Yawningbread.wordpress.com, 21 Oct 2012When Lawrence Wong said that an emerging thread in the public dialogues that he has been part of has been one of “wanting a kinder society, a more gracious society,” his is a rather late observation. I wonder too if the Acting Minister for Culture, Community and Youth has merely scratched the surface, because, if the Sunday Times story of his epiphany is anything to go by, he transplants these outward demonstrations of simple decency into the term “values”. “Values” mean far more than that, they go deeper than that, as I will discuss further down.
His realisation is late. Many academics and observers I have spoken to have been saying something similar for years now: that increasingly, Singaporeans consider the questions of identity and values to be high priority.
It’s been the People’s Action Party government that has been blind to it. They still see things in econometric terms. Their own feedback loop has been so broken, they didn’t even realise that every time they boasted about GDP growing by such-and-such a percent, people were switching off. Some saw it cynically as another excuse to reward ministers and top civil servants handsomely. Full story
