Time for an academic post

I'm taking this class called the Psychology of Conflict Resolution, which I kind of took last semester with Anne, only with Anne it was an actual psych class, and this one isn't, really. But it's still interesting, in a different way. The professor is Israeli, and he is really fixated on the differences between collective and individualist societies. Which at first I found kind of annoying, but I'm starting to understand more what he means after having been here for a while. So he assigned each of us our own book to examine for examples of divergent ways of thinking from what we're used to. The book I got is called Negotiating for Peace in the Middle East, by Ismail Fahmy, who was the Egyptian foreign minister and deputy prime minister before Sadat signed the peace treaty without his knowledge. I'm only like 100 pages in, but there are already a lot of interesting examples of cultural differences from the western way of thought. I read part of the book aloud in class yesterday [the Americans and Egyptians are at a dinner in a hotel. Kissinger and his people have been in Egypt for a little while, trying to "manipulate" (if you believe Fahmy's viewpoint) acceptable solutions out of Sadat]:

"Kissinger relayed to the participants the terms of the agreement he had reached with Sadat on military issues. President Sadat had suddenly agreed that the Egyptian military presence on the east side of the Canal would be limited to 7,000 men and 30 tanks. By so doing, he had astonished everybody, including Kissinger and the Israelis. In fact, Kissinger had argued all along that Sadat could not possibly settle for less than 250 tanks. General Gamasy, who had not been consulted, was very upset, feeling that he and the Egyptian army had been humiliated. His eyes filled with tears, he rose quickly from his seat, retiring to a far corner of the hall and started to weep. Everybody watched General Gamasy uneasily. The Egyptian delegation was affected and emotionally moved, sharing Gamay's humiliation. From the look on the faces of the American delegation, one could easily see they too were upset by the injustice inflicted upon Egypt. But Kissinger, typically only thinking in personal terms, turned pale and kept on muttering, 'What did I say wrong?' When General Gamasy returned to the table, silent and downcast, Kissinger started showering him with extravagant praise...General Gamasy, who is a very modest man, listened in silence. The dishonour was not to be expunged by a few words of personal praise. Sadat had singlehandedly given awy all that the Egyptian army had won with great effort and sacrifice. Without consulting anybody, he had caved in to the Israeli request that Egyptian military presence be reduced to nothing...According to Kissinger Sadat was apparently quite taken aback by the attitude of his senior officers and was to comment: 'My army! First I had trouble convincing them to go to war. Now I have trouble convincing them to make peace.'"

That's kind of long, but if anyone read it, it's very interesting. First of all, there is the fact that Sadat supposedly made this choice without consulting anyone (Fahmy is highly critical of Sadat throughout the entirety of what I've read so far). But there are more subtle things. General Gamasy weeping in a banquet in front of everyone is pretty shocking, but it's also interesting that Kissinger's praise did little to rectify the bad news he received. Our professor says that personal praise does not have much of a place in collective societies and is more a source of embarrassment than anything else. And then there is the disparaging comment that Kissinger was essentially only capable of seeing things through his lens of American self-centeredness, which Fahmy refers to as "personal terms." This is, perhaps, the largest distinction our professor wants us to draw between the two divergent ways of thought.

We haven't done too much actual analysis of what these different examples indicate about the larger social structure, but I'm definitely getting a lot better at spotting them. I was talking to one of my friends last night about the class, who is from Mexico, and he commented on the fact that the professor has us move all of the desks to the side of the room and sit together in a circle of chairs in the center, which I always found kind of annoying, but which is not that weird coming from a place of Simon's Rock, where we like to pretend (?) we are best friends with our professor and have classes outside on nice days sitting on the grass, and in some ways we are kind of like a big, if not happy, family. But my friend commented that it's funny how difficult most of the Americans in the class seem to find his method of teaching and some of his odd habits, and that in Mexico, sitting in a close-knit circle is not so strange a request at all. I guess Simon's Rock really is unique, but that's another blog post for another time.

Things are going well. Pesach break starts today, so the school is going to shut down for a few weeks soon. I leave for London on the first! And then I'm going to Petra with Dara when I get back.