ROCKLAND – The revolution in Egypt contains more lessons than a pomegranate has seeds.

One early lesson is that this was not the triumph of one person over another, but the triumph of culture over personality.

President Hosni Mubarak was not sent packing by someone else lusting for his power. Nor was he the victim of a handful of conspirators.

He wasn’t expelled by another country’s leader, or done in by assassins, or forced out by judges fulfilling their constitutional duties.

What prised him from his perch was the culture itself.

Culture can best be understood as how we do things around here. That second word, we, is crucial. Culture is the expression of the collective will, spirit, and sensibilities of a group.

Though its individual members come and go, there’s a persistent “us-ness” in every organization, tribe, or nation that lays down its qualities and characteristics slowly and solidly, like sedimentary deposits.

While culture can be affected by leadership, it is larger than any individual, even the one at the top.

To 21st century preconceptions, that last fact is almost incomprehensible.

We’re wedded to the Big Man theory of history. We’re told that if we know what makes leaders tick, we’ll understand how change happens. It’s about “tone at the top,” we’ve been told — about how I, not we, get things done.

But how I do things around here is style, not culture. No single personality, however authoritarian in style, can shift a strong culture very far. But a strong culture can rise up and expel a bad leader.

That’s what has happened in Egypt, and it’s been almost completely missed by the media.

Popular news outlets focus on personalities in tension with other personalities. They have few templates for stories about individuals in tension with cultures.

How do they televise a discussion between a person sitting in one chair and a culture sitting in another? They need two opposing faces.

In the last several weeks, there’s been a desperate and disappointing search for those faces. In the early days of the Tahrir Square uprisings, there were questions about orchestration: Who actually fomented these protests, and where can we find their photos?

Disappointment No. 1: There were no obvious personalities to latch onto, so attention shifted to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Disappointment No. 2: They couldn’t provide a ringleader to be the face of change.

Next the media latched onto Mohamed El-Baradei, the Egyptian Nobel laureate, who provided Disappointment No. 3 when it became clear that he wasn’t the leader of this revolution.

So the cameras swung to President Obama, with footage of a stern U.S. president seeking the resignation of a defiant President Mubarak — until it was clear that this picture-perfect battle of titans failed to explain the situation, leading to Disappointment No. 4.

Toward the end came a dazzling possibility: Google executive and political activist Wael Ghonim, who helped organize protesters through his Facebook page. He had all the right stuff: He’d been arrested, held in secret, and released by government security forces.

Then came Disappointment No. 5: He repeatedly rejected the characterization of himself as a hero, pointing instead to the faceless crowd as the real hero.

Finally came the most disconcerting blow of all. With Mubarak gone, the media waited to pounce on the military personality destined to lead the transition. What were they given instead? Disappointment No. 6: a committee!

Old metaphors die hard, and this one fought nobly for its life. It’s time to concede that the Egypt story can’t be explained as a clash of personalities. It’s about culture.

We now need to ask about the biography of this culture. Where was it born? What were the dominant influences upon it? How did it mature into a force as peaceable as it was unyielding? What vision of the future gave it the courage to act?

One thing is sure: When the full story is written, this revolution will be seen as the collective expression of a culture of moral courage.

Like the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in 1989, the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003, and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine beginning in 2004, this one brought hundreds of thousands into the streets in peaceful protest against dictatorship.

By coupling nonviolent methodologies with potent political feelings, the revolution in Egypt dismissed one of the world’s most powerful leaders. It did so leaderlessly, organically, amorphously.

To understand how, we need new metaphors. The clashing of personalities no longer explains our world.

– Special to the Press Herald

 

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