Reflections at a Traffic Light in Amman

Like most of those who work for a private company in Jordan, 5:00 PM is my zero hour. I leave the office I work at, on the outskirts of Amman, and head back home, somewhere in the busiest district in all of Jordan. Endowed with a good geographical sense, the memory of an elephant when it comes to routs, and being clairvoyant enough to invest in the future by trail and error I can easily find less congested roads most of the times. But still, escaping certain points in the way back home is impossible, like this traffic light, within a walking distance from my home.

It is not uncommon for crossroads controlled by traffic lights in Amman to get jammed. Two years ago, many of these were marked with white lines all over and signs, which told the drivers not to drive into the marked area if jammed. It was a complete failure, as if that needs to be said. Even worst, if drivers could not drive through the traffic light while it was green, because of the jam, they will still cross it red and fight to do so as if that was their lawful right.

That does not surprise me at all. Most of our laws, on this planet, grant the common good of societies, in utopias only; it is naively assumed, when laws are made, that the denizens, subjected to them, are selfless people, and that the very few who are not, can be effectively dealt with by giving power to "selected" people, whose job is to maintain order, not considering the fact that those selected ones are nothing but human beings in positions that make them extra-prone to be corrupted by power they wield.

Selflessness is rare, yet it is assumed that we all think altruistically, and practically speaking, even if the majority were, the few who are not are capable of throwing the whole system into chaos, but we never come to acknowledge this in our laws. In the case of this traffic light I am talking about, following the laws would grant everybody getting to their destination in around the same time spent per a distance. But apparently people do not give a damn if others reached their homes or not as long as they can cut their journey time by few seconds and get away with it.

What I want to say here is that laws and preventive measures should not be assessed based on what they promise to deliver If followed, but rather on how robust they are when enforcement fails. Men of law should accept selfishness as endemic to nature, and not an anomaly. This does not mean changing the status of acts deemed criminal to normal, on the contrary. It is merely a new more enabling legal framework, even though I admit that the legalizing institutions themselves are not immune to any of the aforementioned human "flaws", let alone the many restrictions imposed on the whole legal system by the old and conservative ones making up the legislatures themselves.

Ever since I was a kid, I felt sympathy toward many of those fictional characters whom were straight in pursuing their goal of creating perfection or order but then gone awry in their methods, though not goals, not because I agree with them, but because of the feeling of agony they project into you. The one I like the most is called Sargeras, a titan that features in the lore of Warcraft. He was amongst the ones who created a universe and fought relentlessly against the "anomalous evil" that came to plague it. But no matter how hard he tried to eliminate this evil, it just kept crawling back from nowhere, even though it was no match for him, which pushed him to believe that malignancy was intrinsic to the universe they created, and so he sets to destroy everything, the good and the bad, and recreate it once again without any "flaws".

The moral of the story is that a normative approach can be the source of the perceived evil itself. We should instead prefer robustness over utopias. The only practical thing I came to learn from the highly theoretical in nature mathematical models, is that the more realistic the assumptions we build our models on, the better the results are, but the more resources it takes to build and run them. Robust laws will make our lives safer, but they need some creativity no doubt; a thing we pride ourselves on, as a species, even though we rarely exhibit.

Cocky, Now Snobbish Jordanians

I once asked a Lebanese friend, after noting the complicated relationship between Jordanians and the Lebanese, what do Lebanese people think of Jordanians? That friend lived in USA for the longest part of her life, so her answer was not really hers, but her parents', who lived in Lebanon for a longer time. She told me that Jordanians are Cocky.

Cocky! I was surprised a bit, I won't deny it. I thought it all had to do with the grumpiness of Jordanians. But after some thinking, it made complete sense. I mean, don't we take pride in being full of pride? Pride for reasons that exist only in our collective imagination, or that were completely out of our control? Not like they justify, in their own right, a fraction of the cockiness we display either.

But, for the sake of what's to come next, I will say it is very typical of Jordanians to be cocky; regardless of their class, they "always got everything under control". Lets assume it is the genes, and pretend like we can not help it. What is quite new to our society then is the sense of elitism complemented with snobbery.

Before delving any deeper into this, lets differentiate between two types of Elitism: Behavioral, and Intellectual. Elitism implies a claimed air of superiority and vanity, but I will consider intellectual elitism a good thing, for the sake of chasing that which is peculiar to our society and more detrimental.

Very few, however, would disagree with the fact that behavioral elitism is detrimental to the well being of a society. And unfortunately this is the kind of elitism that has been growing recently in Amman. So do we blame the internet? The spoiled generation that did not suffer like their parents did? The newly-rich? Not really, and I don't think that these are answers to the question as much as they reflect the dull conservatism of our society. (The majority of the rich in Jordan are newly-rich! All of our grandparents came either from villages or the desert, and even the ones who were rich had to abandon all of their property and flee barefooted to Jordan)

There was a time in the past (late 60's to early 8o's) when different developed states contributed to human capacity building in Jordan. A decent percentage of the young Jordanians and Palestinian refugees were sent to complete their studies at different countries, such as USA, Western Europe (UK mainly), and the USSR. Being the Macho men they were, who couldn't prepare the simplest of recipes, and for other religious reasons, many of them were wedded to young Jordanian girls, and their kids were born abroad.

