re: "College student slain on Bangkok street" (BP, April 3, 2013) & "Veteran ghost-chaser Watcharapol livestreams to new generation" (BP, April 3, 2013)
Dear editor,
Two articles in today's Bangkok Post (April 3) might seem unrelated, but their intersection sheds much light on Thailand 4.0, as the rampant vision of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha and his faith-driven zealots of sacred coups have made it. The two articles are "College student slain on Bangkok street" and "Veteran ghost-chaser Watcharapol livestreams to new generation". They intersect in the realm of the sacred. Freed as they are from all Earthly reality, ghosts and such supernatural phenomena are the supreme manifestation of the sacred, as Thailand's rich traditions have insisted for centuries. If you want to get ahead, you summon the sacred, if necessary bribing it with a suitable sacrifice of tasty flesh (whole boiled chickens or left over pigs heads being popular choices in my area) or you less carnally gift a large donation to an already gilded edifice of the sacred. That karmic trading in merit is one side of the sacred setting an example religiously followed by the profane aspects of social custom venerated for generations.
A more telling aspect is that the sacred reliably renounces reason and evidence in favour of faith, of pure, unquestioning faith. The problem here, as radio host Watcharapol Fukjaidee admits, is that "No one can prove it is real except the caller", who is convicted by faith alone. Whatever reality the sincerely held supernaturally sacred might thereby have exists solely in the mind of the believer, never in objective reality. It would not otherwise be supernatural: were there any reason or facts to back up sacred claims, they would not be sacred but profane reality solidly supported, or rebutted, by science or other honest, critical discussion.
As cultural anthropologist Andrew Alan Johnson is quoted: "Ghosts become a way to tell stories that are denied elsewhere." There is no shortage of sacred topics about which plain, honest speech is truly, literally, unspeakable in Thailand in 2023. This sacred realm cuts a wide swathe through modern Thai society. Royal Thai Army chiefs, no less, come out to insist on its pre-eminence, even in response to a little graffiti temporarily staining with honest opinion the image of an immaculately white wall deemed sacred by decree. The sacred plainly needs to be pillared by serious secular power.
Having cut itself off from reason and evidence, the sacred has no option but to demand on pain of secular punishment that its dogma be believed without question on the basis of faith alone. This is why Catholic popes traditionally imprisoned, tortured and killed heretics and apostates, or co-opted profane Earthly powers do so. This is why Afghan's faith-driven rulers today ban women from education using secular law that perverts justice in service to their sacred tenets. This is why Thai law imprisons those who think critically and ask highly pertinent questions of what is deemed sacred and therefore off limits to reason and honest investigation.
And this elevation beyond all reason is why those who cite the sacred as their supreme justification commit coups that, by their very nature, set the example of violence to Thai youth. That message has plainly been heeded by those who slew in brutal gang fashion a 23-year-old engineering student from Pathumwan Institute of Technology. We do not yet know the precise motivation, which might have been infringing on a prerogative or simply a perceived slight. The killers, nonetheless, have demonstrated that they learned well the lesson that when your sacredness has been disrespected, violence is the appropriate reaction. Reason and facts being ruled out, brute violence remains the only option to protect your most sacred image. Thus rules the sacred.
It being so, the profane is perhaps to be preferred by those who respect reason and open discussion that seek true understanding of worth.
Felix Qui
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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.
The text as edited was published in PostBag on April 8, 2023, under the title "Beyond reason" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2545631/beyond-reason
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