STUCK, NO WAY BACK, NO WAY FORWARD
A week or so ago David Brooks wrote an article titled “Globalization Is Over. The Global Culture Wars Have Begun“. This really interests me because what I was writing about yesterday was the way that technology makes living in places around the world so easy for a man in his 85th year. And here was David Brooks telling me that this feeling of globalization was coming to an end and instead of soaking in other cultures I had better get ready for a culture war. But I was already becoming uneasy. This week far right Marine Le Pen, an admirer of Putin, is threatening in the French election. I am still living within the threat of Trumpism in the United States. On a wonderful visit to Istanbul three years ago Erdogan was in the process of being reelected. And Narendra Modi is becoming increasingly dictatorial with his BJP Hindu nationalism in India where I love to visit. Where can I travel that isn‘t threatened by nationalism and populism? I am even threatened at home in Swannanoa.
So I feel very out of step. How can living in other lands, made possible by the computerized digital revolution of discovering cheap airfares, finding inexpensive Airbnbs, taking every thing I need in an iPad and a carry on case which I celebrated yesterday, open to everyone, how can my delight in travel be taking place in a world in which so many people find their cultural identity under threat?
In the best of all possible worlds how can so many people be so resentful and frightened and angry? David Brooks, who has done a great deal of research, gives his reasons and you should read him to find out why?
But my concern is how humans can be living in the same world and see it to differently. David Brooks understands the world for all of us, I just have to make my way along as Bill Mosher. I have to figure out how to I talk to my barber in Swannanoa, who before the pandemic, with Fox News playing in the background, recited his resentment and irritation with the state of things in the United States: a collapse of American values and the American way that he was trusting Donald Trump to fix somehow.
Three things irritated him. The first was that his hometown of Black Mountain where his family had lived with hard work and a simple life for generations was now overrun with Yankee liberals who were yuppifying the town, driving up the cost of everything, and threatening the ambiance and values of traditional Black Mountain.
The second was that globalization had sent much of the manufacturing in the Black Mountain area overseas, putting his relatives and friends and clients needing haircuts out of work.
The third was that he felt that his identity was threatened. The two things are all important to him, he said, are his Bible and his guns. His fundamentalist Christian beliefs are threatened by a secular society, his guns give him security. He won‘t give up either and Trump had promised to protect both.
As a college teacher sitting in front of him as he chopped a way the little hair I had left I didn‘t have much to offer. I sympathized with his irritation at northerners upending Black Mountain. I was one of those northerners. I saw the global shifts in manufacturing being partly the result of the very computer revolution that I am so enamored with. I even saw a bright lining, many of those jobs were going to India which has been kept out of the world market and where people were improving their standard of living. The playing field was being leveled with highly paid unskilled American workers losing their jobs to just as hardworking but lowpaid workers around the world. The manufacturing jobs weren‘t coming back to Black Mountain, or if they did come back, as is happening with part of the textile industry, robots, not humans, will be doing the work. The only way out that I can see is for traditional Black Mountain people to get training in new technical computerized fields. But I knew suggesting education, being one of the educated elite myself, was only going to make him scoff. And I have no solution for his threatened fundamentalism and his belief in traditional American values. Traditional American values of white supremacy, male dominance, religious fundamentalism, racial threats and on and on seem to me to be narrow and harmful and of the past. He wants to go back and I, well equipped for it, want to go forward.
The problem is that he is intelligent, well spoken, sincere and a lawabiding good church going person who is simply standing up for what he believes is right. I can argue with him but it is pointless.
And for me this personal encounter seems to mirror what David Brooks is talking about. I don‘t know how to speak to the barber. I can listen, that is all, and understand to a degree. I can try and explain that I see the world differently, but that won‘t help. From his perspective I am part of his problem.
So what do I do with him or anyone else in Britain, France, Turkey, Russia or India who feels the same way?
The best that I can do for myself so far is to see that we come at the world from two different postures. His is defensive, hunkering down, defending what he has from threats, my delight is in opening up, leaving my culture behind and learning new things and opening up to a rapidly changing and stimulating world. But I am not threatened. I have been equipped all my life for change and have had the means to do it. He is threatened. I agree with him on that. I understand his resentment and his anger. But resentment and anger can eat you up. I‘ve discovered that in my own life when I‘ve been threatened and become angry. We only have one life to lead. I can go on traveling for a month and coming home for two months and then traveling for another month. That is easy. But his path is much more difficult. He can‘t go back to the 50‘s, the world is shifting. How can he let go as so many refugees, the resourceful ones with education and money, who come to the United States and start a new life do. They can escape persecution or poverty while those without education or money or a drive to reinvent themselves, who stay home, can‘t. They stay home angry and resentful. It certainly isn‘t fair.
My interpretation is that the world is turning upside down, changing very rapidly. This rapid change can bring stimulation and delight as well as dislocation. You can‘t go back, you have to go forward and adapt, and adapt and adapt. That is fine if you are equipped to do so. But if you want to go back you will be caught in a dead end of resentment and anger leading to violence which in the end will be pointless and a dead end. But if you can‘t go back, going forward is no piece of cake either because we are going into an unknown future.
Having written this I have vented and feel a little better. But I am no closer to a solution than I was in the beginning. Being aware of the problem, if it turns out that I am, is not enough.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 