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LOOKING BACK

The indolence of the

Filipino
By: Ambeth R. Ocampo - @inquirerdotnet
Philippine Daily Inquirer / 05:22 AM March 15, 2019

Ramon Tulfo’s rant against our supposedly lazy countrymen

coupled with unfair comparison with hardworking Chinese has
reaped a whirlwind of online bashing from the onion-skinned
who felt alluded to, and those who take every opportunity to
contradict whatever Tulfo says or writes. Tulfo took refuge
under the National Hero’s overcoat, tweeting: “To those who
have been bashing me. Read Jose Rizal’s essay about the
indolence of the Filipino in his time. Thank you!”
For a moment, bashing stopped, but resumed when those who
looked up Rizal’s essay realized Tulfo had not read beyond the
essay title!

“Sobre la indolencia de los Filipinos (On the indolence of the

Filipinos)” is a very long, and at times angry, essay by Rizal that
saw print in La Solidaridad in March 1890. From abroad and
across time, Rizal reacted to the charge, from the Spanish
colonial masters, that Filipinos were indolent or lazy. Rizal did
not condemn it, rather he explained it:

“We must confess that indolence does actually and positively

exist there; only that, instead of holding it to be the cause of the
backwardness and the trouble, we regard it as the effect of the
trouble and the backwardness, by fostering the development of a
lamentable predisposition.”

Tropical climate is a major factor, Rizal explained: “Nature

knows this and like a just mother has therefore made the earth
more fertile, more productive, as a compensation. An hour’s
work under that burning sun, in the midst of pernicious
influences springing from nature in activity, is equal to a day’s
work in a temperate climate.”

It is the Spaniard who is lazy, argued Rizal, as they detest

manual labor and live surrounded by Filipino servants who “not
only exist to take off their shoes for them but even to fan them!”
His analysis as a physician and historian led to primary sources
that proved Filipinos in pre-Spanish times were not so:
“Indolence in the Philippines is a chronic malady, but not a
hereditary one. The Filipinos have not always been what they
are.”

Using his notes gathered from the British Library from 1888 to
1889 while at work on his annotated edition of Antonio de
Morga’s 1609 “Sucesos de las islas Filipinas (Events of the
Philippine Islands),” Rizal presented early accounts like the
“Zhu Fan Zhi,” published by Chau Ju-kua in 1225, which
described the industry and honesty of the Filipinos before the
Spanish conquest; and Antonio Pigafetta’s chronicle of the
Magellan expedition, regarding the capture and ransom of the
Chief of Paragua. Wielding history as a weapon, Rizal asked
sarcastically: “How did the industrious infidel become indolent
centuries later when he was Christianized? Why did they forget
their proud past and become indolent?”

Rizal also blamed the sorry state of the colony. The galleon trade
had cut off existing trade between the Philippines and China and
Southeast Asia, the trade monopoly running Filipino traders and
artisans out of business. Furthermore, the lure of the galleon
trade led to the neglect of commerce and agriculture. People
were conscripted to work in the shipyards, forced to build roads
and buildings with little or no pay, decimating the population
and killing their natural love for work. Their goods and services
were taken by force, such that they simply refused to work more
only to have their products taken for free, paid cheaply, or so
heavily taxed that these ended up not worth the trouble.

People were also insecure about their liberty, with false

accusations and the like.

Gambling was another factor, because it bred “dislike for steady

and difficult toil by its promise of sudden wealth and its appeal
to the emotions, with the lotteries,” said Rizal. Finally, he
pointed out the failure of education, which was more focused on
religion than on the secular and useful, with the exception of the
Jesuits and the Dominican Benavides. “From his birth until he
sinks into his grave, the training of the native is brutalizing,
depressive and antihuman (the word ‘inhuman’ is not
sufficiently explanatory: whether or not the Academy admits it,
let it go).”

Rizal did not just rant, he provided a solution: education and the
formation of what he called a “national sentiment.” Rizal left us
with 25 volumes of writings to instruct and inspire, but alas, he
wrote a lot for a nation that does not read him. It took a
foreigner, Syed Hussein Alatas, to build on Rizal’s essay and
publish “The Myth of the Lazy Native” (1977), disproving as
myth the laziness of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese in
colonial times.

Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu

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