Plain Talk
By
Mursi Saad El-Din
New Year is always a time for memories, for running through the past twelve months as well as looking forward to the next. It provides an occasion to examine one's performance in the past year, both successes and failures. It can, indeed, become an opportunity to try and recapture the past, a nostalgic "search for lost times" as the French writer Marcel Proust described it.
I have -- and it really is motivated by a desire to have something to aid the memory -- always been an avid clipper and storer of press cuttings. The number of odd pages, half pages or even paragraphs I store away is really quite astonishing. I use them as a way to remind myself of days that have passed and might otherwise be forgotten.
I find when I look back at these cuttings that they are very indiscriminate, in as much as they do not deal with specific topics or themes. They embrace a wealth of stories, including anything that has taken my interest. I have clippings about women, children, the environment, art and science.
I began amassing my cuttings when I was in London, where there are companies that specialise in unearthing whatever has been written on any topic. We used one of these companies to send us any cuttings that related to Egypt, and these would form the core of the reports we would file back to Cairo.
As the old year passes into the new I thought the time was ripe to make a selection from my own archives. I would like to begin with Bryan Appleyard, a writer and journalist whose work I have long admired. Apart from his excellent choice of subjects he has a style that transcends the writing of most jobbing journalists. It is, if I may say, a literary style, characterised by simplicity and ease. His articles read like the work of an accomplished writer.
I have selected two of his articles dealing with very different subjects. "Mugged by the science mafia" deals with what Appleyard describes as a conspiracy, hatched by a group of scientists who believe in the ideology of "scientism", in the omnicompetence of science. He mentions the attacks to which he was subjected following the publication of his book Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man in which he "dared to point out what seemed to be staggeringly obvious -- that science is not necessarily beneficial to mankind and scientism is plainly wrong."
He quotes a BBC producer who also dared to criticise prevailing attitudes towards science. Adam Curtis produced a programme in which he questioned the assumptions on which many scientists base their work. "I was really shocked," Curtis says, "by the way scientists could not see how their ideas and methods were being used in inappropriate political areas."
Appleyard opposes what he argues is a misplaced belief in the ability of science to explain reality. He is of the opinion that science is at best provisional, offering "possible versions of possible truths". Science offers no definites, only maybes. The things we regard as most important -- love, life, art, imagination, peace, tolerance -- are precisely those things about which science has nothing of value to say. "Some may dream of scientific utopia," he says, "but this can never happen."
Appleyard's other article was published in The Sunday Times Culture supplement and focussed on nation building. Whilst reviewing art events during 2003 he comes to the conclusion that while there were many interesting themes, it was nationhood that was the "strange and important one, in Filius, the exhibition at the British Library of the Lindisfarne Gospels... the document that defined post-Roman Britain".
And Appleyard approves of this centrality accorded to nationhood: "Turning away from the nation," he writes, "is exactly like rejecting religion: a void is left that nothing else could fill."
