Ideology Rush! Your Good Society is in them thar (Egyptian) hills!
Gotta dream boy? / Gotta song? / Paint your wagon / And come along!
The race to frame the Egyptian uprising resembles a kind of gold rush of global discourse; what might be termed an ‘ideology rush’, in which pundits vie with one another in a furious dash to apply competing interpretations of events.
In this contest, the upheaval in Egypt is subject to multiple readings, as interested commentators each find proof of their own ideological proclivities in the political drama enacted in Tahrir square.
In an ideology rush, barriers of plausibility may be hurdled with impunity in order to co-opt a current event to a set of beliefs about the world. Political journalist Mehdi Hasan, for example, has noted with incredulity the efforts of neo-conservatives to claim Egypt for themselves.
the idea that Bush fought for democracy in the Middle East in general and Egypt, in particular, is risible. Is this the same Bush who handed over $1.3bn in US military aid to the dictatorship in Cairo during each of his eight years in office? Is this the same Bush who said, in April 2004: "I'm pleased to welcome my friend Hosni Mubarak to my home," adding, "I look forward to hearing his wise counsel . . ."
Australian public intellectual Guy Rundle has provided a provocative and somewhat tongue in cheek typology of what he sees as nine competing ideologically framed interpretations of what is going on in Egypt. Rundle is particularly severe on what he calls ‘Twitterism’, which he explains as the view that
New media alone created this uprising, and any result will be networked dehierachised TED webinar multitasking. Idiots.
Rundle’s blunt skepticism in this regard is to be preferred to the assessment of social media cheer leaders who glibly conflate means and causes. However, postmodern communication technologies are essential to the promulgation of ideology rushes as rapid-fire intepretations are blogged, vlogged, tweeted, facebooked and opined; ‘liked’, ‘retweeted’, hyperlinked, ‘commented’ upon and generally emailed around. Glib explanations rooted in particular views of how the world works can draw literally millions of adherents on the back of a single mind bomb factoid or some clever word play gone viral.
So how should we view events in Egypt? Rundle favors what he terms a ‘liberationist’ perspective, which he describes as essentially anti-grand-ideological approach:
The uprising has multi-layered causes and the participating groups have multiple aims. Any attempt to define its present legitimacy in terms of its future course is essentially a category error, and implicitly imperialist.
In a gold rush, the initial frenzy over alluvial deposits gives rise to a transition through to increasingly more capital intensive and complex means of extracting deeper lodes. The small scale prospectors are weeded out as greater resources become mandatory for economically successful operations. It is perhaps not stretching the analogy too far to see a similar process in the wake of an ideology rush, as the commotion and fury of the punditry gives way first to the publication of longer magazine items and then ‘current affairs’ book titles, before the wheels of academic scholarship requiring investment of time and painstaking method take over. But even in the latter stage, while the contest may become slower moving, better empirically grounded and more sophisticated, it is unlikely to ever entirely subside, as historians, social scientists and others battle on with competing explanations of the available data. Indeed, as time passes, new conditions will inevitably condition how the past is viewed. History, as Dutch Historian Pieter Geyl famously observed, is an argument without end.
