Come join me on the fence

I don't know what it is about social media, but it seems to be very easy to get emotional and lose our senses online.

This article by The New York Times made the rounds in Singapore recently, provoking a quick and harsh response from a Singaporean writer.

The problem I have with the way the response is written is that it paints the original article as horrible beyond redemption.

The writer takes great pains to systematically destroy almost every line in the original article. He does so using only one simplistic tactic: raising counterexamples portraying the failings of the West.

Throughout the response, his tone is combative, hurtful, and laced with venom. It is an astonishing, utterly unprovoked verbal attack against a journalist whose article was worded in the measured, careful manner that her professional standards demand.

As critical consumers of media, we must fight the urge to take sides.

Many educated Singaporeans are sharing the sharp rebuke widely, gleefully celebrating the "smackdown", as a university student acquaintance of mine called it on Facebook, that the Singaporean writer delivered to the Western journalist.

It's natural to get defensive about criticisms against your own country. Patriotism and nationalism can evoke powerful feelings, especially in an indoctrinated country like Singapore where we are trained from young to respect the State, the Government, and authority in general.

But we should temper our desire to rage against such criticisms, by taking time to think about why the criticisms arose in the first place.

There's no smoke without fire, as the saying goes. Criticisms, even those that might at first appear unfounded or unfair, stem from somewhere. Identifying why those criticisms were levelled is important because it points us towards areas for improvement.

I'm a firm believer that all opinions deserve to be considered carefully. None should be rejected out of hand. This doesn't mean I agree with everything. For example, I disagree with the anti-vaccination movement, but I still read the arguments put forth by supporters of that movement to educate myself on how they justify their stand. Then, when I encounter a counterargument, for instance by a scientist, I have the full picture of the issue rather than just half of it.

Forming your personal viewpoint on a certain issue, then, is a matter of cobbling together your favourite bits of the various perspectives proposed by others into a coherent whole that you are comfortable with. After all, it is your opinion, so the only person you have to account to is yourself.

Joining the quarrel for or against any of the warring factions is not a productive use of your time, particularly on social media where practically everybody screams but hardly anyone listens.

My assessment of both writeups

For the record, these are my opinions on the NYT article kerfuffle.

Masks

The journalist, Ms Stack, made a serious error of judgment when she declined to wear a mask despite her husband's reminder to do so.

She quotes the law, which says that we don't have to wear masks while exercising. But for whatever reason, she misses out the part that says we must wear masks before and after the exercise. This is rightly called out by the Singaporean writer, Mr Hong.

By extension, the woman who scolded and photographed Ms Stack for her failure to wear a mask was technically not wrong in doing what she did.

Ms Stack implies that she was being victimised as a foreigner and that the Singapore system would treat her harshly because she is an outsider. But be aware that there's a group of Singaporeans who claim that the Singapore system is biased in favour of foreigners, citing examples of court sentences in which locals were handed stiffer penalties compared to foreigners found guilty of the same offence.

And an outcry accusing White expatriates of receiving preferential treatment from the authorities erupted on social media mere days before Ms Stack's article was posted, after it was reported that some expats had not been punished despite gathering in groups to drink alcohol at Robertson Quay.

So I don't think Ms Stack is justified to feel like the victim in this situation. The fact is that she flouted the rules. Her Whiteness has nothing to do with it. Singaporeans report one another to the authorities all the time. We don't care what colour you are. Like I said earlier, we are brought up to show deference towards authority and obedience of the rules. This means we don't like rule-breakers.

Migrant workers

Where Mr Hong's response goes astray in my view is when he defends Singapore's disastrous exploitation of migrant workers. Remember what I said about criticisms just now? Mr Hong seems like he was stung by Ms Stack's criticisms of the living conditions of migrant workers in dormitories. Let's take a step back and evaluate the situation.

"The government could mandate larger living quarters for these migrant laborers. But bigger dormitories mean higher rent. The more these migrant workers are compelled to spend on rent, the less of their wages they will have to send back home," writes Mr Hong (bold in original), before taking an uncalled-for swipe at the fact that Ms Stack lives in a condominium.

