Skip to main content

Revolutions as innovation

Today at our first outing for the 'innovation module' we were asked to arrange ourselves in a line chronologically according to our favourite 'innovation'. These ranged from 'Skype' through television to the domestication of wheat and fire! (My own preferred option was monasticism)! But the nearest in chronology was the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia. This was problematic as I tend to imagine that something counts as innovation only when it has worked, been adopted, is a part of our given reality.

The revolutions in both Egypt and Tunisia are works in progress. When Chou En Lai was asked what he thought the impact of the French Revolution had been, he is meant to have replied, 'It is too early to say'! But even with a more compressed time scale, it is certainly too early to ascribe to either North African revolutions the character of a success (given that we know what 'success' would look like). The Egyptian one in particular is not, even yet, over that over-emphasized 'tipping point' and the agencies of reaction, today, appear to be fully activated.

I would wish for them an East European outcome: a relatively orderly transition to a functioning, if dysfunctional at another level, democracy that brings you into the dull round of politely contested politics. However, I fear other potential outcomes - politics is an uncertain unfolding in which determined forces (even if soundly in the minority) can play major, indeed defining, roles.

My model for this is always the Russian Revolution (February rather than the October coup). Here with the monarchy displaced and broadly representative forces in place an opportunity arose for a difficult but real transition to an inclusive polity. However, those forces dallied to destruction - a constituent assembly postponed, a war continued and the illusion held of no enemies to the 'left' only seen from the 'right' - and all was undone by the determined work of the Bolsheviks whose coup (and brilliant strategies of co-option and propaganda) successfully set Russia on an alternate (and deeply damaging) course.

One of the factors of this displacement of reasonable by ruthless men was a profound underestimation both of the utter weariness of war and of the tensions that existed between classes that were to generate such extraordinary levels of violence.

The problem with 'revolutionary liberalism' (or liberals entangled in revolution) is that they seriously underestimate the power of passions to derail as well as push forward revolutionary action and their fastidious reticence to manipulate and direct such passion. It often leaves them at a crippling disadvantage to darker powers. Let us hope that upheavals in the Middle East allow sufficient space for transitions that do not only rely on the understandable, pent up frustrations of subject people.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age

Searching for paradise in the hidden Himalayas

At moments of dislocation and intense social uncertainty people will appear offering the possibility of another land where people will be blessed, liberated and genuinely at home. In this case, it was not 'Brexit' but a hidden land of actual immortality, enfolded within the mountain ranges around Mt Kanchenjunga on the Nepalese/Sikkim border. Unlike Shangri-la, Beyul Demoshong was not simply a physical space, carefully hidden (as imagined in Hilton's Lost Horizon) but an occulted place spiritually hidden. The person offering this journey and opening the way to it was the 'crazy lama', Tulshuk Lingpa. Lingpa was a 'terton' a finder of 'terma' which were texts magically hidden until discovered at the right moment for them to be of maximum usefulness to people's spiritual development. They were often hidden by Padmasambhava, the robust wonder-working bringer of Buddhism to Tibet; and, Tibetan Buddhism is alive with such discoveries (though und

Parzival and the neutral angels

Fresh from contemplating 'Lost Christianity', I read Lindsay Clarke's fabulous re-telling of Wolfram von Eschenbach's poem, 'Parzival and the Stone from Heaven' from which 'Christendom' is lost! Von Eschenbach was a sacred poet but one of ecumenical sympathies where not only is Parzival's final battle (unknowingly) with his brother, the piebald Saracen, Feirefiz, essential to his self-discovery but the two of them enter the Grail castle together and are granted together a vision of the 'stone' that is the Grail. When Feirefiz asks whether it is permitted to see this Christian  mystery, Parzival answers (in Clarke's version) yes for, "all Nature's increase is there, so I think that this stone from Heaven must be a living emblem of the earth itself, which is mother and father to us all." There are knights, ladies, sorcerers, hermits and wise old hags abounding in Eschenbach's world but interestingly for a mediev