Rizal's Political Views

RIZAL'S POLITICAL IDEAS 1

RIZAL'S POLITICAL IDEAS

RIZAL'S POLITICAL ideas are scattered through his published and unpublished works ; the two novels, the annotations to Morga, newspaper articles, pamphlets, letters. They occur for the most part in fragmentary form as partial studies, occasional reflections, obiter dicta: yet they seem to spring from a fairly consistent body of doctrine which he had worked out in his own mind, though he never found the time to get the whole of it on paper.

Various attempts have been made to reconstruct this body of doctrine. The most obvious method has been to cull from Rizal's writings all the "political" passages and to combine them in the manner that seems to make the most sense to the compiler. The great weakness of this method is that while the resulting synthesis may be eminently satisfactory to the one who constructs it, we cannot be at all sure that it would be so to Rizal himself. For the pieces of this puzzle can be assembled sembled in a number of different ways ; by simply changing the relationships between them we can make Rizal out to be a radical or a moderate, a liberal or a conservative, a reformer or a revolutionary. Now he obviously could not have been all these at once, and so our different reconstructions may indeed throw light on our own political opinions, but not necessarily on those of Rizal. They will embody more or less neatly the political philosophy whicli we imagine or wish Rizal to have held, not necessarily that which he did hold.

It is not enough, then, to pluck the political ideas scattered through Rizal's work and weave them into a garland the strands of which are of our own devising. We must look for some clue to the structure which these ideas took in his mind and the relative values which they had within that structure. Where shall we find it? Our first instinct is to turn to the novels. Of all Rizal's works they are unquestionably the most elaborate and mature. Yet one consideration must give us pause. These are works of fiction, and in a work of fiction the author speaks for the most part not in his own person but in that of his characters. With regard to certain passages we may have a strong suspicion that while the face may be the face of Ibarra or Elias or Padre Florentino, the voice is that of Rizal. But we can never be quite certain, and Rizal in one of his letters explicitly warns us not to be.

The Background of Nationalism ©1965 By Horacio de la Costa, S.J.


What then? I suggest that we turn to the essays. One in particular seems to present at least the base lines of the structure we are looking for. This is the study entitled "Filipinas dentro de cien años" which appeared in four parts in La Solidaridad, September 1889 to January 1890. I believe that if we use these base lines as a frame of reference we can organize the rest of Rizal's known political views into a consistent body of doctrine whose internal relationships will approximate those intended by Rizal himself.

The concrete starting point of Rizal's thought was the contemporary situation in the Philippines. That situation called for a fundamental change in the relationship which had hitherto obtained between the colony and the mother country, between the dominant and the subject people. This change was inevitable. It could not be stopped and it was useless to try to stop it. However, the change could be directed. There were two alternative directions in which the change could take place, and it was still possible to choose between them. To choose rightly it was obviously necessary to understand the situation that called for change; and to understand that it was necessary to understand the causes that produced it.

Thus, it is with history that Rizal begins. Spanish rule was imposed on the Philippines by conquest. Before the conquest Filipinos had their own culture. They had developed their own forms of economic and social organization. They were governed by their own rulers under their own laws. They worshipped their own gods. They spoke and wrote in their own languages. They had the beginnings of a native literature and a native art. It was all admittedly primitive. But it was all in process of normal development; did not all peoples begin thus? Certain aspects of it were full of promise: left to itself, what might it not have become?

But it was not left to itself. The Spanish conquest surprised it in midcareer and overwhelmed it. The Filipinos were forced to abandon their own for an alien culture, a culture which they never completely understood or assimilated. The result was that they lost their nerve. They lost confidence in their past, faith in their present, hope in their future. Rizal describes this uprooting of the Filipino cultural heritage in the following terms :

The Filipinos now entered upon a new era. Little by little they lost their ancient traditions, their memory of the past. They forgot their own system of writing, their songs, their poetry, their laws, in order to learn by rote alien



ideas which they did not understand, an alien code of conduct, an alien conception of beauty, all far removed from those inspired in their race by the environment in which they lived and by their native genius. They sank in their own estimation. They became inferior beings even to themselves. They began to be ashamed of what was their own, of what was native to their country. They began to admire and praise whatever was foreign and beyond their comprehension. They lost heart, and became a subject people.

