Almost a year ago my friend Leanne encouraged me to apply as a new writer for an online magazine for which she has been writing a column for years – 3 Quarks Daily. It appeals to academics, writers and intellectuals and offers a diverse set of topics. It’s not paid, which probably explains why every year or so they look for new contributors. These days, so many writers are discussing politics. Leanne encouraged me to offer something unique – and potentially something that would help me with the book on Singapore on which I’ve been slowly whittling away.
So I pitched “Lessons From Singapore” – which is kinda’ self-explanatory. I think Leanne and I both thought the series could last only so long before I would need to pivot to other topics – perhaps weaving in other cultures and experiences, possibly weaving in remodeling a house on a Greek island. Undoubtedly Leanne’s introduction helped – and I’m grateful for her encouragement and help because having a monthly column in something semi-professional has been a real joy.
To my surprise. I haven’t pivoted away from Singapore. The content keeps coming.
On my very first visit to Singapore in early 2004, one thing struck me immediately – this was not a normal place. It did not happen by accident. Singapore was very deliberate and intentional. Like so many Americans – even those who visit on business or pass through while traveling Southeast Asia – I knew very little about Singapore other than it was a former British colony that was an economically successful little bubble in a region of less developed countries.
A mixture of Chinese, Malays and Indians in not just a First World setting, but a clean, well-organized, technologically advanced one – wedged between Malaysia and Indonesia, just two degrees above the equator made no sense.
Although we never met, that’s when Lee Kuan Yew came into my life. There is a serious dearth of books on Singapore’s history or culture. The two most comprehensive biographies of modern Singapore were really the founding prime minister’s memoirs. Only Lee Kuan Yew’s work read less like a personal narrative than an explanation of what he created – which makes sense for a book entitled From Third World To First.
There were several things besides the history of Singapore I had yet to understand. First, there is no separating Lee Kuan Yew from Singapore. He became woven into the fabric of the 270 square mile island-city-state. Singapore isn’t a traditional country – it is a complex set of intricately designed systems. Accordingly, not a lot of people can explain both the systems and how they were developed.
I did know a little about Lee Kuan Yew – mostly that he was very well regarded in foreign policy circles including by almost every American President and Secretary of State since the Nixon Administration. LKY was as well regarded by Nixon and Reagan as he was by Clinton. Apparently, he was insightful about events around the globe – not just in his corner of it – and was frequently consulted about all kinds of geopolitical issues. Kissinger referred to LKY as “one of the great asymmetries of history.”
“As the decades went by, it was moving – and inspirational – to see Lee, in material terms the mayor of a medium-size city, bestride the international scene as a mentor of global strategic order.”
I would argue that Lee Kuan Yew was only able to be fully satisfied because he created a country – he didn’t just serve it. He would not have been happy with Kissinger’s job and probably not Nixon’s for that matter.
Reading LKY’s books was like getting a pair of glasses. When I returned to Singapore, I saw it completely differently. Not only did it make more sense, but it was deeply fascinating. What once appeared as kind of blah looking apartment buildings I understood to be the first of many publicly-built condos that were key to Singapore achieving a 94 percent homeownership rate. The ubiquitous ice cream sandwich stands in parks and other public places were part of a program to enable older, less educated people a way to earn a living. The web manicured foliage was cultivated to make Singapore appealing not just to its residents, but to potential foreign investors – to give them confidence in Singapore as a desirable place to do business. And these are just a few.
Singapore has achieved things like universal healthcare without a public option. It has a physical crime rate (ie theft or violence, not cybercrime or embezzlement) of 0.34 percent. The US physical crime rate in 2023 was 2.28%. Singapore’s per capita GDP is about $2,000 higher than America’s. And it has the highest passport power in the world with visa-on-arrival access to 193 countries including the United States.
Both Lee Kuan Yew and his country are liberal and illiberal at the same time. Singapore doesn’t shield the press from being accountable for libel when writing about a public figure – so LKY sued numerous publication and individuals for libel and slander. He would take the winnings and donate them to charity. Both the man and his country believe that not all people are created equal, but they all have the same right and are equally deserving of a shot at success. The Singaporean Constitution is embedded with what we might call Affirmative Action for the Malay population.
