I am citing a National Post article of Sept. 5, 2009 based on a Der Spiegel article by Reinhard Mohr:
" We have the infamous 'be Berlin/sei Berlin' city marketing campaign that wants to transform the lively process of change that Berlin has undergone over the last twenty years into a moneymaker, like a good that can be made pretty, packaged up and exported to all corners of the globe. But what the people behind the campaign don't realise is that, over the long term, this kind of sales pitch undermines the mystique of decay and excitement that made Berlin such an attractive commodity all over the world in the first place. It's like the process of sucking out all the aesthetic marrow that has happened to beautiful and picturesque places all over the world...Places give up their flair in return for long, ant-like lines of tourists - and the money they bring."
This is so emblematic of the commoditisation and uniformity that has gripped our modern world.
We want to transplant a bland sameness, regularity and security to everywhere on the globe. I thought the point of travel was to experience the amazing variety and diversity that should characterise any venture into cultural exploration. Instead we want to avoid the differences that might confuse or disturb us, or that might challenge our core understanding of how life is lived on this planet. This is symptomatic of our approach to life in general, at home or abroad. We seem to be systematically weeding out difference, character, eccentricity, and exploration into the dazzling variance of human life that has flourished upon this earth for eons in our seperate but brave attempts to cope with the diverse challenges that have forged our cultural identies. We need to be unified in celebrating and learning from our differences rather than mowing them down in the name of peace. We will only find peace in moving beyond our differences not by eliminating or pretending they don't exist. We are all as human beings trying to struggle with our ever increasingly confusing place in this world. As our technology continues to make us confront each other we must be both tolerant of difference and at the same time realise that if we don't move beyond the barriers of our historical limits we will put ourselves in a peril that could easily spin out of control.
We are creating an increasingly sterilised society that has been scrubbed clean in the name of safety and a conflict-free world that I don't believe represents the way we want our future to evolve. Again we are hurtling into a future we haven't adequately thought about or reflected upon. If we don't wake up we will be so anaesthetized that we will be impotent to make all the proper decisions that we so desperatedly need to consider. We all need to take responsiblity for the direction our world is taking. We are creating an antiseptic cocoon that is too clean, too perfect, with no risk, no rough edges, no random chance, no life. Due to our obsession to protect ourselves from the vicissitudes of life we are wrapping ourselves in a straightjacket that will stifle our freedom and creativity until our evolutionary growth will grind to a stifled halt. Contingency is a fact of life and our attempt to eradicate it will eradicate the essence of life itself.
