Anwar tinkers with Belloc, Chesterton

 

Anwar Ibrahim is an intellectual.

There are as many definitions of an intellectual as there are members of the set, which is why many despise the breed.

Notorious among the latter was George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama in the 1960s and a presidential candidate, who derided intellectuals as “pointy-heads who couldn’t ride a bicycle straight.”

One isn’t sure Anwar can ride a bicycle straight, but he once rode pillion on a motorcycle to keep a campaign engagement in late December 2007 in Sungai Bakap in Penang.

Traffic was heavy between Juru and the Nibong Tebal turnoff on the North-South Expressway, so Anwar got out of his Mercedes and hopped on a supporter’s motorcycle for the ride to Sungai Bakap to keep a speaking appointment.

“I would not have been able to do that if I was still deputy prime minister,” he joked to an appreciative crowd while on a campaign swing for the 2008 general election.

GE12 resulted in a denial of BN’s supermajority in Parliament, a feat credited to Anwar’s tireless stumping throughout the country in the lead-up, aided and abetted by then prime minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s lackadaisical administration.

Denial was an idea whose time had come; a sense and the articulation of its imminence is a mark of intellectuals.

Several political grandees have been known to smirk at Anwar’s tendency to hold forth on things that have obviously been in his mind for some time prior to bringing them up at public functions.

They think it is so much mumbo jumbo and a waste of time.

They can’t be blamed because Anwar can be circuitous and opaque when he ought to be staccato and brisk.

The languor is likely due to his nibbling at ideas while simultaneously holding forth before audiences.

Ideas, by their nature, don’t lend themselves to neat and easy formulation, nor to easy referencing.

While replying or criticising people who have lambasted him for some failure, Anwar would broach or refer obliquely to an idea or two.

In Penang last Saturday, he responded to the carping criticism that his unity government had done nothing for the Malays.

He called on Malay billionaires to give 50 percent of their profits to poor Malays if they were so concerned for them.

The call was aimed at plutocrats who had waxed rich on the privileges garnered from the state, enriching their families and cronies in the process.

Political economy

Anwar was referencing an idea called distributism, a form of political economy championed by two English thinkers, Hilaire Belloc and GK Chesterton, whose battles with the intellectual luminaries of Britain between the world wars, thinkers like Bernard Shaw, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Harold Laski, George Orwell and others, were the stuff of morning papers.

Distributism was avidly debated in Britain in the interwar period when Capitalism and Socialism battled for the allegiance of voters who had the Conservatives and Labour as the primary electoral choice.

Competing idealogies

The critical difference between the two competing ideologies revolved around the phrase “instruments of production,” the means by which wealth is produced.

Broadly, Capitalists wanted the instruments of production to be in the hands of bold entrepreneurs with few or no limits to their freedom to operate. In contrast, Socialists wanted the tools monopolised by the state to use them to ensure a fairer income distribution.

In contrast to these two schools, distributism was the model that wanted the ownership of instruments of production to be distributed among the various trades and occupations of the people, achieving a fairer creation and distribution of wealth.

Anwar Ibrahim, wittingly or unwittingly, was channelling Belloc and Chesterton in calling for a version of Distributism for poor Malays.

Six months into his administration, Anwar is in the arena of ideas, the legal coin of the intellectual realm.

A good and useful diversion from what would otherwise be distractions of the chattering classes, political conspiracy theories, racially supremacist drivel, and religious bigotry. - Mkini

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TERENCE NETTO is a journalist with half a century’s experience.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.