Topic: The Role of Arts in the Process of Globalisation

Morning session, Oct. 18

Martin Jan Stránský
Mr President, Your Royal Highness, distinguished panellists, members of the audience, dear friends welcome to the third day of Forum 2000. Today is going to be devoted to the role of arts in the process of globalisation and I think that we have to automatically extend that to culture as well. My name is Martin Stránský, I am a Czech American physician and I live and work here in Prague. I publish several publications and I am also a commentator and member of the Forum 2000 programme committee. I would like to thank the committee for giving me the great honour of steering you along today.

I would like to introduce Martin Putna, who is sitting on my left, a literary historian and Director of the Centre for Comparative Studies here in Prague. He will present us with today’s questions. Dr Putna

Martin Putna
Since 1997 when Forum 2000 was launched, I have heard many interesting and inspiring speeches and contributions. However, there were also some that inspired me to think of a word to describe a new genre of literature, it is globalizační tlach. It is rather difficult to translate it into English, but it means ”globalisation blah blah blah” of professional participants of conferences on globalisation. I recommend that this term should be introduced into literary criticism, to the Czech language and perhaps to all languages of our globalised world. I hope that this term and that the scientific analysis of this new genre could help us to distinguish which speech has a concrete content and which is globalizační tlach or blah blah blah. I hope that Mr Havel who is familiar with another sort of blah blah blah, the totalitarian blah blah blah will agree with my proposal.

This day is devoted to arts and culture. In order to make this a day of concrete speeches and contributions, rather than a day of blah blah blah, I suggested that we invite people, who do something concrete, creators rather than conference attendees. Let us invite musicians, writers, film directors and architects to talk about their concrete experience with globalisation. Let us listen, let us ask.

Martin Jan Stránský
Thank you Dr. Putna. As you can see we have decided to set a slightly different tone for today. I’m going to do my best to be as provocative as possible and follow up on that. We do have an outstanding array of people here who are noted for what they do, what they have done and, I think, for what they are going to do. They include people in theatre, writers, musicians and journalists. Before we get started I would ask that we stay a little bit more informal today as there are less people here. Let’s ask some tough questions. Let’s ask ourselves what those questions really are. I would ask that we differ, so that everyone can disagree instead of coming together on a topic, so that we can find where those areas of disagreement are and then perhaps come together.

Our keynote speaker today is Wole Soyinka, a gentleman who has devoted his life to the struggle for democracy in Nigeria. Like many of our former dissidents, he himself is also no stranger to persecution or the jail cell. Mr Soyinka is a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature and the first African to receive this award.

Wole Soyinka
Contact, resistance, accommodation and/or assimilation and of course - suppression - these have always constituted the history of cultures and their arts. The vexatious question has always been: what elements of one culture predominate in the incidence of exchange. If globalisation has taken on a negative import today, it is due principally to the fact that modern technology, as a vehicle of this exchange, appears to carry with it a cultural baggage of the lowest or crudest common denominator, with which it bombards the prostrate culture, dragging it down to its own facile, unreflective, mostly consumerist levels. It was not always thus, needless to say, and cultural encounters are not necessarily the lopsided one-way traffic that is increasingly apparent on the commercial circuits. And globalisation can even be a project strictly of the imagination. Would one be whimsical, for instance to refer to William Shakespeare as Europe's earliest globalised playwright? Quite a number of Arab scholars would stoutly defend such a notion, since they have gone to great pains to prove that he was really an Arab dramatist, thanks to his range of themes and evocation of credible local colour and geography in plays like Anthony and Cleopatra, his familiarity with the tale of Majnun and Leila, transformed into Romeo and Juliet etc. etc. These scholars claim that his real name was Sheik-el-Subair, a compulsive traveller who somehow got shipwrecked on the shores of England. Not to be outdone, I tackled the problem of the name of his wife, Anne Hathaway whom, I insisted, must have accompanied him on his voyages. With the aid of some Arab colleagues, I proposed that her real name must have been Hanna Hathawa, which translates into something like ' a saleswoman with russet hair'. I hope the Arabs here will forgive me for any violence done to their language but after all, it was their own scholars who started this fascinating theory.

To real-life provable instances however: my favourite example is that of an Austrian artist, Susanne Wenger, who encountered my world, the Yoruba part of Nigeria nearly fifty years ago. She went totally 'native', her painting underwent a radical transformation. Three years ago, she had a restrospective in Germany, at eighty years, fifty of which she had spent mostly in Nigeria. It was followed by some commissioned works for a festival in Portugal, where she exhibited together with some Nigeria batik artists whose works had influenced her and been influenced in turn by her. The contrast between her pre-Yoruba works and those created during her Nigerian sojourn - in the German exhibition - were truly startling. Susanne Wenger was an extreme case of cultural submergence. She adopted a Yoruba name, Adunni, took to the orisa, the Yoruba religion, was inducted into the innermost mysteries of that worship, becoming a priestess. She would sometimes go into a trance, emerging to recite the praise-poetry of her deity in a state of possessed inspiration. Such instances are not as rare as they are sometimes supposed.

Is the global adventure therefore not of a much more ancient order of artistic and spiritual relations than is sometimes suggested? This is not to propose a simplistic view of such a complex phenomenon as the evolution of cultures within distinct civilisations, formed by different environments, historic experiences, and even racial tempers. Still, clues are scattered all over the arts of peoples. I have remarked the unnerving affinity between the chanting style of certain ethnic groups in Senegal, or the Yoruba rara on the one hand and - the Portuguese fado, which, though the Portuguese claim Coimbra for its ancestral home, can also trace its antecedents to Brazil. And Brazil is that part of the South American world upon which African slaves not only left an indelible cultural imprint, but effectively domesticated the Roman Catholic religion, giving it its syncretic personality through the merging of Christian saints with African deities. The fado is a music of nostalgia, of loss, berevement, and longing. Is it altogether a coincidence that it did receive inspiration from voices of a different continent who shared the human anguish of severance?

Of the numerous African and Caribbean writers and essayists who have attempted to come to terms with the undeniable history of negation, of denigration of the African continent and its peoples, yet exhort with passion the need to transcend this unequal past of cultural encounters and enter a new humane order of relationships, none is more aggravatingly persistent than Léopold Sédar Senghor. Commencing - in company of Aimé Césaire, Diop etc. - with the concept of Négritude in a self-assertive separatist mould, he soon moved towards according it a destiny of the 'leaven' between cultures. Even the slave encounter was, for him, an instance of some lasting good emerging out of evil, in this case a triumph of cultural métissage - his favourite expression. Indeed, Senghor insists that the greatest civilisations of the world are products of métissage. It certainly explains, in part, his readiness to transcend the brutal processes by which such métissage came about: the end, or even the prospect of the end, justified the means:
Bless these people who brought me Your good tidings, Lord, and opened my heavy eyelids to the illumination of Your faith and opened my heart to knowledge of the world, bringing me a rainbow of new brothers. Yes, accuses Senghor, they did "light their campfires with my parchments, put my seminarians to torture, send my doctors and learned men to exile....destroyed my sacred images" - in short, they systematically destroyed my culture but, bless them anyway because they also: "opened my heart to knowledge of the world"! The impact of the global agenda of both Christianity and Islam on the African continent retains this undercurrent of ambiguous feeling, despite the seeming harmonisation.

From the moment that the exploratory adventurism of the Kon-Tiki sailors or a Ulysses, or the purely intellectual nomadism of a Herodotus translated into the setting up of settlements and colonies, we could claim that a creeping global destiny was already on the human agenda, no matter how ill articulated. Today's vectors of this agenda - from satellite communication and cyberspace to restless NGOs, contemptuous of borders and nations - are different of course, vastly different, and thus the tempo, and even the degree of consciousness of the process itself has indeed given birth to this complex expression that gives due recognition to what amounts to a quantum leap as well as qualitative distortions of a normal process of interpenetration. Commerce, perhaps the most insidious of all the vehicles of the same project, now proceeds, not by wind-blown argosies or desert caravans, but by jet propulsion and - most dramatic of all - on invisible neural pathways. Conglomerates and manipulators of market forces can destabilise societies and bring down governments which fail to obey commercial policies that are predicated on their vision, and accompanying strategies, of the world as one single mega-market. Culture, and the Arts, cannot expect to escape the consequences of this contraction of the world. The ramparts that we are obliged to defend are the ramparts of core uniqueness, revitalising the mainsprings of all cultures in a way to ensure that they are not swallowed up or pumped into an ocean of sameness. The virtual community, let us always insist, is no substitute for the creative community of humankind.

