ln 1 909, a millionaire French banker called Albert Kahn
set out to create what he called an archive of the planet.
The 72,000 colour photographs he collected
reveal a dazzling variety of costumes and fashions.
All over the world, it's clear that clothing defined national identity.
To a truly astonishing extent, people were what they wore,
from Tunisia to Mongolia,
from Morocco...
...to lndia.
But today, a century later, Albert Kahn's project would be more or less pointless...
...because these days most people around the world
dress in pretty much the same way...
...the same jeans, the same T-shirts.
ln other words, the West's way.
In this series I'm identifying the six unique factors -
I'm caIIing them the kiIIer appIications -
that ensured that the West dominated the rest.
And I'm asking, if we Iose our monopoIy over these things,
couId Western civiIization itseIf be consigned to history?
The first four killer apps were competition, science,
the property-owning democracy and modern medicine.
Yet in the first half of the 20th century...
...despite the dominance these killer apps had brought it...
... Western civilization managed to tear itself apart in two world wars.
It took the speciaI magic of the fifth kiIIer app, the consumer society,
to turn the West from unbridIed destruction to rampant consumption.
All around the world, fashions are converging on a Western template.
Just what is it about our cIothes that peopIe can't seem to resist?
Are they dressing Iike us because they want to be Iike us?
Because, after aII, this is about much more than just cIothes.
It's about a whoIe popuIar cuIture that extends through music and movies,
and that cuIture carries with it a subtIe message.
It's about freedom, the right to wear whatever you Iike,
even if it is what everybody eIse is wearing.
It's about democracy,
because onIy those movies and songs
and cIothes that peopIe actuaIIy want get made.
And, above aII, it's about capitaIism,
because, after aII, corporations have to make money from seIIing stuff Iike this.
ln the second half of the 20th century,
the only real rival to Western civilization would be communism.
So, which would win - socialism or shopping?
By 1 900, the world had been economically integrated in a way never seen before.
The different bonds that linked it together -
railways, steamship lines and telegraphs -
were almost entirely Western invented and Western owned.
But perhaps the most remarkable expression of this first globalization was sartorial.
With extraordinary speed,
a mode of dressing that was distinctly Western swept the rest of the world,
consigning traditional clothing to the dressing-up basket of history.
This picture, taken in 1 921, shows two royal heirs,
Crown Prince Hirohito of Japan and Edward, Prince of Wales, the future Edward Vlll.
The thrones they stood to inherit
could scarcely have been further apart from one another.
But here they both were in London, dressed by the same Savile Row tailor.
This is Henry PooIe's Iedger from the earIy 1920s,
and you can see the absoIuteIy huge order of cIothes
that the Japanese pIaced for the Crown Prince Hirohito
when he visited Europe in 1921 .
They ordered everything under the sun - uniforms, waistcoats, fIanneI trousers.
Here's just a singIe Iine - a fancy cashmere suit, a bIue cIoth suit
and a striped fIanneI suit.
This was a comprehensive attempt to give a Western makeover
to a future OrientaI emperor.
And Hirohito wasn't the only foreign dignitary queuing up
for an immaculately tailored English suit.
Preserved in the basement here are thousands of suit patterns
for customers from all over the world who came to get the Western look,
from the Emperor of Ethiopia Haile Selassie...
...to Buffalo Bill.
Hirohito's desire to wear the Iatest Western styIes
was part of a standardizing trend that was sweeping the worId.
The Crown Prince couldn't exactly turn up for golf at Gleneagles dressed like this.
lf you wanted to look the part in a Western-dominated world,
then you had to dress like...
Well, like this.
British cIothes, of course, were about much more than just economic modernity.
Nowhere were the subtIe gradations of the cIass system more cIearIy articuIated
than in carefuIIy taiIored cIoth.
As these wonderfuI iIIustrations from the 1920s show,
this was a time when you reaIIy couId judge a chap's status
by the cut of his suit.
Unfortunately for Hirohito, and for the Japanese in general,
it was also a time when it was no less natural to judge a person's worth
by the colour of his skin.
WhiIe Hirohito headed back to Japan with his bespoke Western suits,
the future King Edward VIII set off for a fancy-dress baII
with his chum ''Fruity'' MetcaIfe.
They were both dressed as Japanese cooIies.
As far as they were concerned,
that was just about as absurd as Japanese dressing up in Western cIothes.
