The third season of the Theatre of Thought will commence at Goethe’s Tahrir Lounge on 11 October 2018. The first lecture I’ll be giving is titled “Unpacking self-expressions in the Modern era” (the talk will be in Arabic). Click here for the Facebook event link.
“Body language, art, fashion, and hairstyles, are some of the familiar modes of self-expression, but in an age of hyper-visibility and inter-connectedness, self-expression has accelerated to become one of the highest articulation of individuality and novelty. Self-expression in some respect is beneficial to crystallize the forces that go into constructing the individual’s expressive identity at a point in time and place, as well as fleshing out a positioning in relation to a world that has become increasingly noisy and blurred. This lecture, however, will explore how in recent decades, in Egypt and abroad, consumer culture has appropriated self-expression, in the midst of the neoliberal storm that’s turning citizens into customers, that it has become increasingly difficult to separate self-expression from the shadow of monetary manipulation. It raises further questions, among them, if self-expression does in fact disguise a different set of established rules and practices, and at one point does non-conformity begin to look quite similar?
Since the 1970s, self-expression grew as the new style of challenging the problems and toxins in the world, but this is becoming somewhat futile when the whole world seems to be moving towards basing itself on self-expression. The reduction of self-expression to feelings and consumer desires has severed the idea of self-expression from any possible higher ideals and the notion that you can be part of anything bigger than yourself. Moreover, self-expression masquerades as a new radical way of seeing or understanding the world, but a mature worldview is arguably unable to crystallize from simply talking about the self and feelings towards the other.
The end result, as Berlin-based South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han observes, is the terror of the same, a world of unceasing repetition of similar experiences pretending to be novelty and renewal. This also consequently sees the ideas of love, bonding, solid relations, responsibility, and communal spirit, collapse in a world further burdened by an endless freedom of choice, oversupply of options and the compulsion for perfection. That is to say, self-expression robs countless hours as a result of choosing the right clothes, embellishing and updating the right Facebook photo, and cultivating special friendships for the self, not the relation, to be projected upon. All so one can participate in the worldly spectacle that sees a global collection of individuals that have moved away from reflection, contemplation, sustained efforts at doing one task, while distraction becomes the norm and the interior of the self is hollowed out.
لغة الجسد والفن والموضة وقصات الشعر هي الطرق المعروفة للتعبير عن النفس. لكن في عصر ال” الأعلى مشاهدة” و”التواصل المتشابك” تطورت فكرة التعبير عن النفس لتصبح الإفراط في الذاتية وطرحها بشكل مبتكر .
إن التعبير عن النفس هو تبلور لكل عناصر بناء الشخصية التي نود التعبير عنها في مكان ووقت معين وعلاقتها بعالم يزداد في الصخب وعدم وضوح الرؤية.
في هذه المحاضرة نبحث في العقود الحالية في مصر والعالم عن كيف استغلت الثقافة الاستهلاكية فكرة التعبير عن النفس وتحويل المواطنين إلى مستهلكين مما يجعل فكرة التعبير عن النفس بعيد عن البعد الإقتصادى، شيء في غاية الصعوبة. وهنا نطرح أسئلة أخرى مثل: هل التعبير عن النفس في حد ذاته يتقيد بقوانينه وممارساته الخاصة وهل يعبر عما في أنفسنا حقا؟.
منذ السبعينات والتعبير عن النفس بدأ في النمو بالتوازي مع التحديات التي تواجه العالم ولكن للأسف هذا التعبير عن النفس لم يثمر عن شيء حين اقتصر هذا التعبير على المشاعر والاستهلاك فخلت الفكرة من أن نكون جزءًا من شىء أكبر منا. كذلك فكرة التعبير عن النفس في حد ذاتها ومحاولة فهم العالم في حد ذاتها فكرة راديكالية لكن رؤية العالم لا تبنى من منظور فردي.
في نهاية الأمر كما أكد الفيلسوف الكورى بيانج شيل هان، وينتج كل ما سبق “النمطية المفزعة” في عالم يكرس للتكرار وإن تخفى في صورة تجديد وامتداد. هذا التكرار يجعلنا نرى أفكارنا عن الحب والتواصل والعلاقات الجادة والمسئولية وروح الجماعة تنهار في عالم محمل بعبء الحرية اللانهائية في الاختيار وزيادة والسعى نحوالكمال. في حقيقة الأمر التعبير عن النفس يسرق منا ساعات في اختيار الملابس المناسبة وتحديث وتعديل صورة صفحتنا على فيس بوك واختيار الاصدقاء المناسبين للسياق العام. كل هذا التناغم مع أفراد الكون التى بعدت كل البعد عن التفكير والتفكر والمحاولات المستدامة للمشاركة في جهد مشترك مما أفرغ النفس من فحواها تعديل صورة صفحتنا على فيس بوك واختيار الاصدقاء المناسبين للسياق العام. كل هذا التناغم مع أفراد الكون التى بعدت كل البعد عن التفكير والتفكر والمحاولات المستدامة للمشاركة في جهد مشترك مما أفرغ النفس من فحواها”.
“Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero,” Andrea cries in the 1938 play, Life of Galileo, by German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, to which Galileo responds: “No, unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”
Egypt can be that unhappy land, a land where farewell parties have outstripped homecoming parties. Where a young female doctor laments she wants to leave because “to give birth to a baby here feels morally wrong, it feels sort of illegal.” Where a juice seller sarcastically quips, “We no longer have time to think of anything else but survival, we don’t even have time to contemplate suicide.” When a country is mired in endless social and economic problems, and smothered in despair, the yearning grows for that batal (hero), that one human figure where all painful and complex abstracts will be realised within and resolved without.
Something happened in Egypt that short-circuited a sport that is often treated by governments of all persuasions as a distracting bread and circus for the masses. Something interrupted the despotic drive to stamp out the uniqueness from the flow of Egyptian life.
Enter Mohamed Salah armed with a moral code.
Mohamed Salah banners and merchandise (Sporting, Alexandria).
While Salah is seen to bring hope to many, he is an unsettling spectre that silently haunts the establishment, for he has options, international prestige and the perception of untouchability. He has grown to be more than a hero of football success. Salah is a different sort of hero, he is a hero of disruption, and a living paradox of a political voice without talking politics. Salah operates in a politics of juxtaposition in which his perceived immaculate persona is unconsciously contrasted with the familiar polluted forces of high politics.
While many of Egypt’s prominent and established figures seem to have an answer for everything, Salah shows up and we’re faced with difficult questions. Namely, why are we investing so much hope in one man? This is more than about the World Cup.
Salah is not a substitute for viable high politics. He is, after all, a football player, and a very good one at that, but his insertion into the volatile Egyptian climate sheds some light on what has gone wrong and why the current fervor around him can illuminate the question of Egyptian unhappiness.
Salah’s stance to steer away from politics, or from inadvertently disclosing his political leanings, has given him an amplified united base. Since the 2011 revolution, Egyptians have had to live with binaries: revolutionary versus counter-revolutionary, secular versus Islamist, civilian versus military, liberal versus hyper-nationalist, pro and anti-Brotherhood, among others. While many of these binaries have diminished under the shadow of the generals, the unity that has come in its place is a negative unity. It is almost always against something, such as terrorism, and when it stands for something, let’s say Egypt, it’s a nationalist straightjacket that is imposed, with no room for plurality of thought or voices.
Salah might just be the first figure in a while behind which pro- and anti-regime supporters can unite. In the words of an Egyptian doctoral candidate studying in California, “Salah is the reason I’m mending my relationship with Egypt.”
It has become commonplace to argue that unhappiness in Egypt is caused by high unemployment, poverty, dysfunctional education, censorship, a crackdown on independent voices, and overall human rights abuses. While there is no doubt these factors contribute to the misery of many Egyptians, there is something worse and pathological that lurks behind them all: The grim reality that new possibilities no longer emerge on the horizon. The dilution of hope that once offered the promise that unhappiness was a temporary moment, now feels for many like the ink of sadness has dried. Depression disarms you before repression even has time to put on its uniform.
For this reason, Salah is like a sudden assertion of human values within a dehumanising system. This did not arise when Salah helped defeat Congo, propelling Egypt into the World Cup last October. Astonishing football talent is not always enough to convert non-football watchers. Nor did his story of humble beginnings to stardom take hold in this moment. There was nothing original in any of these individual success stories. Perhaps because they remained just that: individual.
