Yesterday while I was at a friend’s place, I saw bits of a French reality-television show called “L’ile de la Tentation”. From the goings-on I understood that it is about a group of young people who have been placed on an island to see what they do to each other. Given the word “temptation” in the title, maybe there are some constraints put in to spice up things: some will try to seduce the others, who must resist, or something of the kind.

The players of that game were a carefully chosen group of physically perfect young men and women. We live in a physically demanding age, where attendance to the gym is becoming as necessary a criterion for being a member of the middle-class, as is a university, or at least a high school education. Just ten or fifteen years ago, I remember, the gym was the haunt of the working class, a dark, smelly place where construction workers and stevedores lifted rusty weights in a menacing, don’t-brush-past-me atmosphere. Going there was like getting drunk in a tavern near the harbour, a daring exploit of middle-class adolescence. The focus was on brains, as long as you were not seriously misshaped. Nowadays, the parking spaces of gyms are full of Hondas and Toyotas ( valuable cars in Mauritian society) and the gym owner himself drives a BMW.

So, to come back to the “Island of Temptation”, watching bits of it flash past my eyes– the programme was so sliced up that it felt like bits of teriyaki flying around on the hot plate – I wondered about what next awaited our industrial civilisation, and how it had come to this triumph of the body and the image, of which “Island of Temptation” was the epitome: the eye watching bodies, with minimal thought involved. For something a bit more brainy, you can switch on to the sports channel where your eye watches bodies doing more complicated exercises.

When a civilisation falls, this could be due to internal or external factors, or both. Rome felt the pressure of the barbarians in the Germanic forests, but it was also affected by the cooling of the weather in the first centuries of the Christian Era. This caused crop failures which made it difficult for the Empire to feed its legions. Also to blame for its downfall was the lack of a stable succession system, so that every successful general was tempted to march down on Rome to seize power. The caste system destroyed the unity of Hindu civilisation, so that by the time it was invaded by the Arabs and Turks, the latter found a large number of ready converts to Islam among the low caste Hindus. We may compare this with Spain or the Balkans, for example, where there were not so many converts to Islam depite the centuries of Arab and Ottoman rule. China was a more unified civilisation than India and survived until the early 20th century, when it simply went out of history, like a product removed from the supermarket shelf upon reaching its expiry date (1). It is hypothised that the Khmers over exploited the water resources of their land.

Modern civilisation faces its own climatological challenges, about which I cannot say much. I am wondering whether we also face a cultural challenge. Is our civilisation bringing about its own demise, by hollowing out humanity, by coarsening his tastes, corrupting his soul ? The world becomes one great shopping mall, in which we roam endlessly, pushing on our trolleys laden with their grotesque piles of things which always makes the monthly shopping trip look like a looting expedition (2). Tired, we make a pause, sit in one of those food courts, place various foods on the table : pizzas, buckets of fried chicken, trays of hamburgers – we eat voraciously, our face and hands are soon covered with bits of cream and meat. On giant television screens everywhere, we see the inverted reflection of our fatty selves – perfectly shaped young people, dancing in powerfully erotic motions. We are obsessed with eating, they with keeping perfect body shapes: we are united in our cult of the body. In the end, our souls scream for purity, and we move on to some giant ashram, headed by millionaire gurus, whose acolytes teach us a mish mash of yoga and aerobic, teachings about “loving oneself” and “healing oneself”, vague , perfumed sayings which flatter the ego but cannot lead anywhere, because they always avoid the suffering which is part of any initiation. Yet, in the fringes of society, other gurus do preach suffering to the extreme: the religious fanatics. Just like the obese man cannot stop pleasuring his body, while his counterpart, the pop star, cannot stop tormenting her body, becoming anorexic, in the same manner, in the spiritual sphere, the New Age cults are an endless pleasuring of the soul, by aromatherapy, thalassotherapy, tantric sex, and other practices, and their reverse image is the fanatic cult, Opus Dei, extreme Islam and others, which demand endless torment from their disciples.

Thus, I sometimes imagine civilisation to be out of kelter: why all this ? Because contrary to earlier civilisations, which were based on agriculture, this one is based on industrial production and seems to hate the idea of frugality. That gives the grotesque touch to our modern society, this frenzy of consumption and drove me to this slightly exaggerated – for the sake of effect - description of our lives in the last paragraph.

