Culture, progress and the future: Can the West survive its own myths?

Once I was younger, again within the Nineteen Seventies, I spent two years touring internationally: by truck with a bunch by means of Africa from south to north; in a camper van with a buddy by means of Northern and Japanese Europe and Russia; on foot alongside many of the south coast of Crete; and by boat, bus, truck and practice throughout Asia to India and Nepal.

Probably the most tough cultural adjustment I needed to make was to not the cultures of different nations, however to my very own on my return dwelling to Australia. Many long-term Western vacationers have the identical expertise, shocked specifically by the West’s extravagant consumerism. My preliminary response on flying into Sydney from Bangkok was one in all surprise on the orderliness and cleanliness, the abundantly stocked outlets, the clear-eyed youngsters, seemingly so wholesome and carefree. Nonetheless, this preliminary celebration of the fabric comforts and particular person freedoms quickly gave strategy to a rising apprehension in regards to the Western lifestyle.

In a means I hadn’t anticipated, the expertise allowed me to view my native tradition from the skin; and in methods I hadn’t appreciated earlier than, I turned conscious ours was a flawed and harsh tradition. I noticed that the Western worldview was not essentially the truest or finest, as I had been introduced up and educated to imagine, however simply one in all many, outlined and supported by deeply ingrained beliefs and myths like another. 

We within the West are likely to see materials poverty as synonymous with distress and squalor; but solely with probably the most abject poverty is that this so. Principally the poorer societies I travelled by means of had a social cohesion and non secular richness that I felt the West lacked. We see others as crippled by ignorance and cowed by superstition; we do not see the extent to which we’re, in our personal methods, oppressed by our rationalism and lack of “superstition” (in a non secular sense).

There have been different components to my “re-entry trauma” apart from the expertise of different cultures. My life-style, very open in some respects, was closed or contained in others: the implications of being on the street; and the virtually complete absence of mass media in my life. The publicity to the counterculture of my fellow vacationers, particularly in Asia, was one other affect.

Over the next many years, as a journalist, researcher and author, I developed these early insights into an evaluation of cultural influences on well being and well-being, how we outline and measure human progress and growth, and what the long run holds for our civilization and species. This work is offered on my web site, together with my book, “Effectively & Good: Morality, That means and Happiness,” printed in 2005.

“Tradition” is commonly understood to imply the humanities, or to imply ethnicity and ethnic variations, or to explain a high quality of particular establishments, particularly when their “cultures” change into poisonous. In scientific analysis, tradition is a difficult subject, a lot debated and contested, outlined and used in a different way in numerous disciplines and even inside the similar self-discipline. It may be tough to pin down cultural qualities to measure their results, which are sometimes diffuse and pervasive, with complicated interactions with different social elements.

On this essay, I take advantage of “tradition” to seek advice from the language and accrued information, beliefs, assumptions and values which are handed between people, teams and generations; a system of meanings and symbols that shapes how individuals see the world and their place in it, and provides which means and order to their lives; or, extra merely, because the information individuals should possess to operate adequately in society.

Tradition and well being

The dominant self-discipline in analysis on inhabitants well being is epidemiology (though different disciplines additionally contribute). Over the previous few many years, epidemiologists have change into extra within the so-called social determinants of well being, with a specific concentrate on socioeconomic inequality. Research means that the higher the inequality, the steeper the gradient in well being is (which means that at any level on the social ladder, individuals on common have higher well being than these under them and worse well being than these above them), and the poorer individuals’s well being is total.

I felt cultural elements have been being uncared for on this literature, nevertheless. That is unsurprising: Epidemiology (and science extra usually), tends to miss or underestimate the intangible, summary and subjective in favor of the tangible, concrete and goal, that are simpler to measure. A notable exception within the analysis was the work within the Nineties of psychologist and anthropologist Ellen Corin, to which I instantly associated due to my journey experiences.

In contributions to 2 books on social determinants of well being, Corin argues that tradition shapes each space of life, defines a worldview that provides which means to private and collective expertise, and frames the best way individuals find themselves inside the world, understand the world and behave in it.

People don’t reside in a purely goal world wherein objects and occasions possess an inherent and goal significance, she says; as a substitute, this stuff are imbued with meanings that adjust with people, occasions and societies, and emerge from a community of associations: “Each side of actuality is seen embedded inside webs of which means that outline a sure worldview and that can’t be studied or understood other than this collective body.”

