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The Arab Rulers' New Clothes
The mighty ruler parades before the people, clothed in all the accoutrements of power. His name is Qaddafi, Mubarak, Ben Ali.
Suddenly, a youthful voice rings out. “Look, he has no clothes!”
Another voice takes up the refrain, then another. Soon the same cry echoes throughout the crowd: “He has no clothes!” And everyone can see that it is true.
The acceleration of events in the Arab world caught observers by surprise. How could all-powerful autocrats lose their aura of authority so fast? And why did an uprising that began in Tunisia spread to so many other countries so quickly?
“Tunisia is unlikely to set off copycat insurrections,” wrote the hapless Tony Karon on Time.com last January 18. The prediction was wrong but the metaphor was apt. Rather than a domino effect – Tunisia and Egypt aren’t neighbors, so how can they be dominoes? – it is surely more correct to speak of a “copycat effect.” What most commentators underestimated was the power of imitation as a force in human events. If a copycat effect can shake seemingly impregnable regimes to their very foundations, that’s because all political authority ultimately rests on the same force to begin with.
In Hans Christian Andersen’s fable, everyone applauds the emperor’s splendid new raiment as long as everyone else does. The copycat effect is powerful enough to make the crowd overlook the evidence of their own eyes. But once a child blurts out the truth, the tide of imitation turns, and the unanimous cheers give way to unanimous jeers.
Despite the turnabout, one thing remains the same: the unanimity of the crowd. First the ruler is a wonder to behold – everyone says so! Then he’s a vainglorious fool – everyone says so! In Tunisia, those who once sang Ben Ali’s praises have taken to trumpeting their scorn for him. Of course, they may formerly have hidden their true feelings out of fear of the police. But now even the police have gotten into the act. A graffito spotted in the streets of Tunis reads: “Ben Ali, the police spit on you!”
Fear itself is subject to the copycat effect. Everyone will be afraid to rebel against a vicious tyrant as long as everyone else is. But if everyone loses their fear at once, they might well discover that, together, they have the power to chase away the Big Bad Wolf. And then they may wonder why they ever bowed to his authority in the first place.
This is the perennial mystery of political power, the paradox of voluntary servitude.1 The dizzyingly fast collapse of Ben Ali and Mubarak reminds us of a fundamental truth: all government ultimately depends on the consent of the governed. A ruthless police state may dominate its own people through the force of arms, but even the men who wield those arms are drawn from the ranks of the people. If, as in Egypt and Tunisia, they refuse to massacre their fellow citizens, the ruler will suddenly find himself naked. So what made the people cede their power to one man and let him lord it over them?
The classic answer to this question is the one proposed by Thomas Hobbes. Writing during the bloody English Civil War of the 17th century, Hobbes argued that, in the absence of strong state authority, men are apt to menace each other like wolves. The only solution is for them to pool their violence together and surrender it to a single individual, effectively setting him up as the Big Bad Wolf who will keep everybody else in line.
This rational argument for submission to an established ruler begs the question of how the institution of kingship ever got off the ground. If men are as prone to conflict as Hobbes contends, how could they agree upon the choice of a king? Wouldn’t everyone fight for the privilege of lording it over everyone else? To pierce the mystery of political power, one would need to identify some primeval mechanism that would allow people to unite around a single individual.
In a revolutionary work of social thought entitled Violence and the Sacred, cultural theorist René Girard proposed an original solution to the mystery of how political power emerged along with religion itself. For Girard, as for Hobbes, human society is not possible without overcoming the problem of internal violence. But rather than imagining a social contract in which the parties pool their violence together figuratively and entrust it to a sovereign, Girard takes as his starting point a social breakdown in which the members of a mob pool their violence together literally and direct it at a scapegoat. People naturally tend to imitate each other in attacking the same target: this is what Girard calls the scapegoat mechanism.
There is nothing fanciful about this scenario. In the absence of state authority, crises and conflicts often lead to lynchings.2 Girard finds traces of such events in many pagan myths. He hypothesizes that sacrificial rituals began as deliberate reenactments of episodes in which the unity of a group was restored through a spontaneous act of collective violence against a single victim. Posthumously, the victim may have been celebrated as a hero or god for miraculously bringing peace to a warring community. New victims would be groomed to take up the same momentous task. That’s where the first kings came in. They were not rulers in the modern sense at all, but victims in waiting who, over the course of a long evolution, succeeded in parlaying the prestige of their office into real political authority.