But is this pessimistic picture true, I also wonder. Yes, most people are greedy and superficial – but then people were always like that. One just has to read Les Misérables to see that nothing much has changed in human nature in this respect. Surprisingly, you could even say that human nature is improving in some fields. For example, most people nowadays actively oppose wars. It is a great novelty: up till the 19th century, wars were seen as an unpleasant state of affairs, like an earthquake, something which happened from time to time and could not be avoided. There was sometimes the feeling that war was necessary, to whip up a nation’s manliness. There are photographs of crowds in Europe cheering their countries’ entry at war, in the first days of World War one ( one of them, taken in the town square of Munich, even captured the image of a young Adolf Hitler throwing his hat in the air along with the other men).

The old world – the world of before 1914 – was masculine in the unpleasant sense of the term, smug, disdainful, brutal, self-serving, fond of massive monuments, of busts of generals. There is something deeply unpleasant about reading of the colonial wars of the 19th century, the rebel natives charging on the battlefield, sword and musket in hand, to be mowed down by machine guns: it is no longer fighting, but more like organised bullying. A snobbish world of clubs, tea rooms and brothels, yet with its beauties too – masculine beauties again: of scientific discoveries, of explorers. Despite the machine gun, there was still opportunity for a real, man-to-man fight.(3)

Our modern world gives off a rank feminine smell. Our age is greedy ( shopping, shopping, shopping), lustful and obsessed with bodily matters, in general ( food, health, perfumes, slimming), superstitious ( women are fond of priests, charms, amulets, soothsayers. The shelves of the bookstores groan under the weight of books devoted to divination and “soothing yourself”) , gossipy ( the SMS, the People’s magazines) , superficial and narrow-minded ( nowadays, everywhere you go, you meet gentle , beautiful, dumb people). Its beauties are also feminine: its general peacefulness, its concern with nature and harmony.

How did the world feminise itself ? By the development of an industrial civilisation, which thrives on consumption and therefore on the establishment of a powerful middle class. The values of the middle class are feminine: stability of the family, social ascent by the careful use of money, an obsession about keeping oneself away from the rabble and with rubbing shoulders with the upper class. The working class and the aristocracy, by contrast, are masculine in essence and are linked, beyond the great hill of the middle class, by ancient subterranean tunnels. A cruder virility, at one end, hard-drinking and wife-beating. At the other, the world of boarding schools and the stiff upper lip. The two classes meet in the Army, where one is the officer corps, the others are the grunts. The middle class hates sending its children to the Army.

When we think of the people of the Renaissance, we think of the citizens of city-states of Northern Italy and of the cities of Flanders, the merchants, who financed the great artists and thinkers of their times. When people of future ages will think of our times, maybe they will think of it as the age of the middle-aged urban woman. Working in an office, divorced, maybe, with a teenage boy slumped in front of the television. A bit obsessed with her thighs, which she thinks are too thick. Works out at the gym and does yoga too on Wednesdays. Waiting, waiting for something to happen. And sometimes, something happens, then goes away.

A strange picture- maybe the last picture of our civilisation, before the oceans drown us. Not a bad picture, rather touching actually, like most women are, when observed from a distance. And of course, we do feel concern for her. How will she fare, this silly civilisation of ours ? Man’s downfall is often caused by his pride, or by the trick of a woman. Woman’s downfall is often caused by greed, lust and fear. Who knows ?

(1) To be fair to India, maybe China was favoured by geography too, in that it did not have to face the Arab armies in that great wave of conquest after the Hegira, which has stupefied historians ever since by its speed and success. That tsunami took over the great Indian province of Sind. Later on, the Afghans and Turks conquered the rest of India, while China remained out of reach. Yet China was not so strong, despite its Great Wall –in the course of its history, it has been conquered by peoples such as the Jin and the Manchurians, who have not left their mark as extraordinary conquerors, compared to the awesome Turks, about whom the French coined the expression “Fort comme un Turc”. What would a Turkish China have looked like, one wonders. Its conquest would have been a historical event of enormous importance, like the conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity. Confucianism would probably have survived. Buddhism would have shrivelled to a quaint minority practice. Maybe Islam would have been the world’s greatest religion, today.

(2) In 1999, during the race riots in Mauritius, we could see people coming home from having looted the local supermaket – they were pushing forward trolleys laden with whisky and French sausage, in a bizzare re-enactment of that essential ritual of modern society, the week end shopping at the department store. Together with the car and the computer, the trolley is one of the icons of our times. It is much less exciting than the latter, though – in fact it is a positively ugly object. Seen from afar, a man pushing a trolley looks like someone with a grotesquely extended belly – the very symbol of our obese civilisation.

(3) One of the most misquoted poems of that period is “The Ballad of East and West” by Kipling. Its first line (“ Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet” ), is quoted by all those who love to flog the dead horse of colonialism, yet the full prologue runs thus:

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face,
tho' they come from the ends of the earth!

It is a poem which celebrates brotherhood in arms, and the admiration of one warrior for another, beyond the differences in culture.