Indeed, Edward wrote to his mistress that Hirohito was a ''prize monkey''
and that the Japanese were prone to ''breed Iike rabbits''.
Oh, dear.
(SPEECH DROWNED OUT BY DRUMMING)
Since the time of the Meiji Emperor,
the Japanese had been striving to leave behind their traditional culture
so they would no longer be treated like second-class citizens.
But donning Western clothes just wasn't enough.
To be treated as an equaI, it seemed,
Japan wouId have to acquire the uItimate Western power-dressing accessory -
an empire.
ln 1 904, Japan launched a surprise attack on the Russian fleet
at Port Arthur in Manchuria.
Four decades later, its imperial ambitions culminated with another surprise attack -
on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor.
The outcome was defeat, humiliation and occupation by the American victors.
But the occupying forces in post-war Japan
weren't interested in the traditionaI taiIoring of SaviIe Row.
What they wanted was a more democratic styIe of dress,
the kind of gear a guy couId work in.
By the end of World War ll, the look of the West was no longer European.
ln this photo, Emperor Hirohito is still dressed pretty much as he was in 1 921.
But he's no longer standing next to a member of the British Royal Family.
He's standing next to the victorious American General Douglas MacArthur,
who's in standard duty uniform.
No tie, no formality.
Now peopIe who aspired to dress and Iive as Westerners no Ionger Iooked to Britain.
They Iooked to America and a new re-cIothing of the worId.
After the Second World War,
the image of Western civilization was made in America, not in Europe.
The American ideal of ''smart casual'' -
unfussy, convenient and comfortable off-the-peg clothes,
ready-made for everyone -
goes right back to the American War of lndependence.
Before the American RevoIution,
Iuxury cIoth and cIothes were imported from Britain,
but during the RevoIution
Americans were discouraged from emuIating British fashion.
The new United States wouId weave its own cIoth, make its own cIothes,
design its own fashions.
SheItered behind a protectionist tariff waII,
the American textiIe industry
wouId become one of the foundations of an extraordinary economic miracIe.
To an extent that's often overlooked,
the United States was a country built on cotton and cloth.
Southern cotton fieIds provided the raw materiaI.
African-Americans,
Iike the ones who toiIed here on this pIantation near CharIeston,
provided the Iabour,
and Northern textiIe miIIs did the rest.
For a time, cotton was king of the US economy.
Pretty soon, every major American city had its own garment district.
Then US manufacturers made the crucial discovery
that the range of human proportions
is rather smaller than you might have thought.
lf you could standardize sizes,
then you could make clothes cheaply, on an industrial scale.
The idea swept America, and it didn't just apply to clothing.
You could have a standard house, and a standard car, as well.
The whoIe idea of the American consumer society
was that everybody shouId have a piece of this action.
Everybody shouId have a car, everybody shouId have a garage,
everybody shouId have consumer durabIes, a big fridge,
everybody shouId have a Iawn that they couId mow on Sunday
and, of course, everybody shouId have a desirabIe suburban residence.
That mass consumerism and standardization
could somehow be reconciled with rampant individualism
was one of the smartest tricks ever pulled by Western civilization.
And the key to understanding how it was done lies in that very word - Western.
(CATTLE MOO)
Because it was here in the Wild West
that the ultimate universal Western garment was born -
jeans.
They started life as the no-nonsense clothing of cowboys
riding hard through big country, and gold-digging miners.
For Americans they symbolize a frontier lifestyle
of raw freedom and boundless opportunity.
(INDISTINCT)
But how did these denim waist overalls, as they were originally called,
come to be so globally popular?
BIue jeans are cheap to make, comfortabIe to wear,
easy to cIean and very hard-wearing.
What's more, virtuaIIy anyone can get into them.
But then so are workmen's overaIIs of the sort that we used to wear in Britain,
not to mention farmers' dungarees.
Why was it American cowboys' work trousers
that came to dominate the worId of fashion?
WeII, the answer Iies in two of the 20th century's fastest-growing industries -
movies and marketing.
ln trailers for movies like Giant,
screen icon James Dean advertised Western civilization's new look.
Since anyone could afford a pair of jeans, you too could be Jimmy Dean.
And thanks to good marketing,
these all-American clothes appealed just as strongly to non-Americans.
Even those on the other side of the lron Curtain -
or rather, the denim curtain.
Teenagers in the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe
were crying out for jeans.