I undertook to speak of the Arts, but I must beg your leave to make a digression here, though in essence, I remain within the same territory of the imaginative consciousness. I am both a political and a mythological writer, and that latter means, in essence, that some of my deepest creative sources exist in the spiritual realm. Fortunately, much of what I had to state within this dimension was articulated yesterday by Dr. Karan Singh in a most inspiring and unforgettable address. He has spoken both for the poet and the philosopher in all sentient beings.

There is an unbidden, portentous and undesired guest within these elegant chambers. Its presence has constituted the sub-text of much of our discourse, and unquestionably most notably in the pained, restrained address of Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan. I must commend him on the controlled emotion of his address, infused however by a humanistic retention that was symbolised in his reading of the telegram from the Archbishop of Jerusalem. Like the rest of us, operating from within our disciplines, I have been moved to wonder just what role the Arts could play in a zone of hate, of torrid, in-bred hate that is watered daily even in prayers, hate as a beginning and end of education for generations, hate that has festered for so long in one of the most sublime spots of the world. The word 'Hate' has justifiably surfaced in several contributions. Hate that exceeds anything that Ireland ever had to offer. Or Sierra Leone. Or Rwanda. Now this is not a light admission for me, who have occasionally preached the therapeutic essence of the capacity to feel hate, even while insisting on the necessity to control it, lest it turn self-destructive. or irredeemably warps human nature. As for the role of the Arts when confronted with that genie once let out of the bottle, the answer that has troubled me this past week is that never, in all my nearly fifty years of mature creativity have I ever felt so intensely the feebleness of Art in the face of a comprehensive human rupture. And yet, ultimately, we know that the imagination triumphs.

Archbishop Ganda has addressed the issue of that spectre and called for some action from this Forum. I am in full agreement. If globalisation does have its virtues - which no one denies - certainly such virtues include the possibility that warring sensibilities may encounter one another in the neutrality of imaginative space, and begin to reduce the curse of attachments to the merely palpable. In short, or - more accurately - in a very long term, we may actually gain an autonomy of being that succeeds in eroding the foundations of nation as a walling-in concept, thus freeing the mind for a dialogue of humanity.

Desmond Tutu, in his recent book No Future without Forgiveness writes of the palpable aura of a church in which humanity has worshipped, in contrast with one that is only a structure of brick and mortar. I empathised with this claim, because I had experienced this strange infusion of inner serenity as I stood on Temple Mount in Jerusalem. It was a feeling that erased the particularist claims of any faith however, manifested itself simply as a pantheistic residuum of spirituality. You can smash and wall over shrines, engrave your own denominational symbols and graffiti over the preceding faith in any given space; the erstwhile spiritual emanation never evaporates. It seeps into the new, entwines and reinforces it. In short, centuries of changes of nominal faiths in the temples, mosques, shrines, churches, in the open spaces of worship, martyrdoms, meditations, communion and reverence that litter Temple Mount have resulted only in accretion, not in mutual cancellation.

Considering the gore and mayhem, the mutual massacres of that sere terrain, I know this to be a contradiction. I can only express, not explain it. Perhaps my response had to do with the subjective fact that a prospect for peace in my own land, Nigeria, had opened up only a day or two before my visit to these holy places, and an end to five turbulent years of nomadic existence seemed suddenly in view, like a gift, a blessing from the gods. In that frame of mind, I marvelled that three monotheistic faiths that had sprung from that same inhospitable womb -Judaism, Christianity and Islam - validate their theologies with a constant invocation of peace. Shalom is the daily creed of the Jews, twin to Salaam aleikum of the Moslems, while the Christians anoint their prophet the Prince of Peace. Yet, think what havoc have been wreaked by these several columns of the world’s spiritual edifice by their embrace of the doctrines of the Jihad, and the Crusade!

When one stands on Temple Mount, where prophets and sages, pilgrims in their millions from three different tributaries of one spiritual Source have left their devotional imprint, one is tempted to propose that this is probably the most spiritually saturated terrain on the globe. I am not Christian, Jew, or Moslem . My spiritual empathy and the mythological fount of my creativity is the world of the orisa, the deities of the Yoruba. Despite this however, and despite the contempt and savaging that this ancient, unassuming religion has received from both the Christian and the Islamic religions, I consider Jerusalem as the spiritual navel of the world.

Religion is a structured channel of spiritual intuitions. I have no patience with religions which claim divine authority or infallibility. I join with the Dalai Lama, with Karan Singh, with the humanist philosophers of the world in extolling the cultural glory that have emerged from such religions, the sublimity of their architecture, I concede them their inspired hymns, anthems and symphonies, concede even their mesmeric liturgies, their poetic mantras, the challenging exegesis of their theologies but - I demand their certificate of absolute knowledge and authority. And of course I demand acknowledgement of the unspeakable cruelties they have inflicted on mankind in the name of their deities. Oh yes, again I am in full agreement with Dr. Singh's emendation of President's Havel's observation, only I would put it more forcefully: the hubris of scientists who believe that each discovery is a discovery of the world is nothing compared to the destructive hubris of religions which insist that theirs is the only path to Ultimate Truth.

My world, the world from which I take creative inspiration is that of the orisa, one of those minority worlds that have surfaced from time to time, a world that has endured much contumely from the arrogance of the self-vaunting world religions, a world whose humanity is sometimes derided even today, whose denizens have been enslaved in their millions, shipped across to hostile continents East and West and turned into beasts of burdens, but who, without prosecuting any agenda of proselytisation, without waging a war of the Jihad or the Crusade on behalf of their deities, have nevertheless established their spirituality in alien lands, so that today, in Brazil, Cuba, Columbia, Haiti etc., the ethos of their homeland still rules their homes and their communities. You will understand therefore that I repudiate the word 'great' before any religion with a past in violence. The balance sheet between humanistic elevation and the dehumanisation of the world in the promotion of their dogmas is such that it reduces their stature below those little-known religions that have served their humanity without once spilling human blood in their own cause.

If however, despite its cruel history, the unique spirituality of that contentious space, Jerusalem, is conceded, then we must also concede its status as a world spiritual patrimony. But the potential land of peace has become a stumbling block to peace, not only for the Middle East but for the world. Jerusalem has attained a symbolic status that is unmatched by any other, and it would sometimes appear that, if only peace were attained in the Middle East, a beginning would have been made for an era of universal peace. An exaggeration perhaps? But then so are all faiths, and peace itself commences as an act of faith.

The voice of one who shall soon join the ancestors should not be left to echo and dissipate in the void. I refer to the Pope, who has again repeated his conviction that only the internationalisation of Jerusalem can guarantee lasting peace in the Middle East. "Internationalisation" is perhaps too loaded a political expression, guaranteed to drive the two contending parties immediately into their bunkers. I would plead that we simply proceed as mendicants to Israel and Palestine and beg for the gift of Jerusalem to us, as a cherished spiritual bequest. Implore both to turn Jerusalem over to the United Nations, demilitarise it entirely and, while retaining universal recognition as autochthones and primary landowners of that space, make the United Nations its custodian in every practical sense.

Leaving aside the solid ‘pagan’ foundations - North African, Hellenic, Roman etc. - of Jerusalem, foundations which are often conveniently understated, we acknowledge that the world owes much to Judaism, Christianity and Islam as creators of this unique civilisation and the effluence of its spirituality, but all three must also accept responsibility for centuries of bigotry and cruelty towards other religions, other cultures and civilisations - from the continent of Africa to the Americas, right up to their ongoing destabilisation of our peace. So let this be a gift to the world, but also an act of atonement, of penitence. The Pope is not a dreamer, and if he is, let him know company in a Yoruba writer from the spirituality of the orisa who, standing for the first time on Temple Mount, did undergo this very internationalist affliction. Within the millennial embrace towards which the world is inching, I cannot imagine a more profound, more magnanimous gesture, a gift of unmatchable sublimity that redeems the past, resolves an intractable issue and offers the world an example and a challenge in its quest for an elusive peace. Let the divided city, become a symbol of the unity of humankind.

Shalom. Salaam aleikum. Shanti....Shanti....Shanti....

