Indolence

An old word for habitual idleness, and the term the Spanish colonial record uses for what it claimed to observe in Filipinos.

The course keeps the word rather than replacing it with something gentler, for one reason: Rizal kept it. His answer in 1890 does not begin by denying the observation, and a course that quietly swaps the word out loses the move that makes his argument work.

The move is a relocation. Rizal grants that indolence exists and then writes that “instead of holding it to be the cause of the backwardness and the trouble, we regard it as the effect of the trouble and the backwardness.” Nothing observed is withdrawn. What changes is which column the observation sits in, and therefore whether the question is about a people or about their conditions.

His causes, in the order the essay gives them: climate, wars and invasions, forced shipyard labour, conscription for Spain’s wars, trade restrictions and government monopolies, piracy, church teaching against accumulation, educational discrimination, red tape and bribery, and an internalised absence of national feeling.

Source: José Rizal, Sobre la indolencia de los filipinos, serialised in La Solidaridad in five installments, 15 July to 15 September 1890. English text, The Indolence of the Filipino, Project Gutenberg ebook #6885, free and public domain, which is where the course took the quotation directly. Rizal’s argument is that the indolence is real and misattributed, which is a stronger claim than a denial and a harder one to dismiss.

First used in: 2.4 · The lazy Filipino, and who needed that story