A first draft of why it happened must begin in a rural town in Tunisia on the shores of the Mediterranean where Mohamed Bouazizi was the unlikeliest catalyst of the extraordinary realignment in the region.
— Sharrock et al. 2010: Egypt: how the people span the wheel of their country’s history
David Sharrock, Jack Shenker and Paul Harris just posted an excellent, big picture, article in The Guardian about the events leading up to the resignation of Hosni Mubarak.
The article starts with the corruption that provoked Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia and makes the connection to Khaled Said death at the hands of the Egyptian police. The descriptions of these events are graphic, so be warned. Sharrock et al., go on to describe how the Egyptian protesters were able to use technology to organize in a way that has not been possible before. The article ends with the vacillating moves of the Obama administration as it was buffeted by events in Egypt.
“This time we were determined to do something different – be multi-polar, fast-moving, and too mobile for the amin markazi [central security forces], giving us the chance to walk down hundreds of different roads and show normal passers-by that taking to the streets was actually possible.”
The plan worked better than they could ever have imagined. Throughout the capital and across the country, pockets of protest sprung up and overpowered the thinly stretched riot police, who had no choice but to let the marches continue. Later, when the different strands rallied in city centres – including Cairo’s symbolic Tahrir Square –the police used guns and tear gas to disperse them.
But it was already too late. By destroying the smokescreen of police invincibility, even for only a few hours, the youths had pierced Mubarak’s last line of defence – the fear his subjects felt at the thought of confronting him – and a fatal blow was struck to a 30-year dictatorial regime.
This piece is a bit long, and the vocabulary a bit advanced, for the average middle school student, but it is an excellent summary and first draft of history.
After hard work, great risk, and sacrifice, euphoria.
If we’re not skilled at something then only practice and learning can remedy the situation. But, according to Kruger and Dunning (1999), human nature tends to try to blame other things, like luck, instead of our own lack of skill when things go wrong. Interestingly, we’re even resistant to thinking that our lack of skill is the problem, even when we’re given that negative feedback.
So an essential skill for the student is to learn how to take criticism constructively. Self-awareness, metacognition, and the ability to be honest with oneself are important. Let this be a warning:
“One of the ways people gain insight into their own competence is by comparing themselves with others.” “Incompetent individuals fail to gain insight into their own incompetence by observing the behavior of other people.”
—Kruger and Dunning (1999)
P.S. Note that “incompetent” is used here to express a level of knowledge and skill that can be improved on to become “competent”. Incompetence is not a fixed quality, unless you let it be.
P.P.S. This is another reason why it’s important that students share their work with one another and the class. The best work tends to ratchet up the standards and expectations.
The resignation of Hosni Mubarak and the deafening sound of celebration in Egypt (via the Guardian).
Egypt. A victory for peaceful protest (even though they had to fight off attacks).
Going forward, things will not be easy, but for today, euphoria. Will Wilkinson has an excellent essay, in which he puts aside his natural skepticism for a little while:
It is impossible, for me at least, to watch the crowds in Egypt, overjoyed at Hosni Mubarak’s hotly-desired resignation, with dry eyes and an unclenched throat. … Whatever the future holds, there will be disappointment, at best. But there is always disappointment. Today, there is joy.
–Will Wilkinson (2011) Egypt’s Euphoria
Fireworks are necessary:
The singing (via NY Times) before Mubarak’s resignation:
And after:
To be liberated is one thing, but to earn your freedom is fundamentally at another order of magnitude.
For the record, the following was my attempt to simulate the current Egyptian protests. I tried this one afternoon after the class had watched a particularly stirring video of the protesters, and my intention was to give students with a simplified picture of what was going on and who was doing it. We’re not covering revolutions until next year, but the current events in Egypt are too important to ignore.
The Players
The yellow nodes show the major actors included in the simulation.
1. Hosni Mubarak
Hosni Mubarak. (Image by Presidenza della Repubblica via Wikimedia Commons)
Hosni Mubarak is the President of Egypt and autocrat for the last thirty years. I tried to match students, in a rough and ready way, to the personality/characteristics of the people and groups they were supposed to represent, so for Mubarak I picked someone who could think fast on their feet and would play the role to the end, not giving up easily to the demonstrators just because they (as I believe all my students are) are sympathetic to their cause.
