In this age we live in, where modernity and youthfulness are celebrated and
tradition is often abandoned, are we overlooking the attributes of oldness? 'New' isn't the cool kid on the block after all. There's less to him than meets the eye, writes Colin Todhunter
"What's new?" It is a common question and is tinged with anticipation that what is 'new' will actually be quite interesting. But that's 'new' for you. New is modern and fashionable, new is hope and innovative. New is the cool kid on the block. New is the future. On the other hand, 'old' is the past, old is boring, old is tired and worn out. Old is ready for a walking stick, a massive facelift or just ready for the dustbin because it is yesterday's new. But, is new all it's made out to be? And is there more to old than meets the eye?
Every year, on the first day of January, the whole world celebrates the dawn of a new year. We say goodbye and usually good riddance to the old year and are full of hope and anticipation for the new one. The trouble is that, come 31st December, with hindsight we usually realise that our hopes for the world at large didn't live up to expectations during the year just gone. Although we pretty much appreciate that the upcoming year won't be much better than the previous one, what at least excites us is that it is yet to be written and that it could in some small way turn out to be an improvement on what went before.
That's new and hope — joined at the hip as they wander towards a bright new future.
It's quite natural to think like this and to hope for a better tomorrow. After all, where would we be without positivity? But the modern world is these days obsessed with the new. In a use and throw culture of planned product obsolescence, the latest, newest gadget to hit the shelf offers quick-fix, temporary salvation from the mundane and ordinariness. New is the new religion, the new chic, new has become life's cure-all
remedy.
Today, we are encouraged by that bastion of banality, the advertising industry, to 'live life to the max' by driving fast cars, building six pack abs and attracting fast women (or men). In this world, there is no room for life in the slow lane, wrinkles, greyness or flab. In the entertainment and fashion industries, old is out and new is in. And as soon as you hit 30, you are made to feel old. Why so? Simply because you can then be sucked into buying all those supposed youth-enhancing, anti-aging skin creams that 'reduce the lines of aging'.
The newer you look, the better.
Tradition and modernity
In a youth-obsessed culture, we increasingly tend to have scant regard or respect for the old — a life almost lived and an innings almost played out and already buried in the past, regardless of how many magnificent sixes were hit. You're out! No, you really are — out of the picture, out of sight and out of mind.
When we think of newness, we might think of gleaming steel and glass skyscrapers, dynamism and cutting edge technology. It's all very positive. But in this age we live in, where modernity, youthfulness and the future are to be celebrated and tradition is often abandoned, are we overlooking the attributes of oldness?
In many places across the world, the old has been ripped up to make way for the new. In the UK, where I originate from, the heart and soul of many a city was destroyed in the 1950s and 1960s by town planners who decided to bulldoze old neighbourhoods and ship most of the people off to soulless, out of town housing developments. While some of those old, cramped and filthy neighbourhoods needed to be modernised and redeveloped, there was no need to destroy their social fabric by emptying them of all life and turning them into barren, windswept wastelands. But such policies were based on a misguided notion of modernity and a brave world of newness.
On the other hand, what often strikes me in India is the tight-knit nature of many city neighbourhoods. There is a tangible sense of community and neighbourliness. Take the neighbourhood where I stay. Powerfully built matriarchs chatter in doorways, and grizzly bare-chested old men in lungis sit on steps, counting down the days. Shiva, Ganesh, Vishnu, Nandi, Krishna and a dozen other gods peer out from the various temples and shrines that watch over the neighbourhoods. Streets give way to a maze of narrow alleyways.
Around each corner, a new story, a new scene; neighbourhoods within neighbourhoods, glued together by extended families and perhaps a kind of obliged neighbourliness. Living this close together, you are forced to get along. Boys play cricket in the street, dogs sleep in the cooling dirt and women with fresh jasmine flowers in their hair bend over and sweep dust into the air.
To an outsider like me, the sense of community is tangible, and it reminds me of the now long gone neighbourhoods of my youth in England where, there too, a sense of tradition and togetherness was pervasive. But, in the UK, we embraced some warped notion of 'progress' and modernity. The old was discarded for the new. Jobs were outsourced to the lowest bidding country and profiteering developers and highly paid architects with their pie-eyed dreams of ugly concrete high rise council housing blocks were to create the future.
