MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"
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MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents" |
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KEVIN CAREY, returned from a vacation in the Canary Islands, reflects on the relationship between capitalism and culture.Newspapers read abroad, such as the Herald Tribune and Guardian Weekly or radio stations like Voice of America or BBC World Service, depriving us of accustomed prolixity because of the preciousness of air mail paper and transmitter time, give the news a sharp, almost brutal simplicity. There is no hedging, there is no room for the myriad of self-serving obfuscations which pass for public pronouncements. So, instead of a diet of domestic politics, as addictive as pretzels, the morning on the beach begins with simple slaughter.
Last week in Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands, it was intercommunal murder in Egypt and Nigeria and an upsurge of violence in Mitrovitza, Kosovo. In a sense, all of these are conflicts which entwine religion and nationalism, the apparent commonality of bad Christian-Islamic relations, obscures histories of border friction, rival land and sovereignty claims and the kind of tribal strife which would make the Montagues and Capulets Deans of schools of conflict resolution.
Had these familiar stories, made stark in their brevity, hit me in most places in the world I would have immediately played through my mind the familiar anti-nationalist litany; invoking violence from Hatim to Hitler, I would have said my hopeless prayer for a united Europe, a protectorate Africa and a set of strong global institutions to make and then keep peace. Why this last aspiration is particularly hopeless in the light of United States foreign policy, I discussed last week, so now what is important is that the litany never reached its conclusion.
What stopped me was an accumulated impression of where I was sitting. Anyone who has lived in an expatriate community will recognise the symptoms:
Yet what these expatriates possessed of value, it seemed to me, was a total lack of real, gun barrel nationalism; they wouldn't fight for any flag and would certainly not risk dying for one, whether that flag represented a religion, a tribe or a sovereign state. Their cynicism might be self-corrosive but it wouldn't ever harm anyone else.
- a shallow, sheltered group of people who have unconsciously assumed a mild, vaguely unpleasant, form of superiority over the natives;
- a life of exchange rate calculations and minor pieces of tax free fixing;
- a total indifference at best and ignorance at worst to the history, customs, culture and politics of the place they have come to reside in; and
- a cloying sentimentality about the virtues of the place they have left.
Yet in failing to complete the litany to a universal brotherhood I was already conscious that I live in fear of universal blandness. I found the most difficult part of working in faraway lands was having to do without live theatre and symphony concerts. Worse still, when I was deeply enmeshed in a fine book I could not find anybody with whom I might discuss it or even on occasion enjoy a good argument either of rhetoric or of true emotion. In the end the need for the passionate arts outweighed my individual capacity to be compassionate.
I noticed as we sat in a bar under the Winter Atlantic sun in the shadow of Mount Teidie that nobody seemed to miss culture and didn't know what was happening at the local Cultural Centre. They expressed surprise when I told them that Spain, their ruling power, was in the grip of a General Election campaign deeply coloured by Basque terrorist murders.
There is little doubt I think that religion and identity expressed through communal feeling have both produced great art. It is also true that both roots of identity, cultivated to excess, lead to appalling violence. The key question surely is whether any culture is capable of keeping its life force creative but in check. If it cannot then we might be forced to contemplate the superiority of the bland over the sublime. It is not a prospect I would personally welcome but that is no reason for dismissing it without question.
Billions of the earth's population would be glad of a little blandness and comfort in exchange for the fanaticism and poverty which is their daily lot. Furthermore, although I am uncomfortable with these tribeless people myself, it may well be that the earth will be better improved for most people by the intellectually shallow economic buccaneers than by an assortment of missionaries, political and religious.
This, of course, is a dilute form of the argument in favour of value neutral global capitalism. Its fatal flaw is that nothing is ultimately value free; to operate an economic system indifferent to its consequences is in itself an enshrinement of selfishness. The fact that this selfishness is pursued on a modest scale by a large number of uncoordinated individuals makes it no less dangerous because, as we know from history, there are genuinely evil people in every generation who seek power and who obtain it simply because the majority has no will to oppose them if that means abandoning private selfishness. On the other hand, I would not want to live in a society with anything more than a sprinkling of Ghandis and Jeremiahs; we need our saints to make the rules which we reluctantly follow but they need a functional society in which to win converts.
So, all in all, the mild mannered economic migrants of Tenerife did not worry me over-much. Whatever potential for causing social damage they may possess is so much less obvious than the ravings of the Taliban but I doubt this initial impression would survive a month away from the familiar, morally rugged territory that I prefer to occupy.
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