http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2011/06/01/reviving-pancasila-not-its-myth.html
Reviving Pancasila, but not its myth Donny Syofyan, Padang | Wed, 06/01/2011 7:00 AM Indonesians marks the anniversary of the official state ideology, Pancasila, on June 1, despite controversy. As the state ideology, Pancasila should be the source of political and legal order for government and public life. Now, it is deplorable that a 13-year reform period has witnessed the fading of the Pancasila following the downfall of Soeharto's New Order regime. Pancasila, which was used as a means of repressing ideological freedom under Soeharto era, is now lost in competition with the massive adoption of transnational ideologies. In the contemporary political dynamic, Pancasila as the state ideology is being criticized severely. Some radical transnationalists have accused the Pancasila of failing to tie diversity and consider it diachronic thought. To them, the Pancasila is out of line with the ideology of absolute truth they believe in, that is to say, theocracy. Various attacks against Pancasila through social movements have apparently been made to deconstruct the unitary state of Indonesia. Anti-Pancasila groups grew quickly and declared frankly their aim to change the state ideology and ruin Indonesia. It is ironic that the state took part in relegating Pancasila to a lower or outer edge. The Post-New Order administration has regarded Pancasila as the myth of this country's existence. Any efforts to revitalize Pancasila have been abandoned. For instance, Pancasila is no longer categorized as major or special curricula from secondary school to university level. The results of a research report on ideology in 2009 came as a surprise. More than 61 percent of respondents said they did not view Pancasila as being capable of getting over this diverse country's problems, while 45 percent said Pancasila was less valuable and meaningful than religion. Talking about cognitive aspects, of 1,000 youngsters in the 18-23-year-old group, 59.2 percent failed or were unable to memorize the Pancasila (Syofyan: 2009). Why is the Pancasila being thrown overboard? The answer lies in the fact that people remain traumatized and relate it to the New Order's means of oppressing people and establishing social injustice on behalf of political stability and economic growth. It is high time to provide a jumping-off point for reviving the Pancasila. This will take hard work, following the public cynicism of the previous government and aggressive Western influence over Indonesian values. The need for reviving Pancasila calls for the following strategic steps: First, people need to recognize that Pancasila is not a myth or ideology of sacred and absolute truth. It is supposed to be subject to public discussion and discourse with its liberating force. Society should participate in the process of the reinterpretation of Pancasila in keeping with place and time. Amid the growing religious radicalization, for example, Indonesians may return to the country's original and widely respected values of tolerance and mutual respect, with Pancasila as the bedrock. Reviving Pancasila is also aimed at rejuvenating nationalism. What our founding fathers meant about nationalism had nothing to do with being an isolated country or a chauvinistic one, but a nationalism recognizing world brotherhood and a family of nations. The spirit of Indonesian nationalism should not be a forerunner to xenophobia. Pancasila must be a living ideology, a working ideology that can be anticipative, adaptive and responsive. Pancasila is not a strict dogma as that would prevent it from becoming responsive to the challenges of the era. It should be able to face current and future challenges. Second, reviving Pancasila is in need of living examples from the country's leaders in terms of social justice, spirituality, and humanism. Better change should start with our leaders, because our people are taking their cues from them. Indonesian leaders' living examples are expected to make people to realize Pancasila, allowing peoples of different ethnic and religious backgrounds to bond. The failure to do so would definitely make both leaders and people just implement Pancasila in books, in writings and speeches, but then betray it in daily life. Third, Pancasila needs to play role in establishing egalitarianism respecting principles of civility since it is the people's ideology. For that purpose, the government should also abridge regulations that fly in the face of the core Pancasila principles. Legal reform fitting the Pancasila is necessary. The country's law must stand for both the rich and the poor. At the moment, laws that are not impartial remain scattered. It is important to highlight the need to spread the use of the ideology past the confines of a ceremonial day on the first of June, for example by respecting and helping each other and caring about environmental issues. These are actually the principles of Pancasila. Reviving Pancasila means a joint commitment and hard work, mainly involving the government and people. Relying too much upon House members would be fruitless, on the strength of their political party's interests over public aspirations. In making that mistake, this country remains on the verge of meeting real chaos. For better or worse, Pancasila remains Indonesia's common denominator to bridge the yawning gaps in assorted political power. The writer, a graduate of the University of Canberra, Australia, teaches politics and culture at Andalas University, Padang. +++ http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2011/06/01/back-pancasila-ideals-why.html Back to Pancasila ideals: Why? Franz Magnis-Suseno, Jakarta | Wed, 06/01/2011 7:00 AM June 1 is Pancasila Day in Indonesia. On that day 66 years ago, young engineer Sukarno succeeded in uniting two opposing camps in the BPUPKI (a board of Indonesians tasked by the Japanese rulers to prepare a constitution). The dividing question was whether Islam or secular nationalism should be the basis of the new republic of Indonesia. Sukarno received unanimous applause when he proposed that Indonesia be based on five principles he called Pancasila (five principles). It took lengthy, and sometimes stormy discussions until Pancasila got its definitive form in the preamble of the Constitution which was approved on Aug. 18, 1945 and therefore called the 1945 Constitution: Belief in one God, just and civilized humanism, Unity