Egypt judicial shocker

Wow. I return home to the news that Hisham Talaat Moustafa and his alleged confederate were sentenced to death for the murder of Moustafa’s Lebanese pop star mistress in Dubai last July. He developed my ex-neighborhood El Rehab City, and was so powerful and well-connected here that I think most of us assumed he’d get off somehow (especially since Egypt refused to extradite him to the UAE for trial).

Judges in Egypt are often quite independent, and have done a number of brave things. (I don’t know enough about this case to be sure that this was especially brave; it may be that his connections had soured on him anyway. But it’s certainly a surprise to me.) It was an awfully brutal crime.

The hit man he hired was a security officer at the Four Seasons Hotel, a place very familiar to all of us in this city as well, which brings this lurid case pretty close to home.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/21/suzanne-tamim-slaying-egy_n_206177.html

good live music

A nice end to the semester hearing a colleague’s band. (And no, I don’t want a Twitter account!)

an untranslatable word

I was just reading a couple of class essays on Oppenheimer, which said things like “in his youth, Oppenheimer was a nerd.” Although not quite false, this is somewhat off the mark in a way that I’ve often noticed. For in fact, the rather ugly American English word “nerd” strikes me as untranslatable, since it is dependent on social structures that exist almost nowhere else.

On the whole, my Egyptian students not only speak good English, but idiomatic English as well (it’s generally an American idiom gleaned from Hollywood, except for a handful who were educated at British schools in Egypt or the Persian Gulf). But they all misuse the word “nerd” in harmless fashion to mean “good student”. Anyone who gets all A’s at the American University in Cairo is called a nerd by their friends in laughing tones, and the target of the word always smiles back harmlessly. It is essentially a compliment here.

The continental Europeans I know use it somewhat more negatively and dismissively, but the negativity only goes so far as “what a boring person– all he does is study all the time, and he’s never any fun” (especially among those French and Italians who speak pretty good English, since most French and Italian intellectuals know how to have a good time and they tend to be offended and dismayed by other intellectuals who do not). Such Europeans always insist that there is a word for “nerd” in their own native languages, but whenever I press them on it, it never turns out to mean the same thing. The same is also true of an Israeli with whom I once discussed the word; she told me there was a Hebrew word for the same concept, but upon further questioning it was not the same thing at all. When they call someone a nerd, all they really mean is “What a killjoy! Why won’t he come out and have some fun with us?” It’s a term of frustration, not of exclusion.

I’ve only heard a few British people ever use the term, and they also sounded slightly off the mark in how they used it. Not sure about Canadians, but that would be an interesting control group.

In order to grasp what the word really means, you need an intimate familiarity with the unpleasant universe of American high schools, with their jock-and-cheerleader hiererarchies in which nerd does not just mean “good student” or even “very boring good student”, but functions as a term of both social exclusion and psycho-sexual revulsion. It is to the credit of all other nations that they never produced such a system or such a category, which will always remain untranslatable to outsiders.

But it makes me wonder how many other, far more important terms are misunderstood by outsiders in comical ways.

ADDENDUM: Indeed, Oppenheimer was a “nerd” in his youth in the very ugly American sense. But I could tell that that wasn’t what my Egyptian students meant. They merely meant that he was a good student, as the context made clear.

meetings, meetings, meetings, and meetings

Actually, I only had two of them today… 90 minutes interviewing one of the outgoing Deans, and another hour of the Senate Faculty Affairs Committee.

I fully realize that the standard position among most academics is something like “administrative work sucks.” But I’ve never even been comfortable with the phrase “administrative work.” I call it “reality work,” though “policy work” would do just as well. What you’re getting in these meetings is a sense of where the genuine problems lie, and only this gives you some hope of fixing them. You’re also suddenly in a position (or at least I am now) where it’s your responsibility to come up with actual solutions, and I enjoy that pressure, especially since this is a fairly unique university and I care about what happens to it.

It’s the Latourian in me that holds that building an interface between two ontological concepts is the same kind of thing as identifying and solving a policy problem that affects many colleagues. Even better is the fact that such problems are always tied to local conditions with specific histories, and can’t be solved by fiat; they need finesse, and since no one is born with such finesse, you have to develop it on the fly.

And ironically, I now have the same post at AUC that Latour has at Sciences-Po. He’s promised some hints, and they’ll be most welcome.

a more general remark

The following also seems very true, and gives further evidence of why the “critical thinking” paradigm in philosophy needs to be abandoned:

“I think that philosophy tends to attract more assholes than many other disciplines, because people who are naturally critical of others get a perfect environment to be, well, critical of ideas and they get to be negative to their hearts content, all the time being rewarded for having the perfect critical stance that philosophy says it requires. So you get to be a negative nelly and be good at your job (at least in the short term). Interesting that the other sphere of knowledge where it really pays to be critical or at least highly skeptical is science, although there don’t seem to be so many assholes in that field.”

