When silence is part of the problem Profile by Gamal Nkrumah "What was proven in the last election is that the United States is not an electoral democracy, by which I mean the two parties' stranglehold on power has made it impossible for other voices to be heard." The statement is typical of Laura Nader, a woman who could never be accused of mincing her words, certainly not when talking about the American political establishment. Yet she is exactly the kind of person with whom it would be churlish to mind being stuck in a corner with at a party. Dignified and unassuming, Nader exudes a natural charm. Her simple and sombre-coloured clothes hint at a practical and down-to-earth personality. Yet she speaks with authority. "Americans need to start practising democracy," she insists. Nader, who is in Cairo at the invitation of the American University, spins a gripping philosophy out of a stack of forgotten facts. "Corporate secular fundamentalism shares some of the traits of religious fundamentalism: conviction of righteousness, certainty of the truth, intolerance of difference, evangelising zeal and a paranoid mindset." "The term corporate fundamentalism is used to describe an agenda with totallising tendencies through advertising, television, the Internet, billboards, the polluting of public spaces," she explains. "The marketing onslaught targeting young people in the US operates 24 hours a day, every day, and is driven by tens of billions of dollars in sales and profits. American parents have neither the resources nor the organisations to protect their children from this commercial onslaught even if they want to." Nader becomes animated in her eagerness to explain the philosophy behind her thinking. America, she argues, has not changed much since the days of slavery. "Washington DC Library of Congress before a meeting. A group of people, all black, set up the room. Then they leave and in come the academics and writers, all white. What has changed since the Civil War? Nothing has changed. The black people who set up the conference room are not slaves, but they're still doing the tasks that slaves did." It is a telling anecdote, delivered by a woman who has no patience for those she regards as stooges. "The Black Caucus are Zionists. They are one generation away from civil rights and they have forgotten what civil rights are." Condoleezza Rice is, in Nader's words, a "power slave". So what can be done? For Nader, academic activism assumes centre stage. "In a course I teach on controlling processes, the students are assigned a term paper in which they are encouraged to locate a controlling process in their everyday life and describe how that control works." Advocating anthropology as a vehicle for political thinking, Nader encourages her students to challenge assumptions. "Our founding fathers placed the war-making power in the hands of Congress where decisions could be openly debated. Slowly we are coming to realise that a dozen unelected men and one woman are making decisions that can compromise the lives of American fighting forces, the lives of the Iraqis we say we want to liberate, the future of American schools, healthcare, our relations with old allies -- the costs of war are unfathomable." "Today we face the consequences of the unilateral invasion of a sovereign country, which at the time of the invasion posed no threat to the US," she stresses. "The Bush administration is blind to facts in Iraq." In the academic world, especially as regards the Middle East, American foreign policy and the designs of the Bush administration have caused much scratching of heads. What, I wondered, would be Laura Nader's take on the post 9/11 world? Nader didn't wait for my questions before proceeding to outline her political outlook. "Many people don't vote in the US because there is not much difference between the two parties. My father used to say, 'one tree and two branches'." Nader is very much her father's daughter. He left Lebanon with his young bride for political reasons and moved to the US where they eventually made good. But there was extraordinary scrimping. Her parents saved enough, though, to send her and her three siblings to university. Only Ralph, by far the most famous of the four, does not possess a PhD -- and that was his own choice. And it was her elder brother John -- himself a distinguished anthropologist -- who first suggested she read anthropology at university. He was her mentor at the time. The conversation veers from her elder brother to her younger who, she says, "fights to retrieve American electoral democracy". She lambastes "the terrible tyranny that is typified by American business", quoting the British anthropologist Sir Edmund Leach. She characterises "corporate fundamentalism" as being brutally indifferent to anything that threatens profits as it entreats most of the world's people to "accept an unjust economic order in which they have no power, promising rewards in some rosy future". Drug companies, which are "redefining the way psychiatric medicine is taught and practised", are a particular bugbear. She recounts the example of one of her students whose prize- winning essay focussed on how educational authorities connived with pharmaceutical companies to impose anti-depressants such as Prozac on students. She maintained that she was simply going through a difficult time and just needed to speak with someone, yet the pressure to prescribe anti- depressants was enormous. "I'm concerned about the lack of critical thinking among young people in particular. At Berkeley they can easily be picked up by cults." "Most students are not savvy. They have no critical judgement. I started a new course on controlling processes. It is a very popular course. I ask my students to list the controlling forces they see at work. I urge them to look carefully around them in search of these controlling processes." "One student wanted to know why the system wanted her to be happy. She was put on prozac by the university authorities. The system had a vested interest in seeing her happy all the time, even if this happiness was artificial and drug- induced. Why do we have to be happy? Nobody is watching out for the young. They really are lost." For Nader the moral of the story is clear -- it underlines "the alliance between pharmaceutical companies and the educational and political realms which teaches children to depend on drugs to fit in with what is acceptable behaviour in society." "It is," says Nader, "a form of social standardisation." And the antidote to manipulation by governments, or big business, she argues, is for students and employees not to be obedient and subservient. "We live in a time heavy with ideology and propaganda, so it behooves all of us to