptional half-black American became president.
So, my colleague has put it: trying to put square pegs into round holes. Will we ever make the pegs the same? No.
You suggest to the Malays that we should abolish these provisions in the Constitution and you will have grave disquiet.
So we start on the basis that this is reality. We will not be able to get a Chinese minister or an Indian minister to persuade Malay parents to look after their daughters more carefully and not have teenage pregnancies which lead to failed marriages; subsequent marriages also fail, and delinquents.
Can a Chinese MP or an Indian MP do that? They will say: “You are interfering in my private life.” But we have funded Mendaki and Muis, and they have a committee to try and reduce the number of such unhappy outcomes.
The way that Singapore has made progress is by a realistic step-by-step forward approach.
It may take us centuries before we get to a similar position as the Americans. They go to wars – the blacks and the whites.
In the First World War, they did not carry arms, they carried the ammo, they were not given the honour to fight.
In the Second World War, they went back, they were ex-GIs – those who could make it to university were given the GI grants – but they went back to their black ghettos (in 1945) and they stayed there. And today there are still black ghettos.
These are realities. The American Constitution does not say that it will treat blacks differently but our Constitution spells out the duty of the Government to treat Malays and other minorities with extra care.
Very intentionally, this approach breaks the American paradigm. Lee Kuan Yew is saying we’re not all equal – but we’re going to create a level playing field because that’s the right thing to do. It’s both congruous and not with many of our Liberal assumptions.
Dr Kathryn Paige Harden is a University of Texas at Austin professor whose book The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters For Social Equality was a major success in 2021. Harden and Lee share the perspective that while we know more than 99 percent of our DNA is shared across humanity, we can’t pretend the small number of remaining genetic differences don’t confer different abilities, challenges, advantages and disadvantages. Harden’s view is that if there’s a gene that correlates to higher academic success in our education system as it exists, it’s not eugenics to admit that some kids will have an easier time learning. Understanding this gene can allow us to approach the kids with other genes or genetic expressions in a way that allows them to better succeed. She likens it to giving kids glasses. We don’t condemn short or near-sighted children for their deficiencies and tell them they’ll never succeed in school or life – we craft them corrective lenses and put them back in the game.
Harden – a liberal Democrat – feels the liberal establishment has a tremendous resistance to acknowledging genetic differences because of the great underlying fear of eugenics. Her rebuttal is that eugenics is racism dressed as science or pseudo-science – and we don’t have to allow our understandings of genetic differences serve racist ends. The goal of mapping and understanding genetics and its impact isn’t to create a class of elites and subordinate classes of underlings and outcasts – or to make arbitrary judgments about what is superior or inferior, but to find more tools like glasses that allow people of varying abilities to have a fair shake at success in life.
In Harden’s view, we can level the playing field – not by dragging anyone down, but by lifting up those who need it. What if people with certain genes don’t easily learn math the way we typically teach it, but they can learn it just as well via some other method? Would we not want to identify those in need and offer another curriculum and reach them?
Lee Kuan Yew and Harden would probably agree on a lot – only he offers fewer corrective lenses. In fairness, she’s a middle-aged researcher and psychologist living today and Lee Kuan Yew was a statesman, politician and lawyer who died in 2015 at 91 years-old. Harden probably comes at some of these issues with more tools. LKY’s primary prescriptive tool was providing special benefits and programs for Singapore’s ethnic Malays because he – and apparently enough people to frame a constitution – felt they weren’t in the position to compete with the Chinese and Indian-Singaporeans.
There are deep and abiding differences between groups. And whatever we do, we must remember that in Singapore, the Malays feel they are being asked to compete unfairly, that they are not ready for the competition against the Chinese and the Indians and the Eurasians. They will not admit or they cannot admit to themselves that, in fact, as a result of history, they are a different gene pool and they do not have these qualities that can enable them to enter the same race.
But what explains this in Lee’s view and probably most of the other founders of the Republic of Singapore? Here’s how he explains the difference between Chinese and Malay ethnics:
One is a product of a civilization which has gone through all its ups downs, of floods and famine and pestilence, breeding a people with very intense culture, with a belief in high performance, in sustained effort, in thrift and [the other] by nature with warm sunshine and bananas and coconuts, and therefore not with the same need to strive so hard. Now, these two societies really move at two different speeds. It’s like the difference between a high-revolution engine and a low-revolution engine. I’m not saying that one is better or less good than the other. But I’m just stating a fact that one was the product of another environment, another history, another civilization, and the other is a product of another, different climate, different history.
