McNeill explained:
Even though there is no perceptible consensus about what the term “civilization” ought to mean, and no agreed word or phrase to describe the “interactive zone” … I think it correct to assert that recognition of the reality and historical importance of trans-civilizational encounters is on the increase and promises to become the mainstream of future work in world history …
When I wrote The Rise of the West I set out to improve upon Toynbee by showing how the separate civilizations of Eurasia interacted from the very beginning of their history, borrowing critical skills from one another, and thus precipitating still further change as adjustment between treasured old and borrowed new knowledge and practice became necessary …
The ultimate spring of human variability, of course, lies in our capacity to invent new ideas, practices and institutions. But invention also flourished best when contacts with strangers compelled different ways of thinking and doing to compete for attention, so that choice became conscious, and deliberate tinkering with older practices became easy, and indeed often inevitable.
Contact on Steroids
I am a deep believer in McNeill’s view of history, which aligns with everything I saw as a foreign correspondent. Just as the climate is changing, and weather circulates differently, so globalization is reshaping how fast ideas circulate and change. And that is now posing some real adaptation challenges. As a result of all the accelerating flows, we are seeing contact between strangers on steroids today—civilizations and individuals encountering, clashing, absorbing, and rejecting one another’s ideas in myriad new ways—through Facebook, video games, satellite TV, Twitter, messaging apps, and mobile phones and tablets. Some cultures, societies, and individuals are predisposed to absorbing contact with strangers, learning from them, synthesizing the best, and ignoring the rest. Others, more brittle, are threatened by such contact, or easily humiliated by the fact that what they thought was their superior culture must now adapt to and learn from others.
The difference between those cultures that can handle and take advantage of this explosion of contact between strangers and their strange ideas and those that cannot will drive a lot of history in the age of accelerations, even more than in those eras McNeill wrote about. Specifically, those societies that are most open to flows of trade, information, finance, culture, or education, and those most willing to learn from them and contribute to them, are the ones most likely to thrive in the age of accelerations. Those that can’t will struggle.
The benefits of being in the flow are exemplified by the work of people like Professor Hossam Haick of the Technion, Israel’s premier science and technology institute. Prof. Haick is an Israeli. He is an Israeli Arab. He is an Israeli expert in nanotechnology. And he was the first Israeli Arab professor to teach a massive open online course, or MOOC, on nanotechnology—in Arabic, based out of an Israeli university.
Needless to say, he explained to me when I visited him to write a column in February 2014 in Haifa, he got some very interesting e-mails from students registering for his MOOC from all over the Arab world. Their questions included: Are you a real person? Are you really an Arab, or are you an Israeli Jew speaking Arabic, pretending to be an Arab? Haick is a Christian Arab from Nazareth and was teaching this course from his home university, the Technion.
His course was entitled Nanotechnology and Nanosensors and was designed for anyone interested in learning about Haick’s specialty—“novel sensing tools that make use of nanotechnology to screen, detect, and monitor various events in either our personal or professional life.” The course included ten classes of three to four short lecture videos—in Arabic and English—and anyone with an Internet connection could tune in and participate for free in the weekly quizzes and forum activities and do a final project.
If you had any doubts about the hunger for education in the Middle East today—and how it can overcome the alienation of strangers, not to mention old enemies—Haick’s MOOC would dispel them. He had nearly five thousand registrations for the Arabic version, including students from Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Algeria, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, and the West Bank. Iranians were signing up for the English version. Because the registration was through the U.S.-based Coursera MOOC website, some registrants initially didn’t realize the course was being taught by an Israeli Arab scientist at the Technion, said Haick, and when they discovered that fact some professors and students unregistered. But most didn’t.
Asked why he thought the course was attracting so much interest in the neighborhood, Haick told me: “Because nanotechnology and nanosensors are perceived as futuristic, and people are curious to understand what the future looks like.” Haick, forty at the time, whose PhD was from the Technion, where his father also graduated, is a science prodigy. He and the Technion already had a start-up together, developing what he calls “an electronic nose”—a sensory array that mimics the way a dog’s nose works to detect what Haick and his team have proved to be unique markers in exhaled breath that reveal different cancers in the body. In between that and teaching chemical engineering, the Technion’s president, Peretz Lavie, suggested that Haick lead the school into the land of flows and MOOCs.
Lavie, Haick explained, thought there was “a high need to bring science beyond the boundaries between countries. He told me there is something called a MOOC. I did not know what is a MOOC. He said it is a course that can be given to thousands of people over the Web. And he asked if I can give the first MOOC from the Technion—in Arabic.” The Technion funded the project, which took nine months to prepare, and Haick donated the lectures. Haick said, without meaning to boast, “I have young people who tell me from the Arab world: ‘You have become our role model. Please let us know the ingredients of how we become like you.’”
