Article
Joseph Reylan Viray1, Kriztine Rosales-Viray2,*, Emmanuel De Guia3
1Research Institute for Culture and Language, Polytechnic University of the Philippines, Sta. Mesa, Manila, Philippines
2College of Communication, Polytechnic University of the Philippines, Sta. Mesa, Manila, Philippines
3Philippine Futures Thinking Society, Manila, Philippines
Abstract
Futures thinking was in the minds of historical figures in the Philippines prior to all the current initiatives, conversations, and desk work on it, but without the rigid systematic, methodical, and theoretical orientations that modern advocates and scholars provide. Filipino heroes in the 19th century, like those in the propaganda movement in Europe, aspired for a desired future for a forlorn country in the hands of the Spanish colonizers. In this essay, we claim that Jose Rizal was one of these pioneers of Philippine futures thinking and foresight, exemplified by his intellectual exercise and character traits. The essay takes cues from the seminal work of Benedict Anderson’s “Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination” . Select observations made by Rizal are integrated into the schema of fundamental elements constituting environmental scanning, as delineated by Jen Coote. Additionally, the present essay classifies the socio-political prognostications articulated by Jose Rizal as either positive or negative according to their expected or perceived future outcomes.
Keywords
Futures Thinking, Foresight, Rizal, Philippine Studies, Environmental Scanning
Introduction
Futures thinking has been a topic of interest in management circles, organizational consulting, and academes for decades. The history of futures thinking as a method for radical change and transformative behavior towards attaining preferred futures points to 1960s as its provenance (Kahn, 1967; Kahn, 1962). Later, futures thinking study developed as its own subfield of sociology (Winthrop, 1968). Many sociologists have devoted their scholarship on the future of society but never bothered to call it as a field of study (Bell and Wau, 1971). With Wendell Bell and Bettina Huber (1971), Thomas Cottle and Stephen Klineberg’s (1974) contributions in the 1970s, sociology of the future began to take shape. Even earlier, sociologists did not only write about possible futures, but they also theorized about utopian futures and how they might become realities. Sociologist August Compte (particularly his brand of social evolutionism) envisioned a utopian society with altruism, sociocracy, and religion of humanity as its foundational concepts (Gane, 2006). Marx’s dialectical historical materialism explained evolutions and revolutions (White, 1996). Herbert Spencer’s human social evolution theorized about the human progress from cosmical changes (Offer, 2000). Later in the 1990s, after a long history of scholarship, significant refinements were made to futures thinking studies, and it gradually became a parallel and separate field of study from mainstream sociology (Bell, 1996).
Talisayon (1990) provided an overview of the history of forecasting (and/or futures studies) in the Philippines. According to him, the Development Academy of the Philippines (DAP) made significant contributions to the development of the discipline. Through the DAP’s Population, Resources, Environment, and Philippine Future Project (PREPF), various policymakers, organizations, and government officials participated in social forecasting research and training. Talisayon also mentioned the contribution of UP Diliman’s now-defunct Philippine Center for Advanced Studies in 1979, which produced literatures on political and social forecasts. The first Philippine futuristics conference was conducted in 1980. During this conference, the Philippine Futuristics Society was established as the first organization focused on the future. “Futuristics” is the name of the organization’s journal. The works of Serafin D. Talisayon (1990), Bernardo Villegas et al. (1986), and F. Sionil Jose (1987) contributed to the country’s development of early futures thinking.
