Global capitalism talks about diversity and multiculturalism, but we are all modernizing toward conformity.
Global capitalism talks about diversity and multiculturalism, but we are all modernizing toward conformity.
D arwin’s Arch, the magnificent rock formation near the Galápagos Islands, collapsed last month. It took millions of years of erosion, and then gravity finished the work instantly. It was witnessed by a handful of divers on a nearby ship, Galapagos Aggressor III. What’s left over is being renamed “the Pillars of Evolution.” Why not “Darwin’s pillars”? Probably because Darwin is problematic now. Far safer to name things after the pitiless laws of nature, which cause every poorly adapted beast to disappear from the face of the earth forever.
The world is always disappearing. And faster than you think. The British writer Peter Hitchens visited Bhutan some 16 or so years ago in the first years after it had been introduced to the television. The mountainous and mysterious little country that sits between China and India was ruled by a king who famously privileged “gross domestic happiness” and who banned blue jeans. Hitchens worried about the effect of television on this peaceful, quiet, and devout kingdom. His essay made me long to visit a nation that was culturally formed by Buddhism and whose mountainous geography was so imposing that the two giants of Eurasia had not dared to conquer it.
Hitchens was right to worry about the effects of television. Now, Bhutanese youth are crowding in the capital city, Thimphu. They have smartphones. The traditional culture of Bhutan — its sports, music, and folklore — competes directly with the Bollywood hits that are beamed in to their Motorola phones. Elements of land reform that other nations completed in the 19th century are still part of active debate. And yet, the young King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck just this year abolished the last laws criminalizing same-sex relations and was congratulated by a native identity lobby group, Queer Voices of Bhutan. Such a development was literally unthinkable three decades ago, and yet also inevitable once Facebook arrived.
Even still, something left over from Bhutan’s mannerly and courteous culture shines through. An article about these changes dictated to Vice by Tashi Tsheten, a gay Bhutanese man, noted that Bhutan has never had a single pride parade and doesn’t plan on it. Why? Because “parades are a form of activism where people go out on the streets and talk about policy and legal changes; that’s not something that we Bhutanese agree with.” A Buddhist nation can be queered, but they won’t march about like a bunch of drumming Presbyterians in Belfast. How long can that last? Social media is like a different kind of social physics. Perhaps there will be a police-shooting incident in Nevada someday, and within hours the youth of Bhutan will put Thimphu to flames like Minneapolis last summer.
Global capitalism talks about diversity and multiculturalism, but we are all modernizing toward conformity. Globalization destroys diversity. Sometimes it does so with a malign purpose, such as the Chinese Communist Party using every totalitarian means to extirpate the native Muslim cultures of Western China. But half the time it is hardly intended at all. It proceeds by our attraction to power and wealth. Bhutan’s Buddhist culture, if the lines of transmission are set the right way, will slowly be zapped away by the parts of India’s culture that are made for export. Much of that culture too will have been borrowed by America.
Our desire for better and more easeful lives, not only for ourselves but our children, optimizes for the selection of a few lingua franca. Half of all human languages still spoken today will cease to exist before the end of the next century. Most of them before they had the chance to develop a literature. There will be efforts to preserve and revitalize these treasure chests of human culture and civilization — but it’s like trying to make water gush from a sand dune where there was once a riverbank.
Even at the experience of food, the corporate birds have learned to shape the regulatory environment in which they evolve. The high-minded among us imagine that when we travel, we will diligently search out the hidden gems of culture and food when we arrive. And, with the assistance of our apps, we do. But there’s a reason why you can buy a Starbucks at about a dozen locations on the banks of the Bosphorus in Istanbul. Or settle in at the Bubba Gump Shrimp restaurant in Osaka, Japan. Or buy a Dunkin’ Donuts–branded Boston Kreme donut at the Eurospar An Cheathrú Rua, hidden deep in one of the last Irish-speaking settlements in Ireland.
You can’t force people to live more strenuous lives just for the sake of preserving cultural diversity. The last monolingual speaker of Irish died in 1998. I’ve spent six years, on and off, studying or playing or procrastinating at learning the Irish language myself. It’s a doomed and romantic enterprise, but I know how it ends.
Bhutanese culture will exist as a slight reticence to have the same march that every other city in the world has. Irish language, I fear, will exist only in fossil forms beneath Hiberno-English. One day you’ll pull up a YouTube video in which a scholar explains that the reason the attendant at the Eurospar said, “I’m after the beach,” rather than, “I just went to the beach,” relates to the grammar of a language that died long ago. You, in a suburb of San Diego, that scholar in an Indian University cafeteria, and the attendant back in Ireland will all then eat the same donuts, bop around to the same K-pop singles, and be subject to the same riots. This is diversity now.