When Cris Anthony Mendez, a student who underwent hazing in a University of the Philippines fraternity, died, the reactions were intense. Manifestos were written denouncing hazing. Statements were issued condemning fraternities. Analyses poured forth, to explain why students risked life and limb to join fraternities. Investigations were promised, but hampered by witnesses going into hiding. Secret meetings by fraternity members were held to figure out damage control. Students held an indignation rally on the UP campus. Off-campus, speeches were made, existing anti-hazing legislation was criticized and amendments were proposed.
We have been here before; we’ve been shocked, angry, insistent on justice, before. Why are we in the same place, all over again? One reason is that fraternities are designed with survival in mind.
Fraternities are one of the few institutions that have an institutional memory, and which cherish traditions. They are organizations that serve, for their members, as part of the bedrock of society. I’ve long pointed out that our society, at least for the upper classes, and the middle class which tries to copy the upper class, is defined by three institutions. They are, church, club, and school.
All these institutions require a rite of passage. For Christians, your initiation into the religion begins with baptism. For schools, you have ceremonies to mark your passage from grade school to high school and when you finish college. For clubs, they invariably mark the acceptance of new members with some sort of ceremony, which at times requires some sort of hazing.
Think of it. Weird ceremonies, peculiar costumes, claims of occult or other kinds of specialized knowledge, hanging out, networking and getting drunk: Men love it, and they choose certain faiths, go to certain schools, set up and join certain clubs, to find excuses to wear wacky disguises and learn secret handshakes.
I once met a gentleman who recounted to me, with great pride, how he participated in the hazing of Ferdinand Marcos. He told me how Marcos nearly died. How he and the others who took part in the hazing, took it as a sign of future greatness that Marcos lived. He told me all this, at a time, after EDSA, when the Marcos name hadn’t been rehabilitated by amnesia yet; and I will never forget how he spoke of the Upsilon reunions in Malacanang, with such fondness.
Fraternities not only existed, but had initiations notorious for the violence of the hazing, a long time before Cris Mendez died.
There’s a reason behind the existence of frats, and their rituals. And oddly enough, it has something to do with a freedom Filipinos take freedom for granted. The freedom of association. As well as associations being a means to exercise not only freedom, but gain influence.
Before the fraternities, there were the Masons.
Before our independence in 1946, it could be argued that one major means for political connections to be forged, was through being a Freemason. In Spanish times, this secret society dared question the Catholic church, and it was also color blind, a radical idea in any colonial society. Urban ilustrados like Rizal and members of the provincial principalia like Aguinaldo, found Masonry a congenial place for enlightenment thinking.
Masonry continued to be heavily intertwined with politics up to independence in 1946, and it remains very significant in the legal and military professions. But after independence, political connections were forged through other kinds of secret societies. That is, by means of fraternities. It was a generational shift, accompanied by the rise of new institutions.
Our Masonic generation went to Catholic schools where their friar teachers couldn’t prevent their learning radical European ideas. Our first fraternity generations, on the other hand, went to public schools, including the state university, established by the Americans as a means to counter the power of the Catholic church, besides its being the democratic thing to do.
Filipino students in the public schools, besides trying to copy American-style rhetoric, also learned American-style networking. And they learned, soon enough, that in America, fraternities were an important part of professional life and the power game.
Marcos was, in many ways, the exemplar of this new generation. It’s no coincidence that when he was a college student, fraternities were coming into their own in the University of the Philippines.
The fraternity Marcos famously belonged to, Upsilon Sigma Phi, was established in 1918. It is the oldest fraternity in Asia. Other well-known frats were established in UP more or less in the days when Marcos was a student. Beta Epsilon was founded in 1929; Tau Alpha (engineering) 1932; Mu Sigma Phi and Phi Kappa Mu (medicine) and the Portia Sorority (Law) in 1933; Sigma Rho, the law fraternity to which Cris Mendez was seeking admission, was founded in 1938; Alpha Phi Beta in 1939.
We also know, that extreme violence during initiations was a part of fraternity life even in the first decades of such organizations.
The networking importance of fraternities wouldn’t be so bad, if that aspect of their existence wasn’t so intimately tied up with violence as a rite of passage. Belief in the importance of violence to instill bonding, brings up one reason they keep getting into trouble. They are an outmoded institution, a vested interest, out of step with the needs of our times.
Filipino Sociologist Randy David has long been arguing, that our society is undergoing a crisis of modernity. The crisis comes out of our traditional values turning out to be incompatible with our aspirations to be modern. Modernity, as David pointed out, means institutions that operate according to impartial rules.
For example, what should matter more, merit or connections? What happens, when connections end up putting a few people ahead of the interests of everyone else? You have the crisis in modernity David was referring to.
Knowledge is power. Not only what you know, but who you know, confers power.
This crisis has actually been there for some time. Even if you try to establish a modern institution, the people who make up that institution, often operate to age-old values, and demonstrate behavior drilled into their minds by society.
The most basic distinction in any society is between “us” and “them”. The word barbarian was coined by the ancient Greeks, to describe non-Greeks as uncultured brutes.
Members of fraternities supposedly call non-frat members barbarians. Today, public opinion says the true barbarians are the fratmen who end up killing their own in initiation ceremonies.
My colleague in both the Arab News newspaper and Inquirer.net, Rasheed Abou-Alsamh, says in the United States, Greek letter societies are being abolished. The reason is that they have become unproductive, even undemocratic, institutions.
But let me sound a note of caution. The origins of fraternities lay in aspiring to something we take for granted: Freedom of association.
Yes, there’s the right of the state to defend you and me, from harmful associations. But invoking the right of our government, to defend the whole, by outlawing the relative few, carries a whole set of dangers.
You want all fraternities abolished today? What is to stop the government from going on and abolishing any organization it dislikes, such as the League of Filipino Students, one of the political forces the fraternities compete with for power in UP politics? Nothing.
Besides which, outlawing any organization is a sure-fire way to make people want to join it. Abolition is not the answer. Exclusion is. Simply pass a law, making any member of a fraternity, social or civic organization, ineligible for public office, unless they resign and renounce their affiliation first. Strip the association of the prestige that attracts the Alpha Males, and more peaceful types will join it.