Recent development of futures thinking in the Philippines was attributed to the following scholars: Onofre Corpuz (Founding President, Development Academy of the Philippines), Cesar Villanueva (Peace Futurist), Shermon Cruz (Chief Futurist of Center for Engaged Foresight), Lizan Perante-Calina (President of Philippine Futures Thinking Society), Reginald Ugaddan (Professor, University of the Philippines-Diliman), Emmanuel De Guia (Resident Futurist, Philippine Senate), Michville Rivera (President, Association of Schools of Public Administration of the Philippines), Olivia Domingo (Professor, University of the Philippine-Diliman), Alex Brillantes (Former Commissioner, Philippine Commission on Higher Education), Ruperto Sanggalang (Former Commissioner, Philippine Commission on Higher Education), Alan Cajes (Professor, Development Academy of the Philippines), and other fellows of the Philippine Futures Thinking Society. Efforts from Senator Pia Cayetano, who heads the Senate Committee on Futures Thinking and Sustainable Development Goals, to capacitate Higher Education Institutions on the practice of futures thinking were also noteworthy. Organizations like Development Academy of the Philippines, Asian Development Bank, UP National College of Public Administration and Governance (UP-NCPAG), Center for Engaged Foresight, Philippine National Commission for UNESCO, Philippine Society of Public Administration, Aptissimi Development Innovation Inc., Asian Institute of Management, Northwestern University, among others held various capability building activities that highlight the significance of futures thinking (discipline) and foresight (method) to achieve the sustainable development goals of the United Nations and to project the aspirations for the global future.
Futures thinking was in the minds of historical figures in the Philippines prior to all the current initiatives, conversations, and desk work on it, but without the rigid systematic, methodical, and theoretical orientations that modern advocates and scholars provide. Filipino heroes in the 19th century, like those in the propaganda movement in Europe, aspired for a desired future for a forlorn country in the hands of the Spanish colonizers. In the First Philippine Futures Day: Paglalayag Tungo sa Hiraya sponsored by the Philippine Futures Thinking Society, a panel entitled Imagination and Rizal was organized and held on June 19, 2021. During the discussion, Joseph Reylan Viray and Marlon Tagorda both members of the Order of the Knights of Rizal enumerated the social forecasts of Rizal and how these may be considered as indications of Rizal’s futurist character (Viray and Tagorda, 2021; See also Trillana, 2019). Shermon Cruz and Nicole Kahn-Parreno (2022) mention Rizal as futurist in their article.
In a similar vein, Benedict Anderson’s (2006) groundbreaking work, “Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination,” positions Jose Rizal not only as a patriot or literary writer, but also as a thinker who transcended the limitations of his time. Anderson uses the term “proleptic fiction” to characterize Rizal’s work, specifically “El Filibusterismo,” as a story that foreshadows future possibilities. According to Anderson, Rizal utilizes the domain of fiction to articulate social, political, and ethical concerns that were relevant during his time but also resonate with emerging issues and possibilities in succeeding generations. By imagining a national community emancipated from colonial rule, Rizal anticipates fundamental principles underpinning contemporary futures studies. “Proleptic fiction,” according to Anderson’s definition, is a literary genre that, while rooted in its contemporary context, leapfrogs time to invoke potential future scenarios. It involves ethical dilemmas, systemic implications, and alternative sociopolitical models, going beyond mere prediction. Anderson views “El Filibusterismo” in the context of Rizal as an artifact that employs this proleptic approach, thereby transforming speculative narratives into potential future roadmaps. This conceptualization offers a new perspective on Rizal’s writings by situating them within the larger discourse of futures thinking.
This essay takes its scholarly cues from Benedict Anderson. Specifically, the chapter “Nitroglycerine in the Pomegranate” serves as a foundational text for this essay, shedding light on Rizal’s anticipatory logic, foresight, and visions of potential futures for the Philippines. Anderson’s analytical framework becomes crucial in decoding the intricacies of Rizal’s intellectual corpus, thereby allowing us to extend the discourse into realms of futures studies.
Rizal and Environmental Scanning
In El Filibusterismo: Rizal through Isagani, said: “Tomorrow we shall be citizens of the Philippines whose destiny will be beautiful because it will be in loving hands. Ah Yes, the future is ours! I see it rose-tinted; I see the movement that stirs the life of these regions so long dead, lethargic. I see towns rise along the railroads, and factories everywhere edifices like that of Mandaloyan! I hear the steam hiss, the trains hiss, the trains roar, the engines rattle! I see the smoke rise—their heavy breathing; I smell the oil—the sweat of monsters busy at incessant toil…!”
