The Life and Works of Rizal proudly presents this abridged version of The Indolence of the Filipino by Dr. Jose Rizal. While it is always better to read the piece in its entirety, here is an abridgment that covers all the important points outlined in its five parts.
No paraphrase or summarization has been done. All text is taken from the original English translation, occasionally condensed and truncated for clarity.
Related pages:
The Indolence of the Filipino Full Text
The Indolence of the Filipino Summary and Analysis
The Indolence of the Filipino Editor's Explanation
The Indolence of the Filipino Highlights and Quotable Quotes
I
DOCTOR Sancianco, in his Progreso de Filipinas, has taken up this question, and, relying upon facts and reports furnished by the very same Spanish authorities that rule the Philippines, has demonstrated that such indolence does not exist, and that all said about it does not deserve reply or even passing notice.
Nevertheless, as discussion of it has been continued. And as we can only serve our country by telling the truth, let us calmly examine the facts.The word indolence has been greatly misused in the sense of little love for work and lack of energy, while ridicule has concealed the misuse.
In the Middle Ages, and even in some Catholic countries now, the devil is blamed for everything that superstitious folk cannot understand or the perversity of mankind is loath to confess. In the Philippines one’s own and another’s faults, the shortcomings of one, the misdeeds of another, are attributed to indolence.
Examining the life of our country, we believe that indolence does exist there. The Filipinos, who can measure up with the most active peoples in the world, will doubtless not repudiate this admission, for it is true that there one works and struggles against the climate, against nature and against men.
We must confess that indolence does actually and positively exist there; only that, instead of holding it to be the cause of the backwardness and the trouble, we regard it as the effect of the trouble and the backwardness.
A hot, climate requires of the individual quiet and rest, just as cold incites to labor and action. For this reason the Spaniard is more indolent than the Frenchman; the Frenchman more so than the German. The Europeans themselves who reproach the residents of the colonies so much, how do they live in tropical countries? Surrounded by a numerous train of servants, never going afoot but riding in a carriage, needing servants not only to take off their shoes for them but even to fan them!
Perhaps the reply to this will be that white men are not made to stand the severity of the climate. A mistake! A man can live in any climate, if he will only adapt himself to its requirements and conditions. We inhabitants of hot countries live well in northern Europe whenever we take the precautions the people there do. Europeans can also stand the torrid zone, if only they would get rid of their prejudices.
An hour’s work under that burning sun, in the midst of pernicious influences springing from nature in activity, is equal to a day’s work in a temperate climate; it is, then, just that the earth yield a hundred fold!
Moreover, do we not see the active European, who has gained strength during the winter, abandon his labors during the few days of his variable summer, close his office, flee to watering places, sit in the cafés or stroll about?
What wonder then that the inhabitant of tropical countries, worm out and with his blood thinned by the continuous and excessive heat, is reduced to inaction? Without speaking further of the Europeans, in what violent labor does the Chinaman engage in tropical countries, the industrious Chinaman, who flees from his own country driven by hunger and want, and whose whole ambition is to amass a small fortune? He nearly always engages in trade, in commerce; so rarely does he take up agriculture that we do not know of a single case. The Chinaman who in other colonies cultivates the soil does so only for a certain number of years and then retires.
We find, then, the tendency to indolence very natural, and have to admit and bless it, for we cannot alter natural laws, and without it the race would have disappeared. Man’s object is not to satisfy tile passions of another man, his object is to seek happiness for himself and his kind by traveling along the road of progress and perfection.
The evil is not that indolence exists but that it is fostered and magnified. The evil is that the indolence in the Philippines is a magnified indolence, an effect of misgovernment and of backwardness, as we said, and not a cause thereof. Others will hold the contrary opinion, especially those who have a hand in the misgovernment, but we have made an assertion and are going to prove it.
II
When in consequence of a long chronic illness the condition of the patient is examined, the question may arise whether the weakening of the fibers and the debility of the organs are the cause of the malady’s continuing or the effect of the bad treatment that prolongs its action.
The attending physician attributes the entire failure of his skill to the poor constitution of the patient, to the climate, to the surroundings, and so on. On the other hand, the patient attributes the aggravation of the evil to the system of treatment followed. Only the common crowd shakes its head and cannot reach a decision.
Something like this happens in the case of the Philippines. Instead of physician, read government. Instead of patient, Philippines; instead of malady, indolence.We are not trying to put all the blame on the physician, and still less on the patient, for we have already spoken of a predisposition due to the climate.
Indolence in the Philippines is a chronic malady, but not a hereditary one. The Filipinos have not always been what they are, witnesses whereto are all the historians of the first years after the discovery of the Islands. Before the arrival of the Europeans, the Malayan Filipinos carried on an active trade with all the neighboring countries. The first thing noticed by Pigafetta, who came with Magellan in 1521, on arriving at the first island of the Philippines, Samar, was the courtesy and kindness of the inhabitants and their commerce. Wealth abounded in the islands.
