The two youngsters and their friends also produced a torrent of scabrous mimeographed bulletins, full of scandalous news and sarcastic articles about the Suharto clique. These they first sent to the lower consulate staff (who enjoyed them very much), and only later to the Consul himself. Pipit was and is an amazingly gifted and fearless satirical writer. He believes that ‘everything can be said’ and is brave enough to carry it out. His articles, written in a mixture of formal Indonesian, Jakarta slang and Low Javanese, exploited Javanese wayang-lore, Sino-Indonesian kung-fu comic books, scatology and brazenly sexual jokes to make his friends laugh their heads off and his consular enemies shake with impotent rage.
The most important of his articles was one I later translated as ‘Am I PKI [Indonesian Communist Party] or non-PKI?’ In this searing personal text, Pipit described, with plenty of black humour, his brush with the massacres of the left in 1965. His kindly Muslim father had been the manager of a large state-owned sugar estate in East Java and was harassed by the local communist-controlled sugar workers’ union. As a teenager very loyal to his father, Pipit was furious with the PKI and also with some of his high school friends who ended up as executioners in the autumn of 1965.
But the horror haunted him. In his article he described how regular customers at the local brothel stopped going there when they saw the genitals of communists nailed to the door, and he recalled rafts piled high with mutilated corpses which floated down the Brantas river through the town of Kediri, where he lived. He had come to Germany to study electrical engineering, but influenced by radical German students he soon abandoned his studies for a career as a vocal enemy of the Suharto tyranny. Later he was able to use his friendships with people in the Socialist Party to help block moves by the consulate to punish Indonesian students who stepped out of line.
Meeting Pipit, Komang and their friends was for me very exhilarating. We became very close and have remained so till today. I learned a lot from them both about how to write engagingly in Indonesian, and began to write in the same sardonic mixed-language style they used. We agreed that, under the political circumstances, we would write about everything political in sexual terms, and everything sexual in political language. For example, General Benny Moerdani, commander-in-chief of the Indonesian National Army in the mid-1980s, ‘got erections’ from imagining he might be made vice president of Indonesia. One result was that I worked briefly as a satirical columnist for an Indonesian weekly before military intelligence clamped down on the publication.
In 1967 Sudisman, the last secretary-general of the PKI, was finally arrested and sentenced to execution by a high military court. I attended the trial every day, and was very impressed by Sudisman’s courage and dignity, and by his last defence speech. I got a copy of the speech, translated it into English, and had it published quickly in Australia. In one acid passage the secretary-general spoke of the many colonels who never became generals, whom he nicknamed ‘Moss Colonels’.
These five men and boys gave me friendship, ‘fathership’ and political solidarity, as well as teaching me a great deal. Thanks to them, I was able to continue some kind of useful Indonesian fieldwork over the twenty-seven years of my banishment. In the process, I came to realize that nothing is better for a scholar than being blessed with such deep and enduring attachments, which are often so much more valuable than lonely library research.
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* Published in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 9:3 (July–September 1977), pp. 13–30. A belated follow-up was my only book on Siam, In the Mirror: Literature and Politics in Siam in the American Era (Bangkok: Duang Kamon, 1985).
Chapter 4
Frameworks of Comparison
In my early days at Cornell, use of the concept of ‘comparison’ was still somewhat limited. I do not mean that comparisons were never made; they were made all the time, both consciously and (more often) unconsciously, but invariably in a practical way and on a small scale. Even today, in the Cornell College of Arts and Sciences, there is only one department (comparative literature) that uses the term in its title, and this department did not exist in the early 1960s when I left for Indonesia to undertake fieldwork.
Historians, anthropologists, economists and sociologists rarely thought systematically about comparison at all. The political science department was a partial exception, since it had a subsection called ‘comparative government’, to which I belonged. But the comparisons my classmates and I studied were primarily focused on Western Europe. The reason for this was understandable. European countries had for centuries interacted with one another, learned from one another, and competed with each other. They also believed that they shared a common civilization based on antiquity and different Christianities. Comparisons seemed both simple and relevant.