The really puzzling thing
is that the United States' principal rival in the Cold War
couldn't replicate these supremely simple items of apparel.
Just why was it that Russians couldn't make jeans?
You might have thought
that the transformation of jeans from work cIothes into fashion items
wouId have heIped the Soviets.
After aII, the Soviet Union was supposed to be the proIetarian paradise,
and jeans are rather easier to make than, say, a three-piece suit.
Yet it turned out that, in the fashion stakes,
the Soviet Union wasn't so much the Eastern enemy as the West's ugly sister.
Ugly and dumb.
Because somehow the Communist bloc
failed to grasp the appeal of an item of clothing
that could equally well have been made to symbolise
the virtues of the hard-working Soviet proletarian.
lnstead blue jeans, and the pop music with which they were inextricably linked,
became the quintessential symbols of capitalist superiority
and Western freedom.
Forget nuclear warheads.
Jeans were the ultimate Cold War weapon
because they actually got launched against the Soviets.
(SIRENS)
lf you were a student living behind the lron Curtain in the 1 960s,
you wanted to dress like all the young dudes in the West.
You really didn't want to dress as a Young Pioneer.
(IN GERMAN)
Stefan WoIIe was an East German student at the time.
(TRANSLATION)
Throughout the Eastern bloc, black marketeers sprang up
who would exchange jeans with visiting Westerners for fur hats and caviar.
The communist authorities were only too aware
of the threat that the jeans genie posed to their system.
But what could they do?
This rather hideous buiIding used to house the worId's most boring media outIet,
Neues Deutschland, the officiaI East German party newspaper.
Now, the onIy interesting thing about Neues Deutschland
was the way that it used to represent the West,
which was as a den of iniquity, of unempIoyment, of crime,
and of course of grinding poverty,
aII direct consequences
of the internaI contradictions of capitaIism, you understand.
The troubIe was
that every time they ran a picture of the oppressed proIetariat of the West,
they were aII wearing jeans.
Now, Western civiIization couIdn't be aII bad
if even the proIes got to wear Levi's.
Such was the desirability of this simple article of clothing
that Soviet law enforcement officials coined the phrase 'jeans crimes'',
which referred to ''law violations
''prompted by a desire to use any means to obtain articles made of denim''.
lt was as if the heirs of Lenin were more scared of Wrangler's
than of the US Air Force.
The French Ieftist phiIosopher and comrade-in-arms of Che Guevara,
JuIes Regis Debray,
once said, ''There's more power in rock music and bIue jeans
''than the entire Red Army.''
WeII, he was right in the end.
A Iater generation wouId overthrow the Soviet system
with a veIvet revoIution and a rock'n'roII soundtrack.
But 20 years earIier,
young peopIe on both sides of the Iron Curtain were aIready thirsting for change.
The year was 1968, and it was time to unzip the denim revoIution.
1968 was a year of revoIutions in many ways and in many pIaces,
from Paris to Prague, from BerIin to BerkeIey, and even in Beijing.
But the common factor in aII these disruptions
to the CoId War duopoIy of power was youth.
As the post-war baby-boomers became teenagers,
they yearned to challenge their fathers' stiflingly standardized order.
WOMAN: A Iot of peopIe want revoIution. They want a change of the system.
The onIy way they think they can do it is by revoIution, and that's a fact.
It is the onIy way they can do it.
(CHANTING)
But this was a very strange kind of revolution,
in which style - boy, did the young Parisians have thatl -
counted for a lot more than substance.
On 22nd March 1 968,
French students occupied the university administration building in Nanterre,
''mad Nanterre'' as it became known.
(SHOUTING)
By May, tens of thousands of students were clashing with police
on the streets of Paris. Strikes swept the country.
So, what was it aII about?
WeII, if you'd asked the student Ieaders,
they wouId have said it was about red revoIution,
insurrection in the centres of capitaIism.
''Humanity won't be happy,'' they said,
''untiI the Iast capitaIist is hung with the entraiIs of the Iast bureaucrat.''
The Situationists went even further. They wanted the aboIition of Iabour itseIf.
''Ne travaiIIez jamais'' - never work.
That's the sort of thing you'd have seen sprayed on the waIIs here at Nanterre.
But there was one demand that trumped aII the others,
and that was for unIimited maIe access to the femaIe dormitories,
hence the revoIutionary sIogan, ''Unbutton your mind as often as your fIy.''
As one graffiti artist put it,
''The more l want to make love, the more l want to make revolution.
