CULTURE

 

The enormous wealth made possible by the technological breakthroughs of this period, especially laser-fusion, fueled the recovery from the 2005 – 2009 recession, but it was simply not enough to paper over the cultural chasms that opened up among states. These chasms were in part the result of the dizzying growth in the knowledge about how other people live and how other societies' systems work. A deep alienation arose between the states of the developed North and the underdeveloped South and also even within states, leading to a fragmentation of the world trading system and the creation of the first new states since the collapse of the Soviet Union and of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In some parts of the world, the terrifying appearance of the weather epidemics followed by the OOA-V plague raised suspicions that government agencies in the developed world—the CIA was often mentioned—were deliberately trying to depopulate the Third World.

In the 1990s, an analyst from the policy planning staff of the U.S. Department of State had concluded that the “unfolding of modern natural science has had a uniform effect on all societies that have experienced it…. This process guarantees an increasing homogenization of all human societies, regardless of their historical origins or cultural inheritances.”16 He further concluded that these forces “have a powerful effect in undermining traditional social groups like tribes, clans, extended families, religious sects, and so on,”17 and predicted “something like a Universal History of mankind in the direction of liberal democracy”18 which actually seemed about to come true in the wake of the commitments of the Peace of Paris. In retrospect we can see, however, that the disruption of traditional societies and values had exactly the opposite effect, rendering the South suspicious and insular, and ultimately fractionating the progressive states of the North. Moreover, one of the consequences of modern science, advancing automation, deprived the South of the capital benefits of cheap labor that would otherwise have resulted from globalization. With hostility and fear toward the messages that advanced telecommunications would bring, and without the capital to build the telecommunications infrastructure needed to exploit that technology for their own benefit, the states of the South gradually sank into a kind of silence, but not before they had received pictures, and been pictured, in ways that deeply alienated the two parts of the globe from each other.

Emblematic of this mutual misunderstanding was the massacre at Times Square in 2005, only one year after the final collapse of the remnants of the Al Qaeda network that had savagely attacked the United States in 2001. The movie version of the novel Mahomet depicted the prophet as a young man in defiance of the Islamic injunction not to portray his face. Perhaps because the script had been the subject of worldwide protests, large crowds were gathered on the evening of the premiere at a theatre on 42nd Street in Manhattan. The movie's principal actors, as well as about two hundred persons, including many adolescents, were attacked with automatic weapons by a militant Islamicist group. More than fifty were killed. The pictures of the massacre—the entire scene was captured on video—were repeatedly played across the world and, to the growing consternation of many, produced diametrically opposed opinions in different countries. In the West there was outrage at the killing; in many Islamic states, the terrorists were regarded as heroes. When their release was achieved through a bombing campaign against movie theatres that threatened to shut down the film industry, the West embargoed oil sales from Iran (where the terrorists had turned up to a tumultuous welcome). This proved to be the first in a series of economic reprisals against various oil-producing states in the Middle East, which had the unfortunate effect of raising oil prices and slowing growth early in the century. There seemed to come from the Islamic world a surge of hatred that distressed, alarmed, and above all baffled19 persons in the West. In retrospect this should not have come as a surprise.20

In the opening decades of the twenty-first century, Muslims had suffered successive stages of humiliation at the hands of the West. The first was their loss of a leading role in the world economy as other energy sources—principally owing to laser-fusion technology, which brought the long-sought “hydrogen economy” into being—finally lessened reliance on the fossil fuels that were the source of wealth for many Muslim states. The second was the undermining of Muslim authority in Palestine through the economic renaissance of the Israeli state in the very midst of one of Islam's holiest lands, and the refusal of the United States and other powers to play a part in Mideast negotiations with Israel. The third was the challenge to Muslim cultural traditions, from emancipated women to rebellious children, as the presence of the new handheld television/computer/ telephones loaded with “edutainment” software that combined educational materials with entertainment formats—began to sweep the world. The main effect of the efforts of various Islamic governments that undertook spectrum jamming in an effort to disrupt the signals on which such technology depended, was to remove large sections of the globe from the international communications architecture. The Muslim world was the first to turn its back on the West and the ethos of consumerism, secularism, and libertarianism that was the engine of economic growth of this era. Not all Muslims were reconciled to the ignominious defeat of the Taliban in 2001, nor to the death of their terrorist collaborator. One consequence of the World Trade Center attacks had been a mutual suspicion between Islamic and non-Islamic cultures.

