Where is the world headed? It’s the classic year-end question, especially after a year as tumultuous as 2008.Conventional answers focus on the immediate surface of contemporary events. “To the left, or at least left-center,” Obama watchers might say. “To the right,” respond observers of France’s Nicholas Sarkozy, Germany’s Angela Merkel or Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi. “Nowhere,” is the fearful chorus across much of Africa and Central Asia.
The surface shows painful signs of recession and, more distressingly, a possible global depression.
But on a much deeper level, neither the clash of ideologies, nor the fluctuations of economic performance, speaks to the central tension of a watershed moment:
In nearly every corner of the planet, we are witnessing the final days of traditional culture, and with it the shattering of an unbroken link to the ancestral past. Tradition has been dying a slow, and often violent, death ever since the onset of the Industrial Revolution in the late18th century. The point of no return has now arrived.
FINAL DAYS
A couple of decades ago, it was still possible to experience the traditional world in scattered pockets of the United States – not its lifeless depiction in museum reconstructions or its tawdry exploitation in theme parks, but the real thing. In parts of Europe, it survived into the current decade.
Further off, there was always the Third World, where poverty held change at bay, and air travel kept the living past within relatively easy reach. There was no better way to acquire perspective on the present, on its neurotic pace and expectations, than a week or two in a country where daily life and traditional ways were still the same thing.
I spent much of my career as a reporter wandering over Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, often in remote destinations that had scarcely changed in a thousand years.
Almost overnight, that millennial continuity has evaporated.
In the past few years, I’ve ordered books online from Amazon.com at an Internet cafe on the Indian Ocean borderlands of Kenya and Somalia, watched satellite broadcasts of CNN and BBC News in a Tamil Tiger insurgent outpost in Sri Lanka, and used a cellphone to plead for help during a terrorist strike in the barren wastelands of northern Iraq.
In 2008, virtually no place is out of range of advanced communications, or of their potent effect on venerable customs and the conduct of life.
Social scientists and psychologists are just beginning to grapple with the long-term implications. But one of the short-term consequences is altogether too evident.
From the chaotic aftermath of the Soviet collapse, to the seething crisis of Islam, the relentless onslaught of modern values on traditional ways and beliefs has unleashed immense anger and bloodshed.
The conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and the Caucasus in the 1990s, the explosive rise of Al-Qaeda at the century’s turn, the vigilantism of orthodox Israeli settlers in the Occupied Territories, xenophobic violence on every continent – even, to some degree, the “culture wars” in the United States – are only tangentially about politics or economics.
What joins them is the desperate and almost certainly futile counterattack of tradition.
THE EMPTY COUNTRYSIDE
There is no single definition of what “traditional” means, because genuine tradition is intensely local. But almost everywhere, its local details can be examined within a universal frame.
Except in the case of nomads, the old ways were rooted firmly in the land – in a very specific stretch of land inhabited by an identifiably homogeneous people. The earthy symbols and seasonal rhythms of the rural countryside have always been central to traditional society.
Nothing highlights its fate more graphically than the emptying out of that iconic countryside across the face of the Earth.
In the mid-18th century, an estimated 80-90 percent of Western Europe’s population was employed in agriculture. In most of Asia, Africa and in all but a few scattered pockets of Colonial America, the percentage was between 90 and 95 percent.
Today, fewer than 4 percent of Western Europeans are engaged in farming, according to the International Labor Organization (ILO), and barely half of one percent of Americans. Between 1995 and 2005 alone, the overall percentage of citizens who worked the land in developing countries fell by an astounding 25 percent.
Worldwide, the figure is now down to one-third of the total population. In just 20 years, by some estimates, 300 million Chinese have deserted their traditional family villages for frenetic, hyper-modern megalopolises like greater Canton, Beijing and Shanghai. The urban population of China ballooned from 72 million in 1950 to 450 million in 2000. Since then, it has grown by another 150 million.
Among what statisticians refer to as “the least developed countries” – the poorest of the poor, the last strongholds of the changeless past – cities had fewer than 15 million residents in 1950. The total is soon expected to surpass 400 million.
What makes this significant, beyond its testament to rural despair in the Third World and productivity advances elsewhere, is that agriculture was humanity’s principal social paradigm for 10,000 years, until the last decade of the 20th century.
We are pioneers on uncharted ground.
