Yesterday I met someone who has given up reading newspapers. From behind his car window, he would see the newspaper sellers holding up the front pages, with the large bold letters forming headlines. But he knew he was only observing that news, just as he would observe a fat rat crossing the floor of a public toilet: startled for a moment, but not enough to move his backside or his feet to take a stand on things. "And I am not the only one like this," he said.
Apathy really does act like anesthesia. But where does it end? Newspapers go on being printed, the news keeps on going round and round, yet it seems that the information and opinions served up to the people have ceased providing anything meaningful. If anything is completely dead right now, it is the sense of being involved in a world where accidents, murder, craziness, war or corruption, as well as victory and accomplishment, are not merely other people's affairs, at a cold distance. The need to know, to reflect, to change, or to activate all kinds of things, both good and bad, in communal life, is being lost. The world is shrinking to become a separate room in a partitioned house. "Ah, politics is so sickening now," the non-newspaper-reading person said.
These days, politics really has lost gripping scenes. There are no fists heroically thrust in the air like when people stood up opposing a frightening regime. Politics is no longer confrontation, courage is no longer something special. At the same time, both within and outside of parliament and the parties, one cannot see any enthusiasm to strive for something noble, wonderful, and everlasting. People complain that this is the grand era supported by small-minded people. We no longer have a Hatta, we don't have a Mandela.
And so people long for something different, whether reading newspapers or not. Maybe this is why political commentary by the intellectuals often sounds like criticism of moral laxity: not a description, but rather an appeal, not an analysis, but rather the proposal of ideals.
There has to be something missing when the intellectuals complain about the situation yet actually can only put forward what should be. They don't talk about how the "should be" is achieved. Normative in analysis, muddling "what is" with "what should be", they are often just like dispensers of moral advice. They are actually at a dead end.
In this, Machiavelli was different, and made a great contribution to political science. He distinguished between "the effective truth of things" and "imaginary republics and monarchies that have never been seen nor have been known to exist". He rejected political scientists before him who were occupied only with those "imaginary republics and monarchies", and who therefore were unable to offer guidance to those in power in carrying out their role in the real world. For in the real world, the political leaders on the most part are not broad-minded thinkers: the Republic that Plato held as the ideal does not exist. In the real world, every person is limited by his or her own little circle.
And we live with the inheritance of Cervantes. Knights are extinct. We, along with Don Quixote, know that the old man riding the scraggly horse, imagining himself to be a Don ready to fight to uphold those noble values, is just that poor Alonzo Quixano. When he left home for adventure and to fight to save the world, this was because he was possessed. He had read too many stories of heroism.
But in the hand of Cervantes, Don Quixote does not turn into a cynical diatribe about mankind. Rather, there is something touching about Alonzo Quixano—something that maybe makes Sancho Panza, a no-nonsense farmer, follow him loyally, half believing, half not. This is why Don Quixote is not merely mocking the worldview of knights while the world worships the market. Instead, its grounding and setting is probably melancholy: there, political action that is daring, honorable, and imaginative is something odd.
Here, Sancho Panza appears as an important character. "Miracle me no miracles!" he shouts. He has no guile. He knows that fighting by attacking windmills is not to fight attacking giants who magically transform themselves. He doesn't see it as a dramatic confrontation. He can live without drama. But he cannot desert Alonzo Quixano and his dream.
To Sancho, life (and politics) is a trick to operate in whatever cracks there are. But "the art of the possible" means that one still needs art, still needs tricks. For life is not just completely made up of "what is possible". It transpires that people can also wish for something more, something complex and profound, justice for instance. In other words—and this is what Machiavelli did not see—sometimes there is something of worth, which is outside of the practical order pushing people to make history. Precisely because he is poor, Sancho can be close to Don Quixote.
This is why he is not like our friend who wants no involvement with the world, where the worthy is fought for while the rotten spreads. If Sancho were living amongst us, he would probably complain, "Ah, politics is sickening now". But even though he knew the times had become impossible for the dreamer Don Quixote, he still walked loyally alongside him. He knew that it is only humans who can dream and prepare change, precisely in the unfulfilled world. "Man appoints, God disappoints," he said.
Goenawan Mohamad
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