Mood Swings: Fear and loathing on the Nile By Youssef Rakha A person is a complex mechanism. There is such potential for compassion but ludicrousness always wins, somehow. Indecision, animosity, excess: the one quality of mind capable of countering such seemingly inborn inadequacies is belief; and divine mercy abiding, that shouldn't be so hard to acquire. There remains the question of what exactly to believe in, of course. Whoever said compassion was necessary, after all? Once you have seen sympathy metamorphose into hostile incomprehension, you begin to doubt whether the compulsion to share someone else's emotional experience is as brilliant an idea as it sounds. Faith is the most ingenious evasion. And in a society that has yet to discover the delights of individual choice, it remains the most effective antidote to personal responsibility. Failing to fend for ourselves on the material front, we give up the life of the mind; otherwise (and that is worse) our access to the intellectual products of starkly superior societies engenders a fake mental realm, the projection of causes we have no genuine desire to advocate. Maintaining a gratis faith in life modes we are incapable of trusting, we become virtual moral agents, champions of our worst fears. Belief fails us. And in the absence of belief, what do we have but ludicrousness? Tentatively, Cairo succumbs. The vague awakening of the mid-1950s and 1960s has clearly amounted to little in the way of socially viable scaffolding; and there remains in the construction only the echo of a long-dead voice: fraternity, freedom, equality. The rest is terminally regurgitated custom, the rank and file of a feudal morality that has yet to accept the notion of the human being as an individual or develop interactive procedures that begin to transcend family loyalty and superstitious religiosity. Nor does the multifarious discourse of nationalism do much to dispel economic and sexual desperation. Insofar as it does anything at all, it perpetuates official drudgery and power hunger even further. The nation perceived as a virgin land soiled by foreign influence, for one example of such discourse, is but the unimaginative mythology of shamelessly ineffectual intellects. Gradually, the more modest virtues of the working class -- dignity, skill, humour, magnanimity, resilience -- are giving way to legends of mammon or the untoward strategies of increasingly impossible day-to-day survival. The real world is always elsewhere: in the West, or in other parts of the Arab world; in long-dead (Arab or ancient) glories. To be pragmatic is to concede either the triumph of risk-free misery or the necessity of giving in to the New World Order. Language falls dead over the corpse of politics. Perhaps it is this that makes present-day Egyptians by far more inclined to discredit than have faith in each other; more often than not, sadly, the tendency is justified. And notwithstanding the failure to communicate meaningfully, the reason emerges somewhere along the way to isolation. A person is a solitary thing, especially in a society that systematically excludes the disinherited and the unalike. Acute class consciousness is a condition Egyptians will spend the rest of the millennium coming to terms with; and even then humanity will be hard pressed to think of an effective cure. Nobel laureate Octavio Paz's analysis of the Mexican character proposes as much about the predicaments of social existence in an altogether different part of the so called Third World: once class-related differences are registered, neither poor nor rich are capable of confidence. One feels more comfortable within the confines of one's caste, naturally. Yet even there, one's inevitably negative awareness of the existence of other castes engenders bitterness; and bitterness takes away from faith. Paz's analysis evokes an image of the archetypal contemporary Egyptian man, unemployed and tired, seeking an anonymous gathering like a moulid where, for a few hours a year, he can express and make contact with his humanity. Most, content with satellite television, will not even do that.