Britain was once a place where a pub existed on every street corner and a church on every other one. People now believe in individualism, not community, in the national lottery, not other-worldly salvation, in shopping, not god. And the plight of the traditional British pub mirrors that of hollowed out British society. Many of the churches are now empty shells, but the pub has been transformed into the modern theme bar, the 'theme' being an empty version of the very tradition that was destroyed under the banner of 'progress'.
The modern pub: mass-produced 'real ale' with old-world names and wooden floorboards. There is a huge profit in nostalgia, even if the whole thing is a massive con-trick. People now drink themselves senseless at the trough of make-belief sentimentality — of how they think things used to be. But it is not how it really used to be; it is how it is now — a self-conscious theme world that parodies the past, dreamt up by advertising executives and consumer trend analysts. It is a cynically manufactured reality, which quenches the thirst for 'community lost' and tradition.
Old matters
While much of the old has been torn down or is devalued, there is in some quarters an acknowledgement that old matters, and has value. Look no further than the travel and tourism industry. It is here that old comes into its own.
Where would you rather visit: Disneyland or Venice, Seattle Space Needle or the Taj? I'm guessing the majority would opt for the latter options each time.
But just because something is old doesn't mean we should value it at all costs. After all, there is good money to be made from promoting the old, most notably through the 'heritage industry'. I once witnessed a man in a tourist shop battering a metal vase with a hammer and asked his friend what he was doing. He replied: "He's making it old."
But after visiting the Taj, Venice or the Pyramids, many of us tend to leave these places thinking that the 'ancients' knew a thing or two that we do not and that we sold what they once had for a vision of concrete, greyness and mass standardisation.
Take the main square in Marrakesh, Jemma el Fna, for instance, which is now part of the UNESCO project, Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. The place is known for its active concentration of traditional activities by storytellers, musicians and performers, but was threatened by economic development pressures. In fighting for the protection of traditions, the residents called for action to recognise the need for the protection of such 'cultural spaces'.
I have stood in Jemaa el Fna many times. What you see there is a daily ritual of voices, sounds, gestures and public gatherings which have continued down the ages. In many places, the kind of activities and traditions witnessed there are very often the only link with the past. That square in Marrakesh shelters a rich tradition and a sense of coming together, of community, which cannot be preserved in some museum, replicated by some Moroccan version of a British-style theme bar or reassembled in some out of town new-build development.
A UNESCO World Heritage Site is a place that is defined as constituting special cultural or physical significance. Criteria for inclusion as a cultural site include somewhere or something that is of outstanding importance to the common heritage of humanity, which represents a masterpiece of human creative genius. It must also exhibit an important interchange of human values over a span of time and bear a unique or exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or to a civilisation which is living or which has disappeared. UNESCO also states that a cultural site is directly or tangibly associated with events or living traditions, with ideas, or with beliefs, with artistic and literary works of outstanding universal significance.
If the planners and developers had won, Jemma el Fna could well have ended up looking much the same as a thousand other squares, perhaps filled with shopping malls and trendy apartments. A kind of mini Gurgaon in the heart of the ancient city. Would the destruction of community, history and tradition have been worth it? Certainly, for the developers who were destined to make a huge profit from it. But such a scheme, if it had gone through, would have been typical of so many money spinning land-grab projects that we see in the world and are based on a bogus notion of progress or modernity.
Look around India to see the great 'leap forward' in action. Underwritten by foreign corporations' insatiable drive for domination, the ongoing destructive quest for access to India's retail, agricultural and pharmaceutical sectors marches forward under the banner of progress. Underwritten by PR spin, cutting-edge greed along the newly laid Delhi-Yamuna expressway masquerades as innovation. Underwritten by government lies and media misinformation, the murder of adivasis in Dandakaranya is portrayed as but a glitch on the twisted road to the future promised land.
'New' isn't the cool kid on the block after all. There's less to him than meets the eye. There are just too many fabrications surrounding the modern concept of newness and too few question the relentless pursuit of it. But this is the world we live in, where a one-dimensional version of 'progress' is sold to us at every available opportunity by the media, politicians and corporations. Is this to be the brave future that is ahead of us?