For me, the odd thing was that comparative government did not cover the US itself, which was the preserve of a different subsection called American government. On one level, this division was easy to understand in practical terms. The undergraduate students, thinking about future careers as politicians, bureaucrats, lawyers and so on, were overwhelmingly interested in courses about their own country’s politics. The same ‘nationalist’ interest can be found in most countries. My department was dominated by Americanists because of student demand. A less obvious factor was the pervasive ‘frog under the coconut shell’ mentality created by what I call ‘official nationalism’. The US has two important neighbours, Mexico and Canada, but there were no courses on these countries’ politics, and, right up to the point of my retirement in 2001, it was rare to find a student who could name either the president of the former or the prime minister of the latter.
One of the central myths of American nationalism has long been ‘exceptionalism’ – the idea that US history, culture and political life are by definition incomparable. The US is not like Europe, not like Latin America, and absolutely not like Asia. Needless to say, this fancy is absurd. In different ways, depending on which countries in what periods are relevant, the US is perfectly comparable, especially with Europe, South America, Japan and the British Dominions of the Empire (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and so on). Another aspect of this perspective is its deeply ingrained provincialism. Hence the strong resistance to the logical case for including American politics within comparative politics.
One could plausibly add two other factors that are more specific. The first is the institutional history of the study of politics in the United States. One clear relic of this history is that there are still a number of political science departments that call themselves departments of government (Harvard and Cornell among them). Their lineage derives from the merging of law (mostly ‘constitutional’ law) and public administration, both eminently concerned with the practicalities of governance. In Europe the lineage was quite different: departments of philosophy, sociology, economics and politics based on the grand tradition of Machiavelli, Smith, Constant, Ricardo, Hegel, Marx, de Tocqueville, Weber and so on. My department had a subsection called Political Theory, which was usually taught by a European scholar. Its range extended from Plato to Marx, but included no Americans.
The second factor is that Americans are a practical and pragmatic people, not naturally given to grand theory. A quick glance across the social sciences and humanities for the ‘great theorists’ of the past century makes this abundantly clear, whether in philosophy (Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Levinas, etc.), history (Bloch, Braudel, Hobsbawm, Needham, Elliott), sociology (Mosca, Pareto, Weber, Simmel, Mann), anthropology (Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, Dumont, Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard) or literary studies (Bakhtin, Barthes, de Man, etc.). All these foundational figures are European. The grand American exception is Noam Chomsky, who revolutionized the study of linguistics, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Milton Friedman in economics, though Keynes may last longer. Of course, this does not mean that contemporary US universities are not obsessed with ‘theory’, only that the ‘theory’ either come
s from outside America, is modelled on economics (which has a strong theory-orientation important for understanding the functioning of modern society), or is underpinned by America’s egalitarianism: ‘everyone’, so to speak, ‘can and should be a theorist’, though history shows that individuals genuinely capable of producing original theory are rare. My own experience as a student at Cornell occurred before ‘political theory’ really took hold. My thesis (1967) could almost have been written in a history department. But by then what was later remembered as the era of ‘behaviourism’, understood as making the study of politics ‘scientific’, was on the rise.
The thirty-five years I spent as a Professor of Government at Cornell taught me two interesting lessons about US academia. The first was that ‘theory’, mirroring the style of late capitalism, has obsolescence built into it, in the manner of high-end commodities. In year X students had to read and more or less revere Theory Y, while sharpening their teeth on passé Theory W. Not too many years later, they were told to sharpen their teeth on passé Theory Y, admire Theory Z, and forget about Theory W. The second lesson was that – with some important exceptions like the work of Barrington Moore, Jr. – the extension of political science to comparative politics tended to proceed, consciously or unconsciously, on the basis of the US example: one measured how far other countries were progressing in approximating America’s liberty, respect for law, economic development, democracy, etc. Hence the rapid rise, and equally rapid fall, of an approach that today looks pretty ‘dead’ – modernization theory.
