Sunday, March 05, 2006
Socio-Political Time Compression Factor
Austin Bay has an outstanding post on The Internet Path to Freedom: Ending Information Isolation . He starts by noting "technological compression — the planet “shrunk” in figurative terms by communications and transportation", citing how the internet can give isolated third world communities unprecedented access to libraries and online markets. He then quotes extensively from this essay by Jonathan Rauch, In Arabic, 'Internet' Means 'Freedom' , which introduces us to an Iraqi scholar who "hopes that a new Arabic-language Web site, called LampofLiberty.org -- MisbahAlHurriyya.org in Arabic -- can change the world by publishing liberal classics."
Translating books like 'Liberalism' and the 'Road to Serfdom' into Arabic seems an unlikely way to transform the Mid-East and break the embrace of a destructive Islamist ideology. But Rauch marshals some impressive facts and statistics to support the prospects of a successful intellectual revolution :
"Intellectual isolation is a widespread Arab phenomenon, not just an Iraqi one. Some of the statistics are startling. According to the United Nations' 2003 "Arab Human Development Report," five times more books are translated annually into Greek, a language spoken by just 11 million people, than into Arabic. "No more than 10,000 books were translated into Arabic over the entire past millennium," says the U.N., "equivalent to the number translated into Spanish each year." Authors and publishers must cope with the whims of 22 Arab censors. "As a result," writes a contributor to the report, "books do not move easily through their natural markets." Newspapers are a fifth as common as in the non-Arab developed world; computers, a fourth as common. "Most media institutions in Arab countries remain state-owned," the report says.
You could call it the Socio-Political Time Compression factor of the internet; and it could become a decisive factor in the information war against terrorist ideologies. Perhaps the State Department should view this as a cost-effective way of preparing the info-battlefield for a small fraction of that supplemental request.
Translating books like 'Liberalism' and the 'Road to Serfdom' into Arabic seems an unlikely way to transform the Mid-East and break the embrace of a destructive Islamist ideology. But Rauch marshals some impressive facts and statistics to support the prospects of a successful intellectual revolution :
"Intellectual isolation is a widespread Arab phenomenon, not just an Iraqi one. Some of the statistics are startling. According to the United Nations' 2003 "Arab Human Development Report," five times more books are translated annually into Greek, a language spoken by just 11 million people, than into Arabic. "No more than 10,000 books were translated into Arabic over the entire past millennium," says the U.N., "equivalent to the number translated into Spanish each year." Authors and publishers must cope with the whims of 22 Arab censors. "As a result," writes a contributor to the report, "books do not move easily through their natural markets." Newspapers are a fifth as common as in the non-Arab developed world; computers, a fourth as common. "Most media institutions in Arab countries remain state-owned," the report says.
No wonder the Arab world and Western-style modernity have collided with a shock. They are virtually strangers, 300 years after the Enlightenment and 200 years after the Industrial Revolution. Much as other regions may be cursed with disease or scarcity, in recent decades the Arab world has been singularly cursed with bad ideas. First came Marxism and its offshoots; then the fascistic nationalism of Nasserism and Baathism; now, radical Islamism. Diverse as those ideologies are, they have in common authoritarianism and the suppression of any true private sphere. Instead of withering as they have done in open competition with liberalism, they flourished in the Arab world's relative isolation."
"Startling" is an understatment for those statistics (e.g. average of 10 books per year over the last 1000 years; and today a 130-1 per capita ratio of books translated to Greek vs to Arabic). It's hard to comprehend or predict the impact on so isolated a society of a massive infusion of modern concepts of liberal freedom. Rauch's conclusion is that : "The suffocating Arab duopoly of state-controlled media and Islamist pulpits is cracking -- only a little bit so far, but keep watching. In the Arab world, the Enlightenment is going online."You could call it the Socio-Political Time Compression factor of the internet; and it could become a decisive factor in the information war against terrorist ideologies. Perhaps the State Department should view this as a cost-effective way of preparing the info-battlefield for a small fraction of that supplemental request.
