Cross-culture Understanding for Unity

The current issue regarding regional conflicts in this country shows how people don’t want to solve the problem peacefully. It is just because difference of ethnics or religions, and they don’t want to respect each other, people should kill each other.

What a severe life, when we cannot understand and respect the diversities in our society. This is because they don’t want to think rationally about the core of the conflicts. They just want to solve problems with one belief: their kind is the best, the others are not better.

It might be true that we cannot blame those people directly. Then, we should know first that the nature of certain society is always to create domination. A society always sees and judges the others from their own perspective, and creates ethnocentric perspective—primordial.

The problem is, in Indonesia with many cultures and ethnics, this primordial society will suffer the value of unity in diversity, instead of creating high pride of being unity. We can imagine, when every society with its own culture, with its own point of view, has its own judgment toward the other cultures, the next thing is recession from one culture with the others. Should we “compete” each other just to show that we are better whereas we are in one country?

With this problem that we have, we cannot change their culture, nor change the society. What we can do is to “neutralize” their perspective through education. The basic education that we should give is the knowledge cross-culture understanding. Cross-culture understanding will give wide information not about their own culture or society only, but it rather provides information about the other cultures.

Like current integrated curriculum in school, students in primary school in one region will learn culture from the other regions. This information may be able to be integrated into social course, science, and even religion course. The point is to lead the students to think out of the box, to know the similarity, the variety, the differences to respect, not to compare.

Understanding the other culture will create objective perspective in society to the other civilization. This objectivity will create acceptance toward the other cultures. In Indonesia, it is very important to have this perspective. In this diverse country, we need respect—respect to our culture as a nation.

The diversity in our society will mean nothing when we cannot keep them together. The diversity of the culture, the people, and the nature is a high prestige of a nation. Indonesia has it, and we are Indonesian people must keep it, not the others.