The Middle East: Tribesmen v. Twitters

Clearly, something great is unfolding in the Middle East. Thanks to the Internet and cellphones, those mass-based technologies that are proving to be the great equalizers of our century, disseminating information far and wide in remote villages and harsh deserts of the Middle East, the minds of the youths of these lands have been opened to new and great possibilities. They now are hungry for change and have the freedom to say it. They want to be treated with dignity. They want the duties and obligations of full-fledged citizens and discard the slavish dispositions and passive resignations of subjects they acquired from their tyrannical regimes.

But what are the obligations of a citizen in a democratic republic? What makes a good citizen? It begins first and foremost with understanding the foundations of self-rule, both political and moral.

Democracy in its practical political sense is equated with equality that is the basis of one-man, one-vote principle, of self-rule that is the foundation of republicanism, of enlightened representation through the equal consent of its citizenry. The individual is the source of sovereign power, but whose power he equally shares with his fellowmen through a representative government that he and the others empower, to represent his and their interests. But that individual together with the rest must be wise, enlightened, and just. And insofar as he and they are ruled sometimes by unruly passions and prejudices, a representative government provides the mechanisms with which to check such excesses.

Michael Novak puts it this way:

. . . What Americans meant by liberty are those acts that are made from reflection and choice. The acts that we commit ourselves to when we have reflected on the alternatives and when we understand the consequences.
That's freedom.

What you do by impulse, by contrast, is not freedom; that's slavery to your impulses. Such slavery is what the animals live under. They're hungry; they need to eat. That's not freedom; it's animal instinct.

Freedom is not doing what you want to do; freedom is doing what, after reflection, you know you ought to do. That's what freedom is, and that's why early American thought has been summed up thus: "Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law." Freedom springs from self-government,after reflection and calm deliberate choice.

. . . To have reflection and choice, you need people with enough virtue to have command of their passions. You need people, that is, with the habits that allow them to reflect, to take time to be dispassionate, to see consequences clearly, and then to make a choice based upon commitment. None of us act that way all the time. But we do aspire to have at least sufficient virtue to live responsibly. For how can a people unable to govern their passions in their private lives possibly be able to practice self-government in their public lives? It doesn't compute. In short, freedom in a republic is not feasible without virtue in a republic. . .

Democracy unlike tyranny guarantees a liberal space where freedom in all its facets can flourish. Where conditions of freedom are absent, as manifest in a nation’s value-system steeped in class-consciousness and inequality, or absence of security for movement of goods and people, or in an unenlightened citizenry, then corrupt elections ensue, and bad regimes come to power.

The Middle East is at a crossroads. Either it moves forward or falls backward. As tribesmen should be made to understand the virtues and obligations of becoming members of a political community, so should twitters be made to see that their social movement needs a proper grounding on the virtues and obligations of a republican citizenship.