He turns
and leaves. I make my goodbyes to his two hard-working and loyal
aides and run into a security guard in the hallway. He is to whisk me out of
Istana and into the
hotel car.
This takes all of five minutes. Istana is either the biggest small government building I’ve been in, or the smallest big one.
But Istana is air-conditioned big-time, and so is the waiting car. Air-conditioning; it’s everywhere in Singapore, thank you, Minister Mentor. One wonders what’s next: outdoor air-conditioning? It is one of the first things the Masterful Mind himself decreed had to be added to government offices, many decades ago, when almost all of Southeast Asia was sweating from the perfervid emissions of the region’s swamps, undulating deserts and Lawrence of Arabia sun.
Smart, very smart. Before long, government workers were staying late, especially if their homes weren’t yet so outfitted. Working for the government became, well, the cool thing to do!
You slide gratefully into the back seat and feel the welcoming waft of refurbished air hit you like a wet towel of chipped ice. The car pulls out of the mansion archway and rolls down back Edinburgh Road for the short ride back to the Shangri-la. I wave to the same two guards still at the entrance compound. They wave back. We’re friends.
I allow a residual reserve of trapped, pre-used State Room air
to escape my insides. The two afternoons with Lee are complete, on tape, in the
book. This is done. It is all done. He gave of himself
as good as he was able, I do honestly believe that.
But a part of me wishes it were not over.
This guy is the Clint Eastwood of Asia, a definite straight shooter. But now, how can I put it all together? How can it possibly be gathered all together?
There is only one way. One last time, we will return to the Isaiah Berlin theme of the great man/woman with many ideas for survival (The Fox), as contrasted to the great man/woman with one colossally smart idea or overriding linked set of ideas for survival (The Hedgehog).
Which one is he? Or is there yet a third category that Berlin missed: Beyond the Fox or the Borderline Hedgehog?
Here’s where we can come down on this: Lee Kuan Yew’s unswerving opposition to having any grand ideology or philosophy pinned on his forehead is on one level understandable, but on another, rather suspicious.
Regarding the former, consider this: that in the last century so many countless lives and souls have been ruined, and in many cases brought to a cruel end, because of blind obeisance to some One True Idea. LKY wants no part of being that kind of strong leader.
Rather, it is the dance of brilliant ideas that mesmerizes him, not some goofball, goose-step dance of the devil. Not remotely is he some crackpot Pol Pot, nor some hair-brained ‘Little Hitler’.
But he is one Strong Man, that’s also for sure. The most he’ll let me and the late Berlin do to him—or, arguably, for him—is to allow us to stick the ‘Fox’ label on his forehead. That, you notice, he did give us. But he perhaps unwittingly gave us no more than that.
Yes, on one level, Lee is the original political street fighter, the Foxy survivalist, who, like the great Muhammad Ali, floats like a butterfly (words and speeches, invariably first rate) and stings like a bee (don’t get on his Serious Bad List or he’ll maneuver you into a corner, sue your brains out and you’re done for).
This is the obvious part of the man; this is what you see at work. I give you Lee Kuan Yew, the Fox of all Foxes.
But on another level, that’s just not enough, at least for me.
Look—too many ambitious, intellectually overarching speeches have been delivered, often triggering awe and often enough standing ovations. And—gosh!—consider that his own autobiography (two immense volumes) is almost as lengthy as Winston Churchill’s. Think about that.
And how many mere tactical Foxes bathe comfortably in the pages of Plato, Toynbee, Huntington, et cetera?—the way many of the rest of us read the sports pages of the daily newspaper?
Solving the mystery of LKY is important not simply because Lee
Kuan Yew may be the second coming of Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan) meets St. Thomas
More (Utopia)—though that’s not
a bad way of looking at him.
No, we must push on with our inquiry because his notable personality—brilliant, abrasive, tempestuous, successful, short-tempered, daring, even dangerous—may tell us something valuable about the nature of political man/woman, about the nature of political leadership, and about the nature of what we are going to need to survive the challenges ahead.
Pushing on further, deeper: supposing we liken Lee and his original People’s Action Party team to an Asian version of America’s own founding fathers. Their motive, in each instance, was to establish the best possible governmental structure and environment for their new country. But talk the democratic talk though they surely did, more or less sincerely (just don’t ask too many questions about Jefferson’s slaves, et cetera, et cetera), their credentials were elitist in the extreme: Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin and Monroe (and et cetera, et cetera) were right-off-the-street commoners, right?
Sure, just like Nelson Mandela is just another run-of-the-mill Xhosa tribesman.
So what do America’s founding fathers have in common with modern Singapore’s founding father?
They are all elitists with a democratic cause: to improve the lot of as many of their people as possible.
So there has to be a big Hedghogian idea lurking inside Lee’s head that he wants to keep private. There is, and it is this: sustained and sustainable progress is possible only when a gifted, empowered elite is in more or less complete control of policy. The complete corollary to that is his belief that politics that includes significant decision-making by the unqualified—or by the well-organized narrow interests, the lobbies—is the enemy of superior public policy. This leads to the third forbidden thought: that democracy, at its one-man, one-vote purest, is almost always the enemy of a practical, here-and-now, best-we-can-get utopia.
Please note: these thoughts are my extrapolations, not Lee’s own words. Every word in this book that is directly attributable to him, he not only said, he also reviewed later on to make sure it was down exactly in the style he wanted. He took only a few things out, not wanting to embarrass Singapore. I had no problem with that.
