To wit, Wright points out that Coyne took a quote out of context in order to attribute to Wright “the claim” that “God” is behind humanity’s moral progress. But of course Wright doesn’t “claim” any such thing; he only suggests that it is plausible, as shown by a passage quoted by Coyne that was not, it appears, taken out of context: “Maybe natural selection is an algorithm that is in some sense designed to get life to a point where it can do something — fulfill its goal, its purpose.” Wright thinks that that purpose might have been the achievement of moral order.

As Coyne says, and as I confirmed by reading Wright’s afterword (entitled “By the Way, What Is God?”), this focus on possibilities, as opposed to what we might call provabilities, is “characteristic of Wright’s intellectual style.” But talking about what is possible is almost never enlightening or fruitful. Wright admits as much when he says that a personal God “presumably” does not exist; what he means is that the possibility is not disprovable, but we can and should nevertheless discount it. But the same sort of skeptical approach to “possibilities” vitiates Wright’s own argument.

Now, as Coyne says, there are plenty of reasons to doubt whether humanity has evinced much moral order or progress. But Coyne is not an intellectual or religious historian, so it’s no surprise that Wright gets the pleasure of correcting him on such issues as “the evolution of monotheism,” “Christian inclusiveness,” “belligerence and tolerance in the Koran,” and “the Islamic doctrine of salvation.” But Coyne is a scientist, and the author of an excellent primer on evolution, so I was surprised that he didn’t take issue with Wright’s misrepresentation of natural selection, which turns out to be central to his justification for talking about “god” at all.

In his afterword, Wright imagines a dialectic between an “atheist scientist” (hello, Jerry Coyne) and a “believer.” He starts off by noting that his own “account of the moral direction of history has been a materialist account”: evolution produced the human brain, which produced technology, which allowed for the expansion of social organization, which likewise expanded our “moral imagination.” A totally plausible and godless account. “So why,” Wright asks rhetorically, “start talking about God?”

This is Wright’s believer’s response, and one can’t help but get the sense that it is also Wright’s: “[B]iologists agree that a strictly physical system or process—whose workings can be wholly explained in material terms—can have such extraordinary characteristics that it is fair to posit some special creative force as its source and ask about the nature of that force. Darwin inquired into the creative force behind plants and animals, and his answer was evolution. Surely the believer is entitled to ask the same question about evolution: Where did the amazing algorithm of natural selection come from?”

Well, natural selection is no more or less than the logical outcome of genetic variability and finite resources, neither of which seems particularly “extraordinary” or “amazing” to me. Perhaps this is not the “special explanation” for the “powerful mechanism” of natural selection that Wright has in mind. But of course Wright doesn’t use words like “special” and “extraordinary” innocently; they indicate that he has a bias towards unprovable, nonscientific explanations of where natural selection came from. The argument, if we can call it that, is fundamentally the same as William Paley’s infamous argument from design: some natural thing (for Paley it was the living organism, for Wright it is natural selection itself) is so darn complex and impressive that it just has to have a “special” (read: non-materialist) explanation.

For Wright, the discovery of natural selection merely forces believers to go a little further back into the infinite regress (i.e., but where did that come from?), but for less speculative souls, it did something far more powerful: it suggested that arguments of a particular form (this thing is complex, therefore God or “god” exists) were fundamentally misguided, and also that the more we know, the smaller “god” becomes, so that we might reasonably expect that he will eventually disappear entirely. Attempts to save some scrap of “god” from this onslaught of reason just end up begging the question: do we even recognize this “god” as “God” anymore, or should we maybe stop using that word entirely? For pointing out the tenuousness of Wright’s possibility-addled project, I’ll forgive Coyne’s misreadings and indiscretions.

But this year has  marked far more — the culmination of a decade during which the shine came off the “end of history,” as Francis Fukuyama blandly labeled the post-communist period. First came the wars (Iraq, Afghanistan) often irresponsibly dressed up as civilizational struggles, then a collapse of faith in capitalism so stunning that, had it happened during the Cold War, might have sparked, if not a reverse 1989, a considerable propaganda coup for the Soviet bloc. Whereas one of the cataclysmic events of 1989 — the fall of the Berlin Wall — was more widely celebrated in the soaring boom of the late 90s, 2009 seems more ripe for an exploration of the ambiguous legacy of both the popular movements that swelled, on both sides of Eurasia, twenty years before.

Enter the Iranian election imbroglio, perfectly timed to capture a zeitgeist brimming with expectation of cultural chaos and refreshed by reminders of the popular demonstrations that erupted on the streets of Berlin and Beijing. Salient memories of the former make it unsurprising to watch media figures, cheerleading what they hope is yet another replay of 1989 Berlin, lump the demonstrations against the election result with other recent “Twitter Revolutions”. While Evgeny Morozov disputed social media’s usefulness for such movements in the March/April issue of BR, he is having slightly more trouble doing so in the context of Iran, where the government — let’s all stop inconsistently plastering every momentarily disfavored system with the epithet “regime” — is either much less sophisticated at harnessing the internet for propaganda purposes, or doesn’t need to.

