Indonesia
“History is a valuable teacher,” goes the familiar adage about what it means to study the past. Consider the hundreds of years our nation spent under foreign colonization: ideally, that experience should have made us acutely aware of at least one persistent affliction within our national character.
Centuries of colonization ought to have taught us something important: we harbor deep mental weaknesses that made us easy targets, easy sacrifices for foreign nations and foreign powers. Our own internal frailties are the primary reason we failed to emerge as a formidable nation on the world stage.
That, in itself, should tell us something history has long been trying to teach: it was our own ignorance that allowed colonial hands to grip and oppress this land for centuries on end. An error that persists for centuries points to a weakness that runs far deeper than the surface suggests.
Had this nation truly occupied the status of an educated, learned society, it would never have suffered colonization so severely, or at the very least, it would have emerged not merely ready to fight, but bold enough to challenge other nations toward positive, progressive competition.
If that’s the case, then the root cause that left this nation subdued and powerless before others is unmistakably ignorance. That ignorance is precisely what allowed other nations to deceive us, cheat us, and turn us against one another, reducing us to a powerless mass of people, cast as a “coolie nation,” mired in humanitarian despair.
Foreign powers, too, could never have plunged us into such prolonged subjugation had they not fully understood the weaknesses embedded within our national character. It was precisely because they understood our vulnerabilities so well that they succeeded in planting the roots of their dominance so thoroughly. Here lies the crux of it: our weakness became the very intelligence other nations used to manipulate us.
The weakness that led to our colonization was ignorance. History bears this out: foreign powers that once ruled this land consistently worked to manufacture obstacles and heavy burdens designed to obstruct this nation’s steps and resolve toward building a culture of learning. They had no interest in seeing this nation grow intelligent or free from ignorance, because an educated, “liberated” nation would organize resistance far more easily and prove far harder to keep perpetually deceived.
The words of the scholar Ali bin Abi Thalib, “whoever once taught me a single piece of knowledge, even a single letter, becomes my teacher for life,” deserve to serve as a collective reflection: the movement to eliminate ignorance must be kept alive and empowered at all times, with every breath we take, through every shift of the era, and across the entire journey of human history.
That statement stands as a challenge to every individual not to let themselves fall prey to the affliction of ignorance. This affliction must never be preserved, let alone normalized as culture, because if it persists, this nation will not only struggle to achieve progress and enlightenment but will also remain a people and a nation easily made into victims.
Learning from our historical experience as a colonized nation for hundreds of years should awaken every element of this society to ignite the spirit and mentality needed to break free from the affliction of ignorance. This affliction deserves to be treated as the nation’s foremost enemy, because ignorance is the very soil in which countless other afflictions that render a nation powerless take root and flourish. The movement toward becoming a learning society is now urgent, one that every element of this nation must undertake to eliminate ignorance, an affliction whose primary source often lies in legal norms themselves, norms that leave “room” for tolerating dehumanization. Legal norms can be among the greatest gifts to a nation’s life, yet they can just as easily become a source of serious harm.
It is only logical, then, that people place great hope in the emergence of legal norms that genuinely understand and embrace their fundamental interests. When lawmakers fail to accommodate those interests, it is the legal norms themselves that must be deconstructed and rebuilt, not the people who should be expected to adapt, learn, and accommodate every new reform imposed upon them.
By: Dr. Drs. H. M. Muhibbin, S.H., M.Hum
Head of the Master’s in Law Studies Program, Postgraduate Program, Universitas Islam Malang, and author of several books
This article was also published on timesindonesia.co.id
Photo by Unicef
