Does past greatness imply present failure?
I’m referring to geopolitics here. I’ll admit the question is strange, but my answer is “yes, but only sometimes.” Over a year ago, events in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia kicked off the “Arab Spring.” The ones in Egypt, in particular, seemed so promising. After Nassar and Mubarek, it seemed that Egypt, the most populated Arab country, was on its way to become a free, democratic, and secular country. Unlike Iran, Israel, and many other “democracies” that are really theocracies, with varying degrees of repression, a traditional ally of the U.S. in the Arab world was coming around to the idea that a state religion is the antithesis of freedom—secularism seemed to reign. But the Spring has sprung—came the elections, and the Muslim Brotherhood assumed power.
Now the U.S. is forced to dance along a very slim tightrope like that guy that went over Niagara Falls. In a clumsy demonstration of Orwellian double-speak, the Obama administration isn’t calling what happened in Egypt a coup (it’s probably one of the few policy decisions that’s bipartisan, though). Of course it’s a coup! When the military deposes an elected president, irrespective of the popular sentiment, it’s a coup. It’s as if the people who hated George W. Bush or the people who hate Barack Obama had the U.S. military depose them. That’s not appropriate in a democracy. You throw the bums out at the ballot box (and this is the best argument for term and age limits and ending gerrymandering, by the way). Democracy is incompatible with a military-led government. Egypt is now a military dictatorship.
Recently, we have also learned that the Obama administration talked to Muslim Brotherhood leaders, trying to convince them to accept the coup. That’s like a tightrope walk over Niagara in a tornado. What are they thinking? They’re thinking about oil barges, other goods, and America’s fleet members coming through the canal, that’s what. In other words, they’re thinking greedily—business interests want stability, not chaos. One Egyptian—it doesn’t matter which side he’s on—mentioned that revolutions are chaotic. If we think of America’s own, it was chaotic too. The best policy is hands off and let the dust settle. But our leaders can’t seem to get beyond the habit of sticking America’s nose into everything. Let the chaos continue until a steady state is reached.
That said, what is the real reason for the chaos? My claim is that past greatness often hinders present progressive movements. If you compare the history of Egypt, or even the history of the entire Middle East, with the history of the U.S., you are talking thousands of years versus some two hundred plus. Note that I don’t count all of our British history because of the varied backgrounds of the people who settled North America, even though we were originally a British colony. The United States, as a stable nation, is an infant compared to those empires in the Old World. The Pharaohs ruled for centuries. Most of the time their rule was oppressive, but it was stable for long stretches.
In other words, the Old World has suffered oppressive regimes for centuries. On such a long time scale, it has relatively little historical knowledge about how a democracy should function. The U.S., on the other hand, has a hard time understanding how a country can collapse into an oppressive system of government because our only experience was with the Brits, whose sins were hardly comparable to those of ancient autocrats. Plato wrote of the “philosopher king,” but Plato was too stupid to recognize that no matter how good his original intentions, the autocrat is usually corrupted by the power he yields. Both greed and power must be regulated through the ballot box. Egypt and many other countries just can’t get past that. They are stuck in their history.
Maybe the correct name for this collective psychosis that occurs in so many of these countries is “overthrow he who screws up.” The idea that he who screws up can be voted out in the next election is foreign to people who live in areas of the world where a history of autocratic regimes is the norm. How can you otherwise explain the popularity of Mr. Putin in Russia when things looked so promising back in the nineties? People often choose the known over the unknown, so the Russians returned to a government dominated by an autocratic icon. These attitudes can be extrapolated to our own conservatives in the U.S. who think the sky will fall in with same-sex marriage, for example. It’s something they haven’t experienced before, so they’re uncomfortable with it. The traditional is comforting; the new is an unknown, therefore discomforting.
Like many things associated with human behavior, this tendency to take comfort in the traditional and known and resist the new and unknown probably has its origin in ancient tribal structure. To preserve tribal cohesion, everyone must think along the same lines. Doubt about the leaders and any leanings toward trying new ideas must be squashed. Many large ethnic groups are tribes in that sense. Even the Greeks, their ancient history so important to Western thought, have had to face that their history is filled with autocrats (Alexander the Great, for example). Their early attempts at democracy were too weak to endure. Now their country is in economic chaos. Autocratic figures also fill their recent history.
Sometimes the only solution is to recognize the tribal nature of ethnic strife and separate the opposing forces. When Tito died, the strong hand that had controlled centuries-old ethnic hatreds in Yugoslavia was gone. Now that the parties are separated, there exists some semblance of peace in the region. Iraq is still smoldering as Sunnis, Shi’ites, and Kurds battle for dominance—a three-state solution is radical, perhaps, but necessary. A similar situation exists in Syria and Jordan. Note that all these areas are Old World and have suffered centuries of autocratic rule.
Social scientists are so prolific that it’s difficult to keep up with new ideas, but I’ve never seen ideas like this expressed. Historians record and interpret world events. Political scientists study governments, political movements, and what moves them. Anthropologists analyze tribal, ethnic, and other social structures. Perhaps we need a new discipline called psycho-political-anthropological history that crosses traditional academic taxonomies to point out and study these ideas. Just sayin’….
And so it goes….
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