3 summer 2011 - Prince Claus Fund

and bigger demand in the world I have been describing, defined, at the level ofthe Global Village, by economic interdependence and technological advances and,at the local level, by an anguished need to rediscover the shelters of family,tradition, religion, identity. How to integrate these two worlds, the global andthe local? How to avoid the sickness that both the Global and the Local Villageare menaced by: a soulless, mechanical, money-grubbing, racist and xenophobicworld up in the penthouse; a deprived, mendicant, fundamentalist, even tribalworld, in the gutter?The growing social and economic gaps between different societies, developedand developing, and within each society, developed or not, will not be breachedonly by culture and the arts. But take these away and the chasm dramaticallywidens. Our sense of belonging to the same human species is going to be severelychallenged in the years to come by the faceless movement of speculative capitalsmanipulated by invisible forces; by the insults we are accumulating on the roofof our common house, the biosphere; by the dangers of nuclear accident; by theprofound crisis of urban civilization shared by the First, Second and Third Worlds;and by the untouchable powers of a megacorruption beyond the scope ofnational or international jurisdictions.Can our answer to these challenges be indifference, frivolity, or the mentalityof ‘after me the deluge’? Can it be a complacent hedonism fostered by the fastbuckentertainment industry? Will we all become cheerful robots, amusingourselves to death? Even the availability of instant information might not saveus: are we perhaps witnessing, on a planetary scale, an explosion of informationalong with an implosion of meaning? Are we sure that we are better informedsimply because so much information is obtainable - even if it is meaninglessinformation?The responses to these dangers are both cultural and political. We have torestore this essential value, the reminder that the real purpose of economicactivity is the well-being of concrete human beings end their families. This willnot happen without an approach to education that stresses the variety, theuniversality but also the necessity of exposure to the greatest values createdby any given community, our own and those of other nations: the arts, theletters, the visual and verbal treasures created by humankind.The creative spirit becomes a force for understanding today, when it realizesthat we can only recognize our own humanity if first we recognize it in others.Humanism today means a recognition of the humanity of others, of the culturesthey bear.And creativity means calling into existence new worlds, often forgotten, oftenshunned, but which are, and will have to become, a part of our emotions, of ourlove, and of the value we give to the continuity of life on this earth.Your Majesty,Your Royal Highness,Your Excellencies,Ladies and Gentlemen,As we approach the new millennium end the coming century, I am convinced thatthe Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development is called upon to play amediating role between cultures, defying prejudice, extending the idea we haveof our own limits and possibilities, increasing our capacities to give and receive,our intelligence for understanding what is foreign to us and living up to thedemands of cultural universalism, without which technological globalism canbecome an empty shell.93 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011