Getting to innovation in the Philippines | The Society of Honor: the Philippines
Posted by The Society of Honor on October 19, 2020 · Leave a Comment
Analysis and Opinion
By Irineo B. R. Salazar
Benny Antiporda vs. UP scientists shows the how little recognition (applied) knowledge in the Philippines often has. Power often still seems to believe it is endowed with wisdom of its own. Appointing incompetents to high positions shows a cavalier attitude toward the functional specialization that is a key component of modernity, which I have tackled in a previous . Applied knowledge properly used by decision-makers who consult experts is also key to getting the , as the challenges of today are more than bayanihan moving a nipa hut.
WHAT PUTS THE HANDBRAKES ON THE PHILIPPINES
Cyberjaya in Malaysia
If one looks at Malaysia, which I saw as quite good in integrating tradition and modernity when I last visited there, or Indonesia, which has been very successful in modernizing thanks to Dr. Habibie who Karl mentioned in his article, one wonders what the hell the Philippines isn’t doing. There are attempts to get start-ups running; there is a BPO industry, even a small software industry. But there could be a number of things that prevent the country as a whole from truly taking off:
1) There are some who still have the mentality, as I described in an article. When my father was teaching and researching in Naples, a Filipina migrant told him “that sounds like a good job, how can I get into that”. Some don’t understand specialization.
2) Others have a certain disdain for applied knowledge. My father when I decided to study Informatics said “it is just a tool” and when I later said “many of my former batchmates in Philippine Science are engineers” he said “why just go for something that ordinary”. NHerrera, now you know that you are an ordinary person, although my often credentialist father MIGHT consider you a truly educated person as I recall you have a PhD as well. (grin)
3) Karl has mentioned in a comment once that some Congressmen in the Philippines treat experts like servants. “We treat you like ordinary person”, some Marcos loyalists told the after they hadn’t given Imelda a private concert, beating them up at the airport. Frontliners in the Philippines are often treated badly, even scientists at times as we see.
When my German mother told my Filipino father that feudalism was holding back the Philippines, he proudly insisted that Japan had industrialized from feudalism. Well, the difference is that Japanese respect all those who do high quality work, coming from an old tradition of artisanship which I think was ramped up into high quality engineering later on.)
4) Some see education as just a way to get a job and earn money.
The famous “rant” by Gege Sugue castigated, among others “You, who worked for corporations, managed departments and companies, who made your team do overtime work to finish your annual business plans, so that when you presented to your boss and his/her boss, they would approve your plans and budgets. Every MSExcel cell scrutinized. Every projection defended. Every datum analyzed. But you forgot all that managerial thinking, dumped on the institution that served you your MBA and voted for that incompetent, empty, noisy fool who said he would remove algebra from the curriculum, who said that he knew nothing about economics?!? What were you thinking? Were you even thinking?”
Well, a lot of Filipinos might see their job skills as something you do when you are on the job, when the boss requires it, but not as something they internalize as part of life’s skills. The mentality of a people who have served others for way too long. Who often learn stuff in order to pass – or to top if their parents are ambitious – their exams and then forget it after a while. How otherwise can Persida Acosta have had such a high placement in the bar exams?
Possibly that is why my father told me at the outset of my IT career that “anyone can do what you are doing”. Fortunately I moved up to SAP specialization where I could use the complex thinking my Informatics studies in Germany taught me.
SAP’s architecture is after all mainly by one of its founders, Prof. Dr. Hasso Plattner, and the highly innovative new database architecture of HANA is thanks to his own foundation. But an innovative country needs all levels, including the “ordinary” but respectable level I have now.
5) Filipino one-upmanship inhibits public information and even cooperation between experts and informed laymen. In , I have postulated that ex cathedra arrogance of some of the learned ones, especially those who talk down to the ostensibly less educated just like Dr. Edsel Salvaña often has done on Twitter, is due to friar influence.
A huge contrast to Dr. Salvaña is Prof. Dr. Christian Drosten of the Charité in Berlin, who is an international virus expert who DEVELOPED one of the first Covid tests but has been wonderfully good at explaining a complex subject matter to laymen in the media, raising awareness of the public that tests are needed, making them understand things.
6) Our carpenter Marcelino made high quality furniture from tropical wood, and my father liked to watch him do his work, which could have competed with quality Balinese export furniture. One skill my father had from school days was a bit of carpentry, so he was never a senyorito.
There IS an old artisanal tradition in the Philippines, but it never went beyond its origins.
Raiding, Trading and Feasting by Laura Lee Junkermentions that Filipino chiefs of old protected craftsmen as their good were valuable in the growing trade of the archipelago.
Unlike Japan and Germany, the Philippines didn’t ramp up its artisanal tradition! Why, why?
INCIPIENT CIVILIZATION, INTERRUPTED
Old Tagalog in the days of Sulayman even had a word of its own for one-fourth, saykapat, I recall reading in a book about those days. Today there is only kalahati for one-half and wamport for ¼. Tagalogs of then traded even with Japan, as there also were katanas in Manila during that time.
Fractions are needed if you have to weigh stuff you buy or the gold you pay it with, but the coming of the galleon trade meant the natives were relegated to mere menial work while Spaniards in Intramuros traded with the Chinese in what is now Binondo, a cannon shot away to play safe.
The “better” jobs the Spaniards offered to natives were subaltern in nature: scribes, sacristans etc., which could have been the root of subservience, when under, and totaldominance when boss. That mindset is not conducive to true innovation, as “ordinary people” never suggest improvements.
Lantaka swivel gun
Other parts of Asia were more organized, weren’t colonized that early, and I guess also were able to save a certain self-confidence from already existing and more extensive mastery of innovation. , Malay cannons used in Manila were originally made in the Majapahit empire, for instance.
