Salad, Stew, Cake

I was in Singapore last week for work.

The multiculturalism is the first thing I noticed. Faces, languages, signage, food. Then I looked at the numbers and the impression held up. The resident population is about 74 per cent Chinese, 13.5 per cent Malay, 9 per cent Indian, 3.5 per cent classified as Others. There are four official languages: English, Mandarin, Malay, Tamil. No religion has a majority: around 31 per cent Buddhist, 19 per cent Christian, 16 per cent Muslim, 9 per cent Taoist, 5 per cent Hindu, and 20 per cent with no religious affiliation. Of the 6.11 million people on the island in mid-2025, 1.91 million were not residents at all.

Speaking to people I understood that none of this is left to chance. Public housing, which is where about four fifths of the population lives, operates under ethnic quotas designed to prevent the formation of homogeneous blocks. Schooling assigns each student a “mother tongue” according to their official racial classification. The mixture is administered.

This made me think of an argument from my own field, which studies how disciplines work together. Choi and Pak, in a widely cited 2006 review, distinguish three modes and attach a food metaphor to each. Multidisciplinarity is a salad: the ingredients stay intact and clearly distinguishable. Interdisciplinarity is a melting pot, a fondue or a stew, where the ingredients are only partially distinguishable. Transdisciplinarity is a cake, where the ingredients are no longer distinguishable at all and the result is something of a different nature.

The metaphors were built for research teams. But I found the question they encode transferring on its own: when different things share a space, how much do they actually touch each other?

So I asked myself that about Singapore. How much do these traditions come into contact, and how much do they change each other?

There is an obvious pessimistic answer, and the city kind of invites it. What I felt most strongly on arrival was the efficiency and the work-driven rhythm of the place. Everything works, everything is quick, everything is smooth. It would be easy to conclude that this is the dressing on the salad: that a shared code of work and productivity is what lets very different traditions occupy the same island, and that the price of the arrangement is that each tradition survives only where it makes no practical difference. Preserved and irrelevant.

In the contact with the locals who hosted me, that is not what I experienced. At the university the relationships were warm rather than transactional, which I would not assume anywhere. And outside it I was never left alone, in the literal sense: someone was always making sure I was looked after. More than that, there was a clear intention to show me the best of the place rather than the convenient parts of it. I was taken through the cuisines one by one so that I could experience the plurality of the country directly. At one stage I was included in a Saturday ritual between a father and his daughter, a bicycle ride from a playground to Marina Bay. That is not hospitality extended to a visitor. That is being briefly treated as family.

The eating brought me back to the question I had asked myself on arrival. Over several days I had Hainanese chicken rice, char kway teow, roti prata, nasi lemak, laksa — and what struck me was not the variety but that the three modes were all present at once, in different places, on the same island.

A hawker centre is a salad. These are large open halls, dozens of independent stalls under one roof, each one cooking a single cuisine and doing nothing else: a Chinese stall, a Malay stall, an Indian stall, sharing a set of tables and a queue and no more than that. Every ingredient intact and distinguishable. Peranakan cooking is a cake. It came out of a long contact between Chinese settlers and the Malay world, and it is neither of the two: laksa is not Chinese food and not Malay food, and its components cannot be separated back out into the traditions that produced them. It is a thing of a different nature. And a great deal of what is eaten every day sits between the two, partially distinguishable, which is the stew.

So there is a bit of everything. There is salad, there is stew, and there is some cake. Perhaps it is always like this, and the three dimensions coexist whenever several things are put together. They are also needed in different ways: some things are worth keeping intact, some are worth mixing, and occasionally something new should be allowed to come out.

As the days passed, I came to think that the efficiency is the surface of a city rather than its substance. In several conversations with people who live there, something else kept coming up: an interest in vocation, in calling, in the sense that a life should be for something. This was not presented as a rejection of how the city works. It was more like a question about what the working is for. The critique, if it is one, is not of efficiency. It is of efficiency alone.

The trip also made me reflect on something else.

Part of what took me to Singapore is an interest in the ethical problems raised by artificial intelligence. Given the cultural composition of the place, I half expected the local discussion to be inflected by it — that a debate happening in a city with that religious and philosophical density would carry some of that density into the argument.

It mostly does not, and the reason is not local. The debate on AI ethics is international, and the international debate is Western by default. Which sources count as universal and which are marked as regional, which journals exist, what a citation is worth, what a hiring committee recognises: all of this was settled long before anyone was thinking about machines. A philosopher in Cambridge is never asked what the European tradition thinks about AI. He is asked what he thinks, because Aristotle and Kant are not filed as regional literature.

I did not find this discouraging. I found it interesting, and it looks to me like a gap worth working on rather than a failure to complain about. There is a large body of reflection on persons, obligation, harmony and right action that is currently outside a conversation that could use it, and the traditions that hold it are, in Singapore, physically present and in daily contact.

Which is roughly where I ended up. The mixture works, and it does not need to be any one thing: salad, stew and cake are all fine, and a place can run all three simultaneously. What Singapore suggests is that the third mode, the generative one, is available — not as an ideal to be aimed at, but as something that has visibly already happened.

One further question I am left with is whether the categories transfer properly. Multi-, inter- and transdisciplinarity were built to describe disciplines: bodies of knowledge with methods and boundaries. Traditions, cultures and religions are not that. They carry practices, loyalties and obligations that a discipline does not, and it is not obvious that the same three modes are the right ones, or that “generative” means the same thing when what is being combined is a way of life.

I do not have an answer to that, but it seems worth asking.