A very extraordinary thing, and one that shows the facility with which the natives learned Spanish, is that fifty years before the arrival of the Spaniards in Luzon, there were already natives of Luzon who understood Castilian.
In the treaties of peace that the survivors of Magellan’s expedition made with the chief of Paragua, when the servant-interpreter died they communicated with one another through a Moro who understood some Spanish. Where did this extemporaneous interpreter learn Castilian? Spaniards did not reach Luzon until 1571. Legazpi’s expedition met in Butuan various traders of Luzon with their boats laden with iron, wax cloths, porcelain, plenty of provisions, activity, trade, movement in all the southern islands.
All the histories of those first years, in short, abound in long accounts about the industry and agriculture of the natives, and, considering the time and the conditions in the islands, prove that there was life, there was activity, there was movement.
How then, and in what way, was that active and enterprising infidel native of ancient times converted into the lazy and indolent Christian, as our contemporary writers say? We have already spoken of the more or less latent predisposition which exists in the Philippines toward indolence, and which must exist everywhere, because we all hate work more or less.
What causes operated to awake this terrible predisposition from its lethargy? How is it that the Filipino people has given up its ancient habits of work, of trade, of navigation, etc., even to the extent of completely forgetting its past?
III
A fatal combination of circumstances has induced the decline of labor until it has reached the condition in which we now see it.
First came the wars. It was necessary to subject the people either by cajolery or force; there were fights, there was slaughter; those who had submitted peacefully seemed to repent of it; insurrections were suspected, and some occurred; naturally there were executions, and many capable laborers perished.
Add to this the continual wars into which the inhabitants of the Philippines were plunged to maintain the honor of Spain, costly wars, fruitless expeditions, in which each time thousands and thousands of native archers and rowers were recorded to have embarked, but whether they returned to their homes was never stated.
We would never get through, had we to quote all the evidence of the authors regarding the frightful diminution of the inhabitants of the Philippines in the first years after the discovery. In the time of their first bishop, that is, ten years after Legazpi, Philip II said that they had been reduced to less than two thirds.
Add to these fatal expeditions that wasted all the moral and material energies of the country, the frightful inroads of the terrible pirates from the south continually reduced the number of the inhabitants of the Philippines. These expeditions lasted about three centuries, being repeated five and ten times a year, and each expedition cost the islands over eight hundred prisoners.
It was necessary to construct new and large ships. Fernando de los Rios Coronel, who fought in these wars and later turned priest, speaking of these King’s ships, said: “As they were so large, the timber needed was scarcely to be found in the forests (of the Philippines!), and in order to convey it to the shipyard the towns of the surrounding country had to be depopulated of natives, who get it out with immense labor, damage, and cost to them.
To haul them seven leagues over very broken mountains 6,000 natives were engaged three months, without furnishing them food, which the wretched native had to seek for himself.
Add “the natives who were executed, those who loft their wives and children and fled in disgust to the mountains, those who were sold into slavery to pay the taxes levied upon them,” add to all this “natives sold by some encomendoros to others, those flogged to death, the women who are crushed to death by their heavy burdens, those who sleep in the fields and there bear and nurse their children and die bitten by poisonous vermin, the many who are executed and left to die of hunger and those who eat poisonous herbs, and the mothers who kill their children in bearing them,” and you will understand how in less than thirty years the population of the Philippines was reduced one-third.
We are not saying this: it was said by Gaspar de San Agustin, the preeminently anti-Filipino Augustinian, and he confirms it throughout the rest of his work.
How is it strange, then, that discouragement may have been infused into the spirit of the inhabitants of the Philippines, when in the midst of so many calamities they did not know whether they would see sprout the seed they were planting, whether their field was going to be their grave or their crop would go to feed their executioner?
What is there strange in it, when we see the pious but impotent friars of that time trying to free their poor parishioners from the tyranny of the encomenderos by advising them to stop work in the mines, to abandon their commerce, to break up their looms, pointing out to them heaven for their whole hope, preparing them for death as their only consolation?
Man works for an object. Remove the object and you reduce him to inaction. It seems that these thoughts have never entered the minds of those who cry out against the indolence of the Filipinos.
Even were the Filipino not a man like the rest; even were we to suppose that zeal in him for work was as essential as the movement of a wheel caught in the gearing of others in motion; there would still be left us another reason to explain the attack of the evil.
The abandonment of the fields by their cultivators was sufficient to reduce to nothing the hard labor of so many generations. In the Philippines abandon for a year the land most beautifully tended and you will see how you will have to begin all over again: the rain will wipe out the furrows, the floods will drown the seeds, plants and bushes will grow up everywhere, and on seeing so much useless labor the hand will drop the hoe, the laborer will desert his plow.