''The more l want to make revolution, the more l want to make love''.
Women were encouraged to experiment with hitherto taboo degrees of exposure.
This was as much a sexual and style revolution as a social revolution.
The irony is that the '68-ers,
who routineIy denounced American imperiaIism in Vietnam,
and symboIicaIIy smashed the windows of the American Express offices in Paris,
were themseIves chronicaIIy addicted to American popuIar cuIture.
BIue jeans and rock'n'roII
suppIied the costumes and the soundtrack of the so-caIIed revoIution.
But these were among the most successfuI products of Iate 20th century capitaIism.
The French Situationists might heap scorn on the consumer society,
with its cuIture of crass materiaIism dressed up in spectacuIar advertising,
but those who rioted against capitaIism here in Paris
were wiIdIy underestimating the benefits
they themseIves reaped from economic and poIiticaI freedom.
Give or take the occasional baton charge by policemen
who despised privileged middle-class kids with long hair and flares,
the authorities in the Western world
generally allowed the students the freedom to protest.
This ability to absorb dissent gave the West another crucial advantage.
Behind the lron Curtain, however, it was a very different story.
The year 1 968 saw worldwide student revolution.
Dressed in their jeans,
the baby-boomers challenged the authority of their parents and their rulers.
ln France, students proclaimed themselves Marxists and anti-imperialists,
even if they did buy their jeans
from the best capitalist retailers America could produce.
The contrast when you crossed over to the other side of the lron Curtain
couldn't have been greater.
lt was like going through the looking glass.
For here the same things, even the same clothes,
could have diametrically opposite meanings.
So, in 1967, Levi's organised trade fairs in Moscow, Warsaw and here in Prague.
The Czechs caIIed jeans ''Texasky'', Texan trousers.
Born in the WiId West,
these pants were gaIIoping eastwards to turn comrades into cowboys.
The demand for Levi's soared.
Meanwhile, in clubs and bars throughout the capital,
Czech bands tried to imitate the new musical trends from the West.
(IN CZECH)
The most popular Prague band of the '60s were Olympic, the Czech Beatles.
Lead singer Petr Janda recognised the political impact of popular culture.
(TRANSLATION)
As in Paris,
universities became flash points for a clash of the generations.
ln April 1 968,
President Alexander Dubcek launched his action programme of liberalization.
Significantly,
his economic policy shifted the emphasis from heavy industry to consumer goods.
But the Soviet leadership in Moscow saw the so-called Prague Spring
as an unacceptable threat.
When talks failed to resolve the crisis,
the Soviets sent 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops to the border.
ln the small hours of 21 st August 1 968, tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia.
By the time dawn broke, the whole country had been occupied.
This buiIding used to house the CentraI Committee of the Czech Communist Party.
At four in the morning on August 21st 1968, it was surrounded by Soviet tanks.
(SHOUTING)
Threatened by an angry crowd, the tanks opened fire,
kiIIing at Ieast one young man.
And aII of this was watched by Dubcek and his coIIeagues
from up here on this baIcony.
They were watching the death of a dream.
At around 9am, troops stormed the building.
Dubcek was flown to the Soviet Union.
A focal point of resistance was Wenceslas Square,
where Czechs gathered daily around the equestrian statue of Wenceslas,
the saintly Duke of Bohemia.
Here on 1 9th January,
a Czech student named Jan Palach doused himself in kerosene
and set himself alight.
Three days later, he was dead.
In the West, students induIged themseIves with Marxist rhetoric,
but what they were reaIIy after was free Iove.
On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the stakes were higher.
Here what was at issue was freedom itseIf.
And the biggest threat to that freedom
was posed by the custodians of Marxism in Moscow.
After 1 968,
the Czech communist regime required all professional rock musicians
to sit a written exam in Marxism-Leninism.
(BAND PLAYS)
The avant-garde Plastic People Of The Universe hit back
with songs like 100 Points,
which very pointedly asked why the party was so scared of freedom and democracy.
In 1976, aII of the members of The PIastic PeopIe Of The Universe were arrested.
Two were put on triaI,
charged with ''extreme vuIgarity, antisociaIism, nihiIism and decadence.''
They were sentenced to 18 and 8 months in jaiI.
Never in its history has pop music been more poIiticaI than it was here in Prague.
So, just what were the Soviet authorities so afraid of?
Why not just let Prague's students have all the jeans and rock'n'roll they liked?
