INEWORD P

Monday, May 1, 2023 | Pinewood International American School of Thessaloniki

The Only Crisis Our World Is Facing Is A Cultural One

ofia Papakosta | Contributing Writer

“Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.”

These lines from T.S. Eliot’s Waste-Land come to my mind every single morning, when I see the modern Man commuting to work; when I gaze at these crowds of the modern living-dead, blindly and unwaveringly following their daily routines; when I see in front of me this modern Waste-Land; the withering men and women with their “sighs, their short and infrequent [exhalations]”, “undone” by Death, or rather, by Life, “undone” by the supposed financial crisis. Ever since the collapse of the US housing market in 2008, and its immediate global impact, we have been bombarded and terrorized by these two words: “financial crisis”. And recently, these two words seem to have been replaced by the financial crisis’ sibling: the energy crisis. “Financial crisis” has apparently become our new status quo; Man’ s new plague. Is this truly the case though?

I believe that the crisis of human societies is only seemingly economic. Deep down, the only crisis our modern world is facing and needs to overcome, is a cultural crisis, or a crisis of civilization…. In our western, crudely orthologistic, money-oriented world, civilization has come to be regarded as a surplus, as a luxury, while on the other hand, the securing of “bread”, of material goods has come to be regarded as something sacred, the ‘sanctum sanctorum’ in fact, of the 21st century! But we fail to realize that there is no “bread” without civilization. Perhaps the most representative example of this is the French Revolution. It was the Renaissance that brought about the French Revolution. It was civilization and culture that laid the ground for it. The Revolution was born out of the enlightened ones; it was civilization that gave “bread” (sweet or not) to the people. Our focus needs to shift again towards civilization. Its absence is the true root of our world’ s problems. Its absence is the only crisis our world is facing.

The question that plausibly raises itself is how is civilization absent? How is this justified? The way I see it, the answer lies in the way governments promote a shallow and censored version of literature, which ultimately leads to a decline in people's ability to think critically and intelligently.