The New York Times’ print front page has a photo today of a bunch of scruffy Egyptian youth, sitting around their laptops, that encapsulates for me one puzzle of the Egyptian protests and others like them. These self-consciously hip youngsters, some with Rastafarian-inspired big urban hair, coolly dragging on their cigarettes with a Jimmy-Dean-ian detachment, sporting heavy-rimmed retro black eyeglasses, could easily be planning the next anti-globalization WTO street action if they were in the West. They appear to be the identical demographic that smashes Starbucks stores in Seattle during international trade meetings or that occupies university administration buildings to demand more ethnic studies courses and affirmative action admissions. When such youth voice their overheated moral indignation in the West, my view is: Why should anyone listen to them? They don’t know a thing about the world; they have never had the responsibility of running a business, have only intermittently worked, have no parental duties, and believe themselves to be the first people in the history of the world to feel indignation about poverty or inequality and are all the more proud of themselves for doing so. The Western press loves to glorify such ignorant protesters in the U.S. or Europe, however, because a. it gives them a story, and b. the almost inevitable left-wing slant of youth protests fits nicely with the press’s own pretensions towards “progressive” enlightenment.
So why should we take the youth movement any more seriously when it erupts in repressive or totalitarian regimes? Undoubtedly, youth in Third World or underdeveloped countries are less spoiled than those in the West. They risk more in facing down constitutionally unconstrained authorities—see Tianamen Square. And to their credit, the Egyptian youth do not seem to be advocating violence. I do not know who was behind the looting and destruction of government buildings earlier in the protests. But is the Egyptian youth’s knowledge of injustice any more grounded than the knowledge of the French students protesting an increase in the absurdly low French retirement age? The youth demographic seems right this time, but by coincidence or because of true insight? Obviously, there are other demographics—older adults, professionals—that are out there protesting as well. Without disputing the justice of their cause (though I may add that there may be some slight validity to the idea that the repressiveness of the Egyptian power structure must be balanced against the threat of an Islamic uprising in its stead) we hear little indications every now and then that the silent majority of middle class Egyptians might not be fully on board the protests—but perhaps only because they rightly fear the break-down of law and order.
Was there a youth element to the American revolution? My impression is not. There was, however, to the revolutions of 1848. The Peasant’s Revolt? Anti-slavery protests? Wordsworth loved the French Revolution (rightly?):
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven!”
It would be interesting to classify revolutions and efforts at mass social change by the presence of romantically-inclined youth.
Because I have become deeply conscious of the fragility of law and order, I am wary of almost all efforts to disrupt it. (Again, I recognize that most of the Egyptian protesters are not calling for the violent overthrow of the regime.) I am frankly no fan of the original Tea Party’s dumping of tea, and find some of the colonists’ rhetoric almost as overblown as that of the current Tea party. But perhaps when the regime that brings you law and order is a corrupt, authoritarian one, there are worse calamities than the breakdown of the rule of law. Perhaps.
