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The Age of Tourism: A Quest for the Past
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17296 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1990 |
5,551 Words |
| Author
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Lincoln Allison
Lincoln Allison is senior lecturer of politics at the
University of Warwich in England. He is author of A Journey
Quite Different: Collected Walks, Manchester University Press
(1988). |
Without doubt, when the year 2000 comes there will be a great flurry of optimism and popular futurology. But, unlike the parallel media event in 1900, it will not be typical of its times. We no longer yearn for the future, and our belief in progress has become very partial and ironic. If human beings have generally been influenced by both a myth of a past "golden age" and an expectation of a future "millennium," recent decades have seen a shift toward belief in the past, a shift that has occurred in different degrees throughout the world.
The early years of the century were a period of optimism and of faith in the future and rejection of the past - the years of "futurism," "modernism," and "art nouveau." The most extreme rejection of the past was the futurist manifesto produced by Filippo Marinetti in 1909. Futurism made sense to young Italian intellectuals, largely because it was in Italy that the great weight of history seemed so oppressive. "Let the good incendiaries with charred fingers come," beseeched Marinetti. "Heap up the fire to the shelves of the libraries. Divert the canals to flood the cellars of the museums! …Take the picks and hammers! Undermine the foundations of venerable towns!"
What I want to argue here is that nobody could be more out of sympathy with the aspirations of our own age than Marinetti and that the consequences of our new forms of reverence for the past, expressed in our provision for tourism, leisure, and education as well as in the arts, provide a number of dilemmas and concerns that we have barely begun to appreciate. "It is in Italy," Marinetti realized, "that we are issuing this manifesto of ruinous and incendiary violence, by which we are today founding Futurism, because we want to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries." Today, Italy; tomorrow, the world; Marinetti could scarcely have imagined the profusion of museums and tourist guides that thrive in the late twentieth century. England is, perhaps, the extreme case, a country where at least one new museum, or "heritage center," has opened, on average, in every week of the eighties.
REJECTING THE PRESENT, PRESERVING THE PAST
The story of how England moved from a forward-looking Victorian optimism to a kind of modernized ancestor-worship is both complex and dramatic. From the time industrialization had gathered momentum, there were always reactionaries. William Wordsworth, aged seventy-four, campaigned vigorously against the railway coming to the Lake District in 1844,
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