But as John Dryden wrote, “Geniuses and madmen are near allied/And thin partitions do their bounds divide.” The ban isn’t madness at all, just a manifestation of the Confucian-inflected penchant for orderliness, and its tacit assumption that the social psychology of orderliness is seamless. It’s not just a Confucian conclusion either: The ban makes sense as Singapore’s version of James Q. Wilson’s famous “broken windows” insight. [...]
I’m uncomfortable with caning’s implied paternalism, but not with its results. But it’s really none of my business (or yours, fellow American) since I’m not a Singaporean national. As a general rule, Americans should think twice (or as many times as necessary) before tendering judgments about matters in which they are not vested and probably can’t fully understand for lack of metis. A former Singaporean ambassador to the United States complained to me, recently and in the main justifiably, that Americans often just don’t listen to others, especially others from small countries. She was too polite to add that this rarely stops us from speaking out about the supposed moral deficiencies of said others, whether we know what we’re talking about or not. It’s not one of our more endearing traits. [...]
Out of concern to avoid stigmatizing and humiliating the vulnerable, the government publishes no data on the proportions of the country’s ethnic hearth communities that end up in jail and rehab. It’s a sensitive matter, as are all matters intercommunal, and the reason is that the Malay community, which occupies the statistical bottom of the mean income and education scales, also occupies the top of the incarceration, broken families, delinquent youth, and drug-dependency scales. [...]
The resulting food security anxiety has led, for example, to a megadeal with China wherein a chunk of Chinese land is being developed with Singaporean capital for the main purpose of providing foodstuffs to Singapore. The Jilin Project involves 1,450 square miles of land; all of Singapore is only 751.5 square miles. Perhaps sensing belatedly that putting so much leverage in Chinese hands might be unwise, the government subsequently announced the 30/30 challenge, by which Singapore will produce 30 percent of its own food by 2030, largely through advanced vertical hydroponic methods.
