I've been wondering how this revolution would have gone down in a society with different attitudes toward violence -- a society more like, for example, the US.
During the past month Egyptians have proved themselves hesitant, by and large, to engage in large-scale violence. Policemen retaliated against the stones thrown at them by protesters with clubs, tear gas, and more stones, but rarely with live bullets. Protesters, likewise, maintained their staunch commitment to peaceful demonstrations, even after pro-government thugs came at them with Molotov cocktails and horses (Yes, horses. And also camels. But only to a limited extent firearms.). Internationally, human rights groups have lauded both sides for their restraint, and indeed, watching the brutal put-downs of pro-democracy movements in Libya and Bahrain over the past few days, one has to agree that the Egyptians negotiated their revolution with astonishingly little bloodshed.
As anyone who has lived here knows, Cairo is refreshingly free of the muggings, robberies, and other acts of random violence that plague so many American cities, especially those acts involving firearms. According to statistics published on GunPolicy.org, a website hosted at the University of Sydney's School of Public Health that promotes a "public health model of firearm injury prevention", there are only 3.5 privately owned guns in Egypt for every 100 civilians, and in an apparent corollary -- although the survey does not address the relationship between gun ownership and murders directly -- the rate of homicides by firearm in Egypt in 2006 (the most recent data provided) was only 0.17 deaths per 100,000 people. In the US, by comparison, private gun ownership by last measurement stood at 88.8 guns per 100 civilians, and during the same year Americans died by gun homicide at a rate of 3.36 people per 100,000 -- a rate almost twenty times higher than Egypt's.
Yet despite their commendable behavior in recent weeks and their statistically low incidence of gun deaths, Egyptians are not non-violent people. Because most of the violence here does not involve weapons and takes place within the private spheres of the family home, the neighborhood, or the classroom -- encompassing fistfights, domestic abuse, corporal punishment, and sexual assault, but rarely outright homicide -- it is little discussed publicly, and almost never witnessed, much less experienced, by foreign observers. But its very secretiveness, far from negating its importance, has allowed it to become arguably more pervasive; unlike gun violence in America, a much-publicized social ill and one that is the object of nationwide preventative campaigns, violence in Egypt is seldom studied or talked about and thus is broadly permitted to continue.
So despite Egypt's lack of the headline-grabbing brand of violence common in the United States, Egyptians are perhaps, if not more violent statistically, more exposed to violence on an everyday level. This, along with ill-enforced safety regulations, low-quality and poorly maintained infrastructure, unreliable emergency response systems, and the generally perilous living conditions of many Egyptians, means that injury and even death are highly visible phenomena throughout Egyptian society. The cripples and amputees on the street are in-your-face reminders of the fragility of the human body, while death, while it certainly doesn't go un-mourned, is viewed as a natural bookend to a life, not a deviation from the proper order of things but wholly part of it.
Americans, if I can generalize, have a less comfortable relationship with these grimmer sides of reality. The thought of our bodies, those exalted temples at whose altars we as a society offer so much in time, effort, and money, being violated by pain or disfigurement is to many of us a terrifying thought. Death is more frightening to us still; this fear drives our obsession with warning labels and traffic laws, informs a folk culture rife with ghost stories on the one hand and tales of magically endowed immortality on the other, and justifies the billions of dollars that the American pharmaceutical and health care industries spend every year in their ongoing struggle to keep us all alive just a little longer.
Americans' attitudes toward violence are, of course, part and parcel with their understanding of injury and death. When violence equals firearms, injuries are severe and death is probable, leading many Americans to fear violence with the same outsize terror they hold for its consequences. Others, in awe of its ability to inflict these worst of all outcomes, fetishize it, claiming its power for themselves imaginatively through video games or practically by keeping guns in their homes. In either case there is an element of mythology involved.
This mythologizing of violence, according to my hypothesis, would inevitably have played a crucial role in the revolution had it been carried out by Americans. Let's picture it this way: those who fear violence would have stayed indoors, prioritizing safety over liberty, while those who fetishize it would have been quick to take to the streets with guns blazing, certain that violence was the only solution; the revolution would have been over before it started, the pro-violence faction going down in a hail of police gunfire while the anti-violence majority watched on TV from the security of their living rooms.
Egyptians, neither afraid of violence nor enamored with it, took neither of these tactics, and thus succeeded where Americans would have failed.