question accepted wisdoms, in the academy especially." Nader is an academic whose career, while firmly based in the ivory tower of Berkeley, has embraced a wide range of public activity. She received her PhD in anthropology from Radcliffe University in 1961. Her doctoral thesis formed the basis of her book Harmony, Ideology, Justice and Control in a Mountain Zapotec Village, published in 1990, in which she explores the social and political aspects of Mexican Indian lifestyles. Her sojourn in Mexico widened her outlook and broadened her interests. Like her brother Ralph, she has attracted criticism, though it has never shaken her sense of mission or her commitment to combating racism and ethno-centrism in anthropology. Next Nader went to Lebanon for post- doctoral research. But even though Lebanon is her ancestral home she "could not continue doing fieldwork and research in Lebanon because of the Israeli incursions". She spent the summer of 1980 in Morocco studying the way courts functioned during the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan but found it "was too difficult with my little daughters". She subsequently turned her attention to the US, and quickly realised that there were more women lecturers at Rabat University in 1980 than at Berkeley. Back in California, Nader set goals for herself regarding her work, home and family. "Academic research was my main course. My children were my dessert. I had three young children and we didn't have maternity leave then in the US. In Sudan they had maternity leave at the time." Nader, the first woman hired by Berkeley to teach anthropology, is something of a trendsetter. Her book, Orientalism, Occidentalism and the Control of Women was published in Belgium because she couldn't get it published in the US. "In 1970," she says, "my salary was $27,000 while my male colleagues received $55,000." It is a fact, she insists, that shows prejudice continues against women, "especially if you're good". Nader is as interested in children as she is in gender issues, and in particular the way they are manipulated by commercial interests. "Market researchers," she says, "use a variety of methods to find out what makes kids tick, what can be made to appeal to them. Some market researchers call themselves ethnographers because they use participant observation in addition to focus groups and survey research in an effort to shape children's values to fit commercial interests." Her own childhood, she recalls, could not have been more different: "We were never treated like kids that didn't know anything. My father wanted us to form opinions. He'd say to us, if you don't have any answers what are your questions. We debated public issues at home." They have continued to do so, most famously through the agency of her brother Ralph, who discovered quickly that "corporate America will conspire to thwart any independent presidential hopeful's plans for taking office by storm." Laura is clearly proud of her consumer activist brother, whom she describes as "the most important defender of political democracy since Thomas Jefferson". "He has saved more lives than any US president, and not just in the US. He's done more for seatbelts in Egypt than anyone I know of," she states matter-of-factly. "His book, Unsafe at any Speed, says it all. It launched his career to do something about car safety. First it was the seatbelt and then the airbag. At the time when he did these things it was possible. Now it is impossible. The US is now so corporatised that it is difficult to do anything," she laments. She may be proud of her brother but she is careful, nonetheless, not to speak for him and has a tendency to put his politics in the context of their family background. Nader was born in Winstead, Connecticut, and grew up in the Nutmeg state. "We were a feisty family from a feisty New England town," she muses. Her parents inculcated in their children a love of knowledge and they early developed an insatiable appetite for enquiry. "My parents were my best teachers," she explains. "My mother taught us by story-telling." Nader is an obsessively hard worker who has held visiting professorship at Yale University Law School and Wellesley College, though she remains based at Berkeley where, she points out, "in 1887, 3.5 per cent of the faculty were women, a figure that was exactly the same in 1968." America, she concludes, has changed very little over the course of a century. Again, so what can be done? Nader has no easy answers, and is perfectly aware of the density of what she calls the controlling processes that dominate American society. "The controlling corporate process," she says, "can be summed up in two words -- universal complicity." "Progress is social and not technological," Nader insists. "Europe, the West, thinks that technology is civilisation." She scoffs at the notion. She is especially fascinated by the story of Rifaa Al-Tahtawi. He was 24 years old when he first went to France and spent five years in Paris. Nader compares Al-Tahtawi with Edward Said, and is fascinated by the similarities and differences between the two men. "Whereas Al-Tahtawi confined himself to the manners and customs and institutions of France Edward Said focussed on Western scholarship about the East after over 100 years of colonisation and imperialism. While Al-Tahtawi, and later Michel Foucault, were interested in France's internal processing, Said analyses such processes of control externally. The myths are many and extensive -- Arabs are incapable of peace, they have a bent for vengeance, they are tied to a concept of justice that means the opposite, they cannot be trusted. All of this is naked racism." "Said knew my brother Ralph. I knew him well, too. The first time I sat on the same panel with Edward Said was in Washington DC at a conservative think tank gathering with Samuel Huntington. Edward Said's daughter-in-law was my student at Berkeley. She confided in me that it was a relief for her to take my class because for once in America, people were talking about Palestinians as if they were human beings." "I'm not a movement person," Nader tells me. "That allows me a certain space. I'm not an 'ist'. I can't stand 'ists' actually." She pulls a funny face and shrugs her shoulders. "I don't allow myself to be silenced." But not being silenced is increasingly difficult in the US where, she explains, the corporate-controlled media has a tendency to seek blame everywhere but home and where the American political establishment, she argues, now mirrors the lack of transparency more usually associated with totalitarian regimes and dictatorships. Whatever the obstacles, though, one thing is certain. Laura Nader will continue to speak out. photo: Mohamed Wassim