The Fiipinos remained in this state of subjection for three centuries. During those three centuries the Spanish colonial government not only deprived them of their own culture but imposed upon them heavy burdens and exactions of every sort. Yet they offered no effective resistance. They remained passive and apathetic. Why?

The answer usually given today, in line with our aggressive and somewhat uncritical nationalism, is to deny the supposition. The Filipinos did resist; they did not remain passive and apathetic; and the proof of this is the almost unbroken series of conspiracies, uprisings and revolts which stretches from one end of the Spanish colonial period to the other.

This was not Rizal's view. He pointed out that the revolts cited were limited, local, isolated and easily put down. They were outbursts of rage against this particular exaction, that particular encomendero or official. They were not movements of resistance of Filipinos as such against Spanish rule as such. They were not national for the simple reason that Filipinos were not yet conscious of themselves as a nation.

By Rizal's time, however, by the latter part of the nineteenth century, this was no longer true. Filipinos were conscious of themselves as a nation. And this made all the difference. This, in Rizal's view, was what gave the contemporary situation its particular character of urgency.

What had happened to rouse the Filipinos from the sleep of centuries? What shock jarred them into this new consciousness of themselves as a people? Rizal's answer to this question is curious and characteristic.

He attributes the change not to an economic or political or social cause but to a psychological one. What did it was that the Spaniards added insult to injury. During the



earlier phase of Spanish rule, the colonial government demanded much of Filipinos but it did not despise them. It treated Filipinos as a subject, but not an inferior people. It exploited them, to be sure, but it also recognized their essential humanity and hence their essential equality with the conqueror. Filipinos were drafted into the colonial army, but they were also given positions of command in that army. The government insisted on obedience, but it also listened to complaints and occasionally did something about them. Injustice, even that committed by the white man, was sometimes punished; wrongs, even those suffered by the brown man, were sometimes redressed.

But in the latter phase of the colonial period a different attitude began to prevail among the Spaniards in the Philippines. They began to treat Filipinos with contempt as essentially inferior beings, "mere muscle, brutes and beasts of burden," who were such because they were incapable of being anything else. In Rizal's own bitter words, they affirmed and took for granted what they wanted to believe. They made the race itself an object of insult. They professed themselves unable to see in it any admirable quality, any human trait. Certain writers and clergymen surpassed themselves by undertaking to prove that the natives lacked not only the capacity for virtue but even the talent for vice.

By adopting this attitude the Spaniard wounded the Filipino in the most sensitive part of his spiritual being: his amor propio, that is to say, his selfesteem, his sense of personal dignity. Rizal gave great importance to this. He seems to have looked upon amor propio as the key to the psychology of the Malay race.

Asians in general [he says] and Malays in particular are people of great sensibility; delicacy of feeling is their most prominent characteristic. This may be observed even today. The Malay Filipino, in spite of his contacts with Westerners and their altogether different scale of values, will sacrifice everything – freedom, comfort, security, reputation – to the attainment of some object, whether it be religious, intellectual or something else, that has fired his ambition or caught his fancy. Yet at the least word that wounds his amor propio he forgets all his sacrifices and abandons all his labors in order to spend the rest of his life brooding on the injustice to which he thinks he has been subjected.

No wonder, then, that the Filipino reaction to Spanish contempt was instantaneous and passionate. Not only that, it was national; and this is what Rizal particularly wished to Mtreae. It was national : the affront was offered not to a particular Filipino or to a particular class of Filipinos but to Filipinos as such, as a nation, and in reaction to it the



Filipino nation found itself. What three centuries of oppression could not do, wounded amor propio did ; it brought into being Filipino nationalism.

Conscious now of their common misery Filipinos began to agitate for reforms on a national scale. The day of regional revolts, of local uprisings, of small ephemeral conspiracies was over. The demand was for reappraisal of the entire colonial system from top to bottom and for its reconstruction on an entirely new principle, that of equality between Spaniards and Filipinos. In the van of this new nationalist movement, one of the earliest to arise in Asia, was a group of young Filipinos imbued with the ideas of nineteenthcentury European liberalism, among whom was Rizal himself.