THE NEW EUROPE
Throughout all but the last two of those thousand decades, “nationhood” and ethnicity were synonymous in Europe, the glue that gave its societies cultural coherence and identity.
When demographic change did come, it arrived in the form of devastating conquest, but the epoch of such catastrophes largely ended with the Middle Ages. The most powerful of the nations that emerged in the 12th century retained their homogeneous character well into the second half of the 20th.
Then, suddenly, they were transformed nearly beyond recognition – not by conquest, but by traditional Europe’s own plummeting fertility rate and a scant two decades of massive economic migration from the Third World.
Charles de Gaulle, who passed away in 1970, would be stunned by the street scenes of today’s metropolitan Paris, where 1.7 million Muslims and half a million Buddhists and Hindus live among the “native” French. The population of Rembrandt’s Amsterdam is 24 percent Islamic in 2008, due mostly to newcomers from Africa and Central Asia. The proportionate numbers are similar in Marseilles, Rotterdam, London, Vienna and Brussels, capital of the European Union.
This is where the most durable traditions – among natives and newcomers alike – meet their greatest daily challenge. And it is tradition, on both sides, that is losing ground. Even more than the United States, which has been negotiating ethnic diversity for two centuries, Europe is now the cutting edge of that watershed transition.
It is here, in what many Americans call “the Old Country,” that the reassurances of shared history and tradition are fading most visibly. It is here that Roman Catholic churches are emptiest, and the Vatican’s strictures on marriage and sexual behaviour most blithely ignored.
It is here that vital links with the ancient past are most embattled, overwhelmed by an obsession with the present that was once regarded as uniquely American.
Every European nation has its furious anti-immigrant movement today. Like the tribal wars mounted by rural Serbs in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, they are monuments to a lost cause. The possibility that France’s millions of Muslim immigrants – far less their children – will go back “home” to Algeria and Senegal, is no more realistic than that other second-generation transplants will return to the Auvergne and milk cows.
Their mutual home, their future, lies in the post-traditional crucibles of Paris, Marseilles or Lyon. It is in the immigrant quarters of Europe, and not Africa or the Middle East, where a modernized and secularized Islam appears to be taking shape.
ORPHANS
Neither romantics nor cynics are to be trusted on this subject. Troubled ambivalence is the only response that suits it. The twilight of the Old World should inspire deep regret and uneasiness – but mixed with equal measures of hope and relief.
Rural life in the past, the bedrock of tradition, was nothing like its hygienic depiction in museums or fun-filled summer festivals.
In Italy, where I live, overall life expectancy was under 50 years of age as recently as 1920, and is nearly 80 today. It’s still a dismal 38 in Angola, where oil wealth has delivered the Internet, satellite TV and cell phones, without installing a decent health care system.
For 2,000 years, foreign relations in Europe were written in blood: a grim cycle of murderous wars provoked by dynastic rivals or hostile ideologies. Today, thanks to the European Union treaties, the Old World is a borderless collective enterprise, in which wars among such traditional enemies as the British, French, Germans and Spaniards are close to unimaginable.
Something, without question, has been gained with the vanquishing of ancient traditions.
Yet something extraordinarily meaningful, albeit very difficult to pin down, has also been lost. We are orphans now, shorn of our past and heading blindly into the future.
Frank Viviano – barganews staff reporter – World View CBS5
Questa si che è bella!!! Obama è di sinistra?!
…forse per un americano…
nel mondo reale è di sinistra tanto quanto lo è berlusconi.
perchè è l’Italia il mondo reale?
sinistra, destra ….
ancora con questi termini arcaici risalenti all’arredo francese del tardo ‘700!
Nella pratica non hanno mai avuto un significato rilevante, essendo stati usati e abusati da politicanti e movimenti di massa provenienti da ogni parte della sfera politica – e tutt’oggi sono fonte di scontro, guerra, genocidio, e sofferenze varie …
Che in America la democrazia e il suffragio universale siano concetti svuotati di significato e che i partiti principali siano essenzialmente due facce della stessa medaglia sono oramai dati acquisiti da chiunque se ne sia interessato – con questo, e finché ci è concesso di scegliere, ritengo che a capo del complesso bellico/industriale imperialista più attivo sul pianeta, tra un Bush e un Obama ….
…. la seconda che hai detto!
Comunque la si pensi, l’articolo di Frank mi è sembrato una lucida e documentata analisi capace di far riflettere il lettore su un tema che non è così astratto come potrebbe sembrare a prima vista: certe decisioni programmatiche condizionano inevitabilmente la vita quotidiana di milioni di persone.
