What's next in Egypt? (also, What's the Use of Critical Thinking?)

[I know I haven't posted since early last summer, but I thought I’d share something I posted today on the private blog I maintain for one of my classes.  The class is freshman composition, and lately they’ve been reading about nonviolent resistance, Gandhi and MLK Jr.]

After 18 days of protests, the man who has sat as Egypt's head of state since 1981 (the year I was born) and whose administration has withstood even violent terrorist-style attacks, Hosni Mubarak, has resigned, following the recent example of Tunisia's former President, Ben Ali.  A transitional government is now left in the hands of the Supreme Military Council, an institution that perhaps would not have followed an order to shoot on the crowds even if Mubarak had given it.

A famous photograph was taken in the celebratory aftermath of another, perhaps similar, revolution when massive protests and violence led Romania's military to overthow Ceausescu's* communist administration in the last days of 1989.  The photograph (pictured to the right) is of the Romanian flag against the sky, with the red communist star in the center cut out.  Slavoj Zizek, the well-known Slovenian philosopher, says about the photograph that:

It is difficult to imagine a more salient index of the "open" character of a historical situation "in its becoming." 

Translation: the communist star represented the thing that imposed both meaning and order on human social existence in Romania (something Zizek calls the "Master Signifier"), and the hole left over represents both the exciting and terrifying possibility of meaning and order that now takes it's place.

Zizek further asserts that:

the duty of the critical intellectual...is precisely to occupy all the time...the place of this hole...  philosophy begins the moment we do not simply accept what exists as given ("It's like that!", "Law is law!" etc), but raise the question of how is what we encounter as actual also possible.  What characterizes philosophy is this "step back" from actuality into possibility... (Tarrying with the Negative 2)

These words return to my memory as I ponder what possibilities lie in wait for the people of Egypt.

But even more than that, I think of the various reasons why we're doing what we're doing in class...  Obviously the basic purpose of the course is to teach you how to write for college professors.  My job is to give you all the writing and structuring tools you need to make college writing as easy and painless as possible.  But the grander purpose of non-vocational, liberal arts and humanities courses is to prepare us to be critical thinkers (or "critical intellectuals," as Zizek says).  Do you agree with his assessment of the "duty of the critical intellectual?"  What do you think is the purpose of critical thinking?  What do you think is our duty as developing intellectuals?

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*Interesting social media sidenote: During the last speech of Egypt's former president Hosni Mubarak yesterday, the hashtag #Ceausescu started trending on Twitter, entering top 10.

Men shall learn wisdom, by affliction schooled*

I was disappointed to read the following in Jonathan Turley's Oct. 19 op-ed in USA Today, via Radley Balko:

Around the world, free speech is being sacrificed on the altar of religion. Whether defined as hate speech, discrimination or simple blasphemy, governments are declaring unlimited free speech as the enemy of freedom of religion. This growing movement has reached the United Nations, where religiously conservative countries received a boost in their campaign to pass an international blasphemy law. It came from the most unlikely of places: the United States.

But I was relieved to read the following today at the Washington Post, via Little Green Footballs, via Jeffrey Goldberg:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton criticized on Monday an attempt by Islamic countries to prohibit defamation of religions, saying such policies would restrict free speech.

"Some claim that the best way to protect the freedom of religion is to implement so-called anti-defamation policies. . . . I strongly disagree," Clinton said. "The protection of speech about religion is particularly important since persons of different faiths will inevitably hold divergent views on religious questions."

Nothing too complicated at work here. Just two fairly non-committal comments by Obama administration officials about a non-binding UN resolution transformed by the medium of the press into the following seeming contradiction: when faced with the mutually exclusive choice between blasphemy and censorship, the Obama administration sides with both against both.

This reminds me of a wide-ranging essay I read (skimmed) about two years ago by Slavoj Zizek, "Tolerance as Ideological Category," in which he attempts to wrestle with the "impasse of tolerating intolerance":

Liberalist multiculturalism preaches tolerance between cultures, while making it clear that true tolerance is fully possible only in the individualist Western culture, and thus legitimizes even military interventions as an extreme mode of fighting the other's intolerance...

(I.e. if there's one thing I can't stand, it's intolerance!) It's a fascinating essay, but I'm going to give it short-shrift and boil the conclusion to this: "the particular ethnic substance, our 'life-world,' which resists universality, is made of habits," (emphasis mine) and:

[t]his obscene underground of habits is what is really difficult to change, which is why the motto of every radical emancipatory politics is the same as the quote from Virgil that Freud chose as the exergue for his Interpretations of Dreams: Acheronta movebo - dare to move the underground!

Zizek, in this essay at least, seems still to consider humanity a universal function...as a featureless remnant derived from the subtraction of particular differences (humanity is the nothing left when one subtracts from the American man the habits of his American-ness and male-ness), but it strikes me, and perhaps Zizek would agree, that humanity is also a habit and that the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness would not seem so inalienable had I not learned them by rote. And perhaps, instead of horror and guilt at the news of Lakhdar Boumediene's treatment at Guantanamo Bay I should feel something else. Because it turns out that wisdom, if not information, is the fruit of torture.

"I'm an animal? I'm not human?"

You're welcome.

*from Agamemnon, by Aeschylus