Gen Y Speaks: What does it mean to love Singapore?

What does it mean to love Singapore?

Nanyang Technological University undergraduate Wong Wing Lum argued in a commentary that it is to embrace the country as it is, and to try to look at it positively instead of complaining about its flaws and deficiencies to foreigners.

To do so would be unpatriotic, she argued, for it not only would represent a lack of gratefulness for the privileged lives we live as Singaporeans, but also would risk damaging the reputation of our nation overseas.

Miss Wong’s sentiments troubled me greatly. On the one hand, I agree with her that we should appreciate the fact that we live in a wealthy, developed country like Singapore.

We have made significant progress in our 50 years of independence to become an important global city – a miraculous achievement that we should rightly be proud of.

On the other hand, patriotic feelings should not be mutually exclusive with acknowledging and critiquing Singapore’s flaws.

While there is some truth to our late former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s claim that Singaporeans are “champion grumblers”, it is undeniable that Singapore, for all its success, is far from a perfect country.

Development has brought its own set of challenges that our country must urgently grapple with in the years to come.

Singapore’s socio-economic inequality, with a high Gini coefficient of 0.459 before taking into account Government transfers and taxes, is an example.

While policies such as the Workfare Income Supplement and Medishield Life have gone some way towards making our economy more redistributive, more needs to be done to arrest this problem.

Associate Professor Teo You Yenn’s book, This is What Inequality Looks Like, viscerally highlights the insecurity and despair that some poor Singaporeans face on a daily basis, forcing us to confront the significant social costs that inequality places on Singapore society.

Singapore boasts a quality education system that regularly tops the Pisa rankings.

Yet (as Ms Wong acknowledges) the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development which conducts the Pisa tests also found that 86 per cent of students grapple with anxiety over their grades in school.

Many policies have been tried over the past decade to ameliorate this problem, yet none has proven completely effective in overcoming negative societal attitudes that encourage a toxic “kiasu” mentality towards education.

Loving one’s country means to desire its continual improvement over time, necessitating that we never rest on our laurels in building a more inclusive and prosperous Singapore.

To ensure our continual progress as a nation, we must never become too smug about our achievements and congratulate ourselves that we inhabit the best of all possible worlds.

Progress requires a frank acknowledgement of weaknesses and continual innovation to find new ways to overcome these challenges.

If, on the other hand, we believe that Singapore has “arrived” as a country with little to learn from the world, we risk falling into complacency and overconfidence.

We should take care not to become so obsessed with protecting past achievements that we stop believing in future possibilities.

Such an attitude risks closing our minds to technological innovations and global best practices, potentially leading to socio-economic stagnation.

I experienced this first hand while in London on exchange earlier this year.

Visiting a street market, I found that every stall had installed portable e-payment devices to allow cashless payment.

A stall owner I spoke to expressed surprise that a top global financial centre like Singapore had not yet surpassed the United Kingdom in terms of this technology despite investing heavily in its IT sector.

The moral of the story is this: Singapore cannot take its success for granted.

The world is catching up with us and contentment with the status-quo will eventually cause us to fall behind in an increasingly competitive and disrupted global economy.

Singaporeans must adopt what Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong calls an attitude of “divine discontent”, to “always not be satisfied with what we have, always driven to do better”, engaging in a never-ending process of self-critique to work towards overcoming our deficiencies to become better as a country.

Refusing to admit the imperfections of one’s country is arguably a sign of weakness.

Such an attitude betrays a lack of confidence in the body politic and a sense of insecurity in Singapore’s future.

To frankly acknowledge one’s deficiencies, on the other hand, is a sign of confidence in our country and its people: it signals a conviction that no matter the challenges that we may face in future, Singapore is strong enough to survive.

Singaporeans need not then restrict ourselves to only singing praises about our country. We should instead be objective in celebrating our achievements and acknowledging our weaknesses.

Only by adopting a spirit of humility and openness can Singapore hope to enjoy another half century of progress and prosperity in an increasingly uncertain future.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Ng Qi Siang is a fourth-year History major at Yale-NUS College.