Still they struggled a long time against indolence, yes: but their enemies were so numerous that at last they gave up!
IV
We recognize the causes that awoke the predisposition and provoked the evil: now let us see what foster and sustain it.
In this connection, government and governed have to bow our heads and say: we deserve our fate. When a house becomes disturbed and disordered, we should not accuse the youngest, child or the servants, but the head of it, especially if his authority is unlimited, he who does not act freely is not responsible for his actions; and the Filipino people, not being master of its liberty, is not responsible for either its misfortunes or its woes.
We say this, it is true, but, as will be seen later on, we also have a large part, in the continuation of such a disorder. The following, among other causes, contributed to foster the evil and aggravate it: the constantly lessening encouragement that labor has met with in the Philippines.
The natives were not allowed to go to their labors, that is, their farms, without permission of the governor, or of his agents and officers, and even of the priests.
Those who know the administrative slackness and confusion in a country where the officials work scarcely two hours a day; those who know the cost of going to and returning from the capital to obtain a permit; those who are aware of the petty retaliations of the little tyrants will well understand how with this crude arrangement it is possible to have the most absurd agriculture.
The sordid return the native gets from his work has the effect of discouraging him. We know from history that the encomenderos, after reducing many to slavery, made others give up their merchandise for a trifle or nothing at all, or cheated them with false measures.
This state of affairs lasted a long time and still lasts, in spite of the fact, that the breed of encomenderos has become extinct. A term passes away but the evil and the passions engendered do not pass away so long as reforms are devoted solely to changing the names.
The most commercial and most industrious countries have been the freest countries: France, England and the United States prove this. Hongkong, which is not worth the most insignificant of the Philippines, has more commercial movement than all the islands together, because it is free and is well governed.
The pernicious example of the dominators in surrounding themselves with servants and despising manual labor as a thing unbecoming the nobility, those lordly airs, and the desire of the dominated to be the equal of the dominators, if not essentially, at least in their manners: all this had naturally to produce aversion to activity and fear or hatred of work.
Moreover, ‘Why work?’ asked many natives. The curate says that the rich man will not go to heaven. Why be rich? The native, whom they pretend to regard as an imbecile, is not so much so that he does not understand that it is ridiculous to work himself to death to become worse off.
Add to this the introduction of gambling. The word sugal (jugar, to gamble), like kumpisal (confesar, to confess to a priest), indicates that gambling was unknown in the Philippines before the Spaniards.
Along with gambling, which breeds dislike for steady and difficult toil by its promise of sudden wealth and its appeal to the emotions, went also the religious functions, the great number of fiestas, the long masses for the women to spend their mornings and the novenaries to spend their afternoons, and the night, for the processions and rosaries. And if this does not suffice to form an indolent character, recall then that the doctrines of his religion teach him to irrigate his fields in the dry season, not by means of canals but with masses and prayers; to preserve his stock during an epizootic with holy water, exorcisms and benedictions that cost five dollars an animal; to drive away the locusts by a procession with the image of St. Augustine, etc.
It is well, undoubtedly, to trust greatly in God; but it is better to do what one can and not trouble the Creator every moment.
We have noticed that the countries which believe most in miracles are the laziest, just, as spoiled children are the most ill-mannered. Whether they believe in miracles to palliate their laziness or they are lazy because they believe in miracles, we cannot say; but the fact is the Filipinos were much less lazy before the word miracle was introduced into their language.
The apathy of the government itself toward everything in commerce and agriculture contributes not a little to foster indolence. The government furnishes no aid either when poor crop comes, when the locusts sweep over the fields, or when a cyclone destroys in its passage the wealth of the soil; nor does it take any trouble to seek a market for the products of its colonies.
Why should it do so when these same products are burdened with taxes and imposts and have not free entry into the ports, of the mother country, nor is their consumption there encouraged?
Add to this lack of material inducement the absentee of moral stimulus, and you will see how he who is not indolent in that country must needs be a madman or at least a fool. What future awaits him who distinguishes himself, him who studies, who rises above the crowd?
At the cost of study and sacrifice a young man becomes a great chemist. The young man wins this through knowledge and perseverance, and after he has won it, it is abolished, because the belief exists that the light of progress may injure the people more than all the adulterated foods.
In the same way, another young man won a prize in a literary competition, and as long as his origin was unknown his work was discussed, the newspapers praised it and it was regarded as a masterpiece, but the sealed envelopes were opened, the winner proved to be a native, while among the losers there were Peninsulars; then all the newspapers hastened to extol the losers!
Finally, let us close this dreary list with the principal and most terrible of all: the education of the native. From his birth until he sinks into his grave, the training of the native is brutalizing, depressive and antihuman. There is no doubt that the government, some priests like the Jesuits and some Dominicans have done a great deal by founding colleges, schools of primary instruction, and the like.
