Jose Rizal: Veneration Without Understanding

The Precursors of Mendicancy

In a way, Rizal’s generation is no different from the generation that was engaged in our independence campaigns. Neither was his generation much different from those who today say they stand for independence but do not want to hurt the feelings of the Americans. In a way, Rizal and his generation were the precursors of the present-day mendicants. It may be shocking to say that Rizal was one of the practitioners of a mendicant policy, but the fact is that the propagandists, in working for certain reforms, chose Spain as the arena of their struggle instead of working among their own people, educating them and learning from them, helping them to realize their own condition and articulating their aspirations. This reflects the bifurcation between the educated and the masses.

The elite had a sub-conscious disrespect for the ability of the people to articulate their own demands and to move on their own. They felt that education gave them the right to speak for the people. They proposed an elitist form of leadership, all the while believing that what the elite leadership decided was what the people would and should follow. They failed to realize that at critical moments of history the people decide on their own, what they want and what they want to do. Today, the ilustrados are shocked by the spate of rallies and demonstrations. They cannot seem to accept the fact that peasants and workers and the youth have moved without waiting for their word. They are not accustomed to the people moving on their own. [p. 141]

The ilustrados were the Hispanized sector of our population, hence they tried to prove that they were as Spanish as the peninsulares. They wanted to be called Filipinos in the creole sense: Filipino-Spaniards as Rizal called Ibarra. They are no different from the modern-day mendicants who try to prove that they are Americanized, meaning that they are Filipino-Americans. As a matter of fact, the ilustrados of the first propaganda movement utilized the same techniques and adopted the same general attitude as the modern-day mendicants and pseudo-nationalists, in so far as the colonizing power was concerned.

Ilustrados And Indios

The contrast to the ilustrado approach was the Katipunan of Bonifacio. Bonifacio, not as Hispanized as the ilustrados, saw in people’s action the only road to liberation. The Katipunan, though of masonic and of European inspiration, was people’s movement based on confidence in the people’s capacity to act in its own behalf. The early rebellions, spontaneous and sporadic, could be termed movements, without consciousness. Rizal and the propagandists were the embodiment of a consciousness without a movement. It was Bonifacio and the Katipunan that embodied the unity of revolutionary consciousness and revolutionary practice.

The indio as Filipino rose in arms while the ilustrado was still waiting for Spain to dispense justice and reforms. The ilustrado Filipino was now being surpassed by the indio in revolutionary ardor. The indio had a more legitimate claim to the title of Filipino because he was truly liberating himself. The revolutionary masses proclaimed their separatist goal through the Katipunan. Faced with the popular determination, the ilustrados joined the Revolution where, despite their revolutionary rhetoric, they revealed by their behavior their own limited goals.

Though their fight was reformist and may be regarded as tame today, the historic role of the ilustrados cannot be denied for they were purveyors of ideas which when seized upon by the masses became real weapons. Today their ideas are orthodox and safe. However, the same concepts when made relevant to present society again make their partisans the objects of persecution by contemporary reactionaries.

The role and the contribution of Rizal, like that of the ilus trado class, [p.142] must be evaluated in the context of his particular reality within the general reality of his time. Rizal was a necessary moment in our evolution. But he was only a moment, and while his validity for his time amounted to a heroism that is valid for all time, we cannot say that Rizal himself will be valid for all time and that Rizal’s ideas should be the yardstick for all our aspirations. He provided the model of a form of heroism that culminated in martyrdom. He was a Filipino we can be proud of, a monument to the race despite all his limitations. But we cannot make him out to be the infallible determinant of our national goals, as his blind idolators have been trying to do.

We must see Rizal historically. Rizal should occupy his proper place in our pantheon of great Filipinos. Though he is secure to be in our hearts and memories as a hero, we must now realize that he has no monopoly of patriotism; he is not the zenith of our greatness; neither are all his teachings of universal and contemporary relevance and application. Just as a given social system inevitably yields to new and higher forms of social organization, so the individual hero in history gives way to new and higher forms of heroism. Each hero’s contribution, however, are not nullified thereby but assume their correct place in a particular stage of the people’s development. Every nation is always discovering or rediscovering heroes in the past or its present.

Blind Adoration

Hero-worship, therefore, must be both historical and critical. We must always be conscious of the historical conditions and circumstances that made an individual a hero, and we must always be ready to admit at what point that hero’s applicability ceases to be of current value. To allow hero-worship to be uncritical and unhistorical is to distort the meaning of the heroic individual’s life, and to encourage a cult bereft of historical meaning – a cult of the individual shorn of his historical significance. It is form without content, a fad that can be used for almost anything, because it is really nothing. We must view Rizal as an evolving personality within an evolving historical period. That his martyrdom was tainted by his attacks on our independist struggle is not a ground for condemning him entirely. We must determine the factors – economic and cultural [p. 143] – that made Rizal what he was. We must see in his life and in his works the evolution of the Filipino and must realize that the period crowned by his death is only a moment in the totality of our history.

It is a reflection of our lack of creative thinking that we continue to invoke Rizal when we discuss specific problems and present-day society. This is also a reflection of our intellectual timidity, our reluctance to espouse new causes unless we can find sanctions, however remote, in Rizal. This tendency is fraught with dangers.