Tom Pepinsky

Category: Politics

  • Sensationalism

    Alert! Facebook is a Menace, Clerics Say! Muslim Clerics Declare Ban on Facebook!

    These are recent headlines from the Jakarta Globe, the newspaper that I get delivered to my hotel room every morning free of charge. I asked for the Jakarta Post, which is a better and more established paper, but there was a snafu, I guess. I have become increasingly frustrated by the sensationalist language that newspapers use in their headlines here.

    Why is this sensationalism? Because if you actually read the articles, rather than the headlines, you learn a couple of things. One is that "clerics" mean a limited number of clerics in East Java, not all Indonesian clerics (or even all East Javanese clerics). Second is that "menace" means "a problem for enforcing single-sex educational practices." Third is that "ban" means "declare it to be forbidden to use Facebook for things that are already haram (forbidden)" and "only for schoolchildren in their schools." So Facebook is not a menace, not all clerics agree, and the ban is not a ban. Details details.

    I should note that this is not a problem with just the Jakarta Globe or with coverage of Islam. Rather, I think that the Indonesian press does a particularly good job of making news out of nothing, and a bad job out of covering real news. The coverage of the upcoming presidential elections is an illustrative example. Reading the big newspapers here, you'd think that there's some sort of close three-horse race between the tickets. In reality, SBY-Boediono is going to cream the other two. No one seems brave enough to give a clear run-down of the likelihood of each ticket winning, or brave enough to write (outside of the opinion section) about the criticisms of the two other presidential pairings. When Mega-Prabowo declare that economic growth will average 10 percent a year under their five year term, without explaining how in the world they will achieve this, it makes front page news. The response from market watchers is buried in the business section several days later. Guess that type of stuff doesn't sell papers.

    I don't think that this is just a problem with Indonesian newspapers–of course American journalism can be sensationalist–but my sense is that even the best newspapers here are not as committed to telling it like it is as I would prefer. So let me respond in kind. TP Declares Indonesian Newspapers A Menace!  TP Refuses to Trust Indonesian Newspapers!

  • Majorities with Minority Mentalities

    There is a phrase that's often used to describe Islamic activists in Indonesia, that they are a "majority with a minority mentality." (I think the term comes from FW Wertheim, but I'm not sure if he actually coined the phrase.) Maybe "activists" isn't the word I'm looking for, maybe something more like Muslims with a consciously Muslim identity. Whatever. The point is, it's an evocative phrase that makes a lot of sense. Indonesia is overwhelmingly Muslim in addition to being the world's largest Muslim country, and it's a country where piety is taken very seriously by both Muslims and non-Muslims. There is an argument out there that Indonesian Islam "doesn't count"–it's taken from a misreading of Geertz's The Religion of Java combined with a certain Mecca/Medina-centrism in the Arab world–but I largely dismis this. Nevertheless, despite being a dominant majority, the mentality among many Indonesian Muslims has been similar to that of a minority: that their aspirations are being neglected, that they face systematic discrimination, that they have no proper political (or even, really, social) representation, etc. This was particularly the case under the Sukarno and Soeharto, about whom Wertheim was writing. So this leads to the peculiar outcome of a numerically dominant majority couching its political strategies in the language of an oppressed minority. To give but one example from today's political scene, there is lots of concern by Muslim groups that the presence of Ahmadiyah (a tiny sect that most Muslims consider deviationist) threatens Indonesian Islam, so some action must be taken agains it.

    Political scientists are trained to look for patterns and similarities across countries and contexts. And I think that the concept of a majority with a minority mentality actually fits the case of American political Christianity very well. I mean this in the following sense: as a political project, Christianity in the United States relies on the idea that Christians are repressed or under fire in some fashion. This despite the fact that the United States is probably the most pious advanced industrial economy in the world, one in which even hippy-progressive Ithaca has dozens of churches of every denomination. I could go on. But still the rhetoric we hear is that in America Christians and their rights are under assault. I think that this commercial sums it up perfectly.

    Hat Tip: DSP

    Note the framing of the issue of gay marriage here as not giving rights to a group that has been denied them, but rather taking rights from a group that has always enjoyed them.

    The point of this is that I think we see a common strategy here. Numerically dominant groups must couch their demands in terms that make themselves seem small or at risk in order to mobilize their supporters for their cause. I think that this is consistent with what we know about collective action and social movements and the types of conditions that make them most effective. I also wonder if there's a subtle strategy of creating social cleavages (which is what the "us versus them" mentality is) in order to force groups to align on an issue in a way that a minimum winning coalition is formed. Political scientists can call this endogenous cleavage formation. This is a different perspective on how identities are shaped than that of Daniel Posner. He argues that multiple identities exist in any society (religion, race, culture, language, etc.), and the one that is politically salient is the one that allows for a minimum winning coalition to form. I suggest that when one identity is not minimum-winning (as numerically dominant religious majorities are in Indonesia and the United States) then the identity is itself shaped or reconstituted in a way that makes it minimum-winning.

    NB: Nothing here should be read as being against either Islam or Christianity. I am concerned here not with religion as an abstract concept, a way of life, or whatever. Rather, I am interested in understanding how groups who wish to use religion to achieve political power do it, or put otherwise, in the choice of strategies among numerically dominant religious groups trying to advance a platform via political means.