Detto questo, sottoscrivo quanto espresso da Jack, soprattutto nella seconda parte del suo intervento. Aggiungo soltanto una postilla, a malincuore: democrazia e suffragio universale sono concetti svuotati di significato e i partiti principali sono essenzialmente due facce della stessa medaglia non solo negli Stati Uniti, ma ormai in buona parte del mondo occidentale.
But Jack et al, the essential point made in the first paragraphs is that the left-right paradigm is irrelevant! Something far more consequential is unfolding than that archaic dialectic. It would be refreshing if you actually responded to the article itself once in awhile (if you’ve actually read it), rather than your own personal obsessions. that might make for a genuine debate, rather than the usual self-absorbed ranting.
Magari sarà solo un’ossessione personale, ma qui nel “vecchio mondo”, specialmente se hai avuto un’educazione di un certo tipo, probabilmente siamo ancora in molti a pensare che spetterebbe alla politica il ruolo di indirizzare (o perlomeno governare) certi processi. Per questo non credo sia così fuori tema sottolineare il ritardo della riflessione politica rispetto a molti dei cambiamenti epocali evidenziati nell’articolo. Il fatto che ancora si ricorra alle vecchie distinzioni destra-sinistra, anche quando sono ormai svuotate di ogni corrispondenza a politiche reali, è un’ulteriore dimostrazione di questa incapacità di reagire ad un mondo che cambia troppo rapidamente.
Dice bene Frank: siamo in molti ad essere orfani. Qualcuno di un’ideologia, altri di un nemico da combattere. Forse anche per questo molti dei nuovi fondamentalismi hanno un simile seguito. Come cittadino, posso solo sperare che il “noi contro gli altri” non sia l’unica risposta possibile alla complessità della società contemporanea. Come orfano, non sono in grado di elaborarne una mia e perciò ascolto con interesse chiunque abbia voglia di dire la sua, anche quando va un po’ fuori tema…
Many thanks for your observations, Mato, which as always are to the point and most perceptive. My own thoughts on this subject began to take focus during the wars in ex-Yugoslavia, especially the Bosnian chapter. Whatever else might be said of the slaughter there, it was a brutal passage in the death throes of the traditional world, and had little or nothing to do with the struggle between left and right as conventionally defined. In that sense, we’re doubly orphaned today — deprived of the instinctive urgings of the distant past, and of the ideological models that framed conscious debate for more than a century. The road ahead is even more obscure than the most pessimistic of us reckon.
“But Jack et al, the essential point made in the first paragraphs is that the left-right paradigm is irrelevant!”
precisely – I was just reiterating the point …
Se posso aggiungere un altro motivo di smarrimento, mi pare anche che manchino intellettuali o giornalisti capaci di parlare a molti per aiutarci a comprendere ed interpretare le varie sfaccettature della realtà di oggi al di fuori di facili e comodi conformismi. Tanto per fare un nome (e purtroppo è sempre il solito), mi sembra che siamo orfani anche di gente come Pasolini. E stiamo parlando di uno che spesso andava in televisione e scriveva sul Corriere della Sera: non su qualche pubblicazione per pochi illuminati…
I can only agree, alas, that the contemporary scene sorely lacks engaged and uncompromised public intellectuals — figures like Pier Paolo Pasolini, to whom Mato alludes, or Susan Sontag in America. By “uncompromised,” I mean free of the institutional or party entanglements that can limit both mind and speech. Neither Pasolini nor Sontag felt obliged to shackle themselves to any rigid ideology or behavioral code. They didn’t care if they offended the mandarins of any and all power structures. What mattered was the unblemished truth as they saw it, and they both pursued it ceaselessly across a wide range of media — in film and photography, in poetry, fiction and essays — and always, with great courage, in the full light of public debate. Where is such public debate today? (Even in the brave new world of “interactivity,” we cower behind false names.) Where are the demonstrations of public intellectual courage that once moved and inspired us?
Oh. I disagree, Frank 🙂 Sounds like the weather is really misty and grey in Barga 😉
I can’t read the comments in Italian, so it’s kind of a general reply. It is a very nice article and I agree to the facts. But you can’t convince me from the pessimistic interpretation. I’m not an orphan ’cause I do not follow a traditional path of life. Although we young people live in the cities, we do know how to grow vegies e.g.