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As mirrored in my very own expertise, Corin notes that cultural influences are at all times simpler to determine in unfamiliar societies. “So long as one stays inside one’s personal cultural boundaries, the methods of pondering, dwelling, and behaving peculiar to that tradition are clear or invisible; they seem to represent a pure order that’s not itself an object of research. However this impression is an unsupported ethnocentric phantasm.”

In distinction to this mind-set about tradition, epidemiology understands “tradition” primarily by way of “subcultures” or “distinction,” particularly ethnic and racial distinction, and due to this fact normally as one dimension of socioeconomic standing and inequality. Typically talking, the broader affect of tradition on well being has been seen as distant and diffuse, pervasive however unspecified. As Corin observes, epidemiology’s “categorical” method to sociocultural elements, which inserts comfortably inside prevailing scientific paradigms, strips human realities of a lot of their social context and disregards and dismisses different approaches to social and cultural realities.

Fashionable Western tradition’s well being hazards

I’ve written many scientific papers discussing tradition and well being. Maybe probably the most influential is a 2006 paper, “Is fashionable Western tradition a well being hazard?” printed within the Worldwide Journal of Epidemiology, along with three commentaries by different researchers. On this paper, I argue that cultural elements akin to materialism and individualism are underestimated determinants of inhabitants well being and well-being in Western societies and that an necessary and rising value of our fashionable lifestyle is “cultural fraud”: the promotion of photographs and beliefs of “the great life” that serve the financial system however don’t meet psychological wants or mirror social realities.

Analysis means that inequality impacts well being by means of each materials and psychosocial processes: In different phrases, such processes end result from variations in materials circumstances, experiences and sources and from individuals’s place within the social hierarchy and their perceptions of relative drawback, which contribute to emphasize, melancholy, anxiousness, isolation, insecurity, hostility and lack of management over one’s life. These qualities have an effect on well being straight, and in addition not directly by encouraging unhealthy conduct. If elements akin to perceptions, expectations and feelings have been a part of the pathways by which inequality affected well being, I argued, analysis must take tradition into consideration, since tradition influences this stuff.

Even when we glance simply at inequality, tradition impacts the extent to which a society tolerates and even promotes inequality reasonably than discouraging it. If perceptions of social standing affect ranges of stress and anxiousness, then cultural elements additionally play a essential function: For instance, by amplifying a way of relative deprivation by means of media photographs of “the great life” and movie star life which are more and more past the attain of most of us; or moderating that sense by offering various cultural fashions, akin to downshifting and easy dwelling, that undermine typical social comparisons. Tradition additionally influences the social distribution of danger behaviors like smoking and alcohol use.

Tradition’s impacts are way more pervasive than these results on inequality, nevertheless, penetrating and shaping each aspect of life in ways in which have an effect on well-being, together with which means, identification, belonging and safety. Think about how Western tradition construes the self. Once I was in school, 60-odd years in the past, we have been taught that the atom was made up of stable particles, with electrons whizzing across the nucleus like planets orbiting the solar. Equally, we consider the self as a discrete, organic entity or being. Sociologists discuss of recent society as one in all “atomized” people.

However today science depicts the atom in fairly completely different phrases, as extra like a fuzzy cloud {of electrical} costs. What if we have been to see the self like this, as a fuzzy cloud of relational forces and fields? As a self of many relationships, inextricably linking us to different individuals and different issues and entities? Some are shut and intense, as in a love affair or inside households; some extra distant and diffuse, as in a way of neighborhood or place or nationwide or ethnic identification; some possibly are extra delicate, however nonetheless highly effective, as in a non secular connection or a love of nature.

These relationships can wax and wane, differ in depth and cost (optimistic or damaging). Importantly, they by no means finish — for instance, the breakup of a wedding, or the demise of a mother or father or baby, doesn’t “finish” the connection, simply modifications it. Remodeling how we see the self on this means — as a fuzzy cloud of relationships — would change profoundly how we see {our relationships} to others and the world. It will deliver us nearer to the best way many indigenous peoples see the self, and would alter radically our private selections and our social and political objectives. 

Vices and virtues

A essential consequence of the tendencies in fashionable Western tradition has been their impact on moral values. Values present the framework for deciding what’s necessary, true, proper and good, and have a central function in defining relationships and meanings, and so in figuring out well-being.

