TheJakartaPost

Please Update your browser

Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.

Jakarta Post

Local wisdom and democratic consolidation

Apparently, the disregard for close reading has become emblematic of the post-Soeharto era. 

Pranoto Iskandar (The Jakarta Post)
Montreal, Canada
Tue, February 9, 2021

Share This Article

Change Size

Local wisdom and democratic consolidation

T

o decide on the most appropriate day to commence the COVID-19 inoculation program, President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo reportedly used pétungan, a type of Javanese numerology. This traditional divination system is based on a belief in the parallelism between the universe and the human world.

Dating back to around the 4th millennium B.C., this belief system is a fundamental concept that has influenced the shape of Southeast Asian states.

Considering its historical embeddedness, any revelation that local wisdom is being used in policymaking, a supposedly exclusive domain of logic, should not be surprising at all. In fact, The Economist, oft described as the poster boy for rational choice theory, has been consistent in highlighting the persistent use of local wisdoms, with its latest focus on the rising popularity of the Javanese sultanate that lays its claim to tradition across the nation.

Hence, whatever happens in public life today is not divorceable from the local wisdom that serves as its presupposition. It is local wisdom that is the bedrock of Indonesia’s public life. Further, it seems plausible that any public policy, from conception to implementation, is contingent on its synchronicity with local wisdoms. Without this synchronicity, any policy may well be ineffectual, to say the least.

Thus far, as far as I can confirm, there has been no clear hint that we are taking local wisdom seriously. Instead, most, if not all, reform initiatives dismiss its analytical potential. Worse, such knowledge is thin on the ground, so It is no wonder that social thinkers with the knack to perform scholarly probes are perpetually in short supply.

Embellished with American Ph.Ds in political science, the highbrow “Tim Tujuh” (team of seven) is a case in point as the “chosen ones” to independently engineer the post-Soeharto election system. Curiously, Tim Tujuh is venerated for blindly replicating America’s electoral model, including idiosyncrasies such as the Electoral College, and even has been pushed to do so.

The same holds true for the short-lived Constitutional Commission that supposedly delivered a brand-new constitution to foment Indonesia’s then-blooming democracy. Instead of figuring out Indonesia’s endogenous social structure, the elitist commission was too occupied with debating some alien theoretical lens devoid of any practical judgment. It is no surprise that no one even bothered to chart what lessons could be learned from the commission.

The reformers’ insistence on blindly replicating anything found in the “developed world” is inseparable from erroneous causal reasoning, that since the replicated institutions (commonly) exist in the developed world, it goes without saying that they are the (primary) cause of development.

Little did they realize that most institutions we know today have developed incrementally. To some extent, they are nothing more than a series of ad hoc responses to particular happenings over a certain period of time.

Apparently, the disregard for close reading has become emblematic of the post-Soeharto era. Take, for instance, our relatively nonsensical debate on human rights issues. Our current misunderstanding of the right to life is one of the best examples. The mother of all human rights, the right to life was conceived in response to the flagrant and widespread disregard for the sanctity of human life. Rather than inducing an ingenious way to more deeply entrench human rights, many prominent human rights activists advocate capital punishment for corrupters who they deem as perpetrators of gross human rights violations.

It stands to reason that not only is this unfortunate, but the failure to acknowledge local wisdoms properly also hurts Indonesia’s chance to improve on its ongoing democratic consolidation. One important reason is that institutional discrepancies are inevitable. To confirm this, one needs look no further than the navel-gazing of various structural problems that plague our democratic consolidation.

Let us start with the rule of law. As its core, rule of law simply means to apply law in the strict sense of its textual formulation. On the face of it, it should not be very difficult for any administration to deal with the varied groups of vandals. Hence, it seems absurd to ask why on earth law enforcement against a bunch of “Godly” thugs seems to take forever. To understand this uncanny situation, one must look to local wisdoms yet again.

In this case, sufficient understanding of Javanese culture is necessary, as it is the tail that is wagging the dog named Indonesia. Indicative of any peasant society, the Javanese concept of societal relationships is imbued with communalistic orientations that put a premium on social harmony. For a society of wet rice peasants in which everyone’s fate is inextricably linked, maintaining social harmony is a matter of survival. It is imperative for societal relationships to be conducted within the realm of meneng (ambiguity).

Bearing this calculation in mind, it is obvious that the Western rule of law that requires a black-and-white distinction between right and wrong is bound to become subject to compromise. The reluctance of then-president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to either confirm or negate the results of a fact-finding team in the criminal investigation into former Corruption Eradication Commission deputies Chandra Hamzah and Bibit Samad Rianto, tellingly illustrates the unchanging face of Indonesian politics.

The only conceivable starting point for a remedy is to improve Indonesian intellectual life, which is notorious for its overcentralized, overorganized, spasmodic and practical orientation. Throwing off the centralist yoke may very well likely be the initial step.

Then again, the regions are woefully ill-equipped without a well-designed structure from the center. This makes for the ultimate goal a balancing act between the central government and the regions, with the former providing effective organization as a necessity for inducing creativity in the latter.

The main takeaway, if anything, is that any institution is embedded in its context. In a word, we need to learn critically and consciously while at the same time, we need to take heed of the elephant in the room, that is, our very own particulars.

 ***

The writer is an O'Brien Fellow at McGill University’s Centre for Human Rights & Legal Pluralism, and codirector of the Comparative Farmworker Law Project in Asia.

{

Your Opinion Matters

Share your experiences, suggestions, and any issues you've encountered on The Jakarta Post. We're here to listen.

Enter at least 30 characters
0 / 30

Thank You

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. We appreciate your feedback.