Tomorrow's homework will include reading an article by a very good write, Pico Iyer. The article is called "Are We Coming Apart," and it was published in
Time Magazine back in 2000. I'll try to make some copies for tomorrow, but just in case I can't (and even if I do, so you can have a back up copy), here it is in full.
ARE WE COMING APART OR
TOGETHER by Pico Iyer
If
you like things that are new and different, our globalizing world is a
dream. Plenty of folks, though, want things to stay the same.
It
is a truth all but universally acknowledged that the more internationalism
there is in the world, the more nationalism there will be. The more
multinational companies, multicultural beings and planetary networks are
crossing and transcending borders, the more other forces will, as if in
response, fashion new divisions and aggravate old ones. Human nature abhors a
vacuum, and it is only natural, when people find themselves in a desert,
without boundaries,
that
they will try to assuage their vulnerability by settling into a community. Thus
fewer and fewer wars take place these days across borders, and more and more
take place within them.
Many
Americans, rejoicing in an unprecedented period of economic success and
celebrating the new horizons opened up by our latest technologies, are likely
to embrace the future as a dashing (if unknown) stranger who's appeared at our
door to whisk us into a strange new world. Those who travel, though, are more
likely to see rising tribalism, widening divisions and all the fissures that
propel ever more of the world into what looks like anarchy. Fully 97% of the
population growth that will bring our numbers up to 9 billion by the year 2050
will take place in developing countries, where conditions are scarcely better
than they were a hundred years ago. In many cases, in fact, history seems to be
moving backward (in modern Zimbabwe, to take but one example, the average life
expectancy has dwindled from 70 to 38 in recent years because of rains). To
travel today is to see a planet that looks more and more like a too typical
downtown on a global scale: a small huddle of shiny high-rises reaching toward
a multinational heaven,
surrounded on every side by a wasteland of the poor, living in a
state of almost biblical desperation.
When
people speak of a "digital divide," they are, in effect, putting into
21st century technological terms what is an age-old cultural problem: that all
the globalism in the world does not erase (and may in fact intensify) the
differences between us. Corporate bodies stress connectedness, borderless
economies, all the wired communities that make up our worldwide webs; those in
Chechnya, Kosovo or Rwanda remind us of much older forces. And even as America
exports its dotcom optimism around the world, many other countries export their
primal animosities to America. Get in a cab near the Capitol, say, or the World
Trade Center and ask the wrong question, and you are likely to hear a tirade
against the Amhara or the Tigreans, Indians or Pakistanis. If all the world's a
global village, that means that the ancestral divisions of every place can play
out in every other. And the very use of that comforting word village tends to
distract us from the fact that much of the world is coming to resemble a global
city (with all the gang warfare, fragmentation and generalized estrangement
that those centers of affluence promote). When the past century began,13% of
humans lived in cities; by the time it ended, roughly 50% did.
The
hope, in the face of these counterclockwise movements, is that we can be bound
by what unites us, which we have ever more occasion to see; that the stirring
visions of Thomas Paine or Martin Luther King Jr. have more resonance than
ever, now that an American can meet a Chinese counterpart-in Shanghai or San
Francisco (or many places in between)-and see how much they have in common.
What Emerson called the Over-soul reminds us that we are joined not only by our
habits and our urges and our fears but also by our dreams and that best part of
us that intuits an identity larger than you or I. Look up, wherever you are,
and you can see what we have in common; look down-or inside-and you can see
something universal. It is only when you look around that you note divisions.
The
fresher and more particular hope of the moment is that as more and more
of us cross borders, we can step out of, and beyond, the old categories. Every
time a Palestinian man, say, marries a Singhalese woman (and such unions are
growing more common by the day) and produces a half Palestinian, half
Singhalese child (living in Paris or London, no doubt), an Israeli or a Tamil
is deprived of a tribal enemy. Even the Palestinian or Singhalese grandparents
may be eased out of longtime prejudices. Mongrelism-the human equivalent of
World Music and "fusion culture"-is the brightest child of fragmentation.
Yet
the danger we face is that of celebrating too soon a global unity that only
covers much deeper divisions. Much of the world is linked, more than ever
before, by common surfaces: people on every continent may be watching Michael
Jordan advertising Nike shoes on CNN. But beneath the surface, inevitably,
traditional differences remain. George Bernard Shaw declared generations ago
that England and America were two countries divided by a common language. Now
the world often resembles 200 countries divided by a common frame of cultural
reference. The number of countries on the planet, in the 20th century, has more
than tripled.
Beyond
that, multinationals and machines tell us that we're all plugged into
the same global circuit, without considering very much what takes place
off-screen. China and India, to cite the two giants that comprise 1
in every 3 of the world's people, have recently begun to embrace the opportunities
of the global marketplace and the conveniences of e-reality (and, of course, it
is often engineers of Chinese and Indian origin who have made these new wonders
possible). Yet for all that connectedness on an individual level, the Chinese
government remains as reluctant as ever to play by the rules of the rest of the
world, and Indian leaders make nuclear gestures as if Dr. Strangelove had just
landed in Delhi. And as some of us are able to fly across continents for
business or pleasure, others are propelled out of their homelands by poverty
and necessity and war, in record numbers: the number of refugees in the world
has gone up 1,000% since 1970.
It
seems a safe bet, as we move toward the year 2025, that governments will
become no more idealistic than they have ever been-they will always represent a
community of interests. And corporations cannot afford to stress conscience or
sacrifice before profit. It therefore falls to the individual, on her own
initiative, to look beyond the divisions of her parents' time and find a common
ground with strangers to apply the all-purpose adjective "global" to
"identity" and "loyalty." Never before in history have so
many people, whether in Manhattan or in Tuva, been surrounded by so much that
is alien (in customs, languages and neighborhoods). How we orient ourselves in
the midst of all this foreignness and in the absence of the old certainties
will determine how much our nations are disunited and how much we are bound by
what Augustine called "things loved in common."
Pico
Iyer, a TIME contributor, is the author most recently of The Global Soul: Jet
Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home
