| |
It has taken a series of crises in France, Holland, Britain, Germany and other European countries for the issue of identity finally to be recognized as central to the contemporary global crisis. President Chirac admits on national TV that his country faces “an identity crisis,” a crisis that swells as increasing numbers of immigrants from Asia, Africa and the Middle East crowd into Europe and North America. The editor-in-chief of the Dutch daily, Handelsblad, sums up Holland’s dilemma: “We now want to teach immigrants more about our identity, and we discover that we’re not sure what’s left of it!”
Underlying this crisis are three world-spanning pressures that are ripping up old forms of uniqueness and organization.
First, due to electronic global communication, as well as massive worldwide migration, peoples of totally different psychological and cultural expressions are being forced into a single, globalized technological context. Yet as individuals, not all people have the same psychology. The indigenous Indian people in the heart of the Amazon, for example, or the Bushman in Africa express a different psychology than the Parisian intellectual or the computer programmer in Silicon Valley. This is not a value judgment; it’s not to say one is better than the other. They’re just different.
|
Assessing Global Trends and Decision-Making |
|
|
|
 |
The psychiatrist C.G. Jung first noticed the psychological difference between Arabs and Europeans in the 1920s during a trip through North Africa. Wrote Jung: The “Arab is closer to life than we are,” and their struggle to become aware of their own political existence is, in part, “self-defense against the forces threatening them” from Europe and the “European’s accelerated tempo.” The Arabs, Jung wrote, “live in their affects, are moved and have their being in emotions,” while the European [and Americans] lives with the “illusion of his triumphs, such as steamships, railroads, airplanes, and rockets that rob him of his duration and transport him into another reality of speeds and explosive accelerations.”
Eighty-five years later, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somalian-born former member of the Dutch Parliament, echoes Jung’s assessment. Interviewed by Roger Cohn for the International Herald Tribune, Hirsi Ali says, “I think the immigrants from rural areas, most of them, are at a certain phase of civilization that is far behind that of the host countries, like the Netherlands, and because of that, these terrible events [the murder of Dutch film maker van Gogh] can occur.” She speaks of “immigrants who have not thought about individual freedom” suddenly being plunged into the “anything goes” atmosphere of Holland. Cohn expands Hirsi Ali’s thought and writes, “Pour Islamic immigrants from remote villages into Europe’s most liberal culture, replete with sex palaces, drugs and ever more explicit Dutch-invented TV ‘reality-shows’ – and the chances something might go haywire were real, especially once the boom times passed.”
Akbar Ahmed, the former Pakistani High Commissioner to Britain, puts it more bluntly when he asks in his book Postmodernism and Islam, what is the devout young Muslim supposed to think when he sees Britain's most popular TV sitcom portray a fictional Margaret Thatcher masturbating a fictional Ronald Reagan?
Culture and custom reflect underlying psychological realities. Throughout history, peoples have been relatively separated, thus allowing them to develop culturally and socially in their own manner and at their own pace. Now, due to our global electronic information system, everyone is jammed into one cultural context—that of postmodern Europe and America. It’s creating personal, spiritual and cultural havoc that threatens the cohesion and social stability on which civilized life depends.
The second world-spanning pressure was expressed in the 1940s by the eminent British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle. Wrote Hoyle, "When a photograph of earth, taken from the outside, is available, a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose." Think of the most powerful ideas in history—nationalism, capitalism, socialism, rationalism, modernism, etc. Hoyle suggested that an idea at least as powerful as these—possibly more so—would be let loose by the many pictures of earth we've seen from the space program.
Hoyle’s “new idea” was seeing the human species as a single entity. For the first time since human life appeared on Earth, all tribes, nations and religions are beginning to share a common history and destiny. We have understood this fact as a scientific/physical reality, but we have not yet absorbed it as the decisive psychological watershed it represents. Hoyle was suggesting that all forms of identity are primarily projections that will be transcended by seeing earth from space, and which will offer each of us a larger sense of who we are. This will equally affect our Muslim immigrant as our Parisian sophisticate. It is part of the process mentioned above, of forcing everyone into the same technological context.
Nature drew no lines in the sand or mountains distinguishing one "nation" from another. No one has met God in space who has designated one religion to be the only “true” belief. While people may be ethnically different, there’s no “arbiter of all wisdom” that proclaims the attributes of one ethnic group superior to all others. Most of the dividing lines that have formed “identity” are projections of our subconscious. That’s not to say they’re irrelevant. They have been, and still are, a vital part of who we are. But we have now surpassed those dividing lines as the primary category of identity needed for what appears to be a global era.
