The Global Soul

by Pico Iyer

  The other truth is that they are crossing all the time these days—the new and the old—and producing encounters seldom seen before. Two different worlds are coming together now, and both of us, aliens and unofficials for twenty-eight years in the great immigrants’ Land of Promise, were being tossed about in the fast, driving winds that were blowing the world all around.

  The century just ended, most of us agree, was the century of movement, with planes and phones and even newer toys precipitating what the secretary-general of the UN’s Habitat II conference in 1996 called the “largest migration in history”; suddenly, among individuals and among groups, more bodies were being thrown more widely across the planet than ever before. Therein lay many of the new excitements of our time, and therein lay the pathos: in Cambodia recently, I heard that the second city of the Khmer people had been a refugee camp; even in relatively settled Central Europe, the number of refugees is greater than the populations of Vienna and Berlin combined.

  For more and more people, then, the world is coming to resemble a diaspora, filled with new kinds of beings—Gastarbeiters and boat people and marielitos—as well as new kinds of realities: Rwandans in Auckland and Moroccans in Iceland. One reason why Melbourne looks ever more like Houston is that both of them are filling up with Vietnamese pho cafés; and computer technology further encourages us to believe that the remotest point is just a click away. Everywhere is so made up of everywhere else—a polycentric anagram—that I hardly notice I’m sitting in a Parisian café just outside Chinatown (in San Francisco), talking to a Mexican-American friend about biculturalism while a Haitian woman stops off to congratulate him on a piece he’s just delivered on TV on St. Patrick’s Day. “I know all about those Irish nuns,” she says, in a thick patois, as we sip our Earl Grey tea near signs that say CITY OF HONG KONG, EMPRESS OF CHINA.

  Up the hill, in my hotel, a woman named Madame Nhu is waiting in a corner of the lobby to talk to me.

  “Are you from Vietnam?” I ask as we introduce ourselves, following the implication of her name.

  “No. America.”

  “You never lived in Vietnam?” I press on, not very diplomatically (and mostly because I want to share with her my enthusiasm for her country).

  “I’m from Hue.”

  “But”—I don’t want to make it hard for her—“you left when you were young?”

  “Yes. I never lived there; I am American.”

  I feel a little uneasy about this line of questioning, knowing that I would squirm just as restlessly if someone asked the same of me: those of us who live between categories just tend to pick the nearest (or handiest) answer so we can move the conversation along. In any case, “Where do you come from?” is coming to seem as antiquated an inquiry as “What regiment do you belong to?”

  “I remember once, in Vietnam,” this highly cultured woman goes on, understanding, perhaps, that I’m only looking for a point of contact and, in fact, that I probably have more in common with her than someone from Hue or from the Berkeley Hills might, “the chambermaid at my hotel finally picked up the courage to ask, ‘Are you one of us?’ ”

  “In English?”

  “No, in Vietnamese.”

  “And you must have found it difficult to answer?”

  “No. I said, ‘Yes. Definitely. Yes, I am one of you!’ ”

  “Even though, when I asked just now, you didn’t sound so sure. Maybe it depends on whom you’re talking to?”

  Unfair again, though doubtless true: after all, nearly all the cultures of which she’d been a member had been at war with one another during her lifetime, and wherever she was, whether it was Paris or English boarding school, New York or San Francisco, she must have felt that many of her lives were far away. The previous night, I’d met a man at dinner who’d told me that he dreamed in Swedish, English, and Italian (though only his Italian dreams were in black and white).

  The surprising thing about such encounters, really, is that they don’t seem surprising any more. Already we’re taking yesterday’s astonishments for granted.

  Though none of these mixtures are new, as I say—Homer and Dante tell us everything we need to know about exile and abandoned homes—what is changing, surely, is the speed at which the world is turning, and sometimes I feel as if I’m going through the existential equivalent of that game I used to play as a child, in which I’d spin myself around and around where I stood, till I collapsed in a dizzy heap on the floor. The two great engines of our age—technology and travel (now the largest industry in the world)—give fuel to each other, our machines prompting us to prize speed as an end in itself, and the longing for speed quickening a hunger for new technologies.

  The external effects of this are everywhere—1 million transactions every minute on the New York Stock Exchange, and the speed of silicon chips doubling (as their price diminishes) every eighteen months. Yet the internal effects may be even more disquieting, as memory itself seems accelerated, and yesterday’s dramas become as remote as ancient history. At times, it can feel as if the whole planet is joyriding in somebody else’s Porsche, at ninety miles per hour, around blind curves. As even Marshall McLuhan, the hopeful (if somewhat absentminded) godfather of the “electronic cottage,” confessed, “You get going very quickly and you end up in the wrong place.”

  In the final winter of the old millennium, to see what the official caretakers of our global order make of all this, I accepted an invitation to go as a Fellow to the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The Forum gathers hundreds of “leaders of global security” in Davos each year—captains of industry, heads of state, computer billionaires, and a few token mortals such as me—to map out the future of the planet. For six days in the tightly sealed mountain village, surrounded by teams of armed Swiss guards (the same village, skeptics always note, where Thomas Mann placed his sanatorium in The Magic Mountain), we walked through heavy snowfall, met for panels amidst the buzzing screens of the Congress Centre, gathered for lunch and dinner in elegant hotels.