Most societies have tended to bolster values that emphasize social obligations and self-restraint, and to discourage those who promote self-indulgence and delinquent conduct. Virtues are involved with constructing and sustaining sturdy, harmonious private relationships and social attachments, and the power to endure adversity. Virtues serve to take care of a stability — at all times dynamic, at all times shifting — between particular person wants and freedom on one hand, and social stability and order on the opposite. “Vices,” then again, sometimes contain the unrestrained satisfaction of particular person needs and wishes, or the capitulation to human weaknesses.

Christianity’s seven lethal sins are satisfaction (self-importance, self-centeredness), envy, avarice (greed), wrath (anger, violence), gluttony, sloth (laziness, apathy) and lust. Its seven cardinal virtues are religion, hope, charity (compassion), prudence (good sense), temperance (moderation), fortitude (braveness, perseverance) and faith (spirituality).

French thinker André Comte-Sponville, in his 2002 guide “A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues,” lists these as crucial human virtues: politeness (because the “imitation of advantage,” paving the best way for true advantage to be realized), constancy, prudence, temperance, braveness, justice, generosity, compassion, mercy, gratitude, humility, simplicity, tolerance, purity, gentleness, good religion, humor and, lastly, love (which transcends advantage). He says {that a} virtuous life just isn’t masochistic or puritanical, however a way of life nicely and discovering love and peace.

Fashionable Western tradition undermines, even reverses, common values and time-tested knowledge. The end result just isn’t a lot a collapse of non-public morality, however a lack of ethical readability: a heightened ethical ambivalence and ambiguity, a stress or dissonance between our private values and our life and the institutional values of the organizations we work for, and a deepening cynicism and distrust towards social establishments, particularly authorities.

Suppose for a second about how a lot of public life, particularly as revealed by politics and the mainstream and social media, displays and promotes the “nice virtues” (or, conversely, the vices).

With out applicable cultural reinforcement, we discover it tougher to do what we imagine to be “good”; it takes extra effort. Conversely, it turns into simpler to justify or rationalize unhealthy conduct. There are optimistic (reinforcing) feedbacks within the course of: Delinquent values weaken private and social ties, which in flip scale back the “maintain” of an ethical code on people as a result of it’s these sorts of ties that give the code its “leverage”; they’re a supply of “ethical fiber.” 

Values are the foundations of social group, and any dialogue of non-public well-being and social functioning should start right here. The sounder the foundations, the much less we have to depend on elaborate supporting buildings of laws and regulation. Because the 18th-century political thinker Edmund Burke stated, the much less management there’s from inside, the extra there have to be from with out.

Human societies are complicated techniques, and the administration of complexity requires guidelines which are generic, diffuse, pervasive, versatile and internalized; in different phrases, they want a powerful framework of values. As ethical frameworks erode, and our tradition turns into extra rational, legalistic and technocratic, the extra the work of values is supplanted by legal guidelines and rules, which are usually inflexible, particular and externally imposed; they’re usually a poor or inappropriate substitute.

Cultural fraud

The obvious hurt brought on by materialism and individualism raises the query of why these qualities persist and even intensify, some extent I talk about in my 2006 paper. Each have conferred advantages to well being and well-being previously, however now seem to have handed a threshold the place their rising prices exceed their diminishing advantages. Numerous types of institutional observe encourage this cultural “overshoot”: Authorities coverage makes sustained financial progress a precedence, however leaves the precise content material of progress largely as much as people, whose private consumption makes the biggest contribution to financial progress.

Ever-increasing consumption just isn’t pure or inevitable. It’s culturally “manufactured” by an enormous and rising media-marketing complicated. I cite a determine from Michael Dawson’s 2003 guide “The Consumer Trap: Big Business Marketing in American Life“: At the moment, practically 20 years in the past, company enterprise within the U.S. spent greater than $1 trillion a 12 months on advertising, about twice what People spent yearly on all ranges of schooling, personal and public, from kindergarten by means of graduate college. That spending consists of “macromarketing,” a time period describing the administration of the social surroundings, significantly public coverage, to swimsuit the pursuits of enterprise.

Whereas different species have “cultures” within the type of realized behaviors, people alone require a tradition to provide us causes to reside, to make life value dwelling: to provide us a way of goal, identification and belonging — personally, socially and spiritually — and a framework of values to information our actions. There could also be many cultural paths we will observe in assembly human wants (as I talk about later). That is the supply of our extraordinary range and flexibility, however it’s also a supply of hazard: We will lose the trail altogether, run off the rails.

