‘Tough Love’ and Moral Policing

By Farish A. Noor

The fiasco that followed the JAWI 'morality police' raid on a club in Kuala Lumpur lumbers on at its own inebriated pace, and the Malaysian nation awaits the outcome with jaded eyes and a cynical conscience. After all, we have seen all this before: the plethora of raids, accusations, counter-accusations, threats and abuse that invariably peter out and die a natural death. There was nothing new about the latest brouhaha unleashed by the self-appointed moral guardians of our state religious police. Nor have their methods evolved in any meaningful sense.

Malaysia’s political parties, true to form, have chosen to shut up rather than stand up and be counted; save for two: The Islamic party PAS has at least exercised its democratic right to shoot itself in the foot by supporting the goings-on of JAWI’s cohorts (much in the same way that its support for the Taliban and declaration of Jihad against the USA in the recent past did more damage to it than even the most fervent PAS-haters in UMNO could have dreamed of), while the Gerakan party, true to its calling as the ‘liberal conscience of the Barisan Nasional ruling coalition’ has called on the government to seriously reconsider the usefulness of such bodies. The mainstream parties – UMNO, MCA, MIC – and the mainstream opposition including Keadilan have so far said little about the matter.

I need not dwell much on the internal political complexities of Malaysia and the political reasons why parties like UMNO and PAS have taken the predictable stands they chose for themselves. That matter has been dealt with in the previous articles that followed in the train of the JAWI circus. But here I would like to raise a deeper theoretical question about the relation between the State and Morality, and ask if the state has any business in legislating and enforcing the morality of the nation in the first place. That is the real crux of the issue, though this being Malaysia we often fail to see the wood for the moral guardians hiding behind the trees.

‘Tough Love’ and the State

The modern state is a funny thing indeed. Modern modes of government often see the nation as a singular entity, fixed behind solid boundaries. Internal differences and diversity are often compartmentalized, and in the Malaysian case the plural society that is Malaysia’s is divided along both racial and religious lines. Frontiers within and frontiers without, we remain a divided nation as ever and the dream of a truly plural, inclusive, complex Malaysian nation at ease with its internal differences recede into the dark and murky background.

Malaysia’s Islamization race (which concerns UMNO and PAS mainly) has led to the development of a vast array of laws and institutions set up with the aim of ‘caring’ for the welfare of society. Though more often than not, this paternalistic form of pastoral care has expressed itself in a form of ‘tough love’ which seems more in keeping with the ‘compassionate Conservatism’ of George Bush and the Neo-Cons currently holed up in Washington.

The ascendancy of political Islam in Malaysia means that the state’s propensity to ‘care’ for the moral welfare and wellbeing of the nation has manifest itself with more and more moral policing of the lives of citizens. This in turn lends weight to the (mistaken) view that political Islam necessarily leads to authoritarianism and thought-control. In fact the claim that Islamism is somehow dedicated to the creation of authoritarian regimes and despotic modes of rule has to be seriously interrogated for the fallacy that it is. The plain truth is that the modern political project itself marks a moment towards centralization and control, and that there exists no modern state or political order in the world that can do away with coercive government. A cursory overview of the development of Western political theory will show that practically every major Western political theorist has grappled with the same issues and concerns that plague the Islamists of today, and that there exist a number of commonalities in terms of their approach and concerns: from Thomas Hobbes to Karl Marx, the central question of Western political thought has been how to justify the chains that bind men rather than having to do away with them.

Thomas Hobbes opted for a “politics of divine containment,” where the central aim of government was to create an egalitarian social order and where dissent (particularly over questions of religious dogma) would be foreclosed.(1) In Hobbes’ model of the ideal Commonwealth captured in his Leviathan (1641), the sovereign would rule as God’s prefect on earth, ensuring that the boundaries of discursive economies, social norms and political activity would not be transgressed. This, in many ways, is similar to the concern of some Islamist movements who see shariah law and Hudud punishments as a means to keep society in line rather than an active force that can be used to interfere directly in the private lives and spaces of citizen-subjects. (One is, of course, not suggesting here that Hobbes was the ideological founder of Taliban — but only that such common concerns can be traced between Islamist movements and their Western counterparts over the centuries.)

Traces of the Islamists’ overriding concern for moral values and public virtues can also be found in the ideas of Western thinkers like Rousseau.(2) In the same way that Rousseau hoped to justify the citizen’s forced membership to the nation-state by emphasizing both the obligations and benefits of civic culture, so Islamists today emphasize the benefits of membership to the Muslim moral-political community. If this in turn opens the way for the creation of a docile and submissive citizenry, one should add that such an emphasis on the domestication of society is certainly not unique to Islam or the Islamist project. The challenge that stood before Rousseau (as it stands before the Islamists of today) is to find the means to morally justify such social bondage and submission to the greater will of the community as a whole.

