Transcending ‘Kalabendu’
We have spent 60 of the 73 years in our republic’s existence under irrational politics. The democracy that we have upheld for the past 20 years is full of ceremony, but lacks the spirit of "hikmat kebijaksanaan".
In this article, we use kalabendu (“a time of chaos”) as a metaphor for the recent accumulation of the five negative complexes.
The five negatives describe a time when: truth is seen as a thing of the past (post-truth); “politics” is no longer a platform to achieve the greater good for a diverse people (identity exclusivism); the standards of common sense are discarded among the public (and political correctness is mocked); global civilization is shackled by VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity); and as Barry R Posen (2018) wrote, “the rise of illiberal hegemony” (in reference to the wild and corrosive politics of Donald Trump).
The last four negatives clearly create fertile ground for the spread of terrorism while all five reflect irrational politics.
Historically, our nation-state has spent a majority of its time under irrational politics. The Guided Democracy, for instance, upheld nationhood at the expense of democracy for eight years. The New Order subverted both nationhood and democracy for 32 years. For 32 years, the New Order carried out massive political duplicity over the entire nation. In the 20 years of the Reform Era, which started without “a clean regime change”, nationhood was undermined and democracy manipulated. For 20 years, we have merely upheld the dregs of democracy instead of upholding substantial democracy.
All in all, we have spent 60 of the 73 years in our republic’s existence under irrational politics. The democracy that we have upheld for the past 20 years is full of ceremony, but lacks the spirit of hikmat kebijaksanaan, or “representative wisdom”.
Two ‘kalabendu’
Our nation-state has gone through at least two kalabendu periods: 1965-1971 and 1997-2001. Three of the five negatives above are found in these two periods, when our nation-state was truly hanging by a thread. Afterwards, our nation played with fire at the risk of triggering a new kalabendu, namely during the 2014 presidential election and the 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial election. In both times, all five negatives were present.
In moments of kalabendu, our common sense is subjected to multiple attacks. First, kalabendu traps us in a cyclical, instead of a progressive, period. It establishes a reality wherein civility is trampled upon by antithetical forces. The coherent, aggregate products of mankind’s common sense no longer functions, in both individual and public spheres. In times of kalabendu, truth is turned upside-down against the messages in the “Plato’s Cave” parable. Like Martin Heidegger said, “The brightness of the real world overshadows everything.” Above all else, the defining moments of our nation – those celebrated moments when the nation is enshrined in enlightened politics as formulated brilliantly by our founding fathers – are completely ignored.
If we do not prepare ourselves, the 2018 regional elections and the 2019 presidential election can trigger another kalabendu. This is because we will enter a two-year-long crescendo of political events that will peak in a political race in which the nation’s highest seat is at stake, and the worst political behaviors may rule the day. Perennial, rational politics may be set aside yet again. Even now, we are still reeling from the impacts of the 2014 presidential election and the 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial election that were rife with manipulation, money politics, black campaigns and vicious slander. A form of nihilistic selfishness reigned: “Everything falls if we do not win.” Included here is a reckless orchestration of “hate spin” that Cherian George said was the work of political entrepreneurs (“Hate Spin”, 2016) – a phrase that illustrates a failure to understand the essence of both politics and entrepreneurship.
Nationhood and democracy are interlinked in symbiosis. Nationhood as an egalitarian-autocentric establishment, the greatest collective solidarity, is the ideal platform for democracy. Democracy as an autocentric political system is a rational foundation for public civility that reaffirms the very fibers of nationhood. The autocentricity of nationhood and democracy is upheld whenever citizens respect one another indiscriminately under the principle of “live and let live”. The essence of autocentricity also shines in the noble principles of the Buginese: sipakkatau (mutually humanizing), sipakatuo (allowing all to live) and sipakatokkong (mutual awakening).
Undermining nationhood means undermining democracy, and vice-versa: Without nationhood, democracy will be lost; without democracy, nationhood will diminish. In our era, any nation will be destroyed or left perennially confused if they respect only one or neither. The internalization and praxis of the nationhood-democracy symbiosis is the core of perennial, rational politics. Pessimistic or optimistic discourse on the probable “death” of a nation-state is irrelevant and nothing more than idle talk. Our nation-state could end even before 2030, but it can also rise to glory by 2045 and beyond. The most necessary discourse in the present is none other than to restore rational politics in its entirety, starting with its highest standards. Political rationality must be applied and upheld in the democratic praxis.
We need to heed this highest form of political rationality. In our age, the resilience of a democratic “nation-state” is determined by its ability to safeguard the foundations of “national democracy”. The moment a democratic system is established within a “nation-state”, “national democracy” becomes the determinant for its continued existence into the future. Therefore, the moment a nation-state decides upon a democratic system, it must continuously and actively affirm its national identity in each and every moment, as well as the procedural substance of the electoral mechanism in a democracy.