In my 2006 paper, I argued that Western tradition’s promotion of photographs and beliefs of “the great life” amounted to cultural fraud, concluding:

To the extent that these photographs and beliefs maintain sway over us, they encourage objectives and aspirations which are in themselves unhealthy. To the extent that we resist them as a result of they’re opposite to our personal moral and social beliefs, they’re a robust supply of dissonance that can also be dangerous to well being and wellbeing.

Nonetheless, there are causes for optimism (on this rating at the very least). As Western tradition turns into extra dangerous to well being, we’re seeing a diminishing “cultural consonance”: Rising numbers of individuals in Western nations are rejecting this dominant ethic of particular person and materials self-interest, and making, or attempting to make, a complete shift of their worldview, values and methods of life as they search to shut the hole between what they imagine and the way they reside.

It is a driving dynamic behind numerous countercultural actions akin to easy dwelling, downshifting, minimalism and transition actions. We’re witnessing parallel processes of cultural decay and renewal, a titanic contest as outdated methods of fascinated about ourselves fail, and new methods of being human battle for definition and acceptance.

Tradition and progress

This cultural contest has apparent significance for the notion of progress — the assumption that life is consistently getting higher — which is a defining function of recent Western tradition. One other line of my research has been to handle this subject, together with its cultural and subjective components. The measures of progress that we use matter: Good measures are a prerequisite for good governance as a result of they’re how we decide its success; in addition they affect how we consider our personal lives as a result of they have an effect on our values, perceptions and objectives. Fashions and measures each mirror and reinforce how we perceive progress: If we imagine the fallacious factor, we are going to measure the fallacious factor, and if we measure the fallacious factor, we are going to do the fallacious factor.

Primarily, we equate progress with modernization. Modernization is a pervasive, complicated, multidimensional course of that characterizes our occasions. It consists of industrialization, globalization, urbanization, democratization, scientific and technological advance, capitalism, secularism, rationalism, individualism and consumerism. Many of those options are a part of the processes of cultural Westernization and materials progress (measured as financial progress). This equation of progress and modernization displays a deep cultural bias.

Western nations dominate the highest rankings of most indices of progress and growth, and Western nations are promoted as a mannequin of growth for different nations. On the face of it, the equation appears compelling. The UN Improvement Programme has famous that previous many years have seen substantial progress in lots of points of human growth. Most individuals right now are more healthy, reside longer, are extra educated and have extra entry to items and companies, it reviews; in addition they have extra energy to pick leaders, affect public selections and share information.

Allow us to discover that indicators concentrate on these qualities that characterize modernization and that Western tradition celebrates as success or enchancment, akin to materials wealth, excessive life expectancy, schooling, democratic governance and particular person freedom. Nonetheless beneficial these good points are, they don’t characterize the sum complete of what constitutes optimum well-being and high quality of life. Emotional, social and non secular well-being barely register on this view of progress. It’s exactly in these areas that progress has change into most problematic, particularly in wealthy nations.

Nor does this view of progress adequately combine the necessities of environmental well being and sustainability. This dimension is being addressed in new indices, though not but adequately. Regardless of devoting an enormous quantity of social and political vitality to trying to get the coverage settings proper, growth — at the very least as at present understood and pursued — and sustainability stay essentially irreconcilable. Modernization’s advantages are counted, however its prices to well-being are underestimated and downplayed. At finest, the qualities being measured beneath orthodox approaches could also be fascinating and even needed, however they don’t seem to be adequate. At worst, the measures lead to a constant decline in high quality of life, and lead us towards an unsure and doubtlessly catastrophic future.

Remodeling tradition

Our flawed thought of progress is being challenged by the realities of world threats to humanity, akin to local weather change and biodiversity loss; air pollution of land, air and water; meals, water and vitality safety; world financial crises; nuclear conflict; and technological anarchy (the place applied sciences change into so highly effective and develop so quickly that we lose management over them). And not using a deep change in tradition, we won’t shut the gulf between the magnitude of the issues we face and the dimensions of our responses.

A cultural transformation of this extent may be very completely different from the coverage reforms and technological treatments on which public discussions and political debates sometimes focus. The historical past of climate-change politics gives a transparent instance of the “scale anomaly” or “actuality hole” between the risk and our response. Politics continues to supply sluggish, incremental change, whereas science calls for pressing, radical action. The strain on the political establishment is rising, however has but to crack it open; we’re nonetheless “kicking the can down the street.”

This predicament applies throughout the vary of humanity’s challenges. These are “existential” in that they each materially and bodily threaten human existence, and in addition undermine individuals’s sense of confidence and certainty about life. Tradition is central to resolving the scenario, which means each Western tradition normally and the particular institutional cultures of politics and journalism, which focus a few of the worst points of the broader tradition (making them extra seen).