When it comes to LKY’s personal statements, the liberal-illiberal mix sometimes bordered on cringeworthy – almost as if he sometimes walked up to the line of what was acceptable just to define the territory. For example, in his books he on more than one occasion uses the word “niggardly” in its proper dictionary definition form – to mean ungenerous or sparingly. It has a Norse origin – completely separate from the Spanish origin of the N-word we all abhor. However, because of the word’s similarities, it’s fallen out of favor and in fact, there is a Wikipedia page on “Controversies About The Word Niggardly“.
LKY was also a little loose with the terms mongoloid and mongol. He referred to racial-ethnic groups with terms like American Red Indian and Yellow.
Then again, he once said in an interview, “I want to be correct, not politically correct.”
Lately, I’ve been researching Singapore and LKY a lot – both for the book and for upcoming columns. One of the challenges in finding sources is that much like the dearth of Singapore-related books themselves, the press was glued to LKY. They loved and hated him. His eloquence and intelligence commanded their respect and yet they hated how he would reduce the circulation of publications who refused to run corrections or how he sued them when they libeled him. And the press both loved and hated his fast and often witty comebacks that took them down a peg at times.
Margaret Thatcher once said, “Prime Minister, an hour’s talk with you is itself worth a journey half-way round the world and further still. There is no other world leader I have met in my time in office whom I have admired more for the strength of his convictions, the clarity of his views, the directness of his speech and for his vision of the way ahead.”
For this very same reason, whatever ambivalences they had about LKY, the press went to him – and almost exclusively him – for retrospective thoughts and evaluation of Singapore. Some of his most brilliant colleagues like Boon Keng Swee and RS Rajarathnam who helped found Singapore and govern it together across decades were not approached. They just weren’t as captivating.
So, as if I don’t write enough about Singapore and Lee Kuan Yew, he is ever more with me during this sojourn. One thing I’ve come to learn is how many opinions he had on so many things. Moreover – and this is probably how a lot of the Western press felt – he’s almost annoyingly insightful on so many topics. This is a recent favorite:
“When you have a popular democracy, to win voices you have to give more and more. And to beat your opponent in the next election, you have to promise to give more away. So it is a never-ending process of auctions—and the cost, the debt being paid for by the next generation. Presidents do not get reelected if they give a hard dose of medicine to their people. So, there is a tendency to procrastinate, to postpone unpopular policies in order to win elections. So problems such as budget deficits, debt, and high unemployment have been carried forward from one administration to the next.”
Notably, Singapore has a National Reserve made of both years of budget surpluses and investment of their accumulated reserves which generate increasing wealth for their government – the exact opposite of what the United States is doing.
I could spend a day and a half pasting insightful LKY quotes into a blog post. There are so many good ones.
However, recently I came across a collection of his thoughts and quotes on race, ethnicity and culture which have had me thinking. Like his use of niggardly or mongoloid, some of the quotes are uncomfortable – although not necessarily wrong or bad. Or are they? I don’t know. I keep reading them. What’s so unsettling? We now know that everyone on earth shares 99.9 percent of their DNA in common. For anyone with a liberal, equality-driven worldview, that’s a comforting number. The question is what the other 0.1 percent means – to what extent do our differences matter?
Not unlike Dr Kathryn Paige Harden 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 LKY share the perspective that we can’t pretend there aren’t genetic differences between people that confer different advantages and disadvantages. Harden’s view is that if there’s a gene that correlates to higher academic success in our current system, 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 now they’ll never succeed in school or life – we craft them corrective lenses and put them back in the game.
Harden feels there’s a tremendous resistance to acknowledging genetic differences among the liberal establishment because of the great underlying fear of eugenics. Her rebuttal is that eugenics is genetics mixed with racism. The goal of mapping and understanding genetics and their impact isn’t to create a class of elite and a class of underlings, 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 offer another curriculum and reach those people?
