Egyptian Scribbles: Honk, Honk, Honk...

Wednesday 31 October 2007

Honk, Honk, Honk...

One of the most dominating, never-ending noises in Cairo is the beeping of car horns. At any point in the day or night, you can hear these horns being blasted without regard for the eardrums of the people around. If you are unfortunate enough to be standing directly next to a taxi when it honks, then you are (as I have discovered) temporarily deafened.

But the problem is not so much the trigger(beeping)-happy nature of the taxi drivers, but the nature of the driving. Taxis and cars just stop (or break down) anywhere. If they decide that they want to look at something, say hello to a friend, drop off a

customer... then they stop. It doesn't matter if this means that a junction is blocked. Nor does it matter if they are in the middle of the road.

But, while I understand the need for the honking, I'm wondering if there is a quieter, more communally-minded solution. Maybe there is a way of quietly administering a very small electric shock to the driver who pays no heed to the flow of traffic? I'm talking very very small, of course., and this shouldn't necessarily apply to the people who break down.. but at least then my dreams wouldn't be full of honks and beeps, and I wouldn't find myself suffering temporary deafness when I walk the streets.

(Yes... I see all sorts of potential human rights abuses arising from this electic shock solution... but there must be some way of administering it in a fair and equitable manner ;-)).

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Quotations from Books/ Legal Cases/ Articles I"m Reading

From Richard Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality":
"If one follows Baier's advice one will not see it as the moral educator's task to answer the rational egotist's question "Why should I be moral?" but rather to answer the much more frequently posed question "Why should I care about a stranger, a person who is no kin to me, a person whose habits I find disgusting?". The traditional answer to the latter question is "Because kinship and custom are morally irrelevant, irrelevant to the obligations imposed by the recognition of membership in the same species". This has never been very convincing, since it begs the question at issue: whether mere species membership is, in fact, a sufficient surrogate for closer kinship. Furthermore, that answer leaves one wide open to Nietzsche's discomfiting rejoinder: That universalistic notion, Nietzsche will sneer, would only have crossed the mind of a slave – or, perhaps, the mind of an intellectual, a priest whose self-esteem and livelihood both depend on getting the rest of us to accept a sacred, unarguable, unchallengeable paradox.
A better sort of answer is the sort of long, sad, sentimental story which begins "Because this is what it is like to be in her situation – to be far from home, among strangers", or "Because she might become your daughter-in-law", or "Because her mother would grieve for her". Such stories, repeated and varied over the centuries, have induced us, the rich, safe, powerful, people, to tolerate, and even to cherish, powerless people – people whose appearance or habits or beliefs at first seemed an insult to our own moral identity, our sense of the limits of permissible human variation."