Commentary: The 2010s – when tolerance and pluralism came under attack
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Commentary: The 2010s – when tolerance and pluralism came under assault
With the mass base of intolerance rising globally, Singapore needs to prepare to attempt to ride out some of what is coming, says Shashi Jayakumar.
People watch artists performing at an event to register their business organisation against hate and intolerance, at a public park in New Delhi, India. (Photo: REUTERS/Anushree Fadnavis)
06 Jan 2022 06:35AM (Updated: 07 January 2022 09:03AM)
SINGAPORE: When I squint back at these concluding 10 years and think about what it will be remembered for, what comes to mind is the opening lines of W H Auden'southward verse form September i, 1939, penned at a dismal time - the German invasion of Poland which marked the showtime of the Second World War:
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-2nd Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable smell of death
Offends the September nighttime.
Auden saw a decade of lost opportunities, freedom and democracy increasingly losing ground to narrow ethno-nationalisms; people roused by demagogues, and impelled to violence by ideology and political lies.
I wonder whether futurity generations will await back at the challenges of the 2010s and say the same things.
TERRORISM CIRCUIT CHANGING
The terrorism "circuit" – the space where academics, experts and practitioners commingle - is changing as attending spans, including of those who fund such work, are getting shorter.
Even though the Islamic State (IS) is not beaten in the battleground of the listen, still studying it, and terrorism in general, is important. Just at that place is the feeling, among those of us in the field of security studies, that nosotros tin motion on and address seemingly more than pressing issues like cybersecurity or disinformation.
This is reminiscent of the myopia we had in 2011. Recall the triumphalism nosotros had following Osama Bin Laden's killing and the concomitant sense that al-Qaeda was a spent force.
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Instead, we should be using this time to build deeper understandings of all sorts of trigger-happy extremism and its feedstock, intolerance.
I tell my own analysts who written report radicalisation nosotros cannot carry on as before. We accept to empathize society, ethnographic approaches, issues concerning tolerance and dialogue. And so possibly we might have something useful to say when IS ii.0 or new forms of radicalism come along, as they inevitably will.
THE MOOD MUSIC
The decade has seen in diverse places the cornball longing to recapture the (largely chimerical) onetime days and to restore the "pure" (usually monocultural) nation or a pure ideal. The growing narrative of the Corking Replacement being propagated by right-wing groups in parts of Europe of that the indigenous white Christian population is beingness replaced by immigrants abets this.
This is not something that exists simply at ground-level. People are egged on by leaders of different religious and political persuasions.
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This entire mesh becomes part of the mood music, which does not permit space for the other, for someone who looks, acts, thinks or feels differently or who has a dissimilar opinion. This is a very monochromatic point of view and is not healthy for pluralist societies.
Individuals whose lives are irradiated by social media – indeed whose validation comes from the interplay of their private and public, social media lives – are alienated from meaning and thereby seek information technology even more fervently and in different places.
What the French call anomie. Alienation, sense of worthlessness.
Sometimes, this sense of worthlessness can have on a more than serious dimension. For example, in the virtually contempo statistics released by the Great britain Home Office, the largest proportion of referrals in its PREVENT referral program concerns individuals at risk of radicalisation exhibiting ideologies which are unstable and not birthday clear.
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These individuals depending on what content they find online can shift betwixt unlike ideologies.
In Northward America, where right-wing supremacists' plots and attacks take eclipsed those of jihadist hue for some time, security agencies are now being forced to take niche groups like the Incels (involuntary celibates) movement – part of an online subculture who have been responsible for attacks in Northward America - every bit an actual viable threat. Oddball niche threats are metastasising.
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Those responsible may be pursuing violence in their search for meaning. But some, from their own point of view, may see themselves as changemakers or activists who have wearied all other non-violent means to get their point made.
INTOLERANCE
We've seen reciprocal radicalisation rear its ugly head in the W. The far correct radicals and Islamists feeding off each other in a negative and reinforcing spiral. Egged on past politicians, whose loyalties are to themselves, then to their party, and only then to their state (completely in the incorrect order).
We tend to discount this blazon of thing happening in Singapore because you don't really have a defined far-right feeding off issues like immigration or asylum seekers.
Merely the mass base of intolerance across the lath is unfortunately ascension. Y'all tin can feel it in the region. We can't escape this and it comes into Singapore, either through social media, ideas or people.
