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Article Excerpt
I think it was the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman who once observed that if in modernity the First World showed the Third World an image of its future, in post-modernity this situation is reversed. Now, it is the Third World that shows the First World an image of its future. I keep recalling this passage when I'm walking the streets of Sydney, for I often get flashes of Lebanon and Beirut as I left them in 1976. For example, in Sydney, in 1976, I don't remember people having too many flashy cars or being into exhibitionist 'fashion' as far as clothing is concerned: you went to places like Double Bay to see this kind of culture, rather than having it as a generalised part of society, co-existing with 'ordinariness' and poverty throughout social space, as it was and still is today in Beirut. But now, of course, this is how it is in Sydney as well.
Another interesting aspect to this rise in flashy consumption and display of wealth is that, in the past, it used to be associated with what was considered as economic underdevelopment--specifically, with mercantilist and speculative capitalism. Merchants, bankers and speculators don't need to reinvest their profits into their enterprise to the same degree that industrialists do, so they usually have a lot more money left for personal consumption. Looking 'shiny' is also part of the way merchants, bankers and speculators do business; their look is part of their asset. It is less so in the case of industrial capitalists. And so, flashy consumption was always considered a kind of symptom of the underdevelopment of Lebanese capitalism in the 1970s because it was a capitalism based on banking, tourism and services: what was generally called the Tertiary Sector. Today, these kinds of economies constitute core activities in the developed capitalist world. In contrast, it is the manufacturing industry that is perceived to be going to Third World locations.
A more recent social trend in Sydney that increasingly gives me flashes of Beirut is the rising inequality in access to quality educational institutions, whether schools or universities. We are not yet at the stage where, like in some private Beirut universities, students are offered valet parking, but I wouldn't be surprised if, sooner or later, the so-called 'group of eight' universities start offering such a service to distinguish themselves from other 'lesser' institutions.
There are many other rising similarities between contemporary Australian and Lebanese culture that I can dwell on to illustrate Bauman's point. Not all of them are negative: Australians have become more 'third-world' tactile in the way they greet each other, for example! Males and females are now far more into hugging and kissing then they used to be in the past. Increasingly, it is the 'cerebral' body-free Anglo greeting that is becoming a minority.
But just as first world societies are increasingly hugging and kissing like third world societies do, they seem to be increasingly hating and defending themselves the way third world societies do as well. It is the rise, particularly since 'the war on terror', of this third world-like mode of defence and hatred that interests me most here.
I got a clear sense of this tendency when, in early 2004, I was on leave at the American University of Beirut and began reworking parts of my PhD thesis for publication. I wrote the thesis more than fifteen years ago. It was about how Lebanese Christians evolved into a warring community during the rise of Lebanese capitalism in the eighteenth century and how they continued to evolve as such during the last civil war (1975-1991). Curiously, parts of my analysis of this warring culture reminded me of some of the arguments about the western culture of worrying that I made in my recent work Against Paranoid Nationalism.
I was particularly drawn to the similarity I had established in the thesis between Lebanese Christian, White South African and Israeli culture. All three cultures shared a perception of themselves as a kind of advanced post of Western civilisation in the Third World. They also felt themselves surrounded by uncivilised hordes with whom they had to 'deal' in the best way they could without compromising their belonging to 'civilisation'. The Christians believed that the Muslims were hell-bent on destroying western (here portrayed as Christian) civilisation in Lebanon; the white South Africans felt the same way about the blacks (here western civilisation was perceived as white) and the Israelis thought and still think of the Palestinians along similar lines (here western civilisation is perceived as Judeo-Christian in both its religious and secular manifestations). Interestingly, all three groups felt abandoned...
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