Hoyle’s suggestion of a widening expression of the self is not new to Americans. Before 1776, the inhabitants of the Colonies didn’t think of themselves in relationship to the United States (there was no United States), but in relationship to the particular state in which they lived. After the establishment of the United States, people slowly thought of their lives in a wider context, a new entity called the United States of America. This widening process took time. Indeed, the historian Daniel Borstin tells us it wasn’t until nearly ninety years later, at the end of the Civil War that a distinctly American identity emerged.
A similar process is happening today on a global scale, involving many more people, cultures and religions—not to mention it being far more difficult and dangerous.
The third world-spanning pressure ripping up old ways of identity is a fresh spiritual dispensation struggling to come into existence. Why is Europe secular? The heart of what once was Christendom is now characterized by what used to be considered the “Anti-Christ.” And why is America’s popular culture typified by doubt, gratuitous violence, cynicism, superfluous sex, irony and ridicule? Jon Stewart has become the national guru.
I would suggest a major reason: We are living through the Apocalypse. Don't blanch. The Apocalypse is totally misunderstood. It is not the literal end of the world, as so many believe. Rather, the psychology of the Apocalypse suggests the end of the Christian eon as the dominant spiritual expression emanating from the depths of the Western soul, and the eventual emergence of some new spiritual dispensation expressed in symbols relevant to our space-age context. Such seminal changes of spiritual expression have happened several times before in history.
The word “apocalypse” is from the Greek, meaning, “uncovering what has been hidden.” In other words, apocalypse is the revelation of new truth. The Catholic Church has long predicted this would come, although it declined to specify a date. Before he was Pope, John Paul II warned the Church about what he saw happening: “We find ourselves in the presence of the greatest confrontation in history, the greatest mankind has ever had to confront. We are facing the final confrontation between the Church and the Anti-Church, between the Gospel and the Anti-Gospel.”
A secular view of the Apocalypse was offered by Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Writing in The Washington Post, Mead noted that “apocalypse anxiety has moved into the mainstream of American politics and culture…a line has been crossed. This is Oppenheimer country. The Age of Progress is in the past and this is the era of Shiva, destroyer of worlds.”
It all sounds ominous, despite the evangelical explosion throughout America. So how do we gauge the spiritual and psychological life of today’s America? By public opinion polls that tell us well over ninety percent of the American people say they believe in God? By “mega-churches” that have ten to fifteen thousand members? That’s one way, and it’s perhaps no accident that this fundamentalist spiritual explosion has coincided with a similar explosion of technology—especially information technology—that has engulfed America the past three decades.
Another way to gauge our spiritual and psychological life is to examine our culture and intellectual life, and what they are telling us. Here we find a radically different story. In this realm, the determinants of philosophical-historical postmodernism are dominant—especially with the “creative minority” who give us our science, technology, literature, education, cinema and other cultural art forms. This is important, because culture is to a nation what dreams are to an individual—an indication of what’s going on in the inner life, in the unconscious realm, which is the crucible of consciousness.
|
Purchase Van Wishard's Latest Book Between Two Ages |
|
|
|
|
These three issues—different cultures suddenly jammed into the same mental space, technology downgrading historic boundaries and enabling us to see the human species as a single entity, and the gradual shift from one spiritual dispensation to a new expression, are affecting every aspect of identity. There is no simple formula to solve this global crisis of identity; nor is it going to be resolved quickly.
In sum, we're living through the effects of realizing that all forms of past identity are no longer the prime forms relevant for a new epoch that encompasses the world as a whole. We're living through the agonizing shift from one orientation to a new worldview, and that involves all our categories of identity. Each person has to ask what all this means for them, for their own perspective and sense of identity.
The great challenge of the coming years is to prevent these explosive identity crises from killing hundreds of thousands of people. All of us—leaders as well as led—have got to work through these issues both individually and collectively. If we continue as we are, with the usual political agendas, outmoded expressions of identity, and parochial worldviews predominating, it is almost a guarantee that the worst scenario possible will be realized. But if we can rise above these very genuine, but limiting perspectives, if we can see the world from the “outside” as Sir Fred Hoyle suggested, then totally new possibilities open up for the future.
^BACK TO TOP
|