But then came the other, and equally decisive, side of Salah. Barely two weeks after this victory, and because of it, Salah was offered a luxury villa by entrepreneur Mamdouh Abbas. He politely declined the gift and suggested that a donation to his village Nagrig in Gharbia would make him happier. This move, along with many of his charitable acts, for non-football fans, including myself, was thunderous to say the least, and swayed us to his camp.
To put the implications of this act in a wider context: Cairo’s highways are nauseatingly choked with billboards flaunting the latest exuberant luxury real estate and gated compounds. It is an assault on the senses of millions of Egyptians who are puzzled as to how such developments take place in an era of painful austerity measures, in which they are being asked to continually sacrifice. The billboards, almost always in English and at times with white, blue-eyed European faces, loudly proclaim, “It’s time to think about you,” and, “This time it’s personal.” It is not enough that Egypt’s capitalism on crack and real estate speculation is skewing the economy, but it also ramps up hyper-individualism, greed, and various strands of self-hatred.
Salah’s rejection of the villa was a violent piercing into a culture of the grotesque and excessive, and signified his upholding of the values born, or crystallized, during the 2011 revolution that put the common good above all. His refusal was a significant breach in the business-as-usual patronage and wheeling and dealing circles. If Salah was loved for his victory over Congo, he was now respected more for this move and the many charitable stories that emerged, making it obvious that this has been his character for a long time, and that he didn’t reinvent himself for PR purposes. Love and respect are two different beasts. Egyptians have long missed looking up to someone who commands respect, at least someone who is not in exile, in prison, or long dead.
In recent years, Egyptians have had to live with the exhausting spectacle of doublespeak in which official interpretations are often in conflict with lived realities and common sense. The train heading to Alexandria is declared to be on its way to Aswan, as veteran journalist Yosri Fouda once put it. This war of attrition on rationality has plunged Egyptians deep into a spiral of conformity, scepticism and indifference toward each other. The idea of the higher good receded as officialdom continued, in Czech philosopher Václav Havel’s words, “not to excite people with the truth, but to reassure them with lies.” The intervention of Salah did not necessarily change all that, nor did it reverse the Orwellian trend, but he did help restore meaning to terms that had become scrambled: dignity became dignity again, principles became principles, kindness became kindness, and happiness became happiness.
Salah touched on another existential question within Egyptian state and society: the strong desire for international recognition. This phenomenon weaves its way through Egypt’s modern history. There have been concerted efforts to export Sisi’s branded Egypt, for example, with the new Suez Canal project billboards dotting New York’s Times Square with the slogan “Egypt’s gift to the world.” Salah, instead, lived up to fulfilling that slogan in a much more dramatic and compelling way. In fact, Salah has arguably had more impact on the world’s positive views of Egypt than all the recent years of tourist campaigns, international conferences and mega projects combined. In light of this, mentioning Salah in conversation can give many Egyptians a feeling of breathlessness, tingling hands and a sensation of weightlessness.
This in part has to do with the function of happiness and meaning. If the regime is not suffering from cherophobia (fear of happiness), it believes it can commodify happiness by stating it intends to make “Egyptians among the world’s happiest,” or through the recent discussions with the UAE’s Ministry of Happiness to “export” some of their cool psychedelic juice to Egypt.
Happiness is a question that spans a history of philosophical musings, from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, to Al-Ghazali’s Alchemy of Happiness, to Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols and the Antichrist. All of them would shun the Anglo-inspired utilitarianism of John Stuart Mills that speaks of happiness as the ultimate net objective and has been largely repackaged for neoliberal modernity, rather than a meaningful higher life that produces happiness as a by-product. In other words, you cannot separate the attainment of happiness from respect for justice, dignity, honour, etc. It doesn’t seem to phase the authorities that happiness is meaningless without rescuing vibrant citizenship, opening public spaces, providing fair trials, encouraging pluralism, and preventing overall existential meaning from being fragmented.
Salah offers glimpses into the voids spawned by the above fractures as he communicates not only on the instrumental level of football success, but with meaningful and empathic qualities that come with an honourable character. It is no wonder that Salah was able to inspire calls to a drug user helpline to shoot up by 400 percent.
Salah’s fame, coupled with his stance on religion, comes interestingly at a time when many Egyptians are renegotiating their faith, identity markers and boundaries. The norms of what once constituted a religious person are breaking down under the weight of the country’s endless contradictions. All this takes place beneath the purview of a state that uses religion to arbitrarily police the public space, and preachers who continue to push a baroque Islam at the expense of the religion’s humble essence.
The rise of a widespread spiritual passivity contrasts with Salah’s faith, which has come to animate his public life. He saw no need to dismiss or distil his Muslim identity, even after he achieved a turbo-charged social mobility and stardom. This is not lost on many. The sight of Salah’s veiled wife, Maggie, by his side on a green oval in a European city before the eyes of millions, is a hypnotic sight to Egyptians (and the rest of the world) precisely because it is unusual, particularly at a time of heightened anxieties toward Muslims in the West. “I respect him as he is not embarrassed nor does he try to hide his veiled wife after all that success,” an Alexandrian barber says.
It is for the same reasons that Salah can sprout pan-Arab and pan-Islamic wings across the Arab and Muslim world. He has made it into Lebanon’s graffiti scene and protest ballots in the Lebanese elections (just like Egypt) to a bizarre planned peaceful protest outside the Spanish embassy in Jakarta after the injurious tackle by Sergio Ramos. The Arab world’s traditional idea of a leading, strong, vibrant, noble and outward-looking Egypt – one that spearheads the arts, preserves the seat of intellectual Sunnism, champions pan-Arabism, and stands up for the Palestinian cause – is projected onto Salah with deafening force. Between prostrating on the grass and raising his index fingers to the heavens, hundreds of millions of Muslims are drawn to this well-understood language of piety.
But this attraction transcends culture and religion. As the western world is bogged down in neoliberal sterility, rampant consumerism, loneliness, high-level scandals, populism, xenophobia against refugees and immigrants, anti-Muslim bigotry, anti-Semitism and fake news, the multi-layered Salah – the intimately relatable footballer and loving father who kicks a ball with his daughter Makka – stands out like a moment of truth and living universality, with a mammoth mural recently going up in Times Square reflecting his larger than life image.
Albert Camus wrote to an estranged German friend in 1943: “I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don’t want any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive.”
Salah perhaps embodies this ideal. That love of country does not require drums and chest-beating, but grace, sincerity, modesty and charity. He is a reminder to Egyptians that there exists a better human nature in a landscape barren of prominent reverential role-models. To Egypt and even the rest of the world, Salah is the outlier that proclaims the alternative to nationalism is not treachery but civic responsibility, the alternative to stifling religious conservatism does not always have to be apathy or mockery of the sacred, but breathing faith into a sound value system, and the alternative to injustice can be forgiveness. Ultimately, people had almost forgotten what humility among those with renown looks like. Particularly, a humility that is relentless and consistent, despite being trialled under the stadium floodlights and the stars sprinkled across the Liverpool night sky.
A Salah poster in Sidi Bishr, Alexandria.
Salah is the rare homecoming party Egyptians have long awaited. His face on dangling lanterns lights up dark alleyways, and his colourful posters germinate over the debris of fading election posters in a country that sees official and media-manufactured heroes reckon with publicly-anointed heroes.
While it cannot be implied nor expected that Salah could impact the political situation in Egypt, his animated existence spotlights entry points back into the realm of authenticity. He widens the moral imagination of an attentive public and parades the possibilities that infer that the rhythm of life involves more than birth, marriage, death and even sports. He also raises questions that many power-holders will have to grapple with eventually, someday: That, above all, there are reasons why people ache for heroes in the first place. — What have you done to make them this unhappy?
In the wake of last year’s successful projects, Tahrir Lounge Goethe (TLG) continues the Theater of Thought series. In 2018, it returns to take on the widespread problem of mediocrity by engaging with sociology, literature and philosophical concepts and various intellectual topics in an informal conversational manner that audience members will find approachable, fascinating and interactive.
The array of familiar toxic social problems did not simply enter the world by announcing themselves with drums, fire and brimstone. Rather, they crept up as “common sense” or it becomes repetitive until, eventually, they appeared as “tradition” or a “way of life.” Many will even defend the questionable status quo as part of one’s duty. The rise of mediocrity and fragmentation of meaning has become an intimate part of everyday life.
