Singing Our Own Praises
The wise man’s
mind will even in bliss cause him misery,
While the fool in abject misery will a happy man be.
It is futile to separate from his ignorance
He who does not repent,
Or to address him who lacks sagacity.
Al-Motannaby
This
chapter will address another defect of the Arab mind-set, one that has come
to manifest itself conspicuously in the discourse of the majority of our
compatriots. I am talking of the tendency to indulge in excessive
self-praise and the aberrant social values this defect has spawned in our
everyday lives. Nowhere is this tendency to sing our own praises more
evident than in the mass media which, day in, day out, feed our
self-infatuation by tirelessly extolling our virtues and glorifying our
achievements. The same pattern is repeated at the individual level, where
boastfulness and self-promotion are fast becoming the norm.
This
has not always been the case. If we compare our mass media today with the
newspapers and magazines that appeared in Egypt half a century ago, we find
that this feature, so much a part of our lives at present, is a recent
phenomenon. And if we compare our mass media with those in other parts of
the world, more particularly in the developed countries, we find that we are
unique when it comes to an overweening sense of self-satisfaction expressed
in a constant torrent of self-praise.
In an
effort to trace the origins of this phenomenon, I personally went through
hundreds of back issues of Egyptian newspapers and magazines that appeared
in the ’forties and found them to be completely devoid of the least hint
of empty self-praise. The phenomenon only began to appear, in a diffident
sort of way, some twenty-five years ago, reaching its present brazen
proportions in the last twenty years, with a noticeable leap in the last
decade.
It is
virtually impossible to read a newspaper or magazine today without coming
across one or more articles and/or news items lauding our achievements,
superiority and virtues. Often these paeans of praise are attributed to a
foreign source, as though this imbues them with greater value.
Although much of the material published in this respect inspires more
incredulity than credibility, the phenomenon shows no signs of abating, and
we continue to indulge an apparently insatiable need for self-aggrandizement
by loudly and incessantly proclaiming how wonderful we are.
For
example, not a day goes by without one of the following or similar
statements appearing in our papers:
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The international
community praises Egypt’s economic reforms.
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The World Bank praises
the Egyptian model of economic development.
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According to this or that
university, the Egyptian economy is strong and stands on solid grounds.
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According to such and
such a centre for economic studies, the Egyptian economy will never be
exposed to an economic crisis like the one that shook the Asian tigers.
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UNESCO decides to
implement the Egyptian experiment in this or that area at the global
level.
What does this mean? And why do we not read similar statements in any
French, German, English, Japanese or American newspaper? How to explain our
constant harping on the same theme? The explanation lies, to my mind, in a
desire to escape from a harsh reality into a fantasy world we have created
to fulfill a psychological need for a reality more to our liking. Escapism
is by definition a negative reaction, a passive acceptance of the status quo
and a tacit admission of inability to change it.
The only way we can change
the status quo and overcome our many problems is to adopt a more positive
and constructive approach to the reality we are living. This entails
admitting that we are beset by huge economic and social problems, that we
are, unfortunately, (and, it must be said, unnecessarily), a Third World
country, and that these problems are a direct result of the way public life
in Egypt was administered in the century and a half since the death of
Mohamed Ali in 1849.
It is
only when we abandon the pattern of excessive self-praise, which we all know
to be empty of any real substance, and start admitting and facing up to our
problems that we can begin to achieve progress at all levels.
Of
course, stemming the torrent of self-praise in which we are now drowning and
diverting it in the opposite direction of constructive self-criticism is a
far from easy undertaking. Its success depends on our ability to sow the
seeds of positive values in young minds through educational curricula. But
these will only yield fruit in the long term. In the short term, we must
begin from the top of the pyramid, not its base. Once we admit to ourselves
how bad the situation really is, the next logical step is to ask why we have
reached such a sorry state of affairs.
The
answer lies in the ineptitude of some of the leaderships which ran our
public affairs in the middle of the previous century. It is important here
to emphasize that evaluating the performance of public officials in
today’s world is not based on their adoption of specific ideologies.
Efficient administration depends, rather, on the availability of an
‘executive cadre’ at the summit of society with a pragmatic approach to
problem solving, more concerned with implementing the results of experiments
that proved to be successful than in getting bogged down in futile
ideological debates that only hamper progress and perpetuate the status quo.
The
phenomenon of excessive self-praise is organically linked to another set of
negative values that have pervaded our lives in the last few decades. There
are many reasons for this, but perhaps the traumatic events of June 5, 1967,
have had the greatest impact. The most important of these negative values
are:
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A discrepancy between
words and deeds has gradually transformed us from a society attuned to
reality to one more comfortable with empty rhetoric. This phenomenon is
generalized in a very prominent way throughout the region to which we
belong. It goes back to distant dates and deeply-entrenched cultural
factors. Of all the nations of the world, we sing more loudly and
frequently of our history, our past glories and our superiority to
others. If we compare our attitude with that of a society like Japan,
for example, we find that although the Japanese are extremely proud of
their nation and heritage, they do not constantly express their pride in
grandiloquent language, oratory and slogans.
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Judgements are formed in
the logic of love or hate. This leads to the prevalence of subjectivity
rather than objectivity and ultimately to the formation of judgements
from a purely personal perspective.
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