DISCUSSION

Martin Jan Stránský
Thank you very much, Mr Soyinka, for an incredibly rich and textured speech, which certainly is going to get us started. You set up a triangle of religion, spirituality and the shrinking forces of the planet. You also put forward a very fascinating, concrete proposal that will serve as a focus for further discussion. As moderator, I have been making notes of which words crop up the most and after globalisation it is fear. If it isn’t fear then it is the word hate. I would ask the next speakers to think on their feet as to where those pockets of fear may be in the areas that they might be speaking about.

Our next speaker is Mr Mariano Plotkin Director of the New York University in Buenos Aires, he has a personal interest regarding the role of the intellectual in globalisation.

Mariano Plotkin
In this presentation I would like to discuss some ideas that constitute working hypothesis rather than original thesis regarding the role of intellectuals in Latin America in a context of globalisation from a historical perspective.
Globalisation is not a "fact", it is not a necessary category and it is not (or at least we do not know if it is) the final stage in the development of capitalism, and much less, God forbid, the "end of history". As the Dalai Lama pointed out yesterday, what makes different from the rest of mammals is our ability to articulate and learn from our history. I don’t think it is within my ability to introduce a new definition, I don’t think it makes any sense. I would say that we can characterise globalisation as a famous US Supreme Court judge characterised pornography,” It is something we can’t define, but we recognise it when we see it.” All of us can agree on that. In any case, and like everything else in this world, globalisation has to be restored to the contingencies of history. As I said,, it is not a necessary process and therefore has to be understood historically. Nothing in it is necessary, not even the use of English. Here I am, an Argentine speaking in Prague to a multinational audience in English. However, had this conference taken place one hundred years before, most probably it would have taken place in French and five centuries ago then probably in Latin. A century from now, who knows? Japanese or Arabic? Who knows?
I would like to suggest that globalisation,- I emphasise that I am speaking from a Latin American perspective- is the last of the "waves of moments of globalisation" in history, each of them developing within specific historical (meaning social, economic, political and cultural) contexts. Some things of this latest wave are very new, some others are not so different. A century ago, there were more international migrants than there are today, and certainly frontiers were much more open. It is also important to point out, as former President de Klerk did yesterday, that globalisation does not affect everyone in the same way. For most of humanity, Internet, computers etc., are not very relevant. Each of these waves could be characterised as moments when the world shrinks and there are dramatic changes in the internationalisation of economics, capital and finances and commerce, in the way the world is conceptualised.

I will talk about the very creation of Latin America. I emphasise the word creation, because it was a historical construction of the 15th century. Latin America was not "there" to be discovered. The discovery/conquest/invention/construction of Latin America was cause and consequence of a totally new conceptualisation of the world. In fact "the world" as a concept emerged closely related to the settlement of the Americas. Less than one hundred years after Columbus arrived in the Caribbean there were already well-established intercontinental enterprises and it was not uncommon to see a Spanish merchant established in Peru operating a company with branches in Seville and the Philippines. Production also became internationalised. The production of mercury in Slovenia affected the production of silver in Potosi, today Bolivia, and that had very tangible consequences in the ability of the Spanish crown to pay its enormous foreign debt, and therefore affected in very concrete ways the way people lived in Europe (taxation, prices, etc.).

Today it became almost a cliché to emphasise that any car is made with parts manufactured in different parts of the world. Similarly, however, in the 17th century, Belgian confectioners were making chocolate with cocoa from Venezuela, sugar produced in Brazil by Angolan slaves owned by Portuguese owners, who in many cases had made their fortune in India or China. Of course there are many differences too and there are more differences than similarities. If globalisation now is said to be dissolving the nation state, that could not be possible in the 16th century, when such an entity was not even thinkable. If anything, that was a "pre-nation-state" globalisation.
Interesting enough, this first wave of globalisation was closely related to imperialism as much as, we could argue, future waves too. Isn’t globalisation a new name for imperialism?

If the first wave of globalisation was economic, it was also cultural and intellectual. The discovery or invasion of America, the cultural contact with people who seemed to have been left out of the apostolic spread of the Word and who, nonetheless were able to build cities several times the size of most European cities of the time (and therefore were "civilised"), and the first circumnavigation of the world by Magellan, dramatically changed the way people thought of the world and their place in it. Chronicles of the conquest became immediate best sellers (by the standards of the time) and were translated into many languages. Like the new globalisation, the first wave also dissolved certitudes among intellectuals (nature of humanity, canonical readings of the Bible, development of modern science, etc.) America became "utopia" at that time.

Intellectuals played a central role in Latin America since early times. It could be said that the development of Latin America as a distinctive region was as much the product of intellectuals as it was of conquerors. From the early Catholic priests, who in different ways took for themselves the task of giving meaning to the new discoveries, to intellectuals who formulated regional and later national identities, the (in the words of Uruguayan critic Angel Rama) "ciudad letrada" (meaning both the urban and the intellectual aspect of the constitution of a Latin American civilisation) was an essential component of the Latin American development from early times. Those early intellectuals were of Spanish origin, others were of mixed origin. Such is the case of the Inca Garcilazo de la Vega, who used the symbolic tools of the Spanish culture to articulate his Inca past. Culture became both a tool for oppression and a tool for resistance and accommodation.

The second wave was the process of state building in Latin America, after the consequences of the wars for independence started to recede in the mid-19th century. This consolidation of the nation state was a cause and a consequence of the incorporation of the region into the re-emerging world market, now dramatically expanded and redefined by the second industrial revolution and the revolution in communications (transatlantic communications, shipping, etc.). The particular manner in which this incorporation took place gave rise to what has been characterised as a "neo-colonial order". Formally independent republics became providers of raw materials. European travellers in Argentina in mid- 19th century were surprised to find that local Mestizo cowboys, the Gauchos who lived otherwise in precarious conditions, nonetheless wore "ponchos" manufactured in Manchester and used cutlery made in Sheffield that resembled that made in Toledo. Needless to say this second moment of globalisation also generated vast groups of excluded people. In Latin America, states were born before a national identity was articulated.
The emerging republics had to give themselves a national identity to support them, unlike in Europe. A new breed of intellectuals took the task of articulating this national identity. These identities, as well as the intellectuals who constructed them, were also "globalised". What did it mean to be a Latin American? For liberal intellectuals of the 19th century, national identity could only be constituted through the rejection of the past. The colonial past was perceived as an economic, cultural and social burden, whereas the ethnic composition of the societies was seen as a racial burden.

Both factors conspired against the project of modernisation inspired in Europe and to a lesser extent in the US. The reception and development of ideas was not in synchrony with the social, economic and political development of Latin America countries. This is why Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz talks about "ideas out of place" when referring specifically to the development of liberalism in 19th- century Brazil, a country where African slavery constituted the backbone of its economy until late in the 19th century and which was the only monarchy in the hemisphere. In Latin America, modernity has been always something in the future, a project and not something concrete, a reality. However, it was the idea of modernity that articulated the process of nation building.

A third wave of globalisation occurred in the 1960s. New media (TV, electronic radio, the beginning of computers), new technology (jet planes, etc.), and deeper internationalisation of capital (and culture,- the 1960s was a decade of proliferation of mostly American foundations) developed and changed the way people saw the world. The first televised war, the Vietnam War, and the televised landing the moon constitute symbols of those years. That had important cultural consequences for Latin American youth. What was happening in China, Vietnam, Paris, Prague and Africa had sometimes more centrality in the imagination of young leftist intellectuals than their immediate reality.

The decade of 1960, the starting point of which in Latin America coincided with the Cuban Revolution, was the golden age for intellectuals in Latin America, a moment when the intellectual left hegemonised the field. By combining nationalism and revolution in the context of the cold war, the Cuban Revolution opened the door for Latin American intellectuals to become the spokespeople of the "great Latin American fatherland". Those years were years of intense intellectual activity in Latin America, from the "literary boom" (some names are well known to everybody: Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, and so on), to the centrality of the role of some intellectuals in the political realm.

The importance of Cuba for Latin American intellectuals cannot be over-emphasised. Cuba became, in the words of historian Tulio Halperin, the Caribbean Rome, which reformulated the mechanisms of consecration within the cultural field. A prize of the Casa de las Americas was a necessary requisite for writers to be incorporated into the emerging new Latin American canon. However, the Cuban experience also redefined the political compromise of progressive intellectuals (a moment in which the left hegemonized the intellectual field in Latin America). They became spokespeople of the revolution. All this gave them a visibility and a centrality that they had never had before; in some sense one could talk about a redefinition of the concept of intellectual in those years.

