The following is a slight modification of my in-class essay for Dr. Rick Tutwiler’s class on the Nile river. The question was quite simply, “Should the Aswan High Dam have been built?” (the “general good” in the title is a reference to Rifa’a Rifa’ al-Tahtawi’s equation of the notion of “the general good” with that of “industriousness”):

How do we evaluate a question like this? The simplest and most straight-forward way, as suggested at the introduction of the question, is to consider the original objectives in it’s construction and the extent to which those objectives were met, to weigh the benefits and the drawbacks of the projects and/or to imagine what might have happened had it not been built.

To use the first method yields the answer that the project was an unmitigated success. The dam was built with the objective of bringing Egypt into the modern world. Of course, this was already accomplished by Muhammad Ali and the modernizing process simply continued relatively unabated since then. The building of the High Dam did, however, catalyze and accelerate the process significantly.

Another objective of the dam, to quote from part of the test, was “to boost national prestige and the power of the state.” Again, an unmitigated success on that count. In fact, every objective of the dam project was fulfilled: the elimination of the destructive power and unpredictability and unreliability of the annual flood (“the control of the silent nature”), the vertical and horizontal expansion of Egyptian agriculture (increased cultivated area and greater intensity of agriculture) and the increased navigability of the Nile year-round.

The second proposed method of answering the question—by weighing the benefits and drawbacks—yields a rather more equivocal answer. On the “plus” side, if we assume the fulfillment of all the projects’ original goals to be positive (something of a stretch, in my opinion), we can count all those goals as positive outcomes. There is also the boost in tourism revenues, which was perhaps not considered as one of the original side-effects of greater navigability. The existence of Lake Nasser can be considered something of a benefit, as it seems to be producing something of a robust ecosystem in its own right.

The negatives are unfortunately rather more numerous. For the sake of brevity, I will simply enumerate them:

1. The dislocation of some 113,000 residents of Nubia (from the International Rivers Network, quoted in Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts)
2. The rising of the water table, waterlogging and salinization (including destruction and degradation of antiquities)
3. Erosion of the Mediterranean coastline
4. Erosion by scouring of the Nile’s banks and bed
5. Saltwater intrusion in much of the Delta
6. Habitat destruction
7. Greater pollution
8. Water loss due to evaporation and seepage
9. Increase in pests and disease vectors
10. Increased reliance on chemical inputs in agriculture
11. Urban encroachment (if it can be assumed that the dam was responsible for an exploding population)

One negative consequence that is often overlooked or given short shrift (or even put on the positive side of the balance sheet) is the erasure of local knowledge and the concentration of control over the country’s most important natural resource in the hands of the state. Most of the above-listed negative consequences (with the obvious exception of the inundation of Nubia) could be mitigated by a progressive and responsive policy, but with the concentration of power in an unaccountable state bureaucracy and with the emergence of local initiatives for local solutions based on local knowledge quashed under that state control, such policies can only be imagined on an abstract and grand scale and thus can only be implemented without respect to actual conditions in the real world or the people living in it. Arundhati Roy, in “The Greater Common Good,” puts it more bluntly:

Big Dams are to a Nation’s ‘Development’ what Nuclear Bombs are to its Military Arsenal. They’re both weapons of mass destruction. They’re both weapons Governments use to control their own people. Both Twentieth Century emblems that mark a point in time when human intelligence has outstripped its own instinct for survival. They’re both malignant indications of civilisation turning upon itself. They represent the severing of the link, not just the link—the understanding—between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life and the earth to human existence.

Or, there’s the pop-culture version from Cpt. Jean Luc Picard:

You cannot explain away a wantonly immoral act because you think that it is connected to some higher purpose.

But I want to return to the question and the methods available by which to answer it. Having drawn up a balance sheet of the pros and cons of the High Dam project, we are now in a position where the only way to answer the question one way or the other is to fall back upon an a priori moral or ideological position. But to do so is to obscure the ideological position of the question itself. Inherent in the question is precisely the invitation to draw up such a balance sheet of exigencies and contingencies, but there is no space here for the evaluation of agency. The question is posed in the passive voice. There are no human agents; culturally-situated subjects are absent. There is only the interplay of de-historicized conditions and de-humanized “rational actors.” To pose the question “should the High Dam have been built?” is to mobilize the same ideology that transforms an essentially power-grabbing gesture on the part of a few strong political actors into an historical inevitability. (To be clear, this is not meant to be an indictment of the person asking the question.) The logic that makes the question sensible is the same logic that makes it sensible to weigh the fate of 113,000 Nubians against the ability to build permanent infrastructure in the Nile’s floodplain in Cairo. The High Dam project, in fact, was the focus of a pioneering cost-benefit analysis. The first rule in creating a cost-benefit analysis is that each item on either side of the scale must have a quantifiable value in common units of measurement (which is to say, currency), including human lives, needs and preferences.

And so I wish to interrogate the question and call its logics into doubt. If we are to imagine ourselves back in 1952, I am not content simply to weigh the consequences—even with 20/20 hindsight—or imagine what might happen without the construction of the dam, as if history has its own trajectory, independent of living people, that can only be nudged this way or that by massive mega-projects. There are more important questions to be asked and many more possible interventions in the problems of the day to be considered. In my opinion, the concentration of such arbitrary power should be opposed at every turn, irrespective of any nuances of abstract policy. The pertinent question for me would not be whether or not the dam should be built (a simple, unequivocal, incredulous “No!” should suffice), but where can I find allies in the struggle against those who would presume to have the knowledge to formulate such a plan and the power to implement it unilaterally.