THE WEST IS DEAD (3)

Alicia Kelly, New York

I detected a certain defensiveness about India in Adnan Khan's condemnation of the West and his eulogy of China. Like Keith, I don't think India will "make it" in terms of Western-type prosperity. I rather think that the Hindu caste system, by which the (prettiest) girls have been marrying upwards to usually more intelligent boys for centuries, has created a brilliant Brahmin caste which is now the backbone of their prosperity in the Information Technology field. But I don't see much hope for the majority, into which HIV seems to be invading as quickly as it is in African countries, Burma and Thailand.

As a retired anthropologist I also detect a "Brahmin caste" in America centred around power elites which have graduated from Yale and Harvard particularly. (Both George W. Bush and John Kerry are still loyal ex-members of Yale's "Skull and Bones" club.) Relative to the Oxford/Cambridge circle, which still dominates British political and administrative life, the American phenomenon is more recent. Once again, however, I don't see much hope for the majority of Americans as we move into a more technological age. I don't know much about Europe, but from what I read the same pauperisation of ordinary people and a growing underclass is taking place there also.

As to China, which I know a little better, I detect a powerful revival of its traditional respect for scholarship which the West seems to be losing fast. But this time its Government mandarins (now more powerful than the other two arms of state -- the Communist Party or the Army) are letting its entrepreneurs rip as they never did before -- at least for many centuries. A new elite is growing there.

I see the future as an intermarrying of elites, not as China versus America, or Asia versus the West.