The increasing level of political involvement of intellectuals undermined the very foundation of their role as independent critics, and this would have serious and terrible consequences. Intellectual work became another way of doing politics. The Sartrean "committed intellectual", that archetypal figure of the 60s, gradually gave way to the Fanonian "militant intellectual". Intellectuals could only justify and legitimise themselves in political terms. This coincided with a second moment when Cuba became much less hospitable to critical intellectuals than before.

In any case, the period of political euphoria would not last. If the sixties had been a period of unbounded revolutionary optimism, the seventies would mark a point of inflexion. The political passion that had started to undermine intellectuals´ autonomy was drawn in blood. Military coups in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay (earlier in Brazil) and elsewhere, brought up military government of a new and more murderous breed (in Argentina alone 30,000 people were "disappeared" without leaving trace). Among the first victims of this wave of terror unleashed in Latin America were critical (mostly leftist) intellectuals. The dismantling of democratic institutions was followed by the dismantling of cultural institutions.

The fourth and final period of globalisation saw the democratisation that took place since the mid eighties when military regimes started to collapse as a result of their own ineptitude coincided with the crisis of Marxism both as an interpretative doctrine and as a concrete political and economic system. Crises of previously hegemonic doctrines, re-democratisation and globalisation of culture have defined the universe in which Latin American intellectuals had to operate since the 1980s. In the new world there was no place for the pedagogue-apostle intellectual of previous decades who would have a leading role in defining conditions for revolution.

Moreover, the new environment debilitated the natural framework in which Latin American intellectuals had operated and which they contributed more than anyone to create: the national state. The new wave of globalisation has had many consequences for Latin American intellectuals. The essentially image-centred forms of cultural transmission the ”ideosphere” in the words of Régis Debray seems to have displaced the world of letters, the "ciudad letrada", the graphosphere, the "natural" realm of intellectuals. The privatisation of culture has simplified the conflicting relationship between intellectuals and the state but also eliminated traditional sources of patronage for cultural production. Moreover, the neo-liberal wave and its emphasis on the importance of the market as a space where pluralism naturally grows, proved to be very problematic. The emphasis on the market has changed the rules of the game of the intellectual field, its mechanisms of legitimisation and consecration, its symbolic systems of prestige, etc.

Most Latin American publishing houses, for instance - those who promoted the boom of the 1960s and who continued to support intellectual activity many times with very little profits - have been recently bought by large multinational corporations that cater to the market of best-sellers.

Intellectuals played a central role in earlier waves of globalisation. What is left for them in this new one? They are not nation- and identity-builders any longer, and in fact both nation and identity have been deeply redefined. They are not the spokespeople of revolution. The graphocentric culture that placed them in a prominent place is in crisis and it can be said that they do not even control the rules of the game of their own field.

However, I want to suggest that intellectuals can play an essential role in Latin America in the new century, while at the same time keeping the autonomy of their field of activity. First, intellectuals are key actors in the expansion and consolidation of the public sphere. In a moment of deep political apathy and lack of confidence in liberal politics, intellectuals can occupy the place left void by politics and serve once again as critical observers and interpreters of society: neither isolated in an ivory tower nor allowing their specific realm of activity to be phagocyted by politics, yet articulating universal values in the secularised world. It has happened that some of them have occupied the state themselves. . The replacement years ago of Fernando Collor de Mello (a neo-populist "non-political" president) by Fernando Henrique Cardoso (the archetypal leftist intellectual of the 60s who became a neo-liberal) in Brazil is significant.

A second area in which intellectuals can play a key role in the new order is by promoting "healthy" identities that are not necessarily tied to the concept of nation. If the process of construction of Latin American nations was based on homogenisation of the population and the erasure of differences through exclusion, the foundations of the new identities can be based on difference and inclusion. Some developments are taking place in that direction in Mexico, Guatemala etc. with the emergence of a new breed of Indian intellectuals, who, unlike their ancestors, do not reject their identity as Indians, but rather legitimise their intellectual activity in that identity, even after obtaining their university degrees in prestigious European or American universities.


Finally, another area of action opened to intellectuals is as articulators of the social memory. The horrendous experiences of the 1970s left deep scars in the social fabric of many Latin American countries. Although, still now, some sectors linked to the repression want to impose a blanket of forgetting, it is only through a painful work of memory that the process of healing and reconciliation can take place as the European experience of post World-War II. Intellectuals can articulate the process of recovery of memory not to encourage hatred and revenge, but as a way to come to terms with the past. Lack of history can be very dangerous. It is through the arts, history, and literature that the past can be turned into social memory and can be worked through.

Martin Jan Stránský
Thank you, Dr Plotkin, for illuminating something about a continent that is often neglected in these discussions as well as the role of intellectuals therein. Our next guest is Peter Gabriel, another guest who, I think, needs no introducing. He is of course the founder of the group Genesis, but also a propagator of ethnic music and runs WOMAD - World Of Music, Art and Dance. He has also been an activist in human rights and Amnesty International. It is a great pleasure to turn the floor over to Mr Peter Gabriel.

Peter Gabriel
Firstly, I would like to sign on to Mr. Soyinka's proposal of Jerusalem as an UN-managed area. I remember when I was a teenager and got very excited watching the Beatles on television on one of the first big satellite broadcasts singing: "All you need is love". I was full of hope. There seemed to be a spiritual message there and perhaps it was a very positive outbreak of a limited reach of globalisation. Now, if we are looking at culture in that role, I ask myself: What is culture? I remember that as young musicians we were trying to save money, so we would do the cooking for ourselves, and every night I would heat a bowl of warm milk, and "culture" was what I put into the milk to turn it into yoghurt. I still think that culture is tool for transformation. You still get the same stuff, but you shift it around a bit, and maybe make it into something different. It may also be a bit of an irrigation system, that creativity, ideas give us the chance to inspire, to challenge, to confront, and maybe to heal. Perhaps this is a time of flood, and I am a great believer in the possibilities of the technology.

As we see with the satellites and telecommunications revolution, the first things that we see are people eating the same hamburgers and wearing the same shoes, and as a few people have said, maybe it is the lowest common denominator that is coming through the irrigation system. So, I think it needs to be opened up and I think access is critically important.

With my only personal experience with globalisation - I think that has been a transforming experience - twenty years ago, a group of us were getting fascinated by music from other cultures, partly because I am a failed drummer and I was getting very bored with some of the rhythms that I was hearing, and it seemed to be a lot more interesting rhythms that were coming from other countries than what I was hearing on our radio. So, a group of us, we could only find some of this music in two record shops in London, so we started trying to put together a festival to promote music from many countries and we were told that it would be a disaster by all the music industry. Financially, they were right, but in every other way they were wrong, and we managed to keep it going. In that process, we would get groups of different musicians together, most of whom could barely communicate with each other through language, but when we sat down and started making noises together, you know, there was the initial animal process - sniffing each other out, and then we find ways to communicate. There was a fantastic feeling of warmth, when you managed to get through and find some common place to meet and to talk and to express yourself.

There is also with globalisation the issue of the benefits of a sort of mono- or multi-cultural society, and in my country it was very difficult in my field to hear songs sung in any other language than English. Now, I am pleased to say that it is possible. Maybe not always in the top-ten, but there is an openness now and a willingness to hear people, to hearing their soul speak, even if you cannot understand the language and the entire content of what they are saying. Still, a lot of people would argue for some sort of racial purity and they do not openly and willingly accept the immigrant communities. If you actually look back, historically in most cultures, for example, in England one of the most quintessentially English cultural forms, perhaps, is Morris dancing, which is a strange ritual to many observers, but it is believed that this was originally a Moorish dance, which the sailors brought home. And I think in any culture that believes itself pure and one thing, you could look back into history and find many roots from a sort of multi-cultural travelling world.

Also, I think if you look at this spread of globalised culture, MTV is a good example. It started off thinking that perhaps they could feed the same sort of American diet to the rest of the world. Actually, what they found was that the local programming does much better business and I think that is a healthy sign, because in the gene bank, we find a lot of diversity. If you just have a lot of inbreeding, you get weak results and when you mix things up, you get hybrids, which have a lot of vitality. And I am sure the same is true with culture. When we try to preserve and protect cultures and languages which I am sure we must do in order to keep this wide variety - we should not just stick them into museums where they will perish without air, but they need to be outside, where they can be made appropriate and produce new offspring.

