-- Original Message -----
From: John Hibbs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, January 28, 2000 7:55 AM
Subject: One Country Two worlds
> ==============================================================
> Since the theme for GLD2000 may well be "Bridging the Gap", I thought it
> worthwhile to enclose this entire Thomas Friedman editorial found at:
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/library/opinion/friedman/012800frie.html
>
> CAIRO -- I just had an interesting experience. I did an author's tour of
> Egypt, meeting with students at Cairo University, journalists at
> Egyptian newspapers and the Chambers of Commerce of Cairo and Alexandria
> to talk about the Arabic edition of a book I did on globalization.
> Two images stand out from this trip. The first was riding the train from
> Cairo to Alexandria in a car full of middle- and upper-class Egyptians.
> So many of them had cell phones that kept ringing with different
> piercing melodies during the two-hour trip that at one point I felt like
> getting up, taking out a baton and conducting a cell-phone symphony. I
> was so rattled from ringing phones, I couldn't wait to get off the
> train. Yet, while all these phones were chirping inside the train,
> outside we were passing along the Nile, where barefoot Egyptian
> villagers were tilling their fields with the same tools and water
> buffalo that their ancestors used in Pharaoh's day. I couldn't imagine a
> wider technology gap within one country. Inside the train it was A.D.
> 2000, outside it was 2000 B.C.
> The other image was visiting Yousef Boutrous-Ghali, Egypt's
> M.I.T.-trained minister of economy. When I arrived at his building the
> elevator operator, an Egyptian peasant, was waiting for me at the
> elevator, which he operated with a key. Before he turned it on, though,
> to take me up to the minister's office, he whispered the Koranic verse
> "In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate." To a Westerner,
> it is unnerving to hear your elevator operator utter a prayer before he
> closes the door, but for him this was a cultural habit, rooted deep in
> his tradition. Again, the contrast: Mr. Boutros-Ghali is the most
> creative, high-tech driver of globalization in Egypt, but his elevator
> man says a prayer before taking you up to his office.
> These scenes captured the dichotomy I found throughout Egypt: While its
> small, cell-phone-armed, globalizing elites are definitely pushing to
> get online and onto the global economic train, most others fear they
> will be left behind or lose their identity trying to catch it. Indeed I
> was struck, after a week of discussing both the costs and benefits of
> globalization, by how most Egyptians, including many intellectuals,
> could see only the costs. The more I explained globalization, the more
> they expressed unease about it. It eventually hit me that I was
> encountering what anthropologists call "systemic misunderstanding."
> Systemic misunderstanding arises when your framework and the other
> person's framework are so fundamentally different that it cannot be
> corrected by providing more information.
> The Egyptians' unease about globalization is rooted partly in a
> justifiable fear that they lack the technological base to compete. But
> it's also rooted in something cultural -- and not just the professor at
> Cairo University who asked me: "Does globalization mean we all have to
> become Americans?" It goes deeper.
> Many Americans can easily identify with modernization, technology and
> the Internet because one of the most important things these do is
> increase individual choices. At their best, they empower and emancipate
> the individual. But for traditional societies, such as Egypt's, the
> collective, the group, is much more important than the individual, and
> empowering the individual is equated with dividing the society. So
> "globalizing" for them not only means being forced to eat more Big Macs,
> it means changing the relationship of the individual to his state and
> community in a way that they feel is socially disintegrating.
> "Does globalization mean we just leave the poor to fend for themselves?"
> one educated Egyptian woman asked me. "How do we privatize when we have
> no safety nets?" asked a professor. When the government here says it is
> "privatizing" an industry, the instinctive reaction of Egyptians is that
> something is being stolen from the state, says an official.
> After enough such conversations I realized that most Egyptians --
> understandably -- were approaching globalization out of a combination of
> despair and necessity, not out of any sense of opportunity.
> Globalization meant adapting to a threat coming from the outside, not
> increasing their own freedoms. I also realized that their previous
> ideologies -- Arab nationalism, Socialism, Fascism or Communism -- while
> they may have made no economic sense, had a certain inspirational power.
> But globalism totally lacks this. When you tell a traditional society it
> has to streamline, downsize and get with the Internet, it is a challenge
> that is devoid of any redemptive or inspirational force.
> And that is why, for all of globalization's obvious power to elevate
> living standards, it is going to be a tough, tough sell to all those
> millions who still say a prayer before they ride the elevator.
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
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