A Political Year

Kompas/Wawan H Prabowo

Yudi Latif

Public discourse calls 2018 a “political year”. Moments full of political agendas that do not always bring with them positive connotations, but rather, overshadowed by anxieties such as conflicts over identity, political party breakup, political dowries, extravagant spending, growing corruption, the mediocrity of leaders and unfulfilled promises.

Understanding politics in its negative connotation resembles a kite with a broken string. Politics comes from the word “polis” (city) in the tradition of Athens, a place where everything was decided through rational deliberation (not through irrationality and violence). Because of the presence and involvement of cultured and rational city residents, Aristotle described politics as an art to manage the republic for the public good.

The meaning of politics in its negative sense develops in a city-republic that is crowded with the artifice of image without essence. It is as if the urban residents in Indonesia today live in a floating bubble. Words and promises are like bubbles without essence. The meaning of words dissipates in the noise of the online world. Action is held hostage within the jungle of social media and critical thinking turn into curses without a solution.

In order to make the political year into a year of hope, we must return the meaning of politics and city into its origins. The basic foundation of politics is the culture of citizenship. The citizens of a city-state show their sense of belonging and love of the republic; not just people who live there to sleep and to make a living. They actively engage, move and mingle within the diversity of public space – not “mager” (unwilling to move) and remain isolated in a bunker of their own identity.

Moving and meeting in public spaces serve to trigger an exchange of ideas, cross-culture interaction and citizens’ creativity. In their latest study, psychologists Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz from Stanford University tried to investigate the relationship between the habit of moving/walking and creativity. From an experiment involving a group of “walkers” and another group of “sitters”, the study revealed that the walkers group had a consistently higher level of creativity than the sitters group.

For the sake of positive and productive involvement in public space, the citizens need to have intelligence.

Not just personal intelligence, but mainly civic intelligence: competent in carrying out the duties of a citizen, understanding the obligations and rights of a citizen, able to contribute personal excellence to public harmony and advancement, able to find the commonality in differences and voluntarily engage in public participation. The Athenian people call those who have no commitment or intelligence to engage in public affairs “idiotes”. This is where the word “idiot” comes from.

Developing civic intelligence requires a climate that supports freedom of speech, freedom of association and self-development. Freedom also gives room for tolerance, which in turn allows increasing readiness for appreciating the opinions and creations of others.

The type of politics is a decisive factor. A procedural democracy that is restricted by capital-dependent election rituals with flip-flopping regulation and institutional design has no significance for civic intelligence and creativity.

Eric Weiner (2016) suggests that there is no correlation between a state’s golden era and democracy. The substance that must be presented is creative freedom, not just democracy. China is not a democracy, but has an enlightened autocracy that provides its citizens with the creative room to develop their individual potential and fulfill their civic duties. The governor of Yogyakarta is not democratically elected, but his leadership provides space for creative freedom, including by giving people access to leaders and policies. With all that, Yogyakarta has grown into one of the most creative and vibrant cities in Indonesia.

True democracy should bring with it a climate of broader and healthier freedoms. In a true democracy, creative cities become a magnet that draws in creative, intelligent, eccentric and visionary people who truly respect public thinking and morals.

Such cities have a strong literary culture. The spirit of loving the homeland is public wisdom; leaders are guides; the people are guardians of the republic. Cities turn into centers of excellence and civilization, inheriting the grand tradition of mankind that has always been perceived cities (polis, civic, madina) as having the positive connotations of civility, nobility and order. Becoming a city resident means becoming a civilized human. “Becoming a civilized human,” says Fernand Braudel, “means respecting acts, becoming law-abiding citizens and more sociable.” Max Weber defines a city as “a place that has been designed as a group that is civilized and rational.”

In strengthening the basis of urban civic culture with a noble public, we can welcome the political year as a driver of the politics of hope, not of fear.

Yudi Latif

Head of the Presidential Working Unit on the Implementation of the State Ideology of Pancasila (UKP)