All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
The words are by Yeats, from "Easter, 1916" - a poem written about his Ireland.
And here is the powerful opening of James Carroll's piece on Egypt A new world dawns digitally:
‘CHANGED, changed utterly.’’ W.B. Yeats’ great phrase applies to Egypt, and the Arab world broadly, even as events there continue to unfold. How deeply into the structures of politics the transformation goes, even abstracting from particular outcomes in Egypt, won’t soon be clear. As revolutions always show, the return of fierce repression remains a lively possibility, as much in Tunis as in Cairo. Whether, how, and when democratic liberalism can build on the ruins of despotism will also be indefinitely at issue. "A terrible beauty is born,’’ Yeats concluded about his revolution in Dublin. A like balance in the Middle East is still being struck.
Please keep reading.
Poets often tell us of our times, in powerful ways. Sometimes their words are set to song, as those of my generation heard the words of a poet born Robert Zimmerman, who set his words to music. In the penultimate stanza of one of his great songs, Bob Dylan wrote
Come mothers and fathers
throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'
Please get of of the new one
If you can't lend a hand
For the times they are a changin'.
Yeats' words are not sung, but like Dylan, he has words that are the repetitive end of stanzas, and it is appropriate that Carroll appropriates them and applies them to Egypt. Yeats saw the Easter Rising, Éirí Amach na Cásca, as the start of the end of British rule, even though after about a week it was brutally suppressed. Carroll sees the happenings in Egypt as something likewise irrepressible, and in this case, more widely applicable than the nation in which Tahrir Square is located. He writes about those in the square, the Arab peoples, noting
The utter change, of course, begins with them, all those heroes. "The street is not afraid of governments anymore,’’ one protester said. "The new generation, the generation of the Internet is fearless.’’ More than mere bravado, that sentiment reflects an essential note of what is different now.
Carroll argues that when the Internet was shut down, the spirit of the people was energized, not suppressed. We might note that it was never COMPLETELY shut down, because governments themselves are too dependent upon it, so are their economies. Information continued to flow - out of the country, and within the country. Carroll calls the attempts of the Egyptian government to shut down such communication a "feeble attempt" which demonstrated and enhanced the power of the internet.
Citizens of Egypt, especially the young, are citizens of the wired world. Of the Web. Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jack Dorsey have all been in Tahrir Square, too. More than an advance in information technology, comparable to cassette tape recorders in Tehran in 1979 or fax machines in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the social network wholly transcends the power of government — and is itself revolutionary. Changed utterly — a new form of consciousness is born.
Perhaps after reading this words, you will disagree. After all, the revolution in Egypt has still not fully played out. Other tyrannical governments may look at what happened in Egypt and find more effective ways of controlling the flow of information, even as they understand the need to maintain some form of it for commercial and even military reasons.
the social network - the words are far more applicable than the title of a popular movie. Information now flows in multiple directions simultaneously. Communication is changed. Learning is changed. Society is changed. The world is changed.
I work in an environment that still struggles with this change. Some schools still try to suppress it: our students are not allowed to have their electronics on during the school day. I have friends whose administrations are wiser, and are finding ways to utilize the electronics as a part of instruction/learning: after all, it is how the students communicate with one another. I first experienced this several years ago during the summer, where a young man I had taught suddenly passed away. His fellow students had set up a Face Book group, knowing he had suddenly been taken from his camp job to a hospital. He was in the hospital for around 2 weeks, by which time hundreds of students had joined the group, including many who had not known him. As soon as he passed, they all knew, even before his parents had begun to call family, friends and the school. That's how I found out, although I was not on Facebook. One of his classmates sent me an email.
Carrol argues that the world is changing in a way that requires our nation, our government, to recognize. He argues that the bi-polar approach upon which we relied during the Cold War is obsolete - even if many here saw the last administration try to substitute a "global war on terror" as a new principal of organizing our foreign policy, and of scaring the American people into supporting extraordinary and clearly excessive levels of military spending. The Anti-Communism of the Cold War was sufficient justification to support dictators who at least pretended to be on our side in that bi-polar conflict. And now? Carroll is quite blunt:
he choice between stability that requires shoring up friendly tyrants and uncontrolled popular unrest has been shown to be false. Despotic "stability’’ is the ultimate cause of unrest, not its cure.
And he warns us that the demonstrations in the Arab street are as much against the global economic order of which we are the most important player - he says we preside over it, although there I might quibble. It has lead to massive joblessness in the Arab world, and he cites that as a major cause of the spreading unrest across the Arab world, from Algeria to Yemen. He writes
There can be no political transformation without economic transformation. The global free market is brutal, but it is also self-defeating. Americans see that because the Arab street is every street now.
I stopped when I read those words. I look at the increasing joblessness in our own nation. I see, and have written about, the loss of hope for a better future among increasing numbers of our younger people. I also see older people being cast aside. Our politics are beginning to be fueled by anger, and it goes beyond the irrationality of some in the Tea Party movement. In some cases young people turn off again to politics. In the 60s, my late adolescence and young adulthood, when the sought for change reflected in the words of Dylan was not achieved despite the massive legislative achievement of the Great Society, we saw people begin to move to violence - against the government, against institutions, against the racial order that was changing too slowly. Perhaps some here do not understand the loss of hope that represented. Given how armed we are as a society a turning to violence remains possible here, in our current time.
But so does something else - a rejection of the way we do things without a turning to violence. A recognition that to turn to violence is to admit failure. A willingness to allow the government to resort to such violence only to see it undermine the government and not suppress the movement against which it is applied. That seems to be what is happening in Egypt. It is certainly possible in our nation.
But it may not be neat. It is likely not to flow smoothly - that perhaps was the illusion by which those of us in the 60s were misled. We understand that now.
The young people do as well. They communicate, they function, in a world very different than that in which we found ourselves almost half a century ago. As Carroll notes in his final paragraph, It is the business of change to be dangerous. It is dangerous to the powerful, who may arm thugs as they did in Egypt, or may fund supposed grass-roots organizations as have the Koch brothers in our nation.
The US Government is trying to manage the revolution in Egypt. Perhaps our officials might consider the verse from Dylan before the one I already quoted:
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'
Our change may be different than that of the Arab street. My students are quite aware. Some on the assignment about which I wrote yesterday went outside the bounds I had laid out to try to find a way to include what has been happening in Egypt, to try to understand. They are already thinking about what it means for their lives for their futures.
Picking up Carroll's final paragraph, which begins by warning us not to be glib about change, after the words I put in bold, we read this:
The new consciousness of the digital revolution can undermine basic human values, such as privacy. The crumbling of the old order can usher in unpredicted disorders. Protest heroes can lose their lives. Old tyrants can strike back, new ones arise. W.B. Yeats knew these things. His revolution had already failed when he wrote his poem. Yet he gave expression to a spirit that refused to be defeated. Terrible, beautiful — that spirit lives.
a spirit that refused to be defeated - Yeats was clearly prescient about that. And that spirit lives not only in Ireland, not only in Egypt, but across the world. We are now in a digital world, which gives that spirit new ways of expression, ways which the powers that be are seeking to control, even in supposed democratic systems like ours.
Supposed democratic systems - because how the digital revolution plays out will also change the nature of our government, of our society. It is already changing the lives of our young people. Things we value are being redefined, and it may be our children who teach us what that means.
It is a new world. It is still a dawning.
For the times, they are a-changin'
All changed, change utterly.
A terrible beauty is born
Peace?