Malay Middle Class and Bourgeois Morality

Perhaps it may well be, that this essay is a 3^rd class ridicule dressed in high-browed prose. That does not alter my perception of what Huzir Sulaiman’s essay really is. The short essay by Huzir Sulaiman, touched upon by Mat Chendana and reproduced by the blogger Omong, has one intention. It is actually a subtle indictment on the assumed political incorrectness of the thinking of the majority, meaning us. That political incorrectness demands that Malays disown and abandon what are dear to them- the bedrock fundamentals of Malay leadership. What Huzir’s writing represents is an invitation for Malays to water down their nationalism for liberalism, reject religious doctrine for permissiveness, give up economic corrections for value-free equal opportunity economic growth.

The most contentious issue I think is giving up programs of economic correction for value free equal opportunity economic growth. I am torn between total dismantling of corrective economic programs and the real need for Malays to adopt a more robust attitude. The attitude that calls for a voluntary renunciation of as-of-right privileges and perpetual handicaps. I am an advocate of achievement norms in society. In this particular instance, a Malay society characterised by achievement norms has, as its most vital principal, that one is evaluated in terms of what he has accomplished and can achieve. That is why I believe, that one cannot legislate the want to achieve. It must it generated internally and voluntarily. Unfortunately, this is not the issue I wish to write about.

As to Huzir Sulaiman’s essay, that, to my mind is the intent of his writing. His pious wish is that, actually, the voice that Malaysia must listen to, is the voice of the middle class. That middle class according to Huzir is represented by the saner views of :- Fahmi Fadzil, 27, a writer and performer., son of prominent parents; Datuk Zahim Albakri, 45, the director and actor, a son of a preeminent architect; the composer Datin Saidah Rastam who comes from a family steeped in public life, whose maternal grandfather was Perak’s 14th Datuk Panglima Kinta, who held 56 public service posts at the time of his death. Her father is Datuk Rastam Hadi, the former managing director of Petronas and former deputy governor of Bank Negara. Her uncle was Hasnul Hadi, the dyed-in the-wool socialist. Her husband is the urbane lawyer-turned-banker Datuk Charon Mokhzani (who, with exquisite politeness, declined to be interviewed for article by Huzir); Dain-Iskandar Said is a writer and film director. And Dain Iskandar says it best what the bourgeois liberals want to hear; He sees the concept of ketuanan Melayu as “outmoded, out of step with the times we live in, when the world is becoming more and more global. The world over, people are bringing down barriers of race, yet we are trying to instill and install those outmoded values.” All said they do not subscribe to the ideas of ethnic superiority and non committal to the idea that Malays are the owners of this country.

To hold such weltanshauung is very expensive. One can certainly afford to uphold such views if one has a few million Ringgits in the bank. If I have such amount, Huzir can ask me to parrot what all these people say and I will with exquisite politeness, agree for a full blown interview.

The central thesis of Huzir’s essay, is that the key to changing the mindset of the Malays, rest then, on the slender shoulders of a privileged class- in Huzir’s terminology the new middle class. No attachment to kampong life, second or 3^rd generation progeny of successful parents or grandparents, urbane, cosmopolitan. In other words, a totally new subset of Malays, unschooled in the debilitating values of the ordinary Malays. The members of the class of people which I referred to as the BMW Bourgeoisie, the Café Latte crowd, the smoked- salmon sentinels, caviar-on-cracker crowd and so forth.

In other words, Huzir wants to appeal to an assumed bourgeois way of being as the politically correct ethical framework. A framework within which Malays in the kampong and cities must subscribe to. But what is the source of this framework and its constitution? What Huzir wants to accomplish is to appeal to this ethical framework and at the same time, exposed the nuttiness of the majority of the population. The implications of what Huzir wrote and countenanced further by The Star wasn’t hard to decipher; It was just sort of understood that sane, bourgeois people like Huzir, Fahmi, Zahim, Saidah Rastam and Dain Iskandar Said didn't do crazy things like what those kampong Joes and the counterculture types were doing.

The political significance of Huzir’s writing then is the need to nurture such an exclusive Malay middle class. That, society will be much better off, expending its resources and also conferment of wide ranging powers on this kind of people. That then, is undeniably, the beginning of a real master-servant relationship.