City of the Future: What America Can Learn From Post-Liberal Singapore By Nathan Gardels

The Washington Post

11 February 1996, Final Edition

Fashionable though it may be to vilify Singapore as just one more historically outmoded dictatorship, a case can be made that it ought to be extolled as a model for the future when the center of gravity of human civilization shifts to Asia. Probably no place on the planet is as prepared to enter the 21st century as this orderly high-tech, middle-class, multiculturally tolerant -- but post-liberal -- city-state.

By the middle of the next century, Singapore's far-sighted (and highly paid) governing class will be remembered as one of the first to recognize that the small size of a city-state, once thought to be a disadvantage, is the most efficient scale for any stable polity in a perpetually shifting global economy.

As Singapore's young and impressive minister of information and the arts, George Yeo, says, "The information revolution will not dissolve the world into an amorphous mass of weakened political entities, but transform it into more efficient units of power -- crossroads cities like the big city-states in Europe or in China before the age of empire."

Singapore's governing class will also be remembered as among the first to see that nurturing the "cultural infrastructure" is every bit as important to the survival of a community as its physical infrastructure: that cultural self-determination for their small swatch of destiny is a post-modern virtue, that, indeed, it is the right of a community not to surrender supinely to whatever the entertainers, newsroom editors, executives and marketing wizards of the great Western media empires think is best for them.

Thus Singapore's leaders have not only built an air-tropolis and container port that are among the most advanced in the world, they are also hard at work wiring their society into cyberspace as a matter of policy. (Singapore has its own home page on the Worldwide Web and a program to ensure that all high school graduates have the skills to navigate the Net). At the same time, however, they are making a point of standing up to an "anything goes" world of information flows.

Lee Kuan Yew, still the eminence behind power in Singapore, made the point passionately during a long conversation last fall at Istana, the former British governor's residence in Singapore: "Good governance, even today, requires a balance between competing claims by upholding fundamental truths: that there is right and wrong, good and evil . . . . If everyone gets pornography on a satellite dish the size of a saucer, then governments around the world will have to do something about it, or we will destroy our young and with them human civilization."

This explicit willingness to meddle in the media has rankled the West no end and tarnished Singapore's reputation. New York Times columnist William Safire has made a regular practice of trashing the tyranny he sees in Singapore. Microsoft's Bill Gates told me after a visit to Singapore that "they want to have their cake and eat it too" -- they want cyberspace and control -- but "no place is an island anymore."

But there is another perspective. Is it really so heretical to suggest in the wake of the O.J. media circus, Calvin Klein's proto-porn teen ads, hyperviolent films, gangsta rap and the descent of the mainstream press into tabloidism that the Singapore authorities are not behind the times, but ahead of them?

Is it so outrageous to believe that those societies that ac monitor what their children are exposed to and how it affects them, that have no qualms about drawing the line between what is appropriate and inappropriate, are going to hang together better in the social squalls ahead than those that don't?

Perhaps it is time to consider the possibility that the Western attitude that has all but cast away the notion of appropriate social authority might be outmoded. After all, the key problem of Western civilization now is not the absence of tolerance, it is how to cope with so much freedom. Anyone who watches Jerry Springer, Ricki Lake or Sally Jessy Raphael has to know in their gut that the issue of our time is no longer which limits to erase, but where to draw the boundaries. Smelling political opportunity, even Bill Clinton and Bob Dole are onto this issue.

It is this context that makes Singapore's leaders post-liberal rather than merely reactionary authoritarians. Their stance arises not so much out of fear of what liberalism might mean to their hold on power but from the demonstrated failures of the permissive society carried to extremes. In America they have seen what for most of the postwar era was touted as the future, and it doesn't work.

I asked Lee if he agreed with Zbigniew Brzezinski's worry that "America's own cultural self-corruption -- its permissive cornucopia -- may undercut American's capacity, not just to sustain its position in the world as a political leader, but even as a systemic model for others."

"That has already happened," Lee responded. "The ideas of individual supremacy and the right to free expression, when carried to excess, have not worked. They have made it difficult to keep American society cohesive. Asia can see it is not working. Those who want a wholesome society where young girls and old ladies can walk in the streets at night, where the young are not preyed upon by drug peddlers, will not follow the American model." In other words, extremism in the name of liberty is a vice.

As always in our conversations, however, Lee was careful to praise America's innovative edge -- the genius of innovation and the ability to recover manufacturing productivity in the face of Japanese auto competition. But isn't that innovation and capacity for initiative linked to the very unfettered freedom he so condemns, I asked?

