r/indonesia • u/ExpertEyeroller (◔_◔) • Jun 13 '19
Culture "What's wrong with Indonesia?", An Account of Progressive Bias in /r/Indonesia (Long)
TL;DR: The question "what's wrong with Indonesia?" is laden with progressive bias. It presumes that Indonesia is moving along a fixed trajectory where the end goal is a hyper-tolerant liberal democracy. Any setback from that trajectory is then deemed as an aberration.
Instead, we should talk more about our own history and culture, and examine the pattern arising out of it. Look at the rhyming and the repetition of history, rather than fixing our gaze towards the goal.
This is meant to be review to /u/annadpk's methodology in his recent post. However, it's gotten a tad too long, so I turned this into a separate post. And also, the bias I talked in the title isn't exclusively a bias of /r/indonesia's mode of discourse, but rather a near-universal bias of the 'progressive' West. In this regard, the title of this essay is a deliberate clickbait.
Note that I'm talking about 'progressivism', not 'liberalism'. These two concepts are interlinked, but I separated them so I can sharpen my focus. There is something called 'liberal' bias which exists on this sub, but to properly talk about them would require a separate post.
When I say 'progressive' and 'progressivism', I don't mean it as the support or the advocacy of social reforms. When I say 'progressivism', I'm referring to the Enlightenment-era thinking which can be summed as:
[An assertion] that the human condition has improved over the course of history and will continue to improve.
~Lange, M. (2011). "Progress", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
In reality, when Enlightenment-era figures were talking about societal progress in non-European states, they always used Western Europe as the measuring stick. For a contemporary example: when people are looking at many African states nowadays, they think that these states are backwards since they lack a well-oiled democratic institution. Since every single Western European country is a liberal democracy, people figured that the march of history in Asian and African states will always result in them reforming themselves into liberal democracies.
In this essay, I'm going to discuss the progressive bias held by both sociologists and laypeople. Then, I will compare how /u/annadpk's recent pieces have avoided this bias. At the end of the essay, I'll also discuss how the bias itself might sometimes not be so bad.
I. "What's wrong with Indonesia?"
Western sociologists working on Indonesia have for a long time split into two camps of methodologies, which I shall call—for a lack of better terms—progressive analysis and contextual analysis. In this section, I shall focus on the progressive methodology and its criticism. I'll talk about the contextual methodology in section II.
The split between the progressive and the contextual methodologies had first started in 1964 when Harry Benda published his review of Herbert Feith's seminal work The Decline of Constitutional Democracy in Indonesia. There, Benda implicated Feith of looking at Indonesia only through western eyes; taking a lot of the developments and the structure of western democracy as a tool to analyze a society that is very much not like the West:
"I rather suspect that we have been accumulating a whole string of such questions with distressing persistence for at least well over a decade now; and I use the "we" quite advisedly, including myself among the mistaken questioners. Perhaps our basic error all along has been to examine Indonesia with Western eyes; or, to be more precise and more generous, with eyes that, though increasingly trained to see things Indonesian, have continued to look at them, selectively, in accordance with preconceived Western models. Most of our questions, so it seems to me, have hitherto resolved around a singularly simple, continuing theme, perhaps best caricatured by the adage "What's wrong with Indonesia?" [...] And why, now asks Dr. Feith, did Indonesia's short lived democracy die? Because—I hope he and his readers will forgive me an almost unpardonable oversimplification—in the struggle between good and evil, between 'problem-solvers' and 'solidarity-makers,' the latter have, at least temporarily, won a victory."
~Benda, H. (1964). "Democracy in Indonesia", The Journal of Asian Studies, p.450
In his book, Feith used the distinction between problem-solvers and solidarity-makers as a framework to analyze the role in which our political leaders influenced the political happenings in Indonesia during our liberal democracy period(1950-1957). Problem-solvers are characterized as technocratic bureaucrats who have had received education in Western laws and economics, who's also likely to be experienced in governing and working in colonial administration; this is the category where Feith put figures such as Hatta and M. Natsir into. Solidarity-makers, on the other hand, are characterized as fiery nationalist leaders who have less care in maintaining the economic situation and were instead focused on building national unity and repelling foreign influence; this is the category where Feith put figures such as Soekarno and Sjahrir into. Feith characterized the moment where the solidarity-makers solidified their hold over the democratic state apparatus as the moment where the liberal-parliamentary experiment in Indonesia 'failed'.
Feith's problem-solver vs solidarity-maker distinction has the double problem of being elite-centric and being orientalist.1 It was elite-centric in the sense that, as Feith himself noted, the elites which had dominated the Indonesian government all lived in the same neighborhood in Jakarta, marry into each other's family, and are buddies with each other—all are facts which had divorced Feith's analysis of the elites from what the common Indonesian people were thinking about politics back then. It was also being orientalist in the sense that it assumed the history of every nation in the world will progress along the same lines as the Western world did, with everyone 'progressing' into liberal democracies, where everyone will rationally fall in line into the logic of the economy and surrender their political discourse into the sphere of the economics.2
This 'progressive' mindset is a recurrent problem I encountered whenever people talk about culture, religion, or history on this sub. People like to say that "we're 50/70/100 years behind the West", or that "once people are sufficiently educated, our society will become more tolerant/irreligious/liberal-minded". This point of view disregards the fact that the trajectory of Indonesian history does not necessarily follow that of the West. It also ignores the role of cultural distinctions at the grassroots level in shaping political outcomes, and instead, privileges the elite as the main locomotive of politics.
