A l’occasion du 6me anniversaire de la mort de
Muhammad al-Bu`azîzi auto-immolé,
nous remettons notre essai de l’époque.
~
Well over a century ago, Karl Marx set out to come to grips with history by discovering its laws of motion. The philosophical and scientific underpinnings of this enterprise were significant; the allusion to Newton, deliberate.
In the aftermath, the laws he developed (the labor theory of value, the falling rate of profit, etc.) have proved a most uncertain guide to actual events on the ground. This does not per se
refute these laws themselves -- to see this, we need look no farther
than physics: Knowledge of the Schrödinger equation, Maxwell’s
equations and the rest, is of little help in predicting the evolution of
a hurricane or the flight of a bat. And even in the classical arena
of a single billiard-ball, prediction quickly breaks down unless the table is one of a sharply restricted set of shapes.
A
fortiori, predicting human events at any granularity finer than that of
the Kondratieff cycle finds little support in the laws of Marx. To
discern the trigger
of events (as opposed to their full background), we almost need to
stand Marx on his head: A man will not revolt because he is poor, but
he may well take to the streets from resentment of his better-off
neighbors. A huge amount of what happens in the world is the
immediate result of wounded pride. SUPERBIA, and its thwarting, lies coiled at the heart of events.
 |
| Pieter Bruegel der Ältere -- Das schlimmste der sieben Laster |
*
Thus, consider the astonishing wave of revolts these days in
the Arab world. The ultimate fostering causes and conditions
are many; but the spark that toppled the first of the dominoes was
the self-immolation of the Tunisian Muhammad al-Bu`azizi (محمد
البوعزيزي -- usually
transcribed Bouazizi).
Why did he do it?
The standard narrative is a dumbed-down, sanitized version of the actual roilings of Geist und Zeitgeist -- spirit and the spirit of the times. As:
When police confiscated his produce because he didn’t have a permit he became so sad that he set himself on fire in protest.
(http://arabcrunch.com/2011/01/the-last-facebook-status-update-of-bouazizi-who-set-him-self-on-fire-marking-starting-the-tunisian-revolution.html)
(Actually, lack of permit was not the problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Bouazizi)
… the desperate act of an unemployed man. Mohammed Bouazizi, 26, distraught when police confiscated his unlicensed produce stand, set himself on fire
-- Mona Eltahawy
Washington Post, Saturday, January 15, 2011
(Not quite right to call him unemployed; he worked as a street vendor.)
Likewise Le Monde (5 Jan 11):
Ce
diplômé au chômage s'était aspergé d'essence devant la préfecture,
après s'être fait confisquer la marchandise qu'il vendait dans la rue
par la police municipale parce qu'il n'avait pas les autorisations
nécessaires.
(Actually he was not a diplômé -- he may not even have finished high school. This meme crept in probably because it conforms more exactly to a self-pitying standard Western narrative: college graduate can’t find employment commensurate with his/her own outstanding excellence.)
And the New York Times:
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
March 1, 2011
Future
historians will long puzzle over how the self-immolation of a Tunisian
street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, in protest over the confiscation of his
fruit stand, managed to trigger popular uprisings across the
Arab/Muslim world.
Future historians may indeed wonder, if that is the narrative they are working from. Such an account leaves it incomprehensible why the man resorted to such an act -- “They took my bahnahhnahs! Pass the kerosene!” (shades of the Walrus and his Bucket) -- nor why it resonated so sharply among the populace: the more so since, as these same accounts acknowledge, petty police harassment of vendors was an everyday thing: a harassment that, indeed, pales beside the tortures that go on in the prisons, out of sight. And it highlights the foolishness of the Monday Morning Quarterbacks who point fingers at the intelligence community and demand to know why it did not predict this.
This morning, the Washington Post belatedly alludes to the truth:
The psycho-sociological crux is front-and-center in this
earlier, better article:
Slap to a Man’s Pride Set Off Tumult in Tunisia
Faida Hamdy, a 45-year-old municipal inspector in Sidi
Bouzid, a police officer’s daughter, was single, had a “strong personality” and
an unblemished record, her supervisor said. She inspected buildings,
investigated noise complaints and fined vendors like Mr. Bouazizi, whose
itinerant trade may or may not have been legal; no one seems to know.
On the morning of Dec. 17, when other vendors say Ms. Hamdy
tried to confiscate Mr. Bouazizi’s fruit, and then slapped him in the face for
trying to yank back his apples.