With this as a backdrop, the Tahrir Lounge Goethe launches the second season of the Theatre of Thoughts titled “Animating Spaces of Meaning” with the sociologist Dr. Amro Ali. Dr Ali will engage with the concept of utopianism, a term that has, understandably, been disparaged in the twentieth century in light of the totalitarian nightmares. But this route adopted utopia to looks backwards towards an imaginary past, a prelapsarian paradise, in which life was different, better, innocent, harmonious, and one of plenitude and sensual gratification. A vague future is staked in a reductionist past.
While this might be a utopia from the perspective of its proponents, it often turns out to be a dystopia in reality. The second utopia that the seminars will explore is not the utopia that looks to the restoration of a lost past, but imagines utopia as the intentional product of rational action and human agency through which the good society might be realised in the future.
A sociological-philosophical approach will guide the three seminars, each in Alexandria (4 April), Cairo (10-11 April) and Minya (26 April), that will discuss the pitfalls of modernity and the utopian lines of thinking that can shed light on how to understand the modern problem of mediocrity: dehumanising individualism, loneliness, and, in effect, the fragmentation of meaningful spaces and narratives.
The month of May will see three-day workshops, each in Cairo and Alexandria, and will telescope into story-telling as a utopian form of agency. A process that centres on social transformation for a better society would be sought out but it would be conditioned on not postponing that end towards the future, rather, it would be keeping that end everyday throughout the process. So the problem is not the transition but what that transition involves. It would not be a transition that involves deferring our ends; rather, it’s instigating utopia everyday to the best of one’s human capacity. To do this, the workshops will focus on creative expressions and engaging with German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s concept on the loss of aura.
Given the limited spaces, participation in the workshops will be given to those who attended one of the seminars. This will be followed by a publication of the workshop outcomes in Arabic and English. The Theatre of Thought welcomes artists, bloggers, filmmakers, writers, directors of developmental and cultural projects and members of the public who are interested in incorporating sociological and philosophical questions into their activities.
مسرح الفكر
الموسم الثاني “صعود المعاني”
يستكمل مشروع التحرير لاونج جوته سلسلة حلقات مسرح الفكر بعد النجاح الذي حققه العام الماضي، وفي 2018 يعود من جديد بشكل مختلف وبمفاهيم فلسفية وأبعاد فكرية جديدة تطرح موضوعات وقضايا أكثر عمقًا ولكن بشكل مبسط معتمدًا على التفاعل مع الجمهور، فهو مسرح للأفكار الفلسفية بطله الأساسي المفاهيم المتعلقة بالوجود والمعرفة والعقل والمنطق والبحث عن الأدلة والقيم والأخلاق واللغة وغيرها من الموضوعات التي تفتح آفاقًا جديدة للخيال والابتكار والإبداع والتفكير النقدي.
لم تكن مجموعة المشاكل الاجتماعية السامة المألوفة تدخل العالم بإطلاق النيران أو عزفها على الطبول، ولكنها تسللت إلى عالمنا على أنها “شعور عام” وتكررت أحداثها حتى أصبحت في النهاية ما يعرف “بالتقاليد” أو “أسلوب حياة”، سيدافع الكثيرون عن الوضع الراهن المشكوك فيه كجزء من واجبهم، ولقد أدى موت الأيديولوجيات أو إضعافها منذ التسعينيات إلى حدوث فراغ كبير، الأمر الذي دفع اقتصاد السوق الحر الغير خاضع للرقابة إلى تقييد مفهوم المواطنة، بحيث أصبح من الصعب تخيل ووضع مجموعة البدائل.
وفي إطار ما سبق يطلق مشروع التحرير لاونج جوته الموسم الثاني من مسرح الفكر تحت عنوان “صعود المعاني” مع دكتور علم الاجتماع عمرو علي – مؤسس مبادرة “أكاديمي الإسكندرية” ويركز مسرح الفكر على مفهوم المثالية، فهو مصطلح تم التخلص منه في القرن العشرين في ضوء الكوابيس الشمولية، لكن هذا الطريق اعتمد المثالية كوسيلة للنظر إلى الخلف نحو الماضي الخيالي والجنة، حيث التمتع بحياة مختلفة أفضل، بريئة، متناغمة، ويتم وضع مستقبل غامض في أعماق الماضي الاختزالي، وربما يكون هذا هو مصطلح المثالية من وجهة نظر مؤيديها، إلا أنه غالبًا ما يُحول الأمر إلى واقع مرير، إن المثالية الثانية التي ستستكشفها في حلقات مسرح الفكر ليست هي التي تتطلع إلى استعادة الماضي المفقود، ولكنها تتخيل المدينة الفاضلة كمنتج مقصود للعمل العقلاني والطاقات الإنسانية التي يمكن من خلالها تحقيق المجتمع الجيد في المستقبل، كما يلقي مسرح الفكر الضوء على كيفية فهم مشكلات المجتمعات الحديثة مثل الفردية واللاإنسانية، والشعور بالوحدة، والوسطية، وتفتيت الروايات المدنية.
يتضمن مسرح الفكر هذا العام أربع حلقات يعقبها ثلاث ورش عمل الأولى حول المفاهيم الفلسفية التي تحدث عنها بنيامين والتر عالم الفلسفة والاجتماع الألماني الشهير، والثانية تدور حول الحكي، أما الثالثة تركز حول الأداء المسرحي للموضوعات الفلسفية السابق ذكرها في مسرح الفكر، ستكون الأولوية لحضور الورش لمن شاركوا بالحلقات النقاشية، وعقب الانتهاء من ورش العمل سيقوم مشروع التحرير لاونج جوته بإنتاج كتيب يضم أعمال وإبداعات المشاركين بالورش، ويستهدف مسرح الفكر الفنانين والمدونين ومخرجي الأفلام التسجيلية والكتاب ومديري المشروعات التنموية والثقافية والمهتمين بالموضوعات الفلسفية والفكرية.
يذكر أن “المثالية” حلم راود الفلاسفة والمفكرين لإنشاء مدينة فاضلة يعيش مواطنوها في سلام ووئام، الهدف منها هو تأسيسها إنسانيًا وليس عمرانيًا كمختلف المدن، تركز على أهمية ترابط أفراد المجتمع وترسيخ مبادئ الانتماء والهوية، وتكون الدولة بمثابة كائن حي وجسد واحد يتكون من عدد هائل من الخلايا التي تمثل أفراد المجتمع، وتعتبر المساواة والعدالة من أهم القواعد والأسس التي تُبنى عليها تلك المدنية الفاضلة، لتحقيق التكافل والتكامل بين أفراد المجتمع.
انطلق مسرح الفكر العام الماضي بالتعاون مع الدكتور عمرو علي، ناقش خلالها العديد من النظريات والأبعاد الفكرية والفلسفية، واستهدف المهتمين بالقضايا الفلسفية والفكرية، وذلك من خلال ثلاث حلقات وهي: -“فكرة البدايات” و”آفة الطمس” و”مجتمع مبدع”.
الدكتور عمرو علي هو دكتور علم الاجتماع في الجامعة الأمريكية بالقاهرة، محاضر في العديد من الجامعات والمعاهد في القاهرة والإسكندرية، تتناول أبحاثه دراسة المجتمعات، والحالة الإنسانية في ظل الاعتداء من قوى الاستهلاك العالمي والثقافة المادية، وآثر ذلك على الهوية، ومعنى المدينة والحداثة والمواطنة، حصل على الدكتوراه من جامعة سيدني وكانت الرسالة البحثية الخاصة به عن دور الخيال التاريخي في تشكيل الإسكندرية الحديثة ومواطنيها.
This might prompt further questions as to why Egypt would waste tens of millions of pounds on posters and banners for President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, when his rivals have been muzzled and no credible candidate stands to challenge him? After all, these posters cost, according to one company I spoke with, from LE800 to LE5,000 each, mostly paid for by businesses — money that could have been better spent on hospitals and schools, or even the government’s Tahya Masr (Long Live Egypt) philanthropic fund. But the costly flooding of images across cities makes sense when one considers them to be a symptom of a deeper pathology, one in which political despotism elevates the ruler’s will and passion over rational action and debate and scuffles public welfare by turning the citizenry into a homogenous mass without any real representation. But even the most anti-democratic election can reveal much about the system and its key players.
Rigged elections come in all varieties: ballot-stuffing, the arrest of opposition figures, intimidation of opposition supporters and miscounting of votes, among other imaginative techniques. Yet at the heart of it all remains a consistent factor — the regime views elections not as an institutionalized mechanism within an accountable governance process, but as a carefully orchestrated event wrapped in a spectacle to reinforce the regime’s strength and test the oppositional waters.
