A Singapore Renaissance

With our affluence and so much money floating around, in the pockets of individuals and in the govt coffers, Singapore and Singaporeans are indeed entering its golden years. We have the arts festivals, theatres and major sports events filling up our calendars and all the space available. The celebrities and rich and famous of the world are treating this island of fun as their playground.

The fun, the celebration and partying and money spending are just a few ways to show that we are at a stage like Europe in the 19th century, full of wealth and time for indulgence, that people can afford to have a lot of free time to dabble with the good things in life, to be cultured and refined and to enjoy life to the fullest. These are actually superficial in away, just fun loving. The real stuff in a renaissance is the literature.

We need to have our own literature, the really good stuff, not pray pray type, not the money not enough type. We need serious and deep thinking literature in the class of the ancient barbs, poets, historians, writers of novels, economics, the arts and sciences. We have a few good starts in the right direction with LKY writing a few books on history and politics. SR Nathan also wrote something and recently Raymond Lim also wrote something, likely to be about public administration or politics. Then we have the eminent academics like Lim Chong Yah, Wang GungWu and many others that have written their own books in their respective fields.

In the area of public administration and economics, we have so many brilliant ideas and first of its kind to teach the world, eg raising GST to help the poor, how to build public flats at practically no cost, except charging land cost at one’s convenient and selling at market price and losing big, how to populate the country with third world no talents and fake talents and still going strong, how to reduce the citizen population to improve the citizen core, how to pay the world’s never heard of salary to fight corruption and with the people agreeing to it, how to keep the people’s savings for as long as the govt wants and without protest from the people, and so many many other great ideas like making things compulsory for the people to pay, and more. These will definitely make it to the best sellers list and becoming classics for the civil service in many countries, a must read for their civil servants.

We need more. If all the ministers past and present were to write about their specialties, their achievements and their wisdom, we would have a good collection of the best literature by the best talents money can buy. And Heng Swee Kiat could start a new revision in the syllabus for the schools using our very own text books by our very own intellectuals. We would be original, our children on completion of the school system will be thinking original and quoting from our very own kind. There would not be any need to quote western philosophers, historians, scientists or economists as if they were gods. Out from their mouths will be wisdoms from the likes of LKY, Goh Keng Swee, not sure if he has written any books, Rajaratnam, Nathan, Raymond, and maybe Ngiam Tong Dow. Of course we must not forget to quote from Chan Heng Chee, Kishore, Simon Tay, Barry Desker, and yes, military strategies and stratagems from our very own generals. We could have our own versions to rival Sun Tzu or Clauswitz.

When that day comes, it will be our Renaissance, a Singaporean Renaissance. And some of them will be recipients of Nobel prizes for literature and the arts, and their books could be standard text for reading in schools and universities around the world. Then we can forget about Shakespeare, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Socrates, Orwells, Obama, Bush or Clinton…. All the retired or semi retired ministers should start thinking and writing their memoirs for the benefits of our future generations on their great works and their contributions to the well beings of four young.