Bosch Gallery, Athens.

Having already crossed the threshold of 2000, people, now “transparent”, are trying to define the most important differences between them. Their differences are no longer ideological, political or economic. They are differences of culture.

People define themselves in relation to their ancestors, religion, language, history, values, customs and institutions. They identify with groups defined by culture: tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities, nations and, more broadly, civilizations.

In our time, then, flags matter a great deal, as do the other symbols of cultural identity, such as the cross and the crescent. So the symbols that were used at various times as “flags” are now being redefined, a redefinition that cannot easily forget how each symbol was used in the past.

New technologies, which have themselves helped redefine not only symbols but human existence itself, make today’s civilization a plastic, consumerist one, often perhaps extreme for what human existence can endure.

Contemporary man is called upon to discover new but often old identities, to hold new but often old flags, and possibly to march to war against new but often old enemies. The question is whether he will manage to keep a critical stance towards all this, or give in to the unconditional globalization of culture.

Athanasios Beroutsos