By the very nature of their positions, authoritarian leaders project extreme insecurity, as their legitimacy is not reaped from popular representation and democratic accountability, but from the support of elites and the security establishment. This type of support is extremely precarious, as it is not only suspended above responsible political cycles, but also makes for potentially messy endings such as coups, revolutions and imprisonment. Therefore, elections are often a safety valve to manage threats.
Such elections offer a “dignified” way for presidents to purge strong popular supporters who can emerge as a threat (even if their staunch loyalty was never in question), and reshuffle Cabinet ministers. This can give the illusion to the public that a reset is taking place, and that economic problems should be blamed solely on such ousted ministers, not the president. Elections signal to supporters why they need to be co-opted, and to opponents that broad support for the regime invites further crackdowns. The post-election period often sees security apparatuses reorganize to intimidate real and potential opponents. This is made possible in the first place because an election enables the regime to test the strength of its opposition, and to learn more about them. In an ironic twist, elections can prolong dictatorships.
Elections signal to domestic and international audiences that a “popular mandate” has been renewed, and the establishment is united behind the head of state in question, so foreign leaders need to primarily deal with the president, not the defense minister or to flirt with opposition figures. Also, it is slightly more compelling (albeit still comical) for a president to say, “My people support me and that’s why I won the recent election,” rather than just mouthing a non-concrete, “My people support me” platitude. It is for this reason that authoritarian figures can largely end up, and often do, detached from the public. With the Arab revolutions as the backdrop, the idea of not touching base with the public is unsettling for many leaders. But rather than gain legitimate consent, which is not guaranteed, they would still prefer to manufacture it.
But staged elections also come with a huge risk. According to a University of Oslo study, 50 percent of regime breakdowns or “dictatorship deaths” have occurred during an election year. This is because elections act as a meeting point on which oppositional individuals and groups can focus their attention. Therefore, elections enable coordination, and amplify certain voices. In effect, the election resolves the “coordination problem” that usually plagues oppositional actors at other moments. They also reveal a regime’s vulnerability. A surprising result that shows a loss for the ruling party would lead the people to believe they had overestimated the regime’s strength. Empty voting stations and short voting queues can prove embarrassing enough to break the spell of a leader’s indomitability and allay the fears of activists. This was demonstrated in the 2014 Egyptian presidential election, which sent pro-regime media anchors into a frenzy of begging citizens to vote and the authorities had to extend voting by another two days. Elections unleash forces that cannot always be anticipated or controlled.
Biographers of former President Gamal Abdel Nasser noted that he was obsessed with jokes being made about him and was briefed daily about the latest jokes in circulation. Egyptian humor seems to spare nothing, including ancient Egyptian statues who changed confessions about which historical dynasty they were from — under Nasser’s torture. According to writer Anthony McDermott, one account narrates how Nasser, unusually, intervened in a particular instance in the 1960s when mocked for his near hundred percent referendum victories. The jester in question was brought before Nasser, who reprimanded him and reminded him of his achievements and popularity by adding, “And remember, I was elected by 99 percent of the electorate.” The man replied, “I swear, this was not one of my jokes.”
If this anecdote can perhaps illuminate something, it is that the peak charade — the “election” — in a regime’s lifespan can often be its most vulnerable moment.
The below concept was adopted for a contemporary theatre play in Cairo and Berlin
Below is my philosophical concept that underpins the play (it is not a description of the play)
When the Debris of Paradise Calls There is a deep-seated crisis within Egyptian society, the youth no less, that sees the human condition under assault by global consumption and material culture. An assault largely fanned by elites invoking market-driven economics to justify perpetual development and redevelopment, as well as the erasure of heritage and vibrant communities. The impact goes beyond the citizen facing chronic underemployment, poverty, and the entrapment within a predatory economy dominated by opaque forces beyond their control or understanding.
The individual has been torn away from a sense of cause and effect; suspended above time and its continuity by a severing from historical awareness; developed a deteriorating association with aesthetical standards; all forms of logic have been degraded to shades of ad hominem and confirmation bias; and conspiracies have become the lingua franca. Survive rather than thrive has become the norm. What is needed is to restore the individual’s dignity and agency by “recalibrating” it to relate to the city.
This, in part, can be addressed by raising philosophical thinking that unpacks the core areas of philosophy – aesthetics, epistemology, ethics, logic and metaphysics – and narrowing them to digestible, understandable and fundamental questions that can be engaged with through the arts. Some of these questions can include, in the face of neoliberalism’s dehumanisation, how do publics sustain or retrieve meaningful communities? How can historical imaginaries, ideas, persons, sensibilities, and aesthetics, work their way into renegotiating the citizen’s relationship to the city? How can a crippling nostalgia be appropriated for a forward-looking civic vision? How do these themes make one better understand the familiar spaces such as neighbourhoods and coffeehouses? How do groups understand their role in endowing their urban terrain with a clearer identity and coherent narrative?
This concept is driven by the view that the public should be recognised, and elevated, as the primary ideal, and the individual’s present difficulties in experiencing or attaining pluralism and civic responsibility is tied to the city’s loss of meaning and the citizen’s alienation from one another. The development of philosophical thinking, and its performance, can help address this malaise.
The use of “paradise” alludes to the beauty that weaves its ways through the urban terrain; in social relations, love, language, buildings, decor, music, books, among others. Yet what happens when that paradise crumbles? The sight of tangible and intangible debris is a call to intellectual arms, an artistic awakening required to alert the citizens that something is not quite right. The broken paradise should not be normalised.
There is a need to humanise Egypt, animate the idea of citizenship, and flesh out plurality, biographies and stories from a landscape under assault by the forces of homogenisation and mediocrity. A grand vision is required to nurture the creation of a vibrant public that will demonstrate to other publics that there is another way, a viable way, of looking and dealing with Egypt.
I will be presenting the final ‘Theatre of Thought’ lecture for the year on the Creative Public at 7pm, Tuesday 5 December 2017, at Goethe’s Tahrir Lounge, Cairo.
“Do publics simply exist or are they always created? This seminar takes on the latter in exploring how publics are summoned into being, that perhaps there is a way to explore the idea of new publics made through intellectuals, musicians, artists, books, proclamations, and events. Yet this session attempts to raise a further question, can we write for, or speak to, the public that does not yet exist? This session draws from Czech philosopher Václav Havel’s ‘Parallel Polis’ and French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s notion of ‘gaps of silence,’ relevance and truth, to understand the role of independent thinking and its relationship to the idea of the public.”
هل هناك مجتمعات مبدعة ؟ هل يمكن تكوينها؟ علي من يقع تشكيلها؟”
اسألة تدور في اذهاننا ؟
يقدم مسرح الفكر بالتحرير لاونج جوتة هذا العام تجربة جديدة و تطرح الفكر والمفكرين بأسلوب شيق وجذاب .
ندعوكم للمشاركة في اخر ندوات هذا العام حول موضوع ( المجتمع المبدع ) هل هو موجود و أين وإذا لم يكن موجود ! ماذا نفعل ! هل لنا ادوار !
فكرة “مجتمع مبدع”، في السابعة مساء الثلاثاء 5 ديسمبر المُقبل، وتطرح تساؤلات: هل المجتمعات موجودة بالفطرة، أم أنها تولد من جديد دائمًا، لاستكشاف الكيفية التي يمكن أن يتم بها صناعة المجتمع المبدع والخلّاق من خلال المثقفين والموسيقيين والفنانين، بالإضافة إلى الكتب والأحداث.
إلا أن هذه الندوة تحاول إثارة المزيد من التساؤلات: هل يمكننا أن نكتب أو نتكلم مع هذا المجتمع الذي لا يوجد حتى الآن؟ هل يمكن للأفراد جلب هذا المجتمع إلى حيز الوجود؟
السيرة الذاتية للمحاضر الدكتور عمرو علي ، عو عالم الإجتماع في الجامعة الأمريكية بالقاهرة، محاضر في العديد من الجامعات والمعاهد في القاهرة والإسكندرية، تتناول أبحاثه دراسة المجتمعات، والحالة الإنسانية في ظل الإعتداء من قوى الاستهلاك العالمي والثقافة المادية، وآثر ذلك على الهوية، ومعنى المدينة والحداثة والمواطنة، حصل على الدكتوراه من جامعة سيدني وكانت الرسالة البحثية الخاصة به عن دور الخيال التاريخي في تشكيل الإسكندرية الحديثة ومواطنيها.
