Egyptian cultural note

The other day at the airport, we had to pay 5 Egyptian Pounds apiece just to go into the arrivals area of the terminal and meet our friend coming in from Canada. A smaller fee had always been required at an older terminal in Cairo, so I wasn’t terribly surprised, though I’ve never encountered such a fee in other countries.

Just now, reading today’s newspaper, I saw an article about this charge. The Ministry’s claim is that the 5 Pound entry fee is to help counter the Egyptian cultural tendency to send large parties of friends and family members to welcome or see people off at the airport, which supposedly leads to excessive congestion inside the terminal.

It got me thinking a little bit about how small social differences within cultures might easily lead to larger-scale benefits or handicaps (with the requirement of a 5-Pound airport entry fee being a minor example).

Another such thing I recall reading about is that in China, small street fights between individuals can quickly escalate into massive riots involving hundreds of people due to the tendency of loyal friends and associates to rush to the fight to help protect their friends. And I wondered if a friend system of this sort might not directly lead to an almost crippling need to maintain social order in draconian fashion to prevent rapid unravellings of the social fabric of the sort seen in such giant brawls. I’m just an amateur sociologist at best, and can’t begin to determine what is cause and what is consequence in such a system, but it’s been interesting to think about.

I was thinking about a related issue the other day when reading the various heated remarks over whether the circle of Brentano’s students should or should not be regarded as a “School”. It always seems to me that continental Europeans, especially of a century ago, are able to get really worked up about this issue in a way that puzzles me. I sense that this issue is somehow more harmless in the American context; I don’t know about the British one. In America I think it would be a relatively uncomplicated question– if a certain group of thinkers form a “School,” then this points both to a certain amount of success, along with the possible downside of rigid orthodoxy that might always be found in any group setting. But I can’t imagine Americans getting as upset about the question as I found in Carl Stumpf’s remarks about Brentano’s Prague disciples, or in Karl Jaspers’s complaints to the young Gadamer about the “School” character of phenomenology.

Some of the other examples that come to mind concern the specific character of the natural sciences in Britain, at least in the past (I don’t know how it might have changed). One point, made by Richard Rhodes in his atomic bomb history, was Ernest Rutherford’s disdain for Leo Szilard’s constant wish to patent and profit from scientific ideas; Szilard and Einstein had had no qualms even about pursuing refrigerator patents, and no doubt this would be fine, even admired, in the USA. The claim by Rhodes was that the genteel, aristocratic history of science in Britain was manifesting itself in Rutherford’s attitude. James Watson makes a similar point in The Double Helix when he describes the unwillingness of several British scientists to compete on similar scientific topics with other British colleagues, and Watson states that in both the USA and France, this would never have been viewed even remotely as a problem.

But perhaps my most frequent contact with this sort of difference is with the extent to which European intellectuals are far more polarized on political questions than I’m used to. People can be completely written off due to their stand on this or that political issue, and only in highly extreme cases would it occur to me to write somebody for such a reason. In fact, I can’t recall ever completely breaking off contact with someone due to a political issue, whereas in present-day France I know of numerous such cases even in my relatively small circle there.

It would also be interesting to do a study of which authors have the most different reputations in different countries at various times. Sloterdijk remains a fairly minor figure in the USA, though everyone seems to want to talk about him on the Continent, even if they don’t much care for him. Quite often I find that Germans and Italians in particular rank Adorno much higher as a philosopher than Heidegger, when only certain active interest groups would be likely to do that in the USA. Latour is shelved as a philosopher in Dutch bookshops, but almost nowhere else, and in fact the Vrin philosophy bookstore near the Sorbonne refuses even to carry his books, due to their “off topic” status.

There is also the famous case of Poe, highly respected in France. Although Poe does occupy a place in the American literary canon, it is a mildly disreputable place, and I doubt you’d find many American critics calling him the best writer produced by our country, though I’ll bet a number of French critics would say so. (Harold Bloom, whose judgment usually isn’t bad, calls Poe’s writing “uniformly awful,” which is indicative of the phenomenon I’m describing.)

On my first extensive stay in the former East Germany, in Leipzig, I was surprised to find many of the Germans there deeply invested in KURT TUCHOLSKY, since I had frankly never heard of the guy at that point.

I have no special theory to offer about such phenomena at this point. I just think it would be somehow very revealing to chart discrepancies in the national canons within the set of nations called “Western Civilization”, which otherwise have a fairly large overlap of recognized great works.

This summer in Croatia, I was surprised to hear a few anecdotes about who the favorite recent philosophers are– not because there was anything wrong with the situation there, but just because there seemed to be some strong peculiarities of a kind unfamiliar to me.