One citizen who worries is none other than Lee’s daughter, Dr. Lee Wei Ling, the well-respected neurologist. I have never met her, but I want to, especially after reading her statement below—anyone would.
Here is an excerpt of a year-end message she wrote in 2007 for staff at the National Neuroscience Institute of which she is director and which was subsequently published in The Sunday Times of Singapore in January 2009. She gave it this lead-in: “My house is shabby, but it is comfortable.” It went on thusly:
“While I worry about the poorer Singaporeans who will be hit hard, perhaps this recession has come at an opportune time for many of us. It will give us an incentive to reconsider our priorities in life.
Decades of the good life have made us soft. The wealthy especially, but also the middle class in Singapore, have had it so good for so long, what they once considered luxuries, they now think of as necessities....
A mobile phone, for instance, is now a statement about who you are, not just a piece of equipment for communication. The same attitude influences the choice of attire and accessories. I still find it hard to believe that there are people carrying handbags that cost more than thrice the monthly income of a bus driver, and many more times that of the foreign worker laboring in the hot sun, risking his life to construct luxury condominiums he will never have a chance to live in. The media encourages and amplifies this ostentatious consumption....
My family is not poor, but we have been brought up to be frugal. My parents and I live in the same house that my paternal grandparents and their children moved into after World War II in 1945. It is a big house by today’s standards, but it is simple—in fact, almost to the point of being shabby. Those who see it for the first time are astonished that Minister Mentor LKY’s home is so humble. But it is a comfortable house, a home we have got used to. Though it does look shabby compared to the new mansions on our street, we are not bothered by the comparison.
Most of the world and much of Singapore will lament the economic downturn. We have been told to tighten our belts. There will undoubtedly be suffering, which we must try our best to ameliorate. But I personally think the hard times will hold a timely lesson for many Singaporeans, especially those born after 1970 who have never lived through difficult times. No matter how poor you are in Singapore, the authorities and social groups do try to ensure you have shelter and food. Nobody starves in Singapore....
Being wealthy is not a sin. It cannot be in a capitalist market economy. Enjoying the fruits of one’s own labour is one’s prerogative and I have no right to chastise those who choose to live luxuriously. But if one is blinded by materialism, there would be no end to wanting and hankering.
After the Ferrari, what next? An Aston Martin? After the Hermès Birkin handbag, what can one upgrade to? Neither an Aston Martin nor a Hermès Birkin can make us truly happy or contented. They are like dust, a fog obscuring the true meaning of life, and can be blown away in the twinkling of an eye.
When the end approaches and we look back on our lives, will we regret the latest mobile phone or luxury car that we did not acquire? Or would we prefer to die at peace with ourselves, knowing that we have lived lives filled with love, friendship and goodwill, that we have helped some of our fellow voyagers along the way and that we have tried our best to leave this world a slightly better place than how we found it?
We know which is the correct choice—and it is within our power to make that choice…. We should not follow the herd blindly.”
I like the mature sensibility of these thoughts, don’t you? Dr. Lee speaks well of, and with evident pride for, her father, but there is also a clear undertone of worry about the values-hegemony of materialism in Singapore that her father receives such proper credit for helping imbed. In her statement, another subtle point is made: that what we have in the present is not necessarily superior to what was had in the past, simply because it is contemporary.
So I ask: “Your daughter, the doctor, who is no slouch in the IQ department, as is widely known, wrote what I thought was a penetrating commentary in the context of, oh sure, Singapore has troubles and the growth rate is down and so on, but she wrote that it was time to stop judging everything so materialistically, raising the issue of Singapore’s core values. Did that strike a chord with you at all?”
Reflecting a flicker of cold emotion, Lee looks off into space for a minute, then turns, and quickly—speaking in a more rapid cadence than before, almost as if a dismissive lecture—says: “I would say that that’s only half-true, that if you are not making progress materially and you talk only the spiritual and the aesthetic side of life, arts, culture, you will fail because arts and culture is the result of a level of life that enables such people to develop those skills—leisurely skills, music, ballet, drawing, et cetera.
“So, you must have, you know, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; you must have your basic needs met before you can fulfill yourself, and the writers, the artists, I am not sure about writers, writers like Solzhenitsyn, the more the hardship, the greater his works. I mean, he went back to the Soviet Union after the fight was over against the communists; he didn’t write great works. Maybe he was older but…. But if you look at all the countries that produced art, literature, dance forms, art forms, they are all countries where they have reached a certain level of material comfort.”
But that isn’t her whole point.
There’s no denying the need to have a good solid roof over your head before you try getting fancy about much else. The Lee Wei Ling critique cuts deeper: it goes to the heart—if there is one—of any culture that calibrates its sense of accomplishment almost entirely with economic indicators and measurable standards. Statistics can mislead. Heck, Europe could jump-start its gross domestic product number simply by abandoning its tradition of lengthy vacations and confining its holidays to a maximum of two weeks. But who in Europe wants to do that?
Just like my own home country, Singapore can give the impression of desiring little more, in sum, than more of what it already has got. Dr. Lee proposes (as do others, in Singapore and around the world) a calibration of the good meaningful life that takes in more than just the addition of a new car or a better roof or a grander home.
There is an urge to find deeper meaning in any country or culture that superficially would appear to have almost everything—and then is still asking itself: but is ‘everything’ enough?
It’s interesting. A visitor to Singapore in 2007 would notice at the very top of the nonfiction bestseller list published by the authoritative Straits Times a book titled The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari. The title tells the story. One reviewer praised author Robin Sharma for capturing the persistent angst of the white-collar professional who wonders, among all her or his material acquisitions, if this is all there is to life. That seemed to parallel Dr. Lee’s concern. (At the same time, to keep some perspective, the number three book on the nonfiction bestseller list that very same week was Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires.)
It is the fashion today for governments and others to assess a
nation’s place in the world by referring to common, competitive measurements:
gross domestic product, per-capita income,
et cetera. But life should be so easy to calibrate! It is not.
As much if not more than any public figure I have personally interviewed over the decades, LKY knows that money is far from everything. His unwavering appointment and promotion philosophy emphasizes intelligence and personal achievement over wealth and acquisition. For decades he has lived in the same relatively humble abode. Decades ago he spoke eloquently and creatively about the need for ‘cultural ballast’ to keep Singapore’s souls from drifting off onto a dangerous sea of mass cultural anonymity.
To this end, he emphasized the inculcation of original language, especially Chinese, even as the populace acquired or improved its English, the international language of business. Not many national leaders think more deeply about the role of culture in the fate of a nation.
But I’m not sure Father was listening to daughter this time with all his intellectual might. Maybe not enough of us older folks are listening (as my own daughter, now 23, has said this sometimes of me). Too often, we are overly defensive whenever the younger generation says something. Of course, we elders can’t help it. We want to have everything perfect for our children. It is the utopian instinct in us.
Dr. Lee’s worry was about the damage inflicted on our humanity by materialistic herd-like behavior. It is a profound and also subtle point, and she is undoubtedly right. Singapore is the country that has (almost) everything. In its own way, so is America. But maybe ‘everything’ isn’t really enough … or even everything.