To speak baldly of "Islam" is to risk being misunderstood--though, if so, we ought equally to apologize for referring to "the West." For more refined purposes we would need to decompose such portmanteau categories and recognize not culture clashes but long series of particular conflicts. We might then see that the world's problems lie less in the supposed obduracy of whole religious, cultural, or ethnic systems than in the way communities within them are sometimes hijacked by groups opposed to democracy, human rights, or even peace with neighbors. In a small compass, nevertheless, some virtual stereotyping is unavoidable.

Islamic and other Third World regimes thus span a broad spectrum. Local circumstances will determine the intensity and decide the timing of eruptions there in ways too various to predict. Opinions differ as to whether fundamentalisms represent a return to the past, or its last gasp; the eventual answer may depend on the success or failure of Third World economic growth. Nevertheless, there is a pattern of confrontation between old and new systems of ideas, within Islam and beyond, which promises no early end to unrest over a broad swathe of the earth.

Globalized sources of news and entertainment will doubtless extend the sway of English, but will not make this or any other language universal in the foreseeable future. The next stage is likely to be the replacement of regional by national languages, as in nineteenth-century Europe. Then, the process raised average market size but did not forge a unified market. Rupert Murdoch has claimed that Hindi and Mandarin will expand because the most popular television programs in India and China will be broadcast in them. The number of hurdles for anyone with goods or services to sell will accordingly fall, but the world market will remain segmented.

Despite the confidence of many people in the telecommunications industry, it remains uncertain whether cheaper means of diffusing information will increase freedoms. For by the same token the costs of governmental propaganda and control will be lowered. Linking up young graduates by the Internet is one thing, but it is another to expect whole populations to participate, or to assume that unfocused interest groups cut much political ice. Nineteenth-century European experience suggests a complex process in which, although the international flow of information is unlikely to be stemmed, it may yet be compartmentalized and its messages altered; at any rate there will be censorship or attempts to induce users not to act on the basis of much that they learn. Manipulation of the news has already become a major issue, in some places an industry. Censorship by the assassination of journalists in Algeria is the limiting case. If even the United States government wishes to have mandatory access to electronic traffic, we can expect overt intervention by authoritarian governments. Press reports state that Singapore examined eighty thousand user files in 1994, looking for "pornography and other outlawed materials." Outrage in many countries at the dissemination of child pornography and political or ethnic messages of hate is likely to be the Achilles' heel of the Internet, much as these things may be defended on the grounds of civil liberty.

That national authorities do wish to control thought is plain. The freedoms conferrable by new technologies will be resisted, and political as well as economic markets will be contested. What makes this so likely is the anguish with which communities possessing their own cultures and professing rigid public standards of morality are greeting the arrival of Western films, broadcasting, and investigative journalism. Examples of objections to Western cultural products are easy to find around the world.

After all, within the West itself there is resistance to cultural borrowing, sometimes between next-door neighbors. When the Cour Constitutionelle of France ruled out key parts of the bill to ban foreign phrases (English phrases), the Socialist Jack Lang, who had held the post of minister of culture (meaning minister of French culture), proclaimed this to be "a capitulation to free market ideas." That Lang's side lost, except with respect to documents written by civil servants, is seized on too glibly. A trend in France, accepted by left and right, is to widen the definition of culture. Beyond literature, music, and architecture, even historical food sites have been "listed," including a "Trail of the Fried Carp" in Alsace. The "grammar of taste" is being taught to primary school children. Eighty percent of the funds come from government and the exercises are easy to laugh off as pork-barreling by cultural entrepreneurs. Yet they cast some light on the range of countervailing pressures that exists within the globalizing environment.

To cite a non-European instance, the governor of Tehran has forbidden the sale of clothing bearing Latin characters and T-shirts with images of Western entertainers. Once more, it would be facile to conclude from the incongruity of these prohibitions, from the power of fashion images to captivate youth everywhere, and from reports of
the elite corruption that wriggles round the rules in Iran, that cultural conservatives must lose. Professor Timur Kuran, a specialist on Islamic economics, maintains that sheer processing overload may prompt a retreat to comfortable social forms of knowledge, rather than the espousal of the critical forms hitherto associated with the West.

The Decay of Western Harmony

In Western nations, a sense of economic deceleration and worsening social and cultural ills does seem to be evident, and critical forms of knowledge are under assault. Admittedly every generation complains that wealth accumulates and men decay, and neglects less familiar signs of improvement. For all that, current readings of these matters are gloomier than ever. Persisting high levels of unemployment and the frustrations of temporary jobs amidst objective plenty cannot
help. There is a sense that the West's world leadership really is in jeopardy, despite trumpetings to disguise the fact. In 1951 John Jewkes noted the anomaly that the concept of the "disadvantage of an early start" had seldom been applied to the United States, despite a century of industrialization there. Yet a sequential transfer of economic leadership has been evident since at least the decline of Venice in the seventeenth century. There is nothing to astonish about the continuation of that trend, except the delusion that it halted before our time. John Powelson recently coined the term "chronocentrism" to describe the giving of undue emphasis to one's own period, as if it had been set apart from historical time. Although there seems no true economic law of "first in, first out," we do seem to have reached a point where whole groups of states rather than single countries are swapping positions in economic and power rankings.

In the West the experience of high average earnings gives point to the question raised by Walt Rostow as early as 1959, when he was writing The Stages of Economic Growth: What will lie beyond "high mass consumption"? Rostow was aware as he wrote that the baby boom was substituting for some part of further increases in material consumption, but he believed this was merely deferring the day when his question would have to be addressed, probably in moral terms.

The baby boom is over. Western society has chosen next to consume a high proportion of services. This however implies that average productivity growth will slow, unless extraordinary advances can be made in the efficiency of manufacturing. Sufficient advance on that front to stave off a relative decline of the West is unlikely. The productivity of personal services is hard to lift, even with a computer terminal on every professional's desk, since the essence of personal service is attention from a trained individual. At the same time, the providers of services expect to receive incomes similar to those of people with comparable training. They will raise their charges even though their productivity growth lags behind that in other sectors.

Existing gains in manufacturing productivity have been sufficient to depress blue-collar employment. The fall results from altered mixes of consumption and changes in technologies of production, which render many blue-collar and some white-collar workers redundant. Abstract analysis might say that labor markets are not clearing because real wages have not gone down enough to make poorly-educated workers worth hiring. But wages would have to fall a long way for that to happen, while the typical worker is said to become unemployable if he or she remains jobless for as little as eighteen
months (so much for the argument that education prepares us for life). The market-clearing wage (the level at which most employable people could find a job) would need to fall below acceptable levels, pressing down living standards, and thus ending the compression of post-tax earnings which has characterized Western countries since the Second World War. The implications for public harmony would be alarming. Social distances would widen further against a background of rising drug addiction, the easy acquisition of powerful weapons, and the deteriorating family bonds that guarantee a poor socialization of the young, especially inner-city males. We might expect that the premium on education would become so high that learning--the right, true thing--would be eagerly sought, but the current mood apparently forbids this.

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