On a recent visit to Syria, my friend and I eschewed our guidebook as much as possible. In place of this we sought local inspiration, or merely direction, with the welcome corollary of impromptu conversation. Although our stay was relatively brief (roughly four full days in Syria, the other half of our trip spent in Lebanon) and the opportunity for cultural observation, let alone immersion, correspondingly limited (a problem no amount of time can ever solve for a ‘tourist’), we were, nevertheless, struck by how much our experience of Syria was so completely unlike what people seemed to think we would find:
“They just think differently about things over there, don’t they?”
“They support those terrorist groups.”
“Dude, don’t get killed.” (This came in response to my plan to wear an American Flag pin for most of the trip. I did; and no one cared. Then we started telling people we were American; and no one cared. Then we ran out of sleeves.)
I’ve never understood this sort of mystical authority over the unknown. None of these speakers had ever been to Syria, and their comments put me in mind of the cavalier undergraduate, who hasn’t done the reading and thinks that any hint of circumspection might tip her hand; that this is somehow worse than confession coupled with enlightenment. (The student’s worry, undoubtedly, is that the source of enlightenment will be a reassignment of the past day’s reading. Note well this aversion to effort.) For the student, the tendency for ignorance to breed temerity is imperceptible only so far as the nearest source of contradictory evidence, personified, one hopes, in her professor. For our putative authorities on Syrian people and culture, it turns out that the distance between the student and the lectern is not much shorter than the distance between Oxford (where my friend and I reside) and the Syrian embassy in London, from which we learned that:
‘They’ answer the embassy telephone on the first ring. In person.
‘They’ cheerfully answer my questions about the visa form. In perfect English.
So much for generalizations, and the notion that there is anything necessarily ominous about the fact that ‘They just think differently about things over there’. To be sure, upon arrival in Syria, some differences that we encountered were more difficult to accommodate than others: it took us nearly a day, for instance, to become adept at negotiating taxi rides. (After this we were not only unflappable but audacious in the process, laughing outright in the face of one especially ridiculous offer from a local driver. Far from giving offence, our outburst elicited an appreciative smile from someone clearly pleased to find such shrewed and worthy adversaries. Only later would we learn, from a different driver, that the price we ultimately agreed, while less than half the original amount, was still embarrassingly high. “Said the spider to the fly…” That smile, we should have known.) Other differences we welcomed immediately: Syrian men openly kiss each other in greeting, link arms and even hold hands as they walk down the street; natural male affection with no fear of ‘looking gay’. (A curious confidence: Section 520 of the Syrian penal code punishes ‘carnal relations against the order of nature’ with three years imprisonment.) Still other differences were not immediately apparent, such as the government ban on Facebook, which it took us days to realize because so many Internet cafes use proxy servers. We had to travel three hours into the Syrian desert before we felt the effects of this political censorship.
Even then it was not entirely clear what to make of the situation. One afternoon we met Sary and Radwan, native Syrians who worked in a local private firm. Over coffee, Sary was forthright in telling us that “In Syria, you can think whatever you want about politics, just don’t talk about it”. Then he asked us why Jon Stewart on The Daily Show always gives Canadians such a hard time. (My friend and I are originally from Canada.) They were both much more interested in talking about family life, Sary hoping to marry soon and Radwan keen to send his two children to good schools. (There may have been pictures displayed from a wallet.) Radwan especially was interested in the different family values that might obtain in the West: “I have heard, but I do not know from experience…”
Then we challenged them to an arm wrestling contest to see who would pick-up the cheque, lest anyone harbour notions that Canadians are not good natured, hearty and generous. (The loser would be treated by the winner – we paid.)
None of which is to say that Syria, its politics and its government are not complicated nor potentially very dangerous. Canadians especially can appreciate this following the ordeal of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen deported from the U.S. to Syria, in 2002, where he was detained for almost a year and tortured. Earlier this summer, Human Rights Watch released a report, “A Wasted Decade: Human Rights in Syria during Bashar al-Asad’s First Ten Years in Power,” detailing repeated and flagrant human rights abuses, including warrantless arrest and detention, torture thereunder, and pervasive political censorship. Even a casual relationship with the news of the world makes plain that however much our friends and family overreached with their injunctions against “getting killed” and condemnations for “supporting those terrorists”, their claims were not without some purchase in reality.
So it is not enough say that the source of their ‘mystical authority’ is some crude combination of xenophobia and outright fear of the unknown. There is surely some of this, in different measures for different friends and family, and certainly it is because of these feelings that we are able to delight and amaze with stories of our adventure; indeed, that we are able to use the term ‘adventure’ at all. (Arguing with a London taxi driver is outrageous and tedious. Everyone at Oxford watches The Daily Show.) There is something else that must be added to give rise to such ready and indiscriminate use of the pronoun “They”, explicitly or implicitly, and its simple but spectacular capacity to elide the difference between politics and people.
