The pursuit of nostalgic goals

Published in Mindanao Times 8/31/08

“The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealized past.” —Robertson Davies, A Voice from the Attic

Casual or not, talks in our family seldom happened. Not that we are all reticent or mute, it maybe just one of the few consequences when most members in the family work or study. You come home, they’re already asleep; they wake up, you’re still asleep.

But when talks do happen, they often drifted to my parents’ good old days. They would recount, enthusiastically, those times when their few centavos could already buy Nutri Bun (a bread triple the size of our pan de sal today), when prices of rice and other basic commodities were way below than today, etc.

Then these recollections would end up in a rather strange desire to revive those times. “Unta ibalik katong mga panahon nga barato pa ang mga palaliton, dili unta magkalisod ang mga tao karon,” my mother would sometimes yearn.

Politicians also have the same nostalgia for the things of the past. They are profoundly conditioned by social nostalgia in solving present problems. To solve the present problems, they’ll say, past programs/solutions, which were proved to be successful, should be revived.

Take, for instance, the country’s perennial problem on rice that has loomed large these previous months. There were various proposals to address the rice crisis. The Arroyo administration’s response was to import more and more rice, so that the country, ironically, became number one importer of rice in the world.

Another response from the people, including politicians like Butil party-list Rep. Leonila Chavez, head of the House Special Committee on Food Security, is to revive the Masagana 99 rice production program, as if it is the panacea to the rice crisis.

Masagana 99—masagana is Filipino for “bountiful” while 99 stands for the program’s goal of producing 99 cavans of palay per hectare (about five metric tons of palay)—was launched by former President Ferdinand E. Marcos on May 1973 to address the rice insufficiency problem of the country. It was claimed that under this program, the country did not only become self-sufficient in rice but an exporter of rice as well.

However, Solita Collas-Monsod, an economist, said that while there was indeed an increase in rice production over the course of the program, it is still questionable "whether the increase was due solely to the program itself."

Whether its justified or not, many people viewed it as a successful one. Hence, calling for the revival of Masagana 99 has become fashionable in these dire times.

This attitude—replicating past political, economic successes to solve the present problems—is what the late John Kenneth Galbraith, then Professor of Economics at Harvard, called “social nostalgia.” Social nostalgia, the erudite Galbraith said, is a desire for earlier arrangements which were perceived as “better,” and thus “should be reinstated.” He adds, “social nostalgia supports our continuing conviction that life can be simple and that difficult problems will yield to old and familiar rules and formulae.”

On the surface, it appears elegantly simple. The pursuit of nostalgic goals is driven by the canned wisdom that what worked in the past must also work in the present. But it is not always the case because change is the immutable law of nature. Factors that caused a problem do not remain constant. They vary over time and clime. And those charged in making solutions should know it.

They should break their habit of making knee-jerk responses to the problems besetting the society. Otherwise, they will become a herd of blind leading the blind.

Every problem has an appropriate solution. Solution, in principle, is meant to solve the problem. But if a solution is merely photocopied from the past—as though the past and the present are one and the same—it could be worse than the problem.

The sane thing every sane politician should do, together with the people, is to search for responsive, creative, and out of the box solutions that befit the problem. Solutions should not appear as though they are t-shirts made in factories—one size fits all. What if the parts do not fit? What if it fell short?

The task of crafting such solutions is surely difficult, but there’s no task so difficult we cannot do if we were to start doing it. Which calls to mind the Chinese proverb, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”