2. The Secret Police (also pro-regime “protesters”)
This ID is of an undercover security officer who tried to start a fight, he was apprehended but not hurt, however, he said he was paid to come and start trouble. (via Al Jazerra English)
The student playing the secret police was given a weapon, a popsicle stick, with which he could attack the protesters, but was not powerful enough to “kill” anyone on its own. He had to follow the instruction of Mr. Mubarak. I chose one of my more kinetically oriented students for this role, and he spent a lot of time crawling under tables and harassing the protesters as they tried to make their signs.
I tried the simulation in class before the overnight battles where pro-Mubarak “protesters” attempted to take Tahrir Square, so I just briefed the student tasked with this job that he was the dreaded secret police. However, given that the anti-government protesters were able to beat of their attackers, and that police ID was found on captured attackers, I think the pro-government rioters can be lumped in with the secret police.
3. Barack Obama
Barack Obama.
I chose my student whose major ambition is to be president for this role. He’s quite serious about it, and follows world politics, so could handle the tricky balance of deciding if to support a client who has provided stability (until now), as opposed to supporting the pro-democracy protesters, as his predilections would demand.
4. The Army
Egyptian Army tanks in Tahrir Square in Cairo. (Image from Al Jazeera English)
This was another tricky role to play. The top brass tend to support the regime, while the enlisted soldiers and lower-level officers have shown support for the anti-government protesters. There was even a story of a lower level officer joining the protesters because his brother had been killed in the protests. The Army also has the tanks and power to decide things one way or the other if they so choose. They’re also well respected.
I gave the student playing the Army a simulated gun, but told him, in secret, that he only had three bullets, not enough to “kill” all the protesters.
5. The “People”
The quiet majority. (Image from Al Jazeera English)
Despite all the people protesting in Tahrir Square, the vast majority of the population of Cairo are at home, worrying, watching things unfold on TV, trying to figure out what’s going on and what to do.
My quietest student got this job, one who could exhibit a lot of restraint, and be reluctant to do anything radical. They were instructed that their main role was to worry, but, if things got so bad that they had to take sides, whichever side they took would win. They were that powerful, but unaware or fearful of using that power.
6. Student Protesters
Student protester.
Despite the smile on the face of the student protester in the adjacent image, I instructed the student representing the young student protesters in Tahrir Square that those students were, at the core, angry and frustrated. They are educated so they know a bit of history and about politics. They know what things could be like, how things could be.
7&8. The Muslim Brotherhood
The Muslim Brotherhood.
I assigned two students to be the Muslim Brotherhood, given their relative size. They wrote their protest sign using Arabic characters since the Brotherhood, with all their charities, represent the poorer, less educated people (so they’re less likely to have English as a second language).
My students were told they were pious and work closely together, to represent the religious background of the Brotherhood and the discipline of the organization.
9. Middle Class Protesters
Middle class protester with young child.
In between the major street battles, when the protests swelled to their largest size, the middle class protesters came out. They have something to loose but want the best for their kids. Some of them brought their kids.
They’re educated and probably have a decent income. Although they’re not the loudest or most angry, these are the kind of people with the high per-capita incomes that you want for any new democracy to succeed.
10. Mohammed ElBaradei
Mohamed ElBaradei (image from the IAEA).
ElBaradei is an interesting character in all the turmoil in Egypt. Westernized and liberal-minded, he’s spent a lot of time working for international organizations but has only focused on Egyptian politics in the last few years. As such, he doesn’t seem to have much of a grass-roots constituency.
I try to get my students to argue with me on the basis of logic rather than anything else, and I chose a student who’s rather good at it for this role. Protests, however, are driven more by logic than emotion. So when this student got frustrated and gave up after trying to organize the protesters, who they were all too busy making their signs, I thought added some unexpected verisimilitude to the simulation. (I had to prod them quite a bit to wrap up on the signmaking, otherwise we’d have gotten nothing else done for the rest of the day).
