That was yesterday. Today's young residents of cyberspace look to be citizens of the world. They've watched the U.S.A. since they learnt to work the remote control. Boring. My young adult children, travelling before settling down, have been in Europe and East Africa, discovering others sharing our distaste for what other countries often call the "American octopus." Why identify with 5% of the world when most of the action is in the other 95%?

The recent ascension of various communication technologies is creating, as we speak, a global culture. It will not be homogenous, but it will be conscious and unified, aware of the fact that we are all part of one great human community despite our diversities. Eventually, on some distant day, it will be borderless. The tribal instinct will cease to be about where you are born and instead involve more natural divisions, like what you believe and how you approach life.

We are seeing the genesis of this event, unprecedented in human experience. It is a historical moment that cannot be overstated.

As we look throughout human history, one of the clear patterns that emerge is the trend toward greater inclusion. Our capacity for abstraction grows and grows and with it the ability to abstract our tribal instinct into larger and larger structures. Tribes became cities, cities became states, states became empires which became countries, and now countries are bonding together in new ways in new structures to unite whole continents. This does not discount the effect of smaller, regionalistic impulses, and neither will it eradicate them, but it does subvert them, sapping their strength and making them only part of a larger picture, giving an option to those unwilling to take part. In fact, the historical trend towards the expansion of the tribal instinct seems to indicate that the inclusive model is the most powerful, in the long run.

Still, throughout this process of people coming together to form larger and larger "nations", there has always been the "other", the rival nation, the outsider group that must be opposed, or at least dealt with. What we are seeing now is the beginning of the end of that dynamic. When the global culture takes hold, there will be no "other", nobody to exclude or demonise. On some level, we will finally accept the inevitable burden of our shared kinship as human beings and the responsibility of co-operating for mutual benefit.

Again, this will not prevent smaller tribalisms and rivalries, but they will be undercut by a more fundamental unity. Now, our largest unities are at the level of countries. Though rural BC may have a problem with urban BC, they are still united in their acceptance of being one province. And the province itself may have big problems with other provinces but still the essential unity of us all as Canadians is the stronger force for the vast majority. None of this will change in the new world. The difference will be that the final level of inclusion, of fraternity, will be a place of no division, no rivalry, no tribes, for it will be the entire world and the whole human race. It cannot help but take the killing edge off of the natural divisions that will still occur.

To a degree I feel the same way as Jacob Two-Two does.

However, being innately somewhat conservative (I hear a bunch of people falling out of their chairs now) resists the notion of a free-for-all globalism governed largely by the whims of multinational corporations, which is the "bad globalization" Linda McQuaig sometimes refers to.

Unfortunately, the situation as it stands is not a worldwide people freely merging into a single entity, unencumbered by old parochial passions, but rather a diktat laid down by a hegemonic power and those multinationals who it is friendly with - this being the decree that people shall not be free to move about, but that they should remain restricted within their own countries while the owners of capital can move their assets and money as they please.

There are signs of hope, though - people do more readily identify with each other over longer distances than they used to in the past; babble is just one example of this. Ten years ago I mainly chatted on local BBSes, and rarely if ever called a BBS in Ontario or Quebec.

It is possible that this mutual identification-with-each-other phenomenon will cause people to demand that they be allowed to set the worldwide agenda for the future, not a minority of people who hold the wealth and power.

quote:

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Originally posted by Jacob Two-Two:
But it's not about where you're at, it's about where you're going. Don't you think you identify much more strongly with the rest of the world than you did ten years ago?

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