“في انتظاركم و بناء علي رغبتكم سيتم مد الندوة حتي ٩:٣٠ مساءً لنتمكن من ربط الثلاث ندوات كما وعدناكم
Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus (1928), lion scene. We will examine the role of silence, imagination, and the shifting of responsibility of voice and perception from actor to viewer.
—
في بعض الأحيان نعتقد أن هناك بعض الأشخاص لا يعرفون كيفية التعبيرعن أنفسهم، ولكن في الحقيقة أنهم يعبرون عن أنفسهم. أسوأ العلاقات هي التي تكون بها المرأة مشغولة البال أو متعبة ولا يقول لها الرجل “ماذا بك؟” أو “قولي شيئًا ما..”، أو عندما يحدث العكس، فإن الإذاعة والتلفزيون أدت إلى انتشار هذه الروح في كل مكان، وذلك بسبب التشويش ونشر كلام ليس له معنى، بالإضافة إلى الكم الهائل من الكلمات والصور. الأغبياء ليسوا عُميان أو صامتين أبدًا، لذا ليس هناك مشكلة في إتاحة الفرصة للأشخاص للتعبيرعن أنفسهم، ولكن مع إعطائهم القليل من مساحات العزلة والصمت، والذي قد يتيح لهم في النهاية فرصة للحديث. القوة القمعية لا يمكن أن توقف الأشخاص من التعبير عن أنفسهم؛ ولكنها تحفزهم على التعبير عن أنفسهم، نحن نشعر بالراحة عندما لا نجد شيئاً نقوله، والحق في ألا نقول شيئاً، لأن في هذه الأوقات تكون هناك فرص ومساحات لأن يكون هناك شيئاً نادراً والأكثر ندرة، الشيء الذي يستحق أن يقال. ما نعاني منه هذه الأيام ليس هناك ما يمنع عمليات التواصل، ولكن وجود عبارات ليس لها معنى. ما نعنيه هو الهدف من تلك عبارات. هذا هو التعريف الوحيد للمعنى، وينطبق هذا الشىء على العبارات الجديدة. يمكنك الاستماع إلى الأخرين لساعات، ولكن ما هي الجدوى الحقيقية من ذلك؟؟ هذا ما يجعل الجدال يشكل جهداً وضغطاً كبيرا. لماذا لا توجد أي نقطة جدال؟؟ لا يمكنك فقط أن تخبر أحداً أن ما يقوله ليس له معنى فتخبره أنه على خطأ، ولكن ما يقوله ليس بالضرورة أن يكون خطأً، المشكلة لا تكمن في أن بعض الأشياء خاطئة، ولكنها قد تكون سطحية أو غير مترابطة، وهذا ما تم الإشارة إليه آلاف المرات. إن مفاهيم الموائمة والأهمية والهدف من الأشياء تعد أكثر أهمية من مفهوم الحقيقة. فهي ليست بديلاً للحقيقة ولكنها تعد مقياسًا لحقيقة ما أقوله، وهذا ما يحدث في علم الرياضيات، بوانكاريه عالم الرياضيات كان دائماً يقول أن العديد من النظريات ليست مترابطة تماماً وليس لها أهمية (بلا جدوى)، هو لا يقول أنها خاطئة – وهذا ليس سيئًا للغاية.
الانحياز التأكيدي، يُدعى أيضًا ا لانحيازالذاتي، هو الميل للبحث عن، وتفسير، وتذكُّر المعلومات بطريقة تتوافق مع معتقدات وافتراضات الفرد، بينما لا يولي انتباهًا مماثلًا للمعلومات المناقضة لها .هو نوع من الانحياز المعرفي والخطأ في الاستقراء. يُظهر الأشخاص هذا الانحياز عندما يجمعون أو يتذكّرون المعلومات بشكل انتقائي، أو عندما يفسّرونها بطريقة متحيّزة. يكون تأثير ذلك أقوى في المسائل المحكومة عاطفيًا والمعتقدات الراسخة بشدّة. يميل الأشخاص أيضًا إلى تفسير الأدلة الغامضة بشكل يدعم موقفهم الراهِن. استُشهد بالانحياز في البحث، والتفسير، والذاكرة لتأويل تضارُب الموقف (عندما يُصبح الخلاف أكثر حِدَّة برغم توافُر الأدلة نفسها لدى الأطراف المتنازعة)، ورسوخ الاعتقاد (عندما يستمر الاعتقاد بعد توضيح أن الدليل الذي يدعمه خاطئ)، تأثير الأسبقيّة غير المنطقيّة (الاعتماد بشكل أكبر على أوّل ما وُجد من سلسلة معلومات) والربط الوهمي (عندما يوجد اعتقاد خاطئ بارتباط حدثين أو موقفين). الانحيازالذاتي
The second lecture (in Arabic) at Goethe’s Tahrir Lounge will take place on 28 November 2017, at 7pm, in Cairo, as part of the ongoing ‘Theatre of Thought’ project. The upcoming seminar draws inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s ‘loss of aura’ concept to understand the effects of neoliberalism, hyper-capitalism, and skewed globalisation, that are negatively erasing the differences and contours of the Egyptian cultural and social landscape. One after the other: buildings, cafes, malls, decor, fashion, weddings and so forth, exhume a toxic similarity that is leading to the socio-philosophical problem of shapelessness. The homogenisation and ironing out of character in the cities raises the question, if not yearning, on how does one engage and formulate meaning, form and shape out of an increasingly bland and shapeless urban terrain?
النيوليبرالية،الرأسمالية المفرطة و العولمة تمحو بشكل سلبي الإختلافات والملامح في المشهد الثقافي والإجتماعي المصري واحدآ تلو الآخر، فالتشابه بين المباني، المقاهي، المراكز التجارية، والديكور والأزياء إلى آخره غير مريح حيث يؤدي ذلك إلى استنساخ شخصيات متشابهة دون أي هوية فردية لكل منهم مما أوجد المشكلة الإجتماعية الفلسفية في طمس الهوية، وهذا يدفعنا إلى سؤال كيف يمكن للمرء أن ينخرط في المجتمع ويتشكل في ظل هذا التشوه المتزايد.
تقام الندوة يوم الثلاثاء 28 نوفمبر من الساعة 7 وحتى 9 مساءً في مقر مشروع التحرير لاونج جوته داخل معهد جوته بوسط البلد.
مسرح الفكر كل يوم ثلاثاء من ٧ الي ٩ مساء. في التحرير لاونج. جوتة
٦شارع البستان متفرع من طلعت حرب وسط البلد داخل المركز الثقافي الألماني
I’ll be giving a series of lectures (in Arabic) under a new project, Theatre of Thought, at the Goethe Institute’s Tahrir Lounge in Cairo. The first session, 6pm, 21 November 2017, brings Hannah Arendt and Edward Said into a conversation on the notion of beginnings. Entry is free.
This seminar explores the phenomenon of how new beginnings occur in this world, what dynamics underpin the disturbance of the known order that interrupts the “predictable” flow of history and enables for something novel and new to come into existence. Yet beginnings do not always need to be this dramatic. Think of conversational lines, literary openings, and memorable moments: “once upon a time”, “in the beginning”, “good morning”, sunrise, love at first sight, or the birth of a baby. Humans are fascinated with beginnings as it is intimately tied with novelty, suspense, the chance to recreate something anew, and it is also the furthest extreme point from mortality (literally and figuratively). This session examines why the idea of beginnings is important to understand in the context of Egypt, how new beginnings set the pace, how they can eventually take a life form of their own, and how they can cause a breach and break up of previously known patterns of cause and effect.
‘فكرة البدايات’
فكرة البدايات قد تكون غير مفهومة فالبدايات لها فلسفتها الخاصة .. نوع البداية يتحكم في سير الأمور سواء إلى الأفضل أو الأسوء، لذلك يميل أغلب البشر الى اختيار بداية لليوم تدعو للتفاؤل، كما نرى على سبيل المثال بعض القصص والحكايات تبدأ بعبارات تفاؤلية مثل “صباح الخير “، “شروق الشمس ” ، “الحب لأول وهلة”،”ولادة طفل”..
و يميل أغلب الكتاب الى بدء رواياتهم وقصصهم بمقدمات مشوقة لاضفاء اجواء من التفاؤل والتشويق لجذب القارئ، حيث أن البدايات لديها القدرة على تغيير الواقع الذي يعيشه اي انسان و تغيير مسار حياته..
تقام الندوة يوم الثلاثاء 21 نوفمبر من الساعة 7 وحتى 9 مساءً في مقر مشروع التحرير لاونج جوته داخل معهد جوته بوسط البلد.
