City of Enlightenment

A deluge paralyzed Jakarta because of a drought of reasoning. Enlightenment thinkers believe that every problem has its solution. Our failure to overcome them is due to a thought deficit.

Kompas/Heru Sri Kumoro

Scavengers collect reusable and resaleable waste caught in a trash trap while a backhoe dredges the West Flood Canal in Jakarta on Sunday (12/1/2020), beyond piles of trash next to a manual sluice gate. The trapped garbage included plastic, tree waste and household waste.

The new city of Batavia was born as a biological child of a spirit of enlightenment. Steven Pinker, in Enlightenment Now (2018), identifies four pillars of the idealism of enlightenment: reasoning, science, humanism and progress. The colonial (transitional) regimes of France and Britain, and later the Netherlands, tried to practice the harmony of enlightenment, with the deficit of humanism, in managing Batavia and its surroundings.

In 1808, Herman Willem Daendels was appointed by Napoleon\'s government to become governor general with the mission of "guarding Batavia from British attack". He left old Batavia in the lowlands of the harbor. He built a new Batavia in the plateau in the south, named Weltevreden (Menteng), meaning "calm satisfying". For the convenience and smoothness of the bureaucracy, the head office of the government was moved to Buitenzorg (Bogor), which was more friendly to European tastes. All of this was an attempt to realize Batavia as the Queen of the East.