Many of our thinkers believe that the only way to enrich our experience, while ridding it of the influence of incoming cultures, is to take the past heritage as a substitute for the extraneous cultural influences, and they see that this means is the means to eliminate the cultural alienation arising from our integration into a civilization alien to us.
In this connection I would like to pose a question which I do not intend to express my own opinion so much as to raise a problem which may later be discussed in more detail: Is it not possible that there is an estrangement from the past, equal to or greater than estrangement from the intruder element? ?
In other words, does one feel more familiarity with his past, if that past is distant, if his circumstances have changed radically, more in comparison with the influences that come to him, which are really external, but live with him in the same age and in close conditions? Is not the remoteness of the apartment in the past, in turn, a factor of alienation? And can we be assured, when we call for the resurrection of a past civilization, separated by periods of time and huge differences, that we have truly rid ourselves of alienation?
Alienation from the past
“Alienation from the past” is an idea which I do not think is welcomed by many, and yet I raise it in the hope that it will be examined with more care, and all I would like to do now is just to raise the subject, and perhaps the dimensions of the problem will become clearer if we consider it in the light of The special conditions experienced by modern man, which are radically different from what man was in any previous era.
Our present age is proceeding in a development that leads, increasingly, to the shortening of spatial distances and the narrowing of local differences, and on the other hand, to the confirmation and multiplication of time differences. In both cases, the decisive influence of the interaction between technology and culture appears. Technology, as is well known, tends, thanks to a large number of modern inventions, to dye the world with a cultural color that is getting closer and more similar, and thus gradually cancels the effect of the differences between civilization, or allows the different civilizations to be placed in a unified contemporary framework. Those who wrote on this topic did not notice him.
is that the same process that leads to the removal of spatial barriers and the approximation of the gap between cultures, on the other hand, leads to an increase in the sense of the effect of time differences; This is because modern technology, in turn, has made humanity go through more experiences in ten years of our era than it was going through in previous ages during a whole century, and it is this that will make this rate of change always faster, and the clear meaning of the rapid rate of change—in periods temporality is constantly getting shorter, that is, the gap between the past and the present is constantly widening.
That is, the contemporary man feels that he is farther from the man of the last century to an extent that is much more than the sense of the man of the twelfth century of his distance from the man of the second century, for example, and thus the place and the local character tend to converge and unite, while the time intervals between the present and the past are always getting sharper And if we are not confident of that, the youth movements, and the feeling of the new generations that they are unable to meet on common ground with the older generations who still live with them in one era, is the tangible and stark evidence of the sharpening of the time differences in our present time in a way He had no equal in any previous era.
