Source/Credit: The Jakarta Post | Opinion
By Carlo Argenton | August 10, 2011
When we see politicians or government officials behaving in morally inexplicable or aberrant ways, we tend to automatically awake the specter of self-interest and argue that it must be the personal quest for either political power or financial gain that is working behind the scenes.
In this way we aim at psychologically neutralizing the disorienting impact such behavior is bound to have on us and reconcile ourselves with it.
The sight of Indonesia’s Ahmadiyah sect besieged and brutalized, legally as well as physically, is amongst the most acute of these deeply disquieting phenomena. Thus, the mob that enacted the horror of the Banten lynching last February must be a pawn in some grander political game being fought out among the elites.
Similarly, government officials and provincial governors who blame the victims for “causing conflict,” and who seek a total ban of such a small and non-violent sect in order to “prevent more conflict” and guarantee communal “harmony” and stability cannot possibly be sustaining a principled position; rather, electoral success and personal political aggrandizement is what must be dictating these political choices, we assume.
Though elements of self-interest are undoubtedly often at work in politics, this is clearly but a partial picture of political agency, as the great 18th century Scottish moral psychologist and philosopher David Hume would have recognized.
According to Hume, human agency is driven by “principles” (abstract ideas and ideologies), by “affections” (attachments to specific individuals or groups), as well as by crude self-interest.
What if we enquire into the political role of “principles” and “affections,” rather than self-interest? What if we were to take the principled claims of these self-proclaimed guardians of stability seriously?
If we were to do so, we’d have to concede a basic truth to the government officials and provincial governors who have sought or are seeking to ban the Ahmadiyah sect: the existence of Ahmadiyah is indeed, as they argue, the “trigger”, or “cause”, of religiously-motivated violence in Indonesia.
Ceteris paribus, in the absence of Ahmadiyah there would indeed be much less religiously-motivated acrimony, conflict and violence in the country: there would be more peace, more harmony.
A humaner, blander version of Stalin’s grotesque but impeccable “no man — no problem” equation seems to be at work here.
Once political pre-eminence is ascribed to the values of political peace and social harmony, the anti-Ahmadiyah movement’s legislative and political efforts to have the sect banned throughout the country acquire a certain degree of soundness, if not of legitimacy.
This proposition is obviously not in any way meant to rationalize the shockingly weak sentences just handed down to the perpetrators of the monstrous violence against Ahmadis in Banten that occurred last February.
It points, rather, to the central importance of identifying the basic values that — explicitly or, more usually, implicitly — are at the heart of the public justification of political decision-making and advocacy.
The discourse of stability, social harmony, and unity is pervasive in contemporary Indonesian politics and society.
Religious minorities, “heretic” sects, “liberal” movements, separatisms, indigenous rights’ claims, Playboy: all these socio-political phenomena are often read, first and foremost, from the perspective of social harmony and peace.
“Blasphemy” is but one of the many triggers of these centripetal, disciplining dynamics, though it is certainly the one that has been behind some of the most atrocious acts of violence in recent years.
This political centrality of “blasphemy” would not have surprised Hume. Unlike other matters over which human beings argue, conflicting religious principles seem to be almost intractable.
No “two men, reasoning upon opposite principles of religion” can pass by each other “without shocking” each other. The human mind in this case “always lays hold on every mind that approaches it,” and is “shocked and disturbed by any contrariety.”
Societies characterized by religious pluralism are bound, it seems, to develop a less rigid understanding of what stability is all about if intend to conserve their pluralistic nature.
That stability and harmony have been such a central political concern in Indonesia is, for historical reasons, certainly comprehensible. One of the most diverse nations in the world, it has struggled long and hard over the course of its life as an independent nation to achieve a certain degree of stability, peace and coherence.
This stability has allowed millions to escape poverty and obtain the material and psychological means to more freely act upon their conception of the good, their own understanding of what it is that gives their lives meaning. This outstanding achievement clearly cannot be praised enough.
But stability, it is becoming increasingly clear, is in deep conflict with a set of other fundamental values Indonesia has rediscovered in its post-Reformasi democratic phase. Most importantly, “social harmony” à la Indonesia and freedom of conscience (in which religious freedom, also guaranteed by the Indonesian constitution of 1945, ultimately has its roots) are visibly at conflict with one another.
For what is a “stable,” “harmonious” social arrangement? Essentially one in which the interests and sentiments of the majority are not perceived (by the majority, of course) as being under threat.
What is at issue is not even an objective, tangible threat. Rather, a majority’s purely imagined threat, since we cannot know what long-term consequences a policy of toleration of Ahmadi belief would yield.
It is therefore not simply by sentencing the perpetrators of such acts of unbearable cruelty to longer imprisonment terms, by more draconian penal measures that the issue will be solved.
This is necessary, but not sufficient condition. It is only by undermining the rhetoric of “social harmony”, by profaning it, that a more genuine adherence to the principle of “unity in diversity,” of unity in freedom and democracy, can be achieved.
Far from being confined to the case of Indonesia, the tension between stability and the freedom of individual conscience is manifest in Western societies as well, as they with varying degrees of success struggle to come to terms with the growing presence of immigrants from different religious and cultural backgrounds on their soil.
What the Indonesian Ahmadiyah case reveals, however, are the type of horrific extremes the sacrifice of individual conscience at the altar of stability and social harmony can generate.
The writer has conducted post-graduate studies on Indonesian economic history and is starting a PhD in political philosophy at the London School of Economics.
Read original post here: Social harmony à la Indonesia and religious toleration
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you for your comments. Any comments irrelevant to the post's subject matter, containing abuses, and/or vulgar language will not be approved.