Act locally on social decay

Act locally on social decay

By Ignas Kleden

This is the second of two articles examining the issue of poverty following the recent United Nations social summit in Copenhagen.

JAKARTA (JP): If we may have recourse to the coverage in the Jakarta newspapers, the question of social disintegration turned out to become the least debated point during the meeting, or if that is not the case, it was the least reported issue in the newspapers. However, regardless of what was really happening during the UN summit it is useful for us to make up our minds not only to entertain the idea of social disintegration, but to look into the issue and its relation to the other two.

Poverty, as described earlier, is a social issue which should and can only be tackled at both international and national or local levels, for the simple reason that poverty is not only a direct result of what is happening in world economy but also something which derives from what is going on within the economic policy of a country.

Unemployment, in turn, becomes now an international issue which can be solved as a common problem in both the south and north. In this connection social disintegration has a rather peculiar character, in that it becomes a problem which can be adequately solved only within a country, though some of its causes might come from outside. It tends to be a domestic problem because it has to do with cultural values in terms of which concrete social interaction and social integration take place.

Let me take a very obvious example in Jakarta. Needless to say that the difference between social strata is a sociological commonplace, which can be observed all over the world. What is quite peculiar of the phenomenon in Jakarta is that it is so emphasized and even publicly emphasized. Why on earth is it, that in some parking places only private saloon cars are allowed to come in, whereas jeeps are denied permission? If there happens to be hurt feelings, which can lead to social disintegration, the measures to overcome it cannot be taken over by another country in which such strata differential is taken for granted and is not so much emphasized.

To take another positive example, the success of Indonesia to reduce its birth rate and enhance family planning, without engendering many social conflicts, cannot be simply taken over by another country whose cultural attitude towards sexual life and privacy is different than that in ours.

To put it in a negative way, social disintegration is the absence of social integration, in which the congruence of social system and its cultural superstructure is lacking. The incongruity, which might arise between both systems, will result in a situation where the actual and concrete social action and social interaction do not correspond to the existing cultural values, which become the fabric of meaning in terms of which that interaction is supposed to take place.

This means, if a big change is taking place at the level of social institutions, the participants of a culture should be able to adjust or to recast their cultural values in order to be able to come to terms with the changing social realities. Otherwise there will be a conflict or a discrepancy between the systems of values and beliefs on the one hand and social action and interaction on the other. If we look back to what has taken place during the first 25 year-period of Indonesian development, there are at least three big changes, whose effects can never be exaggerated, and whose results will continue to impinge upon our society.

First, there is a very obvious change at the material level, due to rapid economic growth. Increasing monetization, the relatively unlimited exposure to consumer goods, the set up of entirely new infrastructure and the rising purchasing power, which is not always accompanied by more intelligent economic imagination, are some of those changes originating in the changing material base of our society.

Second, there is also an equally obvious change at the social base of our society due to increasing population, which is faced with the problem of limited living space, limited resources as well as limited living opportunities. In that regard we can notice how the problem of housing becomes more urgent and pressing from day to day. The same can be said of education and employment, which are not always in a position to meet the rising demand of more people.

Besides that, we cannot do away with the problem of distribution or redistribution of income and assets, because human dignity is a principle explicitly mentioned and recognized in our state's philosophy and every citizen can legally claim his or her right to have, and to lead, a properly human life correspondingly.

Third, we can assume that there must be a deep-going change taking place at the mental level of our society, due to the rapid inflow of information made available by global communication. This is still aggravated by the fact that the inflow of information is not always within the span of national control.

The accessibility to global information is no more a matter of technology, which is there, but simply a matter of money. Besides that, the medium which brings in all the information does not necessitate the formation of a reading habit but enhances a listening culture, for radio, and a watching culture, for television and the like.

There is a radical change in the formation of the learning process; a wealth of information in only a few seconds and minutes, without much time to work it out mentally and intellectually. No wonder learning with books, which used to take a lot of time, is overstepped by learning with radio or television, which provides only a very short time span. In many cases too short for the normal process of learning.

If there is a sort of process leading to a situation where people are inclined to become intellectually lazy, it is not because they do not want to learn, but rather because they cannot afford to make it within such a short time provided by communication technology.

Another thing is that the willingness to absorb information about a life style is greater than the effort to obtain information relating to work or thinking. Information about consumption and even a consumptive life, is more quickly accepted, simply because it does not need a long learning process. Whereas information which is needed for productive purposes presupposes a longer process of learning, which renders many people disinclined, or even reluctant, to have it.

Professor Sartono Kartodirdjo, from the Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, once described this situation with a very apt example. What is the difference between an Indonesia and a Japanese student, who both have a motorcycle? According to him, the first uses his motorcycle in his leisure time, to see his friends or to go around the town. The latter uses his leisure time to take apart the engine and re-assemble it in order to learn about the mechanical system and the assembling process. Needless to say the Japanese student undergoes a real learning process whereas his Indonesian colleague does not.

To come back to the UN summit, we are confronted with the sociological paradox as far as world problems are concerned. On one level, there is a quite close relationship between internal and external factors. Poverty, or underdevelopment if you will, is a good case in point. Though many of the important causes can be attributed to outside development in the world market, the action program to reduce poverty cannot be delegated to an international conference.

It should be tackled from within, for the simple reason that those who are faced with the problem are most knowledgeable about the conditions under which they are suffering and what should be done in order to have the conditions improved.

Sociological theories, which try to underscore either external factors only, such as the dependencia theory, or internal factors only, such as the modernization theory, turned out to be inadequate in their explanatory power.

On another level, global development can only have its concrete significance if it is understood in terms of national and local contexts. While the local problem can only be adequately solved if it is treated as a local phenomenon of international development.

Theoretically speaking, the world-system theory and thick- description ethnography are nothing but two sides of the same coin. Or, in the parlance of social activists, think globally and act locally!

The writer is a Master of Arts in Philosophy from Hochschule Fur Philosophie, Munich (1982) and Doctor of Sociology from Bielefeld University, Germany (1995), now working with the Jakarta-based SPES Foundation research center.