Indeed, when one compares the ideas of Western political thinkers of the past and contemporary Islamists, a host of common concerns come to the fore: the need to find a justification for social ordering, policing and government; the need to root their projects in some teleological or eschatological formula; the need to locate the political moment of the present on some grander stage that transcends the confines of the mundane and profane. Hobbes thought he had found the answer in Reason, Rousseau found his solace in the state of Nature, while Hegel found his refuge in the rationalization of the Spirit. In all these cases, the master signifier ‘God’ has been transplanted and grafted on various other values (Reason, Nature, Spirit) in a number of ways, as the final seal that would guarantee their success. That Muslim states and governments of today resort to the same should not therefore strike us with surprise, suspicion or horror. The real question is this: To what extent can the state interfere in the lives of the citizens (ostensibly to ‘care’ for their welfare) before it becomes oppressive and authoritarian?

Humanism and Humane Love

The modern state, be it in the West or in the Muslim world, demonstrates a distinct fear of human beings and independent human agency.

Almost all governments show a tendency to over-control and over-police the citizenry, for fear that all hell will break loose if there is no social policing at all. This is the fundamental flaw in the thinking of both modern technocrats as well as Islamists, for they fail to realise that human beings are far more rational, responsible and socially-conscious than they think. It only demonstrates the streak of anti-humanism that runs in the veins of both secular technocrats as well as religious ideologues, who share a common fear of humanity as a whole.

The tendency of the modern state – be it a secular or Islamic state – to extend its powers to the maximum potential is precisely the main threat to the natural development of a plural and complex modern society. At the least it leads to the policing of ideas and beliefs (such as when text books are written by political ideologues and only reflect the ‘official’ history of the state) and at its worst it leads to the public executions by the Taliban (who were, after all, a modern phenomenon of political Islam gone badly wrong).

But equally important is for us to emphasize the fact that the notion that human beings are fundamentally corrupt, evil, selfish and dangerous to each other has no basis in scientific fact. (Unless some scientist manages to find the ‘Brazilian Carnival gene’ in our blood.) Hobbes’ idea that the natural human state would be a state of war of all against all has no basis in either biology or history; any more than the Islamists’ constant concern about society slipping into infinite decay and collapse can be proven scientifically.

And yet, despite the paucity of concrete truths and hard facts, we continue to tolerate the existence of oppressive state systems that penetrate into every area of our lives, in the name of our ‘common good’. A cursory overview of human history and a comparative look at other so-called ‘non-modern’ societies today would show that human beings can indeed live in peace and harmony with each other without the need of a sheriff to police them. In Berlin, where I currently reside, there are many hip and swinging communes filled with young people living together in a common space, sharing their belongings and living area, having a sense of collective purpose and identity (that does not deny the identity of the individual). So open and tolerant are these communes that they even admit an old fogey like to me join in the fun once in a while…

Can the people of over-policed Malaysia imagine the creation such parallel communities where ordinary Malaysian citizens can live in peace with each other, as equals, and love each other as human beings endowed with reason, agency and free will as well as rights and responsibilities? One certainly does not expect such revolutionary change from the powers-that-be, accustomed as they are to a culture of state control and policing since they were born.

But perhaps the answer lies in the midst of our plural cosmopolitan society itself. The fact that the Muslim Malaysian citizens were arrested in a club that was open to all shows that there are already evident trends of cross-border interaction taking place, whether the authorities like it or not. The internet also provides a virtual space where the question of what constitutes this complex Malaysian identity can be raised, and similar concerns are being foregrounded by contemporary Malaysian artists and film-makers like Amir Muhammad and Yasmin Ahmad. The best news is that their efforts are being met with enthusiastic support from none other than the Malaysian public themselves.

In the years to come, we may all look back at these ridiculous days as a time when Malaysia was brought to the brink of authoritarianism by a state that was bankrupt of ideas and unable to keep up with the march of time. I for one hope that that shall come to pass. But for now, we can at least comfort ourselves with the thought that despite the nonsensical goings-on that masquerade as Malaysian politics and political culture, it is the common sense and common decency of the Malaysian citizen that shines out and prevails. That at least deserves a toast, so see you ‘in da club’ as Mr. Fifty Cent so eloquently puts it.

Endnotes:

(1) William E. Connolly, ‘Hobbes: The Politics of Divine Containment’, in Political Theory and Modernity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1988.

(2) William E. Connolly, ‘Rousseau: Docility through Citizenship’, in Political Theory and Modernity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1988.