There was an interesting remark recently on A Political Refugee From the Global Village about the displacement of Europeans from their ancestral lands. Now I don’t want to see that happen either but I think you have to ask yourself whether people in the West today even have ancestral lands.
If you have no knowledge of the traditions of your own society, no culture and no sense of history (which is the case for most westerners today) can you be said to have any actual ancestral lands? If you have no actual home town, no sense of community and no sense of a link to the place you were born (which is also the case for most westerners today) then do ancestral lands have any meaning for you?
Until a hundred years ago most people in the West still felt an emotional and even to a certain vague extent a spiritual connection to the place in which they were born and grew up. I’m not talking about ethnic identity. Just a sense of having a particular place which is home and having some link to one’s own past, one’s family’s past and the past of a community.
Today we are all rootless cosmopolitans.
Which explains why Europeans don’t care about being displaced from their ancestral lands. They don’t even understand the concept of ancestral lands. They don’t know about their ancestors. They have no past. More often than not they have no children, so they don’t have a future. What they have is an eternal present of consumption, hedonism and mindless entertainment.
The question is – if Europeans don’t care about their home and have no past or future why should anyone care about their fate? Europeans themselves don’t care about it.
The problem is that rootless cosmopolitans aren’t worried about losing their homes. They have no homes. If things go bad in one place they’ll just move somewhere else. It doesn’t matter. One place is the same as everywhere else. They’re not ever going to fight to hold on to what is theirs because they can’t even comprehend the concept. It’s not that they’re not materialistic. They’re materialistic to an extreme degree. But the material possessions that matter to them are infinitely portable. You sell your house in one city and buy a house in another city. You sell your consumer goods and buy new ones in your new city. You still have your bank account. You still have everything that matters to you on your smartphone.
To a rootless cosmopolitan home is anywhere that has a wifi connection.