The answer is of course
that the West's kiIIer app, the consumer society,
posed an existentiaI threat to the Soviet system itseIf.
The consumer society was market based.
It responded to signaIs from consumers about their preferences,
for bIue jeans over fIanneI trousers, or Mick Jagger over Burt Bacharach,
and it devoted an increasing share of resources to satisfying those preferences.
This the Soviet system simpIy couIdn't do.
Their entire system was based on centralised planning.
The party knew, or thought they knew, what everyone needed - brown polyester suits,
and they placed the factory orders accordingly.
They had no clue what anyone actually wanted.
Communists did rockets, not retail therapy.
Tanks had to take precedence over tank tops,
strategic bombers over Stratocasters.
One Soviet critic opined...
(RUSSIAN ACCENT) ''Every ounce of energy expended on dance fIoor
''is energy that couId and shouId have been invested
''in buiIding a hydroeIectric pIant.''
Here in Berlin, the division of the city into East and West
looked like a permanent fact.
With the crushing of the Prague Spring,
the communist system in Eastern Europe Iooked once again unassaiIabIe.
But whiIe the communists were extremeIy good at crushing poIiticaI opposition,
their resistance to the West's consumer society was aItogether weaker.
Ordinary people simply improvised their own Western-style clothes.
Wannabe designer Anne-Katrin Hendel even stitched together her own jeans.
(TRANSLATION)
Some still say that Mikhail Gorbachov or Ronald Reagan
caused the collapse of communism.
But maybe it really was blue jeans and rock'n'roll.
I was Iiving in BerIin in the summer of 1989.
In those days, if you were British,
you couId traveI pretty freeIy from the West of the city to the East and back.
But when you got on at Friedrichstrasse in the East of the city,
you'd be the onIy person on the train.
It was quite an eerie journey going back from one worId to another,
past the oId, diIapidated Reichstag buiIding, through the waII - IiteraIIy.
And then in the summer of '89, things changed.
I was no Ionger the onIy person on the train.
In fact, I was surrounded by Hungarians and by PoIes,
because their governments had, for the first time,
given their peopIe freedom to traveI to the West.
WeII, I got quite excited about this.
In fact, I wrote a newspaper story for one of the British papers
and I wanted it to have the headIine ''The BerIin WaII is crumbIing''.
Just imagine if they'd pubIished it.
I wouId have prophesied the coIIapse of communism. But they didn't.
The editor said I'd been Iistening to one too many RonaId Reagan speeches.
Oh, weII. That's Iife!
(IN GERMAN)
On 9th November 1 989, a bemused press corps was informed
that travel across the border would be permitted,
prompting a flood of East Berliners to the border checkpoints.
Unprepared, the guards chose not to resist.
By midnight, all the checkpoints had been forced to open.
(CHEERING)
With the faII of the BerIin WaII, the CoId War was over.
For some, it was the end of history.
For others, the triumph of the West.
ActuaIIy, I think the ItaIian company got it right
that started marketing a Iine in skin-tight ''perestroika jeans''.
The Western way of dress had done for Soviet communism.
Now only one challenge seemed to remain.
The most populous and worst-dressed nation on Earth.
A people whose egalitarian leaders required them to wear
a billion pairs of matching pajamas.
ln the wake of the Mao Tse-tung's Communist Revolution in 1 949,
China had become the world's drabbest society.
Gone were the last vestiges of imperial silk.
Gone, too, were the Western outfits
favoured by the nationalists between the wars.
ln the pursuit of strict equality,
everyone was issued with the kind of clothes only convicts wore in the West.
WaIk down a typicaI street in China today and what you see
is a veritabIe kaIeidoscope of Western styIes of cIothing.
And not a singIe of pair of Mao pajamas in sight.
What a difference three decades of reform can make to the way a society Iooks.
lt's as if the Chinese are competing to see
who can look most like they've just come back from a shopping expedition
to 5th Avenue or Oxford Street.
Like aII industriaI revoIutions,
China's began with a massive investment in textiIe production.
Factories Iike this one aII over the Eastern seaboard
became unbeatabIe competitors when it came to exporting cheap cIothing.
But now the question for China is this.
With Western economies depressed by a gIobaI financiaI crisis,
is there enough domestic demand in China itseIf for aII this Western-styIe kit?
WeII, the answer seems to be an emphatic yes.
Judging by what l've seen in China's big cities, they're getting there.
