Signs of hope

From the Economist:

"Yet jockeying for power at the other levels of government does continue, causing a few headaches for Mr Ahmadinejad. Earlier this week the minister of the economy, Davoud Danesh Jafari, was shuffled out of the cabinet. Unusually, he left with something of a bang, lambasting Mr Ahmadinejad for dreadful mishandling of Iran’s economy, failing to plan for the future or to listen to economic experts. The president was distracted by “peripheral” issues, and had allowed inflation to soar to 18%, he said. Although others have spoken out before, Mr Jafari’s words were unusually forceful and public as they came from a former ally.

The economy is Mr Ahmadinejad’s Achilles’ heel. The opposition has criticised him over it and the clerical establishment has joined in. In the past week prominent clerics have said that he has failed to take responsibility for Iran’s economic woes. Ayatollah Mohammad Reza Mahdavikani, a former prime minister and a prominent conservative cleric, was quoted in Aftab-e Yazd, a reformist newspaper, as saying: “We shift problems and faults onto others and in order to say we are innocent we blame others.” Several leaders of Friday prayers have complained that the government is doing too little to reduce inflation. Even Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, the president’s closest spiritual adviser, has said that officials have failed to employ expertise to tackle poverty."

Obviously, Mamoud Ahmadinejad is not taking responsibility for much of anything, these days, nevertheless Iran's dismal economy. And Mamoud Ahmadinejad presence in that office, at all, as well as the power of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, should be proof positive to any sane, liberal-thinking person that power and established authority is meaningless as a barometer of right and wrong in the universe.

But recognizing that power is, often, a refuge for those avoiding responsibility, not one where responsibility is learned or effectively modeled, as one of the more persistent facts of political and public life, is a sign of progress.

And having people in Iran willing to take on that power, to take on the overwhelming forces of repression in that country, to openly and honestly criticize that power structure is a sign of progress.

Real progress, generally, does not come from the powerful. Powerful people generally follow those who create genuine progress in a society, not lead them. In fact, it is so obvious that in liberal societies, that when political leaders finally do choose to follow pathes of progress that have been blazed by others, then they are recognized for their contributions to progress that, generally, happens long before those with power make their contribution.

As George Orwell, one such thinker who blazed progress long before and generally contrary to the governing forces of his time, might say, force is not freedom. Power is not progress. In fact, quite the opposite.

Progress is when people are able to live their lives freely, peacefully, democratically, and independently of their governments, including with independent consciences even when governments are abusing their power, as the Iranian government is clearly guilty of doing, today, on so many measures of free, fair, and honest governance, that it is frankly difficult for me to imagine that liberal peoples would ever invest themselves in the foolish idea that government is some kind of final or trustworthy arbiter of all or even most questions of conscience.

To the contrary, Ahmadinejad should be a clear reminder to us of the folly of that notion and the inspiration for liberal governance and liberal society.

I, for one, celebrate that freedom rather than shrinking from it out of the cowardice that, somehow, someday, we will magically harness government to control and prevent all the bad things in the world from happening. It is a clear and unmistakeable illusion to me, today. And I'm confident that future generations will see the same.

Because it is just is, completely independent of what it might wish it to be.