In the context of Singapore’s independence, the political and economic plans developed to get Singapore out of the crisis in which it was born meant the government was asking everyone to work hard – at jobs they might not have been previously doing or never would have chosen. It’s imaginable that Malays might have felt the Chinese and Indians were pushing actions and even values they didn’t share. Their idea of success or quality of life could well have been different.
Taking disparate groups of people and setting a common goal everyone will accept is no small feat – especially on a 284 square mile island with 1.9 million people (in 1965) and neither sufficient agriculture or water to support the population. From the its first moment of independence, Singapore was in an existential crisis. So, some very hasty decisions had to be made. What made them unusual and exceptional was that Singapore’s leaders handled short-term problems with an eye on a long-term path to development. They were done with ambition, not just desperation.
Those early 1965 choices – and everything that came thereafter – involved a vision of economic success that resonated with the Chinese majority and Indian minority. In 2010, looking back at Singapore’s early days, Lee Kuan Yew said:
We could not have held the society together if we had not made adjustments to the system that gives the Malays, although they are not as hardworking and capable as the other races, a fair share of the cake. Their lives are improving, they have got their own homes, more are receiving tertiary education and becoming professionals in various fields. They’re improving because they see their neighbors pushing their children in education and so that helps.
What to do with this statement? In the same stroke as calling Malays less capable, Lee also defends a policy of equity and inclusion that has worked to Singapore’s overall benefit. Singapore’s economic ascension has brought people in all citizen ethnic groups with it. America has not had comparable successes.
The liberal American paradigm has always maintained we’re all the same – we have just been born into different situations and levels of opportunity.
Warren Buffet summed it up like this:
Imagine that it is 24 hours before you are going to be born and a genie comes to you. The genie says you can determine the rules of the society you are about to enter, and you can design anything you want. You get to design the social rules, the economic rules, the governmental rules. And those rules are going to prevail for your lifetime and your children’s lifetime and your grandchildren’s lifetime.
But there is a catch
You don’t know whether you’re going to be born rich or poor, male or female, infirm or able-bodied, in the United States or Afghanistan. All you know is that you get to take one ball out of a barrel with 5.8 billion balls in it. And that’s you.
In other words, you’re going to participate in what I call the Ovarian Lottery. And that is the most important thing that’s ever going to happen to you in your life. It’s going to determine way more than what school you go to, how hard you work, all kinds of things.
He’s right. All of that is extremely true and impactful. It’s generally where the American liberal story ends. Lee Kuan Yew – who was friends with Buffett – and Kathryn Paige Harden like to point out there’s more to the Ovarian Lottery – the DNA itself. And it too matters. We are a product of the luck of where we’re born, to whom we’re born and all of society’s rules. We’re also a product of the genes our parents give us and just as we all have various talents, we all have each our own challenges. It’s another way to frame nature vs nurture.
In 1998, Lee Kuan Yew offered this more nature-oriented conclusion:
I started off believing all men were equal … I now know that’s the most unlikely thing ever to have been, because millions of years have passed over evolution, people have scattered across the face of this earth, been isolated from each other, developed independently, had different intermixtures between races, peoples, climates, soils.
You take the American Red Indian. He is genetically a Mongolian or Mongoloid, the same as the Chinese and the Koreans. But they crossed over, according to the anthropologists and the geologists, when the Bering Straits was a bridge between America and Asia. But for a few thousand years, in Asia, they had invading armies to-ing and fro-ing, huge infusions of different kinds of genes into the population from Genghis Khan, from the Mongols, from the Manchus, God knows how many invasions. And in the other, isolation, with only the buffaloes, until the white men came and they were weak and defenseless against white men’s diseases and were eliminated. So, whilst they were identical in stock, origin, they ended up different.
I didn’t start off with that knowledge. But by observation, reading, watching, arguing, asking, that is the conclusion I’ve come to.
This is something which I have read and I tested against my observations. We read many things. The fact that it’s in print and repeated by three, four authors does not make it true. They may all be wrong. But through my own experience, meeting people, talking to them, watching them, I concluded: yes, there is this difference. Then it becomes part of the accepted facts of life for me.
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