Insight: Prophetic clarion and moral voices in political wilderness

On Monday, Jan.10, several religious leaders issued a joint statement regarding 18 statements that they alleged to be lies told by the government. I happened to be in a small town in Central Java, busy checking my students’ papers. Intermittently, I roamed through nearby villages to get a feel of how ordinary people, without caring too much about whether there was such a thing as government, conducted their survival strategies.

Admittedly, most of us view the country’s state of affairs from the flow of life in a concrete sense, while the government seems to see things from an overarching vantage point of a spreadsheet.

This cannot be otherwise, since every government is an administration by aggregate. Aggregation is a form of simplification, and simplification is not always a bad thing. But aggregation as a simplified facsimile of reality should not be claimed as representative of the real flow of ordinary citizens’ life, no mater how successful the government claims to be.

There is another tragic fact ingrained in the nature of a government that proclaims to be democratic. The fact that persuasion rather than brute force lies at the heart of democratic politics carries this crucial implication: The reasons political leaders decide and act upon policies are categorically distinct from the reasons with which they publicly defend the policies.

It is not unusual, for instance, that privatization of many state-owned companies is factually driven by the corporate capture by some government officials and their private counterparts. Yet the move is defended publicly as a necessity to promote productivity.

Liberalization is advanced to stuff the insatiable maw of the money class, yet it is publicly defended as a way of opening new employment opportunities for the poor. Since politics tends to degenerate into a theater of illusion, new names and data are easy to invent.

Like a diamond, this incongruence is bound to last forever. Even if unintentional, games of appearance are the daily routine of politics. If democracy was invented to remedy the tendency toward deceit, procedural democracy simply breeds further deceit.

Noble words are used for public defense at the moment when they are emptied of their contents. Why this vicious cycle? It is because rulers run on a self-perpetuating cycle of confidence. Apparent confidence garners the faith of voters, which then are needed to free the same rulers to govern decisively.

In the hunt for these moments of decisive governance, rulers must first capture the prize of apparent confidence, and it is in the chase for this image that rulers resort to the games of appearance.

Within this problem, I understand the joint statement by the religious leaders, not as a demand for the present leadership to step down, but as an ultimatum for its excessive conduct in the games of appearance. Thus, we will have a politics of popularity being confused with leadership. To be popular is a good aim for a head of a musical band, but it is certainly a poor one for a president of Indonesia.

So why are excessive games of appearance so intolerable? It is because the stakes are high, and these stakes are called the common good. The joint statement can therefore be understood as a warning that the conduct of politicians ought to return to the craftsmanship of the common good.

Indeed, the secret of politics is to care about personal success — but not too much. There is nothing wrong with claiming success. The problem is that nothing fails like success, as claims to success are persuasive only to those with whom the notion of success is relevant in the first place. Since a political regime is meant to govern on behalf not of itself but of the citizens, success must not be defined by its own criteria but only in terms of the citizens’ experiences of the state of affairs.

Whether this discrepancy is called one lie or 18 lies is immaterial. What seems warranted is this: any claim to success cannot simply be stated in statistical terms, because what the ordinary people experience is an increasing precariousness of life. The so-called old and new lies listed in the statement are nothing more than the contents of this precarious experience.

Why did it take the combined effort of religious leaders to express this precariousness of our lives?

Certainly it is not because they are morally more righteous than most of us; the same concerns could have similarly been voiced by other alliances of citizens. Either way, it is the accident of timing that has brought us to this indignation: That common good is not just a matter of economic statistics but a moral issue concerning the overall social existence in which our shared lives are embodied. If a political regime is not interested in this moral problem, then it has lost its raison d’etre, since that is what we citizens yearn for.

The fact that this historic concern was voiced by religious leaders could not have been better.

Otherwise, they simply waste time in squabbles over sectarian matters. But a crack is also lurking in the wings, for the government has every interest in tearing down this new alliance by its divide-and-rule tactics. If this happens, we will soon lose a prophetic clarion and moral voice amid this political wilderness.

The writer is a lecturer in the postgraduate program at the Driyarkara School of Philosophy, Jakarta.