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Muqaddimah
, or “Introduction” to a
world history, that desert nomads, in aspiring to the physical comforts of
sedentary life, create the original dynamic for urbanization that is then captured
by powerful rulers and dynasties, which in turn, by providing security, allow
cities to flourish. But because authority requires luxury, decay eventually sets in,
as group solidarity erodes and individuals, through their accumulation of wealth
and influence, weaken executive power. Thus, systems grow brittle and
fragment, and are superseded by other formations.
9
For the first time in history
this process is operating on a global scale. Vast cities and megacities have
formed as rural dwellers throughout Eurasia, Africa, and South America migrate
toward urban centers from the underdeveloped countryside. As a consequence,
the mayors and governors of these conurbations can less and less govern them
effectively from a central dispatch point: so that these sprawling concentrations
informally break up into suburbs and neighborhood self-help units, whose own
local leaders are often motivated by ideals and ideologies originating from afar,
by way of electronic communications technology. Radical Islam is, in part, the
story of urbanization over the past half-century across North Africa and the
Greater Middle East. Urbanization also accounts for the far more progressive
demonstrators for democracy who overthrew various Arab regimes in 2011.
Forget the image of the Arab as the nomad or inhabitant of an oasis on the
steppe-desert. In most instances he is a city dweller, of a crowded and shabby
city at that, and is at home in vast crowds. It is the very impersonal quality of
urban life, which is lived among strangers, that accounts for intensified religious
feeling. For in the village of old, religion was a natural extension of the daily
traditions and routine of life among the extended family; but migrations to the
city brought Muslims into the anonymity of slum existence, and to keep the
family together and the young from drifting into crime, religion has had to be
reinvented in starker, more ideological form. In this way states weaken, or at
least have to yield somewhat, to new and sometimes extreme kinds of
nationalism and religiosity advanced by urbanization. Thus, new communities
take hold that transcend traditional geography, even as they make for spatial
patterns of their own. Great changes in history often happen obscurely.
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A Eurasia and North Africa of vast, urban concentrations, overlapping missile
ranges, and sensational global media will be one of constantly enraged crowds,
fed by rumors and half-truths transported at the speed of light by satellite
channels across the rimlands and heartland expanse, from one Third World city
to another. Conversely, the crowd, empowered by social media like Twitter and
Facebook, will also be fed by the very truth that autocratic rulers have denied it.
The crowd will be key in a new era where the relief map will be darkened by
densely packed megacities—the
crowd
being a large group of people who
abandon their individuality in favor of an intoxicating collective symbol. Elias
Canetti, the Bulgarian-born Spanish Jew and Nobel laureate in literature, became
so transfixed and terrified at the mob violence over inflation that seized
Frankfurt and Vienna between the two world wars that he devoted much of his
life to studying the human herd in all its manifestations. The signal insight of his
book
Crowds and Power
, published in 1960, was that we all yearn to be inside
some sort of crowd, for in a crowd—or a mob, for that matter—there is shelter
from danger and, by inference, from loneliness. Nationalism, extremism, the
yearning for democracy are all the products of crowd formations and thus
manifestations of seeking to escape from loneliness. It is loneliness, alleviated
by Twitter and Facebook, that ultimately leads to the breakdown of traditional
authority and the erection of new kinds.
Loneliness is a particular characteristic of urban existence, in which strangers
are many and true friends and family relatively few. And so the new urban
geography of the former Third World in the twenty-first century will constitute a
map of intense, personal longing. Indeed, George Orwell’s depiction of tyranny
rests to a great degree on the human proclivity, however much it may be denied,
to trade individual freedom for the enfolding protection and intimate contact of
the group. “Always yell with the crowd, that’s what I say. It’s the only way to be
safe,” one character declares in Orwell’s novel
1984
.
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Indeed, the Internet,
explains the novelist Thomas Pynchon, offers the protection of a virtual crowd,
and thus “promises social control on a scale those quaint old twentieth-century
tyrants with their goofy mustaches could only dream about.”
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Meanwhile, the
media amplify
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