If a painter is working with more than one colour, he is working with a richer palette, but if he mixes the colours up too much, he gets this mud, this grey sludge. So there needs to be a balance I think, between how much we throw things together and how much we keep things apart. I also think that the role of mixing cultures has a chance to fight racism. It's through culture that we can begin to understand, and that's what our hearts and souls are crying for, to confront people different from us. I think that in many ways we all are racists, we were born that way, we are instinctively afraid of something that is different from us and it requires work to overcome that. That work is easy and a lot of fun, and I think creativity is great route for us to pursue that goal. Creativity and the arts often seem to be a reserve of the elite and I am a great believer that it should be opened to everyone.

I remember at school I could not play certain instruments because I was not good enough, and there was a limit and restriction in the sense that only the really talented should be able to pursue their artistic goals. I would argue that really all these arts are just languages and that they should be open and available to everyone, whether it's writing, music, painting, media. They are things through which we get self-worth, through which we can express ourselves, our suffering, our hopes, our fears and our spiritual aspirations.

Yesterday, we heard about experience becoming more important than ownership, and if there is a line which goes from information to knowledge into wisdom, then perhaps it is experience that shifts people along that line. I believe that we can accelerate the rate at which people have experiences through culture, through artistic experiences, through encouraging them to be creative and to take the tools for themselves.

As we have heard several times in this Forum, the Internet is irrelevant to most of the world population and most of the world's problems. I understand that only 3% have access to it. To me though, it's an enormous sign of hope, because through the Internet we have the possibility of putting the entire sum of man's knowledge, of man's culture from each different country, each different language, online and available to all people as an enormous resource. I believe that the free flow of information is a means of changing our world, politically and spiritually. I think it's fundamental that we make sure that the divide which exists between rich and poor, is not echoed in this digital divide. I would like to propose an initiative that all the computers that the richer countries are discarding almost every year, are as a matter of course sent to the developing world and that for every wireless device that is sold in the rich, there should be a one-for-one agreement that one is given away to the developing world, because it is those inequalities, as many speakers have pointed out, that cause bitterness and cause, in the end, disruption. I believe that this is a way of giving everyone a voice so that through the technology, we have the possibility each to become a radio-station, a television-station, for all the voices to be heard.

As we have seen with the government trying to stop the flow of information - Russia trying to hold back fax-machines would be an example - it is a little like standing in the sea and trying to hold the waves back. It is impossible. We are moving into that world. Let us just make sure that the quality of what is going down the pipes is as good as we can get it and that there really is universal access. I think it has an enormous potential to transform the world we live in, but unless we make sure that the growth, the digital growth, if you like, is moving at the same speed, than we are sowing the seeds of our own destruction.

I love the idea that peace is what happens when you learn to respect others and I think it is through culture that we can begin to feel and understand others and begin that process. I loved the Dalai Lama's image of the garden yesterday, and I, too, would echo that we need to make sure that we have many different flowers in bloom. Also, I appreciated Dr. Singh's reminding us that we are just on a speck of dust in the cosmos and perhaps I could finish with a conversation I had with an astronaut when he described the impact of seeing the world for the first time in space as a single entity. He said what a life-changing experience that had been for him, because he saw that any other divisions seem ridiculous.

Thank you.

Martin Jan Stránský
Thank you very much for bringing up so many interesting concepts, Peter. For example, of culture as a diet that we can get too much or too little of, but which we nevertheless do need. President de Klerk made the point that if more people than ever before are producing art and music, why do we produce so little great art and music? I would be interested in your views later.

I’d like to introduce our next speaker, Mr Ivan Klíma, an internationally well-known writer. He is certainly very well known in this country for his activities in the Prague Spring and for his international works such as My Golden Trades and other such books.

Ivan Klíma
I promise not to speak about fear and hatred and anything political and I don’t intend to give a short review of European history. I will try to add only a few remarks on culture. Let me start with a short comment on the role of art in the process of globalisation. I do not like it when someone determines the role or the goals of the arts in any time. I will try to formulate an answer that I find acceptable. The arts should send a personal message from the artist to the public.

I guess it was true thousands of years ago and it is true now in the time of globalisation. To send a personal message is quite logically connected with the character of the creator as well as with some tradition, religion and culture that the artist has inherited from his ancestors. Real art always has some roots, although that doesn’t necessarily mean national roots. For example, writers are mostly influenced by their native surroundings, language and culture. Even such writers as Kafka, who never mentions the real locality, apart from his dream America, was deeply rooted in the special milieu of Czech, German and Jewish Prague.

Two or three years ago I took part in an EU conference on the arts in The Hague. Some speakers expressed the fear that new global trends in culture will endanger the specific shape, originality and national identity of the culture of small nations. I guess it is either the wrong explanation or the wrong expectation of some problems in the field of cultural values. I shall mention an example of Czech literature on the world stage. Never before were so many Czech books translated into so many different languages. The most successful books by Hrabal, Škvorecký or Viewegh are rooted in the ground of the author’s homeland in its specific features, customs and traditions. Even the most popular books by Milan Kundera were written before his emigration and were closely connected with the Czech, or rather Moravian, experience. Every good literature touches common problems, which means it addresses people all over the world.

The new global situation brings a different and subtle problem, which I should like to touch on. Over the past years people’s notion of the world has changed rapidly. The new era brings an avalanche of information. It is commonly said that the world has shrunk, because we have ongoing information about food in China, tornadoes in Florida and we can read books translated from Icelandic. In fact the world has not shrunk. On the contrary, its dimensions defy our powers of imagination. Every time I visit the Frankfurt Book Fair, my head spins at the hundreds of thousands of books that swamp the market every year. However interesting or exciting they may be, I will not know a thing about them. The problem doesn’t lie only in the process of globalisation, it is connected with the dimension of contemporary mankind. Six billion humans of different races and cultures live in millions of cities, towns and villages. This quantity is already beyond our comprehension, this also includes thousands or more likely millions of singers, writers, painters or actors.

In developed countries - as Mr Peres mentioned yesterday - we have many more artists than we have peasants. This quantity leads to resignation of many. People are lost in the labyrinth of culture. It is much easier to enter the realm of pure entertainment. Even the minority that refuses to follow them needs to be able to visualise the realm in which they live, where the quantity of information is not beyond their imagination. What can they do? What are we all doing? We choose some representatives from one cultural sphere and we change them into symbols or idols. We are not recognising literature any more as a complicated, structured and living body, as we are reading only a few examples of it. Only then can we extol their greatness and their talent, we can ponder on their life stories and talk about them with others. That is what I am afraid of. People have always had a tendency to adore idols, but today people select them from professional image-makers, mostly film actors, musical groups; occasionally they are joined by some writer or composer, if he is a winner of some important prize, or by a painter who produces some provocative work.

So our overcrowded world is gradually disintegrating into a small circle of people that associate with each other and a handful of people, whom they never meet, but whom they admire as symbols, very often as the wrong symbols of creativity and talent. Culture is a river of many streams and can never be reduced to one or two idols. Culture should bring some integrated picture of life, but the idols do not integrate; they rather epitomise or symbolise our lives. It is up to us in the arts to persuade the public that life deprived of the arts is life deprived of one important dimension.

Martin Jan Stránský
Thank you very much, Mr Klíma, for talking so eloquently on art and literature and giving us your perspective of a world that in your view is expanding but is threatened by reductionism and the creation of pockets within.

Our next speaker is Martin Porubjak, who is the President of the International Theatre Institute of Slovakia as well as being the literary advisor of the Slovak National Theatre.

Martin Porubjak
To speak about globalisation and culture in this town does not lack a certain paradox. Gothic and Baroque artistic monuments in Prague represent convincing evidence of the value of meeting and penetration of artist’s creation from a different part of the world. I might object that Europe is not the world, that Rudolf II was not American, that the turn of 16th and 17th centuries was still a little bit different from that of the 20th and 21st centuries and that Umberto Eco's admiration of a varied cultural environment of Rudolf II and Arcimboldo's paintings is only a nostalgic sentiment of a European intellectual. It is possibly a sentiment, but it is a sentiment towards a lively mixture of works of the European artists, which were characterised by their uniqueness and variety, not by uniformity. European "globalisation" in the 16th century was not standardised as the series of portraits of Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol.

Let us move, however, four hundred years later and try to contemplate about the present condition and mainly about the sense of such a peculiar phenomenon as a theatre, in the country where theatre played an important role during the last century, as in many other similar small European cultures, in the period of national revival. This heroic stage is definitely behind us now and the important social and political function of 19th century theatre is over - not only in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, but also in Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, etc.. The second half of the 20th century "endowed" this European area with the communist totality, when the theatre in its most redeeming expressions acquired its critical social ethos and significance once again. Dramatist Václav Havel could speak a lot about this, as well as Slawomir Mroźek, Andrzej Wajda, Konrad Swinarski or István Örkény - the two last named, of course, if they were alive. All of them participated in the struggle of ideologies in their respective theatre cultures.

