Walking backwards

Mohamed Sid-Ahmed asks whether apparently outlandish theories might have more to them than meets the eye

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My late brother-in-law, Elham Seif El- Nasr, once wrote a short story set in a world where people could only walk backwards. Building on this fanciful assumption, he gave his imagination full play, attributing to the denizens of this imaginary world features that were at the same time consistent with the premise of the story and extremely strange.

But as the facts now being revealed by modern science prove, truth is often stranger than fiction. For example, most of us take it for granted that compasses point north. Sailors have relied on the earth's magnetic field to navigate for thousands of years, while birds and other magnetically sensitive animals have done so for considerably longer. But according to the latest issue of the prestigious scientific review Scientific American, the North and South poles of our planet revert magnetic and electrical polarity over varying periods of time that can in some cases stretch to millions of years. In other words, they switch from positive to negative or vice-versa and, by so doing, move backwards instead of forwards, a phenomenon that is no less strange than the imaginary premise of my late brother-in-law's short story. How this will affect life on Earth, including the future of the human species, is another story.

Indeed, the same phenomenon applies not only in fiction and science, but also in politics and history, which sometimes seem to be moving backwards rather than forward. One of the most salient examples came on 11 September, 2001, when the forward march of human civilisation was rudely interrupted, if not actually reversed, with the barbaric attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The common assumption is that history moves rectilinearly from the past to the future, moving on an onward course through the present. However, this assumption is now being called into question by some modern scientific theories. For example, the notion of progress is well established in our psyche as meaning that the more experience we acquire the greater our ability to control the world around us and the better our chances of moving forward towards ever more progress. But it is becoming increasingly clear that the more we know, the more we become aware of what we do not know, and that, as knowledge increases in absolute terms, it decreases in relative terms. Does this mean that our concept of what constitutes progress is inherently defective?

Let us ponder over this proposition for a moment. Can we say that Shakespeare's plays are inferior to Bernard Shaw's because Shakespeare lived before Shaw? Should we believe that Leonardo Da Vinci's paintings have less artistic merit than Van Gogh's for the same reason? In other words, is art subjected to quantitative criteria, to cumulative effects? Are comparisons acceptable in such cases? And how can we ignore the observer as an element in assessing the objective value of a work?

Moving to the field of politics, let us apply this proposition to one of the most ubiquitous words in the modern political lexicon, democracy. Today, everyone is paying lip service to democracy. But democratic practice varies from one society to another. Indeed, the word democracy is used in different political systems to denote very different, often contradictory, things. Thus we find some American officials denying that Egypt is a democracy by any standard, while Egyptian officials deny that US-style democracy is a suitable formula that can respond to the requirements of Egyptian reality. Who to believe? Should this question be asked in the first place, or is it detrimental to all concerned?

Is there a general denominator that brings together the various definitions of democracy? Does democracy have a core? It is often said that democracy is to politics what the market is to economics. One essential characteristic of a market economy is that one cannot predict in advance whether a given commodity will become the object of a market transaction or not. This will not depend on any given participant in the transaction taken separately, but only on the conclusion of the deal in its entirety. The same applies to implementing democratic rule, nobody can predict who will be the winner.

Of course, we are talking here of an ideal "free market" where no non-market factors affect the results, where no intervention on behalf of monopolistic forces, for instance, disturb the game. No individual player enjoys absolute liberty. There is always an evergrowing space for freedom which, like knowledge, as it increases in absolute terms, decreases in relative terms.

The course towards progress, as we all know, does not proceed in a smooth linear progression but is interrupted by zigzags. In some cases, a zigzag could last for so long that it appears to be the norm, not a setback that can eventually be overcome. When a whole historical stage seems to be caught in a zigzag, it becomes hard to tell whether things are moving backwards or forward. It all depends on what we agree to use as a frame of reference, a basis for measurement. When the zigzags are too small to be noticed, this projects the false impression that history repeats itself.

9/11 marked the onset of a gigantic setback in the march of civilisation, a deep zigzag that puts the very theory of progress into question. How can we talk of progress, for example, when the neo- conservatives in America, the most advanced country in the world, are trying to ban the teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution in the classrooms? Their attempt harks back to another shameful chapter in America's history, the notorious monkey trial early in the 20th century. The ludicrous debate over whether or not a well- established theory that has for long been accepted by scientists all over the world should be included in educational curricula is what reminded me of the story set in a world in which people could only walk backwards. Unfortunately, it is not an isolated incident. Many of the debates now underway over whether history repeats itself belong more to the Middle Ages, when inquisitions were the norm, than to the 21st century, when science and reason are meant to prevail.