Writing on the wall…

Use it or lose it is an evolutionary maxim. A smug corollary, called Dollo’s Law, jeers ‘and it ain’t ever coming back’. This has always worried me. It is punitive, like religion, and sounds like bad science. My suspicion was vindicated last month by a tree frog. About 200 million years ago, frogs decided to jettison the teeth in their lower jaws. But a splinter group of tree frogs grew them right back again 20 million years ago. Today, Gastrotheca guentheri has unquestionable bite. We have John Weins of Stony Brook, New York to thank for discovering this spot of re-evolution.

When millions crowded Tahrir Square, the Western press wondered if Egypt was ready for democracy. Would they be able to tolerate it, after years of dictatorship? Haven’t they evolved into gormless flakes devoid of will and action?

Like Guenther’s tree frog, Egypt has re-evolved. That’s a terrible word. It exists only because we haven’t invented one, not yet, for ‘evolution revised.’ Evolution was derived from the Latin for unrolling. Darwin never used the term for his celebrated theory; rather his friend and champion Charles Lyell first used it in this connection. Devolution, the reversal or regression to a more primitive state, makes for great science fiction, but is seldom true in biology. This tree frog’s decision demands a new word. It also demands that we start thinking outside the box.

Since January 25, the Arabic word tahrir has become synonymous with liberty. American papers call it Liberation Square with faint irony as though liberty were a stay-at-home location, rooted firmly in the Verrazano Narrows. To the rest of the world, tahrir has spelled hope. Tahrir has a second connotation — it also means writing, and the liberation that ensues from a piece of writing. It is this meaning that worked for me as I read the words of those millions gathered in Cairo, people like you and me who had never before raised their voices in protest, never publicly voiced their convictions.

The net is a great example of tahrir. Never in the history of human thought has information been so universally accessible. Writing is freedom. The moment it is censored or banned, democracy is gone. Hosni Mubarak, like all dictators, broke the pens of dissident writers. And Egyptians saw it for the fearful, cowering gesture it was.

We haven’t had our pens broken, but books have been banned and libraries burnt. Such actions don’t spell the end of democracy. We bring that about by our response to these threats. Tahrir showed us the choice. We can either continue being obedient—refusing to display MF Hussain’s paintings and excluding James Laine’s book from the public discourse — or we can do what we did so well a century ago. Be civil, but disobedient. We taught the world how to do that. In Memphis, in Wenceslas Square, in Tiananmen, people did what we no longer know how to do. Like the tree frog we will have to opt out of our sixtythree-and-a-bit spell of evolution and recover our bite.

Before Tahrir became a Square it was a Midan, a maidan, a field, a place for debate. Calling it square represses its exuberance into Euclidean rigidity. Geometry is all about the writing on the wall. The human spirit is all about erasing the writing on the wall—how else can you make place for grafitti?