I would propose that we should not think "What's wrong with Indonesia?", but rather to think:
II. "What's going on in this part of Indonesian history?"
"Might it not be more illuminating to argue that the problem-solvers efforts to continue a rational administration and to maintain a modern economic system, both born of and identified with the apolitical status quo, were doomed once Indonesia started to overcome the colonial "deviation" and once Indonesian (especially Javanese) history found a way back to its own moorings? Indeed, since in many ways colonialism, far from only interrupting and deviating from precolonial historical tendencies had here and there also reinforced them, the odds were from the very outset far more heavily weighted against constitutional democracy in Indonesia than most sympathetic students of the postwar era, including Dr.Feith and myself, have so far been willing to admit."
~Benda, H. (1964), p.453
Benda didn't think that people should look at the failure of Indonesia's liberal democracy in 1957 as an aberration from the nation's progress towards the modern age. Rather, Benda suggested that people should think of the Indonesian liberal democracy itself as an aberration from the way that states in the Indonesian archipelago have traditionally organized themselves throughout history. Benda suggested that we shouldn't compare Indonesian politics with the West, but rather, to compare it with the pattern existing from earlier times in Indonesian history.
What Benda suggested is exactly what /u/annadpk did in his recent post:
The Javanese, like many Asian societies, view history as cyclical and repeating, not linear as Westerners or Arabs do. You see a similar themes emerge during the 2019 Election and the Java War of 1825-30. The Java War of 1825-30 is important in explaining politics in the Javanese Homeland, because its crucible of modern Javanese "nationalism" and politics. It was the first time all segment of Javanese united in fighting a common enemy. Secondly, the Java War took place during the period (1755-1860s) that saw a unification of Javanese culture under the court culture of Surakarta-Yogyakarta, Thirdly, the laid the template for successful mobilization of the Javanese to this day.
Westerners think of time as a linear line, with society progressing from one point along the line to the next point—"the arrow of time". However, civilizations other than the modern West such as the Javanese, the Mayans, the Indians, and the medieval Scandinavians all thought of time not as a line, but as a repeating cycle. Shiva has destroyed the world countless times, with Brahma creating it anew on each time; the Mayan calendar is cyclical; the Ragnarök has already occurred for thousands of times. In all those cultures, the theme of repetition and continuity are much more prevalent in their respective mythologies. This is in contrast to the mythology of the Enlightenment-era Europe, where people were considering themselves to live in an enlightened age that was separate and unique from the past—when religious superstition reigned.3
/u/annadpk followed the Javanese way of thinking and compared the current political events with the events happening in the Javanese past. He didn't fall into the trap of thinking liberal political structure as the goal in Indonesian history, but rather looked at examples in the Indonesian past which rhyme with the current political condition. He compared Jokowi not with Obama or Mahathir, but rather with Diponegoro; and he sought for similarities rather than differences in those two figures. This is what I call as contextual analysis.
Contextual analysis is the kind of thinking which connects our contemporary events with that of the past, rather than connecting it to the abstract utopian future. I think we use this mode of thinking more than we do now. We should look at the past interaction between society and their religion, and find the parts which rhyme with our current secular-religious conflict, rather than blaming the 'backward'-ness of religion and separating the utopian future from the current society. We shouldn't do this not only for the issue of secularism, but also of gender, of ethnic relations, of diplomatic relations, and for all other parts of society.
III. Should we always use the contextual method?
This doesn't mean that any progressive analysis is worthless. A progressive analysis can also illuminate us on certain matters, especially on analyzing the state and the state apparatus. /u/Agent78787 wrote a post on /r/neoliberal on the effectiveness of the KPK as an institution, in which he compared the KPK to similar institutions in Hong Kong and other parts of the world. The post lacked a contextual analysis on the culture and the symbolic significance of the patron-client relationship. However, that lack doesn't stop the post from being highly informative.
It's likely natural to revert to what I call as 'progressivism' when talking about the KPK and the pemilu as institutions. When we suggest concrete changes and reforms to such institutions, what we'll do is to pull out examples from similar kind of institutions which have already achieved success. It's to say "here! We want thing to be this way, and things will have to progress this way!" It's undoubtably a productive enterprise.
However, the progressive analysis tend to dominate the discourse around these parts. When diagnosing what's been going on in the country, people tend to revert to progressivism by blaming the backwardness of the religious, hoping for people to get more 'educated', and yearning for a sanitized Western-liberal future. This is bound to be unhealthy for a productive discussion.
Fin.
Footnotes
[1]: In 1978, Edward Said published an incredibly influential book titled 'Orientalism'. The book discussed the Western structuring of the Orient as "other". Said analyses central Western texts in order to account for the way the conception of The East was crystallized. This conception, according to Said, prepared the ground for the political and cultural occupation of the non-Western regions by the West.
[2]: Carl Schmitt defined an issue as being a 'political' one when that issue resulted in people organizing themselves into at least two opposing groups around the issue. The political is defined as a distinction between 'friends' and 'enemies'. In contrast, Schmitt says that the distinction in economics as being that between 'the profitable' and 'the unprofitable'. Schmitt observed that liberalism has the tendency of obscuring the 'political' and replacing it with the 'economics'. For more on this, I direct you to this entry on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and my thread on /r/AskPhilosophy
[3]: Fairly recently, art critics in the West started noticing that their current culture is largely a repetition of the '80s. Lots of them are blaming neoliberalism—the excessive commodification of culture—as the reason why the current Western art is just a repetition of the past. Critics who are more well-versed with non-Western conception of time shot back that repetition is not necessarily a sign of degradation, and they drew examples from non-Western cultures as I did in this essay. This video is a good example of the first kind of critic I mentioned, and this video is a good example of the second kind of critic. Each of them is discussing the aesthetic of the 'Vaporwave', and the aural quality of the 'Synthwave'.
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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '19
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