Hello Indonesia, are you aware that the Information Technology Revolution that is in progress and from which we cannot escape is also triggering a cultural shock?
Imagine an IT age where thanks to sophisticated information and data processing, medical doctors could prevent heart attacks, conduct brain implantation, eliminate cancer or overcome kidney or liver failure for good. Imagine where the mode of food consumption resembles the one now applied in outer space journeys.
An age will come where mankind has become independent from fossil-based fuel to create energy, where agriculture and husbandry adjust accordingly.
An age where warfare is no more fought by fire power, but by nano-electronic weapons, as already experimented in the Gulf War of 1990 (Toffler, Alvin & Heidi, War and Anti-War, Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century, 1995).
Imagine when thanks to miraculous language processing you can have a tele-conversation with someone in Beijing who talks in their language despite you being unable to understand a word of Mandarin, or read the original Tolstoi’s Voyna I Mir in a hyper post-modern Amazon version, although Russian is completely strange to you.
You may well freely delve into further imagination, because by then techno-scientists would be instructing presidents and prime ministers on how to perform their prime duty: to protect, serve and facilitate the citizenry.
A techno-science based government, where bureaucrats become obsolete and replaced by super-intelligent programmers, would deal with various crises and work on further development programs.
The Russian President Dmitri Medvedev already talked about “electronic government” (Newsweek, 30 March 2010). It will be an age quite resembling the post-industrial age imagined by Alvin Toffler, though a bit more complex (The Third Wave, 1980).
As usual in history, a new age brought about by new inventions ushers not only possibilities for improvements in human life, but also collateral surprising risks. The IT Revolution would trigger another cultural shock with profound consequences.
“The future shock is the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time” (Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, 1970).
The IT age would experience the same, however, now with a tremendous speed that would drive humans into a sort of confusesianism (I borrow this term from Prof. Bambang Hidayat, the legendary Indonesian astronomer).
We must be able to cognize how Indonesia would respond to the effect of a culture shock in the majority of countries of the world, particularly because Indonesia would experience the effects of a situation overwhelmed by confusesianism with predictable complications.
Being a nation of more than 500 ethnics scattered in more than 17,000 islands with different traditions, we are indeed a pluralistic society par excellence.
We are often proud about it, but simultaneously we also often forget the burdens of plurality. Without a culture shock but with a complex diversity in belief, way of thinking and way of life that all melts in a dynamic social pot of change, Indonesia already suffers from conflicts frequently.
The culture shock would worsen value disorientation that may well lead to a dangerous anomaly if not anticipated with a serious work in social planning and engineering.
There lies Indonesia’s problem. The three general elections conducted peacefully and orderly to date actually reflected the peaceful aspirations of the Indonesian people looking forward to a smart and visionary national leadership.
Nonetheless, it is rather embarrassing that after 12 years leaving an authoritarian regime behind, the Indonesian government has yet to be made aware of the pressing need to embark on serious national development work, which is indispensable to compensate its lagging behind in efforts to accommodate our fragile internal differences.
Forget the culture shock or let alone the IT age, to date, Indonesian governments have been in neglect to deal structurally with social disturbances that actually used to happen along familiar patterns: communal conflicts, religious intolerance, economically motivated social commotions, which during the Soeharto era was admitted under the acronym of SARA (ethnic, religious and inter-class sensitivities).
The perennially neglect of the SARA risk won’t help us any further in coping with the imminent culture shock and even less in drawing the advantage of the coming IT age.
Following the noblesse oblige wisdom, Indonesia’s leadership has the obligation to become aware about the pressing need to provide a decisive answer to the challenge of the bursting culture shock.
Like or dislike, Indonesian politicians must be willing to get out of their respective box of primordial interests and get into the smart give and take exchange in a pluralistic democracy that is the result of our own general elections (John Shattuck, Testimony On Human Rights In Indonesia, 1998).
To be realistic, we have to admit that as a pluralistic society, we can only survive and flourish if our society is governed as an open society where transparency, tolerance and the indiscriminate rule of law prevails over the (feel like) “right is might” rule.
The habit of only boasting ourselves as a pluralistic society with a sophisticated culture without a true and honest attitude to admit its consequences and absent willingness to commit ourselves to serious efforts to build a solid and stable society will prove hypocritical and entail in a slow but sure social suicide.
The hanky-panky style of politicking and the hit-and-run style of decision making of our politicians and government will lead us nowhere.
Franz Magnis-Suseno stated his impression on this situation in his, “Mengapa Saya Menentang Pembangunan PLTN Muria”, Basis 2008 (Why I am against the Muria Nuclear Power Plant), which I may condense to: The Indonesian mentality of 2007 is not fit for nuclear technology (which is part of the IT age). Unfortunately, after three years, that mentality is still as good as the same.
The writer is a professor with the School of Philosophy, Parahyangan Catholic University, Bandung.
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