In memory of greatness
It’s almost a general truth that generation after generation, people tend towards mediocrity, in the stature of their accomplishments and the strength of their character.
Examples abound in literature and the written word. Genesis 5 has the pre-flood patriarchs living about 900 years on average. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, in its large-scale structure (but I’m not a LOTR fan and my memory could be wonky) deals with the passing of the age of Elves and the coming of the age of Men. Michael Ende’s Neverending Story is about the decay of the realm of Fantastica (the spread of “the Nothing”); similarly The Magician’s Nephew (the first Narnia book) has Queen Jadis from an older, dead world coming to London and messing up.
(Incidentally CS Lewis, as narrator, often inserts his own commentary on the more mundane action of the story, for instance “she (Polly) was given dinner with all the nice parts left out and sent to bed for two solid hours. It was a thing that happened to one quite often in those days” – and through that he makes a clear distinction between the time of the narration and the time of the action – ”those days”. But I digress.)
Dr Goh Keng Swee passed away 10 days ago, and was immediately remembered as a giant of a person. Quite rightly so. I was surprised that Temasek Review put out an article “Why Singaporeans do not owe Goh Keng Swee or other PAP leaders a ‘debt’ of gratitude” which to my mind bounded on historical revisionism. It was at the very least rather petty to politicise the whole thing, given that the guy’s dead. Some points are valid or at least worth consideration, but TR should have had the decency to leave a seemly interval between his death and running that article. And I don’t buy their “PAP propaganda” spiel, just like the way I don’t buy most of the stuff that passes for commentary in ST – I resent that their pieces are uniformly and predictably biased, which is an insult to the discerning reader.
But I’m not so much thinking about his achievements, as wondering why there is such a tendency to mediocrity. I think it’s perceptible in many areas – school exams always seem to be getting easier; politicians make larger boo-boos more often these days; and of course decay is a favourite theme in literature (especially fantasy – which is about the only genre that explores story arcs on the scale of generations).
If this is indeed the case, what’s the reason for it? Why is it that we had such people as Dr Goh, S. Rajaratnam, LKY, David Marshall, while now we simply don’t seem to have people of equivalent calibre (in a population more than twice the size)? I think this is worth examining, because as trends go this one is particularly alarming for the quality of the political leadership we’re going to get in a few decades’ time.
I have no answers but a few guesses – partially reassuring.
- Eulogies are invariably glowing, glorified affairs; it’s a given that they put a positive gloss on everything a person has done.
- The crop of post-independence leaders were taking over at a low point in Singapore’s development; naturally there were more avenues and opportunities for development then compared to now, and since we’ve come so far their achievements are also bathed in the same light of glory. To my mind this does not quite address the objection that many other post-colonial states failed to achieve similar trajectories of development despite starting from a similarly low level.
(However it does present an interesting (though irrelevant) form of observer bias – a well-educated observer living in a state of material well-being is more likely to be living in a country where, at some point in the past, good leadership has emerged that has brought about the current state of affairs.) - People’s achievements are built up over a career spanning decades – most of the political leadership are still in the prime of their career and it’s understandable that their accomplishments aren’t of the same magnitude as the founding fathers. (But this seems to be too charitable in that it relieves the current leadership of the pressure to excel.)
I hope I’m wrong about the tendency to mediocrity, and somewhere out there there’s an answer that I just haven’t stumbled across.