Obviously, Rizal here imagined a preferred future. His image of the future was not drawn from nowhere. He employed environmental scanning, looking for drivers, signals, trends, and even megatrends, though he was not acquainted with these terminologies at that time. Rizal involved his senses in describing Philippines’ future. He presented the future poetically using his senses of sight, olfactory sense, hearing, and feeling. There would be no powerful faculties that could be used in scanning but our own senses. From our senses, our intellectual faculties process the data, deduce conclusions, and map out some strategies for the future.
Environmental scanning, which is part of the early stages of the foresight process, refers to activity focused on trends and changes in the environment to learn from these events. As discussed by Jennifer Coote (2012), environmental scanning looks for the following: events, trends, emerging issues, weak signals, ideas and visions, alternative possibilities, and historical investigations. It is great in situations where there are so many complexities in various internal and external structures. Some techniques of environmental scanning are as formal as online or computerized data search, quick or rapid scan, survey, Delphi, and others, or as informal as “pagmamasid” (observation) and other Filipino indigenous research methodologies as “pakikisalamuha” (interaction with) and “pakikisangkot” (getting involved). In Rizal’s case, we assume that he used a less formal method of scanning. His keen and observant attitude through “pagmamasid” helped him identify various events, phenomena, trends, and megatrends.
Rizal was born into a privileged family. He was never exposed to the experiences of those who are marginalized. He only knew realities that he read about in books that his Jesuit education provided him. As if channeling Rizal’s thoughts through Ibarra, his character in Noli Me Tangere, he said, “I was brought up among the people, and perhaps I do not know what they need. I spent my childhood at a Jesuit school and grew up in Europe. My opinions are formed by books, and I know only what has been exposed; I know nothing of the things that remain hidden and that have not yet been written about. However, his concern for society, his awareness, and his “pagmamasid” were sparked by the execution of the martyred priests. He begun to observe and learn the society from what is happening in his environs, beyond what his books offered him. In his letter to Mariano Ponce, he called the execution of the priests Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora in 1872 an eye-opener. He would have been a Jesuit missionary had it not been for the injustice that he felt, as a young boy, suffered by the priests. Rizal (1889) wrote, “At the sight of those injustices and cruelties, though still a child, my imagination awoke, and I swore to dedicate myself to avenge one day so many victims” Other drivers of Rizal’s social awareness were the injustices committed against his own family. His mother Teodora’s unjust imprisonment on suspicion of poisoning Alberto’s wife (later his brother’s wife) Teodora, with failing eyesight, was made to walk around 30 kilometers from Calamba to Sta. Cruz, in Laguna. There were also land disputes involving the family and the friars. These events drove Rizal to scan the environment on a larger scale, the results of which were conveyed in his novels and in his correspondences with friends and family.
Most of Rizal’s observations about Philippine society were chronicled in his novels Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. In Noli, he wrote about the dominance of the Catholic religion over politics and culture, how they commandeered the nation, the proliferation of corruption, the state of poverty, the intellectuals, etc. His observations were not only meant for the present generation but also for future generations. His scanning was for the future aspirations that he imagined. Through Don Anastacio, Rizal (1886) wrote: “Because I’m not writing for this generation, I’m writing for the ages. If they could read these, I would burn my books, my life’s work. On the other hand, the generation that can decipher these characters will be an educated generation…Mystery and these curious characters will save my work from the ignorance of men, just as mystery and strange rites have saved many truths from the destructive priest class.” Rizal’s portrayal of the country’s plight through his novels is closer to reality, if not a truthful depiction of his milieu. In Rizal’s Letter to Blumentritt in 1890, “Fr. Faura” said to me: “You have not written a novel; the book has nothing of the novel in it; you have described the sad conditions of our time”. And now he believes God will punish me with death because I wrote the truth.” (Rizal, 1890)
Other important observations of Rizal which impacted his thinking about the future of the country’s direction are as follows:
Table 1: Rizal’s Scanning Results vis a vis Coote’s Futurewatching
When integrated with the broader method of foresight, environmental scanning considers all time dimensions. Present signals, drivers, trends, and megatrends are identified. It goes back to history. And it projects and constructs the future based on both the present and the past. This is consistent with Rizal’s belief that knowledge and awareness of the past and present is necessary in predicting the future. As Rizal said: “To foretell the destiny of a nation, it is necessary to open the book of her past.” (“Philippines a Century Hence”, 30 September 1889, 178). It should be emphasized that in Sohail Inayatullah’s Futures Triangle, the three-time dimensions of the past, present, and future are crucial components in the creation of plausible future narratives (Inayatullah, 2008).
