On Jan. 25, 2010 Fareed Zakaria penned the term “the Democratic Republic of Google” when describing the spat between the behemoth search engine and the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) regarding state censorship. Zakaria may have been complementing Google for taking on a behemoth such as the PRC.
It is quite intriguing, then, to read news in Indonesian newspapers and compare them to the Google phenomena.
I randomly picked out an example from The Jakarta Post. In its Feb. 19 issue, this newspaper
ran on its front page a story about the personal assets of Supreme Audit Agency (BPK) chairman Hadi Purnomo, who reportedly has more than Rp 26.58 billion, 97 percent of it coming from “donations”.
Over on the next page was a story that two officials from the Foreign Ministry, allegedly implicated in the airline ticket scam, would be sent to China and Canada as ambassadors.
Further on there was news about the Batam administration’s plans to levy a tax on prostitution.
In the readers’ section there was an exchange of opinions over whether getting a tattoo went against religious beliefs (and which ones). There was also the issue over the performance of the special parliamentary committee dealing with the Bank Century bailout.
All the reports read like a soap opera script.
After Soeharto’s fall in May 1998, Indonesia very quickly achieving full democracy. Our nation now is the world’s third largest democracy after India and the United States. But we should not forget that bad practices, such as corruption, feeble law enforcement and abuse of power, remain rampant.
It is remarkable to note former vice president Jusuf Kalla’s reservations on our process of democratization, in which he said in November 2009 that “democracy is only a tool” that could well be of little use if proven to be too expensive to achieve its ends.
Certainly some people, such as those from the Freedom House, might despise such a statement. There have always been those who believe that democracy is everything, and treat it as a panacea.
But people very often forget that democracy has its qualifications and that it can indeed become unreasonable, particularly if implemented on a basis of “majority wins”, as in Athens during ancient Greek times. Implementing democracy Athens-style nowadays could lead to what Bellamy and Castiglione termed “democratic authoritarianism” (Constitutionalism in Transformation, 1996). One of the fundamental pillars of modern democracy is that it requires transparent consistency, which in turn demands honesty.
Former US president Bill Clinton almost got impeached on the grounds that he had lied to the public, and not so much for his sexual indiscretion.
In a democracy, people are expected to walk the talk, which applies particularly to government officials of all ranks, simply because they are constantly under the watchful eye of the general public.
We cannot put hypocrisy in the same basket as understatements or white lies. The latter are used to state matters in a refined manner, and are therefore cultural instruments for fine-tuning social relationships.
Compared to understatements and white lies, hypocrisy is simply a lie, as it is an act of continuously pretending that something untrue. Public hypocrisy leads people into situations where everyone thinks they can lie about anyone else without guilt.
Hypocrisy is therefore detrimental to the process of maturing in a democracy, or to make it fit its functions vis-à-vis modern society. Rather than helping a democracy mature, a widespread hypocrisy entails a social anomaly, as the public are ushered toward thinking something false to be true. There can be no doubt that Indonesians must put a halt to this demoralizing attitude.
Taken from this perspective, Kalla’s statement should be seen as a form of selbstkritik. This German expression, however, might be useful only for those who are ready to undergo painful processes in order to correct a wrong trajectory. Selbstkritik requires far greater courage than that required for one to look into the mirror to check on a swollen or misshapen nose.
We might even risk dishing dirt on ourselves while trying to clean up our surroundings. As Friedrich Nietzsche said, “Those who want to clean the world should prepare to bathe with dirty water” (Also Sprach Zarathustra, 1885).
Although it is frequently hard to distinguish dirty from clean and separate the two in real public life, we need to clean ourselves first if we really mean to take up that gorgeous robe named “democracy”.
The writer is a professor at the Parahyangan Catholic University’s School of Philosophy, Bandung.
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