At almost the same time, the meltdown of a nuclear reactor in Belarus (of the same design as the one that curdled at Chernobyl in 1988) caused a flood of refugees from Russia, Ukraine, and Poland to storm barricades hastily erected at the German border. In the next two and a half months, more than 1.5 million persons tried to enter Germany, where eventually they were housed in camps. Unable to return to their poisoned homelands, these persons were not allowed to move further west into Germany and were strictly confined. A wall, unfortunately reminiscent in some ways of the Berlin Wall, was ultimately erected around the perimeter of the camps.

Then, as if to show that no area would go unscathed, an indigenous revolution in the southern states of Mexico ignited a popular uprising in the economically depressed north. This touched off another mass migration, with eventually more than five million Mexican nationals pouring into southern Texas and California. Scenes of vigilante violence against the illegal aliens shocked the country, and perhaps more ominously angered and repelled the Hispanic community in the United States. In both Texas and California there were reprisals; armed Mexican Americans volunteered to protect the refugees; for some months there was a lawless state of affairs along the border. Throughout the nation, there was a mood of mutual disgust: non-Mexican Americans felt betrayed by those who sheltered and hid illegal aliens. Hispanic Americans, in numbers well beyond those of Mexican heritage, felt contempt for their fellow Anglo citizens who had appeared indifferent to Mexican suffering.

In 2015, a teenage gang led by a former Army officer known to the world only as “Prince” seized power in the area around Monrovia, in Liberia. There were at that time about one million persons living in this city without potable water and without electricity. Using automatic weapons and often accompanied by handheld minicams, soldiers from this force engaged throughout the next months in a campaign of terror and depravity that was filmed and sold to distributors in the West. An outcry arose in the United States in particular urging intervention to restore order. There was no G-9 (P8) or U.N. force available to intervene. The advocates of a policy of intervention captured the imagination of the African American community—Liberia had been founded by former American slaves— who detected an unspoken racism behind the president's reluctance to intervene. Many Americans, however, saw the matter differently: the problems of poverty, political instability, and what were widely perceived as “tribal” conflicts were thought to be beyond solution. Indeed events in Africa tended to harden the worst racial stereotypes in the developed world. A divisive and intemperate debate in the Congress over whether to send humanitarian aid ended by failing to provide any funds for such a measure. Rioting broke out in Washington, D.C., where an Afrocentric curriculum had long been mandated in the public schools.

These developments seemed to exhaust the global community, which had struggled with the immediate but attenuated empathy that instant communications seemed to evoke. In reaction, states of The Garden turned inward, and groups within those states ceased striving for cultural homogeneity and celebrated differences instead.

Ironically, it was the multicultural aspects of the developed states that fostered this mutual distancing. By creating a culture in which the international media and entertainment industry had more influence than the national political class of any state, the market-states of the early twenty-first century had also created a powerful weapon that destabilized other societies and, even in their own societies, brought forth violent reactions that sought to restore the cultural values that were apparently being cast away. International communications at first made famines in faraway countries moving and tragic; eventually, these events seemed tiresome and inevitable. International communications initially made the prosperity and liberty of the developed states alluring; eventually these qualities came to seem vulgar and addictive. The national political class was powerless to either lead a state's people toward compassion or insulate a state from cultural invasion. The fragmentation that then occurred in these developed states was only an inner reflection of the alienation their peoples felt toward the outer, foreign world: the contact with other cultures had reinforced the intractability of cultural differences and the felt need to avoid the frustration and danger of such encounters.

As a result, the market-states of this era were thrown back on custom. Customary approaches to allocations are not concerned with optimizing output or increasing the productivity of the individual. Many of the steps taken by the states in this era were irrational, if by that is meant the adoption of policies that cannot in the long run strengthen the economic opportunities of the society on whose behalf such policies are undertaken. Openness and candor are often sacrificed by relying on customary approaches, but openness and candor are not absolutes and there are other values—the preservation of a way of life, religious values that range from the sanctity of life to the protection of a certain structure of the family—that were protected. By mid-century languages that were almost dead in 2000 were flourishing. Art and architecture ceased to be dominated by the West and experienced a new renaissance. Educated persons played more musical instruments, performed more plays, and made more art now that echnology brought down the skill levels required for these tasks. The Garden, by subordinating the value of the race for wealth, evoked the value of artistic expression in many cultures that had almost nothing else in common.