I

n the early 1970s, Clifford Geertz, that high priest of anthropology, wrote an illuminating essay on nationalism in new states of which Indonesia was one — well under his scholarly scalpel.

On the fate of independence after its declaration, Geertz has the following, mordant words to say. “Its actual advent has been anticlimactic,” he said. “It is not that nothing has happened, that a new era has not been entered. Rather, that era having been entered, it is necessary now to live in it rather than merely imagine it, and that is inevitably a deflating experience.” This crafted analysis is graced with intellectual prescience.

As the glowing advent of political independence gave way to the tedium of the real, it came as a subduing realization that a nation was neither a product of natural fiat nor could it be fashioned only out of poetry or hymns. Independence is a story of romance stumbling into realism. It is forever a story of a void. Its flag-bearers are tossed between somber experience and luminous expectation: The nation is simultaneously there and not there.

Such is the plight of human projects, and Indonesia, like all nation-states, is carved by human beings and is not produced by mechanism. That is why, despite all the managerial stratagems of political or economic mandarins, Indonesia is a project that above all demands human will. This was true not only at the moment of its creation, but also during the course of its elusive realization.

But, who wills Indonesia? No one is doing things with the conscious aim of forming or renewing the nation. Who is responsible for managing its realization? To say that no one has that responsibility is courting the idea that Indonesia is a child of randomness. But to say that someone or some agency is in charge is like extolling an omniscient deity.

History seems to have sided with the second in the face of elected leaders. It is a truism, therefore, to say that the nation is never an ultimate goal, but rather a political project to make life together bearable. That is why the nation is often conceived as a political community. But at this point we must hasten to leave nirvana and return to the hassles of history.

First, it is rare to find elected leaders who govern with a vision of nationhood. With the current talk of globalization, they are easily deceived by some laissez-faire economic idea that conceives nationhood as something not to be pursued intentionally as it will be a natural byproduct of individual self-interested pursuits. What ironically turns out is not only the sense of nationhood gone astray, but also the pursuits of self-interest gone anomic. Indeed, a democratically elected government that loses the instinct to form and renew the nation is one that has lost the entirety of its point.

Second, the technology to accomplish this mission is public policy. Public policy is called public not because it is promulgated or enacted into laws, but because it is an instrument to form and renew the nation as a political community. On this score, the present government of Indonesia is too easily seduced by any superficial cheers from the international community. It is a form of vanity of the poorest type, as we know that games of deceit are the daily routine of diplomacy. All this simply masks the absence of meaningful domestic policies to renew the nation in distress.

Third, in matters of people’s lives, the presence or absence of government does not seem to make any difference. This is true with the issue of poverty, education, religious conflicts or infrastructure. In policymaking circles, stark inequality is an urgency that dares not even speak its name. Lost is a common sense that the nation will have self respect only if the many and not the few are contented. Most in charge of renewing the nation are lacking a properly tragic view of life to grasp how most Indonesians live.

However, a spark of life always rescues the distress. With streets now are adorned with the red-and-white of the Indonesian flag, the somberness of experience gives way, if fleetingly, to the horizon of expectation. It comes not from the noble conduct of those we entrust to renew this nation but, rather, from the natural energy of human hope.

No matter how banal this flag-raising ritual is, it is ordinary people’s way of showing their patient loyalty to a patria (homeland), and it reveals a profound message: Patriotism is a belief that it is impossible to love the humanity you can’t see unless you love your neighbor. The duty of the government is simply to tap into this life-giving energy for the renewal of the nation.

Like at the time of its creation, the renewal of a nation is a work driven by a void: The nation is a prophecy to be self-fulfilled by its own prophets. Its image is there to see; across the country schoolchildren raise flags and sing odes to the idea of Indonesia. It is called hope. This is the moment when the past rubs shoulders with the present. It is hard to feel this yearning without hearing the sound of history rhyming.

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