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 one prescriptive tool was providing special benefits and programs for Singapore’s ethnic Malays because he – and apparently a lot of people – felt they weren’t in the position to compete with the Chinese and Indian-Singaporeans. Let’s roll tape on that….
“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.”
So that leaves me with a tight feeling in my stomach…. Then he also says this on the difference between Chinese and Malays:
“One is a product of a civilisation 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 civilisation, and the other is a product of another different climate, different history.”
Ok, I feel a little better now.
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 uptight and bossy. I can imagine it not working well if a large group of Balinese were forced to work in a factory in Germany.
Then in 2010:
“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.”
Ok… social stability through opportunity…. the “capable” part is a touch queasy….. Let’s move on to some other “not wrong, but not altogether loving it” topics:
Now, we are into a stage of disgenics — not eugenics — where the smarter you are, the more successful you are, the more you calculate. And you say, look, yes, for the good of socially, I should have five children, but what’s the benefit to me? And the wife says, What? Five children? We can’t go on holidays. So one is enough, or at the most two. The people at the lower end — in our three-room flats, two-rooms — some of them have 10, 12 to 14 children.
So what happens? There will be less bright people to support more dumb people in the next generation. That’s a problem. And we are unable to take firmer measures because the prevailing sentiment is against it. But these are the realities. You cannot disapprove of it and say it’s a pity that it should work that way. That’s the way procreation has been structured by nature. And we are going about it in an obtuse and idiotic way.
Again, not necessarily wrong – but he certainly doesn’t sugar-coat anything. Also, that quote was from 1983. One thing he may not have foreseen is that as financial success swept across Singapore’s population, the birthrate declined across the board. There are no more 10, let alone 14-person families. Singapore is actually offering financial incentives for couples to have a third child. And then for the mother to go back to work.
Here’s another that also isn’t necessarily wrong, but I can’t help but cringe a little:
Industrial status can be achieved only if new value systems and behaviour patterns are grafted on the old. It is in part the difference between the more intense and exacting Sinic cultures of East Asia and the less intense and less demanding values of Hindu culture of South and South-east Asia, that accounts for the difference in industrial progress between Eastern and Southern Asia.
The softer and more benign Hindu civilisation spread through Burma, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, meeting the Sinic civilisation on the borders of Vietnam, hence the name, the Indo-China Peninsula. …
Gunnar Myrdal, in his “Asian Drama,” voluminously sets out the reasons for lower achievements amongst these peoples. He terms them “soft societies.” Their expectations and desire for achievement are lower.
Had he studied the Sinic civilisations of East Asia — Korea, Japan, China and Vietnam — he would have come to the opposite conclusions, that these were hard societies.
Of course this is a man who has a book called Hard Truths To Keep Singapore Going. He definitely was not afraid of hard.
Besides getting more of a sense of the many facets of Lee Kuan Yew as I research – and having to absorb all of them – I wonder if some of these quotes don’t affect me more because of where we are socially right now. It seems like part of what people were saying when voting in Trump was that they’re tired, if not worried about the progressive left. That most people are not open to an infinite number of genders. That more Americans than not don’t want their daughters competing in sports against people who are genetically boys or men because it isn’t a fair playing field and it changes the nature of the space. That lots of liberal-minded people don’t feel minors are in the position to make permanent, irreversible decisions about their bodies. And maybe most importantly, people want to have discussions about these things rather than feeling shamed for not going along with the progressive perspective.
I don’t think Lee Kuan Yew was Archie Bunker. Clearly, from what he did with Singapore, he was trying to provide the most success for everyone. he just didn’t feel everyone came with the same set of skills, beliefs and outlooks – and it’s okay to say so. Just as Kathryn Paige Harden feels like the bigger problem is trying to ignore disparities in order to wish them away – rather than approach them with kindness and ingenuity – finding everyone their right glasses.
On that note, I’ll let Lee Kuan Yew finish this blog post with a LONG quote from a speech to Parliament that I think better represents how he saw it necessary to point out disparities and to address them positively. This doesn’t make me uneasy in any way:
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.
