Filipinos are not by nature moral absolutists. They do not see the world in high-key black and white while standing on a bedrock of ideology and dogma. They are natural post-modernists without even knowing it. They see the world from a mixed perspective. This mixed perspective is inherently fragmented and does not require a wholeness absent contradiction. They’ve lived with contradictions all their lives. Contradictions are what they eat day or night.
Consider how many of them love their Catholic religion. They love it even though it had been at one time in history the religion which stood against their freedom and independence. Their forebears may have been Katipunaneros. But even so, they go to church and pray to a God whom they love. And they love him bereft of the historical positions her priests and bishops may have taken in the past. They live in the here and now knowing fully well how quickly and inevitably everything in the world changes. They know fully well how transitory this world and they themselves are.
Which might be traced to the fact that until colonial times they had no history of building with stone. Their houses were small and built from natural materials not meant to last longer than their single life-times. For them, there was no point building anything otherwise. In some old cultures here, houses were abandoned to the dead whenever any member of the family died. The living simply moved a bit away to build themselves another house and another life.
That sort of practice has of course disappeared by now. We do not do that anymore. But it is possible some trace of that ancient mindset may still be left manifesting itself in social behavior. We have been accused of historical forgetfulness. How else do we explain how we still have Marcoses, Enriles and Estradas in Congress? We must have a lack of collective remembering. But it might also be, we are by nature slow to condemn and easy to forgive.
This stems from a deeper source. In a way, we have all been victimized by our colonial past, the twisting and turning of historical events which brought us here. Despite our peculiar history, we do not hate the Spanish, the fact we were colonized primarily by them, notwithstanding. We do not hate Americans even though their short colonial rule over us was quite bloody. And just as surely, we cannot hate the Chinese. Most of us probably have their blood running in our veins. We do not even hate the Japanese even though we fought a brutal war against them merely just a few generations ago.
It is truly not in our nature to hate anything or anyone for too long. We are conscious of a fact of politics that whoever might be our enemy now could be our friend in the short future. And whoever is our friend now may eventually become our enemy.
We are pragmatists as befits a current trend in the world. We are pragmatists to a fault. That is true, but in a way, this pragmatism is what makes us what we are. It’s what gives us our collective charm; What makes us look so charming especially through foreign eyes. We are beautiful, warm, loving, friendly and quite forgiving. It is bad form here to wear your politics on your sleeve and to speak too loudly or forcefully when you speak out what’s wrong with the world. Confronted with a people like us, it is not difficult for foreign visitors to decide to stay here longer than they initially planned. Quite a number stay here for good.
There are those who present the Catholic church as a church of dogma. There are no conservative or liberal Catholics. The Catholic church is in their wishful minds only a single church with a single immutable Catholic teaching. There are no liberal Catholics because liberals, if they were only right-minded, should have “excommunicated” themselves already. They are morally excommunicated de facto by their disagreement with what the church teaches.
This is all well and good, except that it is not a type of thinking which sits well with typical ordinary Filipinos, be they religious or otherwise. Conservatives think of themselves as good Catholics. Which is a good thing. This assertion makes possible its philosophical opposite which can only be “bad Catholic” if it is not “liberal Catholic”.
“All good Catholics out there, raise your hands!” They should put out a survey to rate what type of Catholics most Filipino Catholics think they are: Conservative, Liberal, Good Catholic, or Bad Catholic? My bet is that Bad Catholic will win hands down.