By Menelito Mansueto, Jr.
I am deeply honored of being tasked to give this opening message for today’s webinar. Of course, we are very much honored to have our very distinguished speakers for this afternoon. I would like to share my own personal exposure to philosophical movements in the southern part of the Philippines sometime in the late 1990’s when I was a young seminarian of the Society of the Divine Word missionary congregation, popularly known worldwide and in the Philippines as the SVD Fathers, Brothers, and Conferrers. One of the perks of being an SVD conferrer at some point in my life was that at a very young age, I was able to personally mingle with some of the popular and giant names in Filipino Philosophy. Aside from listening to their much-valued lectures, we also got the chance to converse, sit down and dine with, pray with, party with, study with, and live with personalities like Bro. Romualdo Abulad and Fr. Leonardo Mercado. For instance, I experienced being tasked to transcribe and translate Fr. Mercado’s interviews with key informants from his raw cassette tape records, among those were from his pastoral and mission works with the Mangyans of Mindoro. The transcripts he later used for his anthropological and theological works and studies. When I left the seminary formation and have taught as a college instructor, I was invited to attend philosophical conferences hosted by the PHAVISMINDA, the only professional philosophy organization at that time for the Visayas and Mindanao. That was also the time when I got the chance to listen to Dr. Romulo Bautista in May of 2008, when he gave a plenary lecture on his concept of “Bayani-krasya,” a term which he anchored from the concepts of “bayanihan” and “demokrasya.” But unlike highly recognized authors, on one hand, for example, in the caliber of Fr. Dionisio Miranda and Dr. Rolando Gripaldo, who also had given their respective plenary lectures as keynote speakers in the PHAVISMINDA, Dr. Bautista, or simply called Dr. Bau and his lecture, on the other hand, was met with many clarificatory questions and criticism from the attending audience during the often forum. He struggled with much effort to introduce his concept since Dr. Bautista, at that time, was yet to be known as an outstanding Filipino thinker who came from the far-flung regions of Mindanao, despite his training and education which he obtained in Spain. Based on my own assessment and judgment, I have felt the dismay that Dr. Bau had experienced after his presentation due to the misunderstandings of his proposed political and philosophical concept, which was anchored from the Filipino tradition. I would like to personally claim that it was out from this unfortunate experience or occurrence in which Dr. Bau had conceived the idea and the necessity of organizing a philosophical society to be based primarily in Mindanao. I think he had already reached out and spoke to some Mindanao-based scholars who were in attendance the possibility of forming a Mindanao-based philosophy organization. Two years later in 2010, the Social Ethics Society was born of which Dr. Bau had officially co-founded with a much younger colleague, Dr. Christopher Ryan Maboloc, both thinkers are from the Ateneo de Davao University in Davao City. Interestingly, Dr. Maboloc had also completed his two Master’s degrees in Europe, although he chose to finish his Doctoral studies at the University of San Carlos in Cebu City for reasons of being near to his immediate family. Dr. Maboloc was then conferred the Maxima cum laude award, the highest recognition of a scholar, the first so far awarded by the university.
With
this eventual and dramatic beginning of the Social Ethics Society, the Mindanao-based
philosophical organization needs to continually stand today against all forms
of exclusion, discrimination, misrecognition, and underdevelopment with Mindanao
being the hot bed of various social turmoil in the country, often labelled in
the past as the “promised land” of the Philippines, or “ang lupang pangako.” With
the unique set of culture and tradition, Mindanao has always been perceived as
a land of conflict that existed for centuries among the local settlers and
intruders, and among Christians and Muslims. To simply reduce the conflict as
part of the generalized global-wide problem of capitalist imperialism and neocolonialism,
or even as effects of the nationwide problem of corruption, oligarchy, and
cronyism, is to undermine all other relevant aspects of the Mindanawon social lifeworld
or social reality, such as their long-held socio-cultural beliefs, religion,
cultural practices, and the unique traditions of the different indigenous
peoples (IP) communities. To truly addressed the root cause of the conflict, a
demand for social recognition of their much-valued cultural identities is very
much important. Currently, one Mindanawon contemporary social thinker in this
direction is the works of Carlito Gaspar, a Redemptorist missionary brother, who
is commonly known in the name, Karl Gaspar. Bro. Karl, for instance, had given
emphasis on the “immersion” method in dealing with the indigenous cultures, an
approach which Bro. Karl himself had used in his missionary work among the
Lumad communities in Mindanao, particularly among the Manobo in Arakan Valley, North
Cotabato. Our speakers this afternoon are equally eyewitnesses of the struggles
of the Mindanawon peoples. One is an eyewitness to the narco-politics of
Misamis Occidental. Another is a first-hand informant during the siege in
Marawi. Then, we have a technologist who is wary about preserving the local
cultures. We also have a hybrid philosopher from Israel who have mixed
influences from both the East and the West, and who happen to have wandered in
the Apo mountains of Digos, Davao del Sur when strong magnitude earthquakes hit
Mindanao in the year 2019.
Today,
the Social Ethics Society, also known as SES, aims to gather and unite-as-Mindanawons,
some highly competent scholars, young and old, from different walks of life and
varying expertise from different academic background and specialization. The
SES, which is primarily a philosophical organization, is not exclusive to the
philosophical discipline alone but across the whole spectrum of the humanities,
social sciences, political and development theory. Throughout the years, I have
seen in Philosophy being valued and used as an integral basis among various research
paradigms in the different fields of academic specialization. As a matter of
observation, some accepted and published research works in some high-end
publications and journals are the ones that are anchored in philosophical
knowledge and theories. More so, the integration of philosophy into the various
academic disciplines could help in the reaching out of philosophy to the lived
experiences of peoples outside of the four corners of the classroom or
conference room. Philosophy is often diagnosed with the seemingly
unsurmountable eccentricity in the ivory tower. There is a challenging call for
social thinkers to rise above their eccentricity, and instead to step out into
the real world of poverty, exclusion, discrimination, and all forms of social
injustice.