You look for public intellectual courage? Elfriede Jelinek. Almodovar. Juli Zeh! Most important Juli Zeh. Wim Wenders. Rafik Schami. R.D. Precht. (I’m a bit focused on Germany I have to admit). Or the scientists: Paul Crutzen. Or a young one: danah boyd. Yo-Yo Ma – he also has a political message. And all the independent artists and musicians who don’t stand in public light. jasmina in Sarajevo. Visit the Berlinale film festival and you see so many young people with ambition and courage. Or the SunDance festival.
Media dominated by Sarkozy or Berlusconi or Springer or Murdoch will never let these ppl speak – but they are very alive 😉 and active.
For more information about people mentioned in this comment, please click on the names below:
Rafik Schami
R.D. Precht
Juli Zeh
Almodovar
Elfriede Jelinek
Paul Crutzen
Danah Boyd
Thanks, Kerstin, for those names, and for your timely reminder that unadulterated pessimism is often hasty — although in the present moment, there is dismayingly good reason for it. I’ll look into the people you mention, hoping to find examples that measure up to Mato’s Pasolini and my Sontag. But in advance, I’d have to say that Almodovar isn’t on their level. It isn’t strictly a matter of courage or professional skill as a filmmaker. His work doesn’t have the same range, diversity of media expression or liberating unpredictability. Susan Sontag wrote the definitive philosophical treatise on photography, as well as profoundly influential essays on politics and two very fine novels. Pier Paolo Pasolini was one of the most gifted poets of his generation, a world-class film director (whose work directly inspired Almodovar), and a constant presence on the opinion pages of Italian newspapers. They are very hard acts to follow.
I’m adding Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy 🙂
I guess it’s a rather lopsided comparison – names of the glory past against names of a diverse present. It’s us who give meaning, importance, and severity to a public persons voice.
So, I just wanted to mention, there are many, many ppl with courage these days – who don’t want to personate the declared conscience of the intellectual west. And most of them are not covered by mainstream media.
Oh dear. Chomsky is undeniably a gifted linguistician; but when it comes to his essays into politics the results are simply emabarrassing. It is like a re-run of Bertrand Russell: a genius when it came to logic and the philosophical foundations of mathematics, but who made a fool of himself several times over when commenting on current affairs. With respect, I don’t think the most important question is whether or not someone has the moral courage to speak out – and I wouldn’t for a moment question the integrity or courage of those mentioned. For me it’s much more important to assess whether what these people are trying to convey makes sense and provides a sound basis to understand the world as it is!
Understand the world as it is now: just where we started. After the fall of biggest 20th century ideologies, during one of the most serious crisis of modern capitalism and under a ever changing skyline, not just for the disappear of the twin towers (West may be the best, but it’s not the entire world).
I didn’t mean that today there aren’t great minds or brave intellectuals, Kerstin, but I mentioned Pasolini because while he had clear, uncompromising visions and deep thoughts about modernity, he shared them with a lot of people from the columns of the most important newspaper of his country and from the screen of the public television. I don’t know in Germany, but I don’t think this could happen today in Italy. Not just because of Berlusconi: the last battle fought by the italian democratic party was against the rise of taxes for Sky subscribers…
And I don’t think it’s just a political problem, but a cultural matter in the broadest sense of the term: maybe we are not ready for a so complex world, and meanwhile we lost someone or something trusted to ask for help.
Please, don’t call me pessimistic: I’m sure there is a pattern underlying the present confusion and a better way to the future. It’s just that I (as many others, probably) can’t see them at the moment.
My view is that this romantic attachment to ‘someone trusted to ask for help’, or even to that intangible ‘something meaningful’ which Frank has lost along the way, are reminiscent of the two old fogeys leaning over the balcony on the Muppet Show, ranting and raving about life, the universe, and everything.
History is littered with innumerable examples of ‘valiant’ knights charging against the windmills of ignorance and entropy (no sense in name dropping; but the western tradition boasts a plethora of Greek philosophers, Jesus Christ, and so on up through the ages, who have all had their say on the matter). The result? Well … certainly a generalised if grudging acceptance of the theoretical validity of certain basic human rights: most people in our part of the world are able to work their way around a TV remote control and switch on a computer to download anything from mp3s, video games, and porn – whilst feigning to ignore the plight of their fellow human beings hailing from less fortunate climes … oh, and the invention of the flushing toilet.
