Insight: When violence is rampant, words are a cloak of inactio

What we have in this country is a chicken-hearted police. If this is not sufficiently clear, we can say it plainly that the police we have are cowardly, timorous, gutless and toothless. If this plain language is not understood still, it is simply proof that the police have lost their way.

Ahmadiyya Times | News Watch | Int'l Desk
Source/Credit: The Jakarta Post
By B. Herry-Priyono | February 17, 2011

A specter of violence is haunting Indonesia. After the brutal attacks on members of the Ahmadiyah in Banten and another rampage on church buildings in Temanggung, Central Java, the bigots are marauding with bolder recklessness. It is lulling to hear sedative words from many talk-shows, but the naked fact is too stubborn for any babbler.

As an ordinary citizen, I have been for some time troubled by an uncomfortable idea that might insult our collective pride. I have been curbing it, but the flow of events gives even more reinforcement to what is struggling to stay hidden. It is an idea that our life together has degenerated into a state of barbarity. It is a relapse from the state of civility to the state of nature. If the term “state of nature” is too obscure, it can easily be substituted with a condition in which brute force rules.


The signs and symptoms are too glaring to be ignored. One of the most obvious signs is how words, data and persuasion have lost their ability to settle disputes over our life together. Losing to what?

Losing to brute force, violence and thuggery! Why is this distressing? It is because living together is predicated upon a state of civility, while settling disputes through violence is the nemesis of civility.

A state of civility is a condition of living together as citizens (Latin: civis). Since all citizens are made not of beasts but of humans, the basic precondition of civility is an appeal to what is characteristic not to beast but to human, i.e., reason, persuasion, argument; hence the state of civility is a way of living together based on law.
It is not without reason therefore that the state in a democratic polity is founded on the letters of law (a constitution) in carrying out the art of governance. However, a tragic fact remains ineradicable, in that a constitution by no means wipes out the beastly tendencies ingrained in citizen-humans. That is why the same state is also vested with another constitutional mandate, i.e., the monopoly of the means of violence — the police for public order, the military for defense.

In many respects, these two instruments of governance are simply a reflection of the Janus-faced nature of the citizens — creatures capable of human persuasion as much as beastly savagery. In the history of ideas, these twins are called the consensual and coercive faces of power. As such, the art of governance must know how to appeal to the good sides of human nature, but at the same time it cannot avoid dealing with humans at their worst.

Otherwise, the letters of law are but empty words. The purpose of the state’s monopoly of violence, even if cautioned with many provisos, is precisely to prevent violence being randomly used as a means of dispute settlement among citizens.

The implication is plain and chilling. Apart from the police and the military, the use of violence is neither legal nor legitimate. Of course we are only too aware that this monopoly over the means of violence has become for the police and military a source of gross abuse. But even persistent abuse does not empty the constitutional mandate. Here lies the laughing stock in the recent waves of violence.

What we have in this country is a chicken-hearted police. If this is not sufficiently clear, we can say it plainly that the police we have are cowardly, timorous, gutless and toothless. If this plain language is not understood still, it is simply proof that the police have lost their way. The police are ferocious in hunting down peaceful demonstrators but gutless when it comes to arresting corrupt officials.

They are overly zealous when hired as mercenaries by business tycoons to suppress peasants in many land disputes but chicken-hearted in dealing with religious bigots on violent rampages.

The irony of the Janus-faced nature of governance is this: When words are not pursued with immediate enforcement, only babble remains. Then, it does not take long for a constitution or presidential instructions to be emptied of their efficacy in the art of governance. The stage is readily set for the state of civility to backslide into the rule of brute force, which is precisely what is befalling us now.

This leaves us with an exigency so familiar that it has long been the very cliché of clichés: The police should raise their heads and act firmly on any groups that resort to violence in settling disputes. Since the police are at the behest of the President, the same can also be said to the President.

It is time to stop acting only by way of symbols. It is true that humans live by symbol, but the problem with symbols is that their efficacy depends entirely on the intricate levels of sensibility and finesse on the part of the receivers. When savagery is the only idiom, no amount of symbols will unravel the naked act of violence. If this sounds as if its yielding too much to the rawness of the state of affairs we are now in, it is because the alternative is the escalating wave of violence.

Sadly, what looks urgent may slip into a mistake, but I bet that we make a mistake in good company.  


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


Read original post here:Insight: When violence is rampant, words are a cloak of inaction