By its very nature, social or political change is always morally ambivalent. Those who struggle for change are driven by hopes for a situation other than that in which they unhappily live. Change appears as an envisioned redemption.
However, once change is realized, new dreams and aspirations can lead to distinct -- and contrary -- notions of how best to capitalize on the new situation.
The 1998 political reform in Indonesia was a new beginning made possible by the end of Soeharto's authoritarian rule. While the officials that governed during the New Order regime kept talking about democracy, what they actually had in mind was a form of guided democracy -- such as that declared by Sukarno in 1959 and successfully implemented by Soeharto from the 1970s until his withdrawal from office. When these same officials spoke of the rule of law, what they meant was law instrumentalized and simply used to justify the interests and wrongdoings of those in power.
Since 1998, the public has been confident that regained freedom can eventually lead to more advanced democratic politics. As it turned out, freedom is a lesson the citizens have yet to learn.
The New Order program of depoliticization has made most Indonesians politically illiterate concerning freedom as a basic democratic right. Possibly, this is a remnant of New Order political thinking, which treated freedom as a threat from political liberalism, though in the case of the economy, there was no objection whatsoever to a liberal market economy.
Now that freedom is back in Indonesian politics, it looks like a book that has long been closed and now lies open on the table -- without enough people able to read through its text. Instead, the words and sentences seem to puzzle the public, whereupon the general reaction is not the desire to learn to read, but confusion that provokes them to tear the pages.
In the early 1970s, W.S. Rendra, the greatest living stage actor of Indonesia, conducted a sort of retreat in Parangtritis, south of Yogyakarta, in which he tried to put the expressive capacity and imaginative potential of young people to the test.
He wanted to know whether these young people were able to express themselves as freely as possible, if provided with enough opportunity to do so.
To his dismay, he found their expressive capacity was poor. People were not at all experienced in using their body as a source of potentially unlimited expression.
Instead, most of their bodily expressions were uniform, at worst, and clumsy, at best. Freedom could not be exploited to produce original gesticulations and authentic movements.
Turning from the cultural and artistic field to the political sphere, we find something similar. People tend to perceive freedom of speech and expression as the requirement to say something, without first figuring out what they want to say, or whether they have something to say at all. For example, the luxury of demonstrating is treated as an opportunity to take to the streets almost every day, with or without sufficient cause.
The regaining of political rights has led many to the misleading perception that everybody is entitled to found his or her own political party, even if they have never actively engaged in politics before. Many believe there is no need to reckon with the mass of potential constituents because you can buy everything in Indonesian politics -- including political support and constituents' votes -- or you can attract people to your political cause simply because it enjoys some popularity in print or electronic media.
Unfortunately, with respect to the economy, there are only limited efforts to motivate people to work harder and more efficiently while many economic enterprises preoccupy themselves with all kinds of services, with only a few involved in sustainable, productive industrial reform. Both high-ranking officials and the rank and file feel free to be corrupt in whatever they do, and a game involving astronomic figures becomes the order of the day.
In the intellectual and academic domain, political freedom seems to underline a new, "anything goes" attitude that is allegedly promoted by postmodern philosophy.
People easily forget that this "intellectual liberalization" is a response to a long-standing intellectual establishment into which most postmodern theorists have been born and with which they are well acquainted. This implies that promoting the "anything goes" attitude in a society still in need of a solid intellectual establishment is like following a tempting and seductive mirage.
At this point, a politico-historical audit is necessary. Are we culturally evoling and overcoming infantile immaturities or are we getting trapped, time and again, in staid politics that amount to little more than a tempest in a teacup, without much progress made with respect to our preoccupations?
So many things happen without much substantial progress, so many social changes take place without many lessons learned, so many people suffer and die for no clear cause and so much commotion and internal fighting occurs in vain.
The question before Indonesian politics is much more serious than choosing a presidential or parliamentary system, or implementing an open multiparty or limited multiparty democracy.
At bottom, the fundamental question still lingers on, fairly unnoticed: Can we stop this political involution and start embarking upon a real political evolution?
The writer is a sociologist and chairman of the Indonesian Community for Democracy (KID).
