The passing of a Founding Father - Reaching the Common People

May 23, 2010
Simply sincere
Dr Goh's simple yet eloquent writing style showed desire to reach out to ordinary people
By Janadas Devan, Review Editor

Dr Goh Keng Swee has been described as the founder of the Singapore Armed Forces, the architect of Singapore's economy, the master builder of independent Singapore. He was also, as I have said on many occasions in this space, a remarkably gifted writer - indeed, the most distinguished writer of English prose this country has had.

Was there a connection between the writer and the statesman? Might we trace in the qualities of the writing the nature of the genius that made so profound an impression on our history? Was he so effective a public servant in large part because he was so precise, so translucent, so gracious a writer?

We know not all distinguished statesmen are good writers - Singapore certainly has had many able public servants who were poor communicators. And we know precious few good writers become passable, let alone distinguished, public servants. But Dr Goh was both, and in his case at least, the writing shaped in profound ways his statesmanship.

To begin with, he was possessed by the desire to write - to communicate, to explain policy, to clarify, to argue, to convince. As Dr Goh himself noted, not without some pride, he and his Old Guard colleagues 'may be the few remaining members of a vanishing breed of political leaders: We write our own speeches. We have our ideas as to how societies should be structured and how governments should be managed. We prefer to express these ideas our way'.

As a result, as Dr Goh went on to observe in the preface to his first collection of essays, The Economics Of Modernisation, he and his Old Guard colleagues ended up addressing 'their citizens on matters of public policy more often than is usual in most countries'.

And in Dr Goh's case, at least, speaking about public policy really meant speaking about public policy. He was never condescending to his audience, no matter how humble they were; he never acted or behaved as though public policy, no matter how complex, could not be understood by the public.

I will, if I may, cite a personal memory here as evidence: The first time I heard Dr Goh deliver a speech was at the NTUC's historic Modernisation Seminar in 1969, which my father, Devan Nair, organised and chaired. Only 14 years old then, I had been dragged to the seminar because I was a nuisance at home, and was dreading listening to Dr Goh speak.

To my utter surprise, I not only understood what he said, but also found it most interesting. And if I, a 14-year-old, could understand him, so could the unionists.

There were no scholars in the NTUC in those days. The best-educated unionists then would have come from the teachers' union, and possibly the journalists' union, but even then, few among the teachers or journalists would have been university graduates. And yet, Dr Goh spoke to the unionists as equals, without a hint of condescension, and explained to them in great detail the economics of cooperatives, with his English being translated simultaneously into Mandarin, Malay and Tamil.

'I suggest that the financial base could be built upon a life insurance cooperative,' he urged, arguing against the proposal to start with a bank, as the NTUC had been advised to do by some European trade unions. 'The insurance cooperative should not, at any rate in the initial stages, move into other fields of insurance such as fire, marine, motor and general insurance,' he continued. 'There is no advantage that a cooperative enterprise enjoys in these fields over private enterprise. It is otherwise in respect of life insurance.'

And so on - very serious but plain talk. And thus was NTUC Income born - not as a result of scholar-officials shuffling papers in a hermetically sealed committee room, but as a result of a world-class economist speaking directly to the representatives of port workers, postmen, petroleum workers, road sweepers, seamen, bus drivers, bank clerks and factory hands. Speaking directly to them, moreover, of complex issues in so accessible a fashion that even a 14-year-old could understand; and speaking of these weighty matters without in any way misrepresenting their complexity or talking down to his audience.

Even now, more than 40 years later, I doubt if any academic - or journalist or civil servant, for that matter - would be able to produce a more exact, thorough and accessible account of the principles of cooperatives as Dr Goh produced that day for unionists. I was too young to realise it then, but it appears clear to me in retrospect that what Dr Goh did that day was profoundly democratic.

And here I think is a hint of how his linguistic gifts contributed to his statesmanship. He was a graceful, even stylish writer, to be sure. His ear - in part because he listened to a good deal of music, especially Baroque - was unerring. His diction and his tone had a classical purity. I don't think he ever wrote a sentence that didn't sound good. But all this was incidental.

What made Dr Goh so important a writer was the same thing that made him so important a statesman: a deep ethical sense. His writing - the way he worked at it to arrive at the precise formulation, the way he always used the simple word in favour of the difficult, the way he strove for clarity - all this was a technique in sincerity, in honesty. He wanted to explain; he desperately wanted to communicate; he felt writing was a way of speaking clearly, honestly and sincerely to his fellow men.

As I look back 40 years to that speech in 1969, I am struck by how unlikely it all was. In how many countries would a finance minister, as Dr Goh was then, even attempt to seriously engage unionists on the principles of cooperatives? How many world-class economists, as Dr Goh was also, would go out of their way to eschew technical language as he did? How many people in his position - at least a foot smarter than anybody else in almost every room he found himself in - would take this much care to talk to perfectly ordinary people about complex issues?

'The vicissitudes of fortune which we experienced in our quest for a decent living in a none too hospitable environment bears resemblance to the biblical journeys of the children of Israel in their search for the promised land,' he wrote once. 'And like Moses, we had to explain, exhort, encourage, inform, educate, advise - and to denounce false prophets.'

The prophet is dead. May his soul rest in peace. We have only his prophecies left. They still bear reading.

janadas@sph.com.sg

(With thanks to Sunday Times www.straitstimes.com )
http://www.straitstimes.com/Think/Story/STIStory_530159.html


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