The Whipping Boy

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Even without its government's disciplinary measures, Singapore more than plausibly would be much the same as it is now. An academic commonplace today is that the major factor determining social peace and prosperity is culture -- a sense of common identity, tradition and values. The house that Lee built is 76% ethnic Chinese, a people with one of the most self-disciplined cultures in the world. Prizing family, learning and hard work, overseas Chinese have prospered wherever they have settled. Heavily Chinese Hong Kong is, granted, a somewhat messier place than Singapore. But without social engineering or the flogging of vandals, Hong Kong is still very safe and quite rich. Its crime rate: 1,522 reported offenses for every 100,000 people in 1992. Singapore's was 1,507.

And America's? Don't ask. Unlike Singapore, though, the U.S. today is a nation in search of a common culture, trying to be a universal society that assimilates the traditions of people from all over the world. Efforts to safeguard minority as well as individual rights have produced, as Lee charges, a gridlock in the justice system. America is not the pandemonium portrayed in the shock-addicted mass media. But its troubles stem more from the decay of family life than from any government failures. Few societies can afford to look on complacently. As travel eases and cultures intermix, the American experience is becoming the world's.

Singaporeans have every right to be proud of their achievements. Does that justify Michael Fay's sentence? A letter writer to the New York Times advised that "six of the best," as he suffered at an English public (that is, private) school, might cure all that ails American youth. Comparing Fay's sentence to a headmaster's paddling is fatuous -- but then, as John Updike once noted, old boys of Eton and Harrow can often "mistake a sports car for a woman or a birch rod for a mother's kiss." The pain from flaying with wet rattan, as it is done in Singapore, can knock a prisoner out cold.

The circumstances of this affair -- evidently no Singaporean has ever been punished under the Vandalism Act for defacing private property -- suggest that Singapore has used Fay as an unwilling point man in a growing quarrel between East and West about human rights. Several large Asian countries, China among them, argue that the U.S. has no business criticizing their own, equally legitimate values. But Japan stresses majority rights too. So does Hong Kong. Neither is watering its economic miracle with the blood from a bamboo cane.