Rizal’s Future Narratives
Based on his observations and environmental scanning, Rizal was able to make important forecasts for the Philippines. In his essay entitled “Philippines: A Century Hence,” which he wrote in 1898, he came up with future scenarios for his beloved country. His time horizon was a century (1898–1998). From the signals, drivers, and trends that Rizal gathered through his travels, scholarship, and/or exposure to various phenomena, he was able to forecast that: (1) The Philippines will one day declare herself independent; (2) The Great American Republic with interests in the Pacific may one day think of acquiring possessions beyond the seas; (3) The Philippines will defend with indescribable ardor the liberty she bought at the cost of so much blood and sacrifice; (4) Japan will swallow us; (5) The Philippines will perhaps establish a federal republic; and (6) The Philippines will perhaps enter openly the wide road of progress and will work jointly to strengthen the mother country at home and abroad.
Austin Craig (1912), an American scholar, highlighted Fyodor Jagor’s influence on Rizal’s futuristic interpretation of the Philippine archipelago. Rizal read “Travels in the Philippines” by Jogor while he was still a student at the Ateneo de Manila. Later, in Berlin, Rizal met and became friends with Jagor. As Craig (1912) put it, they were “often discussing how the progression of events was bringing true the fortune for the Philippines, which knowledge of its history and familiarity with its then condition had enabled the trained observer to predict with the same certainty as a meteorologist predicts the weather for tomorrow.” Jagor’s was certain that the Philippines’ circumstance in 1873 could no longer be maintained due to “changed conditions” worldwide. Jagor believed that the Philippine archipelago could no longer be kept separate and isolated from the rest of the world given the current political climate and conditions. Foreign investments and business interactions with other nations became inevitable. Foreign capital and customs enhance prosperity, enlightenment, and self-respect, thereby heightening impatience with existing evils (Jagor, 2016).
As mentioned in the last section, Rizal knew about how countries under tyrannical rule organized uprisings and revolutions to topple down their oppressors. The Philippines would certainly be not an exemption. Rizal observed that nationalism, despite the elusive character of homogeneity, was already brewing in the country, especially when strident calls for a national revolution started to be heard in various underground circles. The establishment of the Katipunan and La Liga Filipina are some indicators of this phenomenon. Hence, Rizal predicted that the Philippines would declare itself independent from the colonizers.
The economic battlefield during the 19th century was the ocean. Whoever controls and dominates the seas holds the power. As a result, competition among the Europeans (Spain, Amsterdam, and England) determines the leader of the global economy. It should be noted that there was not much activity in the Pacific as compared to the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean prior to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Not to downplay the significant contribution of the Manila-Acapulco Galleon Trade that connected the Philippines to the rest of the world, the opening of the canal doubled the activities in the Pacific Ocean. Rizal was aware that the United States and Japan were beginning to vie control and influence in this part of the globe. Rizal also noticed the activities in the US when he visited New York and other neighboring states and how great the country could become despite its defects. But it was only in the late 19th Century, right after Rizal’s execution, that the US became a dominant key player in the Pacific. This dominance it shared with countries in the British Empire (Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji), Germany having colonies in the Region like Papua New Guinea and Micronesia, and Japan was also beginning to assert itself particularly after its victory in the first Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895).
