Current Intellectual, Ideological and Spiritual Climate

The context of Student Ministry

Current Intellectual, Ideological and Spiritual Climate

By Feliciano V. Carino

An Issue as Old as WSCF

The concern which prompts this brief presentation and around which it revolves is one that is as old as the Federation itself and one that has been a subject of discussion in ecumenical circles in Asia for quite sometime. It is the same concern that I expressed at the CCA-WSCF Consultation on the Ecumenical Task of the Asian SCM that was held in Tao Fong Shan, Hong Kong in March 1982, and again at the CCA-WSCF Consultation on A Critical Review of the Vision and Reality of the University in Society that was held in Bangkok, Thailand in April 1985.

After analyzing what I then considered as the depressing condition of university life in the context of repressive regimes in Asia, I noted that one of the reasons for such a condition is the fact that we for one reason or another seem to have begun to think that the university is not worth fighting in or fighting for. The impoverishment of the university in short is in part testimony of our failure and of our neglect, purposeful or benign, concerning the university and the student world. The battle lines seem to have been drawn elsewhere for us and the deployment of resources and attention have been so withdrawn from the

university and the student world so that that world has become barren of any real and meaningful ecumenical witness and presence.

A Three-fold Task for SCMs

Tao Fong Shan in 1982 and Bangkok in 1985 said one other thing that is basic to the life of the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF) and the Student Christian Movement (SCM). They said that while located in the university, which therefore constitutes the primary locus of the SCM's work, the SCM must nevertheless continually reflect upon (its) membership in the community of faith and work with others in that community for the renewal of the churches. This means a number of things about the life of the SCMs:

1. The SCMs are to be a part of a double renewal. First, they must be a part of the ongoing search for new ways of understanding and expressing the meaning of Christian faith and of the life of the church. Second, they must reflect theologically in the midst of their work for the renewal of the educational enterprise and the society of which that enterprise is a part.

2. The work of renewal implies the adoption of a critical but deep and abiding commitment to the intellectual enterprise in all of its various expressions. Note that Tao Fong Shan used the word reflect. The SCM in short is to be a community within the university, inviting and giving a home to all members of the university community to be a part of this movement of renewal of both church and academic society and through such work of society as a whole.

3. As a community, the SCM is also to be a caring community where its work of prophetic witness must be accompanied by a pastoral interest that gives attention to the needs of those with whom it works.

A Double Alienation of SCMs

I must confess that the vision expressed in Tao Fong Shan in 1982 and in Bangkok in 1985 has largely been ignored or has remained unfulfilled. Maybe the vision was too visionary so that within the means available to the SCMs, it could not be fulfilled, or maybe the task was so great that it could not be done. The result however is that the struggle for the soul of the university, which Tao Fong Shan noted, has largely been lost. Indeed, what was already noted at Tao Fong Shan seems to have become more pronounced since then. What was to be a concerted effort at building movements and under girding partnerships for the task of renewal has led to a greater deterioration of a double alienation on the part of the SCMs: alienation from the churches and alienation from the university.

I hope I do not sound too judgmental or too critical. I mean only to underscore the fact that if we are to build and to plant as this meeting is meant to inspire and to imbibe upon us all, or as the centennial effort asks us to be a community of memory and hope, we should have no illusions about the enormity of the task and the amount of concerted devotion we must invest collectively and individually, I should add that to the degree that the SCM has been a major part of the emergence of the modem ecumenical movement, to that extent too the enormity of the task of rebuilding and replanting the SCM is a microcosm of the enormity of the task of rebuilding and replanting the whole ecumenical enterprise in our time.

A Different Ideological Posture in the Past

What makes this task even more daunting is that as we begin to undertake the ideological and spiritual climate in the universities, at least the ones that I am familiar with, it seems to go against the grain of much of the ideological posture that the WSCF and the SCMs have taken in the recent past.

Both Tao Fong Shan in 1982 and Bangkok in 1985 noted the fact that the first time the CCA (then EACC or East Asian Christian Conference) and the WSCF had a joint consultation in Hong Kong in 1966, the university world was engulfed in the rise of the student protest movement. From Berkeley to Tokyo, to Seoul, to Manila, to Paris, to Frankfurt and to nearly every university center in the world, students were going to the streets engaging the powers in protest against injustice and oppression. The political context in which all of these happened was conflictive and confrontational. Hanoi was being bombed and the Vietnam War was beginning to peak. Across the border from Hong Kong where the first consultation was held, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was launched with its attack on the elitism of religion and intellectuals and of a whole effort to uproot society from the ground up. All across Asia and the Pacific military regimes have begun to take over. Martial law in the Philippines, military regimes in Korea, Indonesia, Thailand. In other parts of the world, similar events began to take place.

Students began to abandon the universities as places of privilege and threw themselves in the throes of struggle with the poor and the oppressed. Being student and intellectual became derogatory. Being a Christian intellectual became even more derisive in character. At the World Student Conference in Turku, for example, a speaker from the Students for a Democratic Society described the university as the vulnerable point of present society because its liberty meant that it was the soft underbelly of the establishment.

