Devan, April 15 2007, Straits Times Interactive

Below is a writing from ST journalist Janadas Devan. Singapore need journalists like him, and editors with the guts to publish writings like this one.


Janadas Devan, April 15 2007 -

SINGAPORE has come through a rather gruelling week. Money - who has it, how much, who doesn't, why - there is no more controversial issue.
In what follows, I don't expect to resolve the debate on ministerial and administration service salaries to anyone's satisfaction. But perhaps a brief glossary of some terms that came up during the parliamentary debate on the issue might help us get our bearings.

Politics, politicians: These words come from the Old French politique, via Latin from the Greek politikos. And politikos, in turn, comes from the Greek polites, which means 'citizen'; politeia, 'citizenship'; and polis, 'city'.

In other words, the Greek word for 'city' is the base for 'citizen', 'politics' and 'politician'. The word 'policy' - as in 'government policy' - also derives from the same source, polis.

City, a defined territory, produces a community, citizens. Citizens, regulating themselves, produce politicians. And politicians, devoting themselves to the welfare of the citizenry, produce policy for the city. From polis to polites to politikos to policie to polis - it is almost a perfect Platonic circle.

So how did 'politics' and 'politicians' become terms of abuse soon after they entered the English language in the 16th century? One of the earliest definitions of 'politician', according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), was not the respectful 'one who practises the science and art of government'. Instead, it was the insulting 'a shrewd schemer; a crafty plotter or intriguer' - a definition that the OED rather hopefully, and misleadingly, classifies as now 'obsolete'.

In fact, it has never gone out of fashion. Shakespeare, almost soon after 'politician' appeared in English, wrote: 'Get thee glass eyes, and like a scurvy politician, seem to see the things thou dost not.' He was merely echoing what Euripedes wrote in 425 BC: 'Spare me the sight/ Of this thankless breed, these politicians/ Who cringe for favours from a screaming mob/ And do not care what harm they do their friends,/ Providing they can please a crowd.' And if one looked up The International Thesaurus of Quotations, or any other standard compilation of quotable quotes, one would find those same themes echoing down the ages in various societies.

There is Walter Savage Landor (British): 'In argument, truth always prevails; in politics, falsehood always.' There is Will Rogers (American): 'If you ever injected truth into politics, you have no politics.' There is Nikita Khrushchev (Russian): 'Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.'

How did we get from that perfect Platonic circle to all this? Let's see:

Government/Governance: In his speech to Parliament on Wednesday, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong observed: 'In the old days, they called it government, now they call it governance. Sounds a bit more erudite but basically it means it's become more complicated.'

Both 'government' and 'governance' are nouns and the OED uses identical words to define them: 'the act or manner of governing'. But 'governance' is almost as old as 'government', first appearing in English in the 14th century. It has been used variously to mean: 'controlling, directing or regulating'; 'good order'; 'the manner in which something is governed or regulated, method of management, system of regulation'; 'a rule of practice, a discipline'. Thus 'governance' has been used in various contexts, ranging from 'clinical governance', referring to standards of care in hospital systems, to 'corporate governance', referring to standards in business conduct, as Mr Michael Quinion notes on his World Wide Word site.

All these various meanings of 'government' and 'governance' have their root in the Latin gubernare and the Greek kubernan, which means 'to steer'. 'The act or manner of governing', in other words, has always hinged on how one directs, navigates, positions - 'steers' - the ship of state.

(As an aside, it is worth noting that 'the Middle English governess was originally spelt governeress meaning a 'female ruler'', as The Oxford Dictionary Of Word Histories informs us. English, it would seem, had feminist instincts centuries before England got a female ruler in Elizabeth I.)

We commonly call governors who steer the ship of state well 'statesmen' - 'a person skilled in affairs of state', 'a distinguished and capable politician', as the OED defines the word - not 'politicians'. A statesman, it may be true, is often a 'politician who has been dead 10 or 15 years', as Harry Truman put it cynically once, but we generally resist conferring the title on run-of-the-mill politicians. Precisely because politicians have so often soiled the polis, we have imposed on politics a touchstone, a benchmark, as a means of distinguishing mere politicians from the 'distinguished and capable' ones - the 'statesmen'.

And there we have the word that resounded in Parliament last week:

Benchmark: The word indicates broadly 'a standard, point of reference, criterion, touchstone'. Surveyors were among the first to use the term to indicate 'a mark cut in a wall, pillar, building, etc, used as a reference point in measuring altitudes'. More recently, the term has been applied to the evaluation of the performance of computer systems 'by comparison with a benchmark' - thus 'benchmark test'.

There is no need to rehearse here the endlessly rehearsed monetary benchmarks for ministerial and civil service salaries in Singapore. Instead, let me explain why politicians were 'scurvy' to Shakespeare. Because there were precious few benchmarks, monetary or otherwise, for high offices of state in his time.

'From the nobleman...down to the humblest tidewaiter and gauger, what would now be called gross corruption was practised without disguise and without reproach,' wrote the 19th-century historian Thomas Babington Macaulay. 'Titles, places, commissions, pardons, were daily sold in the market overtly by the greatest dignitaries of the realm; in the 17th century a statesman who was at the head of affairs might easily, and without giving scandal, accumulate in no long time, an estate amply sufficient to support a dukedom.'

One can still observe similar practices in many parts of the world today. Here are the annual 'official' salaries of senior government officials in a South-east Asian country: Head of Government - S$120,000; his deputy - S$96,000; ministers - S$79,000. Those are sums that cannot possibly support dukedoms. And yet, dukedoms are precisely what some of these officials have managed to support on their un-benchmarked - un-governed, un-steered - unofficial incomes.

Why has politician as 'shrewd schemer; a crafty plotter or intriguer' never gone out of fashion? That's why.