There is something powerfully raw and vivid about Hannah Arendt’s essay that came out in the midst of Europe’s darkness in the Second World War, before the worst horrors inflicted upon the Jews were fully unveiled. Originally published in January 1943 as “We Refugees” in a small Jewish journal called Menorah (shut down in 1961), the piece captures what it really means to be a refugee – the endless anxiety, ravaging despair, deluded optimism, jolting absurdity and even the humour of the “refugee.” What it is to be a wandering individual in search for dignity within a larger collective that “fight like madmen for private existences with individual destinies.” Arendt’s larger lesson is poignant: “The comity of European peoples went to pieces when, and because, it allowed its weakest member to be excluded and persecuted.” A message that projects a long arm into the present and can be read in the current global context that sees indifference and outright hostility to refugees, a political and social attitude that can only come at the price of exacerbating tensions and rupturing the moral fabric of the perpetrators of such indifference and hostility.
Hannah Arendt
“We Refugees”
In the first place, we don’t like to be called “refugees.” We ourselves call each other “newcomers” or “immigrants.” Our newspapers are papers for “Americans of German language”; and, as far as I know, there is not and never was any club founded by Hitler-persecuted people whose name indicated that its members were refugees.
A refugee used to be a person driven to seek refuge because of some act committed or some political opinion held. Well, it is true we have had to seek refuge; but we committed no acts and most of us never dreamt of having any radical opinion. With us the meaning of the term “refugee” has changed. Now “refugees” are those of us who have been so unfortunate as to arrive in a new country without means and have to be helped by Refugee Committees.
Before this war broke out we were even more sensitive about being called refugees. We did our best to prove to other people that we were just ordinary immigrants. We declared that we had departed of our own free will to countries of our choice, and we denied that our situation had anything to do with “so-called Jewish problems.” Yes, we were “immigrants” or “newcomers” who had left our country because, one fine day, it no longer suited us to stay, or for purely economic reasons. We wanted to rebuild our lives, that was all. In order to rebuild one’s life one has to be strong and an optimist. So we are very optimistic.
Our optimism, indeed, is admirable, even if we say so ourselves. The story of our struggle has finally become known. We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings. We left our relatives in the Polish ghettos and our best friends have been killed in concentration camps, and that means the rupture of our private lives.
Nevertheless, as soon as we were saved—and most of us had to be saved several times—we started our new lives and tried to follow as closely as possible all the good advice our saviors passed on to us. We were told to forget; and we forgot quicker than anybody ever could imagine. In a friendly way we were reminded that the new country would become a new home; and after four weeks in France or six weeks in America, we pretended to be Frenchmen or Americans. The most optimistic among us would even add that their whole former life had been passed in a kind of unconscious exile and only their new country now taught them what a home really looks like. It is true we sometimes raise objections when we are told to forget about our former work; and our former ideals are usually hard to throw over if our social standard is at stake. With the language, however, we find no difficulties: after a single year optimists are convinced they speak English as well as their mother tongue; and after two years they swear solemnly that they speak English better than any other language—their German is a language they hardly remember.
In order to forget more efficiently we rather avoid any allusion to concentration or internment camps we experienced in nearly all European countries—it might be interpreted as pessimism or lack of confidence in the new homeland. Besides, how often have we been told that nobody likes to listen to all that; hell is no longer a religious belief or a fantasy, but something as real as houses and stones and trees. Apparently nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings—the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends.
Even among ourselves we don’t speak about this past. Instead, we have found our own way of mastering an uncertain future. Since everybody plans and wishes and hopes, so do we. Apart from the general human attitudes, however, we try to clear up the future more scientifically. After so much bad luck we want a course as sure as a gun. Therefore, we leave the earth with all its uncertainties behind and we cast our eyes up to the sky. The stars tell us—rather than the newspapers—when Hitler will be defeated and when we shall become American citizens. We think the stars more reliable advisers than all our friends; we learn from the stars when we should have lunch with our benefactors and on what day we have the best chances of filling out one of these countless questionnaires which accompany our present lives. Sometimes we don’t rely even on the stars but rather on the lines of our hand or the signs of our handwriting. Thus we learn less about political events but more about our own dear selves, even though somehow psychoanalysis has gone out of fashion. Those happier times are past when bored ladies and gentlemen of high society conversed about the genial misdemeanors of their early childhood. They don’t want ghost-stories any more; it is real experiences that make their flesh creep. There is no longer any need of bewitching the past; it is spellbound enough in reality. Thus, in spite of our outspoken optimism, we use all sorts of magical tricks to conjure up the spirits of the future.
I don’t know which memories and which thoughts nightly dwell in our dreams. I dare not ask for information, since I, too, had rather be an optimist. But sometimes I imagine that at least nightly we think of our dead or we remember the poems we once loved. I could even understand how our friends of the West coast, during the curfew, should have had such curious notions as to believe that we are not only “prospective citizens” but present “enemy aliens.” In daylight, of course, we become only “technically” enemy aliens—all refugees know this. But when technical reasons prevented you from leaving your home during the dark house, it certainly was not easy to avoid some dark speculations about the relation between technicality and reality.
No, there is something wrong with our optimism. There are those odd optimists among us who, having made a lot of optimistic speeches, go home and turn on the gas or make use of a skyscraper in quite an unexpected way. They seem to prove that our proclaimed cheerfulness is based on a dangerous readiness for death. Brought up in the conviction that life is the highest good and death the greatest dismay, we became witnesses and victims of worse terrors than death—without having been able to discover a higher ideal than life. Thus, although death lost its horror for us, we became neither willing nor capable to risk our lives for a cause. Instead of fighting—or thinking about how to become able to fight back—refugees have got used to wishing death to friends or relatives; if somebody dies, we cheerfully imagine all the trouble he has been saved. Finally many of us end by wishing that we, too, could be saved some trouble, and act accordingly.
Since 1938—since Hitler’s invasion of Austria—we have seen how quickly eloquent optimism could change to speechless pessimism. As time went on, we got worse—even more optimistic and even more inclined to suicide. Austrian Jews under Schuschnigg were such a cheerful people—all impartial observers admired them. It was quite wonderful how deeply convinced they were that nothing could happen to them. But when German troops invaded the country and Gentile neighbours started riots at Jewish homes, Austrian Jews began to commit suicide.
Unlike other suicides, our friends leave no explanation of their deed, no indictment, no charge against a world that had forced a desperate man to talk and to behave cheerfully to his very last day. Letters left by them are conventional, meaningless documents. Thus, funeral orations we make at their open graves are brief, embarrassed and very hopeful. Nobody cares about motives, they seem to be clear to all of us.
I speak of unpopular facts; and it makes things worse that in order to prove my point I do not even dispose of the sole arguments which impress modern people—figures. Even those Jews who furiously deny the existence of the Jewish people give us a fair chance of survival as far as figures are concerned—how else could they prove that only a few Jews are criminals and that many Jews are being killed as good patriots in wartime? Through their effort to save the statistical life of the Jewish people we know that Jews had the lowest suicide rate among all civilized nations. I am quite sure those figures are no longer correct, but I cannot prove it with new figures, though I can certainly with new experiences. This might be sufficient for those skeptical souls who never were quite convinced that the measure of one’s skull gives the exact idea of its content, or that statistics of crime show the exact level of national ethics. Anyhow, wherever European Jews are living today, they no longer behave according to statistical laws. Suicides occur not only among the panic-stricken people in Berlin and Vienna, in Bucharest or Paris, but in New York and Los Angeles, in Buenos Aires and Montevideo.
On the other hand, there has been little reported about suicides in the ghettoes and concentration camps themselves. True, we had very few reports at all from Poland, but we have been fairly well informed about German and French concentration camps.
At the camp of Gurs, for instance, where I had the opportunity of spending some time, I heard only once about suicide, and that was the suggestion of a collective action, apparently a kind of protest in order to vex the French. When some of us remarked that we had been shipped there “pour crever” in any case, the general mood turned suddenly into a violent courage of life. The general opinion held that one had to be abnormally asocial and unconcerned about general events if one was still able to interpret the whole accident as personal and individual bad luck and, accordingly, ended one’s life personally and individually. But the same people, as soon as they returned to their own individual lives, being faced with seemingly individual problems, changed once more to this insane optimism which is next door to despair.
