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By Root 1211 0

of the old order. “We have left the past behind,” Lee Kuan Yew said to me about his part of the world, “and there is an underlying unease that there will be nothing left of us which is part of the old.” But even this anxiety is familiar from the Western experience. When Asian leaders today speak of the need to preserve their distinctive Asian values, they sound just like Western conservatives who have sought to preserve similar moral values for centuries. “Wealth accumulates and men decay,” wrote the poet Oliver Goldsmith in 1770 as England industrialized. Perhaps China and India will go through their own Victorian era, a time when energetic capitalism went alongside social conservatism. And perhaps that combination will endure. After all, the appeal of tradition and family values remains strong in some very modern countries—the United States, Japan, South Korea. But in general, and over time, growing wealth and individual opportunity does produce a social transformation. Modernization brings about some form of women’s liberation. It overturns the hierarchy of age, religion, tradition, and feudal order. And all of this makes societies look more and more like those in Europe and North America.

The Mixed-up Future

When thinking about what the world will look like as the rest rise and the West wanes, I am always reminded of a brilliant Indian movie, Shakespeare Wallah, made in 1965. It features a troupe of traveling Shakespearean actors in postcolonial India who are coming to grips with a strange, sad fact. The many schools, clubs, and theaters that had clamored for their services are quickly losing interest. The English sahibs are gone, and there is no one left to impress with an interest in the Bard. The passion for Shakespeare, it turned out, was directly related to British rule in India. Culture follows power.

What is replacing these merry bands of minstrels? The movies. In other words, part of the story in Shakespeare Wallah is the rise of mass culture. Bollywood—India’s indigenous mass culture—is a cultural mongrel. Because it is part of mass culture, it borrows from the world’s leader in (and perhaps originator of) mass culture—the United States. Many Bollywood films are thinly disguised remakes of American classics, with six to ten songs thrown in. But they also retain core Indian elements. The stories are often full of sacrificing mothers, family squabbles, fateful separation, and superstition. The West and East are all mixed up.

The world we’re entering will look like Bollywood. It will be thoroughly modern—and thus powerfully shaped by the West—but it will also retain important elements of local culture. Chinese rock music sounds vaguely like its Western counterpart, with similar instruments and beats, but its themes, lyrics, and vocals are very Chinese. Brazilian dances combine African, Latin, and generically modern (that is, Western) moves.

Today, people around the world are becoming more comfortable putting their own indigenous imprint on modernity. When I was growing up in India, modernity was in the West. We all knew that the cutting edge of everything, from science to design, was being done there. That is no longer true. An established Japanese architect explained to me that, when he was growing up, he knew that the best and most advanced buildings were built only in Europe and America. Now, the young architects in his office see great buildings being built every month in China, Japan, the Middle East, and Latin America. Today’s younger generation can stay at home and create and access their own version of modernity—as advanced as anything in the West, but more familiar.

Local and modern is growing side by side with global and Western. Chinese rock vastly outsells Western rock. Samba is booming in Latin America. Domestic movie industries everywhere, from Latin America to East Asia to the Middle East, are thriving—and even taking domestic market share from Hollywood imports. Japanese television, which used to buy vast quantities of American shows, now leans on the United States for just 5 percent of