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The asylum seeker and the economic migrant get more than their due in raw weight of public animus. If there is a free pass, it goes to what we might call the refugee from boredom: those who flee cultural backwaters (as they see them) for the scintillating metropole. Clive James, who died last weekend, was the face and voice of this intrepid breed. “I’m an Australian first, but not foremost,” he once wrote, 50-plus years after quitting the place for the Old World. “Culturally, being a European defines me.”
The continent was the home of the art treasures that he had sampled second-hand in pre-Opera House Sydney, where he played Eroica on vinyl and tried to fathom the Metaphysical verse of John Donne. Europe beckoned in just the same way to Robert Hughes (who went on to America), Germaine Greer and other of James’s compatriots in an unreciprocated brain drain for which Australia would not be out of order to now send an invoice.
Back then, in the 1960s, Europe’s power to bewitch outsiders with its cultural riches was an unambiguous asset. As the continent feels its way gingerly into a very different century, I question whether that is quite so true.
Economists talk about the paradox of plenty, or the “resource curse”, whereby countries of vast mineral wealth find their development perversely retarded. With great advantages — so this theory goes — comes great complacency. The temptation is to coast on the proceeds from the natural assets. Sound habits of commerce and public administration are never formed because they do not strictly have to be. I spent my first five years of life in a supposed textbook case in point. We left for a reason.
I wonder if there is such a thing as a culture curse. Is Europe’s intellectual and artistic inheritance so prodigious as to constitute a slight drag?
The Old World languor that some blame on welfare and atheism has more to do with the availability of laurels to rest on
It guarantees the continent a minimum level of self-esteem, after all, which it might otherwise have to go out and earn through more contemporary endeavours. To have so little to prove to the world is a lovely but dangerous privilege.
And to speak of earthlier matters, culture also confers on Europe a generous living through tourist traffic alone. The continent has the most visited country on Earth (France) and the two most visited cities in the west (Paris and London). This is to say nothing of the Renaissance sites that have to all but ask people to stay away, lest they get loved to death.
Even without having to exert itself, then, Europe is assured a certain station in the world, if not in power then in prestige. In theory, this is a good thing. But then in theory, bottomless reserves of oil and iron ore are a good thing. The perverse consequences of lavish inheritance are the point here. The Old World languor that some conservatives put down to atheism and generous welfare, as though nowhere else has such things, might have more to do with the availability of laurels to rest on.
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None of which is to pretend that Europe is a unique store of genius. China and India are much older civilisations. But they have been poor enough recently enough to be inoculated against lethargy. The US dominated many or most art forms in the past century. But those feats are not so old as to (yet) be a source of complacency.
No, Europe is unusual in the extent to which it can monetise its cultural legacy, even its built environment, and draw status from it. If the result is a relative lack of energy, it did not matter when much of the world was cut off by ideology. It matters rather more in a century of ferocious competition.
“Even if I could make it home to die,” wrote an ailing James in 2016, “I would still, on the day before I did, be waking up in Europa.” His point was that Europe is a cast of mind as much as a territory. It can be “home” to anyone who cares for the sublime over all else. The challenge is to stop the heft of past glories weighing down the present. Perhaps the trick is to lure those, like him, who renew the culture even as they worship it.
Follow Janan on Twitter @JananGanesh or email him at [email protected]
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Source link : https://www.ft.com/content/be6b7e9e-11ca-11ea-a225-db2f231cfeae
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Publish date : 2019-11-29 08:00:00
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