Some centuries more and the Philippines would have been at a similar level, imitating and improving stuff from others due to increased trade and warfare. Competition drives progress. Not that the Filipinos didn’t have own innovations especially in boats, as necessity is the main driver of invention.
But the geographical location of the Philippines, as I mentioned in the article , meant it got the stimuli Malaysia and Indonesia got from outside with some delay. And those who came “out of the blue” in 1521 had a longer history of progress.
The Phoenicians were among those with the first alphabet in their area, syllabic but allegedly simplified from Egyptian hieroglyphics. The Greeks imitated and simplified that into the first “real alphabet” with letters. The Romans imitated and modified the Greek alphabet in their turn.
Same with organization – the ancient Greeks who razed Troy must have been underestimated by the certainly more organized mainlanders they invaded. About a thousand years later, the Greeks set out to colonize large part of the Mediterranean. The Romans were basically peasants on donkeys then. Germanic tribes were looked down upon by Roman Tacitus, yet Arminius decimated three Roman legions on his home turf, much like Lapu-Lapu was to kill Magellan on his home turf of Mactan. Later they occupied much of Western Europe, followed by the Vikings from even further in the cold north.
Arabic displaced Greek in many a place when Mohammed set forth with his new religion. Arabs kept a lot of Greek knowledge the Europeans had forgotten during the Dark Ages. Arabs invented algebra, but using an Indian mathematical concept – that of zero, and were far ahead of the Iberian peoples. But the Iberians threw the Moors out of their peninsula and themselves set forth to conquer, using improvements on Arab navigation technology to reach the Moluccas first and the Philippines later.
Geography (all these places aren’t too far) and competition played a role in that long development. Being close by also meant that the neighbors who were behind weren’t TOO far behind and COULD catch up quickly. But Germanic tribes also took around half a millennium to catch up with Romans.
And of course, history has often been a gang fight between peoples, and gang fights mean bragging and intimidation. Prof. Xiao Chua mentions how old colonialist books called the Philippines “Lesser Asia” and at times emphasizes that Filipinos weren’t “bobo” (stupid) as that wording could imply. Dear Xiao, we learned to think of ourselves as “bobo” (and call others bobo like Atty. Gadon does, whom you imitate so marvelously) because in colonialism, “superiority was mostly a matter of bluff”, as an English colonizer once said. Many gang fights start with intimidation and might end there. Luck and geography often make a huge difference. But all is NOT lost. We aren’t pushed to the mountains like the Quechua of the old Inca Empire in Peru. We aren’t a minority like Hawaiians in Hawaii now.
WHAT CAN BE
UP Ayala Technohub
Joe wrote : Filipinos must start thinking forward to work on “what can be” rather than being resilient in reacting to what “was”. It might be the job of historians help dispel the national PTSD of an interrupted incipient civilization. The present mess needs resilience too. As for what can be:
1) Encourage popular education, like Prof. Xiao Chua already is doing for history and Gideon Lasco is doing with his articles and his new book . Isaac Asimov wrote that popular science in America was geared towards promoting science in a country that did not like “eggheads”, as they were called in the 1950s. Any American 1950s high school movie will show you how the “guys with glasses”didn’t get dates. “Revenge of the Nerds” was a much later movie. Smart shaming has to end.
2) Encourage teamwork WITH STRANGERS. A Filipino software entrepreneur I knew used “peer recruitment”, meaning usually the Filipinos in his teams were old college cliques. Working with them as someone NOT part of their cliques was pure hell for me and I stopped doing it.
Outside of in-groups that trust and help each other, Filipino one-upmanship and crab rules. Don’t know if the BPO age has changed that a bit, Giancarlo for sure could tell us more. What I have seen is that Indians in IT worldwide help one another more, even in Internet forums.
3) Encourage interdisciplinary and practitioner-theoretician communication. Filipinos who only know slightly more than others often either “deadma” them (give the silent treatment), intimidate them with lots of gobbledygook, or outright mock them as inferiors, while those who know less often plant the seeds of resentment or become outright anti-intellectual.
Innovative firms like BMW or SAP live from communication that runs from scientists to engineers to technicians all the way to the shop floor and back via the same channels. Applied knowledge lives from constant feedback loops between theory and practice.
With these fundamentals slowly built up, the implementation of other stuff like Karl’s ideas on (better informed by resource persons from all expertiseas well as practitioners), , , and the will be easier.
Finally, starting small is the key. Romanian high-speed Internet was originally built on a small scale.
When I came with an idea to network all Philippine Embassies and the DFA worldwide in 1995, the then IT responsible of DFA had an expansive idea of how to do it. When I said that small steps are better to finally have stable success (and more resilient, especially in those days were bandwidth was very expensive, and also resilient against hacking as subnetworks can work standalone) his answer was “we are the DFA, we should not think that way”. I wonder what DFA has today, worldwide.
Starting small doesn’t mean staying where you are though. Sarao jeepneys were great in the 1970s. Japanese cars in the 1950s weren’t too far ahead of Sarao jeepneys, but they didn’t stop there while Sarao didn’t continue to improve and innovate.
Now I am not Prof. Dr. Hasso Plattner, I am not Bill Gates, hell I can’t even measure up to Maoi Arroyo with her biotech startup initiative. But these are my two cents, based on what I have seen, from what I have succeeded AND also what I have failed in which can teach one the most.
Irineo B. R. Salazar, Munich, 15 October 2020
This is dedicated to the UP Elementary School teacher who helped me discover my aptitude for math with new teaching methods she had just learned in the USA, making me feel less bobo than before.
Also recalling the US popular science books my father brought from UP Clark when he was teaching there to add to our family income, which sparked my initial interest in science and science fiction and made me dream of launching the veryfirst own Filipino satellite, achieved in 2016 by Diwata-1.