When In Rome

“When in Rome,” I have been told, “do as the Romans do.”

I never thought to ask if this would still be valid if the Romans are laying waste to their empire. Does it still apply?

When your very existence centers around balancing on a cross-cultural tightrope, you think a fair bit about Rome and Romans- at least the proverbial ones. Critical applied linguists like Adrian Holliday, Alistair Pennycook, A. Suresh Canagarajah preach that applying “Western” standards on the rest of the world is cultural imperialism, more insidious and more barbaric than anything ever imposed by any concrete empire. And so, being a reasonable being, I try to abstain from cultural imperialism, since I prefer to be neither insidious nor barbaric. But do I succeed?

In the many little customs and habits and daily demands of Arabian culture, I bend my stubborn will, pretzel-like, to accommodate local demands. It is impossible to colour inside the lines all the time, but I think I do all right and have won the trust of the local community in my orbit, patching up my shortcomings with liberal doses of diplomacy, patiently-won rapport and home baking. It is fair to say that I succeed to some extent, putting my own cultural ideals on the indefinite backburner.

But when Rome is burning, I simply will not fiddle along. I dismally and hopelessly fail, and messrs Holliday, Pennycook and Canagarajah are welcome to fling me on the conveniently smoking pyre. When local ways are costing lives and laying waste to the land, I do believe that a little dash of cultural imperialism is in order. In fact, I would like to ask these fine gentlemen whether, in such a case, “imperialism” would not be better described as “enlightenment”. Allow me to demonstrate. And bear with me: this does have educational implications.

Ask any Omani and you will find at least one member of his or her family- usually a young man- has been lost to a violent road accident. With a population of under 3 million people spread over a vast territory, Oman sees an unlikely average of 10 000 road accidents a year, slaughtering 680 people and injuring over 7 000, according to statistics. But more telling is the cause of these accidents: ten of the thirteen top causes are patently due to driver neglect. On the road, one notices certain consistent patterns of behaviour that have become acceptable locally, although they demonstrate limited understanding of the workings of traffic. A terrifying is example is overtaking on blind curves and heights, and neither indicating nor looking before changing lanes. When in Rome, I usually do go with the flow. But when the Romans are dying in droves, one has to ask a few questions. Call me a cultural imperialist: at least I will be alive to hear it.

A less immediate peril is the perennial popularity of the plastic carrier bag. Although the best-placed hypermarket in the country has finally issued a strong, reusable carrier bag, people do not know its purpose. They buy several, put them in the usual plastic bags and proceed to have their trolleyfuls (often two trolleys per family) of monthly groceries packed into yet more plastic bags, often one item to a bag. For two and a half years I asked, cajoled, begged, wept and wrestled with the packers to put my modest pickings in one bag. Now that the reusable bag is available, I offer it triumphantly to the packer, who proceeds to pack the egss and tomatoes at the bottom and objects when I intervene. At the very end of my tether I stop to ask myself why this is happening.

Stop. Breathe. Count to ten.

Repeat a few times.

The packers have ceased to consider me eccentric and have concluded that I am patently insane. They truly do not understand what my problem is. But how could they? Environmental issues are displaced by more immediate emergencies in the Arab media, while the international media are hampered by a language barrier and an irremediable credibility problem. Moreover, while literacy has increased to a reported 75%, reading is not a major pastime for most folks. (The technician who installed my telephone looked at my modest nomad’s collection of books in puzzlement, musing: “What for?”) The plastic carrier bag is still considered here as a banner of modernization. The fact that it waves from an increasing number of thorntrees is not yet raising significant alarm.

As promised, all this does have implications for education. I back the critical linguists up one hundred percent when they decry the imposition of subjective “Western” standards on the rest of the world. However, there are areas where it is critical to decide on objective standards that apply to everyone. If I play by the rules of cricket while you play by the rules of football, we won’t get very far: we all lose. A certain scope of standard behaviour needs to be agreed upon when it comes to things like preserving our lives, our planet and the standards of education.

I don’t know if that is cultural imperialism. But the opposite is suicide. Even in Rome.