On February 23, 2016, the Associated Press carried an interview with Zyad Shehata, an Egyptian student who completed Haick’s course. “Some people told me to remove this certificate from my résumé,” said Shehata. “They said that I might face some problems. I have no interest in whether it is an Israeli university or not, but I’m very proud of Professor Haick and I see him as a leader.”
Translation: Never get between a hungry student and a new flow of knowledge in the age of accelerations.
The Melting of Minds
All of this contact between strangers, together with the accelerated flow of ideas on social networks, is surely contributing to rapid changes in public opinion. Points of view, traditions, and conventional wisdom that looked to be as solid as an iceberg, and just as permanent, can now suddenly melt away in a day, in ways that used to take a generation.
The Confederate flag flew over South Carolina’s statehouse grounds for fifty-four years. But on July 10, 2015, it was lowered for good by a South Carolina Highway Patrol honor guard just a few weeks after nine worshippers were gunned down at a historic black church in Charleston by a self-proclaimed white supremacist—who had posed for a picture with the symbol of the Confederacy. The killings triggered a huge social network blowback, and just like that, that Confederate flag was gone from the statehouse grounds.
Running for president, on April 17, 2008, Barack Obama declared: “I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian—for me—for me as a Christian, it is also a sacred union. God’s in the mix.” A mere three years later, on October 1, 2011, President Obama, talking about one of the oldest conventions in the history of relations between men and women, told a Human Rights Campaign annual dinner that he now supported gay marriage: “Every single American—gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual, transgender—every single American deserves to be treated equally in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of our society. It’s a pretty simple proposition.”
When you see how fast attitudes toward lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people have changed in just five years, argued Marina Gorbis, executive director at the Institute for the Future i
n Palo Alto, “you have to believe it has something to do with so many young people being immersed in what is increasingly a global dialogue—often about values.” This system, she added, “amplifies everything that goes through it, so it creates feedback loops used to bully people, and it creates more points of interaction and many more opportunities for people who are homophobic to meet a gay person. And now suddenly so many more people are meeting gay people. If empathy comes about through human interaction, this system creates so many more opportunities for that.”
The day I interviewed Gorbis, Bettina Warburg, a researcher at the Institute for the Future, told me this story from her recent commute in the San Francisco area: “I was riding in a Lyft the other morning—where you ride-share with others headed in the same direction. My driver chatted with me and mentioned his last [passenger] was ‘voted out of the car,’ because he was expressing extreme homophobic rhetoric. He said, ‘You won’t get a ride in San Francisco with those values—you are in the wrong city.’ We were a black, a Hispanic, and a woman in the car talking about how intolerance does not jibe with an economy built on platforms that value participation.”
Given the myriad new technological opportunities to have contact with strangers, “the conception of community is going to evolve,” said Justin Osofsky, VP of global operations and media partnerships at Facebook. In the pre-Facebook, pre–social network era, the notion of community “was constrained around you, around that time and around that place.” Now, with social networks, you have “the ability to maintain relationships through every context of your life if you choose to”—and to create new contexts for relationships that were unimaginable just a decade ago. “Without this level of connectivity you used to live your life in separate chapters,” he explained, “and you grew as a person in each one, but now there is a connectivity between chapters” and it is possible to open chapters far outside your geographic context that include people with shared interests. “Our mission is to connect the world. And as that happens, ‘the nature of community’ will evolve. In the past you basically had two life choices—stay in a community or leave it.” Today, he said, “if you grew up in the world of mobile phones with Facebook, the connectivity to a community can remain strong both for those who stay and those who leave.”
Moreover, “if you are the world expert on Eritrean politics you can find an audience of like-minded people at an enormous scale,” said Osofsky. “You or your child could have a rare illness, and before Facebook, you were feeling lonely and lost.” Now you can instantly “find support groups going through the same thing.”
That’s the best part of the globalization of flows today—its ability to foster contact between like-minded strangers or transform old friends who had become strangers back into friends and a community.
Unfortunately, there is also a downside to this ease of finding the like-minded. Some people crave support groups to become neo-Nazis and suicidal jihadists. Social networks have become a godsend for extremists to connect with one another and to recruit young and impressionable strangers, and the supernova just keeps increasing their firepower. It is troubling but unavoidable. (I will discuss this further in chapter nine when we deal with “the breakers.”) But for now I see many more upsides than downsides.
Indeed, it is actually quite exciting how easy it can be to summon the flow to fight bad things and promote good ones. Ben Rattray founded Change.org in 2007 to create a platform where any digital David could take on any Goliath: corporate, governmental, or otherwise. Fast Company described Change.org on August 5, 2013, as “the destination of choice for amateur activists and squeaky wheels of all types.” It now has more than 150 million global users, a number that is growing steadily—and they launch more than a thousand petitions a day. Change.org provides both advice for how to launch an online petition and a global platform on which to publish it and draw attention and supporters alike.
