The stories that can help shape S’pore’s future

Towards the end of his 2016 National Day Rally speech, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong asked: “Can things get any better after SG50?”

He, of course, answered with an emphatic “yes”, having earlier sketched out a bright vision of Singapore in 2030 and beyond: Greater connectivity with the High-Speed Railway and new terminals at Changi Airport, as well as dramatic physical transformations such as the Lake District in the west, Tengah “Forest Town” and the Greater Southern Waterfront City.

The question “Can things get any better?” and its uncomfortable variant — “Is the best behind us?” — are perennial questions that confront societies.

I would like to suggest that the answers lie in three archetypal stories that exist the world over. Such stories reveal how societies everywhere understand and deal with the passage of time.

The first is reinvention. When a society’s leaders tell a story of a courageous leap forward and of radical transformations, and when it resonates with the people, then the narrative of the future is one of continual reinvention.

This narrative is underpinned by, among other things, charismatic and capable leadership, and its main purpose is to guarantee the future. In essence, the story of reinvention is to ensure that there are always new chapters to the story.

This story of reinvention is one of boldness that often tips into thick-skinned swagger. One need look no further than Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s “mud-flats” speech of Sept 12, 1965: “This country belongs to all of us. We made this country from nothing, from mud-flats ... Over 100 years ago, this was a mud-flat, swamp. Today, this is a modern city. Ten years from now, this will be a metropolis. Never fear.”

In retrospect, clearly some literary licence was taken vis-a-vis mud-flats and swamps. But it was done so that the story of collective courage and optimism, and of a better future, could be sold and, more importantly, bought.

The second way in which a society articulates its future is resistance. Narratives of the future that are rooted in resistance speak to a sense of temporal panic, of running out of time.

Such stories of the future reflect a sense of vulnerability: There is a very visceral sense of a community finding its survival, integrity or continuity being threatened either by barbarians at the gate or the enemy within, and which must be resisted.

The resistance narrative enjoins us to preserve and secure what we already have.

In Singapore, we tell just such a story using words such as scarcity, smallness, threats, vigilance and resilience, and which warns of dangers whose occurrence are a matter of when rather than if.

When such stark stories of the future are told, they reflect societies poised on some precipice and whose words and actions are focused on “buying time” in order to resist and head off impending doom.

Moreover, such stories of omnipresent dangers and perpetual resistance are so deeply entrenched that attempts to reframe them are often dismissed as (ironically enough) dangerously naive. Here, the story of the future looks very much like the present.

The third archetypal future is that of restoration. The story of restoration is one of reclaiming the past. Note that a society that tells this story is not necessarily saying that its best days are behind it. On the contrary, often the story is that a brighter future is possible, but only if ideas and values of some mythic golden age are reclaimed and restored.

Such stories are tinged with nostalgia, if not imagined memories, and in Singapore’s case, they typically take the form of bringing back the “kampung spirit” and drawing inspiration from the “founding fathers”.

Ideas and policies for the future are typically “versions 2.0” of past ones.

But there is an insidious side to the story of restoration, and societies that are fractured, despondent and disillusioned with their present are particularly susceptible to it, especially in the presence of opportunistic demagogues.

The danger is when the discourse of restoration tips over into the fascist politics of purification. The story degenerates into one of identifying impurities within society that are to blame for its present plight, and expelling them in order that society and its future are purified and somehow made great (again). Lest we forget, before Brexit and the rise of Mr Donald Trump, such ideas found fruitful purchase in 1930s Germany.

In the wake of the 2013 Population White Paper, I wonder if we also flirted perilously with a story in which the future had to be purified of feared “others”.

Was there a segment of us, in using the xenophobic language of “Singapore for Singaporeans”, trying to tell a story in which things would get better if only there were fewer foreigners in our midst? “Better” of course meaning back to how things used to be.

Such archetypal stories of the future can, and in fact do, exist simultaneously within society. Which story dominates depends on the complex interplay of diverse ideas, expectations, fears, values and so forth within society.

Nevertheless, in answering the Prime Minister’s question, our articulations of the future actually tell us more about our present.

By unpacking our stories of the future, we can uncover and assess the reasons for our optimism, challenge the basis for our conservatism, and guard against the nascent risks of insularity and fascism.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr Adrian W J Kuah is Senior Research Fellow and Head, Case Studies Unit at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. He is also part of the School’s Future Ready Singapore project.