Needless to say, there was often an openly stated Cold War objective behind this kind of theory. Namely, to prove that Marxism was fundamentally wrong! In its innocence, this kind of ‘look at me’ theory typically ignored such embarrassing things as the very high rates of murder and divorce in the US, its hugely disproportionate Black prison population, persistent illiteracy and significant levels of political corruption, and so on.
Nonetheless, there is no doubt in my mind that my experience as a graduate student unconsciously prepared me for later comparative work. My duties as a teaching assistant in American politics and (European) comparative politics obliged me to study a great many texts that I would not otherwise have read. The undergraduates in those days were 90 per cent American and knew very little about Europe. To help them, I found it useful to make constant comparisons between the US, the UK, France and Germany. I myself took graduate courses on the Soviet Union, Asia, the US and Western Europe. Finally, the format of the Southeast Asia program forced me not only to start thinking across the region in a comparative sense, but also to read across disciplines, especially anthropology, history and economics. At the time, I did not have a high level of consciousness about all this – it was all fun because it was so new to me.
My gradual introduction to comparative thinking, however, was quite bookish and ‘intellectual’ until I went to Indonesia. There, for the first time, my emotional and political leanings came into play in my work. Yet the main effect was not to make me think more theoretically in any general sense. Rather I found myself becoming a kind of Indonesian (or Indonesian-Javanese) nationalist, and feeling annoyed when I ran into bullying American officials who clearly looked down on Indonesians, had no time for Soekarno and were very anti-communist, to the point that when Soekarno angrily uttered his famous anti-American phrase, ‘To hell with your aid!’, I felt like cheering.
It was still from within this framework that I wrote my first explicitly comparative work, a long article entitled ‘The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture’, published in 1972 in a book titled Culture and Politics in Indonesia, edited by Claire Holt. This essay had an unlikely origin. One day, as I was sitting in my office with the door open, two senior professors walked by, chatting loudly on their way to lunch. The man doing most of the talking was Allan Bloom, who much later published a best-seller called The Closing of the American Mind. He was a rather fascinating and even intimidating figure. Unashamedly effeminate, and clearly favouring his male over his female students, he was nonetheless a charismatic conservative lecturer, and a first-class scholar in the field of political theory (Plato to Marx). At the University of Chicago he had been among the top students of Leo Strauss, the famous political émigré from Nazi Germany and a principled philosophical conservative, many of whose pupils (especially bright and ambitious Jews) went on to lead the neo-conservative movement in American political life under Reagan and the two Bushes, as well as in the best universities.
What I overheard Bloom say was this: ‘Well, you know that the ancient Greeks, even Plato and Aristotle, had no concept of “power” as we know it today.’ This casual, lunch-hour comment seeped into my mind and stayed there. It had never occurred to me that the two philosophical masters, whom we were always told to revere as the founders of ‘Western Thought’, had no idea of power in their heads. Dubious at first, I rushed to the library to consult a Classical Greek dictionary. I could find ‘tyranny’, ‘democracy’, ‘aristocracy’, ‘monarchy’, ‘city’, army’, etc., but no entry for any abstract or general concept of ‘power’.
This set me thinking about power in the context of Java and Indonesia. Not long before there had been a heated polemic between the Swiss journalist Hubert Luethy and Clifford Geertz, in the notorious CIA-supported magazine Encounter. It took place between late 1965 and early 1966, when the massacres of the communists and their sympathizers were raging in Indonesia after the attempted coup of 1965. Luethy had started it by writing an acerbic essay on the ‘irrationality’ of Indonesian political life and discourse. Properly annoyed, Geertz replied with a stinging retort entitled ‘Are the Indonesians Mad?’, which strongly defended Indonesian rationality, not on theoretical grounds but on the basis of his long experience of doing fieldwork in Java. Geertz was already a famous figure at the time, and the dominant influence in American anthropology; along with Kahin and Benda he was one of the three most important senior figures in Indonesian studies. As a good Indonesian nationalist I was of course on Geertz’s side, but I was starting to think about a more systematic and historical study of ‘rationality’ in terms of political theory.