Such in brief was Rizal's analysis of the Philippine situation as stated in the La Solidaridad articles and resumed or referred to in many passages of his other works. We must now consider what he thought of the Spanish policy towards it. And first, what did he think that policy was? He believed it to be, on the whole, a policy of repression. He observed that the Spanish Conservatives were opposed to any change in the colonial administration on principle. But even the Spanish Liberals, while they might pay lipservice to liberty, equality and fraternity, did not seriously entertain the introduction of any real reforms. As certain Liberals themselves put it, they could afford to be Liberals in Spain; in the Philippines they could not be anything but Spaniards.

We would expect Rizal to look upon this policy as mistaken. But he went further than that. He looked upon it as impossible. How indeed, he asked, did Spain propose to stop progress in the Philippines? He could think of only four ways: by keeping the Filipinos in a state of utter ignorance, by reducing them to abject poverty, by not allowing them to increase in numbers, or by sowing discord among them. None of these devices could possibly work.

The first had been in operation for some time, and, with singular lack of success. In spite of an educational system designed to impart ignorance rather than knowledge, an increasing number of Filipinos were finding ways and means of enlightening themselves and their fellow countrymen either by selfinstruction or travel abroad. As for the second method, a little reflection would show that its effect was bound to be the exact opposite of what was intended.

The third method was to limit the population of the Philippines and by slow degrees



render it extinct; an impossible task. The Australian, the Polynesian and the American Indian might give way before the advance of European settlement and waste away into a few scattered tribes. But the Filipinos, in spite of recurrent epidemics, in spite of the almost uninterrupted series of wars in which they had been forced to take part either as antagonists or as allies of the Spaniards, were actually increasing in numbers. Malays are too prolific; they absolutely refuse to become extinct.

There remains the method of setting Filipinos against each other and thus preventing them from combining against a common enemy or working for their common interests. This might have succeeded and did succeed to a large extent in the past, when communications between the different regions were slow and difficult, travel costly and dangerous. It had ceased to be ipracticable by Rizal's time. The very attempt to create regional division strengthened national unity, for it meant sending native troops from one island to another, and this intermingling of Filipinos, far from estranging them from one another, merely gave them excellent opportunities for discussing their common problems and seeking a common way out of them.

If Spain persisted in her intransigent policy, there was no doubt in Rizal's mind as to what direction the inevitable change would take. The Philippines would be compelled to seek by force of arms its complete independence. The Filipino people still recognized moderate reformers as their leaders; but in the measure that they lost hope of obtaining redress by peaceful means they would transfer their allegiance from the men of peace to the men of violence. Rizal's observations on this subject are strangely prophetic:

It is thus that we interpret the situation, we who labor through legal means and peaceful argument. With eyes fixed on our objectives we shall continue to promote our cause without overstepping the limits of the law. But if force compels us to be silent or misfortune removes us from public lifewhich is not impossible since we are mortal – then we know not upon what courses a younger generation, more numerous and more aggressive than we are, and straining to take our places, will embark.

Would the Filipinos be deterred from attempting a war of liberation by the nearcertainty of failure? Rizal did not think so. Doubtless they would fail the first time, fail a second, third and fourth time; but they would not always fail. The unalterable facts of geography and demography were in their favor. Spain was far away and her limited



population could not long support the strain of keeping down by main force a people determined to be free. Once free the Filipinos had a fair chance of keeping their freedom. True, every European Power was on the lookout for colonies : but this was in the Philippines' favor, for the Powers would hardly permit one of their number to steal a march on the rest.

Thus Filipinos would at last regain control of their own destiny and resume the untrammeled development of their characteristic culture and society after the harsh interruption of Spanish rule. This was one direction the impending change could take. Rizal considered it, presented it and rejected it.

For one thing, its cost in blood and treasure would be appalling; and it would sever a historic bond between Spain and the Philippines which had been forged by three centuries of coexistence, which had yielded mutual benefits in the past and might yield still greater benefits in the future.

