The 2022 World Cup at Qatar ended with the most exciting and excellent final game and with the best football player in the world holding the cup high as a most deserved crown.
When the tournament ended, people all over the world were effusively proclaiming this to be the best World Cup ever or at least the best in the last few decades.
However, when Qatar 2022 started a month ago, it seemed it was going to be the most controversial tournament ever. Controversies after controversies dominated the news cycle.
There was a rehashing of older scandals like the corrupt manner Qatar was awarded the tournament by FIFA or the scandal of uncounted numbers of migrant labourers dying to build shiny stadiums in the desert.
However, the newer scandals related to the clash of personal freedom versus social norms got the most airplay because of their direct connection with the ongoing global conflict of cultures and value systems.
Qatar's restriction on the expression of diverse sexual identities and public consumption of alcohol became global talking points for a couple of weeks.
Even the final was marred by a brewed-up controversy surrounding the Qatari Emir donning Lionel Messi with a bisht, a traditional Arab cloak.
In a way, these cultural controversies were quite expected. We had two decades of intense global discourse on the War on Terror, clash of civilizations, Islamophobia, and Islamist extremism.
It's not surprising that a World Cup taking place in the epicentre of this decades-long war of mind and body, the Arabian Peninsula, would generate scores of controversies.
However, what was surprising was the dog that did not bark. A month-long World Cup took place in a Gulf Country but there was not a peep about terrorism from anywhere. This is one of the clearest signs that the War on Terror era may be truly behind us.
Another interesting point in the clash of values in the World Cup is that controversies about labour exploitation in Qatar, corruption at FIFA, took distant backseats to cultural conflicts.
This juxtaposition shows that in the contemporary world, issues of economics are eclipsed by issues of values. Another reminder to the traditional leftists that they are badly losing ground to the cultural left all over the world. Cultural issues like sexual and gender identities have become issues du jour globally.
In the beginning of the Ukrainian War in early 2022, Russia justified the invasion as safeguarding Russian security from the expansive NATO. Then the defense shifted to protecting the Russian people from Nazi-affiliated Ukrainian forces.
Now the focus is on gender identities, how Satanic Western ideology of 72 genders is trying to destroy the traditional Russian people.
The Iranian Mullah regime is claiming that the Hijab-protesting women are acting as agents of the West to destroy the traditional structure and values of society and family in Iran.
In India, Hindus and Muslims are threatened by each other's value systems, and both in turn are in fear of the liberal West.
It seems everywhere in the world there is a battle going on between the values of the traditional and the local against the values of progressives and the global. A continuously running “Cultural World Cup” where every arena is a knockout game with no compromise possible.
Although many commentators claim that these cultural battles all over the world are orchestrated by elites to mask their rapacious exploitation of the masses, there is no denying that the masses seem to be very enthusiastic participants.
Social media has given voices to the masses and the voice of the masses has worsened cultural fault lines everywhere.
People everywhere seem to react more readily and more viscerally to issues with cultural values than with economic division or political representations. Politicians are exploiting this trend by couching economic or political positions in terms of value systems.
However, there is no reason to think that one value system triumphing over all others and becoming the undisputed world champion is a good outcome for humanity.
The great driver in human cultural evolution is that different cultures learn from each other and change.
Admittedly at any one time, not all cultures are equal in their capacity to advance individual and social well-being. Some cultures and value systems are clearly better than others overall.
However, all cultures have some points on the human condition to teach others. And even leading cultures like Western progressivism have many deficiencies that will bring catastrophic outcomes for humanity if it becomes the only value system.
The world needs to provide space so that cultural conflicts do not become winner-take-all. Different value systems should have their own space so that they can demonstrate their “value” to the rest.
Laboratories of cultural diversity are essential for robust cultural evolution. However, spaces for different cultures cannot be coercive.
We should not allow value systems like the Afghan Taliban to go un-protested and unopposed in this world. Members of every cultural space or value system must have options of exit, voice, or loyalty.
Adults must have choices to be loyal to the system, voice protest against the system, and exit the system if that is the final preference.
That is the way the “values World Cup” should run.
Shafiqur Rahman is a political scientist.