In 1889, the Meiji Constitution was enacted in Japan, which marked the strong resolve of the Japanese government towards imperialism. This constitution granted the monarch sovereignty. Rizal visited Japan a year prior (1888) and observed the culture of the people. His observations were communicated to Ferdinand Blumentritt (Letter to Blumentritt, Epistolario Rizalino, V. Part I, NO. 40, 240), Vicente Barrantes (Letter to Vicente Barrantes, Epistolario Rizalino, II, No. 271, 192), and to his family (Letter to his parents and brothers, Tokyo, 1 March 1888). Perhaps the events prior to the enactment of the Meiji Constitution drove Rizal to predict the future of Japan in the Pacific–that Japan, like the US, may also establish its empire in the region, which would eventually have an interest in occupying the Philippine archipelago.
Rizal’s forecast that Filipinos would be willing to shed blood for independence was based on his observations of various signals, drivers, and trends. With the bravery that was shown by Filipino revolutionaries through some sporadic skirmishes in various parts of the archipelago, though with varied motivations, Rizal anticipated that the country “will defend with indescribable ardor the liberty she bought at the cost of so much blood and sacrifice” against the new colonizers (Japan and America). Of course, Rizal also took notice of the idea that in history all colonizers met their end through bloody revolutions.
Being a voracious reader, Rizal knew global political history. The history of the federalism discourse was so clear in his mind. The genesis of the discourse may perhaps be attributed to the Federalist Papers of the 18th century. This was when America became a federal experiment. This discourse excited the Europeans. It seemed that the federal theories of Montesquieu, Rosseau, and other leading lights of the enlightenment were concretely translated into political reality. At roughly the same time, in Germany, where Rizal stayed as a student, the development of federalism as a political reality started. The ideas of Montesquieu and Rosseau formed the starting point of Germany’s federalism. From 1871-1990, despite of the nationalist and absolutists tradition of Germany and the unification of Germany, Federalism never disappeared in German political imagination. Hence, it is our conjecture that Rizal was silently engaged in the federalism discourse in Germany and even when he transferred to Belgium in 1890. Or months after he wrote the Philippines A Century Hence. As we know, In January of 1890, Rizal transferred to Belgium from Paris. He knew about the situation in Belgium–that is the growing tension between Flemings and the Walloons. The Belgians also imagined a Federal Government that could resolve the conflict. His forecasts regarding the Country’s federal direction, was not idle. He tried to work towards that end. In fact, on July 2, 1892 or seven days after returning from Hong Kong, Rizal launched the La Liga Filipina—here he sought to unite the archipelago into a homogenous body. La Liga would have started the federalism discourse had Rizal not been banished to Dapitan.
Finally, “the Philippines will perhaps enter openly the wide road of progress and will work jointly to strengthen the mother country at home as abroad”. The rise of the intellectuals and the rise of the Filipino Middle Class might have been the cues observed by Rizal to come up with this forecast. As mentioned, Rizal knew that nothing could redeem the Philippines except its intellect/brains. Today, an economist professor Danny Quah of the London School of Economics, re-articulated this projection with data, “by 2050 the world’s economic centers of gravity, a theoretical measure of the focal point of global economic activity based on GDP, will have shifted eastward to lie somewhere between China and India”. “53% of the world GDP will be generated in the Asian region.
It is interesting to note that the forecasts of Rizal in his essay may be classified according to their outcomes. When organizations engage in scenario planning, they often explore positive and negative outcomes to prepare for a variety of future possibilities. According to the work of Schwartz in “The Art of the Long View,” scenarios are “stories about the way the world might turn out tomorrow, stories that can help us recognize and adapt to changing aspects of our present environment” (Schwartz, 1991). This implies that both positive and negative outcomes are useful for robust planning and decision-making.