In a different context, Lewis Lapham has observed that “A society overwhelmed by complexity places a correspondingly high value on simplification.” Lapham’s particular concern, published in 1988 but still unshakably relevant, perfectly illustrates this natural tendency: “If the water engineers went out on strike, the cities would become uninhabitable within a matter of hours… But who would miss Dan Rather?” The implication is that our society’s highest honours (money and fame) go to those who best perform the “ritual simplifications” (such as digesting the news for a television audience), while those who really keep things going toil in obscurity. Little wonder that movie stars and football players forever out-earn doctors, nurses and the whole fire brigade.
The incongruities of ‘value’ are a symptom of what Lapham rightly identifies as the more generalized addiction to simplification. It is an enormous task merely to establish a reliable, articulable purchase on the news available every day about every place in the world. (Hence the enduring popularity of The Economist and its chimerical promise of the comprehensive perspective. Its latest ad campaign proclaims, ‘Get a worldview. Read The Economist.’) The prospect of keeping even this limited certainty in a state of perpetual flux, indefinitely contingent and subject always to revision or exception, is not just daunting but despairing and even, in the face of the radical skeptic, exhausting. “But how do you know the sun will rise tomorrow?” “I don’t, now shut up and go to sleep.”
So it was that we rose early one morning and encountered two teenage girls exploring the Roman ruins near Palmyra. The absurdly early hour, justified only by its delivered promise of a tolerably cool desert atmosphere, made them bold (giddy?) to say that they were only pretending to be Canadian on this trip; in fact, they were American. “We’re actually from the South”. (You don’t say?) After the appropriate exchange of pleasantries (“Where in the South?”, “Where in Canada?”), we told them about our failed experiment with the flag pin (“Nobody cares”) and sent them on their – hopefully now American – way.
Paradoxically, the complexities of simplification made this correction both too little and too late. Too little, because while their subterfuge was irrelevant to one derogatory simplification (the girls would never have had to insist that “We are not the US Government or even stereotypical Americans”) it was always and remained predicated upon another (the simplifying presumption that “They will think we are…”). Too late, because their crude pretence had already forestalled dozens of opportunities to discover its embedded misperceptions, and who knows whether the confidence to declare national identity survived a proper and sobering night’s sleep.
Of course, the tendency to simplify goes both ways; it is not a peculiarly Western impulse, and the kettle may justly respond that the pot, too, is black. In a Conversation in a Syrian Taxi we heard both Israelis and the Danish condemned for the acts of some of their members, by a Syrian who readily admitted he had neither traveled to nor met any individual from either country. Unfortunately, the shared desire for a world more easily grasped does not necessarily, if ever, lead to common or even commensurable generalizations.
Even cases that appear to confirm a simplified understanding are not necessarily so. Our wanderings around the Old City of Damascus took us into an abandoned school. The school turned out to be some sort of military facility, which we discovered only when we were chased off the premises and down the street by angry men shouting futile Arabic. They physically detained us, attempted to take our cameras, and were mollified only when some local passers-by (this is how we met Sary and Radwan) helped us to translate our willingness to delete the offending images: we had photographed broken desks, basketball hoops and an anatomy textbook (pictured here, and speaking for itself). So much for military secrets. The whole exercise was as pointless as it was gravely (not to say furiously) undertaken by the military personnel, and reminded me of having my shoes X-rayed at the aeroport or reading about the USA PATRIOT Act provisions permitting warrant-less acquisition of public library records.
One thing made clear by our trip to Syria was how many differences are merely that, at once insignificant and the stuff of cocktail hour legend. In both cases the personal experience provides the necessary perspective, and the drama increases with the number of retellings. In the Old City of Damascus, what began as an impromptu kick-about with some local boys becomes a pitched battle for regional pride and personal passage (through the narrow street), with Oxford playing Syria to a hard fought and eminently diplomatic 1-1 draw.
Other differences are more serious, and for this reason travel much faster and further afield than anything my friend or I could manage with a few Facebook updates or blog posts; the stuff of ten o’clock news reports and NGO discussion papers. The desire to draw conclusions from so much publicly available information is not only reasonable but imperative, to any form of intelligent discussion, but coupled to this must be (if the discussion is truly ‘intelligent’) a reluctance to make such claims definitive, or to reach very far beyond the bare facts. As we learned from our time in Syria, the alternative may run dangerously close to prejudice, or at the very least, like the temerous student, risk ready embarrassment from a contradiction close-at-hand.
Consider, as a final case, the generally reliable folks at LonleyPlanet.com, who begin their guide to Syria with so much cheap and tired rhetoric:
“Here’s a newsflash: contrary to what the US State Department may wish the world to think, Syria is not populated by terrorists, zealots and other bogeymen.”
The sigh may be audible, for surely this over-eggs the pudding. The actual language of the U.S. State Department is admittedly couched in terms that favour a ‘better-safe-than-sorry’ approach to the world, but is otherwise reasonably circumspect and supported by examples of actual mistreatment:
“While most Syrians appear genuinely friendly towards foreigners, underlying tensions can lead to a quick escalation in the potential for violence.”
Before going ahead and dismissing one or both of these assessments on grounds of over-simplification (though not of the same subject), let me suggest one additional fact for consideration: the only building between the Lebanese and Syrian borders (when one is driving between Beirut and Damascus), a sprawling, modern rest station, supporting gleaming pink and orange letters?
Dunkin’ Donuts.
