Frank Viviano's World View

  Where is the world headed? It's the classic year-end question, especially after a year as tumultuous as 2008.

Conventional answers focus on the immediate surface of contemporary events. "To the left, or at least left-center," Obama watchers might say. "To the right," respond observers of France's Nicholas Sarkozy, Germany's Angela Merkel or Italy's Silvio Berlusconi. "Nowhere," is the fearful chorus across much of Africa and Central Asia.

The surface shows painful signs of recession and, more distressingly, a possible global depression.

But on a much deeper level, neither the clash of ideologies, nor the fluctuations of economic performance, speaks to the central tension of a watershed moment:

In nearly every corner of the planet, we are witnessing the final days of traditional culture, and with it the shattering of an unbroken link to the ancestral past. Tradition has been dying a slow, and often violent, death ever since the onset of the Industrial Revolution in the late18th century. The point of no return has now arrived.

FINAL DAYS
A couple of decades ago, it was still possible to experience the traditional world in scattered pockets of the United States – not its lifeless depiction in museum reconstructions or its tawdry exploitation in theme parks, but the real thing. In parts of Europe, it survived into the current decade.

Further off, there was always the Third World, where poverty held change at bay, and air travel kept the living past within relatively easy reach. There was no better way to acquire perspective on the present, on its neurotic pace and expectations, than a week or two in a country where daily life and traditional ways were still the same thing.

I spent much of my career as a reporter wandering over Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, often in remote destinations that had scarcely changed in a thousand years.

Almost overnight, that millennial continuity has evaporated.

In the past few years, I've ordered books online from Amazon.com at an Internet cafe on the Indian Ocean borderlands of Kenya and Somalia, watched satellite broadcasts of CNN and BBC News in a Tamil Tiger insurgent outpost in Sri Lanka, and used a cellphone to plead for help during a terrorist strike in the barren wastelands of northern Iraq.

In 2008, virtually no place is out of range of advanced communications, or of their potent effect on venerable customs and the conduct of life.

Social scientists and psychologists are just beginning to grapple with the long-term implications. But one of the short-term consequences is altogether too evident.

From the chaotic aftermath of the Soviet collapse, to the seething crisis of Islam, the relentless onslaught of modern values on traditional ways and beliefs has unleashed immense anger and bloodshed.

The conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and the Caucasus in the 1990s, the explosive rise of Al-Qaeda at the century's turn, the vigilantism of orthodox Israeli settlers in the Occupied Territories, xenophobic violence on every continent – even, to some degree, the "culture wars" in the United States – are only tangentially about politics or economics.

What joins them is the desperate and almost certainly futile counterattack of tradition.

THE EMPTY COUNTRYSIDE
There is no single definition of what "traditional" means, because genuine tradition is intensely local. But almost everywhere, its local details can be examined within a universal frame.

Except in the case of nomads, the old ways were rooted firmly in the land – in a very specific stretch of land inhabited by an identifiably homogeneous people. The earthy symbols and seasonal rhythms of the rural countryside have always been central to traditional society.

Nothing highlights its fate more graphically than the emptying out of that iconic countryside across the face of the Earth.

In the mid-18th century, an estimated 80-90 percent of Western Europe's population was employed in agriculture. In most of Asia, Africa and in all but a few scattered pockets of Colonial America, the percentage was between 90 and 95 percent.

Today, fewer than 4 percent of Western Europeans are engaged in farming, according to the International Labor Organization (ILO), and barely half of one percent of Americans. Between 1995 and 2005 alone, the overall percentage of citizens who worked the land in developing countries fell by an astounding 25 percent.

Worldwide, the figure is now down to one-third of the total population. In just 20 years, by some estimates, 300 million Chinese have deserted their traditional family villages for frenetic, hyper-modern megalopolises like greater Canton, Beijing and Shanghai. The urban population of China ballooned from 72 million in 1950 to 450 million in 2000. Since then, it has grown by another 150 million.

Among what statisticians refer to as "the least developed countries" – the poorest of the poor, the last strongholds of the changeless past – cities had fewer than 15 million residents in 1950. The total is soon expected to surpass 400 million.

What makes this significant, beyond its testament to rural despair in the Third World and productivity advances elsewhere, is that agriculture was humanity's principal social paradigm for 10,000 years, until the last decade of the 20th century.

We are pioneers on uncharted ground.

THE NEW EUROPE
Throughout all but the last two of those thousand decades, "nationhood" and ethnicity were synonymous in Europe, the glue that gave its societies cultural coherence and identity.

When demographic change did come, it arrived in the form of devastating conquest, but the epoch of such catastrophes largely ended with the Middle Ages. The most powerful of the nations that emerged in the 12th century retained their homogeneous character well into the second half of the 20th.

Then, suddenly, they were transformed nearly beyond recognition – not by conquest, but by traditional Europe's own plummeting fertility rate and a scant two decades of massive economic migration from the Third World.

Charles de Gaulle, who passed away in 1970, would be stunned by the street scenes of today's metropolitan Paris, where 1.7 million Muslims and half a million Buddhists and Hindus live among the "native" French. The population of Rembrandt's Amsterdam is 24 percent Islamic in 2008, due mostly to newcomers from Africa and Central Asia. The proportionate numbers are similar in Marseilles, Rotterdam, London, Vienna and Brussels, capital of the European Union.

This is where the most durable traditions – among natives and newcomers alike – meet their greatest daily challenge. And it is tradition, on both sides, that is losing ground. Even more than the United States, which has been negotiating ethnic diversity for two centuries, Europe is now the cutting edge of that watershed transition.

It is here, in what many Americans call "the Old Country," that the reassurances of shared history and tradition are fading most visibly. It is here that Roman Catholic churches are emptiest, and the Vatican's strictures on marriage and sexual behavior most blithely ignored.

It is here that vital links with the ancient past are most embattled, overwhelmed by an obsession with the present that was once regarded as uniquely American.

Every European nation has its furious anti-immigrant movement today. Like the tribal wars mounted by rural Serbs in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, they are monuments to a lost cause. The possibility that France's millions of Muslim immigrants – far less their children – will go back "home" to Algeria and Senegal, is no more realistic than that other second-generation transplants will return to the Auvergne and milk cows.

Their mutual home, their future, lies in the post-traditional crucibles of Paris, Marseilles or Lyon. It is in the immigrant quarters of Europe, and not Africa or the Middle East, where a modernized and secularized Islam appears to be taking shape.

ORPHANS
Neither romantics nor cynics are to be trusted on this subject. Troubled ambivalence is the only response that suits it. The twilight of the Old World should inspire deep regret and uneasiness – but mixed with equal measures of hope and relief.

Rural life in the past, the bedrock of tradition, was nothing like its hygienic depiction in museums or fun-filled summer festivals.

In Italy, where I live, overall life expectancy was under 50 years of age as recently as 1920, and is nearly 80 today. It's still a dismal 38 in Angola, where oil wealth has delivered the Internet, satellite TV and cell phones, without installing a decent health care system.

For 2,000 years, foreign relations in Europe were written in blood: a grim cycle of murderous wars provoked by dynastic rivals or hostile ideologies. Today, thanks to the European Union treaties, the Old World is a borderless collective enterprise, in which wars among such traditional enemies as the British, French, Germans and Spaniards are close to unimaginable.

Something, without question, has been gained with the vanquishing of ancient traditions.

Yet something extraordinarily meaningful, albeit very difficult to pin down, has also been lost. We are orphans now, shorn of our past and heading blindly into the future.