In The Golden Bough, James Frazer showed that the earliest kings served primarily as scapegoats for events beyond their control. Among the tribes of the Upper Nile, for example, the king’s main duty is keeping drought at bay. As long as the rain falls and the crops flourish, the people are satisfied he is doing his job. But when the clouds dry up, the king’s angry subjects blame him for holding out on them. “Worshipped as a god one day,” Frazer writes, “he is killed as a criminal the next.”
Frazer explained such behavior purely in terms of the outlandish religious beliefs surrounding it. What Frazer missed is the crucial social role played by the scapegoat king in a time of crisis. The longer a crisis like a drought lasts, Girard notes, the more tensions are going to rise. It’s not the king’s fault or anybody else’s, but an empty stomach will make people angry even when nobody is to blame. Directing their rage at the king may be a good way for the subjects to avoid taking their frustrations out on each other.
Doing fieldwork among the Nilotic tribes of Southeastern Sudan in the 1980s, Dutch anthropologist Simon Simonse studied rainmaking kings who are halfway along the evolutionary path posited by Girard: they are skillful at milking their position for maximum advantage but still face death at the hands of the group if a drought drags on too long. Even when relations are cordial, “the possibility of an assault on the King is never completely absent from the minds of his subjects.”3
The King serves as everyone’s favorite enemy, drawing to himself the tensions arising from clan, village or generational rivalries. With respect to these rivalries he “is the unifying factor, a shared focus of attention, a centre,” Simonse writes. Without the King to kick around, “the centre cannot hold and society falls apart, reverting to its constitutive segments.” At the death of a King, the Shilluk say: “The country is no more.”4
In Egypt, Mubarak succeeded in uniting the society’s most disparate elements against him. Here is how a French journalist described the scene in Tahrir Square during the revolt:
“Youths, intellectuals, 1970’s militants, managerial types, unemployed workers, elegant bourgeois, beggars or bearded Muslim activists, men, often-veiled women, elderly persons or entire families, everyone is here. The common enemy is on all the banners: Mubarak, leave!”5
After their enemy’s abrupt exit, some Egyptians felt strangely bereft. “The whole country is Hosni Mubarak,” a man on a Cairo street corner told a reporter two months after his ouster. “That’s why it’s hard to get Hosni Mubarak out of Egypt.” Another man voiced similar thoughts. “He was like God, and we still keep saying that he is ruling Egypt, even though he has been arrested.” During his nearly 30 years in power, the reporter explains, Mubarak “engaged in the alchemy of a typical autocrat, transforming his mortal identity to that of near deity – or in the Egyptian context, pharaoh.”6
In ancient Egypt, the dead sovereign was equated with the dismembered god Osiris whose limbs were scattered across the land like seeds and who was resurrected each year with the flooding of the Nile.7 Thousands of years later, the reign of Egypt’s rulers still rests on their ability to provide the people with grain. Subsidized bread, costing a penny a loaf, “is the most important thing the government gives to the people,” according to Egyptian economist Mohamed Abu Pasha.8 Ever since Nasser, Egypt’s leaders have handed out subsidized bread like manna from heaven.
Once self-sufficient in wheat, Egypt is now the world’s biggest importer. Its bread supply depends less on the flood of the Nile than on an international market where the price of wheat has doubled since 2005.9 Governments across the region are facing a similar challenge. Algeria, Morocco, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Libya and Tunisia all count among the world’s top 20 wheat importers. Yet the problem is less outright hunger – the regimes have done their best to maintain the subsidies – than the resentment people feel at seeing the ruler and his cronies grow rich when others must swelter in crowded bread lines.10 That is what has sparked the revolts.
If all his subjects band together at once against him, the Big Bad Wolf stands revealed as a paper tiger. He suddenly reverts from predator to victim, a metamorphosis ritually enacted at a Nilotic rain king’s installation. After capturing the new king in the bush as if he were a ferocious wild animal, the Lokoya transform him into a grazing beast of prey. The Lulubo compare a new rainmaker to a domestic animal marked for sacrifice, describing him as “taken to be cut.”11
These ritual observances foreshadow the ultimate fate of such rulers. For when the rain clouds dry up – or prices rise sky-high on international commodity markets – the blame will fall on them. Shorn of their wolf’s clothing, they will be exposed as sacrificial sheep.
That brings us to the picture accompanying this article.12 Taken in Tahrir Square last March 18, it shows a banner depicting (right to left) Mubarak, Ben Ali, Qaddafi and Yemen’s Saleh as sheep in a pasture. Why sheep? Take a look in the lower right-hand corner. The first thing you see may be an outstretched cell phone – someone is recording the placard using the digital technology that has played such a big role in the Arab revolts. But just behind the cell phone, a throwback to a much older technology is visible: a butcher’s knife. The knife makes the poster’s meaning clear: the once-powerful dictators are sacrificial sheep waiting “to be cut.”