Now they make the clothes and buy the clothes.
All the West supplies are the brand names.
With Russia converted to Gap and China worshipping Armani,
you would think the triumph of the West's consumer society was complete.
Well, not quite.
As we'll see, there's a growing movement in the world today
that rejects the dress code of Western civilization altogether.
Welcome to lstanbul, a cosmopolitan city,
where the outward trappings of Western civilization
are immediately apparent in the streets.
(TRAM BELL RINGS)
Take a tram ride though IstanbuI's main shopping centre
and you couId be aImost anywhere in the Mediterranean.
To the Ieft and to the right, it's the Western Iook that predominates,
which gives you the impression that this is just another Eastern frontier
that's been coIonised by Western civiIization.
(CALL TO PRAYER)
But look elsewhere in the same city, and it's a very different story.
Here in Turkey there's been the most extraordinary backIash
against Western modes of dress in recent years.
Western modes of dress for women, that is.
As far as many MusIims are concerned,
and the overwheIming majority of Turks are MusIims,
the Western styIe of dress
exposes far more of the femaIe head and body than the Koran prescribes.
And that's why I'm seeing so many more headscarves and veiIs
than when I first came to IstanbuI 15 years ago.
Yup, even the burqa is back.
This represents a wholesale rejection
of the policy introduced by the founder of the Turkish Republic.
ln the 1 920s, Kemal Ataturk set out to Westernise the way Turks looked
and banned religious forms of dress.
For 60 years his secular ideas flourished in Turkey.
(CHANTING)
But in October 1 998, there was a backlash.
1 40,000 people protested
against the long-standing ban on wearing headscarves in schools and universities.
ln lstanbul, thousands of girls opted to miss classes
rather than take off their headscarves.
Elsewhere there were even cases of suicide.
The whoIe controversy over the headscarf
iIIustrates just the way our outer trappings can come to have
a profound cuIturaI and even poIiticaI significance.
ShouId we regard it as just an expression of personaI reIigious faith,
which a truIy toIerant Western society shouId aIIow
on the principIe of freedom of expression?
Or is it an antiquated symboI
of a profound inequaIity between the sexes ordained by IsIam,
which a secuIar society shouId prohibit?
The headscarf issue is represented by lslamists
as an issue of individual freedom and human rights.
To my eyes, it's more like the thin edge of a wedge
designed to restore sharia law to Turkey.
It's not just a case of Western decadence against IsIamic puritanism,
because here in headscarf heaven, as you can see,
there's a whoIe pIethora of different headscarves you can buy.
In fact, you can imagine young girIs competing
for the Iatest fashion accessory.
I've even spotted one down there with diamante.
Now, this is a reaIIy, particuIarIy fine one.
CouId you show me how to put this on?
Ah, that's...that's where you foId it.
BeautifuI! I suppose it just goes to show
that the veiI, the headscarf, is as susceptibIe to the vagaries of fashion
as the kind of thing that seIIs in the typicaI Western high street.
Now, the lslamists can claim, you don't need to Westernise yourself to be chic.
In this fiIm, I've tried to show that what we wear reaIIy matters.
The West's two great economic Ieaps forward,
the IndustriaI RevoIution and the consumer society,
were both inseparabIe from cIothes,
making them more efficientIy, and wearing them more reveaIingIy.
The spread of the Western way of Iife
has been inseparabIe from the spread of the Western way of dress.
But if some peopIe today no Ionger aspire to dress in Western styIes,
that probabIy means they're rejecting Western vaIues too.
The backlash against Western dress is spreading in the Muslim world
as a symptom of a global lslamic revival.
Completely veiled women are now as common a sight on the streets of London
as English Premier League football shirts on the streets of Shanghai.
Should we follow the French in banning the burqa?
Or does the West's consumer society
have an antidote as effective as blue jeans once were to Maoist pajamas?
But maybe that's the wrong question to ask.
Is that what Western civiIization boiIs down to?
After capitaIism, science, the ruIe of Iaw and democracy,
is aII we've got Ieft today just a spot of shopping?
Is that what reaIIy Iies behind the veiI, our veiI, the veiI of our own superiority?
Nothing more than retaiI therapy?
WeII, in the finaI episode of this series, I'm going to ask
if the real threats to our civiIization come not from radicaI IsIam,
or any other externaI threat,
but from our own seIf-doubt, from our Ioss of faith in our Western cuIturaI heritage.