Googling each other's eyes

Once upon a time, political battles took place between ideologies: someone was left, someone was right. This clash continues today, but the biggest conflict currently in Western societies is about identity. If a white singer wears Dreadlooks (like American actress Whoopi Goldberg, for example), then the mistake happens

"Lauwarm", lukewarm water, is the name of a band from Switzerland, which plays Jamaican music. At the end of July, this musical group wanted to give a concert in Bern, the capital of Switzerland. Shortly after they started playing, the band members interrupted the concert. Some visitors were stunned because some band members wore African costumes, others had Dreadlooks (like American actress Whoopi Goldberg, for example).

The visitors of the concert addressed the organizer, complaining that they did not feel good in front of this band, which, according to them, has done "cultural appropriation", that is, it has taken something from other cultures. Visitors accused the band of appropriating symbols belonging to other countries. These symbols, according to angry visitors, are distinctive signs of oppression or the struggle for freedom of other peoples.

The unexpected happened: the concert was interrupted. And media Switzerland was embroiled in a wide-ranging and tense debate over how it is possible for some snotty boys and girls to disrupt a concert with accusations of "cultural appropriation". There were readers who angrily concluded that according to this logic, coffee should also be banned, which does not belong to the "source culture" of the West, but came from Africa. In 1573 the German doctor Leonhard Rauwolf tasted the first coffee in Aleppo, Syria, in 1592 coffee reached Italy through the doctor Prospero Alpino. Should coffee be banned now too? And doctors Rauwolf and Alpino to be declared racist?

Once upon a time, political battles took place between ideologies: someone was left, someone was right. This clash continues today, but the biggest conflict currently in Western societies is about identity. In 1995 the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz held a lecture in Vienna on the essence of world order. According to the Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev, at that time most Western scholars thought that the era of the spread of Western values ​​was now beginning, but Clifford Geertz saw a tense future, with growing divergences and with pluralism and polarization both in the West and in East. The main battle, according to Geertz, would take place over identity.

In retrospect Geertz's thesis was visionary. In the United States of America, the Democratic Party for a long time has ignored the working class and the disappearance of jobs, especially in states with non-urban populations. On the other hand, exponents of the party held strict debates on whether there should be toilets for the "third gender" in New York, i.e. for people who do not feel like men or women. For an American worker left without a job due to Chinese competition, the question of whether New York will have three different toilets for different social groups is a very peripheral topic. His concerns are of a different nature: how to support his family, for example. This applies not only to the USA, but also to other Western countries. Such debates are then used by the right to mobilize its clientele – from the American countryside to the fields of Orban's Hungary.

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The fight against discrimination of minorities, the fight for equality not only between the sexes, but also for all social groups, is a noble and legitimate battle. But this struggle sometimes slips into absurd territory. Finally, for example, a German publishing house withdrew from sale a book about the youth of the Apache (Indian of North America) chief. These books were once made into films with Winnetou. Entire generations have grown up with Winnetau, now German public television has decided not to show these films anymore - because they were conveying racism and colonialism. The debate has already reached the pillars of the culture column of elite German newspapers. The polarization goes so far that at times it seems like there is a race to see who is poking out the other's eyes the fastest.

Meanwhile, the members of the band "Lauwarm" have declared that they have great respect for all cultures, but this did not work for them either. A minority blind and ready for absurd ideological battles sees the problem in the African hairstyles of the band members.