Irrational Politics Revisited: How Conventional Political Theories No Longer Work In Malaysia
By Farish A. Noor
It's bad enough that academics and political theorists are badly paid and overworked; now it seems that we have to make sense out of a mode of politics that is, frankly, nonsensical and irrational in Malaysia.
Perhaps the cause of the dilemma that is faced by many academics today lies in the fact that we were trained in rational choice theory and the assumption that human being are, and can, work and live as rational agents who are capable of making rational choices in life. That was certainly the predominant ethos in the 1960s to 1970s, when it was assumed that nation-building was a rational process to be driven and determined by technocrats who at least attempted to plan and develop the country along rational lines. It was assumed, for instance, that with the accumulation and division of wealth then the comfort zones of all communities would slowly expand and that greater income and capital equality would lead to a more equitable society that was more tolerant and harmonious.
It was also assumed that with mass rural migration to the urban industrial zones the nature of social relations and social bonds would become more contractual and rationalised, and that primordial loyalties to birth-places, clans, essentialist notions of identity and feudal modes of politics etc would diminish with the passing of time.
These were the pipe-dreams of technocrats and social scientists who perhaps spent too much time in the laboratories of the developed world and failed to see the prevailing social realities of Malaysia in the face. Social scientists (and I include myself in this list of losers) failed to note that despite the superficial trappings of progress and development, Malaysian society and culture remained mired in the politics of communalism, feudalism, narrow ethnic and racial communitarianism and the like. We earnestly believed that science and technological advancement would open up new opportunity structures and introduce new social arrangements where identity politics could be reconfigured on perhaps a less essentialised basis.
