I am officially living in Brussels, but I cannot really say that I feel like an ‘inhabitant’ here. And this feeling led me to an observation recently that I find rather striking.
To most of my friends I have always stated that I like Brussels, and from one side this is true – it has a nice architecture, not spectacular but cozy, subtle. But from another perspective I have come to fundamentally detest this city, because wherever I go, it feels abandoned, deserted, despite all the people on the street. Or maybe the best word to describe this feeling would be ‘alienated’. This city is alien to itself.
When you grow up somewhere, you develop an emotional relationship with that particular piece of earth you are living on. German language has the nice word of Heimat for this place. It is like a personal friend: You know it inside out, the small streets, the old guy in the night shop, the wild apple tree in the fields, the dreamy atmosphere when all is covered with snow in January, year after year, after year, after… It is a friendship that you cultivate and cherish, and when you come home there after some time of absence, you and your habitat have a lot to talk about and catch up with each other.
Brussels gives you the feeling that it is actually nobody’s Heimat anymore. This place is an emotional void. It has been conquered by aliens: on the one hand a high percentage of (mostly African and Oriental) immigrants with their small subcultural circles and their apparent dislike and emotional distance towards the place they are living in, and on the other hand a considerable amount of these infamous Eurocrats (to which I should definitely count myself). Even though these groups have otherwise nothing in common, what we have in common is that we give a shit about this city, we don’t inhabit this city, we just… reside here, temporarily. And you can feel it in the air.
It is not a surprise that this happened to the capital of Belgium, a “non-country” (to speak with MEP Nigel Farage) that is anyway suffering a severe identity crisis. The forced co-existence of the Flemish and Walloons is contributing to the erosion of Brussels’ local character as well, and already for a long time. But that is just the ‘enabling circumstance’ for a process that seems to be the order of the day, or rather the tendency of our time, not only in Europe: the step-by-step uprooting of our society, the systematic alienation through a universal loss of Heimat.
There is a tractate from 2007 called “L’Insurrection Qui Vient” that identifies exactly this process as one of the main threats that are inherent to the further development of our civilisation. Our urbanisation and our striving for unconditional mobility – what is described in this text as the merciless mobilisation of mankind for the service of the machine – is destroying our emotional relationship with our surroundings, is generally destroying everything that used to be lasting, that used to give us emotional stability in a world that is ever more full of opportunities – and threats. And we shouldn’t expect this tendency to be reversed as long as we do not somehow put an end to globalisation. Hahaha.
So what we can expect from our future is a scenario where not only Brussels as a first daunting example, but all our cities have grown alien to themselves, devoid of emotional attachment, administered by statal drones whose mission is rationalisation, populated by anonymous people with anonymous lives who are paying a maid to water their plants and always ready to follow the next call that will lead them wherever. The concept of “belonging somewhere” is on the retreat. And what is worrying is that the feeling of responsibility (both human and civic) seems to evaporate wherever this feeling of belonging is lost. It’s a brave new world we’re looking forward to…
