What happened to the Arab Spring? What seems to be happening
in the Kingdom of
Saudi Arabia Saudi
Arabia , Where Women's Suffrage is a new
idea,” published on November 2, 2015. To understand some of what's happening in
that region of the world, we need to develop a general idea about the evolution
of cultures.
Like ripples in a pond, a cultural trend begins with a
single event, and spreads horizontally while diminishing in intensity. It dies
out eventually unless it is fed by one or more exterior forces such as winds
from above or currents from below that would add energy to it, turning it into
a raging sea, for example.
Most cultural events live at least for a decade or two
because they are fed with enough energy provided by new artists embracing the
trend. You see this in such art forms as painting and sculpture that keep
evolving till they reach a “logical conclusion,” at which point they begin to
transform into a different trend. Often however, the old trend is replaced by
an entirely new one – at times one that is the antithesis of the old. In fact,
it can happen that the new comes into being as a backlash to the old having
gone to an exaggerated extreme.
The same thing happens more massively at the macrocosm level
when the entire culture is transformed from one package into another. Such
package would contain not only the arts but also the political expression,
literature, the leisure industries, dance, theater, sports, foods, the pop
subculture and all the rest. Without necessarily producing violence – though
such a thing can happen at times – the culture goes through a period of
upheaval if not a revolution during which time the old order breaks and makes
room for the new.
That is how a culture rejuvenates itself. But like a living
organism, a culture can only go through a limited number of cycles over the
decades or the centuries before it begins to feel its age. What happens then is
that the process of rejuvenation produces something that's not different from
the old. That is, the culture clones itself with each cycle as if it were
unable to sire a younger, more vigorous offspring.
When this happens, even a culture that has attained the
level of a civilization in its own right will stagnate for a long period of
time. It will even be seen to decline, if only in relative terms, because the
rest of the world will be advancing. This has been the fate of the ancient
civilizations in the East of Asia and its south, in the Middle East and the
Levant, as well as in North East Africa from Egypt
down south to Ethiopia .
Thus, the two burning questions of the day: what to make of
the Arab Spring? Is the apparent transformation in Saudi Arabia part of the Arab
Spring?
To answer those questions we must first establish that 22
very different countries are called Arab simply because they share one common
written language even if they speak, on a daily basis, in hundreds of different
dialects that can be as different from each other as Greek is from German.
Still, despite the fact that each has its own history, therefore its own core
culture, what happens in one country has the tendency to affect the others due
to the fact that modern communication has shrunk the world to the size of a
global village. In fact, Egypt
can affect Saudi Arabia in a
cultural sense no more and no less than China
or America
could.
What we saw happen in Egypt
recently, and what Carol Giacomo says is happening in Saudi Arabia ,
is the phenomenon of public apathy toward the idea of participating in the
elections. When it came to doing business such as the twinning of the Suez
Canal, the people of Egypt
roared like a lion not with their vocal cords but with their pocketbooks. As to
Saudi Arabia ,
the women told Carol Giacomo they are too busy doing business to bother with
the elections. Why is that?
Well, think of America ; what's the voter turn out
there? It is very low. And this is why the candidates who run for election
arrange to transport the voters to the polls. And those who do vote do it not
because they like someone's message but because they hate the opposition. That's
what they call democracy?
Nobody is fooled. The people of the world know that while
the idea of democracy started out as something good, it is now reaching its
twilight years. The best thing we can do as we watch the developments in the
Middle East and elsewhere in the world, is to be relaxed spectators and enjoy
the show rather than pontificate as to what should be happening that is not, or
what is happening that should not.