In the middle of the last century, after the Second World War and as the Arab states won their independence one after another, the ruling political elites of the time were marked by an enthusiasm for building and for drawing up road maps for development. The most important thing to note about that historical period is that development processes did not all follow the same approaches or move at the same pace. The development experiences of the Arab countries are therefore not one and the same. It seems to us that the states that succeeded in the early stages of their development projects were those that chose to wager on human capital. That required a package of basic individual social legislation to prepare the "cultural and social space," by implanting symbolic systems capable of reshaping human capital in a way that would enable it to produce progress, even if over generations.
Perhaps the timescale of development itself was then patterned on social, political, and cultural time. Today, however, setting the pace is no longer the private affair of a given society or state. There is an overarching temporality that dominates everyone and is imposed on them. Our idea, therefore, is that progress has become compulsory, as compulsory as education and as the prohibition on infringing the rights of others. Progress is compulsory because it is now bound up with existence in the world. It is no longer possible to settle for consumption and spectatorship without taking part in producing this progress, which never stops progressing.
The communications technology revolution has today dictated its conditions for guaranteeing existence, and it is not a patient revolution, as the industrial revolution was, and after it the intellectual revolution of the eighteenth century, through to the French Revolution. The concept of progress is no longer a mere luxury; it has become, more than ever, a question of peoples' existence and continuity. If modern critical theories, especially the theses of the Frankfurt School and of postmodernism, dismantled the ideology of Western progress and warned against technical development becoming an instrument of domination, of human alienation, and of environmental destruction, that warning has come too late today, because what was feared has already happened. What is needed are approaches of action and participation, not approaches of superficial adaptation through the gateway of passive consumption, as is the case at present. We are here at the heart of a thorny problem: the present Arab understanding of progress, which is still reduced to its material dimension.
This fragmentation, between a sweeping rush to consume the products of the digital revolution and a simultaneous attachment to a traditional intellectual upbringing that favors institutions at the expense of the individual, produces a formalistic progress that does not address the civilizational gap foreseen and criticized by the pioneers of contemporary Arab thought. Abdallah Laroui insisted on the necessity of adopting what he calls "modernist historicism" as a "comprehensive system." Mohammed Abed al-Jabri focused on dismantling the structure of the heritage in order to revive a rationality founded on demonstration. And the Tunisian Hichem Djaït called for absorbing the essence of the deep intellectual emancipation of the European cultural pattern. As we can see, the Arab intellectual elites were aware of the fragmentation in the Arabs' relationship with progress and in how they understood it: that the prevailing character of this relationship is consumerist, which calls that understanding into question.
We have not managed to overcome the "absent," or "half-absent," dimensions, even if there have been timid beginnings. We therefore need a bold plan that breaks with the obstacles to progress: the pedagogy of rote learning, the suppression of critical reason, reliance on a rentier economy, and the modest trajectories of freedoms and rights that affect creativity and the use of the Arab mind's capacity to excel. These are among the reasons driving Arab minds, including young ones, to emigrate.
Despite all these gaps, the sweeping global shift of recent years toward the "knowledge economy" and "artificial intelligence" opens before Arab societies an important opportunity for civilizational catching-up and for a qualitative leap in progress. The knowledge economy has made data the new source of wealth creation, and algorithmic innovation the instrument of dominance. Progress, in other words, is a compulsory defensive mechanism for genuine participation in this economy, which rests above all on superiority in knowledge.
In truth, what strengthens the idea that there is a historic opportunity today to deepen our connection with the nature and conditions of progress is that our societies possess a unique demographic strength: an enormous mass of young people, larger than in the long-advanced states that suffer from population aging. This strength is not confined to demographic numbers. The advanced world itself now imports the best of our young people, well aware of the intelligence of the emigrant Arab scientific talent in engineering, medicine, the exact sciences, and mathematics, minds that prove their worth every day in the finest research centers, hospitals, and technology companies in the world.
The bottom line: it is no longer possible to go on holding a truncated understanding of progress, especially now that the "knowledge economy," which so fascinates our young people, has become one of the most important resources of progress and competition. It is an opportunity for us to share knowledge with the world and to leave behind the role of the consuming spectator.