MOVING UPSTREAM
Nosotros demand to address the roots of this risky behaviour, some (but non all) of which conspicuously lies, far upstream, in intolerance.
The decade has seen important upstream work beingness done internationally – in mentoring people who are lost, who seek management, only who might i day fall into the "at risk-of-radicalisation" category. Some of the intervention needed for such individuals is not a direct counter-radicalisation i, but more than like the social work being done in areas such every bit prevention for delinquents.
Only should we not be going fifty-fifty further upstream?
Preserving mutual infinite is going to exist critical. In Singapore, nosotros still talk virtually resilience, understanding, tolerance and multiculturalism without sniggering. At that place is a diminishing grouping of nations similar this.
Young people in Singapore have of their ain accord come together to do this kind of work including the numerous interfaith dialogues and platforms we accept.
I have talked to these people – they are committed, they know what is at stake, and they are great to engage people, away from the crowd of people who usually turn up, in more personal and face-to-face interactions. Efforts such as these are going to be disquisitional in sustaining the boulder of diversity we have.
(DIS)INFORMATION
George Kennan, the starting time Director of the US State Section's Policy Planning Staff, observed: "Nosotros take been handicapped however by a popular attachment to the concept of a basic difference between peace and war, past a trend to view state of war every bit a sort of sporting contest outside of all political context."
Kennan wrote this in 1948.
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When it comes to disinformation and cyberattacks, there are no red lines, with states routinely impugning the sovereignty of others through disinformation and existent globe interventions.
We need an international treaty that conspicuously reaffirms what sovereignty means in the data age, but given the lack of international norms, we are not likely to even come close for decades.
In the concurrently, the states trying to shore themselves up confronting these threats will continue to play defence.
Besides many studies talk in a full general and airy fashion about the panacea. Serious studies are needed to sympathise what these actually are, how they can be introduced into societies, early, and what real result they have.
In this respect, funders and policymakers demand to understand that not everything that has value tin be measured. These things are difficult to measure and quite oft they slip in between interagency cracks, particularly when no one is looking, or, when we assume someone else is taking ownership.
In other locations, the constant attrition leads to poor political hygiene, enabling all sorts of things – groupthink, demagoguery, the manufacture of outrage, to proper name some.
The philosopher Sissela Bok, whose life's work has been the written report of lying and deception, observes that lies apply deception to narrow our choices in political societies. Lies near politics are therefore, she argues, the "most dangerous body of deceit of all."
Bok observes differences between states that understand the principles of veracity and honesty and those, on the other paw, that harness the energies of the state to the enterprise of lying. Such societies, she argues - where truth and falsehood are hopelessly jumbled – inevitably implode.
THE SINGAPORE MODEL
Singapore has been spared from a bang-up deal of the world'due south vicissitudes. Some people remember therefore that it has all the answers. It doesn't.
Singapore has always thrived in equilibrium and seen the globe prosper in such times. How can it counsel otherwise, even if it is targeted, as it increasingly will exist, I suspect for failing to accept sides?
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Strange dignitaries come up to us in the wake of domestic events tragedies as they are interested in the "Singapore model" of tolerance.
This is why events such every bit the International Conference on Cohesive Societies (ICCS) organised by the Due south Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) with the Ministry of Community, Culture and Youth (MCCY) are going to be very important in fourth dimension to come – nodes where experts, practitioners, religious leaders and youth ambassadors can come together in an unforced atmosphere, to share notes and experiences.
When the history books are eventually written, if people do indeed look back on this decade like they did the 1930s, I wonder what they volition say virtually states which prized tolerance, veracity and pluralism.
Singapore cannot avert all of what is coming. But we demand to think seriously about building a rugged generation, battening downwardly the hatches, and attempt to ride out some of what is coming.
As our outset prime government minister, Lee Kuan Yew, observed in 1965 talking about the Konfrontasi – which was a sort of political warfare mixed with bursts of kinetic action: "We've got to build up men and troops who can meet this kind of warfare – y'all know, constant harassing, abiding pressure, no real state of war as such but international thuggery. This is what it is. And we've got to train our men to come across this sort of state of affairs."
Shashi Jayakumar is the Head of the Heart of Excellence for National Security and Executive Coordinator of Time to come Issues and Technology at the S. Rajaratnam Schoolhouse of International Studies (RSIS) at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore.
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