But at the end of the day has anything really changed? Is it not just a case of scale? After all, way back when (barring a few misguided mavericks who invariably came to an unsavoury and untimely end) you always had your privileged, your well travelled and your educated – above all your well fed – who went about their daily business impervious to the plight of the rest of the rabble! Today it’s just more generalised and has gone global. It’s still a case of us and them, only the ‘us’ are not a more or less greedy assortment of ‘nobles’ in some feudal backwater; but the vast majority within the confines of the North-Western enclave. By the same token the ‘them’ are not the jolly serfs mucking about in their own excrement; but children in the Indian sub-continent racked by ailments we don’t even know the name of, caused by inhaling glue or other chemicals so that we can prance about in our favourite running shoes, or more children in Africa brutalised into joining a variety of militias and armies to protect the status quo in the diamond mines and oil fields to feed our spiralling consumerism – not to mention sex ‘tourism’ in the far East (and in our own inner cities), together with any number of other unseemly practices around the globe. Et cetera, et cetera …
So, where does that leave us? A rapid survey of the ‘ascent of man’ will confirm that it leaves us exactly where we were before.
Now that’s what I call tradition!
Solo una precisazione: cercare aiuto da qualcosa o qualcuno per far cambiare le cose non sarebbe solo romantico, sarebbe messianico. D’altra parte, pretendere da intellettuali, economisti e politici una lettura più approfondita di quanto sta avvenendo oggi nel mondo credo sia legittimo. D’accordo con te: certe cose, le peggiori putroppo, non cambiano mai, o perlomeno non sono mai cambiate. Basta questo per smettere di ragionare sul presente? Non si tratta di interrogarsi sull’universo o sul fine ultimo della vita umana, quanto piuttosto di imparare a conoscere un mondo difficile da decifrare con le vecchie categorie di cui disponiamo. A me piacerebbe leggere o sentire qualcosa di nuovo e interessante sull’argomento, ma non mi capita da tempo. In questo senso andava la mia richiesta di aiuto indirizzata a chi dovrebbe riflettere su queste cose per definizione, o almeno per professione. Ma mi sembrano in tutt’altre faccende affaccendati…
I plead halfway guilty. You’re at least partly right about the “old fogey” business, Jack, and nothing new about his bitching and moaning. He is a standard character in the folk tales of every traditional culture, reaching back to the Old Testament and Aeschylus. There was probably someone like me lamenting the effects of new technology when our ancestors squatted around a fire eating chunks of mastodon. But that doesn’t mean such concerns are always empty. On occasion, they’re rooted in genuinely epochal shifts, in the sudden recognition that we really have entered new and uncharted ground. It seems to me that we’re deep into such ground today, and we don’t have much idea where the road is leading. The point, to be sure, is not a foolishly romantic conviction that the traditional past was always better than the confused present. In measurable ways, it was often infinitely worse. But a call for reflection and analysis — for Mato’s sharp-eyed visionaries, who can help the rest of us to see where we are and begin the necessary mapping of a new landscape — is not at all the same thing as romantic wailing.
point taken, if somewhat sceptical as regards our (or anybody else’s, for that matter) capacity or even propensity for ‘mapping of a new landscape’!
Here’s hoping …
I’m still trying to establish a ‘not one light but many lights at the end of the tunnel’ philosophy: Walter Jens for Germany and Umberto Eco. (I giggled myself over stating Chomsky – but it’s really hard to find any name ;-))
I’m not sure if this world really ever knew, where it was heading to… BUT: From all the facts Frank summarized in his article and all the stated names, we can puzzle ourselves a vision of the future I think. 20th century was the century of (2 world) wars, globalization and mass consumption – in one word: money. 21st century will be the century of ressources (water, food, gas, manganese). It’s the century of private networks, local structures, minimalism, energy neutral design, diversity. Farmers and forestry owners will replace ‘bankers’ and be the ‘New Rich’. New economies pop up: New Zealand (exploiting the deep ocean), Antarctica, the Arctics. As in all centuries, Europe is going to play double standards: e.g. protecting EU energy market by installing solar farms in Sahara and being heroic in rescuing the Dutch (and with declining birth rates also non EU ppl) from rising sea-level. Ppl value their government by an efficient crisis managment. Most of the time we are busy growing our own vegies. My favourite: Germany is performing environmental studies on ‘the suitability of renaturation German Autobahn to grow durum wheat’.
Cheers 🙂