In a recent piece in The New Yorker article, writer Rohinton Mistry mentions growing up in India in the 20th century, “raised to believe that this ancient country was futureless, the only solution to settle in the West, to make a better life.”
This raises a basic question: how do people come to believe they are or are not the future? This belief is central to civilizational confidence, and to a society’s momentum, but it is hardly universal.
The present is here, it is just unequally distributed
People do not even necessarily believe that their societies are in the present, a prerequisite for believing one is the future. It is common to hear people in developing countries say, “We want to be a normal country, we want to join the present.” They have an active sense of dyschronicity: that there is a progression toward a future, and they are further from it than others.
And some cultures may feel shut out of the present. This is a political issue in some societies. In Latin America, for instance, over the last few decades indigenous peoples emerging from quasi-colonial treatment explicitly demand to be considered part of the present, not relics of the past.
Battling for the past
To believe one’s way is the future, it is helpful to believe that you are the culmination of the past. This is a strength of many religions, including state Marxism as practiced in the 20th century.
The American right grasps this concept, incidentally, and is working hard to redefine the American past, sometimes straining historical realities in the process.
China seems to be working through this redefinition now too. In its new narrative, China is not the formerly oppressed vanguard of the Third World—its story for a while—but the global leader for millennia, now emerging from a temporary (150-year) bad patch. (You don’t have to pick a real past to go back to. Some groups that see themselves as the future seek to go back to a past that never was: the glorious rule of the Caliphate, or a free America without government.)
Losing faith
A society can lose its belief in its own place in the future. That happened gradually to the Soviet Union, as its faith-based Marxism was gradually proven to be inferior to other systems, until Gorbachev came along and announced that not even the leadership believed any more.
There is a sense that this is happening in the United States now, that the American narrative is faltering. This is implicit in comments that many Americans make about the Chinese: “They just want it more” and the like. And it seems to underlie the seeming inability to contemplate — or fund — any large projects.
It is unclear whether this is a bigger loss of faith than other periodic doubts, but it is a departure from the normal narrative. From de Tocqueville on, Americans and others typically assumed that America was destined for greatness.
The “American exceptionalism” argument is partly about this: if you are the anointed leader, you must be the future. And in the past, the sense of exceptionalism was in no small sense based on reality: America was the future in so many areas: we had levels of democracy, electrification, car ownership, college education, etc. that other countries would not reach for years.
That reality is gone in almost every area, from health care to Internet speed to political dynamics. Perhaps it is time to find some new ways to be exceptional, to be the future?
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Image: The Wandering Angel (Flickr)
Amnesty International reports that 1,000 women accused of being witches have been rounded up by Gambian security forces, who were accompanied by Guinean witch doctors.
The reason? “The witch-doctors were invited to The Gambia early in the year, soon after the death of President Jammeh’s aunt. The President reportedly believes that witchcraft was used in her death,” Amnesty reports.
This exemplifies dyschronicity — that two places may be greatly out of sync in time — as the developed world last engaged in mass witch persecutions centuries ago.
It also reveals, again, how flimsy governance in Africa is: many countries lack any authority that can be relied on to act with rationality and restraint.
Image copyright Futureatlas.com — usable with attribution and link
This week provided a clear example of dyschronicity, from Saudi Arabia.
The Washington Post reports that the kingdom’s “most revered cleric” has issued a fatwa demanding apostasy trials for two writers who questioned an aspect of hardline Saudi Islam in articles.
The cleric decreed that the writers should be tried and executed if they do not repent.
Hence the 400-plus year gap between Sweden and Saudi Arabia on the dyschronicity map: Western Europe gave up this conception of the role of religion around the 17th century.
(Image usable with credit and link to FutureAtlas.com)
I was quoted in World Politics Review on the issue of the cultural gap between Turkey and the European Union:
- In terms of value systems, “Turkey and Western Europe exist in different eras.”
- “When it comes to values and general outlook on the world, Turkey and Western Europe are decades apart. This phenomenon, which might be called dyschronicity, is even more acute if you compare certain parts of Europe to Turkey’s Anatolian heartland: the time-gap between Sweden and some rural areas of Turkey is something like three or four centuries.”
As an example, author Handan Satiroglu points out that at least 12 people have gone on trial in 2007 for the crime of “insulting Turkishness.”
And Turkey’s arrival in the EU “would multiply the number of Muslims living in Europe more than five-fold, to an estimated 90 million,” a challenge for the most secular of continents.
Turkey may now be prepared to join the Europe of 1950, but Europe has moved on, and it will take enormous change for it to even begin to catch up.
The Washington Post reveals an example of dyschronicity in Europe: thousands of people in Albania are engaged in long-term blood feuds between families.
In most of the rest of Europe, this kind of vendetta was put aside as social practice decades or centuries ago — revealing something of the challenge Albania will have convincing the European Union that the poor Balkan state is ready for membership.
Future Atlas has a new map of an aspect of dyschronicity, the distance in time between places measured by culture, technology, or some other characteristic.
In this case, the map shows approximate distance between one place and the rest of the world in the area of values and attitudes.
The reference country in this map is Sweden, as it is notably further along in a number of social trends that many countries are now undergoing. The map is essentially an estimation of how long ago Sweden was like that place in its values and attitudes.
This kind of dyschronicity can illuminate some culturally-rooted issues. For instance:
- There is some logic in finding Denmark at the heart of the cartoon controversy of last year: it is centuries out of sync with most of the Muslim world at the cultural level.
- Turkey and Western Europe are at best decades apart at this level, helping to drive European reluctance to bring Turkey into the European Union.
- Western Europe and the US are also partially living in different times, with Europeans viewing Americans as backward on issues such as the death penalty, health care, and environmentalism.
For more, see this Future Atlas page.
Examining a map of the regional split in the Mexican election results, Investor’s Business Daily applies American political analogies: the “red,” sunbelt north of Mexico voting for the conservative PAN party, and the “blue” south going for the leftist PRD.
The analogy is flimsy, however, due to “dyschronicity”: Mexico and the US live in wholly different eras, and no elements of their politics line up neatly beside each other.
The PAN may be conservative, but in the Mexican context that means that they are modernizing, outward-looking, and one sense progressive: they are trying to achieve a functioning modern state in which capitalism can operate. Success would mean making Mexico more like the early 20th century United States: Mexican conservatives can only dream of their country being as capitalist, individualist, and libertarian as “blue America.”
The Mexican south is much farther removed from any American experience, resembling blue America not at all, and red America only by loose analogy, in that both are the traditional, religious, and inward-looking parts of their countries. The dyschronicity with the US is acute: the peasant and indigenous culture that dominate the Mexican south has never existed in the United States, and most Americans’ ancestors have not lived in similar circumstances for 300-500 years. Chiapas resembles Bolivia more than it does Massachusetts.
In short, the Rio Grande is too broad for some analogies to make it across.
[via Social Technologies]