  If globalism has a formal, corporate face, it was surely here, amongst the pinstriped CEOs and faces familiar from our TV screens gathered to discuss the theme of “Responsible Globality.” Fellows were given “global calendars” on which they could compute the time in Karachi, Rio, and Sydney, and a World Electronic Community was set up to allow us to network on-line as well as off. The first session on the opening day was devoted to the perils of jet lag, a scientist telling his groggy audience that attention skills fall 500 percent after a long-distance flight. Beside the narrow, slushy road, along which Bill Gates and Warren Beatty and Yasir Arafat could be seen trudging, one Institutional Partner had erected an enormous snow sculpture in the shape of a Coca-Cola bottle cap.

  Of all the bodies on the planet, multinationals have the greatest stake—quite literally an investment—in telling us that the world is one (and Everyman, therefore, a potential consumer). CNN, part of the new media conglomerate for which I work—the largest such in the world—forbids the use of the word foreign on its broadcasts, and IBM, aiming, like most large companies, to be local everywhere, tells us in reassuring tones, “Somehow the word foreign seems foreign these days.” Globalism has become the convenient way of saying that all the world’s a single market.

  Yet what the members of the Forum were contemplating in 1999 was the fact that a small world is a precarious one; and in our closely linked planet, a fire in one place soon becomes a blaze in another. Day after day, flanked by large-screen images of themselves, leaders came out onto the main stage of the Congress Hall to assure us of what Al Gore had called the “wisdom of connectedness,” and to say that the conflagration was under control. We were all joined now, they said, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health; all we could do was make the most of it.

  Yet as the days went on, another strain began to rise up from the corners of the gathering as spokesmen for the world’s poorer nations began to address us, somewhat in the manner of chi
ldren with their hands extended outside a private party in some Fashion Café. “Our global village has caught fire,” Hosni Mubarak said in the fluent English that almost everyone seemed to use, “from where we do not know. We have put out some of the flames … but we do not know where to begin rebuilding.” Kofi Annan told us that a quarter of the human race seemed condemned to starvation, and one of his colleagues reminded us that more than a quarter of the human race was actually poorer now than before the end of the Cold War. “Is globalism only going to benefit the powerful?” asked Nelson Mandela, in his farewell address to the gatekeepers of the new world order. “Does it offer nothing to men, women and children ravaged by the violence of poverty?”

  The other sound I heard, unmistakably rising up in the shadows of the Congress Centre, under the collective breath almost, was an undercurrent of anxiety about what the global order was doing to those parts of us that do not show up on screens. Even Global Man cannot live on bread alone, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople reminded us; values do not figure on the currency charts, and all the globalism in the world could not add up to universalism.

  Such whispers, to my surprise, were coming even from those most in tune with the planet’s synergies. A young scientist credited with the invention of massive parallel computers held a dinner at which he outlined his dream of creating a “Millennium Clock,” an instrument that would toll every thousand years, to remind us, in our accelerating world, of the virtue of slowness, and of the need to think of generations we could not see. A futurist spoke of “High Touch” as the necessary complement to “High Tech”: consumer technology was the largest industry in America, he said, but the flight from consumer technology was the second. A film producer led a dinner at which he asked, straight out, “What happened to home?” The only home he knew, he said, had come in two unexpected moments of stillness—spiritual epiphanies, really—while traveling through rural Ireland.

  At least along its fringes, the unspoken message of the conference, for me, was that it was not just goods and data (or even “gypsy capital”) that were being sent around the world in ever greater quantities, but souls, and souls not always used to living without a sense of orientation; and that the “global” we so readily attach to every product we wish to make seem desirable struck a less happy note when it came to “global hearts” or “global loyalties.” All the new joint ventures we celebrated so happily in the public sphere had private correspondences, and sometimes, I suspected, they were the more significant precisely because they were the less considered. Borders, after all, were collapsing in lives as much as on the map (borders between now and then, or here and there; borders between public and private). The way in which nearly all the world’s conflicts now were internal ones—twenty out of thirty in 1995, according to a Swedish agency—had a counterpart, surely, in the way in which more and more of us had to negotiate a peace within, in our own private Sarajevos or Cape Towns, made up in many cases (as in Madame Nhu’s) of several clashing worlds. And the fact that the world was moving in two directions at once (countries breaking down into smaller units, while companies straddle more and more continents) had a parallel in our lives, where we may find that we have more and more “connections” in the telephone, or airplane, senses, and fewer and fewer in the classic human sense.

  It made me wonder, not for the first time, whether humans were really meant to cross five continents in an afternoon, and what effect it must have on us to be (in Mr. Toad’s immortal phrase), “here today—in next week to-morrow!” And I couldn’t help but notice that in the midst of all the talk of a world without borders, the most recent Nobel laureate in economics was detained for ninety minutes at Zurich’s airport—prevented from joining the global discussion—because his (Indian) passport lacked a (Swiss) visa.