Many of these kids, especially the ones born in western states, acquired dual citizenships; the Jordanian one, and that of the country they were born in. The fathers, in many cases, proved competent, and found themselves a place in the flaring western economies of the time (or in the westerner compounds of the Arab Gulf countries) so they lived there for a while with their families, and the kids were raised in decent conditions. They started returning back in the mid-90's, importing many new concepts to life in Amman, and contributing to its modern day identity (e.g. Malls, the IB curriculum, gyms... etc)

How old are their kids right now? In their 20s-early 30s. Most of them do their studies in USA, UK or Canada, and then some of those come back to work in Jordan. Actually the financial crisis sent many of them back to Amman, regardless of their preference. I met some of them. They are good people, like other people, spoiled, like most of of our generation in Amman is, though they still retain some responsibility. Sincere, candid, they blow their nose while around you, they prefer speaking in English, but don't mind Arabic, some of them are abusing their wealth no doubt, but that is not exclusive to them; locally raised kids of the rich philistine merchants do much worst than that.

However, despite the fact that these are not a majority, they are setting, unintentionally, a new standard of living in Amman; the behavior is changing to be more westerner, without a change in mentality, which is quite worrisome, because this is turning people into brainless zombies or behavioral replicas that are too shallow. Nothing can be more dangerous than shallowness, and we are not even importing the good behavior. What you get at the end is snobbish people, like my uneducated aunt who lived in a rural area for the most part of her life (nothing wrong in this) but who now acts like she had been to Harvard Law School for no obvious reason other than that life now "necessitates" having a Facebook account, throwing a couple of English words while speaking in Arabic, and listening to Hip-Hop songs to be called modern! (that is the definition of modernism in Amman and not worldwide)

Another thing to add is that even though most of those born-in-the-West kids are not into reforms, the few of them who are, got it completely wrong. They think that Jordan can be reformed as fast as their trip is from Heathrow to Queen Alia airport. They saw the "solutions" already, so it is a matter of imposing them on the society, with minimal modifications, forgetting that it took long times and sacrifices for the West to reach what it already had reached, that solutions evolve, and are rarely imported. And I am afraid that the motivation behind most of what they do is some form of self interest.

It was really absurd to see some of those calling themselves "prominent", or "genius" and they did nothing significant yet, other than getting a Bachelor degree from a University in UK, or being popular among a small clique of their likes!!! That is again, what I call unjustifiable snobbery and elitism. This can never help, in a positive way!

The Levant Union?

It is extremely weird that the Jordanian media did not mention anything about this, but it seems that Turkey had given up on the idea of the European Union; to be more accurate they gave up on the "European" but not the "Union".

According to Hurriyet daily news: Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, this last Friday in Istanbul, had signed an agreement to form a "Levant quartet", a step that aims to foster integration between the four countries on economic, cultural, and political levels, that might evolve into an economic and monetary union in the future. The agreement, it seems, is taking into consideration, and looking forward accommodating many countries in the region, including Iran, but excluding Israel, by the year 2015.

A couple of days ago, I was in Istanbul, and I came across many Turkish people, who when heard the group of peers I was with speaking Arabic, started speaking to us in whatever Arabic they could manage. They expressed their love to Arabs and Muslims, and even their hatred to Europe, as if that was a way to prove their hospitality. It might be that they wanted to demonstrate their skills in Arabic, nothing more nothing less, or a feeling of sympathy that grew in the aftermath of the flotilla raid, but, politically speaking, it is widely accepted that Turkey's attitude toward the Arabs had changed dramatically lately from Arabs are traitors to Arabs make good potential allies.

However, a prominent Turkish lady told me an interesting story; Recep Tayyip Erdogan is of a gigantic ego, and is a dictator. When she told me that, I felt stupid, I mean how come that I did not notice it. Arabs liked him, and Arabs do not like rational leaders, they are naturally endowed with an affinity to demagogues. Erdogan, it seems, is imprisoning anyone who opposes him, and his son started making a fortune out of nowhere ever since he became the president of Turkey.

But that is not the point; the "scary thing", according to that lady, was that he had made some referendums to change the constitution in a way that grants him more control. In light of this, I came to conclude that, logically speaking and away from the convolutions of politics, this Levant Union is one of four things:

• A trick that Turkey is playing on the EU
• Erdogan (as the head of his ruling party) wants to create a Neo-Ottoman Empire
• Turkey wants to sustain its economy in these harsh times
• The countries in the region want to form a Union for real (after digging a bit deeper, I found that Iran has been trying to do something like that lately, but the WikiLeaks, it seems, will have adverse effects on its relationships with the Arab states in the region)

Anyways, the story unfolded nonlinearly, befor me, while I was in Turkey, and what added to the thrill of it were two questions that I had been pondering about in the last couple of days: what would this region look like in 20 years? And will any of these young nationalities that were formed in the past centenary hold any longer? We can not predict, but we can observe, so lets take a seat, and watch as history comes out the way she is.

P.S.

6 days ago, before learning about this story, I decided to start calling my self a Levantine from Jordan, in the hope that in few years saying that I am a Primate from planet Earth won't sound like treason, so the thrill of it all is justifiable.

Link to the story in Hurriyet official website.