These are my thoughts:

1. Dormitories in Singapore are privately run by dormitory operators who, under the status quo, are making huge profits. They can afford to house the workers in more spacious dormitories without raising the rent. They are making so much money they won't go bust even if they do this.
2. The workers don't rent the dorms directly. The companies they work for enter into agreements with the abovementioned dorm operators to house their respective workforces over the long term. It is these companies that pay the rent. If the rent goes up, it's true that the companies will likely cut the workers' salaries to recover the additional cost. But the actual financial impact on the individual worker will be smaller than if he rented the dorm room directly, as Mr Hong's statement implies, because economies of scale will dilute the amount that each worker has to indirectly contribute in terms of salary cuts to the overall rental payments owed by their employers.
3. Phrasing the argument this way, framing it as a relationship between physical space and monetary cost, ignores a broader issue, which is this: Should migrant workers even have to worry about any hypothetical increase in their rent threatening their livelihoods? Going by Mr Hong's no-support for giving each worker more personal space on the pretext that this would hit their wallets hard, it looks like under the status quo, migrant workers indeed have to worry. But if their livelihoods are so fragile and hanging by a thread, it simply means we're not paying them enough. And before anyone complains that paying migrant workers more will raise the cost of everything since they take care of all the basic goods and services in Singapore, think about these questions: How sensible is it that we are almost completely reliant on foreign labour for all our essential needs in the first place? Won't offering higher salaries for the jobs currently occupied by migrant workers attract some locals to fill those positions? And for the migrant workers who do fill the positions that there aren't enough locals to fill, won't higher salaries improve their quality of life? Going through the employers' finances, how much money are they making now thanks to the depressed wages they pay? Doing the sums, if we decide to pay migrant workers more, how much of the cost increase can the employers bear without going bust? And how much do they honestly need to pass on to the end consumers? My take: For far too long, we have allowed capitalism to grow unfettered like a cancer within society. Companies engage in flagrant profiteering without regard for ethics. This must change: We owe it to these migrant workers to pay them more, even if it means less for ourselves.

Mr Hong also tells the story of the introduction of the Child Labor Deterrence Act to support his point that "Americans have had a long and storied history of making the world worse with a “West-knows-best” approach to aid. (bold in original)" He draws the troubling conclusion that the Act, which barred the United States from importing items from countries employing child labour, caused an increase in child prostitution. I find this disturbingly spurious. I also wonder what Mr Hong suggests as an alternative. Should the West turn a blind eye to the social problems in the world and simply do nothing?

Ms Stack wasn't being unfair in calling out the cramped conditions that migrant workers live in, or pointing out that this was a major reason for the explosive outbreak of the coronavirus among them.

For Mr Hong to attack Ms Stack on the basis of her Western origins is disingenuous and a classic case of ad hominem.

Let me wrap up this section by saying this: As demonstrated here, neither writeup is completely flawed or completely flawless. Both have their weaknesses. In other words, neither is one hundred percent right or one hundred percent wrong. Indeed, what is right and what is wrong? Everyone measures such concepts using different yardsticks, depending on the ideological lenses they wear. And there's absolutely nothing wrong (pardon the pun) with that.

Depejoratising fence-sitting and reserving one's opinion

I hesitate to use the cliché, but here goes. On social media, complex issues are portrayed as being either black or white. You are either with me or against me, my friend or my enemy. But in fact the world is many shades of grey. I can agree with some, but not all, of what you say. You can agree with some, but not all, of what I say. We can try to convince each other through a rational, thoughtful discussion in which everybody controls their emotional impulses, but we can also simply agree to disagree. Sometimes a failure to reach a consensus is because of ideological differences that are too big to bridge. And ideology is immensely personal: Each of us has our own unique ideology that is shaped by every little thing we've read, heard, and experienced since we first came into being; it is malleable, constantly changing in response to new inputs until we draw our dying breath.

Once we recognise this, we'll learn not to take disagreement too personally. Everyone has a right to their own opinion, but no one has the right to demand that others adopt the same opinion as them. Oftentimes, to keep the peace, staying out of online confrontations is the best course of action. Silence doesn't always mean consent. It may simply indicate battle-weariness, a reluctance to engage in a fruitless mudslinging contest, or acceptance that one's own view is just one out of a diverse range of equally valid views out there. As I said before, the only person who needs to be convinced of your opinion is you. As long as you are happy, why bother about what others think?

The long and short of what I'm saying boils down into two key phrases that I hope we can use on one another online more often, to replace the vitriol that unfortunately flows more naturally from our angry fingers:

That's okay

Live and let live

I believe this is one step towards a more mature internet for all to enjoy.