The nationhood-democracy symbiosis is also founded upon the hierarchical difference between the two. The nation is the independent variable and democracy is the dependent variable, similar to the relationship between a “nation” and a “state”. At no moment can the positions of these two variables be violated in a democracy without the risk of the loss of democracy or the “nation-state” breaking up. This means that “national democracy” (democracy that upholds nationhood as an independent variable at all times) is key to the sustainability of a “nation-state”. This is what I call “perennial political rationality”. Our nation-state can only be safeguarded through a series of autocentric praxes of democracy that are founded upon and support the nation in its entirety.
Transcending “kalabendu”
The main trigger of the 1965-1971 kalabendu and the peak of chaos during the 1997-2001 kalabendu was the jettisoning of nationhood. In 1965-1971, the exponents of the New Order set privileges for themselves as managers of the state above all political parties and groups in the republic. All external sociopolitical powers were looked upon with suspicion as “state traitors” and therefore systematically subjected to unfair treatment.
In 1997-2001, there was a showdown between the supporters of the New Order – whose ideology was outdated, yet they still tried to cling to power and disparage the government (complete with inciting violent conflicts in many regions and stealing from the economy at a massive scale) – and the leaders of the Reform Era who understood the people’s political demands, yet were scattered in incoherence. Even today, the remnants of the New Order are still holding on to power, especially in the state legislature, their character unchanged: They do not care about the nation or nationhood. In a majority of regions, economically and politically, the praxes of regional autonomy trample the idea of the nation and nationhood – the mother of all the regions.
Specifically regarding the regional and presidential elections, political rationality demands that we hold all political contests without resorting to identity or populist politics – including the idea of creating caliphates, which is nothing more than escapism. We must not forget that the regional and presidential elections are celebrations of the nation-state. In a nation-state, nationhood must be upheld at all times, and it is absurd to view the idea as an intermittent entity.
In the context of Indonesia, populism (another name for majoritarianism) is identical to identity politics as propagated by the majority and must be denounced as a tyrannical act as committed by the majority. The tyranny of the majority – as with the tyranny of the minority (such as when the state leadership is steered by a small group of business magnates) – is a betrayal of the nation-state and the establishment of the nationhood as a principle, a starting point and the cornerstone of all activities in the nation. It is impossible to end one form of tyranny with another form of tyranny, as all forms of tyranny are essentially suicidal acts.
Supporters of populist or identity politics often read and refer to the longest paragraph in Soekarno’s “The Birth of Pancasila” speech, which touches upon the composition of the People’s Representative Council and is unrelated to the speech’s message as a whole. The paragraph reads: “If the majority of Indonesians are Muslims … then let us – the leaders who mobilize the people – deploy as many messengers of Islam as possible.”
The exponents of identity politics never heed the paragraph’s concluding sentence, which is full of ideas on “representative wisdom”: “Allah the Exalted and the Glorious provides all of us with the gift of the mind so that we, in our daily lives, mingle with one another as if we are husked rice being threshed to remove the chaff, and that [unhusked] rice is then [cooked to become] the best possible Indonesian rice.” The phrase “in our daily lives” means “all the time”, and the phrase “mingle with one another” means “to educate one another” in the civil race for the sake of the greater good.
This requires “a contestation of programs and of common sense” instead of “a contestation of identities”. Furthermore, the paragraph must be read in conjunction with the conclusion of the ninth paragraph below it: “Let us all practice our religions … in a civil way. What is this civil way? It is respect for one another.”
The core message of this brilliant speech was none other than that our diverse nation must stand united and achieve progress together under the guiding light of the five Pancasila principles – our national identity.
We need to believe that the banners of “post-truth” are nothing more than the fads and foibles of the time. The common sense and conscience of the people long for truth: that whoever practices “politics” as a disingenuous platform of identity politics will be destroyed by their own actions; that contests in the public realm can only be won by upholding common sense; that all exponents and supporters of virtue in Indonesia and abroad are constantly working hard to keep VUCA under control; That “the rise of an insane hegemony” is just a fad, as mankind everywhere, as a whole, always seeks out common sense and conscience.
Today, as he has been from the beginning, Trump is being overwhelmed by solid resistance from the force of virtuousness in the US, even from within the White House. Posen is right when he wrote, “No matter how hard he tries, Trump will fail in his efforts to respond to today’s challenges by resorting to methods of the past.”
Such is also the case with terrorism. If terrorists truly claim to be Muslims, then their actions based on amaliyah [words and deeds] are in complete opposition to the principle of ahsanu amala [genuine, spiritual understanding]. Only with ahsanu amala – common sense or “representative wisdom” – that is firmly based on perennial political rationality, can our nation-state resolve and transcend the clutches of kalabendu.
Mochtar Pabottingi,Research Professor at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), 2000-2010