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Place of the Arts

When I watched Secondary the Musical last year by Checkpoint Theatre, there was so much that resonated with me, with the teachers around me about the Singapore education system. It stirred me to feel something about teachers, students, inequality, and even though there was something moving about the end where the teacher chose to stay and continue to live her passion for teaching, I could not but feel a sense of unease for the character.

I had thought and understood that this was what art was to do for us. And this was why there was such a time when the artists seemed as though they were critical of government all the time. Artists’ role in society is ultimately to bring out the subjects, topics and matters worth the attention of society. They could be overlooked groups in society, or matters that still need to be deliberated and discussed, rather than considered a “sacred cow”.

Arts is also a way to cry out in a deeply human way the causes that are worth attention not because of commercial numbers or tangible metrics but that they touches deeper aspect of being human. Whether it is our relationship with nature, or heritage and history, minority culture, there are just things that our marketised, industrialised modernity do not capture though we as humans ought to.

The place of the arts is also for aesthetics and beauty, but one that has identity and soul in the society from which it blossoms. Yet what is the business model for the arts? In a capitalistic society, what are we to do to feed our artists? Whose responsibility is it to ensure they are not exploited by commercial interests to support unworthy causes? What alternative systems are available to fund, to protect them?

Driven by inspiration

If you think that Singaporeans were motivated by fear to build up our country in early days of nationhood, think again. There wasn’t really all that much to fear because we didn’t have much to begin with. This narrative that we had no resources, we had to rely on our manpower, and our ingenuity, that’s all true but it wasn’t translating into fear for our forefathers. We had it wrong to think that Lee Kuan Yew fearmongered two generations of Singaporeans into the building up a metropolis we have today.

I believe the early Singaporeans were driven by inspiration – the ‘against all odds’ was possible because it was well worth a shot. We didn’t have much to lose; and there was everything to gain on the table. We had institutions to build, and a new identity. How exciting! And of course, we do not slacken, we are not complacent, because we were not there yet – we were limited only by our ability to envision the future and inspire our countrymen towards it.

Fast-forward today, we seem to think that we managed to achieve all that we did out of fear. We think it was ‘kiasuism’ (fear of losing) that drove us. Probably not. What was there to lose anyways; and yes we are competitive because we want to win, not because we are afraid of losing. Being afraid of losing only happens when you have won at least once. And we did win, more than once, and we begin to hold on to our victories and achievements more than our vision of the future. And in fact, this vision of the future morph, and then slipped.

Consider this press release by the Singapore government in November 1988, there seem to be a clear policy and longer term strategy underpinned by a theoretical framework of the economy. There was a deep understanding of what it means for our economy to grow and the structure by which it is expected to grow with. But without a clear sense of vision for what we want to build Singapore into, we will fall into the trap of just trying to push certain figures up indefinitely.

Ten years ago, in 2015, Ravi Menon sketched out some kind of economic vision for the future framed in a retrospective 100th year anniversary speech for Singapore in 2065. It is brilliant and perhaps reflects Ravi’s aptitude for such high level strategic thinking and visioning. If we look at the decade of performance that took place after the speech was made, I’d say things have not been kind to the world and Singapore in terms of geopolitics. That’s perhaps something Ravi did not anticipate and would not have been expected to identify as a challenge for Singapore.

In the next five decades, our nation will be confronted with lots of geopolitical challenges and turmoil in the world; our economy will require more radical thinking and transformation than the country has ever had to go through. But we can only get through it with inspiration, not fear. We can only be driven by the desire to create a future we want to live in, rather than to react to the world’s situation with the classic ‘bo-pian’ attitude that we might find more common amongst our people.

Singapore’s 60th

I sat down and listened to the National Day Rally speech with a break in between. In terms of delivery and finding the stories to tell, I’d say Lawrence Wong did well. He also positioned the 4G team well, and to a large extent, it almost feels like political campaigning. The election results this year have shown a good amount of trust in the PAP government and reduced tolerance for weak opposition candidates. So I’d expect that the ruling government would lead confidently and start working on rolling out a vision.

I think the elements of vision involve more of the old playbook, unfortunately: another committee to work on the economy, more new towns and spaces earmarked to be developed, and then programme funding or tweaks to support Singaporeans, in terms of reskilling or upskilling.

There’s this common thread that Lawrence Wong seem to have been emphasizing, but I’m not sure I observe much of it on the ground. He seems to be recognising that general sense that the government had been dominating decision-making, and so there are generally more attempts to involve the people, to gather feedback, or to listen in. If that was his diagnosis about the sentiments, it is correct. It is not something to be ‘fixed’ overnight however. And it will take time to create a culture where people contribute responsibly to policy-making, and to concern themselves with the needs of the wider society.

Over the years in Singapore, there had been more individualistic attitude – because the government’s approach to just about everything involves sticks or carrots, more often than not, there’s this general attitude of ‘what’s in it for me?’ From the NDR speech, I can see Lawrence Wong urging less of that individualistic attitude, more of the ‘we’, but I wonder what are some behaviours that the government or the civil service can lead with, in order to foster and encourage that.