Classifying Rizal’s forecasts according to negative and positive outcomes yield to the following table.
Table 2: Rizal’s Forecast as to Outcomes
| Positive | Negative |
| The Philippines will enter openly to a wide road of progress. | The great American Republic with interests in the Pacific…may one day think of acquiring possessions beyond the seas. |
| Philippines will one day declare herself independent | Japan will swallow us. |
| The Philippines will defend with indescribable ardor the liberty she bought at the cost of so much blood and sacrifice. | |
| The Philippines will establish a federal republic. |
Finally, most of Rizal’s forecasts and future narratives he described in his prescient essay came true. On June 12, 1898, the Philippines formally declared independence from Spain, as Rizal had foreseen. The Treaty of Paris was signed on December 10, 1898, between the Kingdom of Spain and the United States many months later. Spain relinquished all its claims to numerous territories, including the Philippine archipelago. Rizal predicted that the United States would want to rule over territories in the Pacific. And it did happen. By issuing the “Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation” on December 21, 1898, President McKinley declared the United States of America’s colonization policy in the archipelago, exactly 11 days after the Treaty of Paris. Filipino rebels did not quickly yield, as Rizal had predicted. They persisted in their struggle for genuine freedom. After McKinley’s proclamation, the Philippine-American War started less than two months later. The Philippines was under American Occupation until 1935, when Tydings-McDuffie Act established the Commonwealth Government of the Philippines as an interim government to help the country become ready for full independence. But as Rizal foresaw, Japan swallowed us. In 1941, Imperial Japan occupied the Philippines. After three years of occupation and with an effective guerilla warfare from the Philippine-American forces, Japan surrendered in September 2, 1945. In July 4, 1946, the United States granted the long-awaited independence to the Philippines. Clearly, Filipino bravery and heroism faced three powerful colonizers and as Rizal correctly predicted: “The Philippines will defend with indescribable ardor the liberty she bought at the cost of so much blood and sacrifice”.
Conclusion
Rizal’s environmental scanning resulted, among others, to the following: Events (America is great, but with defects, Christianity in Europe is better than the Christianity in the Philippines); Trends (Free countries are most commercial and progressive); Emerging Issues (The revolutionary effect of Noli Me Tangere); Weak Signals (Regionalism and provincialism are discussed in an article by Regidor); Ideas and Visions (Nothing can redeem the country except Filipino’s intellect); Alternative Possibilities (Spain could gain appreciation from Filipinos should it facilitate reforms); and Historical Investigations (History of the establishment of Spain in the 15th and 16th Century through bloody battles against Arabs/Uprisings and revolutions/Education/Anti-human Education). From these observations, Rizal was able to generate social forecasts that may be categorized either positive or negative scenarios.
Finally, and as a side note, Rizal also created his own personal scenario narrative. Rizal foreseen scenarios of his death.
Rizal was ready and prepared. He said:
Though I do not believe in these things, though my body is very strong and I have no ailment whatsoever, nevertheless, I am preparing myself for death, I put in order what I am going to leave behind, and I get ready for any eventuality. Laon Laan (always ready) is my true name. (Letter to Marcelo Del Pilar, Brussels, 11 June 1890, Epistolario Rizalino, III, No, 385, 60-61)
Rizal knew that his death would be an honorable death. In a letter he sent to his sister Soledad, he wrote: “To fall with the head high and a serene brow is not to fall, it is a triumph. The sad thing is to fall with the stain of dishonor”. (Letter to Soledad (Brussels), 6 June 1890. Epistolario Rizalino, III, No. 383, 56). Undoubtedly, Rizal’s execution in Luneta in 1898 was a triumph–an honorable death that sparked a revolution.
Acknowledgements
The researchers express their gratitude to the Research Institute for Culture and Language, Polytechnic University of the Philippines for supporting this project.
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