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2005
Why must casinos be out of bounds?
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Parliament sat for 4 days to debate the government's decision to permit 2
'integrated resorts' to be built in Singapore. Many ministers and MPs
spoke, including Goh Chok Tong and Steve Chia, who both recounted the
times they tried their hand at games of chance.
Loh Meng See spoke up strongly against the government's decision. He accused Goh, Chia and his fellow MPs of being the thin end of the wedge, in destigmatising gambling. Loh said,
-- Straits Times 22 April 2005 It's quite an apocalyptic view. But what can one expect of a die-hard Christian, who lists on his web curriculum vitae his interests as "Travels [sic] and Gospel Music"? (It's quite scary that the PAP think nothing of having fundamentalist Christians as MPs. Would they countenance fundamentalist Muslims as PAP MPs?) Loh went on to say,
Many of us will have the uneasy feeling that he was asking too much, but why do we have this feeling? Because Loh tacitly conflated simple gambling as a "vice" with compulsive gambling as a social ill. They are two very different things, as different as social drinking from alcoholism. True, alcoholics all start off as social drinkers, but the vast majority of social drinkers do not end up as alcoholics. Ditto for people having a holiday in Las Vegas or Macau. In our exercise of public reason, we can, whatever our moral and religious points of view, all agree that compulsive gambling and alcoholism, as well as drink driving, impose serious costs and dangers to other people; they are thus social ills in a secular sense. However, because we subscribe to different beliefs and religions, or none at all, we do not all agree that social drinking, a simple flutter at the roulette table, or an evening in the jackpot room of an NTUC resort [1] is such a great sin or vice that we must all choose between abstinence or damnation. Loh obviously feels that even one minute at the casino opens the gates of hell. He is entitled to his belief. But where he has gone too far is to suggest that all political leaders, government employees, private sector directors of listed companies, and all teachers must abide by his definition of good and evil. We can all accept that compulsive gambling is a social ill, but that in no way means we all agree that gambling in itself is an evil or even a vice, which was why I put it in quotation marks 3 paragraphs before this one. It is important to remember this distinction so that we aren't fooled by those who expect fundamentalist Christian morals to apply to everyone in Singapore. Fortunately, Education Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam, squashed the idea, by saying it was absurd to require the entire teaching profession to stay away from the casino. What about other professions? Where would it stop? On a broader level, Loh's diatribe raises another question. One can read between the lines of his speech and sense the assumption that certain classes of people -- political leaders particularly -- must be morally immaculate. Even a single instance of buying Toto, as Goh said he did, would be beyond the pale. The question is: The simple answer is: no. Not that they mustn't be, but they can never be, and we shouldn't expect them to be. They can never be because there are as many definitions of virtue as there are people in the country. You'll never satisfy everybody. To start with, how can we require a non-Christian politician to live up to Christian notions of virtue? And how is a beef and ham-eating Taoist Chinese going to meet the standards of non-beef Hindus and non-pork Muslims? How is a Buddhist MP on contraceptive pills virtuous in the eyes of (some) Roman Catholics who condemn all contraception? Yes, we can demand that in certain respects, they must live up to a high standard of ethics. These would be in areas relevant to a job as a politician: honesty, incorruptibility, accountability. But whether they love wine, use condoms, take a vacation in Macau, or visit a nude beach, should be quite irrelevant. Alas, Singaporeans have been misled to expect much. much more. Misled. We've been told that our political leaders must be exemplars of virtue. This is part of the message put out by the PAP to preserve themselves in power. They know very well that all their claims of electoral mandates after every general election always sound somewhat forced, since typically, less than half the constituencies actually go to the polls, and anyway the boundaries are gerrymandered just weeks before polling day. Together with the severe restrictions on the scope for opposition parties to communicate with voters, it is always hard to convince observers that the PAP won "fair and square". In the absence of a convincing electoral mandate, our government leaders shore up their legitimacy by talking up the Confucian notion of upright leaders. They are paragons of virtue, while the opposition is made up of scoundrels. And so the PAP unwittingly built the trap for themselves and then one of their own MPs, Loh Meng See, springs it. Since we are paragons of virtue, no one in our government, not even civil servants, must get near a jackpot machine. He didn't say it like that, but what he said wouldn't make any sense unless the starting assumption -- paragons of virtue -- was in place. Nor should we try too hard to expect politicians to be virtuous. If we want a good engineer, we shouldn't be looking for something talented in soccer. If we want a good counsellor for teens in distress, we shouldn't be looking for a fast-talking salesman. If we want capable people in statecraft and economic management, we shouldn't be looking for priests (or nuns). If we do, we won't get the best people we can. And we should remember that history is full of great leaders with numerous private peccadilloes. Thomas Jefferson, so revered by Americans as one of their founding fathers, cheated on his wife and had an affair with his black slave. Abraham Lincoln, in the United States' darkest hour, rallied his half of the country to fight to hold the union together, achieving full emancipation for all slaves. As pointed out in a recent book, The intimate world of Abraham Lincoln, by C.A. Tripp, Lincoln shared a bed with Joshua Speed for 4 years in their 20s. This is not new information. Contemporaries and other historians have known this for a long time. It was described as a very intimate friendship -- using the language of the period. But there were more. Even when he was President (and married), he shared a bed with David Derickson, the captain of his bodyguard Company K, whenever Mrs Lincoln was away. Contemporaries were likewise aware of this. Tripp reckoned that Lincoln was a 5 on the six-point Kinsey scale. In other words, by today's understanding of sexual orientation, he was largely homosexual. If Lincoln were alive today, with such information at hand, he would have no chance of becoming President. And if he were in Singapore, even less than nil; he might be considered a criminal. He would not meet many people's idea of virtue. But he was a great leader. © Yawning Bread
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Footnotes
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