On December 6, Charles Paul Freund, a senior editor at Reason magazine, delivered the fourth of the 2004-2005 Bradley Lectures. Edited excerpts follow.

Arab pop culture celebrates Arab individuality, provides an ever-increasing number of models for Arab identity, subverts state power, challenges restrictive social and moral norms, portrays socially marginalized groups in sympathetic terms, seeks solutions to societal problems, portrays women in roles of power, and ultimately increases social tolerance.
 
These are only a few instances of a sustained conflict between Arab commercial pop culture and various portions of Arab societies. The new pop culture is obviously appealing to huge segments of these societies; they are supporting it with their money, time, attention, and energy. And it is also obviously discomfiting other people, who are steeped in traditions that are important to them and who are unhappy to see these familiar patterns and norms threatened. Others, however, are the region's ideologues and authoritarians, specifically the entrenched remnants of Arabism and the rising Islamists.

Authoritarian systems have managed to control traditional folk culture and high culture, either by harnessing them to their own purposes or destroying the types of high culture they have not liked. But no authoritarian system has ever been able to deal effectively with pop culture.

Shaping Arab Identity

Two centers of culture, the Arab novel and the Arab music video, recognize what appears to be a vitally important shift in Arab identity. The Arab novel becomes depressed at the prospect of greater Arab individuality, which it sees in terms of isolation and futility. In contrast, the Arab music video celebrates that individuality and provides the tools for intensifying individuation, because that is how the consumers of pop artifacts everywhere else in the world use these artifacts.

The most important aspect of these videos is that they offer their audience an imagined world in which Arabs can shape and assert their identities in any way they please. These are men and women cut off from the familiar icons of family and nation. They are individuals, but they are not examples of isolation and futility. In fact, they largely seem to be having a pretty good time and are enjoying their individuality.

What this low, "vulgar" genre is offering is a glimpse of a latent Arab world that is liberal and "modernized." The reason is that the foundation of cultural modernity is the freedom to achieve a self-fashioned and fluid identity, or the freedom to imagine yourself on your own terms. The videos offer a route to that process. By contrast, much of Arab culture remains a place of constricted, traditional, and narrowly defined identities, often subsumed in group identities that hinge on differences with, and antagonism toward, other groups. In addition, numerous videos present women in the roles of power and play with gender types, and several videos confront the nature of Arab identity directly, especially in encounters with non-Arab "others."
 
Cultures that have been transformed by individualist, consumerist self-fashioning share similarities. Most of the members of these cultures are far less tied to the groups they were born into than are traditional cultures. As a result, they tend to be far more willing to tolerate each other than is the case in many traditional societies. If you adhere to this phenomenon, then you refer to it as "liberationist." If you do not, then you call it "social atomization," a charge that has been made for two centuries.

As for the role of ephemeral and disposable pop cultural artifacts, their use by audiences to assert and validate a shifting sense of self is a well-known phenomenon. In seventeenth-century Holland, the members of that country's suddenly enriched middle class latched onto paintings of themselves and their world as a way to express their new social power. At the time, such subject matter was a departure for painters; indeed, it was the first time that anyone outside the aristocracy had owned paintings.
 
The emerging British middle class of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries went through a fiction-reading frenzy as it looked for models for its new social opportunities and identified with characters grappling with an industrializing, urbanizing world. Similarly, movies and rock music were powerful forms for different generations of twentieth-century Americans. They used such forms to play with the new possibilities of identity that were coming within their grasp.
 
For nearly a century, a series of utopian political systems has been advanced in the region to attempt to break its cycle of conflict and stagnation: Pan-Arabism, Baathism, Nasserism, Islamism, Kemalism, and even, under Egypt's Anwar Sadat, an unsuccessful market approach. These have all failed. What may yet work in the region is what has worked elsewhere for centuries: commercialism that does not transmit a regime's utopian dreams but addresses the personal dreams of the audience.