What do you think? If you don't agree, leave me a comment.
During the past month Egyptians have proved themselves hesitant, by and large, to engage in large-scale violence. Policemen retaliated against the stones thrown at them by protesters with clubs, tear gas, and more stones, but rarely with live bullets. Protesters, likewise, maintained their staunch commitment to peaceful demonstrations, even after pro-government thugs came at them with Molotov cocktails and horses (Yes, horses. And also camels. But only to a limited extent firearms.). Internationally, human rights groups have lauded both sides for their restraint, and indeed, watching the brutal put-downs of pro-democracy movements in Libya and Bahrain over the past few days, one has to agree that the Egyptians negotiated their revolution with astonishingly little bloodshed.
As anyone who has lived here knows, Cairo is refreshingly free of the muggings, robberies, and other acts of random violence that plague so many American cities, especially those acts involving firearms. According to statistics published on GunPolicy.org, a website hosted at the University of Sydney's School of Public Health that promotes a "public health model of firearm injury prevention", there are only 3.5 privately owned guns in Egypt for every 100 civilians, and in an apparent corollary -- although the survey does not address the relationship between gun ownership and murders directly -- the rate of homicides by firearm in Egypt in 2006 (the most recent data provided) was only 0.17 deaths per 100,000 people. In the US, by comparison, private gun ownership by last measurement stood at 88.8 guns per 100 civilians, and during the same year Americans died by gun homicide at a rate of 3.36 people per 100,000 -- a rate almost twenty times higher than Egypt's.
Yet despite their commendable behavior in recent weeks and their statistically low incidence of gun deaths, Egyptians are not non-violent people. Because most of the violence here does not involve weapons and takes place within the private spheres of the family home, the neighborhood, or the classroom -- encompassing fistfights, domestic abuse, corporal punishment, and sexual assault, but rarely outright homicide -- it is little discussed publicly, and almost never witnessed, much less experienced, by foreign observers. But its very secretiveness, far from negating its importance, has allowed it to become arguably more pervasive; unlike gun violence in America, a much-publicized social ill and one that is the object of nationwide preventative campaigns, violence in Egypt is seldom studied or talked about and thus is broadly permitted to continue.
So despite Egypt's lack of the headline-grabbing brand of violence common in the United States, Egyptians are perhaps, if not more violent statistically, more exposed to violence on an everyday level. This, along with ill-enforced safety regulations, low-quality and poorly maintained infrastructure, unreliable emergency response systems, and the generally perilous living conditions of many Egyptians, means that injury and even death are highly visible phenomena throughout Egyptian society. The cripples and amputees on the street are in-your-face reminders of the fragility of the human body, while death, while it certainly doesn't go un-mourned, is viewed as a natural bookend to a life, not a deviation from the proper order of things but wholly part of it.
Americans, if I can generalize, have a less comfortable relationship with these grimmer sides of reality. The thought of our bodies, those exalted temples at whose altars we as a society offer so much in time, effort, and money, being violated by pain or disfigurement is to many of us a terrifying thought. Death is more frightening to us still; this fear drives our obsession with warning labels and traffic laws, informs a folk culture rife with ghost stories on the one hand and tales of magically endowed immortality on the other, and justifies the billions of dollars that the American pharmaceutical and health care industries spend every year in their ongoing struggle to keep us all alive just a little longer.
Americans' attitudes toward violence are, of course, part and parcel with their understanding of injury and death. When violence equals firearms, injuries are severe and death is probable, leading many Americans to fear violence with the same outsize terror they hold for its consequences. Others, in awe of its ability to inflict these worst of all outcomes, fetishize it, claiming its power for themselves imaginatively through video games or practically by keeping guns in their homes. In either case there is an element of mythology involved.
This mythologizing of violence, according to my hypothesis, would inevitably have played a crucial role in the revolution had it been carried out by Americans. Let's picture it this way: those who fear violence would have stayed indoors, prioritizing safety over liberty, while those who fetishize it would have been quick to take to the streets with guns blazing, certain that violence was the only solution; the revolution would have been over before it started, the pro-violence faction going down in a hail of police gunfire while the anti-violence majority watched on TV from the security of their living rooms.
Egyptians, neither afraid of violence nor enamored with it, took neither of these tactics, and thus succeeded where Americans would have failed.
What do you think? If you don't agree, leave me a comment.
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