Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy 35 long political tradition that systematically misrepresents the prohuman and therefore essentially compassionate nature of democracy. It is this natural tendency towards kindliness that probably motivates many academics in this country to cloak the brutality of oligarchic rule and pass it off as democratizing albeit feckless governance. If the political reality is far too unsettling, the proffered strategy is to publicly minimize it and then quietly assist in efforts to change it. This alternative becomes even more attractive should the short-term appear to preclude pragmatic possibilities of regime modification or outright progressive change. Many academics, driven by wistfulness and an intense longing for democratic governance can actually liberally respond to oligarchic politics by extending to its practitioners a most liberal benefit of the doubt. They are then vulnerable to being recruited by the powers that be and eventually lend their prestige and expertise to anything but democratic national administrations. (Quite a few of those who served in the Marcos Cabinet as well as many who served the past Arroyo administration are of this liberal mindset. Many likeminded Filipinos are in active service in the present Aquino administration too.) Ÿ Lapses of this variety of professional misjudgment, according to Gunnar Myrdal, author of the classic Asian Drama: An Inquiry Into the Poverty of Nations, may be induced by biases deeply rooted in the very psyche of social scientists probing deep into sensitive concerns of highly stressed, often poverty-stricken societies. Civility could block an academic's tendency towards seeking the truth and "blunt truthspeaking." So Myrdal, addressing scholars and not sparing himself, cautions: It is the ethos of scientific inquiry that truth and blunt truth-speaking are wholesome and that illusions, including those inspired by charity and good will, are always damaging. Illusions handicap the pursuit of knowledge and they must obstruct efforts to make planning for development fully effective and successful. For this reason the present book [Asian Drama] is intended to be undiplomatic. In our study we want to step outside the drama [of punishing, widespread poverty in most Asian countries] while we are working. We recognize no legitimate demand on the student to spare anyone's feelings. Facts should be stated coldly; understatements, as well as overstatements, represent biases (1968: 23). (His own even more straightforward footnote to the passage quoted above also acknowledges the general bias of academics towards optimism in their investigative work. Civility in reading disconcerting