"Out of all the ideologies which dominated our century and had a horrible impact on our destinies, capitalism is the only one left. Everything is now calculated and foreseeable. We all know that the genetic technology will characterise the next century. We can feel that thanks to the new media it will be marked by mass communication. Those will be the media festively promising the global interface and communication amongst people on one hand, but on the other, they will reduce or even make impossible the immediate contact among human beings." This is the prognosis of Günter Grass pronounced in Gazeta Wyborcza in the interview with Mark Orzechowski.

I do not want to argue against it, but if it really holds, it represents a challenge and a chance for theatre where human contact is the most essential phenomenon. Even during the times of communist totality this very human contact was the most attractive in theatre. If you visit "Divadlo na Zábradlí" (Theatre at the Railings) where Havel's plays were first staged in the 60s, you will be surprised by the "pocket" size of this theatre. There were dozens of such theatres in the former communist Czechoslovakia, not only in Prague and Brno. Their attractiveness, strength and grandiosity consisted in their "small size" only increasing the immediate human contact.

During the worst period of the 70´s, most of the theatre activities "withdrew" into an even smaller territory, into "apartment theatre" of Vlasta Chramostová, Radim Vašinka. The miniature occasional rented premises, where Ivan Vyskočil, Ján Vodňanský and many others performed, or the periphery pubs where the first and final nights of Havel's Beggars Opera were staged. The youngest theatres preserved the sense of values in the period of a general "crisis of values". The essential thing there was an immediate human contact - not only with the public, but also between them. The first common project of small theatres and groups were performed. Paradoxically, the gradual agony of communist system was a great era of small theatres.

The critics of the modern victorious and dominant system - capitalism - which according to Grass "behaves as a madman", and the critics of its product: globalisation, speak again about the crisis of values. Jeffrey Sachs talked about this with enthusiasm, and quite convincingly last year. Timothy Garton Ash discussed that aspect of globalisation, "which is trying to spread the only model of world society" and "the reality of the new aquarium in Central Europe" he characterised as "a bad kitschy copy of the existing West." And he quoted Ivan Klíma, who said: "We have a new God. The new God is called entertainment." Mass entertainment was not embarrassing, even for the communist regime.

Along with the official spectacular regime "cultural activities", a servile distraction was among the preferred and supported goods. The most popular programme on East German television was a primitive show: Ein Kessel Buntes, exported to other East European television stations, and popular also in West Germany. The tastes of Erich Honecker and Franz Josef Strauss were exceptionally in harmony here. "The proletarians of all kinds of entertainment join together!" the famous communist slogan could be paraphrased like this. The East European series were already at that time a kitsch copy of western series and today they are only a little more polished and technically improved. The stupidity remained the same.

In the present world the mass entertainment is being macdonalised. It is exchangeable, easily "portable" and understandable. It is short-term and standard. This kind of show business is being successfully globalised. Can it be referred to as a culture, and mainly at this forum called "Culture in the Age of Globalisation"?

Freedom is a variety. Nothing else was the objective of those small theatres, semi-legal cultural events and alternative activities in the communist era. If the official ideal was an entertained and applauding consumer, all those small alternative theatres respected and perfected human uniqueness and maintained a direct and open contact with a non-anonymous play-goer. Open and allied communities were established, as it should be typical for a civic society. In that consisted their alternative against the totalitarian collectivism. The individual human being was the most important, not the state, a unique human experience and personal authentic statement, not a doctrine.

Currently we are surrounded by the East European caricatures of a consumer global pop-culture: not only in television advertising, but also in the populist practices of political parties, in corrupt business, shameless arrogance of the might of money. How does the theatre react to this? Definitely, also by spectacular mega-projects. If you walk the streets of Prague these days, you will come across a higher number of small original theatres, alternative groups, ambitious smaller and bigger festivals, allied artistic and play-goers' communities. All around there, an immediate human contact and lively communication is being cultivated. That world is not closed, it is open. It is unbelievably pluralistic. This variety and immediate communicativeness is a natural alternative for uniformity of globalisation, the same as in the former regime it used to be an alternative for uniformity of totality. The ambition of this kind of theatre and culture is not short-term entertainment, but an authentic and fundamental reflection of the human experience.

I do not want to spread an illusion here that such a theatre can change the world. By no means can it knock down the God of mass entertainment. Of course, it is minor, elite, small. But: "Small is beautiful!" in that "new aquarium in Central Europe" there are some quite nice and jolly small fish running around. They are successfully increasing their numbers and they cannot be eaten up.

Martin Jan Stránský
Thank you for bringing up theatre for its role in terms of human contact, from the time of the Greeks till today, as well as its social and political implications. There are few who would argue that this country was not helped in its quest for freedom by the theatre.

We are right on time so let’s go for coffee break.

COFFEE BREAK

Martin Jan Stránský
Mr Soyinka has informed me that he will need to leave before noon. So if you see him leaving it is not a sign of personal indifference at what is being said and we should try and focus some of the questions at him first.

The second half will start off with our Students Forum speaker, and afterwards we will have some time for questions. We would ask you to limit yourselves to questions and not short speeches, not that they are not interesting but we find that it is the questions, especially directed at a member of the panel that create the best atmosphere for discussion. Before I introduce the Students Forum speaker I would like to say that I have had the pleasure of moderating that Forum as well. It is a vibrant dynamic and very energetic forum and I think that you will agree that they are no exception this. For me it is not an easy task to moderate here and you can imagine what it is like to give a speech in such distinguished company. To all the students in this room a round of applause please.

Fritjof Capra
And to you for moderating so brilliantly.

Martin Jan Stránský
So to all the students here.

(Applause)

Martin Jan Stránský
Thank you Mr Capra. So our first student is Mihoko Ito from Japan and she studies on the field of culture and international relations.

Mihoko Ito
I have been wondering why I was given such a difficult topic, which does not have a right or wrong answer. Actually I am studying public administration, which is not related to culture at all. I am not in the performing arts like some of the speakers. Finally, something entered my mind last night. Perhaps the organisers of the Students Forum thought of me as an artist when I sing karaoke in bars. It was only in the late 1990s when the Republic of Korea started to import Japanese culture, such as movies and pop music. To be honest with you, for me personally, this news was more surprising than the collapse of the Berlin wall in Europe. Due to the sad, past the South Korean government had been prohibiting people from engaging and enjoying Japanese culture. Thanks to the increase of access to the Japanese arts, more and more Korean people, especially the young, started to learn Japanese. I think that that this is really an amazing thing between two neighbouring countries in Asia, brought together by arts.

As one of the participants of the Students Forum 2000, I would like to talk about the relationship between arts and education. First of all what are the arts? It could be plays, music, sculptures, painting, computer graphic art and even cartoons. What kind of roles have the arts played in the time before globalisation? Even primitive people painted and made sculptures. I think that there are three main roles.

Firstly, art is a great way to send a message to all kinds of people, even in the future. Recognition by others is one of the basic human needs. Dancers dance to be recognised and share their happiness and sadness with others. People have been using arts as a tool to understand the various kinds of messages from history through to dreams, as Mr Gabriel mentioned. How many of you here visited museums, when in foreign countries? Weren’t you there to learn about the local history and people you were visiting?
People need to show that they belong to a group, for example a religious, ethnic, cultural group. In my country, each region has its own traditional folk dance and music. Through dancing these dances at the local summer festival every year show their identity. I assume that all of you here have one form of art that reminds you of your own roots.

Furthermore, in the wake of the 21st century, another role of the arts has been emerging. I believe the biggest role of arts today is to challenge us with providing many choices. Nowadays we can see many kinds of arts around us; maybe we are living in a flood of arts. As former President de Klerk mentioned yesterday, we are following the same culture, like music and cartoons, wherever we are. I myself enjoy watching flamenco by Christina Oios from Spain and films such as Gone with the Wind or Life is Beautiful, in Japan. In your case you may watch films by Mr Kurosawa or your children or grandchildren may love Pokémon. If you don’t know anything about Pokémon please read today’s paper.