We are the first non-religious Jews persecuted—and we are the first ones who, not only in extremis, answer with suicide. Perhaps the philosophers are right who teach that suicide is the last and supreme guarantee of human freedom; not being free to create our lives or the world in which we live, we nevertheless are free to throw life away and to leave the world. Pious Jews, certainly, cannot realize this negative liberty: they perceive murder in suicide, that is, destruction of what man never is able to make, interference with the rights of the Creator. Adonai nathan veadonai lakach (“The Lord hath given and the Lord hath taken away”); and they would add: baruch shem adonai (“blessed be the name of the Lord”). For them suicide, like murder, means a blasphemous attack on creation as a whole. The man who kills himself asserts that life is not worth living and the world not worth sheltering him.
Yet our suicides are no mad rebels who hurl defiance at life and the world, who try to kill in themselves the whole universe. Theirs is a quiet and modest way of vanishing; they seem to apologize for the violent solution they have found for their personal problems. In their opinion, generally, political events had nothing to do with their individual fate; in good or bad times they would believe solely in their personality. Now they find some mysterious shortcomings in themselves which prevent them from getting along. Having felt entitled from their earliest childhood to a certain social standard, they are failures in their own eyes if this standard cannot be kept any longer. Their optimism is the vain attempt to keep head above water. Behind this front of cheerfulness, they constantly struggle with despair of themselves. Finally, they die of a kind of selfishness.
If we are saved we feel humiliated, and if we are helped we feel degraded. We fight like madmen for private existences with individual destinies, since we are afraid of becoming part of that miserable lot of schnorrers whom we, many of us former philanthropists, remember only too well. Just as once we failed to understand that the so-called schnorrer was a symbol of Jewish destiny and not a shlemihl, so today we don’t feel entitled to Jewish solidarity; we cannot realize that we by ourselves are not so much concerned as the whole Jewish people. Sometimes this lack of comprehension has been strongly supported by our protectors. Thus, I remember a director of a great charity concern in Paris who, whenever he received the card of a German-Jewish intellectual with the inevitable “Dr.” on it, used to exclaim at the top of his voice, “Herr Doktor, Herr Doktor, Herr Schnorrer, Herr Schnorrer!”
The conclusion we drew from such unpleasant experiences was simple enough. To be a doctor of philosophy no longer satisfied us; and we learnt that in order to build a new life, one has first to improve on the old one. A nice little fairy-tale has been invented to describe our behaviour; a forlorn émigré dachshund, in his grief, begins to speak: “Once, when I was a St. Bernard …”
Our new friends, rather overwhelmed by so many stars and famous men, hardly understand that at the basis of all our descriptions of past splendors lies one human truth: once we were somebodies about whom people cared, we were loved by friends, and even known by landlords as paying our rent regularly. Once we could buy our food and ride in the subway without being told we were undesirable. We have become a little hysterical since newspapermen started detecting us and telling us publicly to stop being disagreeable when shopping for milk and bread. We wonder how it can be done; we already are so damnably careful in every moment of our daily lives to avoid anybody guessing who we are, what kind of passport we have, where our birth certificates were filled out—and that Hitler didn’t like us. We try the best we can to fit into a world where you have to be sort of politically minded when you buy your food.
Under such circumstances, St. Bernard grows bigger and bigger. I never can forget that young man who, when expected to accept a certain kind of work, sighed out, “You don’t know to whom you speak; I was Section-manager in Karstadt’s [A great department store in Berlin].” But there is also the deep despair of that middle-aged man who, going through countless shifts of different committees in order to be saved, finally exclaimed, “And nobody here knows who I am!” Since nobody would treat him as a dignified human being, he began sending cables to great personalities and his big relations. He learnt quickly that in this mad world it is much easier to be accepted as a “great man” than as a human being.
The less we are free to decide who we are or to live as we like, the more we try to put up a front, to hide the facts, and to play roles. We were expelled from Germany because we were Jews. But having hardly crossed the French borderline, we were changed into “boches.” We were even told that we had to accept this designation if we really were against Hitler’s racial theories. During seven years we played the ridiculous role of trying to be Frenchmen—at least, prospective citizens; but at the beginning of the war we were interned as “boches” all the same. In the meantime, however, most of us had indeed become such loyal Frenchmen that we could not even criticise a French governmental order; thus we declared it as all right to be interned. We were the first “prisonniers volontaires” history has ever seen. After the Germans invaded the country, the French Government had only to change the name of the firm; having been jailed because we were Germans, we were not freed because we were Jews.
It is the same story all over the world, repeated again and again. In Europe the Nazis confiscated our property; but in Brazil we have to pay 30% of our wealth, like the most loyal member of the Bund der Auslandsdeutschen. In Paris we could not leave our homes after eight o’clock because we were Jews; but in Los Angeles we are restricted because we are “enemy aliens.” Our identity is changed so frequently that nobody can find out who we actually are.
Unfortunately, things don’t look any better when we meet with Jews. French Jewry was absolutely convinced that all Jews coming from beyond the Rhine were what they called Polaks—what German Jewry called Ostjuden. But those Jews who really came from eastern Europe could not agree with their French brethren and called us Jaeckes. The sons of these Jaecke-haters—the second generation born in France and already duly assimilated—shared the opinion of the French Jewish upper class. Thus, in the very same family, you could be called a Jaecke by the father and a Polak by the son.
Since the outbreak of the war and the catastrophe that has befallen European Jewry, the mere fact of being a refugee has prevented our mingling with native Jewish society, some exceptions only proving the rule. These unwritten social laws, though never publicly admitted, have the great force of public opinion. And such a silent opinion and practice is more important for our daily lives than all official proclamations of hospitality and good will.
Man is a social animal and life is not easy for him when social ties are cut off. Moral standards are much easier kept in the texture of a society. Very few individuals have the strength to conserve their own integrity if their social, political and legal status is completely confused. Lacking the courage to fight for a change of our social and legal status, we have decided instead, so many of us, to try a change of identity. And this curious behavior makes matters much worse. The confusion in which we live is partly our own work.
Some day somebody will write the true story of this Jewish emigration from Germany; and he will have to start with a description of that Mr. Cohn from Berlin who had always been a 150% German, a German super-patriot. In 1933 that Mr. Cohn found refuge in Prague and very quickly became a convinced Czech patriot—as true and loyal a Czech patriot as he had been a German one. Time went on and about 1937 the Czech Government, already under some Nazi pressure, began to expel its Jewish refugees, disregarding the fact that they felt so strongly as prospective Czech citizens. Our Mr. Cohn then went to Vienna; to adjust oneself there a definite Austrian patriotism was required. The German invasion forced Mr. Cohn out of that country. He arrived in Paris at a bad moment and he never did receive a regular residence-permit. Having already acquired a great skill in wishful thinking, he refused to take mere administrative measures seriously, convinced that he would spend his future life in France. Therefore, he prepared his adjustment to the French nation by identifying himself with “our” ancestor Vercingetorix. I think I had better not dilate on the further adventures of Mr. Cohn. As long as Mr. Cohn can’t make up his mind to be what he actually is, a Jew, nobody can foretell all the mad changes he will have to go through.
A man who wants to lose his self discovers, indeed, the possibilities of human existence, which are infinite, as infinite as is creation. But the recovering of a new personality is as difficult—and as hopeless—as a new creation fo the world. Whatever we do, whatever we pretend to be, we reveal nothing but our insane desire to be changed, not to be Jews. All our activities are directed to attain this aim: we don’t want to be refugees, since we don’t want to be Jews; we pretend to be English-speaking people, since German-speaking immigrants of recent years are marked as Jews; we don’t call ourselves stateless, since the majority of stateless people in the world are Jews; we are willing to become loyal Hottentots, only to hide the fact that we are Jews. We don’t succeed and we can’t succeed; under the cover of our “optimism” you can easily detect the hopeless sadness of assimilationists.
With us from Germany the word assimilation received a “deep” philosophical meaning. You can hardly realize how serious we were about it. Assimilation did not mean the necessary adjustment to the country where we happened to be born and to the people whose language we happened to speak. We adjust in principle to everything and everybody. This attitude became quite clear to me once by the words of one of my compatriots who, apparently, knew how to express his feelings. Having just arrived in France, he founded one of these societies of adjustment in which German Jews asserted to each other that they were already Frenchmen. In his first speech he said: “We have been good Germans in Germany and therefore we shall be good Frenchmen in France.” The public applauded enthusiastically and nobody laughed; we were happy to have learnt how to prove our loyalty.
