Good find Bill. Brooks usually provides interesting takes on current affairs. He's definately one of the most thoughtful conservative pundits. However, I think he's indulging here thinking cultures are dividing and carving out differences more than they are. Besides, they're inherently different to begin with. Globally it's difficult to argue that beyond radical fringes (of which there have always been and will always be) we're seeing increasing cultural divergance. Yes, Islam is going through a crisis. But where he sees instances of segmentation one can surely find the opposite somewhere else. Even in America. Jon Stewart's discussion with Bernard Goldberg looks at whether America is actually more moderate than it appears from debates on Fox or CNN.

But I digress, the reason I'm writing is to share a particularly relevant comment from Richard Florida (from his book The Rise of The Creative Class):

"In agricultural societies and even for much of the industrial age, people basically lived under conditions of scarcity. We had to work simply to survive. The rise of an affluent... economy means we that we dont' have to devote all our energies to staying alive, but have the wealth, time and ability to enjoy other aspects of life."

He quotes economist Robert Fogel:

"Today people are increasingly concerned with what life is all about. That was not true for the ordinary individual in 1885 when nearly the who day was devoted to earning the food, clothing, and shelter needed to sustain life."

Western society and people in it are simply living this out.

Hi Tim:

Thanks for the note.

I would tend to endorse the segmentation argument -- with the understanding that I don't see the global picture, or even all of Canada and North America.

The Toronto Star did a a story on the GTA's growing ethnic enclaves. The numbers of them with one ethnic group comprising 30 per cent or more of the census division's population have gone from six in 1971 to 254 in 2001. There are very large areas of the GTA that are now predominantly Chinese or South Asian, as one example.

That's not necessarily new. College St. West was the destination for Italian immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s. Queen St. West, home of the hipsters, was known as Little Ukraine in the 1950s.

There's always been segmentation based on income; if you want to live in this city's Bridle Path neighborhood, you better have significant net worth, probably well into the eight-figure mark.

A cultural geography question I would find interesting to answer is where does a South Asian who's "made it" live -- do they choose to be among their own people, do the wealthy South Asians form their own little enclave or do they gravitate to the neighborhoods of the traditional economic elites?

Some of the stuff Brooks talked about isn't strictly cultural geography, in my opinion.

How can radical Islam in Europe be analyzed in cultural geographic terms, for example.

I sort of agree with the sentiments expressed by Florida and Vogel -- but I also don't.

They seemingly ignore the growing number of low-wage have-nots in North America who often have to work the equivalent of two jobs to get by. This is getting worse, not better -- many companies are trying to permanently reduce their payroll costs by having new employees start on a lower scale.

Those have-nots might not be 19th century agricultural workers, but the long hours and low return on their labour are things the two groups would have in common.

If you have a collection of people of the same relative level of affluence, they may be more concerned with what life is about, but they might go about exploring it in different ways: One might follow a traditional religion, one might be a Buddhist, one might be into paganism and so on.

How does cultural geography explain that?

Just some thoughts. :)