On the latter point, I suspect that it’s because there is a more obvious reality principle at work in science. It’s a bit easier there than in philosophy to know the difference between good and bad work. There may be assholes in the sciences, but one can forget that and work with them as long as they’re delivering the goods.

What’s unique in philosophy is that people can feel superior precisely because they’re not delivering the goods. They can tell themselves and others that there is something capitalistically vulgar about actually delivering a finished work to press. They can smugly sit at home, sure that their never-to-be-finished masterwork trumps all of the actually extant work in philosophy. No one’s going to take that seriously in the sciences.

towards a sociology of the web

I agree with the following just-arrived analysis as well, and have been especially surprised at how lesser-known people think they are entitled to vile web behavior against the better-known:

“What’s amazing about these things is the way that the same syndrome keeps repeating itself on the web, with different people performing the same roles. The weasels are always liable to cry ‘fascism’ if you close comments boxes… There’s an inbuilt slave mentality with these people; somehow their swagger of superiority always goes alongside a resentful sense that they don’t have the same level of power as others who have a stronger voice and a clearer project (as if that stronger voice or bigger profile was somehow a gift from the gods rather than a consequence of courageously doing what they are too scared to do, and state a position, maintain it, think through its implications, and adjust it)… in their own minds, their ‘lesser’ position supposedly legitimates their invective: they are heroic little Davids casting slingshots at oppressive Goliaths, bringing down to earth those who have ‘got too big for their boots’… “

more reader mail

“The web, sadly, provides a very congenial space for these spiders. Their natural home is the comments box and the discussion board, where they can waste their own time and waste the time of others forever…”

ADDENDUM: That’s becoming clearer every week… Some people really do want to waste time. Do they think they’re immortal?

a repeat advice post

This may be the right moment to transition into an advice post, though it will merely be the sorts of things I’ve already said before.

At a young age, it can be extremely helpful to have good models. It’s best if you have some sort of personal contact with them, even if they are not your immediate supervisors. They should be working at a level somewhat above your current level. If they are somewhat intimidating to you at the moment, don’t worry about that, because they probably weren’t at that level yet when they were your own age.

I’ve been very fortunate to know two older figures who, by friendliness and by their own examples, helped push me to a much higher level intellectually and in terms of sheer self-discipline than before I met them.

The first was Alphonso Lingis, whom I had as a professor while doing my M.A. He is one of the most productive writers I have ever met, and still the most talented literary stylist I have ever met. What I learned from Lingis is how to have the act of writing permeate an entire day while still having a life filled with rich experiences. Lingis is constantly writing, yet somehow it never seems like it. Between his own work and his gorgeous, delicious letters (the best I have ever seen, including among historically prominent figures) he is one of the most productive people you were ever meet, without being a sort of tense “workaholic” type. Furthermore, Lingis reads widely in many disciplines, which everyone should do. And finally, Lingis was a great model for travel. Though I’m still not at his level in that category and perhaps never will be, he was certainly the one who showed me to what good use a good mind can put travel experiences. When I first him I had only been to the USA, Canada, and 7 or 8 Western European countries, whereas he’s been practically everywhere.

The other was Bruno Latour, who was never my teacher in an official sense– in fact, I already had my Ph.D. when I first met him. Latour is 14 years younger than Lingis, but with his more settled personality and lifestyle actually seems older. Latour was another great model in terms of productivity, and especially in his unparalleled “interdisciplinary” mastery: Latour’s body of written work is practically its own disciple, and it all fits together perfectly even though you could put him in any of 10 different bookstore shelves and 10 university departments. Latour also provided a good example of how to integrate humor into a tightly-woven argument. Another of his many remarkable skills is the ability to listen to people and take them very seriously without losing a sense of his own intellectual center. (Many people have to shut themselves off form outside influence in order to remain what they are. Latour is very centered.)

These were two who really helped me. Everyone should try to find one or two older people they deeply respect and like, and again, I think that some sort of personal contact is important. We can always find plenty of “hero authors” as models for writing. But in terms of knowing how to weld work and life together in ways mutually beneficial to both, it’s best to see that up close to some extent.

Anger and bitterness are such universally available affects for all humans that, unless you put the greatest effort into following positive models and developing positive ideas, there is a real risk for each and every one of us of spiralling into denunciations and sabotage and self-sabotage. It is very important that you not spend time with people who may reinforce this tendency in yourself, because the train of the tendency is there in everyone (though more dominant in some than in others).