Also in Turku, a student who ran to the stage to take the microphone away from him because he (Visser’t Hooft) was from the establishment disrupted W. A. Visser’t Hooft in his speech. The new society was around the comer; why bother with staying in the university? One has to step out to be in the bottom of the struggle, led by non-students and non-intellectuals. Why worry about books and degrees when the new earth or the new heaven with its promise of full humanity is around the comer for us all to covet and to welcome?

Relative Tranquility at Present

Today, at least in Asia and the Pacific, things are relatively more tranquil both in the universities and in the wider arenas of political life. The wars in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia are over. In June 1995, Vietnam, which has opened its economy to world markets, will have become a part of ASEAN. The Cultural Revolution in China is gone, and there is a return in the universities to the basics of science and democracy. China meanwhile has become the fastest growing economy with its version of market socialism. A commentator on Chinese economics noted not too long ago that the principle of one country two systems could be serious only if Hong Kong became socialist!

The whole Asia-Pacific region, once wracked by wars of liberation, is now touted as the next economic and trade center of the world, shifting the main lines of economic and commercial activity from the Atlantic to Asia-Pacific, a shift that is more monumental than previous shifts in the world economy because of the people and happens to be also the home of the so – called non – Christian civilizations of the world. In the universities of Asia,

students now prepare not to join the trenches but to benefit from the economic windfall that is already occurring in many countries and is expected to occur in others soon.

Collapse of Socialism

A major ingredient in the changing ideological climate in the universities is the collapse of socialism and the ideological props that held it up both as a historical phenomenon and as a vision of the future. When I speak of the collapse of socialism, I mean it in at least three concrete ways. First, as an economic system that is designed to express the creative vitality of the human species to control at least the power of its own labor and liberated from the dehumanizing oppression of capital, money and private property. Second, as a political system that is to lead the fullest participation of all in the decisions that affect their lives. Third, as a dream and as a vision of a new humanity unlimited in its horizons and achievements, wherein compulsion and control would disappear because each individual would identify self with the public good.

Time was when you had little weight as an intellectual unless you had read socialist literature and quoted it. Time is now that if you quote socialism there is a response of dismay, if not disbelief. I personally find it difficult to imagine how so very many were influenced by this system and the vision it purported to hold and how much it inspired superhuman devotion and sacrifice among many students and other practitioners of the academic vocation. Amidst this collapse, so many who have invested in it their lives are combing the rubble for intellectual and moral bricks with which to build a new social ethos.

An Ideological Drift in Society

The result is not necessarily an ideological vacuum, but a situation of ideological drift. In the absence of any concrete and historical alternatives, people prepare themselves in universities for individual amelioration without much, if any, social vision or responsibility and obligation. Nayan Chanda of Asia week, in a talk at the Indo-China Meeting of the Christian Conference of Asia and the World Council of Churches in Phnom Penh, noted that in Vietnam individuals are all trying to get rich but society is becoming poorer. In the crumbling of the socialist system and vision in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, people who have suffered under it are now rejecting even the questions - of social justice, of community beyond class and nation, and of control over economic power for the public good - which that system and that vision tried to answer. Chanda asked whether churches and the Christian organizations could revive this concern for social responsibility without giving the impression that they are reviving the discredited socialist experience.

Ideological Drifts also in SCMs

The privatization of economic life and of economic amelioration in short has also led to the privatization of intellectual and vocational goals. The challenge, which was already prominently noted at Tao Pong Shan of so-called conservative and evangelical campus groups, comes stronger in this context. The appeal, which the concern of these groups for personal help and salvation has, becomes more prominent and attractive to people in the academic communities. It is for this reason that the battle for Christian Presence in the academic communities has largely been won by these groups. The importance of giving a response to personal need in the midst of the ideological and spiritual drift in university life is something, which we must bear in mind. While, again to use the words of Tao Fong Shan, we must continue to be

appalled by the social and political significance of such religion and spirituality, we dare not neglect the need to which they respond. I doubt very much that we can rebuild and plant without dealing with such need.

In Philippine universities, the main curricular and intellectual emphases are now business and management, on the one hand, and science and technology, on the other. Both are considered the main academic infrastructure of economic take-off and of the effort to make the country into a new industrializing country by the year 2000. Whether 2000 in the Philippines or 2020 in Malaysia, the drive is to produce the human resource that can fuel economic take-off and make of the countries in Asia competitive in the emerging open and global economy that is now considered irreversible.

The words of the vice chancellor of the University of the Philippines recently provide something of the flavor of the academic interest. In other Asian countries, he noted, for example, Japan and Korea; people retained their native culture and adopted quickly the skills of Western science and technology. In the Philippines, we adopted Western culture rather quickly, but retained effete Filipino technology. We need to reverse the trend, and the universities should be at the forefront of such an effort. In such a world, knowledge and information become valuable capital. Competitive excellence becomes both a target and a basic | ingredient of academic life, especially in selected areas of academic investigation. Innovation, we are told, is the name of the game.

A New Role for Religion?

Strange as it may seem, the situation brings the issue of religion quite prominently in the field of discussion. In the absence of any compelling ideological alternatives, religious traditions and prescriptions become bearers of social vision, or social cohesion

and identity, or social conflict and division. What is now known as the Huntington theory of the clash of the civilizations has of late been a subject of debate in various universities and intellectual circles. The situation, in other words, opens up a situation where religion becomes the new political reason for conflict, or possibly, also the new reason for the imagining of a new political and social community that has not yet been found.