— Amr Bargisi, a senior member of the Egyptian Union of Liberal Youth
Well! There’s a cold bucket of reality for everyone who hopes the Arab masses can Twitter and Facebook their way to liberty and prosperity.
Bargisi’s demand for his fellow Egyptians to study foreign thinkers who can equip them with useful ideas and concepts is brave. It’s not going to win him any praise from people who put political correctness above everything else.
“How dare he cite dead white European and American males as having something to teach the Egyptian people in their hour of turmoil,” they will say. “Does he not realize that Twitter, Al Jazeera and a youthful attitude are all that the Arabs need to set themselves free?”
(If Al Jazeera could make people free, shouldn’t the country where it broadcasts from, Qatar, have evolved from a quasi-medieval monarchy to something more up-to-date? Al Jazeera can bring people into the streets, it seems, but it cannot conjure up a lasting attachment to liberty. It cannot train people in liberty and democracy like the program Sesame Street trains kids to count to 10.)
I can see why Bargisi would advise his countrymen to read the works of Hamilton and Jefferson. Here, he has the bad taste to admit that Egypt’s history has little to teach those crowds in Tahir Square about how to nurture free political institutions. Having no models of their own, they must turn to examples from other countries.
But I would go a bit further back than Hamilton and Jefferson, and urge the Egyptians to start their political education with a man with whom almost all of America’s Founders would have been familiar. A man who, in no small sense, was an inspiration to several of the Founders. including Jefferson and Adams.
I mean here the great English writer John Milton, known mainly today for his poem Paradise Lost, but who also wrote many important defenses of political liberty.
Here’s an excerpt from one he wrote in 1654, which has been compared by some to Washington’s famous Farewell Address:
Is there not something universal in these words? Is there not some political wisdom in Milton’s words that free men and women in all countries will want to recall from time to time?
Two more passages from Milton that the Egyptians should read and think about:
“You therefore, who wish to remain free, either instantly be wise, or, as soon as possible, cease to be fools; if you think slavery an intolerable evil, learn obedience to reason and the government of yourselves; and finally bid adieu to your dissensions, your jealousies, your superstitions, your outrages, your rapine, and your lusts. Unless you will spare no pains to effect this, you must be judged unfit, both by God and mankind, to be entrusted with the possession of liberty and the administration of the government; but will rather, like a nation in a state of pupilage, want some active and courageous guardian to undertake the management of your affairs.”
It was the universal quality of Milton’s thinking on liberty that gave his writings great appeal to the American Founders. Even though he had been long dead by the time Americans began to press for independence, Milton had much to tell them as they set about separating themselves from Britain, and then building a free government.
If the Egyptians will give him a chance, Milton can also teach them many things – more than they can ever learn just by Twittering, or watching Al Jazeera and trying to substitute technology and gadgetry for the hard work of absorbing and digesting the ideas of liberty.