If patriotism were a matter of routine or practice, we should be the most patriotic people in the world. Let us go back to our Mr. Cohn; he certainly has beaten all records. He is that ideal immigrant who always, and in every country into which a terrible fate has driven him, promptly sees and loves the native mountains. But since patriotism is not yet believed to be a matter of practice, it is hard to convince people of the sincerity of our repeated transformations. This struggle makes our own society so intolerant; we demand full affirmation without our own group because we are not in the position to obtain it from the natives. The natives, confronted with such strange beings as we are, become suspicious; from their point of view, as a rule, only a loyalty to our old countries is understandable. That makes life very bitter for us. We might overcome this suspicion if we could explain that, being Jews, our patriotism in our original countries had rather a peculiar aspect. Though it was indeed sincere and deep-rooted. We wrote big volumes to prove it; paid an entire bureaucracy to explore its antiquity and to explain it statistically. We had scholars write philosophical dissertations on the predestined harmony between Jews and Frenchmen, Jews and Germans, Jews and Hungarians, Jews and … Our so frequently suspected loyalty of today has a long history. It is the history of a hundred and fifty years of assimilated Jewry who performed an unprecedented feat: though proving all the time their non-Jewishness, they succeeded in remaining Jews all the same.
The desperate confusion of these Ulysses-wanderers who, unlike their great prototype, don’t know who they are is easily explained by their perfect mania for refusing to keep their identity. This mania is much older than the last ten years which revealed the profound absurdity of our existence. We are like people with a fixed idea who can’t help trying continually to disguise an imaginary stigma. Thus we are enthusiastically fond of every new possibility which, being new, seems able to work miracles. We are fascinated by every new nationality in the same way as a woman of tidy size is delighted with every new dress which promises to give her the desired waistline. But she likes the new dress only as long as she believes in its miraculous qualities, and she discovers that it does not change her stature—or, for that matter, her status.
One may be surprised that the apparent uselessness of all our odd disguises has not yet been able to discourage us. If it is true that men seldom learn from history, it is also true that they may learn from personal experiences which, as in our case, are repeated time and again. But before you cast the first stone at us, remember that being a Jew does not give any legal status in the world. If we should start telling the truth that we are nothing but Jews, it would mean that we expose ourselves to the fate of human beings who, unprotected by any specific law or political convention, are nothing but human beings. I can hardly imagine an attitude more dangerous, since we actually live in a world in which human beings as such have ceased to exist for quite a while, since society has discovered discrimination as the great social weapon by which one may kill men without any bloodshed; since passports or birth certificates, and sometimes even income tax receipts, are no longer formal papers but matters of social distinction. It is true that most of us depend entirely upon social standards, we lose confidence in ourselves if society does not approve us; we are—and always were—ready to pay any price in order to be accepted by society. But it is equally true that the very few among us who have tried to get along without all these tricks and jokes of adjustment and assimilation have paid a much higher price than they could afford: they jeopardized the few chances even our laws are given in a topsy-turvy world.
The attitude of these few whom, following Bernard Lazare, one may call “conscious pariahs,” can as little be explained by recent events alone as the attitude of our Mr. Cohn who tried by every means to become an upstart. Both are sons of the nineteenth century which, not knowing legal or political outlaws, knew only too well social pariahs and their counterpart, social parvenus. Modern Jewish history, having started with court Jews and continuing with Jewish millionaires and philanthropists, is apt to forget about this other trend of Jewish tradition—the tradition of Heine, Rahel Varnhagen, Sholom Aleichemn, of Bernard Lazare, Franz Kafka or even Charlie Chaplin. It is the tradition of a minority of Jews who have not wanted to become upstarts, who preferred the status of “conscious paria.” All vaunted Jewish qualities—the “Jewish heart,” humanity, humor, disinterested intelligence—are pariah qualities. All Jewish shortcomings—tactlessness, political stupidity, inferiority complexes and money-grubbing—are characteristic of upstarts. There have always been Jews who did not think it worth while to change their humane attitude and their natural insight into reality for the narrowness of castle spirit or the essential unreality of financial transactions.
History has forced the status of outlaws upon both, upon pariahs and parvenus alike. The latter have not yet accepted the great wisdom of Balzac’s “On ne parvient pas deux fois”; thus they don’t understand the wild dreams of the former and feel humiliated in sharing their fate. Those few refugees who insist upon telling the truth, even to the point of “indecency,” get in exchange for their unpopularity one priceless advantage: history is no longer a closed book to them and politics is no longer the privilege of Gentiles. They know that the outlawing of the Jewish people in Europe has been followed closely by the outlawing of most European nations. Refugees driven from country to country represent the vanguard of their peoples—if they keep their identity. For the first time Jewish history is not separate but tied up with that of all other nations. The comity of European peoples went to pieces when, and because, it allowed its weakest member to be excluded and persecuted.
The legendary African-American novelist James Baldwin once noted on his trip to France, in 1949, the extent of violence “Paris policemen could do to Arab peanut vendors.” The crime of an Arab, it seems, was to be visible, and therefore it was safer for Arabs to be invisible, with the help of the French authorities – be it through the prison cell or the ironing out of their cultural distinctions in the public sphere.
Yet I have always found it quite peculiar this French manner of discriminating against the visible in order to make them invisible – often the people France needs the most.
My encounter with French racism and hypocrisy came about when I stayed in northern Paris in the autumn of 2009, at a bed and breakfast place. I was hosted by an upper-middle class mother who, during a chilly October morning over breakfast, told me about her work in art/decor and went on to disclose her politics as “left and progressive.”
Yet soon enough she mouthed off racist statements against Arabs (apparently I was the “civilised” Arab that would be sympathetic to her rants). Then she moved onto, specifically, abusing Algerians, then onto Muslim women who wore the veil. The only “concession” she could make was that French colonialism brought its “subjects” back in the form that France has to do deal with today. Before I could reply, she had to “urgently” leave for work. Exhausted from her conversation, I sat back at the breakfast table, in a beautiful 1850s apartment from the Baron Haussmann era, trying to wrap my head around all that she had said (I usually hear bigots out to the end, and try to deconstruct their line of thinking).
At that point, I heard the echoes of Arabic singing reverberating through the courtyard of the building’s interior. I peered out the window to see a group of Algerians/Moroccans fixing the broken pipes. I gazed down with despondence and voiced to myself: “How utterly sad France is, many of you are the backbone of this country. The French need you but don’t want to see you.”
This set off a series of questions that I would ask Arab residents of the city and make careful observations of race relations.
There was something haunting and disturbing about the necessity and invisibility of these workers. This shed some light on French hypocrisy and their craven need for cheap labour that often comes out of France’s thriving shadow economy, that mutually complements the official economy, which is populated with immigrants, their descendants, and refugees.
The French need Arabs for service and maintenance, but only when such Arabs are doing so out of sight.
The French need black Africans in restaurants, but as long as they are in the kitchen and not the ones serving the customer (more than enough East Europeans to do that).
The French don’t mind the poor Muslim woman who is veiled as long as she is scrubbing their apartment and office floors on her knees but God forbid if her kind invades French recreational spaces and attempts to be equal on her terms.
The Burkini was a non-issue elevated to a political and identity war. It took a non-issue to expose, again, the hypocrisy of France’s ideals and understanding of liberalism and feminism.
The poisonous sting of hypocrisy will not only consume the intended target – Arabs and Muslims. But it sets irreversible precedents and opens up pores in the nation’s body politic to illiberal infection from all directions. The rise of the far right is one obvious example, but they are just one manifestation of a larger ominous current that is yet to come. One should never think the xenophobic tide will stop at Arabs and Muslims. Hatred never runs on rational thought, it is irrational and all-pervasive, and will seek new targets once it exhausts its initial victims. Supposed liberals and feminists are not only aiding and abetting in this assault, but are conducting a grievous self-harm that will see their legitimacy undermined, value system compromised, and ethical standards dismantled. The consequence is that it will leave them vulnerable, in a worst-case scenario, to French anti-democratic political forces that will seek their destruction or cooptation. French history is testament to such undesirable possibilities.
When Baldwin was imprisoned in Paris for an unintentional petty crime (he used bedsheets that his acquaintance had stolen from another hotel!), he observed that, unlike the other lifeless clay-like prisoners in his cell, the “North Africans, old and young, who seemed the only living people in this place because they yet retained the grace to be bewildered.”
The woman on the beach in her human quest to be visible, had the grace, understandably, to be bewildered. A large swathe of your citizens are bewildered, France. The world is bewildered, France.
References James Baldwin, “Equal in Paris” in James Baldwin, Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998) pp. 101-116.
