To Big To Fail and In Lieu of Ideology

Guest posting from KS Lim, Washington DC.

On the long journey home, I bought two long books to read on the flight, and it was money not wasted. The first was the book "Too Big to Fail" about the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the subsequent rush to save the global financial system. It depicts high finance as a high-octane, high-powered industry, populated by some very big personalities and egos. Reading about them they kind of remind me of all of the bankers I happen to know of; smart, yet egoistic, ruthless and with the tendency to mix in each others' company almost exclusively. It was overall a thrilling read.

The second book was a dry but educational piece called "In Lieu of Ideology", which basically analysed and summarised the writings and thoughts of Goh Keng Swee, and attempted to explain his philosophy of government through his own words. I came away from it even more impressed by Goh. The man seems to have been a true Renaissance man. His thinking drew from the best of the West and the East; he was much enamoured by Sun Zi's Art of War and the Warring States' general Wu Qi, but was also interested in Ancient Greece and Rome. His portfolio spanned the education, defense and economics, but he tended to view these varied elements in a holistic manner. Goh, according to the book, hated theorising about economics for its own sake, and believed that the main weakness of economists was that they neglected political science, sociology and other areas of study. He believed that the study of social science should have a practical use, that being to build a nation, and Singapore was his canvas. Thus, education, defense, the arts, finance etc. were all aimed at building a strong Singapore and therefore had to be integrated. He seems not to have disregarded the arts or "soft subjects", which is in complete contrast to the stereotype of the Singaporean.

It seems that Goh had a strong, almost Confucian belief in the rectification of the individual. He decried "traditional values" and believed that he was trying to mould a modern, "industrial" man in order to fit the economic models of the West. To him, the Western models could only work if they were applied to a certain type of person, thus his belief in the value of education. Interestingly, he was not happy about the pursuit of money and the "lack of moral education" which was prevalant in the Singaporean education system, and strived to introduce character building, physical boldness and creative thinking into schooling, not always successfully. To Goh, the individual really was the basis of society, and education was therefore key. That, at least, was what I got out of the book while reading it on the plane.