Blog: The tension between modernity and tradition is real

The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman famously wrote a book, ‘The Lexus and the Olive Tree’ in the concluding years of the 20th century. In Friedman’s formulation, Lexus stood as a metaphor for modernity(globalisation) and the olive tree one for tradition. All in all, Friedman was bullish about globalisation, deeming it to be the defining feature or a large megatrend that would reshape the world in fundamental ways. Events and even trends corroborated and validated Friedman’s claim: capital flows crisscrossed the globe, as did people flows; state sovereignty – a feature of the Westphalian order – was getting malleable and so on. In this schema, the nation-state was held to be an irrational construct, an obstacle in the way of progress defined by a certain economic philosophy, that was intellectual and maiden of the 3rd wave of globalisation, that could be traced to mid-1970s.

But, fast forward a couple of decades: globalisation is in crisis and the nation-state is making a comeback. The ‘walls’ are going up again and the world is retreating into itself. While this might be in the nature of a pause or hiatus in the larger grand historical perspective, but mellow-balisation or slow-labialisation is real, a trend that will only get exacerbated in the post-COVID-19 world. Friedman then was ‘irrationally exuberant’. What explains the halt to the onward march of globalisation?

The answer lies in the metaphor of the olive tree.

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Man(woman), in the final analysis, is intensely tribal and is, as opposed to certain theories wired to be so. Mankind’s tribalism gets kind of reified in his or her desire for a stable identity. (Multiple identities in oneself, might even be unnatural and lead perhaps to the rebellion of the core self against assumed identities). It is, say in a Western context, only the second or the third-generation immigrant cohort that can be said to be rather fully integrated. The first or even the second-generation cohort are in a constant battle to negotiate their identities with their selves and host societies.

But, more eloquently, or tellingly, it is in larger projects that the battle or quest for identity becomes more powerful and salient. Here Brexit, the United Kingdom’s divorce from the European Union might be a case in point. While, for instance, a man or woman from Bath in the UK will have more in common with people from the same region than Yorkshire and while classes are also a constituent in the make-up of identity, in the sense of immediacy, but the larger British identity accords reassurance and connect between this identities-emotionally and psychically. This holds despite the fact Britishness is also a construct, or in the formulation of Benedict Andersen, an imagined community that, obiter dictum, had an outward-looking thrust during the heyday of imperialism but turned inward after that.

It was this sense of emotional and psychic reassurance that the larger European project fractured. The man(woman) from Bath would rather be anchored to Britain and the attendant idea of ‘Britishness’- a category that was, in his or her mind already under assault by the multiculturalisation of his or her country. Slowly but inexorably, the core self rebelled against a project and its vague ideational boundaries, porous as they were. The result was foreordained here.

This is happening in various permutations and combinations across the world. The post-colonial intellectual, in an attempt to create an identity for his or her newly liberated country, tried to wed the country together by creating ideational and intellectual constructs, that were more Lexus than the Olive Tree. But, while this elitist construction succeeded for a while, in the ultimate analysis, the more emotive and visceral aspects of identity are gaining in salience.

Is project modernity, in the sense of fashioning a ‘new’ man by and through intellectual devices and state structures a failed one? Probably. Social engineering of this sort is doomed unless and until allied to the emotional and emotive aspects of the soil. But project modernity has not entirely failed. It has chalked some notable successes but when it comes to modernity and tradition, there is tension and even conflict between these.

Modernity, to paraphrase Emile Durkheim, can be an intensely alienating process, with no endpoint. And, when this alienation hits, man(woman) seeks refuge in community or the nation. This is what explains Brexit and similar movements across the world, populist or otherwise. In this sense then, the Olive Tree always trumps the Lexus!


(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are the personal views of the author and do not reflect the views of ZMCL)