Transcript of Speech by President Tharman Shanmugaratnam at IPS-Nathan Lecture Series – 12th Fellow, Professor Wang Gungwu ‘Living with Civilisations’

Mr Janadas Devan,
Director, IPS,

Professor Wang Gungwu,
12th S R Nathan Fellow,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Thank you for having me join you this morning. I agreed immediately on receiving Janadas’ invitation. I regard Professor Wang Gungwu as the most outstanding scholar of the humanities that Southeast Asia has produced. And amongst the most outstanding historians of our times.

I read Professor Wang Gungwu’s four IPS-Nathan lectures with great interest, and I urge everyone to read and reread it for the wisdom that it conveys.

The central thread running through his book arises from a fact, which Prof Wang explains very carefully. The fact that Southeast Asia, which Singapore is a part of, has never comprised a civilisation of its own, but a set of evolving cultures. A set of local and national cultures that were shaped by external influences and, in particular, were shaped by four ancient civilisations – the Indic, Sinic, Islamic, and European-Christian. The region had the fortune, uniquely amongst regions around the world, of being shaped in significant ways by all four of these ancient civilisations.

Arising from this fact, Prof Wang draws several important observations and lessons. The fact of not having an indigenous civilisation, one capable of spreading the wings of its values and ideas well beyond its terrain, also helped each of the cultures and eventually nations of the region to be open and inclusive through their histories. They have been proud bearers of the ancient civilisations – in one combination or another -   the Indic, Sinic, Islamic, and European Christian civilisations.

They have also had the local genius of not adopting any one of those civilisations holistically or singularly, but selecting elements from these different civilisations and integrating them within their own evolving national cultures. It was a local genius that enabled Southeast Asia to selectively modernise, in order to preserve its own evolving set of cultures.

I would add that this open and inclusive trait that runs through Southeast Asia’s histories gives the region resilience in today’s world, and I’m sure, equally significantly the world of tomorrow.

The ability to selectively incorporate different civilisations from around the world enables the nations of the region to navigate, each in their own way, the tensions and tides of a changing world - a world where each of the ancient civilisations is being constantly interpreted and propagated by the current day sentiments of the major nations and regions abroad that are home to each of these civilisations. It better enables us to avoid being pulled and tugged by those contemporary impulses. The evolving Southeast Asian cultures, open and inclusive, able to select elements from the ancient and still living great civilisations, and never having been singularly dependent of any, gives the region resilience.

This was always significant for Singapore, in Prof Wang Gungwu’s telling. Ujong Tanah, as it was once called - the “land’s end” at the tip of the Malay Peninsula - was most exposed to people from different merantau origins. Singapore was continually exposed to those different civilisational influences.

But there was another interesting feature in Singapore, as Prof Wang notes, in that the Western colonial power that ruled over the island, the British, did not try to change the fact of these different civilisations influencing its people. The British were practical. They sought to minimise the possibility of conflict by allotting different plots of land around the island to the different merantau. They brought modern government, but the people continued their lives as they were. They lived, traded, and practised their faiths in ways that continued to reflect the different civilisations they were influenced by.

I would make another observation, with regard to Singapore. We are unique in the region, in that the community which came to be in the majority in Singapore, the Chinese, had a long experience of being a minority community in Southeast Asia. That long experience of being a minority community in different parts of Southeast Asia does appear to have shaped a distinct ethos amongst the Chinese who settled in Singapore. And that itself has helped us to become a multiracial society in a fuller sense after independence. We would otherwise very likely have had a strongly majoritarian culture and polity. The fact that our majority community had long experienced being a minority in a region, where there were four major civilisational influences, was an important heritage.

Coming back to Southeast Asia. I believe the openness and inclusiveness of cultures that we’ve seen variously in Southeast Asia, and the fact that none of the individual nations nor the region as a whole regards itself as a civilisation in its own right, is an advantage in today’s world. It gives us the humility that allows us to keep learning, and never to think that we’re superior to the rest of the world.

We will go through periods where there will be a tendency for any one of these other national cultures, the homes of the major civilisations, to believe that they represent the best of human values, or the best interests of humanity. Southeast Asia’s history of open and inclusive cultures, allows us to be circumspect. They give us that resilience.

I therefore conclude with two important lessons that Professor Wang himself enunciates. First, it is important for Singapore to stay united within ASEAN, as is indeed fully our intention. And second, it is important for ASEAN to be united and to prevent our multi-civilisational cultures from ever descending into the warring nationalist cultures abroad that threaten us today.

Professor Wang emphasises in this regard the distinction between the Sinic civilisation and contemporary China’s national culture as it keeps evolving. I would add that the same can be said about the Indic civilisation and the evolving contemporary Indian culture, and likewise Islamic. For each of the civilisations that have shaped us and continue to shape us, we should always distinguish between the enduring civilisational ideas and values and the contemporary national cultures, temperaments and impulses in the parts of the world that they came from. That too, is how we retain our resilience.

We’re advantaged by having civilisational influences that shaped us over a long period of time. We should continue to evolve our national culture - informed and enriched by those civilisational influences as well as our own melding together of cultures that we have developed locally, and what we’ve developed as a region in Southeast Asia.

So I end there, drawing on the wisdom we gain from Professor Wang Gungwu’s lectures and book. As I mentioned, they are worth reading. Tese are the writings of one of the most outstanding scholars of our times.

Thank you very much.