Between two worlds

Some people ruminate on Dover beach, others on Leblon

Having just lost the entire contents of this post let me try to remember and rewrite:
This is not specifically about Brazil. Have been thinking about polarisation and how it seems to be a dominant theme in the modern world. People rushing to zealous extremes - eg of pro-religion or anti-religion, often in the same families, and the middle ground being squeezed out of existence. Likewise the kind of middle class in which I and other 40-something Brits grew up. It is also under threat as the globalised world creates a new virtual country inhabited by winners and another virtual country full of losers. No longer does the nation state serve as a shortcut to lifestyle expectations. The country I am from is downwardly mobile on the whole, having cruised through much of the twentieth century as a post-empire, a role that has now been taken by the US. But there are many in the UK who still enjoy very comfortable and privileged lives. Increasingly, though, they have more in common with financial "winners" in Brazil or China than with their less fortunate compatriots.

"Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold", wrote Irish poet WB Yeats, before adding, "mere anarchy is loosed upon the world". Polarisation is when things fall away from the middle and towards the edges. Perhaps the centre was not meant to hold, since it is now the wrong centre and "anarchy" is what a conservative perceives when he experiences chaotic but necessary change ?

I wonder what polarisation means on a cellular level, how the tug-of-war pattern is perhaps an essential precursor to healthy molecular change ?

In this second decade of the new century, the new millennium, people, countries, societies, economies are all in flux. A process of polarisation is underway. For many of us it is painful and unsettling. We remember all too well what happened in this same decade of the last century and what kind of anarchy was ushered in by that new order. English poet Matthew Arnold famously greeted the dawning twentieth century with the sentiment about "wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born".

After six months in Brazil, here specifically to greet a new world that had undoubtedly been born - my son - I am perhaps projecting too much of my own deracinated, midlife anxieties when I say that the world feels increasingly anarchic and polarised. Brazil and it's fellow BRICS are supposed to be the new emerging empires. The world's cells are stretching, splitting and regrouping. Nothing is certain except the fact of inexorable change. The question is how much the patient may have to weaken first before she can become stronger ?