of Indonesia, People's power (or relatedness to the people) led by the guidance of wisdom in common deliberation/representation and social justice for the entire Indonesian people. While foreigners sometimes wonder what was so special about those five principles, Indonesians offer a question whether Pancasila maintains its "ideological" power. But why, on the other hand, has Pancasila since a few years ago been taken up again by Indonesian intellectuals, mainstream Muslim (and other) religious leaders and even politicians. The return to Pancasila (if that's the case) must be understood on the background of the growing worry of many Indonesians about the actual situation in the country. At first sight this seems strange. Although not perfect the country seems to be on a solid path to success. Except for some parts of Papua you can move freely and efficiently around the whole country. Poverty is not up. And in spite of serious acts of terror, security in general is much better here than in many other countries. But this is only the surface. Competent economists point to serious weaknesses: National economic growth comes almost exclusively from the extraction of natural resources. There is no significant growth in industrial production, unemployment is consistently high, infrastructure is in a worrying state and almost 50 percent of the population still lives below welfare levels. And there are two really distressing developments. The first is the all pervasive corruption involving the political elites. There are almost no politicians who do not dirty their hands on. Every month a new scandal surfaces and overshadows the previous scandals. The popular outcry against the planned construction of 28-story building for the House members, originally projected to cost US$188 million, arose from the justified suspicion that the 560 politicians would get a significant cut from the project. It is widely known that politicians who sponsor a project in a region receive kickbacks between 7 and 13 percent. No legislation will be endorsed without the politicians being paid extra money. Corruption is now worse than the situation under Soeharto. This means nothing else than that reformasi, the reform movement that forced Soeharto to step down, has failed to live up to eradicate corruption, collusion and nepotism (KKN) as expected. It also means that our state is losing its moral dignity. It is clear that this situation gravely endangers the fruits of reform: democracy and human rights. When people perceive democracy as nothing more than a project of the political elites who reap the most out of it, democracy will be over. What would follow then is every body's guess. At the same time, since reformasi gave us all democratic freedoms, a new hardline, extreme and exclusive religiosity is steadily infiltrating the minds and hearts especially of young students and intellectuals. This mostly Middle East inspired religiosity pretends to offer a clear-cut, morally respectable alternative to the general trend to Western consumerism, hedonism and corruption. It means that values like "the nation" or Pancasila are left behind. This new hardline religiosity goes together with an open contempt for religious tolerance and a growing readiness to use violence in the name of religion. At the same time the state seems to have lost the courage to enforce its constitutional duty to give zero tolerance to violence. It is heartening to observe that mainstream religious leaders are now alerted of this danger. In this connection they bring Pancasila back into the national discourse. Johann Wolfgang Goethe once wrote about the "two souls living in my breast". The one is the part of the heart illuminated by a deep attraction to the good, the other is a devilish abyss where evil lurks in the dark. The same might be true for the soul of a people. Indonesians now feel as if the spell of darkness is descending on our country and the devils arise in the forms of intolerance, hatred, bloodthirstiness (imagine preachers calling on their community to "kill, kill, kill" in the name of God!), as well as greed, irresponsibility, egoistic desires and corrupt mind. It is on the heels of the awareness of the crucial importance of Pancasila arises. Pancasila expresses the shining noble part of Indonesia's soul. It paints Indonesia as Indonesians dream how she should be, the ideal Indonesia Indonesians would be proud of, as expressed in Pancasila's beautiful five principles. But Pancasila is more than that. Indonesians recount Aug. 18, 1945, the day when Pancasila was inaugurated, as one of Indonesia's most shining hours, the day when Indonesians, for the sake of national unity, committed themselves to accepting each other in their respective religious, cultural, ethnic and racial identity. What happened? On the morning of Aug. 18, 1945 the constitutional assembly (PPKI) agreed unanimously to drop an addition to the first principle of Pancasila (belief in God), i. e. that Muslims were obliged to live according to the sharia They recognized that naming one religion in the most basic philosophy of the state would make full identification of the others impossible. Thus for the sake of national unity even the formal representatives of Islam agreed not to push for that point. As a consequence Indonesia endorsed the 1945 Constitution where the majority religion (Islam) does not get any special treatment. Many say that only the willingness of the Muslim majority not to insist on special privileges has made unity of all those different people between Aceh and Papua possible. Thus Pancasila embodies the finest hour in the formation of the Indonesian nation. It is the documentation of the fact that Indonesians, at a decisive moment in their history, were able to overcome their respective narrow, sectarian and particular interests and prejudices in order to build one nation, united by the ideals of Pancasila, in quest for a "free, united, sovereign, just and prosperous" nation. Now that Indonesians of different backgrounds try hard to re-actualize Pancasila, they want to bring Indonesia back to her most shining idealism. The writer, a Jesuit priest, is professor at Driyarkara School of Philosophy in Jakarta. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ Post message: [email protected] Subscribe : [email protected] Unsubscribe : [email protected] List owner : [email protected] Homepage : http://proletar.8m.com/Yahoo! 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