After all, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad counts among his supporters significant numbers of the lower classes, and, though reported on with far less zeal by the BBC or (when it finally stuck its head out of the embarrassing gutter of celebrity gossip in which it’s been increasingly entrenched) CNN, many thousands of them also managed to mobilize in Iran’s capital without the aid of an expensive iPhone. Indeed, missing from the many discussions about the protests in Iran, from technology to the flared tempers on display in the streets, are they they, like many large street demonstrations over the past decade — and unlike the uprisings of 1989 — have been taking place in an atmosphere charged with class politics.

This fact appears lost on the State Department, which, in contrast to the sober statements being issued by the White House, which were cautious not to play into any belief in further U.S. interference in Iran, effectively intervened on behalf of Iran’s largely pro-Moussavi Twitterati when it asked the site to defer its planned downtime today. Mir-Hossein Moussavi, the reformist presidential candidate, began his political career popular with Iran’s lower classes, but his ascendancy to his new status as icon of the reform movement has aligned him more closely with the slightly more secular Iranian elite. In other words, the reason so much Twitter traffic appears to support the Iranian “revolution” is because those that can afford to tweet and SMS — that is, one side of the digital divide — are largely arrayed on one side of the political spectrum.

The difference between Tehran 2009 and the uprisings of 1989, therefore, is not simply the technology available to participants. After all, it didn’t take mobile web to assemble thousands of Germans in Leipzig, weeks before the fall of the wall, for the “Wir Sind Das Volk” (“We Are the People”) protests that are being commemorated across the former East Germany this year. No, the movements in Berlin and Beijing were qualitatively different than the likes of Tehran 2009 — or recent rallies in Bangkok, Kiev, and Caracas.  In these examples, large masses of protesters have turned up on either side of the political debate.

Of course, class has fueled street demonstrations — from the French to the Russian Revolutions — throughout history.  And many recent manifestations of “people power” — from Pakistan’s Lawyers’ Movement to many of the “Color Revolutions” in the former Soviet bloc — also implicated class. But in many recent movements, what is notably gone is the simple formula — which so many Western commentators have tried to impose on the much more complex situation in Iran — of “the people versus the regime”. In the new class conflicts, a much broader economic and cultural elite — the upper middle class — has faced down a proletariat standing behind a charismatic leader. Consequently, both sides claim democratic legitimacy — and, in the most extreme examples, accuse the other of being anti-democratic.

In the ideological vacuum opened by the so-called “end of history”, epic conflict can be staged between forces which each claim the democratic mantle. Even the greatest perceived contemporary threat to democracy, Islamism, largely fits this mold. The protests in Iran have not challenged the fundamental character of the Islamic Republic, and three of the largest Islamist groups — the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas in Palestine, and Hezbollah in Lebanon — are all deeply engaged in the political process. In the recent elections in Lebanon, in fact, Hezbollah displayed political maturity by conceding defeat to a “pro-West” coalition of Christians and Sunnis.

Protests such as those in Iran have broken out, specifically, where there are wide class cleavages in nominally democratic states, and when orderly transitions of power were distrusted, resulting in alternating demonstrations of approximately equal size. Members of such crowds occasionally engage the police, when they swelled to the point of threatening disorder, but governments have declined to confront them, lest their own popular allies, whose protests were a sign they were counting on their own democratic legitimacy, be accused abusing their power — or worse. While 1989 has been largely euphemized as the year history ended when the Berlin Wall fell, memories of Tiananmen remained much more salient among those who feared being charged with repeating it.

But even if the movement aligned with the ruling class committed some grievous crime, the simple fact that no side can claim a monopoly over the “will of the people” means that the narrative of a struggle against authoritarianism cannot repeat itself. A replay of 1989 — either in the form of the fall of the Berlin Wall or Tiananmen — is impossible.

What could be more ironic than the return of class — driving force of the old “spectre haunting Europe” — on the anniversairy of communism’s demise? Perhaps it’s that this era of dueling mandates and electoral uncertainty began with a recount in Florida, followed by a definitive ruling from America’s Guardian Council, the Supreme Court. On average, a poorer, more rural voter preferred George W. Bush (“against their interests,” snorted the likes of Thomas Frank) — and a considerable number of coastal elites took to the streets to protest him as they never had before.

Such origins may suggest that the greatest contemporary threat to democracy is not authoritarianism, or its prohibition of forms of information-sharing, like Twitter, but, at the vulnerable point of democratic transition, social structures that cause people to mistrust fellow citizens, and such an overabundance of divergent information that one can always choose what to believe.