Trust in Singapore

As our nation crosses the diamond jubilee at SG60, people were putting down their wishes of ‘I want to…’ during NDP. The messages played on the videos for NDP were really inspiring and had nice stories from ordinary Singaporeans of diverse background. I felt genuinely moved and encouraged that we can be more than just ourselves and what we bring because Singapore is just a society that has been on the move, that has been developing and growing and thriving. It all feels good.

The stuff that doesn’t feel that good – how do we approach it though? The fact that places and spaces have been sacrificed, people uprooted to make way for development (as the Tekong story suggested). Or that sporting feels more like a lone wolf endeavour more than a national one, particularly during the ‘invisible phase’ of training, working towards Olympic qualifications, etc (story of Lloyd Valberg; though one can’t say this through that story since Singapore wasn’t yet a nation in 1948). Or that the big corporations often push around small businesses because that is ‘normal’ in our culture (story of Yanee; ‘but are you ready for an order of this scale’).

There is a choice to be made on how we see things. And whilst we have been told repeatedly there would be trade-offs, we haven’t yet learnt the real principles and intentions behind the decisions on those trade-offs. Why do we choose one over another? To the ones in places of power, it might be obvious. How could the sacrifice be made worthwhile for those suffering from its consequences?

What principles do we use to uphold our values – whether they are peace, justice or equality? Or perhaps progress? What happens when they are trading off each other? What if we cannot accomplish all of them at the same time? Often, ‘progress’ as the value seems to take centre stage. And is the kind of progress broad or narrowly defined?

To move forward, we must also learn unravel more the principles worth learning about and keeping, which we can use to navigate the future. Our forefathers left them for us but if we don’t pick them up to use them, it would be squandering the success that they’ve worked so hard to build us.

Learning from mistakes II

A few years back, I devoted a couple of blog posts to writing about ‘wicked learning environments’, a concept popularised by psychologist Robin Hogarth (see the posts here, here and here).

Some recent experiences working on various requests for proposals and tenders brought this concept back to mind. And I want us to think about it a bit more as we think about the culture that we are developing here in Singapore – in school, business and within organisations.

I ran into a situation where multiple organisations belonging to this larger mothership, who was originating various requests for proposals refused to entertain request for feedback on the proposals submitted. Basically joining the tender was a black box with rather binary outcomes; and when you fail, you couldn’t even take a lesson out of it. At times, non-constructive feedbacks were provided; such as ‘the competition was strong’, or that ‘we received many competitive proposals and decided not to go with yours’.

I was reminded of a story from a friend who had a really non-supportive reporting officer (RO). When she requested feedback on her performance, the RO said she was doing okay, but when the performance reviews came back, she was placed at either average or slightly below. The response she got from her RO about why she was placed in that performance grade was that her grade was ‘already not bad’.

Feedback is so important, but in Singapore, we are so conflict-avoidant that we refuse to think about it more thoroughly. We might even have experienced defensiveness during exit interviews when employees felt more free to voice out concerns or areas of improvement. The fear of mistakes borders on being completely irrational and the desire to run from the shame or perceived humiliation supersedes the willingness to learn from those mistakes.

This is a massive problem for our culture. And Singapore is worse for such behaviours – where juniors are expected to silent dissenting voices, sometimes to the extent of surrending their thinking ability in exchange for harmony and masquerading that as ‘respect for elders’.

How can we move faster and progress if we want to enable Singapore to make the leap towards a better future?

I wrote another post with the same topic but from a different angle 2 years back. You can find it here.

Functional Atheism

Despite being a Christian, I’d probably confess to living most of my life like an atheist, and for most of us in the modern world, that is perhaps the case. As we send our reports and deliverables to clients, we don’t start praying to God for Him to grant favour in the eyes of our clients. At the same time, before we start our meetings to make crucial decisions, it’s not like we ask the Lord to grant us wisdom to decide the right course of action in a corporate prayer. Beyond prayer, more often than not, we are petty with the way we approach our suppliers, and potentially quite transactional on many interactions.

If we had been in a more agriculture setting, surely after tilling the land and sowing the seeds, we would have prayed for good weather and for patience to arrive upon harvest time. Each day as we work the fields we’d ask the Lord to bless the work of our hands. And when if we were to be waiting in the market for someone who needs our produce to pass, we might ask for customers, and we might deal with them with greater kindness than we would when chasing a customer for bill payment.

I don’t know if it’s the environment, the (false) sense of self-sufficiency and control that leads us to act this way. But we often enjoy acting like we are in control; and we are glad for the assurance from others’ false sense of control over circumstances and happenstance. We have lost the security and comfort that we can have in the embrace of God’s grace and His provision. And each time we practice that modern day ritual of self-reliance and independence from nature and from God, we weaken our faith so much.

License to sin

One of the first things that people tend to ask or wonder when they hear about the gospel of Christ is: if all people’s sins are always forgiven, then won’t they keep sinning? In the letter to Romans, Paul actually asked that same question himself to make explicit why such thinking has no place in Christianity:

What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. – Romans 6:1-4 (NKJV)

I already dissected these verses in a previous post, and so I want to address a bit more how hiding these verses in our hearts allows us to apply the verses to some of the inner conversations we might be having with ourselves.

