الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

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Pathways to an Open World

an over-production of ‘goods’ of all kinds, most of which are destined, not to satisfy needs, but to accumulate profit. Intelligence is geared to this (marketing pitches are taught in universities), and the sale of crap by appeals to stupidity and infantility is not only a profitable but a respectable activity. Government and industry are so intertwined in this world that, even with governments that have not yet totally abandoned themselves to ‘the system’, anything like long-term, long-range thought and action is not only impractical, it is inconceivable. While this system grows, cancerously, in some parts of the world, others are left, more or less fatally, more or less enviously, in penury and destitution. Some well-intended gestures may be made towards them, often with disastrous results (as in the Sahel a few years back). But mostly they will be left to their own devices, which may take various forms, from the fanatically religious to the politically terroristic – when culture (both physical and mental) has been destroyed, when there is nothing left to take pride in, there can always be a faith to adhere to and any action may seem preferable to none. Moral indignation on the part of the recipients of this kind of re-action, military repression, paternal re- organization (which means in the long run wholesale conversion to the deletary world system) do nothing to transform the context. Extreme cases apart, enclosure-cultures and parochial perspectives abound within the general system, providing niches of obsolete, caricatural culture as refuges, as what psychologists call ‘supplements for the soul’, what sociologists call ‘the re-enchantment of the world’. That said, there exists also, at the present moment, a broad current of scepticism and negativism in face of the ideology and practice of Progress (whether it be to a ruthless liberal Capitalist ‘ideal’ or to a Communist model). And it is out of this sceptical negativism that a new field might emerge. Real cultural work nowadays means opening and working that field. It has to begin with a radical definition of culture.

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