It so happened that my favourite Indonesian fellow student in the mid-1960s was a middle-aged, white-haired historian called Soemarsaid Moertono, whom we all affectionately called ‘Mas Moer’. ‘Mas’ is a Javanese term of address, a little more formal than ‘big brother’ but close to its meaning. He was a real old-fashioned Javanese gentleman, a fine historian, a kind and witty man, a natural democrat, and with an endearingly childish side to him. He would often tell us the story of the first morning that he woke up in Ithaca to find the town blanketed in snow. He was so enchanted by this strange beauty that he hopped out of bed barefooted, ran downstairs in his sarong, and jumped happily into the snow, completely forgetting that it was ice-cold. Our student offices were next door to each other, so we chatted all the time, and he showed me the drafts of his MA thesis on aspects of traditional Javanese royal rule (published eventually as State and Statecraft in Old Java). He knew the Javanese sources very well, and there were dozens of riveting and strange passages in his text. No doubt the strangest of all was the story, solemnly related in the chronicles, of what happened at the death in 1703 of Amangkurat II, an unsuccessful Javanese monarch of the late seventeenth century who had not designated an heir. As the claimants and courtiers surrounded his deathbed, one of them, Prince Puger, noticed that the dead king’s penis was erect and at its tip there was a glowing drop of liquid. He rushed to drink it up, and the penis subsided. The chronicler added that this showed that the tédja, or magic light of kingship, had passed to the prince, who became Amangkurat III.
Since I was quite sure that the Javanese were as rational as anyone else, I wondered what basic assumptions must have been in play to make this odd story reasonable. Remembering Bloom’s remark, it occurred to me that, like Plato, the Javanese might have no abstract concept of power as a relationship strictly between human beings. Conversations wit
h Moertono confirmed that this was the case, yet at the same time they had a clear concept of ‘concrete’ power, a kind of mana immanent in the cosmos, and detectable in magical objects, spirits and human beings (including their sexual organs).
This seemed to me the key which could open the door to pursuing Javanese rationality step by step, social field by social field (taking in bureaucracy, diplomacy, taxation, agriculture, etc.), and help explain the behaviour and aspirations that Luethy had deemed irrational. One could then go back to the West and see many similarities prior to the arrival of Machiavelli, the first Western philosopher of politics to exclude anything ‘divine’ or ‘magical’ from his thinking. (From what assumptions did his rationality derive?) It was also probable that in many parts of Asia one could find an outlook not too distant from that of the pre-modern Javanese. The irony was that Bloom and Moertono, on the same campus at the same time, were entirely unaware of each other’s existence.
When writing the final version of ‘The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture’ – conceived as a study in comparative political philosophy – I tried to anticipate and forestall the easy reaction of most Western readers: ‘Well, the Javanese were and are primitive, and we are not.’ Luckily, I had help from Max Weber, who introduced the concept of ‘charisma’ into modern sociology, though he had great difficulty in explaining it clearly and systematically. Hitler, Reagan, Mao, Evita Peron, de Gaulle, Soekarno, Gandhi, Fidel Castro, Lenin and Khomeini: what rationality lay behind their hold on people’s imaginations? Was there a substratum of old ways of thinking about ‘power’ (mana, tédja) even in cultures that thought of themselves as completely modern? Much later on I was gratified to learn that Reagan never made important decisions before his wife had telephoned her fortune-teller, and that the top leaders of today’s Chinese Communist Party eagerly consult astrologers and feng shui masters – out of the limelight, of course.