Many things made possible the recent Egyptian Reformation—Facebook, the spread of information, plain courage—and many have been rightly celebrated. But one has remained more or less a parenthesis: the Egyptian Army’s clemency.
When he enlisted, each member of the army, from private to general, swore fealty to his government. The protestors’ aim was to dissolve that government. And yet all armed men refused to intercede.
We can speculate upon the reasons why—they would not let so much blood as was requisite to stop the protestors; they would not stop a movement whose motives they took for their own; they feared observers’ shame—whatever. We may never know. More interesting is their justification for their actions. They had an obligation to preserve their government. How could they breech it?
A good case could be made on their behalf by John Locke. He would argue that the obligation in question never existed. The army had an obligation to their government; but their government was not that leviathan with Hosni Mubarak at its head; it was rather something more abstract, not actually concretized in any institution: what Locke called the “legislative.”
A people constitutes its society and emigrates the state of nature when it authorizes a legislative with its consent. Strictly speaking, that is the sole government of society. The government cannot trammel any of its constituent’s rights—to life, to liberty, and to property—for no man can ever relinquish them. Thus any actor which violates those rights is not actually the government. It is rather a usurper.
So the army, who swore fealty to the government, swore fealty to the Egyptian people. And when their will diverged from Mubarak’s, it had an obligation to follow not his but theirs. The Egyptian Army not only had no obligation to fire, but an obligation not to fire.
I doubt whether any of this argument played upon the minds of anyone in the Egyptian Army last month. Perhaps it did upon a few. But that is not really the point. The point is that this argument, the same small argument that was called upon by many to justify the American Revolution, can be called forth to justify the salvation of the Egyptian one. I do not interpret this as the triumph of the West; I rather think it is our humility. Our ideals are no longer special, no longer uniquely our own; they now befit the world.
photo credit: http://hereandnow.wbur.org/files/2011/01/0131_cairo-protests-500×333.jpg