Two weeks ago I was sitting in a little restaurant in southern Portugal talking with Irish, Portuguese and Japanese people about surfing. I was amazed that they knew as much about the sport as I did, since I am a native Californian. This small event got me thinking about globalization.
Stories like this are commonplace: rural African chiefs talking on cell phones, Islamabad residents checking their investment portfolios online, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il being a huge fan of Michael Jordan. Generations ago, to see someone my age traveling around Europe would have been unusual - now it is common. And people are going much farther abroad than Europe - it would not be extraordinary for me to go to China, Africa, or the Middle East, either. Whether one talks about financial flows, immigration, travel, or communication, the world is shrinking by almost every measure. What will this mean for people's sense of identity?
Every culture likes to think of itself as the center of civilization - that is human nature. The words Bantu, Inuit and Navaho all translate directly to 'The People' in their respective languages. This is true for many other cultures as well - the names they give themselves emphasize their uniqueness, like the Israelites calling themselves "the chosen people." Being part of a group means security, it means being with others who share the same language, values, and traditions. This identity once made the difference between life and death - either you were in the tribe and safe, or in the wilderness at peril. Now that mere survival is not a primary concern, what is the use of a tribe?
In Copenhagen, nearly every person I talked to spoke fluent English. In Dublin, my Irish friends grew up with the same TV shows, the same music, the same books, and many of the same experiences as me - we immediately shared a huge array of memories. In Bosnia, the students I met oftentimes knew more about American pop-culture than I did.
It was not always this way. With the global consolidation of media providers, retailers, publishers, and companies of all sorts, people from around the world are getting their intellectual and cultural education from a shrinking variety of sources. Although the ease of communication greatly increases the number of options, it plays into the hands of those who speak loudest: the AOL-Time-Warners of the world. Traditional educators - parents, teachers and cultural leaders - are finding it harder to compete with the flashy newcomers.
I have never gotten culture shock from traveling in Western Europe. Despite numerous small differences in customs and language, I have always been able to mesh easily with people my age. We just start talking about the Simpsons or about new movies and immediately have much in common. Long gone are the days when Gladstone could call the Czechs a "far off people about whom we know nothing." Today, you do not even need a passport to go from one EU country to another.
On one hand, this could lead to more thorough understanding between different peoples. It is safe to say that cultures that share the same values are less likely to come into violent conflict - take the UK and US for example. However, a strong sense of tribe can become pathological - when being "in" means being the best and means a right to dominate outsiders. This was expressed in Hitler's "Volk" or Milosevic's "Greater Serbia" or England's "White Man's Burden" with disastrous consequences. Perhaps further convergence of cultures will blur the line between in and out.
On the other hand, just as genetic diversity is vital for evolution, a diversity of ideas and cultures is crucial for intellectual growth. If everyone has the same curriculum and reads the same texts, a phenomenon known as "groupthink" emerges - when a group of individuals unintentionally comes to the same conclusions because they all work from the same information.
The availability of knowledge does little by itself to increase wisdom. Anyone who has done research using standard Internet search engines can attest to that - you are bombarded with so much information, it becomes difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. I wonder if this is happening on a global scale; if in the face of overwhelming amounts of data, people are looking to the same well-worn sources they think they can trust. Extinction is happening with greater and greater frequency - not just in the biological world, but in the cultural world as well. In a few decades, the Tibetan culture will hardly exist outside textbooks. Indigenous American cultures are relegated mostly to reservations and souvenir shops. What will happen to Gaelic, Danish, Landau or the myriad dialects of India? Will there come a day when the only spoken languages are Chinese, English, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, and Swahili?
Cultures have always been changing, assimilating and dying, but now is different. The ease of communication and travel and the huge differences in power between nations are causing many different cultures to converge into a few dominant ones. If nothing else, cultural convergence will make traveling pointless. What is the use of leaving your own home if everywhere else is essentially the same? More profoundly, it means less individuality; less uniqueness.
Many smaller countries have sensed the change already. All Irish students learn Gaelic, even though few people still speak it. The Danes are obsessed with keeping Denmark "Danish." More sinisterly, politicians like Jorg Haider of Austria have been able to capitalize on this fear of assimilation, using it as an excuse to close borders and drum up nationalism.
In short, things are moving in two directions simultaneously. First, people are becoming more connected and reaping the benefits of globalization. It is easier than ever to travel, read authors from other countries, collaborate with people around the world, and follow events in far off nations. Second, people are becoming more fearful of losing their identity and in some cases are becoming more nationalistic.
China is a perfect example: the Chinese want the benefits of Western investment but at the same time want to maintain Chinese culture and traditions. This is becoming harder - the closer they get to the West, the more the West will influence them. When Beijing demanded an apology for the spy plane incident, it was sending a message - "We are different than you. Just because we benefit from your investment and trade does not mean we are prepared to become like you or kowtow to your wishes. We do not want war, but we want to be powerful and respected and we want to do things our way." Whether or not this balance can be maintained will be one of the crucial things to watch in the next ten years.
