From the Los Angeles Times
Changing the ways we connect
Globalism today has less to do with countries than with how we choose to define our communities.
By Pico Iyer
April 7, 2008
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?
I journeyed to Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama's exile home in India, to see how this longtime refugee and lifelong traveler was looking at our newly mobile world. One of the interesting things to me about him was that he had been born in what was one of the most materially undeveloped and remote places on Earth -- rural Tibet -- in 1935. No cars, no foreigners, no paved roads. And yet within two generations he had become one of the most visible spokesmen for a world in which everywhere is a part of everywhere else. You can no longer think of Buddhist and non-Buddhist, East or West, god-king and regular guy, he might have been saying: Those categories are over.
I had first visited the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala in 1974, when I was 17, and had been listening to him talk in every corner of the globe since then. But what seemed exhilarating -- and unexpected -- in the new millennium was that the larger vision he was speaking of was being advanced by others too. Desmond Tutu takes the skills he sharpened in setting up his Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and brings them to, say, the troubled in Northern Ireland. Bill Gates takes the ingenuity and determination he once used to make extraordinary amounts of money and uses them now to give away extraordinary amounts of money.
This is all a kind of opportunity we've never been in a position to see before. Bill Clinton's most recent book was on global giving, an extension of Bono's idea that a kid in the slums of Dhaka is as much our neighbor -- and therefore our responsibility -- as the boy in the projects across the 405. And one of the most surprising and liberating politicians in recent history, from Kansas and Kenya by way of Hawaii and Indonesia, reminds us that thinking only in terms of black and white reduces us all.
In recent times, we've all heard of how many young Tibetans, holding to the old dualities, remain convinced that Tibet and China are enemies, and that to attack their neighbor is to advance themselves. The Dalai Lama, while responding fully to their suffering, always holds that the neighbors are so intertwined that you can't hit another without harming yourself
The deeper point he's making, though, has to do not with China and Tibet but with you and me. Globalism has less to do today with multinationals, World Trade Organization agreements and e-mail connections than with the way each one of us chooses to define community, home and ourselves. How much will we take in the neighbors, how much expand our narrow orbit?
The airport lounge may not help us come to the right decisions, but the travelers who pass through it, making a mockery of old borders and divisions, just might.
Pico Iyer is the author, most recently, of "The Open Road," a book about these themes.
