Changing the ways we connect
Globalism today has less to do with countries than with how we choose to define our communities.
WE ALL KNOW the feeling: sitting in an airport departure lounge with Starbucks on one side of us and McDonald's on the other. Some featureless ambient music is playing in the distance, and we're sipping bottled water that has the same taste as the terminal itself. All the cultures of the world are here, but they're all translated into placeless ciphers of a kind; we sit before screens, drift off, plug into our machines and feel as if we've entered the global space of a Haruki Murakami novel, a food court, a minimalist white-on-white Nowhere Hotel.
This globalism-lite is what we find around us often, especially in places like L.A.; it's cooler, sleeker, more diverse than the world we grew up in, but it's not clear that it sustains us deep down. We can access Beijing in a millisecond, fly to Bangalore tomorrow -- and yet we find, when we get to either place, that they don't look so different from Ventura Boulevard or Monterey Park. This lowest-common-denominator globalism feels like an absence of identity or distinction, even amid its multiplying abundance of choices; it's as if we're sitting in a lounge with 100 different televisions, but none of them helps or even allows us to see who or where we are.
Then we pick up a book -- by Orhan Pamuk or Salman Rushdie, say -- and see cultures strutting past one another, trying on one another's clothes, mingling so gleefully that something new and radical comes out of their unions. We hear a world leader -- call him Vaclav Havel or even Bono -- who refuses to stick within narrow limits and who, from the realm of the arts, asks us to conceive of an identity as large as the planet. Then we meet a new exile, who tells us how he sees L.A. as the center of his dreams and how he has all these gifts from his own culture -- rhythms, stories, ideas -- that he wishes to share.
Soon after the millennium began, I decided that this planetary neighborhood was the world we had inherited, and that our only civic responsibility would be to find what new possibilities lay inside this daily expanding community.
People like the Dalai Lama were speaking often of what he called a "new reality" -- a universe in which the idea of "we" and "they" made little sense anymore, so much were our identities intertwined. The exciting challenge before us was what to do with, you could say, the global LAX. How to find a sense of meaning, a future tense, within -- or behind -- our anonymous surfaces?