Not so, says the senior minister in a revealing insight that echoes those who have argued that America went wrong with the extremism of the "rights revolution" of the '60s and '70s. Lee similarly argues that when the lifestyle experiments of the cultural avant-garde are democratized, society subverts itself.

"The top 3 to 5 percent of a society can handle this free-for-all, this clash of ideas," he says. "If you do this with the whole mass . . . you'll have a mess. In this vein, I say, let them have the Internet. How many Singaporeans will be exposed to all these ideas, including some crazy ones, which we hope they won't absorb? Five percent? Okay. That is intellectual stimulation that can provide an edge for society as a whole. But to have, day to day, images of violence and raw sex on the picture tube, the whole society exposed to it, it will ruin a whole community."

Neither Lee nor Yeo, however, has any illusions that censorship can be effective. Rather, as Yeo put it, "censorship is a symbolic act, an affirmation to young and old alike of the values held by a community."

But ought this kind of power be in the hands of the state?

"What is the power of the state in local Singapore, a city-state with less than three million people?" asks Yeo in response. It is not, after all, a Leviathan like the old Soviet empire or even the French state or the American federal state. "We are really what in America is a local community. What we do is not so different from the people of Omaha or some other community saying, "We don't want the Playboy channel to play here because it is offensive and contrary to what we believe in."

Fair enough, but in the name of a wholesome and trusting society the Singapore government never hesitates to drag the Economist, the International Herald Tribune (which is co-owned by The Washington Post) -- or even the local Business Times to court for libel or for publishing leaked information. Isn't there a chilling effect, I asked, that will prevent the press from playing its critical check-and-balance role on corruption, nepotism or the manipulation of government information?

"If this were the case in Singapore," Yeo answers not wholly convincingly, "we would be destroying ourselves . . . . We are a nation of arbitrageurs. We can't afford to be a nanosecond behind Tokyo, London or New York. For us to try to limit information to a banker, a trader or a journalist would sound the death knell for Singapore. It would be contrary to our entire economic strategy."

Whatever one's doubts, this balancing act of good governance that guards the integrity of the cultural infrastructure in an efficient city-state of manageable administrative scale has been highly successful.

Anyone arriving in Singapore from the poverty and chaos of Calcutta or even Bangkok will readily acknowledge that it is a social model that works. Though it can be seen as one huge, immaculate shopping mall that is comparatively boring on the evening entertainment front, it is undeniably a very decent place. Indeed, the indices of social decency in this island nation of just under 3 million people are a reverse mirror image of the indices of American social decay.

Drugs are nonexistent as a result of one of the toughest policies in the world. On your immigration card you cannot miss the bold warning in red ink that drug smuggling carries a mandatory penalty of death. The boulevards, landscaped with palms and orchids, are spotless. Graffiti, penalized by caning as we know from the Michael Fay case, is nonexistent. Famously, women can safely walk the street alone, late and in the dark.

The standard of living in Singapore is as high as in many European countries, and more egalitarian. Fifteen years ago, the average income of the top 20 percent was 14.4 times that of the bottom 20 percent; by 1994, it was only 10.5 times as great. In that same period, the average income of the top 20 percent fell 3 percent while the average income of the middle 60 percent rose more than 4 percent. Savings rates are as high as they get in any society.

Chinese (who dominate ethnically) and Malays, Hindus and Muslims live and work together side by side as harmoniously as anywhere else. English is the dominant language to reach the outside world. Mandarin the inside. English is the language of the important newspapers; Mandarin the language of the most popular television channel. There are also Hindi and Malay TV stations.

Any businessman will tell you that Singapore is one of the few places in Asia where you can trust the rule of law not to be wholly corrupted. In a region where the notoriously blurry line between connections (guanxi) and corruption pervades all commerce, Singapore stands out. Late last year Fortune magazine named Singapore the best place in the world to do business.

At a time when so many societies are decaying or growing out of control, Singapore is going to make it. It is a place where I would feel comfortable raising my children but, admittedly, would hesitate to live as an adult. That I, like so many others, sometimes arrive at just the opposite conclusion about the United States assures that the Singapore model will continue to resonate as a critique of permissive societies run amok well into the next century.

Nathan Gardels is editor of New Perspectives Quarterly and the Global Viewpoint service of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. His forthcoming book of essays and interviews is entitled "At Century's End: Great Minds Reflect on Our Times."