Berikut tulisan Sutan Sjahrir pada 1938 yang membahas kultur west dan east. kita akan bisa lihat bagaimana relevansinya untuk modernisasi dan Intellektualitas di Indonesia. Kita bisa joega melihat ini sebagai good wisdom.
dari buku Out Of Exile 1949, Poedjangga Baroe 1938 & Sjahrir Politics & Exile ================================================== ...Early in 1938, Sjahrir published one of his very few articles from exile in Banda Neira and Boven Digul (read: present Irian Jaya--red), a long essay for the Batavia Indonesian Literary Journal "Pedjangga Baroe, "New Writer". Bourgeius culture, as he wrote : which also is called western culture, has already become the universal culture, the culture of the world... the culture of educated men in the East is nothing but this western culture... This truth and this reality do not necessarily degrade [eastern intellectuals]. On the contrary, they are in accordance with the sprit of time. For the eastern man, Sjahrir wrote in same essay, western culture was an 'heirloom' [poesaka], which he must absorb and master. This was not a suggestion of surrender. Indonesian culture, Sjahrir wrote, was "very young". ... It may be illuminating to make an inventory of what Sjahrir disliked in "Eastern Culture". First of all, what's bad in eastern culture are "the civil-servant mentality" , obsession with "hierarchy" , "a feudal ideology", "a slave mentality", and what grew out of all this , are ----> "Eastern inferiority complexes" ; next, "stagnancy" and an inclination to "tranquility and reflection", "gentleness [kehaolesan atau terlalu haloes]", excessive tolerance , a propensity for "mystics", a "museum-and-incence style of life and a "disregard for the real world and life, a virtuosity in the art of negation". What Sjahrir and other wants is cultivating the society full of 'progressive-ness', full of spirit and joy, "a dynamic [dynamisch] society which keeps thinking and progress as time develops. ... The prime "good' quality of the eastern man, to Sjahrir in Banda Neira as before are "dynamism", a "dynamic spirit", a "vitality", "a capacity to see one's life's strife, as a fight and as a movement" , The next "good" quality was 'rationality', allied with sobriety, matter-of-factness", and also a "moral responsibility". A man who was "matter-of-fact [nuchter]", As Shahrir wrote, could hardly fall victim "to the phantasies of Ramayana & Mahabrata". To such a modern Eastern man, Sjahrir believed, there might be "no cosmic life' but the life of humans, dignifying , enriching and beautifying man as a specifies. This was a belief in universal man. Only 'rationality', sjahrir believed "is powerful enough to rule this world".