Cultural elements are one driver behind rising electoral fragmentation and tribalism. An absence of a way of belonging or social attachment was necessary to Donald Trump’s election as president. Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein (of Watergate fame) noticed lately that American democracy had not labored nicely for many years, and that Trump had ignited what he known as a “chilly civil conflict.” It was a mistake, he stated, “to take a look at the nation simply by way of politics and of media. It is a cultural shift of big dimension.” 

In a earlier essay in Salon, I argued {that a} deep and harmful divide existed in liberal democracies between individuals’s considerations about their lives, their nation and their future, and the proclivities and preoccupations of mainstream politics and information media. The cultures of politics and journalism are too short-sighted and narrow-minded to bridge the gulf between what we are literally doing as a society and what we now know we have to do. Including to this failure is a concentrate on division and battle over a multiplicity of discrete points, that are handled in isolation from the totality, complexity and interconnectedness of life. As I concluded in that essay, political debate must encourage the conceptual area for a change in our worldview, beliefs and values as profound as any in human historical past.

This cultural transformation may be in comparison with that in Europe from the Center Ages to the Enlightenment: from the medieval thoughts, dominated by faith and the afterlife, to the trendy thoughts, targeted on materials life right here and now. Historian Barbara Tuchman, in “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century,” writes that Christianity offered “the matrix and regulation of medieval life, omnipresent, certainly obligatory.” Its insistent precept was that “the lifetime of the spirit and of the afterworld was superior to the right here and now, to materials life on earth.… The rupture of this precept and its alternative by perception within the value of the person and of an energetic life not essentially targeted on God is, in truth, what created the trendy world and ended the Center Ages.”

As we speak, humanity faces one other rupture or discontinuity in its view of what it’s to be human, and that rupture will profoundly change how we reside. Simply because it was unattainable for the medieval thoughts to anticipate the trendy, so too is it unattainable for the trendy thoughts to understand what may come subsequent. A higher consciousness and acknowledgment of the issues and failings of material progress and modernization, nevertheless, can encourage us to assume extra positively about alternative routes of dwelling that ship a top quality of life with a lot decrease materials consumption and social complexity. Rising and deepening crises will assist to precipitate this modification.

Different views

The fashionable fantasy of fabric progress implies, even insists, that past life was wretched, as expressed within the oft-quoted phrases of Seventeenth-century thinker Thomas Hobbes that the lifetime of man in his pure state was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and brief.” It’s true that folks have been materially poorer and their life expectancy decrease previously, however they usually led wealthy social and non secular lives, as current accounts of the standard of life amongst indigenous Australians present.

Conventional indigenous methods of dwelling have been devastated by the arrival of Europeans, however early accounts recommend a lifetime of relative abundance and ease. Culturally talking, the lesson is that we have to notice and settle for that different, fairly completely different and even higher methods of constructing sense of the world and our lives are doable. Moreover, we have to look at our scenario at this elementary stage if we’re to have an opportunity of attaining the next and sustainable high quality of life.

Anthropologist Wade Davis’ writing gives an eloquent exposition of this viewpoint. In his books “Light at the Edge of the World: A Journey Through the Realm of Vanishing Cultures” and “The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World,” he urges us to heed the voices of different cultures as a result of these remind us that there are options, “different methods of orienting human beings in social, non secular, and ecological area.” They permit us “to attract inspiration and luxury from the truth that the trail we’ve got taken just isn’t the one one accessible, that our future is due to this fact not indelibly written in a set of selections that demonstrably and scientifically have confirmed to not be smart.” By their very existence, Davis argues, the varied cultures of the world present we will change, as we all know we should, the basic method wherein we inhabit this planet. 

Davis realized as a pupil to understand and embrace the important thing revelation of anthropology: the concept that distinct cultures characterize distinctive visions of life itself, morally impressed and inherently proper. Cultural beliefs actually do generate completely different realities, separate and completely distinct from one another, whilst they face the identical elementary challenges.

The importance of an esoteric perception lies not in its veracity in some absolute sense however in what it will possibly inform us a few tradition, he says. “What issues is the efficiency of the assumption and the style wherein the conviction performs out within the each day lifetime of a individuals.” A baby raised to imagine {that a} mountain is the abode of a protecting spirit might be a profoundly completely different human being from one introduced as much as imagine {that a} mountain is an inert mass of rock able to be mined. A baby raised to revere forests as a non secular dwelling might be completely different from one who believes that they exist to be logged.