This bond ought, then, to be preserved: but how? Not as it was. The mastersubject relationship was no longer tenable. To keep the relationship one must change it, and it would have to be a fundamental change indeed. The colonial bond must become a partnership. More than a partnership; for what Rizal contemplated was not so much the British idea of a commonwealth of nations as the French idea of assimilation. The only way to keep Filipinos loyal to Spain, he claimed, was to grant them equal citizenship with Spaniards in the same Spanish nation which would then include not only the Spanish homeland but the Philippines. This was a tall order and he realized it fully. He proposed that it should be set up as an ultimate objective the way to which was to be paved by a series of reforms.

Some of these reforms should be undertaken by the Spanish government, others by the Filipinos themselves. The political reforms proposed by Rizal, taken individually, were no different from those proposed by his colleagues in the Propaganda Movement. What makes them distinctively his own and hence of interest to our present inquiry is the order of importance in which he lists them. First on his list is the removal of restrictions on the freedom of expression in the colony with reference to matters of public interest.

Another reform which Rizal stressed was that the colonial civil service be open to Filipinos and Spaniards alike, and that admission and promotion in the service be strictly



on the basis of merit as established in competitive examinations. His argument in support of this is a faintly sardonic one. Surely, he said, the Spaniards could have no objection to this, since they regard themselves as being in every way superior to Filipinos; they cannot therefore have any fear that Filipinos will take their jobs away from them. Moreover, it has been said often enough that the Filipino is indolent; very well, why not give him this opportunity to prove his indolence both to himself and to the world?

The reforms which Rizal urged his fellow countrymen to undertake in their own lives and in the customs and usages of their country are familiar enough. They are woven into the very theme of the Noli and the Fili. Filipinos do not have the Spaniards alone to blame for their state of subjection. They have themselves to blame just as much if not more. "There would be no masters if there were no slaves." Filipinos must realize that they cannot have the privileges of freedom unless they are willing to accept its responsibilities. But to fit themselves for the responsibilities of freedom means undergoing a long, slow and painful process of selfdiscipline; making a determined and sustained effort, individually and collectively, to lift themselves out of the slough of despond, ignorance, apathy and indolence in which they have been complacently wallowing for centuries.

Moreover, if Filipinos wished to establish a democratic republic in their country, then instead of merely agitating for it as they were doing, let them devote some time and effort to cultivating in themselves those virtues which the citizens of a democratic republic ought to have. What were these virtues? In an interesting and all too little known letter to the members of La Solidaridad Rizal enumerates those which he considered to be the most important.

One was what he called economia : the prudent husbanding of limited resources so that they will produce the maximum benefit for the greatest number. The British slogan of some years back, "austerity," will serve well enough as a modern equivalent. The point here is that Rizal thought the importance of this virtue so obvious that instead of expatiating on it, he merely wrote it down three times: economia, economia, economia – "austerity, austerity and again austerity."

Another virtue most necessary to the free citizen of a free nation is what Rizal called transigencia, which we may roughly render as "the spirit of giveandtake." By this Rizal meant the willingness to compromise, not indeed on matters of principle, but on those



questions of practical policy which are of their nature subject to adjustment. Democratic government is unworkable without this readiness to make mutual concessions in order to arrive at general agreement. For democracy, Rizal pointed out, is government by discussion ; the people or their representatives meet to debate several different courses of action and decide on one. Hence, the object of debate in a democratic government is not to make one's opinion prevail at all costs, but collectively to choose that course which will be found after free and frank discussion to be the wisest and the best. This course may not be one's own ; it may not be anybody's ; it may be, and usually is, a course which emerges during the debate itself through a series of mutual concessions and compromises. This procedure, so necessary in a democracy, requires a high degree of discipline, selfrestraint and humility on the part of its ctizens. Tramigencia thus understood does not come natural to people, especially to people with as much amor propio as Filipinos. It must be the object of conscious effort. It must be learned.

Finally and in the last analysis, what did Rizal understand by nationalism? There is no question but that he meant by it, first and foremost, sacrifice. The true patriot is he who is ready at all times to forego his own personal and private advantage in order to advance the welfare of his people. The common good of the nation is a fine thing; it is a precious thing: but like all fine and precious things it has an exorbitant price. That price is sacrifice, and the true patriot is he who is willing to pay that price ; to pay it "sin dudas, sin pesar," that is to say, without thinking twice about it, and without calculating the cost.

