It is no criticism of our redoubtable corps of foreign correspondents to remark that once an arena goes (in the modern military jargon) ‘kinetic’, sociology goes out of the window.
It is no criticism of our redoubtable corps of foreign correspondents to remark that once an arena goes (in the modern military jargon) ‘kinetic’, sociology goes out of the window. When there are battles to report, a correspondent’s instinct is to find the action and describe it. News is what good journalists do, first and foremost. In the claimed Arab Spring this year, therefore, the ebb and flow of conflict is at the centre of media reports.
And of course the ebb and flow of conflict matters, urgently. But (for me at least) the urgency becomes a problem. Once we put war reporting at the centre of news and commentary, it displaces inquiry into the psychology of the participants.
Being presented daily with tidings of battle, we become prone to take the dramatis personae as a kind of given. A battle has two sides, two armies — in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, the Rebels and the Patriots; in today’s Arab Spring reportage, the ‘forces loyal to the regime’ and the democrats/revolutionaries/reformists/protestors. As with pieces on a chessboard, we note the advances, stalemates and retreats, and look for assessments of numbers and capabilities. On the government side we feel we don’t need to know much about the men inside the uniforms; and maybe we’re right. But what about the revolutionaries? Volunteers in the fullest sense, what do they think they’re doing? Why are they risking life and limb in the attempt? Are we as curious about this as we ought to be?
I’m not suggesting that reporting of the Arab Spring has lacked for interviews with protestors: our correspondents have done a valiant job gathering vox populi. In the trade it’s called (I’m afraid) ‘colour’ or ‘background’. But what we are short of from Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria and Yemen is systematic analysis of the composition and numbers of the agitators; or any serious attempt to assess in quantitative terms the class, age and background of the ordinary rebels, or to divine and classify their hopes and intentions.
In Britain, as the mock-battle of a general election approaches, we spend much effort on what might called the anthropology of public opinion. But during this Arab Spring one could be forgiven for gaining no more than a generalised impression that the trouble is being caused by a load of rather idealistic young men with mobile phones and Facebook accounts. In British election campaigns we became familiar with Essex Man, Mondeo Man, White Van Man and Worcester Woman. In the Arab world this summer I want to hear about Cairo Kid, Tunis Teen-Rebel, Benghazi Boy, Syrian Student, Damascus Dreamer, Aleppo Aspirational and Homs Hopeful.
Being (in historiographical terms) a bit of a Marxist, my instinct is always to follow the money: to view — or try to view — social or political earthquakes in terms of the clash of economic interests. It follows that my own bent has been to ask if revolts in North Africa and now Syria are really just cries of despair from an increasingly educated and in-touch generation of (mostly) young and (often) unemployed Arab men, at the failure of their prospects to keep pace with their hopes — it being easiest to blame the despotism or dysfunction of their governments for what is at root economic failure. My analysis would dampen optimism about the outcome of revolution because after the revolution the poor will still be poor, the country will still be an economic and industrial invalid kept alive on drug injections of hydrocarbon revenues, and one corrupt tyranny will therefore tend to be replaced by another.
The argument is easy to make. And I may be right. But the simplicities of my reductionist view have been challenged by conversations with a young white British friend who returned (before the unrest in Syria really got going) from teaching English in Homs. His was a private academy, and most of his class were more or less privileged kids, with not unreasonable aspirations for adult life in Syria or abroad. He keeps in touch with some of them. He had not seen them as fertile ground for agitators or revolutionaries.
But (he tells me) many of them seem to have been as bitten by the bug as those you might call the victims of the Assad regime. Though not themselves downtrodden (he says), they feel humiliated for their countrymen and country, in the face of a police state so unlikeable that even its beneficiaries (he says) cannot like it.
He adds that to Arabs he knows, the sight of Arab blood being spilt at the hands of other Arabs is very shameful; and victimhood, even by proxy, has helped fuel indignation. There is also (he says) something ‘attractive’ (his word) to some of his students in the picture of young Arab men standing up to authority and force: heroism alone, almost regardless of cause, appeals to them, not least because they feel their countrymen as a whole have been downtrodden for a generation. ‘There’s also,’ he added, ‘the simple matter of people seeing which way things are going, and not wanting to sink with the Baathist ship.’
I asked him if revolution had become cool, cultish, chic among the young. No, he said, it wasn’t that: not in Syria. In Iran (where he has also spent time) being a democrat a badge of being middle-class and educated. ‘Some young people there wear [the revolutionary] green almost as a fashion statement’; but in Syria being a rebel was too dangerous to be a question of fashion.
By my analysis these Homs kids ought to be either apathetic or sympathetic to a regime which underwrote their own prospects. But it seems not. True, my friend spoke more of honour, shame and heroism than of democracy; but he spoke little of money, of despair or of unemployment.
So perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe it isn’t about jobs, but about something even the rich can feel: shame.
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