Davis cautions that modernity (whether or not recognized as Westernization, globalization, capitalism or democracy) is an expression of cultural values: “It’s not some goal pressure faraway from the constraints of tradition. And it’s actually not the true and solely pulse of historical past.” The Western paradigm, for all its accomplishments, and impressed in so some ways, just isn’t “the paragon of humanity’s potential,” he writes; “there isn’t any common development within the lives and future of human beings.”

The author Barry Lopez, in his 2019 guide “Horizon,” additionally brings an anthropological perspective to humankind’s present state of precarity, “a time when many see little extra on the horizon however the suggestion of a darkish future”:

As time grows brief, the need to pay attention attentively to foundational tales apart from our personal turns into extra crucial…. Many cultures are nonetheless distinguished right now by wisdoms not related to fashionable applied sciences however grounded, as a substitute, in an acute consciousness of human foibles, of the traps individuals are likely to set for themselves as they enter the traditional labyrinth of hubris or blindly pursue the appeasement of their appetites.

Lopez warns that if we persist in believing that we alone (no matter our tradition) are proper, and that we’ve got no have to hearken to anybody else’s tales, we endanger ourselves. “If we stay frightened of human range, our potential to evolve into the very factor we most concern — to change into our personal deadly nemesis — solely will increase.”

The way forward for cultures

Davis and Lopez’s warnings take me again to an early Nineties UNESCO venture on the futures of cultures, which had as its speculation that “cultures and their futures, reasonably than technological and financial developments, are on the core of humankind’s extremely unsure future.” A venture report famous: “A few of the individuals expressed the view that tradition could nicely show to be the final resort for the salvation of humankind.”

The venture thought-about some essential questions on tradition. Will financial and technological progress destroy the cultural range that’s our valuable heritage? Will the “which means techniques” of various societies, which have offered their members with a way of identification, which means and place within the totality of the universe, be lowered to insignificance by the steamroller results of mass tradition, characterised by digital media, client devices, occupational and geographic mobility and globally disseminated function fashions? Or, then again, will the explosive launch of ethnic feelings accompanying political liberation destroy all chance of each real growth based on common solidarity and community-building throughout variations? Will we witness a return of native chauvinisms, breeding new wars over boundaries and intercultural discriminations?

Background papers for the UNESCO venture proposed two situations: one pessimistic, one optimistic. The pessimistic state of affairs was that cultures and genuine cultural values might be, all through the world, bastardized or lowered to marginal or decorative roles in most nationwide societies and regional or native communities due to highly effective forces of cultural standardization. These forces are expertise, particularly media expertise; the character of the trendy state, which is official, centralizing, legalistic and controlling; and the unfold of “managerial group” because the one finest means of constructing selections and coordinating actions.

The optimistic state of affairs was that humanity will advance in world solidarity, with ecological and financial collaboration, as accountable stewards of the cosmos. Quite a few important and genuine cultures will flourish, every pleased with its identification whereas actively rejoicing in variations exhibited by different cultures. Human beings all over the place will nurture a way of possessing a number of partial and overlapping identities whereas recognizing their main allegiance to the human species. Cultural communities will plunge creatively into their roots and discover new methods of being fashionable and of contributing valuable values to the common human tradition now in gestation.

Members within the UNESCO venture appeared to see the pessimistic state of affairs as extra possible, as issues stood then (it’s maybe much more possible right now), whereas the optimistic state of affairs was extra a great to information coverage.

With tradition as with so many different areas of recent life, humanity’s future hangs within the stability: A dominant tradition that’s deeply flawed is however spreading all through the world. Epitomized by right now’s world, technocratic, managerial elite, this tradition has change into vastly highly effective, the default setting for operating nationwide and world affairs. But its failures develop correspondingly extra profound, with rising inequality and focus of wealth and energy, rising distrust of presidency and different establishments, rising world issues akin to local weather change. On the similar time, ethnic and different “tribal” emotions have change into extra fervent and unique, usually fanatical, together with within the West. The 20-year conflict in Afghanistan gives one highly effective image of this cultural contest.

However, someplace past this ugly combine, largely hidden by the outdated and dysfunctional cultures of mainstream politics and the information media, by means of these similar twin processes, there’s additionally the potential, the likelihood, for the optimistic state of affairs: a world the place wealthy cultural range underpins a brand new and important cultural universality.

At the least we should always hope so. Humanity’s destiny hangs on the result.