Such in brief are what I have called the base lines of Rizal's political doctrine. How are we to evaluate that doctrine? Rizal being our national hero we naturally tend to accept whatever he wrote almost as gospel truth. It may therefore be of help towards an objective appreciation if we pointed out what seem to be deficiencies in his historical analysis.

There are some. Rizal consistently overrates the preSpanish culture of the Philippines, which was not nearly as developed as he makes it out to be both in "The Philippines a Century Hence" and in the annotations to Morga. On the other hand his evaluation of Spanish rule is vitiated by the assumption that the Spanish conquest destroyed the indigenous culture and substituted an alien culture in its stead. This is to oversimplify matters considerably. Cultures are not destroyed in quite so summary a fashion. Spanish rule undoubtedly modified our native culture and added to it elements which were completely new – Christianity, for instance; but it hardly destroyed it. The Filipinos did indeed receive Spanish culture, but they did so selectively and vitally; they



made it their own, a culture different both from what they had originally and what the Spaniards brought.

I suppose that Rizal, if pressed, would admit this; but he would claim (indeed, he has claimed) that this transformation of our culture was a bad thing, a forcible deflection of its normal line of development. This view seems to me unsound. One may well ask: what is the "normal" line of development of any culture? Is it claimed that cultures develop normally only in a vacuum, solely by the unfolding of its own inner potentialities and never by stimulation or enrichment from without? If so, then what existing culture can be said to have had a normal development? What existing or even extinct culture can be called native in this sense? Can even our preSpanish culture, with its numerous borrowings and adaptations from India and Indonesia, be called such?

No one questions the fact that the Spanish conquest of the Philippines was violent and destructive, as all conquests must be, and that the subsequent colonial rule was in many ways oppressive and repressive. But it is going beyond the evidence to argue from this, as Rizal seems to do, that the Spanish period of our history was an almost completely negative interlude: a state of suspended , animation ; a kind of Dark Age which contributed nothing to the enrichment or development of our national culture. The cultural value of Christianity is pretty generally admitted even by those who do not believe in it, and our debt to Spain in this regard is as obvious as it is profound.

Does the Filipino or Malay amor propio deserve the key role which Rizal gives to it in the awakening of Filipino national consciousness? People like myself who have only the slightest acquaintance with social psychology would be tempted to say no. We tend to look for more tangible causes, usually of an economic or political nature. Still, one can perceive, especially if one happens to be a Filipino, that there is great value in this insight, even if one cannot agree with Rizal's valuation of it. Certainly there were other causes equally important which I have tried to suggest elsewhere. Not the least of them was precisely the action of Spain itself which Rizal tends consistently to minimize.

It is curious but undeniable that colonial rule by the Western nations sooner or later develops the nationalisms which eventually put an end to colonial rule; and this not only negatively as sheer reaction but positively, by supplying the separatist movement with its frame of reference and its principles. It may even be said that colonialism, at least of the Western type, is selfliquidating.



But this ought not to be surprising, especially to us Filipinos, who must realize that it was through the mediation of Spain in part that the ideas of human equality, civic freedom and the rule of law, ideas Hellenic and Christian in origin, became an integral part of our national culture. One does not have to read very extensively in Rizal and his associates to realize that their rejection of colonialism had for its theoretical base not an Asian but a Western world view. It was not from the Upanishads, or the Confucian Analects, or the Kokutaino Hongi, or even the Code of Kalantiao that they derived their inspiration. The liberty, equality and fraternity they spoke of were forged in the Greek citystate, the Christian gospels, the universities of the Middle Ages, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.

But these considerations are surely peripheral to Rizal's main argument. That must stand in its essential lines as a monument to the man's perceptiveness and breadth of vision. We may cavil at the details, but we are bound to recognize that among Rizal's contemporaries no one grasped so surely the prime factors of the problem presented by the political situation in the Phlippines, or passed upon them so balanced a judgment.


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Rizal's Political Views