Many churches today emphasize the grace of God without highlighting that the grace exists because of the need for justice. And so one of the challenges for many Christians today is that when reminded of their sins or continued sinning, they are quick to say ‘am I under the law?’ – essentially implying if one is to be held accountable for his sins, then Christ died in vain for him. That is an extremely convoluted understanding of the gospel.

Paul makes it clear that the incredible grace of God suggests that one who has truly accepted his/her salvation and has been saved from sins would not choose to live in sin. When we continue to live in sin, we are not identifying with the Christ who died on the cross for us. Paul doesn’t just stop there. He reminds us that identifying fully with Christ means that our sins died with Christ on the cross; but not just that, we gain a new life that is meant to be lived in this world, just as Christ was raised to live from the dead by God.

This is a powerful thought – because baptism in our minds tend to relate to some kind of new birth, the sense of being born again. But to be born again only works when the old self has died. Thinking of salvation as a license to sin is precisely the workings of the old self, not the new. So if the old self is not yet dead, there isn’t the born-again to speak of. As we Christian continues to struggle with sin and temptation, let the words of Paul from Romans 6:1-4 encourage us to tread forth in the newness of life.

Governing authorities

I wrote this back during the period of 2025 Elections but did not post it. I put it up at this point just as a record of my thoughts.

Having gone through the general elections in 2025, there was a bit of reflection on how our faith plays a role in the manner we approach democracy and vote, especially when it comes to a world where, in the US, faith is increasingly politicised and used often as a means to gain political support. Gratefully, in Singapore, and also in Australia, the system pushes towards the center rather than polarising towards the extremes.

Nevertheless, as a Christian, it is essential to recognise the place of authorities from a faith perspective. And considering also how, as Christian voters, we approach the whole idea of elections. We have been called to submit to authorities of our land in Paul’s letters to the Romans – this was in the backdrop of authorities that were not democratically elected. So they probably had little respect for the people they ruled over – many of whom were foreigners who were their spoils of conquest.

And so when people go through the political route seeking to express and take action on their ideals, we could give them the benefit of the doubt and determine who best represents our voice. It is perfectly acceptable for two strong and devote Christians to come to different conclusions about who represents or aligns more with their political inclinations. What is important, is that the partisanship in politics do not contaminate or affect the unity of the church.

As a model for the society then, we ought to recognise and respect the democratic process as a means for us to determine as a society who will help to govern and what would be the priorities for the next term of government. If we allow the campaigns, the political lines or partisanship to poison the entire term of government, or worse, the rest of our lives, then we are probably missing the point.

Problem-solving or answer-finding

I am a Singaporean. And one aspect about Singapore highlighted by many stories of its growth and early leaders is the notion of pragmatism. Yet I feel that this notion probably has been overplayed.

Pragmatism is used to suggest that the ends justify the means. Now within the context of school, it could mean that you can get your grades by rote memorisation as opposed to genuine learning. Or that you could simply find the right answer to copy than to solve a problem yourself on an assignment.

Same goes for the worker at work – just find the answer, don’t bother solving the problem. This may mean finding out how it was done before; or to figure out what others who had the same problem was doing. One could argue those are problem-solving heuristics. Maybe. But I call those “answer-finding”.

As a consultant, I cannot help but recall clients who are asking, “but have you done this same thing before with another client or somewhere else?” This is answer-finding, not problem-solving.

The Singapore today needs trail-blazers and problem-solvers; as it always had. But decades of overemphasizing pragmatism means we prefer to pay for answers than purchase problem-solving capacity. We desperately need to shift this culture and move towards real problem-solving than answer-finding.

Sinning in abundant grace

I’m currently doing some bible memory work of Romans 6:1-4. And sometimes, it just helps to do a close reading of the verses bit by bit and digest it so that the verses stick in my memory not just merely as words but as deep concepts and associations with the many other things I’ve learnt.

The context of Romans 6:1-4 is the preceding chapters of Romans that Paul has penned. He writes and expound on the incredible grace of God that is given to us through the gospel – that Christ died for our sins so we may gain salvation, and be reconciled with God.

Paul asks two questions:

  1. What shall we say then? – this question is more to get us to respond somehow to the implications of the grace of God that had been presented before us in the preceding chapters.
  2. Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? – this question effectively spells out what would be in the minds of most disciples: is the grace of the Lord fuelled by or shown only by the fact that we have sinned greatly?

He then answers the second question himself: ‘Certainly not!’

And then he poses another question to introduce another concept: “Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into His death?” He is presenting the argument that as we submit ourselves to be baptised in the name of Christ, we are entering His death (we allow our old selves to be dead)

Finally, having presented that concept, Paul then concludes his point here with a long statement of the implications of this baptism into Christ’ death:

  • We were buried with him through baptism into death
  • Just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father
  • We also should walk in newness of life

In other words, just as Christ was raised up, we are likewise raised, living a different life from the one we lived before when we identify with Christ and accept Him as our saviour, receiving our salvation from Him.

I reproduce again the full text of the verses I’m trying to memorise:

What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. – Romans 6:1-4 (NKJV)