In the 20th century the battle was between the slowly emerging world of commerce and the well-established ideological world of human perfectibility. The German government was based on a human perfectibility derived from ‘Aryan blood and soil’ in contrast to the evil ‘Jewish rationality’. The Communists had a perfectibility of humans based on rational control by social experts in the government. Commerce does not believe in the perfectibility of humans but advances each individual according his own unique contributions, existing as they are.
The 21st century is about commerce and the modern world that commerce has created versus the tribal world. The tribal world is still dominant among most Arabs, Africans, Latins and Southeast Asians.
What is the appeal of the traditional tribal world? How can so much of the world be hostile to modernity and commerce?
I have relatives who visit and live in the Arab tribal world. I personally have visited friends in the tribal worlds: in the Latin world, in Africa, among Arabs and in India.
The tribal world has the same two universal attributes worldwide.
* First is a pace of life that is considerably slower than anything found in the commercial modern world. This pace is much appreciated by most people who get to try both worlds. People sit talking among friends all day. When they come to visit it can be for weeks or months.
* Second, the tribal world is built around the family. There are many different types of families ranging from patriarchal in the Latin world, to cousins in the Arab world, to brothers and sisters in the African world and community members in the Indian world.
In all tribal situations the individual only exists as part of a family. The family provides everything, all the time, from entertainment, to sex, to education, to raising offspring, to healthcare: everything. The tribal member exists in a solid durable comforting framework.
None of these things are true in the commercial-modern world. Our pace is increasingly fast and the most successful among us are the ones moving the fastest. Some of the very fast can often be the most productive.
The family has been rapidly disappearing in the modern-commercial world. My estimate is that half of Americans have no functioning family in any traditional meaning of the word family.
These two worlds, modern-commercial and tribal are in conflict. Neither seems to want the other.
Neither will be able to convert the other. Most moderns are bored and feel straight jacketed in the tribal world and most tribal people hate the unstructured, uncaring, isolated, over sexed modern commercial world.
How a peaceful reconciliation will ever come about, or the defeat of either side, remains a mystery to me.