3 summer 2011 - Prince Claus Fund

contact with the vast agenda of the post-Cold-War world, an agenda hidden byfour decades of Manichean simplifications and strategic myths that clouded theconcrete reality of the bearers of any possible creativity: the six billion menand woman who live on this planet, demanding our embrace because they aredifferent and because we are different.The end of the Cold War has permitted many cultures to rise from the basementand become the protagonists of a history that is far from over. We have entereda dangerous world of conflicting jurisdictions: the transnational, theinternational, the regional, the national, the local, even the tribal. All of themdispute our allegiances and fight for supremacy.They are conforming two distinct villages, the Global Village of instantcommunications, world-wide economic integration and accelerated technologicaladvances, and the Local Village of faith in traditional values, self-government,the hearth and the memory of a culture - the Global Village of Bill Gates and theLocal Village of Emiliano Zapata. Both villages present great opportunities, butalso great dangers, to creativity and the new humanism.The Local Village, all too often, spills over into religious fundamentalism, ethniccleansing, hatred of the other, xenophobia, and racism.The Global Village, all too often, wears a cold, uncaring technocratic mask, asthough macroeconomic wisdom did not affect people, only numbers: it generalises,conforms, and even amuses people to death, robbing them of their personality.We are caught, in a sense, between the Cheerful Robot who lives in the GlobalVillage and the Idols of the Tribe who inhabit the Local Village. How to bridgethese extremes? Through our attention, I think, to real people, to the urgentagenda of the 21st century: the saving of the environment, the populationexplosion, the bodily and mental freedom of women, the increasing disparity allover the world between haves and have-nots, inside each society but especiallyin the North-South divide; and the grim crisis of our urban civilizations, Northand South: crime, drugs, violence, the homeless, the elderly, crumbling infrastructures,plunging standards of education and brutal pandemics that do notdistinguish between First, Second, Third or Fourth worlds.The Evil Empire is no longer. It has shifted to the Evil Slum.And from these slums, both internal and external (since the First World has itsown Third World; since there are beggars and homeless people in Boston, Birminghamand Bogota; since children are murdered in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, theghettos of New York City and the suburbs of Liverpool), from all of theses placesand many more, come the new nomads of the local village moving towards theGlobal Village: the immigrant, coming in waves from South to North and from Eastto West, challenging us to meet the other, the men and women of differentcultures, transforming but enriching our own; or exterminating the other, denyingthe humanity of those who are different and degrading our own humanity, oncemore, in repeated holocausts.The 3,000-mile border between Mexico and the US is the most striking exampleof this challenge to meet and understand two different cultures. How to livewith those who are not like you or me? How to expect that in the age of globaleconomic integration, and instant communications, the other would not instantlyarrive in our midst? Did not, after all, during five hundred years of ceaselessexpansion, the West, take over the land, modify the culture, colonize, exploitand arrogantly rule over those who are now heading West to give the West ataste of its own challenges? Here they are, coming back, defying our humanity,our sense of justice and, finally, even our creativity.For the centres of humanist creativity, once limited to the nations of the West91 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011