But this is not enough; their effect is neutralized.
They amount to five or ten years (years of a hundred and fifty days at most) during which the youth comes in contact with books selected by those very priests who boldly proclaim that it is an evil for the natives to know Castilian, that the native should not be separated from his carabao, that he should not have any further aspirations, and so on. Thus, while they attempt to make of the native a kind of animal, but in exchange they demand of him divine actions. And we say divine actions, because he must be a god who does not become indolent in that climate, surrounded by the circumstances mentioned.
Deprive a man, then, of his dignity, and you not only deprive him of his moral strength but you also make him useless even for those who wish to make use of him. Every creature has its stimulus, its mainspring: man’s is his self-esteem. Take it away from him and he is a corpse, and he who seeks activity in a corpse will encounter only worms.
Alas! The whole misfortune of the present Filipinos consists in that they have become only half-way brutes. The Filipino is convinced that to get happiness it is necessary for him to lay aside his dignity as a rational creature, to attend mass, to believe what is told him, to pay what is demanded of him, to pay and forever to pay; to work, suffer and be silent, without aspiring to anything, without aspiring to know or even to understand Spanish, without separating himself from his carabao, without protesting against any injustice, against any arbitrary action, against an assault, against an insult; that is, not to have heart, brain or spirit: a creature with arms and a purse full of gold... there’s the ideal native!
Unfortunately, or because the brutalization is not yet complete and because the nature of man is inherent in his being in spite of his condition, the native protests; he still has aspirations, he thinks and strives to rise, and there’s the trouble!
V
In the preceding chapter we set forth the causes that proceed from the government in fostering and maintaining the evil we are discussing. Now it falls to us to analyze those that emanate from the people.
Peoples and governments are correlated and complementary: a fatuous government would be an anomaly among righteous people, just as a corrupt people cannot exist under just rulers and wise laws.
Like people, like government, we will say in paraphrase of a popular adage.We can reduce all these causes to two classes: to defects of training and lack of national sentiment.
The very limited training in the home, the tyrannical and sterile education of the rare centers of learning, influence the mind so that a man may not aspire to excel those who preceded him but must merely be content to go along with or march behind them.
If by one of those rare accidents, some wild spirit, that is, some active one, excels, instead of his example stimulating, it only causes others to persist in their inaction. ‘There’s one who will work for us: let’s sleep on!’ say his relatives and friends.
True it is that the spirit of rivalry is sometimes awakened, only that then it awakens with bad humor in the guise of envy, and instead of being a lever for helping, it is an obstacle that produces discouragement.
Nurtured by the example of anchorites of a contemplative and lazy life, the natives spend theirs in giving their gold to the Church in the hope of miracles and other wonderful things.
“You can’t know more than this or that old man!” “Don’t aspire to be greater than the curate!” “You belong to an inferior race!” “You haven’t any energy!” This is what they tell the child, and as they repeat it so often, it has perforce to become engraved on his mind and thence mould and pervade all his actions.
The child or youth who tries to be anything else is blamed with vanity and presumption; the curate ridicules him with cruel sarcasm, his relatives look upon him with fear, strangers regard him with great compassion. No forward movement! Get back in the ranks and keep in line!
To combat this indolence, some have proposed increasing the native’s needs and raising the taxes. What has happened? Criminals have multiplied, penury has been aggravated.
Why? Because the native already has enough needs with his functions of the Church, with his fiestas, with the public offices forced on him, the donations and bribes that he has to make so that he may drag out his wretched existence. The cord is already too taut.
We have heard many complaints, and every day we read in the papers about the efforts the government is making to rescue the country from its condition of indolence. We are reminded of the gardener who tried to raise a tree planted in a small flower-pot. The little tree died, leaving the man convinced that it belonged to a degenerate species, attributing the failure of his experiment to everything except the lack of soil and his own ineffable folly.
Without education and liberty, that soil and that sun of mankind, no reform is possible, no measure can give the result desired.
What we wish is that obstacles be not put in his way, that the many his climate and the situation of the islands afford be not augmented, that instruction be not begrudged him for fear that when he becomes intelligent he may separate from the colonizing nation or ask for the rights of which he makes himself worthy. Since some day or other he will become enlightened, let his enlightenment be as a gift received and not as conquered plunder.
We desire that the policy be at once frank and consistent, that is, highly civilizing, without sordid reservations, without distrust, without fear or jealousy, wishing the good for the sake of the good, civilization for the sake of civilization, without ulterior thoughts of gratitude. Let the government heed material interests more than the interests of four orders of friars; let it send out intelligent employees to foster industry; just judges, all well paid, so that they be not venal pilferers, and lay aside all religious pretext.
This policy has the advantage in that when the mother country loses her colonies she will at least have the gold amassed and not the regret of having reared ungrateful children.
Abridged by J. R. Lim