Point Blank
laquino@theguidon.com
One thing that has always struck me is the sheer power of the creative mind. A short story can enlighten an entire generation or reinforce the closed-mindedness of society. A film can spark revolutionary sentiment or deepen the masses’ desires for all things bourgeois. A doctoral dissertation on quantum physics or postmodern thought can break new ground for academia or pave the way for the future of humanity.
Indeed, we see very clearly that the creative thinkers of the world wield an immense power to transform the planet we call home.
In the Loyola Schools, a place a lot of us hold in great regard and consider to be a high point in the Filipino intellectual landscape, thinking as a discipline is alive and flourishing. In fact, the act of thinking is done quite excellently here, and that’s probably what gives us any right at all to call the Ateneo an institution of higher learning.
However, thinking in the Ateneo is not done courageously enough. Far too many Ateneans seem to be trapped in a cage that limits their thinking to the comfortable and the commonplace. Precisely at that point where the questions begin to get harder, the contradictions seem more difficult to resolve, and the prospects of the radically new offer glimpses to the mind, too many Ateneans retreat, forgetting that their capacity to think is made precisely for that place of struggle.
Instead, Ateneans fall back into the luxury of the status quo, reassured by its stable, firm embrace—the fear and trembling far, far away. Only some faint weeping from Payatas or a violent yell from Mendiola disturb the comfort and break the silence, but only ever so softly, always a little bit too quiet to interrupt the lullaby.
But the Atenean can be easily jolted from this sleep. All it takes is for the radical imagination to force the cage of slumber open, and thus find for itself new possibilities and opportunities for the world, unhampered even by notions long established by the dominant worldview.
It is exactly this that gives me hope—that Ateneans’ capability to think excellently also points to their capability to think courageously, as long as they dare to do so.
And they must, really, because in this era of global social upheaval, it’s high time to go back to the grand narratives. However helpful we get to be to a certain number of Payatas families, we can’t really talk about social entrepreneurship forever. There will come a time when we will all have to face the beast eye-to-eye.
We can only do that when we are not afraid to talk about the big topics and pose the hard questions. It will be contentious, but eventually, for example, we will all really have to talk about capitalism and its injustices. About why we let the dominant institutions of society get away with the oppression of whole populations of people. About the inhuman march of modern technology. About why we are even talking about all these things.
After all, the imagination is charged with the power to liberate—an act called for by none more so than the contemporary human condition. We don’t get anywhere by being docile sheep. It’s time to raise our pens and voices. It’s time to reimagine a world far better than the one we’re living in now. It’s time to think more courageously.
