Toledo, Rosabell C.

2019-11569
Juris Doctor
On Nick Joaquin’s “A Heritage of Smallness”

The Mitigating Circumstance of Passion or Obfuscation

Many parts of Nick Joaquin’s work on ‘A Heritage of Smallness’ ring true to this

day. However, a lot of his ideas stopped making sense a long time ago. There is no

question to his point that a mentality which engenders fear of the grand and

faithfulness to the miniscule remains a great and seemingly insurmountable barrier to

development, but Joaquin fails to identify a target for his fatal attacks. In criminal law,

it’s like Joaquin was a prosecutor that effectively proved that a crime was committed,

but could not present an accused. Hence, there is no one to prosecute—no one to put

behind bars. This is not to say, however, that Joaquin’s failure endangers the credibility

of his entire work. After all, indiscriminate firing may be wrong, but attendant to the

fact is his love for country—which could very well have produced in him intense

passion or obfuscation-- a mitigating circumstance for most crimes.”

In his conclusion, the author says Filipinos “seem to be making less and less effort,

thinking ever smaller, doing even smaller. The air droops with a feeling of inadequacy. We can’t

cope; we don’t respond; we are not rising to challenges.” He is not wrong. There is an

onslaught of depression in the country, both in the city and the countryside. Farmers

are currently bucking under the weight of the rice liberalization program, which may

have effectively reduced inflation by flooding the market with rice supply, but at what

cost? We imported rice at a discount from countries who have industrialized the rice-

planting process, while our farmers remain stuck with their primitive and altogether

more expensive rice production process. As a result, farmers cannot compete with the
lower cost of mass-produced rice from other countries. That’s while workers in the city

struggle with ever-shrinking pay checks sliced on account of being late most of the time,

by reason of mass public transport in this country being nothing but a massive joke.

Joaquin was right—these are neither colossal nor insurmountable challenges, but

somehow, this country cannot rise to meet them.

Now, here lies the problem. The question that Joaquin failed to address or even

pose in his well-articulated essay is this: who is the culprit? Smallness has indeed become

a culture, a heritage, a part of the national consciousness of Filipinos. Surely though, a

writer and philosopher of Joaquin’s caliber knows that all these things are social

constructs. They do not exist on the minds of Filipinos just because they do—but

because someone put them there. Joaquin says “we don’t grow like a seed, we split like an

amoeba. The moment a town grows big it become two towns. The moment a province becomes

populous it disintegrates into two or three smaller provinces. The excuse offered for divisions is

always the alleged difficulty of administering so huge an entity.” It seems to me as if the

writer missed a couple of subjects and words here. If I may proffer a re-writing:

“The moment a town grows big it is split into two towns. The moment a

province becomes populous, it is disintegrated into two or three smaller

provinces. The excuse offered for division is always the alleged difficulty of

administering so huge an entity, but that is a lie. Truth is, gerrymandering has

always been and will always be the tool of the bureaucrat-capitalist. Dynasties

not unlike the Dutertes of Davao, the Cayetanos of Taguig, and the

Mangudadatus of Maguindanao sometimes grow way too big that they have to

split towns just so all of the siblings will have kingdoms of their own.”

Joaquin makes the same fatal mistake of not identifying the root cause of

the problem as early as the second paragraph. He talked about sachet economics

as if it’s Exhibit A of the Filipino people’s long-standing felony of thinking too

small. “This is a country, perhaps the only one in the world, where people buy and sell

one stick of cigarette, half a head of garlic, a dab of pomade, part of the contents of a can

or bottle, one single egg, one single banana,” he says. He continues with a

lamentation and proclaims that “the amount of effort they spend seems out of all

proportion to the returns,” as if it’s the poor people’s fault that this country is not

moving forward. Joaquin brands it as an “aversion” to larger things, but in

reality, not a single poor family in the world would be averse to bigger boxes of

soap and bigger bottles of shampoo—if only they could afford it. It is not

adversity—it is lack of any other choice.

In conclusion, Joaquin makes some excellent points in his essay “A

Heritage of Smallness,” but he fell a tad short in explaining just who the

mastermind of this decay really is. Not a single soul can deny that the writer’s

sentiments are coming from an enviable place of extreme love for country, but

that fact is a mitigating circumstance at best in criminal law. Scholars are bound

to use Joaquin’s work to blame the poor and those who “think small” for this

country’s regress, all while those who have benefited from such small thinking

run free from criticism, and thus run free to continue running this country—

trapping many people in a cycle of smallness, so that greatness may only be

amassed by the few. Joaquin points more than fingers. He is pointing big guns

loaded with painful truth, but he has not locked in his targets, and is simply

aiming at the wind.