Striking testimony to Change.org’s ability to leverage global flows to drive change faster comes from Ndumie Funda, a South African lesbian whose fiancée was gang-raped—a so-called corrective rape—by five men because of her sexuality. As a direct result of the attack, the fiancée developed cryptococcal meningitis, an infection of the brain and spinal column, and died on December 16, 2007. “Corrective rape is a relatively new term,” Funda explained in a February 15, 2011, interview on WomenNewsNetwork.net. “This ‘hate-filled’ form of rape is found worldwide. Based on the idea that forcing a lesbian to have sex with a man will ‘cure’ her of a ‘deviant life,’ it is accompanied most often by extreme violence.”
In December 2010, Funda sat down at a Cape Town Internet café and launched a petition through Change.org that demanded government action to end the “corrective rape” of lesbians in South Africa’s shantytowns. It almost immediately collected 170,000 signatures worldwide. Another petition drive was started by the digital activist site Avaaz.org, reported WomenNewsNetwork.net. Together the two petitions got nearly one million signatures worldwide and embarrassed the South African Parliament into creating a national task force to delegitimize the practice. Gay marriage has been legal in South Africa since 2007, and although “corrective rape” is still a problem, the perpetrators no longer enjoy the easy public acceptance they once did.
I asked Rattray what he and his Change.org team learned from the experience. He answered: “If you ask people about a large social problem like rape, they will tell you they’re against it, yet they will rarely do anything about it. But if you tell them a personal story about someone directly affected and give them an opportunity to join a movement for change, they will often immediately respond by taking action.”
Build Floors, Not Walls
Globalization has always been everything and its opposite—it can be incredibly democratizing and it can concentrate incredible power in giant multinationals; it can be incredibly particularizing—the smallest voices can now be heard everywhere—and incredibly homogenizing, with big brands now able to swamp everything anywhere. It can be incredibly empowering, as small companies and individuals can start global companies overnight, with global customers, suppliers, and collaborators, and it can be incredibly disempowering—big forces can come out of nowhere and crush your business when you never even thought they were in your business. Which way it tips depends on the values and tools that we all bring to these flows.
In the face of more and more uncontrolled immigration, globalization today feels under threat more than ever. We saw that in the vote by Great Britain to withdraw from the European Union and in the candidacy of Donald Trump. But disconnecting from a world that is only getting more digitally connected, from a world in which these digital flows will be a vital source of fresh and challenging ideas, innovation, and commercial energy, is not a strategy for economic growth.
That said, people have bodies and souls, and when you feed one and not the other you always get in trouble. When people feel their identities and sense of home are being threatened, they will set aside economic interests and choose walls over Webs, and closed over open, in a second—not everyone will make that choice, but many will.
The challenge is to find the right balance. In too many ways on too many days, we have failed to do that in the big Western industrial democracies over the past decade. If many Americans are feeling overwhelmed these days by globalization, it’s because we’ve let all the physical technologies driving it (immigration, trade, and digital flows) get way too far ahead of the social technologies (the learning and adapting tools) needed to cushion their impacts and anchor people in healthy communities that can help them thrive when the winds of change howl and bring so many strangers and strange ideas directly into their living rooms. Warning: in the age of accelerations, if a society doesn’t build floors under people, many will reach for a wall—no matter how self-defeating that would be. With so much changing so fast, it’s easier than ever today for people to feel a loss of “home” in the deepest sense. And they will resist. Addressing that anxiety
is one of today’s great leadership challenges, and I will discuss it later in the book.
In the meantime, if there is one overarching reason to be optimistic about the future, and to keep trying to get the best out of digital globalization and cushion the worst, it is surely the fact that this mobile-broadband-supernova is creating so many flows and thus enabling so many more people to lift themselves out of poverty and participate in solving the world’s biggest problems. We are tapping into many more brains, and bringing them into the global neural network to become “makers.” This is surely the most positive—but least discussed or appreciated—trend in the world today, when “globalization” is becoming a dirty word because it is entirely associated in the West with dislocations from trade.
That’s why I want to give the last word in this chapter to Dr. Eric C. Leuthardt, a neurosurgeon and the director of the Center for Innovation in Neuroscience and Technology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, who asked and answered the question “Why Is The World Changing So Fast?” on his “Brains & Machines” blog:
I would posit the reason for the accelerating change is similar to why networked computers are so powerful. The more processing cores that you add the faster a given function can occur. Similarly, the more integrated that humans are able to exchange ideas the more rapidly they will be able to accomplish novel insights. Different from Moore’s Law, which involves the compiling of logic units to perform more rapid analytic functions, increased communication is the compiling of creative units (i.e., humans) to perform ever more creative tasks.
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