If Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam were alive today, he would be 84 years old.

He would have been out of bankruptcy, back in politics and preparing for the next general election due 2011.

And he would still be the principle dissident of Singapore, which would be great.

But because I attended his memorial held on his birthday recently at Hong Lim Park to commemorate his passing in September 2008, it means that he has not been around for quite a bit.

And that leaves me with a discomforting feeling.

That’s because you’ve got to have dissent and opposition in any society and no one stuck it to the establishment better or as well as Jeyaretnam did.

Which brings me to the point of this missive: The more vocal and persistent the oppositional voices in any given society, the better.

But how and why is that possible, you might ask?

And from which bleeding-heart, tree-hugging liberal did I get this crazy idea from?

Well, let’s start with the who first. He is Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law school professor who came up with this idea that conformity of thought and the stifling of alternative views has a polarising effect.

It tends to drive people into opposite directions and sometimes they can go pretty far off either way. What is left is little common ground in between for any consensus to prevail, simply because there is no way for engagement to exist.

And that is not a good thing.

Basically, people who keep sharing the same ideas with their own kind end up going off tangent – and fall off the proverbial edge.

Well, Sunstein is liberal, yes, but bleeding-heart and tree-hugging, he definitely is not.

In reality, he is known for being pretty empirical and thorough. And not to mention prolific. And he happens to be working in President Obama’s administration these days.

Sunstein, as a legal scholar and researcher, conducted extensive studies to find out about the effect of diversity of views on people. He carried out his research primarily because he was in law and was always interested in the formulation and presentation of opposing arguments.

What Sunstein’s research pointed to was that conformity of thought through the lack of alternative viewpoints – in extreme cases – can lead to widespread terrorism and extremist fundamentalism.

This is where people take matters into their own hands, and do things that do not consult the general sentiments of other factions in society. And the outcome is usually more harmful than good.

And he even wrote a book in 2003, Why Societies Need Dissent, to make an academic case for the need of oppositional voices.

As Sunstein argues, places in the world today that are hotbed for terrorism are also places where open discussion is stifled.

So, for the sake of a vivid illustration, imagine what happens when one potential terrorist walks all over town the whole day and the only other people he gets to talk to are potential terrorists.

Their extremist conversations would naturally lead to greater polarisation of their already polarised views.

And then they will make bombs. Blow stuff up – including themselves. Which is all not very good for society as a whole.

So to prevent polarisation of views, society needs to let opposing views confront each other head on. It lets off steam and also allows the more valid views to prevail.

This is simply to ensure that there is lessened conformity of thought because society would be prevented from being pushed off into nasty extremes by the sheer volume of diverse perspectives available.

And as I would argue, a prime Singaporean example would be the AWARE takeover last year launched by a group of religious women who took it upon themselves to right what they saw was wrong with society.

If they decided to take over an established women’s organisation and operated more publicly, spoke to more people other than themselves about their intentions and what they were truly up to, several thousand women (with some men in tow) would not have showed up at the extraordinary general meeting last year to cast their decisive vote of no-confidence for the covert operators.

But the damage was done and one religious faction took a public beating in the media as a backlash.

So why does dissent need Jeyaretnam?

Jeyaretnam was a public figure and opposition politician who was democratically elected to act as a representative for the people. As part of Singapore’s political legacy, he is pretty much similar to David who was elected to face Goliath.

When he made it into parliament, what he said mattered and it became an issue of public record, and quite naturally, generated public interest.

And this is what we need.

We, the people, need elected representatives who are able and willing to go into parliament to say things that count, and even to say things that run contrary to what is being said by the dominant faction.

And it all has to be said publicly, subjected to the scrutiny and prying eyes and ears of the populace. Even if some others do not really like or agree with what is being expressed.

But that is not the point. The point is even dissidents need to find some form of expression that counts, and there is nowhere better place to put forth that view than in parliament.

This situation is rather different from, say, being an anonymous blogger whose dissent is never going to surface into public consciousness. The alternative views might be critical enough, but it fails to reach a critical mass.

It was a plus point that Jeyaretnam was sincerely interested in reforming the system and made it to parliament in the hopes of seeing those changes through.

And even if he managed a less-than-genial retort from the ruling government in the past, he created some forced dialogue. That is important because engagement between opposing camps is what makes a progressive and democratic society, well, progressive and democratic.

Last but not least, I do not know if Singapore will ever see the likes of another personality like Jeyaretnam who would run the risk of being financially ruined time and again just to make a point and be heard.

As more of the socially-minded and politically-astute populace become increasingly well-educated and even world-weary from having traveled overseas extensively, what Singaporeans need and demand in the coming times is their basic right to engagement.

This is because something tells me that consensus-building style of governance and reactive tail-wagging is nowhere close to being on the same level as engagement with the hearts and minds of the populace.

The polarisation of views in society today might be more severe than what the ruling elite might realise or acknowledge. The result of a silenced populace, especially in Singapore’s case, is itself a manifestation of a society that has gone to one extreme to shut itself up.

In 20 years’ time, we might be wondering whether this present epoch was the turning point where we might have missed an important transition.

Perhaps we needed someone who could have expedited this transition from where we all seemingly agreed to where we can agree to disagree.

And it is at such a time that Jeyaretnam shall be sorely missed.

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