opinion The scene of secular fist fights, a bomb hoax and flying chairs at the 38th MCA Youth annual conference held in Kuala Lumpur last Friday has given Malaysia and the world a rare glimpse of the Hobbesian state of nature as analytically constructed in British political theorist Thomas Hobbes' magnum opus, Leviathan.

For those who are familiar with Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the scene is reminiscent of the Germanic forests and morasses beyond the Alps or north of the Danube, as seen from the perspective of the Roman Empire. Muslims might consider it as an example of the zaman jahiliah.

The MCA incident shocks and surprises many foreign observers of Malaysian politics as well as some younger Malaysians whose sense of history is not very solid. But for those who follow a historical perspective, it is certainly nothing very new.

Respected and popular cartoonist, Lat, for example must have been nostalgic of the late '70s and early '80s when he drew the a cartoon for the front page of the New Straits Times last Saturday depicting a man screwing a chair on the floor to make it immovable.

Years ago, Lat used the same idea to poke fun at meetings of the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC), noted for the frequent altercations among those present.

Thus, looking from a historical perspective, MIC president S Samy Vellu should perhaps be proud of his achievement in the civilising mission. Malaysians should also give due credit to Samy Vellu - there have been no fist fights, four-letter words and flying chairs at MIC meetings in recent years.

PAS, DAP, Keadilan, Gerakan, PRM and even Umno leaders, members and supporters could also really smile at the MCA as Roman emperors like Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antonius Pius and Marcus Aurelius smiled at the inhabitants and their chieftains in the Germanic forests and morasses, beyond the Alps and north of the Danube.

Secular propaganda

However, there are also non-partisan or less partisan perspectives of looking at the fist fights, flying chairs, the liberal flow of four-letter words and the bomb hoax at the MCA Youth meeting last Friday.

Social psychologists would find it empirically instructive and useful to reaffirm the universal observation that propensity to violence, intolerance and aggressiveness are common to all human beings irrespective of race, ethnic culture, secular ideology or religion.

Thus, for those Malaysians, especially urban Chinese who have been bombarded in recent years by secular propaganda associating violence, intolerance and aggressiveness with a particular religion or ethnic community, it is time for them to re-think the premises of their beliefs and world views.

There were simply no Taliban, 'mad mullahs' or Anwar supporters, or for that matter, Americans and Westerners at the 38th MCA Youth annual conference. Yet violence, conflict, disorder and instability erupted.

There were only Chinese whom the prime minister and Umno president recently stereotyped, for the purpose of a grand psychological warfare, as 'peace-loving, hardworking, smart and not emotional'.

This social psychological insight could also be made good food for thought for the police Special Branch and for those who are in charge in conceptualising 'threats to national security' and defining national security.

The social psychological observation on the propensity of human beings certainly does not preclude or exclude some human beings from standing over and above other human beings.

Of course, the MCA is MCA, the Chinese are Chinese. As the MCA or MCA Youth and the Chinese community are actually two different concepts and entities, what happened at that infamous meeting cannot be construed as typical of all Chinese.

There are many tolerant, peaceful and upright Chinese in PAS, DAP, Keadilan, PRM, Gerakan, Supp, PBS, the civil society and even in MCA. The point is that there are bad Chinese as well as good Chinese, just as there are good Malays and bad Malays (like those who threatened to raze to the ground the Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall).

Single language

For those impatient advocates and proponents of the Vision Schools, or Sekolah Wawasan, who argue that placing children under one roof and instructing them in one language would achieve national unity and harmony, they should think again in view of the ugly MCA Youth meeting.

Coming from the same educational system, they shouted and insulted each other in one single language, namely Chinese-Mandarin (just after they all sang the song 'Unity of Strength' in also one language).

Contrast that situation with the ones in the pasar malam and mamak stall where Malaysians speaking Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil mingle and exchange ideas peacefully, gently and joyously, we would find that the argument for Vision Schools is untenable and dubious.

If one language could unite everyone, there would be no MCA and its various factions. DAP, Gerakan and Keadilan would compete with each other for the support of the Chinese-speaking Malaysians.

There would also be no Umno with PAS and Keadilan competing for Malay support. There would also be no North and South Korea, China and Taiwan, the several Arabic-speaking nation-states in the Arabian Peninsular, or the at least five English-speaking countries, namely the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, existing side by side, sometime friendly to each other, while at other times, hostile.

There are certainly more moral lessons to be drawn from that infamous MCA Youth meeting. The more we learn, the faster we grow intellectually, morally and spiritually as a nation.

JAMES WONG WING ON, chief analyst of Strategic Analysis Malaysia, is a former Member of Parliament (1990-1995) and a former columnist for the Sin Chew Jit Poh Chinese daily. He read political science and economics at the Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. While in Sin Chew, he and a team of journalists won the top awards of Malaysian Press Institute (MPI) for 1998 and 1999.