Missing
Putting all this together quickly did mean that I probably missed some major players, including, I suspect, the important role of the media.
Putting it all together
With the actors in place (and signs finally ready), my protesters marched on the square. The Army was caught in between the protesters and Mr. Mubarak. The “People” watched from the sidelines. Everyone had their say, from the perspective of their group, but I had to do a little coaching to keep them to their assigned tasks.
No one won in our simulation. It ended in a stalemate, because the only actor capable of bringing things to a conclusive end, the Army, could not decide which side to choose. Which is pretty much where Egypt has been for the last week. Until today.
Graphic representation of the Wikipedia discussions about deleting articles. The image links to an interactive version of the graphic at http://notabilia.net .
Swings to the right are arguments for keeping the article, swings to the left are arguments to delete them. Moritz Stefaner and others’ website have created this wonderful graphic of Wikipedia’s discussion threads. They have lots more details and discussions on their website.
The central proposition in our argument is that incompetent individuals lack the metacognitive skills that enable them to tell how poorly they are performing, and as a result, they come to hold inflated views of their performance and ability…. the way to make incompetent individuals realize their own incompetence is to make them competent.
– Kruger and Dunning (1999): Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (pdf)
If you don’t know what you’re doing, then it’s quite likely that you don’t know that you don’t know. Kruger and Dunning (1999) did a set of interesting studies to show this to be the case. It explains why people with the least information and knowledge about a subject may feel the most confident to opine about it.
It kind of explains why adolescents know everything. I know that I knew everything when I was 12, and ever since then I’ve been knowing less and less.
Of course there are the less typical teenagers who don’t express the same unaware overconfidence. They can be extremely competent at a particular thing (let’s call it a domain), like writing to take a purely random example, yet are extremely unconfident of their ability.
Well Kruger and Dunning (1999) have an explanation for that too. Competent people tend to think everyone else is competent too, so they tend too underestimate their ability relative to everyone else.
Teachers can easily fall into a similar trap, because we will often, quite unintentionally and unconsciously, assume students know more than they do. This is one of the reasons peer-teaching works so well. Students are more likely to know where their peers are coming from, and what they know to begin with.
The NY Times’ Errol Morris has a great interview with one of this study’s authors.
I’ll end with the most wonderful concluding remarks, which really put this whole study in perspective:
In sum, we present this article as an exploration into why people tend to hold overly optimistic and miscalibrated views about themselves. We propose that those with limited knowledge in a domain suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Although we feel we have done a competent job in making a strong case for this analysis, studying it empirically, and drawing out relevant implications, our thesis leaves us with one haunting worry that we cannot vanquish. That worry is that this article may contain faulty logic, method- ological errors, or poor communication. Let us assure our readers that to the extent this article is imperfect, it is not a sin we have committed knowingly.
—Kruger and Dunning (1999)
The question of the role of the British monarchy always comes up when we talk about government types, so it’s nice to have a good, clear explanation. C.G.P. Grey explains the difference between the UK and Great Britain, and untangles the relationship between Britain and its former (and current) colonies.
It’s a fascinating piece of world history. Apparently, Britain is technically a theocracy, because all power is vested in God, and God’s delegate is the monarch. The state religion is Anglicanism.
Patrick Appel, at the Daily Dish, points out a (paper) in the journal Public Choice on why some major revolutions, like Egypt’s, so often come as a surprise to everyone.
Kuran (1989) posits that people tend to hide the fact that they are opposed to the government, especially repressive governments, which makes a lot of sense if you think about it. Then when some odd thing, which might seem unrelated to anything, happens, and the opposition to the government starts to look like it might be able to win, then everyone piles onto the bandwagon and a revolution occurs.
Two weeks ago, practically everyone thought that Egypt was too stable, and Mubarak too entrenched to by ousted. A lot of commentators wished the Egyptian regime would go after Tunisia’s, but they pretty uniformly agreed that it was too strong.
at least 1 million people sang egypt's national anthem. Image and caption from Al Jazeera English (Feb 4th, 2011)