But who will do the cutting? In Egypt, when the “Old Man” refused to go quietly, the army cut him loose. By not bowing to popular pressure, Mubarak gave the army the chance to position itself as the people’s savior. But the army only sacrificed him to save the regime.
Frazer describes a “modern, but doubtless ancient, Arab custom of burying ‘the Old Man’, namely a sheaf of wheat, in the harvest field and praying that he may return from the dead.” The heroic young Egyptians who sowed the seeds of revolt have reaped a bitter harvest: a ruling council of old men in uniform intent on preserving the military’s six-decade grip on power. By cannily sacrificing Mubarak, they have consolidated their own prestige. According to a recent Pew survey,13 the most popular man in Egypt today is Field Marshal Mohamed Tantawi, the head of the military junta, which unilaterally drew up constitutional changes and rammed them through in a quickie referendum that saw opposition spokesman Mohamed ElBaradei turned away from a polling place by a stone-throwing mob.
Even if Mubarak is a sacrificial sheep, that hardly makes him an innocent lamb. He is one ruler whose come-uppance was royally deserved. But is he any guiltier than the men running Egypt today? Maikel Nabil, a young blogger who was active in Tahrir Square, posted personal testimony and information from human rights groups about the army’s brutal treatment of protesters and its torture of detainees.14 At the end of March, the army arrested him. On April 8, thousands of protesters poured into Tahrir Square once more. To demand the release of Nabil? No, to call for the prosecution of Mubarak. Just like old times…
Meanwhile, the army found Nabil guilty with record speed. Displaying the “superb professionalism” so admired by Roger Cohen,15 it dispensed with defense arguments and cut to the chase, sentencing Nabil to three years in prison for spreading false news and insulting the military. A secular pacifist from a Coptic Christian family, Nabil makes an easy target. Is that any reason to lock him up?
Egypt’s military leaders understand the “scapegoat mechanism” and how to manipulate it to generate consensus. The Western media have been slow to recognize their success. Why? Journalists are not immune to the copycat effect. No one wants to be the first to say the Egyptian revolution has no clothes.
Mark Anspach is an anthropologist and the editor of Oedipus Unbound: Selected Writings on Rivalry and Desire by René Girard (Stanford, 2004).
References
1 On the relevance of La Boétie’s 16th-century Discourse on Voluntary Servitude for the violence exercised by states against their own populations today, see the important new book by Franco-Canadian philosopher Paul Dumouchel, Le Sacrifice Inutile (Flammarion, 2011).
2 During the Tahrir Square protests, individuals accused of being police informers would too often find themselves beaten mercilessly by the crowd. “Someone points the finger at anyone who looks remotely suspicious and within seconds the mob reacts,” writes Jason Koutsoukis in an instructive account of a near-lynching: http://www.thecourier.com.au/news/world/world/general/in-this-atmosphere-lynching-is-only-a-matter-of-time/2067668.aspx
3 Simon Simonse, Kings of Disaster: Dualism, Centralism and the Scapegoat King in Southeastern Sudan, Leiden, Brill, 1992, p. 360.
4 Ibid., pp. 214, 281.
5 Jean-Paul Mari, “Huit jours qui ont fait basculer l’Egypte,” Le Nouvel Observateur, Feb. 3-9, 2011, p. 42.
6 Michael Slackman, “Mubarak Leaves an Air of Wistfulness,” New York Times, April 20, 2011.
7 Simonse, Kings of Disaster, p. 397. Frazer discusses Osiris at length in The Golden Bough.
8 Hamza Hendawi (AP), “Russia’s grain ban showcases Egypt’s love of bread,” thedailynewsegypt.com, August 19, 2010.
9 Charles J. Hanley, “Egypt’s Cost of Bread Could Triple If Subsidies End,” huffingtonpost.com, March 28, 2011.
10 Annia Ciezadlo, “Let Them Eat Bread: How Food Subsidies Prevent (and Provoke) Revolutions in the Middle East,” foreignaffairs.com, March 23, 2011.
11 Simonse, Kings of Disaster, pp. 374, 377.
12 Photo by Mohamed Abd el-Ghany (Reuters).
14 http://www.maikelnabil.com/2011/03/army-and-people-wasnt-ever-one-hand.html
15 In “Hosni Mubarak Agonistes” (New York Times, Feb. 13, 2011), Cohen wrote: “The Egyptian army has shown superb professionalism. It can be the guarantor of an orderly transition.”