Cambodian future seems bleak

April 6, 2011
A. Gaffar Peang-Meth
PACIFIC DAILY NEWS

I had begun writing on a different topic for today's column. On Jan. 21, the U.S.-based International Republican Institute released the results of a survey that said 76 percent of Cambodians are satisfied with the direction of the country, citing infrastructure improvements such as roads, bridges, buildings and schools, and 23 percent say it is headed in the wrong direction, citing corruption, unemployment, poverty and inflation.

Statistics are awesome. They can be made to say many things. They are numbers with no feeling. Only real people laugh and cry. Elite kids spend $2,000 drinking at a nightclub, others scavenge city dumps for food. Functionaries write checks for $50,000 like it's nothing while some citizens, evicted from their only homes, are beaten by police.

During a coffee break, I read the March 28 New York Times "Tools for Thinking" by David Brooks. A day after, Brooks' "More Tools for Thinking" appeared. Then, an email arrived from Phnom Penh. The writer read my column, "Young Khmers key to the future," and said I hit the nail on the head. He described the country's "visible hardware" -- buildings -- everywhere, bemoaned its lack of the much needed "software" -- informed critical thinkers. A strong culture of suspicion and mistrust will "cripple society even deeper into a passive coma," he said.

"Even many of the young are now in this unfortunate trend," he wrote.

His hypothesis about Cambodia's future parallels my own. Cambodia is a nation of youth. More than half of the populace is under the age of 21. The median age is 22.9 years, but Cambodia spends only 1.6 percent of itsGDP on education.

An uneducated populace is consigned to low-skill, low-wage jobs -- 4 million live below the poverty line. As significant is the reality that those who lack education also lack the tangible and intangible resources that catalyze change, a likely calculation of a regime that breeds fear and corruption and disdains its people's rights.

I scrapped my column on the survey. That email redirected me.

Symposium

As regular readers may have surmised, I don't write this column to win popularity. I am trying, in my way, to spark some action from Cambodians, many of whom seem to have their heads in the sand, so to speak. Cambodia's future depends on how its people think. In furtherance of my mission, I came across Brooks' columns referencing a symposium on the mind and society sponsored by the Edge World Question Center.

Columbia University's John McWhorter's "path dependence" got me under way. "Something that seems normal or inevitable today began with a choice that made sense at a particular time in the past, but survived despite the eclipse of the justification of that choice," he wrote.

Creatures of habit, men do what they have always done. When typewriters jammed as people typed too fast, manufacturers designed a keyboard to slow typists down. We don't use typewriters anymore, but with our state-of-the-art computers, Brooks noted we still use "the letter arrangements of the qwerty keyboard."

Evgeny Morozov's "The Net Delusion" says man often tries to solve problems by using solutions that worked in the past, rather than looking at each situation on its own terms. New conflicts are still seen through the prism of Vietnam, the Cold War or Iraq.

Brooks, who noted that many contributors to the Edge symposium discussed the concept of "emergence," wrote that "public life would be vastly improved" if we relied more on this concept.

"Emergent systems," he explained, "are ones in which many different elements interact. The pattern of interaction then produces a new element that is greater than the sum of the parts, which then exercises a top-down influence on the constituent elements."

Culture is an emergent system, Brooks wrote. "A group of people establishes a pattern of interaction. And once that culture exists, it influences how individuals in it behave."

Emergent systems must be studied differently, "as wholes and as nested networks of relationships," Brooks said. He suggested we think "emergently" rather than try to address a problem like poverty through teasing out individual causes.

Fast facts

I have written about the impact of Cambodia's traditional hierarchical culture. Brooks' comments align with my long-held view that culture influences how people behave.

What is supported by the theory of emergent systems is the idea that culture is susceptible to change.

Unfortunately for Cambodians, education and the intellectual capacity that is its outcome, are essential elements to cultural change.

A reminder about how a high-quality education is essential to a meaningful life is found in some fast facts on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's website.

The Foundation notes that a college degree or professional certificate is critical for most young people to achieve success and security in today's labor market. By 2018, 63 percent of U.S. job openings will require college education, and employers will need some 22 million new workers with college degrees, but colleges will fall short by 3 million graduates. U.S. adults ages 55 to 64 are tied for first in the industrialized world in college degree attainment, but young Americans ages 25 to 34 are tied for 10th.

Cambodia's future seems bleak. The generation of Cambodians, my generation, that profited from at least a basic education, will fade away. The young who are left to carry on must grasp the importance of education and find a way to pursue learning. What they think and do now will determine their nation's future.

A. Gaffar Peang-Meth, Ph.D., is retired from the University of Guam. Write him at

peangmeth@yahoo.com.