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Monday
May 28, 2001

Awareness brings change

Rasheed's point is well-taken ["Let's accept our weaknesses"]. It's my fault that I've been so concise in my writing ["Camel's neck to a dolphin's body"]. You are right! From what I said, it is implied that change is impossible. However, I don't think it can be implied from what I said that maa az damaagh-e fil (yaa az jaa-ye digari) oftaade'im, and I certainly didn't mean to suggest that. I'm sorry if I sounded self-centered.

But about change... Well, I think real change will not come about unless we, as a nation, gain awareness about the why and how we ended up where we ended up and the West ended up where they ended up. (Again here, I am not judging either ourselves or the West as good or bad, mind you.) What's for sure, taqlid-e kurkuraane will get us nowhere except adding confusion to confusion. There is an invisible but immensely omnipresent history behind the behavior of people of each culture, that shouldn't be neglected, nor can they be ignored.

Now this awareness in turn will realize only by Education. And by Education, I don't mean a mass production of Ph.D.'s. Iran has produced a lot of engineers and scientists and medical practitioners in the past, and is still continuing to do so, but the mere existence of these gol-haa-ye sar-sabad (=creme de la creme) of our nation will not bring about a substantial change. And mind you, this is not only because many of them flee from Iran never to return, but most importantly because, with all due respect to them all, they mainly operate not better than parts of a disassembled engine, put next to each other on the floor!

Let me stick to this beautiful, though not quite poetic metaphor, and remind you, that as every mechanical engineer concedes, what makes an engine work is not only its parts arbitrarily put together, but the "soul" (if you will) of the engine, an underlying system connecting them in a very specific way, giving each component its due role.

This is of course an exaggerated metaphor. In society, or when it comes to functionality of a camel's body, we don't need the precision of an actual engine's assembling. But it is true that in the absence of an underlying philosophy, a more or less consistent way of thinking, a nation cannot become anew, no matter how many more Ph.D.'s you supplement. They would only have a superficial impact at best, and at its worst, they just add to the scientific weaponry of the Other!

I know I have entered some sort of a vicious cycle here. Change is possible only through Education, while the the attainment of the latter is impossible without achievement of the former. Not quite vicious though. These two will, in the ideal case, improve together and gradually, one feeding the other, the other feeding the one, and in their interaction a nation prospers. But of course, I think we need to start from Education.

Now that the very polite, humble, not to mention complimentary Rasheed gave me a chance to clarify some points (I hope!), I would like to modify a minor part of what I wrote and Mr. Javid kindly titled "Camel's neck to a dolphin's body". I think my example about not respecting each other's right in the saf-e noon-barbari may not apply to Iranians living in the US, so I thought I'd give you a more concrete example. Fasten your seatbelts, if ready as it is not going to be a very sweet example.

Here it is: We never seem to learn to be on time for Iranian gatherings, even after so many years of actually (or at least physically and geographically) living in the realm of this rather different civilization, either because we simply can't find a clean pair of socks, or perhaps because we find it fashionable to be late, and as it is with our inherently tribal culture (Please don't get me started here, or I'll bombard you with numerous examples on why I think we have a really really long way to get to the stage to see the gates of a civil society, and that only with a binocular), we have to emphasize --in almost every social encounter-- our own importance and superiority over others, unless they are a cousin, or a neighbor, or a cousin's neighbor, or a neighbor's cousin. (This is, by the way, my explanation for the chaos that is Tehran's traffic: keeping a tribal spirit while among the skyscrapers.)

Ataollah Togha

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