Arts are intermingled internationally everywhere and the arts are challenging us as we can choose from thousands of different types of arts. Since we are swimming in this flood of the arts, education is important to keep swimming ahead so that we do not lose our own identity. We should have a certain insight so we can admire our own culture as well as the global culture. This insight can be established only through active participation in the learning process. Such education should take place not only in schools but also at home and within ourselves, amongst each other as we students, demonstrated here in Prague in June.

We should not forget that education helps us to become mentally richer with sharing our favourite arts. As the Dalai Lama said yesterday, the arts give us a mental level of happiness. However, if we make a mistake we could be brainwashed in the worst case as has happened during wars. We can only rely on our ability to make decisions sharpened by education. Let me go back to Pokémon. Some of you may be worried by the bad influence of Pokémon. However, my understanding of Pokémon is not teaching children how to beat up each other. It is stimulating children’s brains in how to run. I cannot memorise the hundreds of monsters, but children are willing to memorise them all. They can also share time with their friend playing Pokémon card games.

One of my friends who is teaching English at Junior High school in Japan told me one interesting story. She used have a very difficult time in motivating her students to learn English. One day one of her friends brought a big Pokémon poster with the names of all the characters in English. Suddenly, the students voluntarily asked the teacher what their favourite Pokémon characters were called in English and slowly they began to learn English. I believe that this shows how to choose arts and how to use them.

I would like you to think of the importance of the arts. It is the only field where we do not judge others by their nationality, age, gender, able-body or physically handicapped, social status, homosexual or heterosexual. We are all equal under the arts, even younger people who dropped out of school can become world-renowned artists. At that point they are no longer losers. We do not need to compete with others in the arts even though we live in a world where to push others aside and to get more is the best achievement.

There is no other way. The arts can breach the divide between different people and different centuries even, because we are all lonely and wandering around trying to find something to share.

Thank you.

Martin Jan Stránský
Thank you very much, Mihoko, for telling us that art is a choice and bringing us so nicely back to where Mr Wole Soyinka started. Without further ado I’d like to ask our distinguished panellist if there are any questions.

Fritjof Capra
Just a quick comment on Pokémon. Maybe its uses are different in Japan to what they are in California. In California it is banned in many schools as it has an in-built capitalist and consumerist streak which is very dangerous for our children as you said at the end, to push people aside and win more is exactly the idea of the Pokémon game. I would like to nominate Harry Potter for children to read.

Martin Jan Stránský
Thank you. Anyone else. Yes, Mr Singh.

Karan Singh
I would also be in favour of Harry Potter. I don’t understand why our civilisation is obsessed with monsters. There are dinosaurs, brontosaurs, the most horrible creatures. Instead of moving forward to, wards symbols of beauty and harmony, we seem to have this weird anathema emerging from the depths of our consciousness. I think that you can’t move in America for all other dinosaurs. Whether America itself is becoming a dinosaur I will not comment on. There are too many dinosaurs around nowadays.

Martin Jan Stránský
As a physician, I might offer a different explanation: that we are programmed towards fear and to be aware of our enemies, which does ensure our survival. That is an altogether different topic. Yes, Peter.

Peter Gabriel
I would just say that many of the guardians of heaven were in fact monsters, and only by confronting the monsters can you in fact see the beauty.

Martin Jan Stránský
Hazel Henderson, please.

Hazel Henderson
I would like to pick up on the advertising media, who I think are the only corporations that have absolutely no social conscience. They believe that because of the edict of the freedom of the press that they have any kind of licence. An antidote to this is very important. One of the things that I would like to contribute is part of a piece I am giving at the UN University in Tokyo on capitalism and ethics at invitation of Professor Hans van Ginkel. This is a list of obligations of global corporations because there is a big movement in the world, totally unreported, of corporations voluntarily signing on to codes of conduct, ethical standards. This sounds like a very weak kind of sanction, but we have no international law that can handle these issues. As corporations sign on in these codes of conduct and are willing to have them audited by outside firms, this very soon comes into a body of international law. I would like to offer that there is a list of global obligations.

I mentioned the Earth Charter, which came out of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and is based in Costa Rica in San José. This has gone on now for ten years across the world, looking for the global minimum. What are our responsibilities to each other, other species and the biosphere? And its now a very robust document, launched in The Hague by the former Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers and the Queen and other dignitaries. This is the way I think we can get international law up from the grass roots.

Martin Jan Stránský
This I think brings the question of institutions. Do we work with existing institutions or do we create new ones? Is there another question for the panel? Yes, please.

Takeaki Hori
My colleague mentioned Pokémon, and as one of the only people who know it, coming from Japan, I feel I must speak, as my colleague from California spoke of it. Not to defend it, but is a great invention in Japanese pop-culture. If you look at the game, what sort of an idea is behind Pokémon? It goes back to human nature. It’s killing and kicking among more than 150 monsters. It is to do with human nature not intellectualism. When you look back at your childhood, everybody is trying to satisfy their curiosity, by maybe running out into the forest. At Junior High school some people collected butterflies, some collected cigarette label or matches; everybody has an ownership mentality. I think that it is dangerous if this continues above an infantile fantasy to the stage of fighting for territory, for Prime Minister or other things. Pokémon, and I’m not defending it, came about through human nature not intellectualism. When you are an adult you should try to hide it. I simply wanted to explain why Pokémon is so popular.

Martin Jan Stránský
I think that by debating Pokémon so much we are certainly helping the Pokémon cause. Yes please, I can’t see down that far, please identify yourself.

Jostein Gaarder
I didn’t have a defence of Pokémon. I would like to defend the dinosaurs, because many young boys especially have a fascination with dinosaurs that is an awe for our natural heritage. We’re talking much about culture, although we are not descended from the dinosaurs, they are our uncles. I see that this is very important attention among young people towards our natural heritage. If you go just 300 million years back, then our branches meet. I feel more related to dinosaurs than to bats. I have five fingers like a dinosaur and I feel better than being compared to a bat. I really think that it is fascination of our belonging to nature. So let’s hear it for the dinosaurs.

Martin Jan Stránský
I called for a lively debate and I think we’ve got one.

Peter Scott
I’m not going to talk about dinosaurs, I’m sorry. I wanted to make a comment of commercialisation of art and culture. I think it’s very easy to demonise the mass media’s role in this. In a sense we buy the newspapers, we watch the television, we buy the products that advertisers advertise, so we are complicit in these arrangements, particularly people who live in rich countries, who drive the media. I must say I feel very uneasy on any restriction to the freedom of the press with whatever benign intentions, with standards. I see this as a slippery slope that ends in censorship, which doesn’t just censor the bad as the people of this country know, but we all have our examples of censorship of what we would regard as creative matter. I think we should turn to the concentration of the ownership of the mass media. We don’t have any response at the moment. The second is probably a very leftist view, but I think that the state or the public sector should have some role in developing culture as a counterweight to some of the power of the market. We should go down these two roads by asserting the public service element and attacking the ownership of the press instead of restricting the expression of the mass media.

Hazel Henderson
I do agree with you about the ownership of the press and the self-censorship that even the best editors and reporters bring upon themselves, as they know that owner has some relationship with the advertiser. We also have to understand that no right is absolute. Absolute freedom of the press is not what we have anyway. You do not have the right to ”cry” fire in a theatre. In our global village, in a media sense, our theatres are often cities. We have seen copy-cat crimes often because of the portrayal of terrible violent acts. It was a case in Britain, if you remember, where two little boys saw a film, which had a detailed murder of a four year old child. These two little boys re-enacted the scenes from the film and killed a little boy. The way it was tried in Britain was appalling: they had the two little boys in the dock and not the Hollywood producer or the New York Times who reviewed it, or the company that produced it. In no country in the world do you have the freedom to sell heroin or cocaine in advertisements. So there is a lot of re-thinking about the freedom of the press. I know it is a very sensitive subject, especially in Eastern Europe.

Martin Jan Stránský
Thank you, Hazel. The next speaker will be Gavan Titley.

Gavan Titley
I just wanted to make two points - which I think need to be separated - on the media. One is the political economy of the media itself and its organisation as a global business. The other is its reception, regarding Pokémon, etc. It’s very dangerous to draw a linear line between the way something is produced and the way we read it and the way people view it in the socio-cultural contexts. What we need to look at is what are the resources of their cultural capital that they have in interpreting what goes on in the media. This depends on a number of factors such as formal and informal education that they have access to. It also depends on the different amounts of contrasting views they have of society. One of the big challenges for education and it surprises me that with a social actor of the scale and penetration of the media that schools have not instituted media literacy courses. What we need to look at in that area is for people to seek out a plurality of representation, particularly in these debates we have been having on tolerance and multiculturalism. Secondly to give the people the ability to critically engage, not simply to receive but to interrogate where that information has come from, where it was produced and how it is structured in the political economy.