But you and I have a right to take what a great leader says and use it to improve our own understanding and draw our own conclusions. Lee will, could and probably should deny what I have said above. I also will have no problem with that. He may even be right about himself.
But I doubt it.
Here’s why. Lee’s sole motive was never just power, never only political domination of his country. That would not have been enough; the Confucian in him would have known of his shortfall of character, for he is not an insincere human being.
His motive was to show the world—and let me say it again, for emphasis: for all the world to see—that a Chinese leader and his Confucian people could in a united spirit do the governance job as well as anyone, better than most, and maybe, somehow, better than anybody!
Such an assertion would seem like quite a stretch to anyone examining the inferior level of governance in the world’s largest Chinese country, right? That’s the whole point; that’s why, when giant China’s maximum leader visited Southeast Asia in 1978, which Southeast Asian country had the most impressive set of achievements to show Chairman Deng? It sure wasn’t mostly Malay Malaysia!
What’s more, Lee and his elite and his people, reflecting Confucian acceptance of ‘Father Knows Best’, did not stop there; they decided to take it one phenomenal step further. Not having a Shanghai—not to mention an India or, indeed, a China—to have to govern (who, after all, was up to that impossible task?), they could imagine Singapore becoming a very model of contemporary governance at its best: using only the ‘best practices’, achieving maximum equity for all, constant striving for progress, all but electrocuting corruption (period), and maintaining the threat of Hobbesian law and order one inch below a cosmopolitan surface (all the while trying to give the impression that Singapore was just a Chinese Sydney).
So here was the post-modern Confucian Utopian dream: Singapore could indeed become like a (political) garden of Istana. You plant different varieties, give them proper observation and care, weed out the ones that just won’t grow no matter how hard you try, and over time give birth to a glorious garden-variety of all kinds of public policy ideas and programs, from the celestial to the mundane (citizens are bilingual, congestion pricing, no gum sticking, we-cane-your-butt-if-you-get-out-of-line, everyone-gets-good-health-proper-education-home-ownership, et cetera, et cetera).
So how do we best describe or depict this Garden of Political Istana?
We all know that classic heavenly utopias do not really exist on this polluted planet. And some alleged utopias are nothing but flaw-ridden. The Soviet rendition of heaven-on-earth was most often a hell-on-earth. Fidel Castro may have had the best of intentions 50-plus years ago when his band of ideological communists swept down from the mountain and seized Cuba; but in due course their utopian ideology and Stalinist governance made everyone (except the party elite) more or less equally … poor. And whatever we might say of Mao Zedong and his Worker’s Paradise perhaps, well, at this point, it is better left unsaid. Then there’s Pol Pot’s hellhole Cambodia … and on and on.
By contrast, Lee Kuan Yew walked the walk of utopian-inspired governance better than so many others. With enormous effort, he pieced together, layer by layer, a skilled governing elite (like a Plato, but advised by Machiavelli)—encompassing all the important professions, not just governmental—that pushed his country to the globe’s top league of accomplished economies. And with remarkable self-awareness he sought to avoid the poison of purist political and economic ideology that undid otherwise great men like India’s Nehru, without descending into the creepy cronyism and crippling corruption characteristic of so many other egomaniacal regimes around the world.
He, his inner elite and his people did all this while hewing in an almost intimate way to two political ideas. One was the vision of Plato, elevated to the scale of a nation-state, and the other was the hard-nosed methodology of Machiavelli.
It seems to me that Lee Kuan Yew is where Plato meets Machiavelli—in the special land of Confucius. But did it work? It mostly has, and is. Had he been nothing more remarkable than a Machiavellian thug, his country would have descended into mere cynicism and manipulation; just the former, and the whole ambitious neo-utopian project would never have gotten off the drawing board. But using (when available!) scientific methods of policy and governance, maneuvering into power a highly educated and motivated elite, and scaring the living hell out of anyone who stood in his way, including, potentially, a media that might get into trouble-making or agenda-setting, Lee Kuan Yew achieved pretty much what he set out to do.
Think about that: for all the hot air of politicians, for all the complex modeling and intellectual posturing of academics, for all the high-minded moral statements of the moralists and activists, Singapore took it all in, worked itself to the bone, and got a whole lot of it done.
Utopia of course comes from a Greek word and it can mean ‘no
place’ or ‘doesn’t exist’. The adjective ‘utopian’ is often used to suggest
implausibility, if not impossibility. The plural ‘utopians’
can be used to mean ‘starry-eyed dreamers’. And surely one citizen’s utopia is
another citizen’s hell.
Singapore is certainly no utopia for drug dealers or drug users; it’s anything but heaven on earth for opponents of the governing party and government. Among other privileged acolytes you find preening in the West, criminal trial lawyers are given a much less rope in Lee’s Singapore. First Amendment absolutists will find no utopian joy in the generally subtle but clearly limiting red lines placed around the news media.
So, one way or the other, we agree, earth has no utopia. Singapore resides on the planet earth. Therefore, Singapore is no perfect utopia.
So what is the next best thing? And what should we call it?
The thing itself may well be Singapore itself, faults and all. It is this era’s Neo-Utopia, a living example of getting a place into as utopian a shape as is humanely possible.
That is Lee’s achievement. Lee is a Pragmatic Confucian Neo-Utopian. That’s the very big idea: Singapore as a very small place that became a very big deal.
Yes, it’s not perfect. No real-world Utopia is. But maybe we need to start being more realistic about what we should expect from our neo-utopias, if we want to recognize them for what they have to offer. For what was done in Singapore, over a mere half dozen decades, had to have been the work of some kind of Hedgehog.
Absolutely.