Culture Of Development And Development Of Culture

Culture of Development and Development of Culture Agus Pakpahan It is a right time for us to think of what should be done next year as this year will end soon. In the shadow of a celebration of “Happy New Year-2008”, it is also a time of preparation for harder work after we have been experiencing unfinished job to cure our national crisis. After more than 37 years of practicing development mantra, we still unable to practice of the word development means in our daily life if we mean by development is increasing capability of people can do or can be such as mentioned by Amartya Sen. Culture of development is about what people believe, think and do in association with their efforts in increasing their capabilities. Sense of crisis is a cultural variable that makes people strongly or weakly responsive to the crisis of our nation and strong sense of community will determine whether or not our efforts to end our crisis is weak or strong. It is a psychological variable that influences community’s behavior toward rivers of crisis solution. It is also a state of mentality that is hold by our people. What we observe is a consequence of the above situation. Illegal logging, environmental destruction, low productivity, high conflict potentials, poverty, income disparities and so on are impacts of our weakness in our culture of development. So, development of culture is our effort to internalize our capabilities in a sense of increasing what people can do or can be. In other words, development of culture is the way to solve our developmental problems. It is a process of sacrificing our old culture that inhibits our growing capability toward better life. It is a learning process. To what extent our learning process is successful with respect to what we gain after experiencing development for more than 37 years? How far our learning capability has improved relative to what has been achieved by other countries? There are global indicators that usually used by scholars or policy analysts. However, ones rarely see that if we use cultural perspective we have to focus on what is unique to us rather than what is relative to others. Why? Uniqueness is source of originality and only original solution that will solve our fundamental problems. All successful countries have found their original ways to tackle their problems. For example, we see how Chinese and Soviet Union had ended up in different situation now. Uniqueness is about fitness. It is about cultural differentiation, selection and acceleration. Here, technology, institutions, laws, values, and other human creation are a part of culture. We cannot accelerate development without having differentiation and selection process. Cultural diversities, therefore, are our stock of potential resources. European or American culture is usually assumed superior than local culture. It could be true. But, how fit that culture to our culture is still a question. The fact is that at

our present time we cannot afford to adopt westerners’ culture when, for example, our per capita income is still far behind. It does not mean western or eastern culture is bad or good; culture is unique in their owned. After taking care of our national efforts to develop our nation, it is time to be more serious in seeking our efforts based on our own uniqueness. We have to seek our own cultural identity and recapitalize it into our original ways to solve our problem. It is about digging our spirituality in order to revitalize our strength and to salvage our weakness.