Related to that is how the political economy of the media is structured. The keynote speech by Anthony Giddens on the first day mentioned a third arena of public space between the state and the market, which can guarantee discourse and dialogue for a society. The problem is that the public sphere has gone. The state entered the public sphere in Europe and other places in the 1950s and then in the 1980s the market took over. The classical models are gone. I would just like to suggest a few things mentioned by media sociologists of how to reconstruct the public sphere.

The first question is how to create some sort of representation in the media, allowing for the fact that the media is a commercial entity and that that cannot be restructured from outside. The question is how you can lay some responsibility on large media systems to be representative in a very real sense. There will be more people having a concept of cultural rights vis-à-vis the media, how they are represented, how they have control over their social environment.

The second point is to have participation in the media, be it through the new technologies or the classic old technologies. Thirdly, something that is denigrated in Europe and dead elsewhere is public service broadcasting, which is problematic, as the state should provide for its people. The question is: Are cultural resources fit properties for the market? Are they something that can be traded like goods? I think we all agree that the answer is no. So we have to decide what kind of freedom we want regarding the media. Are we to have people which have the capital to enter the media market to act free from state interference? Is there a role for the state to act on behalf of those who do not the means to act themselves? I think that this is a crucial question that we face now.

Martin Jan Stránský
Thank you for covering so much ground on the matter and so well. I think there will be a time for media literacy courses, but then there will be the question what should one critically evaluate and what not, etc.

Peter Gabriel
I think that the discussion on censorship is a very important one. There was a study done recently, where children were allowed to run wild in a supermarket for a month. The first week they fed themselves on just crisps, Coca-Cola, junk food of all sorts. By the end of the month they were eating fruit, vegetables, brown bread and fruit juice. They had not had any guidance; that was the direct result of being given the complete freedom of choice. Should there be allowed to be racism or how to make a bomb available in the media? Perhaps it is a wiser path than that of censorship. I look to the technology as providing some solutions. In my country there were two television channels. Now there are over a hundred and soon there will be millions. Instead of email we will be delivering stuff in multimedia and the filtering methods exist so we can find the stuff that actually nourishes us. This way we have a much better chance for all the minorities to be heard and for all voices to find their audience. The question of how you censor and what you censor is critical.

Martin Jan Stránský
If I may, I am going to prefer the panellists that haven’t yet spoken. Colm O’Cinneide

Colm O’Cinneide
A lot of the speakers today have emphasised the positive side of the massive expansion in cultural terms through IT, film and TV networks. I would like to say that often too much choice is as restrictive as too little choice. We are being presented with a sea of images, which very often we do not have the educational mechanism to sort out. This seems to have two effects, the first being that there is a sense of being disconnected from reality - being lost in a sea of images. If you have so much information and so much culture it is very often the images pushed to the foremost, the images pushed by the major corporations, that dominate. This is a concern and central to this in coping with the sea of images is education in culture so that you can filter images and how to deal with images. Gavan spoke of media education; we also need much greater cultural education. In the 1960s education ideologies there was perhaps too great emphasis on bringing out natural creativity and too little emphasis on looking at different types of creativity and dealing and interacting with these forms. I think that you need training in culture to an extent that will allow you to be able to filter through culture.

The second point I would like to say, backing up what Peter Gabriel said about the two young children in Britain: the James Bulger case. There has been a controversy in Britain over the past few months about whether the two boys actually saw the video in question or whether it was a story manufactured by the tabloids. It has become a very contested story, with different newspapers taking different sides. It is not a simple clear-cut case. We have to be very slow in regulating. It seems to me that regulating even at an informal level is less effective than training the individual to make the choices, to value what should be valued and reject what seems to be corrupt, useless or damaging. That’s where the key seems to be in not so much regulation but more education.

Martin Jan Stránský
I would like to ask Fritjof Capra to take the floor and then to ask for any questions from the audience.

Fritjof Capra
I would like to make a comment about Mr Soyinka’s last suggestion about Jerusalem being put under the administration of the UN: I would like to say that it is not a new idea, but the way it was presented was novel and it was put very movingly. You presented Jerusalem very movingly as a spiritual treasure of humanity as a whole. I think it would behove the Forum to support this suggestion and I would encourage the other delegates to make comments on it.

Hazel Henderson
On the question of censorship, of course you are right: we must look for alternatives. I have been working on a global public access channel called WE TV. The WE stands for we the people, the whole Earth. It is another gift from Canada, and the Nordic countries, Holland, Switzerland and Austria have all put money into a foundation so that they will have no influence whatsoever. It is a public/private partnership in which I am a partner. We are broadcasting to over 60 countries and we are broadcasting from the Expo in Hanover. We have just picked up another 80 million homes in China and we are trying to be the world’s first global, grassroots, public-access television channel. Women’s culture will be recognised for the first time and indigenous cultures will be showcased. I agree that the alternatives are preferable and I just wanted the alternatives to be known.

Martin Jan Stránský
Please carry on.

Christopher Lord
I think that pop music is clearly the most important vector of cultural globalisation as it reaches the young. I have a couple of questions for Peter Gabriel. What do you feel about gangster rap music, where the singers are actual gangsters and regularly get killed in shoot-outs? The second question is more complicated. It is true that MTV has for business reasons developed local operations, but the only people who can make it on to those are those that go through the commercial filter. That means that a lot of indigenous groups and local musicians who would be heard by the people are just not heard on MTV. At the same time as promoting some local pop stars they are broadcasting Celine Dion, Madonna and Phil Collins to every country in the world. Do you think that Napster and Mp3 and Internet methods will make a positive impact in getting music over to people?

Peter Gabriel
I am not a fan of Gangster Rap or its negative message, but I would defend its right to exist and be heard. I would agree with Colm in that example that education is better than regulation. As for MTV, I would accept that there is a commercial filter. I would argue that by accelerating the speed that we all get access to this Internet and wired world we will increase the chance for alternatives to MTV and should include traditional music. If you look at decentralisation of broadcasting, the pointers are that it will happen much more. I am hopeful that the big broadcasting powers will have less power in the future as a result of the spread of technology. Thirdly, on Napster and Mp3, I have made a stand as a musician, out of self-interest, that I think that musicians should get paid. There are already TV programmes and films available on the pirate places on-line and the same will apply to literature and journalism and any creative work. As a society we must decide as to whether someone who creates a piece of work has the right to a copyright to that, or whether everything is open and freely accessible to everyone. I can look at the Mp3 parroting of my music as free promotion, so thank you very much. For smaller artists or for artists from other parts of the world, 60% of their income is from the sale of records; that livelihood will be destroyed.

Martin Jan Stránský
Nestor Enriquez has asked to speak

Nestor Enriquez
I wanted to say some remarks on what Mr Chairman said this morning about the word ”fear” being frequently used. I will read my note. Fear and hate as classical human characteristics are impossible to avoid during the transformation to globalisation because this frequently mentioned is still just theory because we have not yet seen the transformation. We are all talking about how good it will be, but we have no guarantees, no security on how it will really affect our futures. Simultaneously hate feeds fear of the unexpected, because hate is a consequence of accumulated frustration at how history has created today’s civilisation. For people in developing countries there is a great potential for hate and fear of what globalisation can represent for them. For people in developing countries, there is a high level of hate as this history has not resulted in welfare for them. However, I consider globalisation as a good wish, as a good intention for the future of civilisation, which is unfortunately full of unexpected consequences and mainly obstacles on the way. If we look back in history we can find a lot of educated people who have made enormous mistakes in decision making. We see a lot of priests that have tortured and punished non-believers for thinking differently. We see governments that have used the death penalty as a frequent and unjustified way of applying the law in the aim of the common welfare, etc.

I wanted to say that from theory to practise there is a long way and it’s as long as big is the challenge to deal with adversity and our plans to what we consider an ideal future. If I relate this remark to the role of art in the process of globalisation, art is a natural way to harmonise and articulate human efforts to find practical solution to the everyday challenges. In other words, art is the oil easing friction in the cogs in the engine of society.

Martin Jan Stránský
I know there are still quite a few questions, but I have been asked to finish on time. You mentioned the long road and I think we have taken a small step today. We shall meet again in one hour.