RECENTLY, an anonymous White House staffer claimed in a widely shared New York Times op-ed that the “root of the problem (of the Trump administration) is the president’s amorality”.

What is interesting about this perspective is that it didn’t place the blame on the conditions that led to President Trump’s election, nor the lack of checks and balances towards his power. In this view, the “amoral” person is not the symptom of a corrupted system, but rather causes it.

Thus, the argument migrates from the institutionalist framework policy experts and political scientists usually work on – whereby the onus is on constitutional and policy structures to prevent such outcomes – to an ethical one, in which the “fix” will have to come from the restoration of moral values within society.

In other words, only by creating a society of moral people, however defined, can we be led by morally virtuous leaders.

This observation is important to the Malaysian context because one can see it in the obsession about LGBTs (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) in our political discourse.

Admittedly, the upshot in the interest in sexual minorities is also due to the pivoting of Umno towards the religious conservatism of PAS, but a strategy as such can only work because it has a deep resonance within our society.

In other words, the salience of LGBT issues in political discourse lies in a conception of politics that links private sin (which homosexuality is, at least from the religious standpoint) to public morality. Politics is corrupted by extension of society’s corruption, which is something religious fundamentalists are most keen to argue.

A polity that tolerates private sin has no grounds to foster a morally righteous regime. The prescribed fix for politics, therefore, always starts from “fixing” the body.

However, if private sin is tied to public morality, there is another question: how come corruption, which is also heavily proscribed by religious teachings, is relatively tolerated in our view of politics?

The former can only oust a government after years of build-up, and even that takes a scandal of extravagant proportion, while the latter can easily rally vehement protests.

I suppose what lies behind the emotional gravitas of LGBT issues in politics is also the question of identity. Indeed, the political scientist Brent Steele once wrote, “is there anything more political in social life than the struggle over identity?”

Corruption never earned the place of perceived sexual deviancy because being a corrupted person is not an identity. The act of corruption is never sanctioned by almost every moral code available to mankind out there. To the contrary, it brought shame, which, according to sociologist Anthony Giddens, is the sentiment one feels when behaviour distances from a self-narrated identity.

This is why the pervasiveness of corruption is followed by a stream of rationalisations, be it for race, religion, or family; micro-expressions of which are nicely captured by the recent break-out film in Malaysian cinema, One Two Jaga.

Sexuality, on the other hand, lies at the core of the “family” narrative, which has been the bedrock of identity for human beings for thousands of years.

The anxiety about LGBT, in other words, stems from the anxiety regarding the centrality of the family unit. Yet, our political discourse tends to miss out the aspect of societal change.

In three generations, the idea of a family has shifted from the big family structure with multiple families cohabiting (or at least staying close enough for communal living), to the nuclear family structure that reigns supreme today, while slowly gravitating towards notions of families defined also by single-member households and childlessness, be it by choice or circumstance.

For now, it does not appear to me that such changes are preventable. Even the ultra-conservatives who lament the birth control pill for undermining the family structure (or really, just patriarchy) still, as far as I observe it, live a pretty modern lifestyle with two, if not maximum three, kids in tow, and a Starbucks in hand.

These norm entrepreneurs gain from pontificating about losing control of the future not because they themselves are paragons of virtue (many aren’t, by the way), but because their audience feels the same way.

To be clear, I am not an apologist for moralistic-identity politics here (and certainly not its toxic variant). Neither am I harbouring any nostalgia towards a false idyllic past.  

But if the ontological foundation of politics is identity, surely we must reconcile with such a fact, and try to approach the problem at the point where the dilemma lies – that string ball consisting of public morality, private sin, and identity politics.

For starters, we can at least acknowledge the anxiety of identity loss following rapidly changing social norms and structures. But doing so doesn’t mean we resign to romanticising the past.

Rather than clinging onto the obviously anachronistic idea of each family only fending for themselves – which doesn’t work for young adults today due to their physical distance from their parents and the enormous financial burden in starting, let alone maintaining a family – we should explore new forms of state support and social networks, whether familial or extra-familial, that enable collective dignity living for both young and old.

Frank and empathetic discussions should be held so that people feel that social change does not entail freefall, but is moderated for the better. Adverse social implications as a corollary of such changes must be addressed and as we negotiate new ways to support the physical and psychological needs of a (greying) society.

For example, instead of patronising the young for their lack of “traditional” values in a non-traditional world, why not bring them in as part of the solution through programmes like these?

By showing that there are indeed options to anchor security in change, we can undermine the unexamined idea that our sense of public corruption is tied to narrow conceptions of private sin; that the principle of Occam’s razor applies in explaining complex political and social phenomena; that change and corruption is necessarily the same thing.

Only by boldly, sensibly, and intelligently embracing the inevitability of change, we can show that we are still in control of our destiny. – September 23, 2018.

* A forensic science-asian studies hybrid, Nicholas Chan is interested in how authority is shaped, exercised, and more importantly, resisted in Southeast Asia.

* A Forensic Science-Asian Studies hybrid, Nicholas Chan is interested in how authority is shaped, exercised, and more importantly, resisted in Southeast Asia.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.