“She humiliated him,” said his
sister, Samia Bouazizi. “Everyone was watching.”
The point was not the apples, but being publically bitch-slapped by a policewoman.
This is not a narrative that Western liberals wish to hear. Neither Thomas Friedman, sucking such factors as “Google Earth”, “the Beijing Olympics”, and “something I’ve dubbed ‘Fayyadism’ ” out of his outsize thumb to explain it all, nor Hillary Clinton, peddling her one-size-fits-all Wellesley agenda around the world, is furthering comprehension. Nor will Marx help much -- more like Freud.
This is not a narrative that Western liberals wish to hear. Neither Thomas Friedman, sucking such factors as “Google Earth”, “the Beijing Olympics”, and “something I’ve dubbed ‘Fayyadism’ ” out of his outsize thumb to explain it all, nor Hillary Clinton, peddling her one-size-fits-all Wellesley agenda around the world, is furthering comprehension. Nor will Marx help much -- more like Freud.
 |
| Die materialistische Theorie, auf den Kopt gestellt |
Update: Indeed, as reported in the 4 April 2011 New
Yorker: "The initial slogan was 'Dignity Before Bread', because
Bouazizi was humiliated.”
[Update 6 Aug 2011] Sidi Bouzid: the
sorry, sodden aftermath.
In Tunisian Town of Arab Spring
Martyr, Disillusionment Seeps In
Triste mise à jour:
[Update 16 Sept 2012] Reflections on the subject, in
the wake of the Anti-Islamic Video affair, that led to the storming of
embassies:
~
The basic point here is not new. Perhaps the bottom of this page may become a repository of
similar observations. Thus,
Christine Stansell (American Moderns, p. 140), on the anarchist Emma Goldman
(whose floruit antedates America’s entry into WWI, and thus the Russian
Revolutions and the foundations of the subsequent CPs):
She argued that it was “spiritual hunger and unrest”, not
just economic oppression, that drove people to rebel.
Bertram D. Wolfe's autobiography, A Life in Two Centuries
(1981):
War fits even less than nationalism
into the materialist interpretation of history. … The driving forces of modern war are fierce untamable mass passions -- pride, anger, xenophobia … The ‘war aims’, the material motives and
calculations, had hastily to be improvised after war erupted, to give the
irrational explosion … an ostensibly rational explanation…
And, again in a Muslim context:
Pakistan’s generals and
diplomats were proud but easily bruised.
-- Steve Coll, Ghost Wars
(2004), p. 516
In the American sociological tradition, motives similar to these (which I have called by the grand old word Pride) have been discussed more academically and sedately under the rubric status anxiety. A valid perspective, certainly, but one that does not quite manage to get its arms around the deep upheavals that are shuddering through much of the world today. You don’t go to the public square and set yourself on fire out of status anxiety.
For a classic analysis of the role of Thwarted Superbia as the hidden key to mass behavior, see the account by Bernard Lewis, "The Roots of Muslim Rage" (1990).
~
When a subset seeks political independence,
Its intellectuals will exchange
second-class citizenship [in the extant larger polity] for a first-class
citizenship [albeit in a second-rate state] plus great privileges based on
rarity; its proletarians will exchange
hardships-with-snubs for possibly
greater hardships with national identification.
-- Ernest Gellner, Thought and
Change (1964), p. 172
[Updates & Afterthoughts]
Gideon Rachman meint, dass die Anerkennung eines verletzten
Nationalstolzes in vielen internationalen Krisenherden eine wichtige Rolle bei
der Konfliktlösung spielen könnte. "The implication of all this is that
solving international conflicts may involve thinking as much about emotions as
about interests. Sometimes the concession required to address a sense of
national or cultural humiliation may be impossible. Nobody is going to concede
a caliphate to tend to the wounded feelings of Isis. But sometimes the gestures
required to restore a sense of national pride may be relatively minor. Greece does
not seem to have extracted significant concessions from its creditors.
Nonetheless, a display of national defiance, combined with some linguistic and
technical changes, appears to have mollified the Greeks for now. As the west
contemplates a dangerous conflict with Russia and the ambitions of China, it
might remember that symbols can sometimes matter almost as much as
substance."
(Financial Times vom 09.03.2015)
[Update 9 February 2016] What the media remembers of this signal incident, has
settled back into banal economism, passing over in silence the
angles explored above:
Kasserine was one of the cradles of
the Arab Spring, which started in 2011 when a street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi,
set himself on fire in a neighboring province after being stopped by the police
from selling his produce.
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