I once had the good fortune of meeting the late great Conrad de Quiros (CdQ) up close, albeit rather briefly. It happened during a rally along Ayala Avenue in Makati. I can no longer remember though if it was during a rally against Erap or GMA.
What I do remember was how stunned I was when I made out his face from a distance. He must have noticed I was waving at him as he nodded his head and smiled. “Sir Conrad, fan nyo po ako! (I’m your fan!),” I managed to say aloud as I nervously offered my hand. “Uy, kumusta?,” he amiably shot back as he—thankfully—took my hand.
When I heard that he had passed away, I found myself leafing through Tongues of Fire (having lost my dog-eared copies of Flowers from the Rubble and Dance of the Dunces to friends and acquaintances who were also fans of his writing), and scrolling through the digital version of his long-running There’s the Rub column in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. Never mind that the deadline for my graduate class report on the Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit’s book was fast approaching.
As it would turn out, rereading CdQ’s essays while wading through Margalit’s The Decent Society was not exactly a bad idea. Here’s why.
According to Margalit, it is not enough to bring about a just society. The latter may imbibe fairness by say, providing unemployment benefits, but if it does so in a manner that humiliates the jobless, then it is far from decent.
But what does it mean to humiliate?
Margalit asserts that society humiliates humans when it treats them merely as objects, as machines, as animals, and as subhuman, in that order. In Still, the National Animal CdQ brings this concept closer to home:
“They (teachers) had a perfect way to describe themselves then…That was that they were the new ‘national animal.’ They had replaced the carabao for that dubious honor…That was so because like the beast of burden, they were being worked to death with little reward.”
Margalit clarifies, however, that humans cannot treat other humans as animals all the time. A human being’s face, after all, can register emotions that animals cannot. Strangely, it is possible to treat other humans as subhuman on a more pervasive basis. This takes place whenever we reduce the other to his/her perceived defect. Such is the case with the side curls, the beard and the hat of the Orthodox Jew, as well as the smell of people who love to eat garlic and curry. Other examples of such stigmatization are the lamentable treatment of dwarfs, amputees, people with burned faces, severe albinos, and obese people.
By way of CdQ’s Inspired Madness we can add defect in intelligence, and how this can blind us to the humanity of a human being with a low IQ. Take the character of Forrest Gump of whom de Quiros wrote:
“In a world of sorrow, he shows caring. In a world of fickleness, he shows steadfastness. In a world of betrayal, he shows love. In a world of despair, he shows hope…Yet he is called infantile while the world is called mature. He is called stupid while the world is called wise…”
To overcome our tendency to humiliate, what is needed, according to Margalit, is to develop an “a-stigmatic”vision. This can be realized when humans who are raised in prejudiced or racist communities are able to think.
Alas, this is easier said than done. Most people do not really think, preferring instead to behave as a matter of habit. As such, they are unable to question what they were raised to believe about the “instsik beho,” the “bumbay,” the “baluga,” the “tibo”, the “bakla” and other humans we so easily humiliate.
For this reason, Margalit assigns a premium to the study of culture and history. Without a doubt, no other discipline enriches our understanding of culture and history than the Humanities. Cognizant of the increasing global deemphasis on the humanities in favor of AI and robotics, CdQ reminds us in Sense and Sensibility that:
“…they (the Humanities) teach people to be more polite to each other. That politeness has nothing to do with not slurping soup at the dinner table or not burping in polite company…. It has everything to do with what’s inside of us. It has to do with the tempering of the spirit, with being kinder, and more tolerant, and more compassionate. It has to do with making us human.”
It’s been almost a decade since Conrad de Quiros last wrote an essay for the Filipino public sphere. Yet his writings continue to resonate with us Filipinos. Such is his gift as a writer. My sense is that, just like the classic musicians he would listen to—from Simon and Garfunkel to Jackson Browne, from Gary Granada to the Jerks—the power and the glory of his writing shall neither die nor fade away. Heck, he even helped my class reflection write itself.
