Michael Orthofer: belief

Transcript context

…Let me tell you an argument about New York City which I occasionally hear. And I know it’s not true about you, but whether you think it’s true at all. And it gets at these paradoxes of globalization. That in some ways New York City, or maybe just Manhattan, is fairly provincial because people think — and they’re led to believe — that the whole world comes here. In some ways that’s true, both tourism and migration, but you don’t actually get the whole world here at all. You get a highly processed, filtered version of a bit of it from each particular region. Then people here, in a way, become more inward looking. They don’t go as many other places. They feel everything is right here. They get into their routines. And is it possible that parts of Manhattan are evolving into this highly provincial place because of these cultural paradoxes? I think so, although New York still remains such a dynamic place because you also have great shifts in what populations come here and how that affects the city, I think. And so there is that dynamism, the changing neighborhoods. I still think, in that sense, it is a very vibrant city. And it’s fairly unprovincial for a metropolitan city, compared to even some European — I mean, I’m from Austria, and Vienna is a cosmopolitan city, but in the end of things, it is — . Still Vienna.…

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