  One day, as I was listening to all the talk of open markets and the Euro, a pioneer in artificial intelligence leaned over to me and said, quietly, that he’d never forgotten a trip he’d taken to a monastery. What had moved him most, he said, was just the way the stone on the monastery steps had been worn down, by centuries of monastic feet, all anonymous, but all walking on the same path to the chapel, to sing the same hymns every morning.

  My own steadying point, ever since I could remember, had been the essays of Emerson, with their translation of Asian and ancient Greek wisdom into a code of New World optimism that turned into a private declaration of independence. Experience, but also something deeper and more innate, led me to believe that there was a higher component to the collective unconscious—that we converge as we rise, as Teilhard says—and that, in fact, almost everyone, in his better moments, longed to subscribe to the creed of universal loyalty voiced by Thomas Paine (“My country is the world, and my religion is to do good”). There is a “universal soul” behind us, Emerson writes in Nature, and shining through us, that is “not mine, or thine, or his, but we are its; we are its property and men.” We are “children of the fire, made of it,” he declares in “The Poet,” and “only the same divinity transmuted and at two or three removes, when we know least about it.”

  The key to this global soul, for Emerson, lay entirely in perception: it was not so much that man had been exiled from the Garden as that he had ceased to notice that it was all around him. In that sense, our shrinking world gave more and more of us a chance to see, in palpable, unanswerable ways, how much we had in common, and how much we could live, in the grand Emersonian way, beyond petty allegiances and labels, outside the reach of nation-states. When Edward Bellamy, inspired by the same impulse, envisaged the year 2000 in his novel of 1888, Looking Backward, he saw us all united by a system he called “Nationalism” (in which, ironically, there was “neither selling nor buying,” neither money nor trade).

  Yet the chance to rise to this higher sense of kinship was shadowed by the fact that more and more of what we seemed to share was on the merest surface, and global unity was most often defined in terms of common markets and linked networks; sometimes it could seem that the main force carrying the “Novus Ordo Seclorum” around the world—our new order of man—was the dollar bill (on which that noble motto is inscribed above the Masonic seal). And though the world was available to many of us in ways inconceivable to our grandparents, that also meant that all the age-old human problems played out now on a planetary stage, with “centers everywhere and margins nowhere” (in McLuhan’s digital upgrade of Augustine’s God).

  When my parents were growing up, in the heart of an old-style empire (their hometown of Bombay the largest “British” city outside London), they were part, willy-nilly, of a worldwide web of such schoolchildren, learning the same poems and reciting the same catechisms, thousands of miles away from London; the British Empire exported Shakespeare and the hymns of Wesley around the globe just as determinedly as the Disney Company distributes Aladdin or Mulan. By the nineteenth century, in fact (not least because its origins lay in the commercial undertakings of the East India Company), the Raj had set up a global transportation and staffing system—linking Wellington to the Falkland Islands, and Kingston to Nairobi—that was not so different from a multinational’s today.

  What was different, though, was that in the British Empire every child was born to the immigrant’s bifurcation—torn between the home he carried in his blood and the one he had on paper; colonials were all condemned to living with two faces. Yet in the modern world, which I take to be an International Empire, the sense of home is not just divided, but scattered across the planet, and in the absence of any center at all, people find themselves at sea. Our ads sing of Planet Reebok and Planet Hollywood—even my monthly telephone bill in Japan speaks of “One World One Company”—yet none of us necessarily feels united on a deeper level.

  Reflecting on all this, I began to wonder whether a new kind of being might not be coming to light—a citizen of this International Empire—made up of fusions (and confusions) we had not seen before: a “Global Soul” in a less exalted (and more intimate, more vexed) se
nse than the Emersonian one. This creature could be a person who had grown up in many cultures all at once—and so lived in the cracks between them—or might be one who, though rooted in background, lived and worked on a globe that propelled him from tropic to snowstorm in three hours. She might have a name that gave away nothing about her nationality (a name like Kim, say, or Maya, or Tara), and she might have a porous sense of self that changed with her location. Even the most ageless human rites—scattering his father’s ashes, or meeting the woman who might be his wife—he might find himself performing six thousand miles from the place he now called home.

  This Global Soul, to use the convenient tag, lived in the metaphorical equivalent of international airspace (the human version of cyberspace, in a sense): his currency might be “air miles” (40 percent of which are now earned on the ground), and the main catechism he knew by heart might involve “fastening your seat-belt low and tight across your lap.” His memories might be set in airports that looked more and more like transnational cities, in cities that looked like transnational airports. Lacking a binding sense of “we,” he might nonetheless remain fiercely loyal to a single airline.

  High above the clouds, in an alternative plane of existence—a duty-free zone, in a way, in which everyone around him was a stranger—the Global Soul would be facing not just new answers to the old questions but a whole new set of questions, as he lived through shifts that the traditional passenger on ocean liner or long-distance train could never have imagined. His sense of obligation would be different, if he felt himself part of no fixed community, and his sense of home, if it existed at all, would lie in the ties and talismans he carried round with him. Insofar as he felt a kinship with anyone, it would, most likely, be with other members of the Deracination-state.