Kantian Civil Disobedience Depicted in Kamila Andini’s “Before, Now & Then” (2022) and Why It’s Demeaning
I have tons of comment about Kamili Andini’s latest period hit but I had a hard time to analize it in academic context due to the very pro-submissive culture theme. It depicts the zenith of war between supporters of Negara Islam Indoensia (NII) which was also known as Darul Islam (DI) with Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI) members in 1960s where a Sundanese woman named Nana became the victim of this conflict. She then settled with a rich, ethnic Sundanese family but internally struggling and kept regaining her composure. Nana also decided to rub salt into the wound by obediently submitting to a life of collectivity instead of preaching the subtle feminist symbolism as tweeted by many Indonesian reviewers.
It is somewhat unrealistic, sentimental but captures what most Indonesian women still value today: obedience, traditionalism, religiosity and patriarchal societal value are not unfortunate and signs of primordial life among the moderns, as this is what they consider morally good that way. I fail to understand how romanticizing women’s oppression might associate to the Western woke-culture of anti-patriarchy, as the movie speaks volume of how men had caused chaotic raptures in both family and indirectly, the nation’s political situation, as unveiled here that most PKI and NII/DI perpetrators and associates were identified as men.
The German enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) describes a model of society in terms of a system of laws. Following Kantian lines on categorical imperatives and civil obedience, we shall argue that, on the basis of a hypothetical social contract, citizens are subject to coercive laws of the state. For Kant it is a moral duty to obey the law, thus framing civil obedience in moral terms. Thus, it may seem dubious whether, within the Kantian framework, there exists any leeway for civil disobedience at all. The depiction of the struggling woman Nana and her thoughtful considerations highlights that obeying the state and common laws are considered as morally good as what Peter P. Nicholson in Ethics, LXXXVI, pp. 214–30 (1976) argues, explicitly recognizing the importance of Kant’s moral philosophy to his political writings, that
Kant’s position on resistance is a similar application of the Categorical Imperative, though he uses that terminology only occasionally. … The maxim upon which the resister acts cannot be conceived as a universal moral law without contradiction. For example, is it right to resist a tyrannical sovereign? The maxim of the proposed action would be: “whenever it can prevent injustice and oppression, I shall resist the sovereign.” When this maxim is universalized, it contradicts itself; it is willed that there be justice (by ending the sovereign’s unjust actions) and simultaneously that there be no justice (by denying the sovereign the authority which is the necessary condition for justice).
As we can see Nicholson quoted Kantian argument for civil disobedience from Kant’s ethics book Groundwork, in this case, ethics based on moral values produced using metaphysical approach. Another accomplished German philosopher G.W.F Hegel (1770–1831) presented two main criticisms of Kantian ethics. He first argued that Kantian ethics provides no specific information about what people should do because Kant’s moral law is solely a principle of non-contradiction (Singer 1983, pp. 42).
He argued that Kant’s ethics lack any content and so cannot constitute a supreme principle of morality. To illustrate this point, Hegel and his followers have presented a number of cases in which the Formula of Universal Law either provides no meaningful answer or gives an obviously wrong answer. Hegel used Kant’s example of being trusted with another man’s money to argue that Kant’s Formula of Universal Law cannot determine whether a social system of property is a morally good thing, because either answer can entail contradictions.
He also used the example of helping the poor: if everyone helped the poor, there would be no poor left to help, so beneficence would be impossible if universalized, making it immoral according to Kant’s model (Payrow Shabani 2003, pp. 55–56). In my case criticizing Nana’s indifference and silence towards her obvious gender-biased mistreatment, if her husband helped Nana, or for the sake of following the film’s atmosphere, if every husband helped his struggling wife, there would be no struggling wives left to help (or in other words, all wives are happy!), so the beneficence of the drudgery-filled husband would be impossible if it became general laws, making it immoral.
Hegel’s second criticism was that Kant’s ethics forces humans into an internal conflict between reason and desire. And this is what Nana, and her friend did throughout the film: putting Kantian ethics of forcing themselves into internal conflict. For Hegel (and I applaud his criticism for it), it is unnatural for humans to suppress their desire and subordinate it to reason. This means that, by not addressing the tension between self-interest and morality, Kant’s ethics cannot give humans any reason to be moral (Richardson, 2005).
As shown in the film, it’s psychologically unnatural for Nana and Ino to have suppressed their desire and being subordinate it to reason, in other words, attempting to be rational by suppressing their desire and emotions. Self-interest and morality in their situation have certainly become blurred lines which explains Nana delightfully cheated from her stoic and toiled husband to her first presumed-dead one. The only act of resistance against this particular women-oppressive system seems, according to Andini, to be smoking and cheating from your husband, exactly like Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878) and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), although she did not smoke and poured her frustration as being the greatest spendthrift in town.
Overall, I expect more of a political climate and social portrait of an ethnic family rather than watching a mother’s standstill of “surrendering to the fate”, obvious sympathy-baiting that seems to ask for self-pity on “are the women guilty of the men’s fate” semi-sexist questions. I completely agree that how Indonesian ideas of feminism is not at all in the nature of Western women’s rights movement on the basis of the equality of the sexes, but instead a collectivist compartmentalization to adhere into the Kantian “general good” of preserving your already-existent family, no matter what costs, has become demeaning in even modern arts.
This, I think, is what still lacks in modern Indonesian cinema, even in any artistic expression, even though the premises are exquisite. The Ego dissolution flourishing in the culture of being candor and mindful for surrendering with situations permeates into the nationally known arts since these values stimulate the regional, cultural identity awareness on ethnic women. This, undeliberately, generalize the collectivist mentality through art and entertainment mediums. Truthfully, I fail to sympathize with the characters due to this ego dissolution. Unlike Fachri Albar as Gambir in Pintu Terlarang (2009), or Slamet Rahardjo as an astounding Captain de Borst in the classic November 1828 (1979), these almost “dominantly egocentric” filmmakings touch the theme of (artistic) cultural identities and convey soliloquizing characters into even the cold-hearted audience like me and managed to capture their philosophy perfectly.
