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c h a p t e r 4 The Fundamentalism of the Rat Race ‘‘Well, in our country,’’ said Alice, still panting a little, ‘‘you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.’’ ‘‘A slow sort of country!’’ said the Queen. ‘‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!’’ lewis carroll, Through the Looking Glass Beyond Cultural Truisms The question is inevitable: When we talk about relationships ‘‘between’’ cultures, do we in fact place ourselves outside them, like an unconnected and impartial judge (as the word ‘‘between’’ would suggest), or do we play the old game where one of the sides disguises itself as the third? If I start off with this typically spiteful argument (used so often against relativism), I am not doing it to blackmail those who are trying to build bridges by accusing them of double-crossing; instead, I am attempting to unmoor the discussion about the relationship between different cultures from an understanding so banal that, in most cases, it keeps the discussion floating in the midst of a preachy and impotent methodology. For example, those who have at heart tolerance and understanding between cultures must condemn the terrorism that seems to have become the privileged fighting method of Islamic fundamentalists. The first duty of any intellectual who is confronted by the harshness of a fanaticism that kills the most openminded and creative human beings, and by the ‘‘resentment’’ that conceives their works only as betrayal and sin, is to publicly condemn them and show solidarity with the victims. However, this is just our first duty. Instead, today it seems to have become the only one, as it exhausts almost everything that one might do at the level of conceptual elaboration in 52 The Fundamentalism of the Rat Race 53 deference to neoliberal ideas that seem to constitute the most evolved frontier of thought. Indeed, today we proclaim the superiority of liberal principles as a cultural truism that resembles another equally and similarly boring cultural truism, the one that, about twenty years ago, allowed people to believe that, by shifting ‘‘more to the left,’’ they could gain the best perspective on the world. I do not wish to question here the value of a liberal understanding of politics and of the State, nor do I want to ignore the harsh rebukes that history has bestowed on the many glib theories that claimed to have ‘‘surpassed’’ liberalism. I do, however, want to avoid thought from stopping even before it has begun to walk toward a face-to-face that ignores the dramatic complexity of the conflicts that is being played out. Using (ironically and without nostalgia) a metaphor that old cultural platitudes employed repeatedly against the one that dominates today, we want to descend from the plane of circulation, where all subjects seem the same, to the plane of production, where differences are instead evident. In other words, I would like to discuss thematically the relationship between cultures without avoiding the areas of greatest conflict. More speci fically, I would like to emphasize a cluster of questions that are closely connected with each other. Can one reflect on the relationship between cultures while neglecting the negative conditioning that the stronger culture exercises on the weaker one? Is the cultural model of the West, with its power and with its constant tendency toward expansion, capable of tolerating societies governed by different organizational principles and by cultural models not founded on constant dynamics and on unlimited production ? Conversely, can a cultural model founded on parameters that differ from production and consumerist models resist nowadays the cultural (but also economic and political) attacks of the West? These are not disinterested questions, nor do we wish to organize a World Wildlife Fund refuge for survivors of noncapitalist cultures that is financed by guided tours from developed countries (even if it could be a splendid trick devised by market laws). The problem is not archeological but political. If in fact, as many claim, the Western cultural model and way of life are not reproducible, and the idea of extending its income and consumption levels to the rest of the planet is a dangerous utopia, we must ask: Is the protection of nonproductive cultural models an unrealistic nostalgia, or is it...

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