by Pico Iyer
Insofar as the global village is a village, moreover, it brings with it all the frustrations that have propelled so many millions away from villages (and into cities): small worlds and narrow horizons, village idiots and ancestral rivalries. Rumors and superstitions fly now across the planet at the speed of light (on CNN, on the World Wide Web), and where the poor have always been able to look, inflamingly, at the towers of the rich, in New York or Rio or Johannesburg, now they can do so everywhere by turning on their machines (more and more of the world may be feeling homesick now, if only for the unreal and unattainable homes they’ve seen on-screen).
A million people are crossing borders every day, and it’s safe to assume that many of them are transporting viruses, or illegal goods, arms or biases: even as I write this, Nigerians are getting onto Lufthansa planes bound for Frankfurt, and, upon departure, disappearing into the toilets and swallowing every page of their passports. On arrival, they will say that they have no documents, and ask for amnesty (and though they will likely be denied it, the six dollars they are given every day while staying in “amnesty hotels” may be more than they could earn at home). To take an almost random example, more than half a million Ukrainians have been smuggled into the West of late, according to the International Organization for Migration (itself a global body), and at least 100,000 of them are living by selling their bodies. The new motto of the Disney Company, as enunciated by the character Hades in the animated version of Hercules is, “It’s a small underworld after all.”
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The obvious response to all this is that, much as the Global Soul is having to find new ways of living with an adulterated or chameleon sense of self, so the global order is being smoothed down into a tepid whole. My own experience, however, crisscrossing the planet, suggests that the world is more divided than ever, in part because of our illusions of closeness. The last time I was in Havana, I was approached, as I’d often been there, by a young, strikingly articulate, and well-informed character from the university who seemed (as almost everyone on that isolated island does) desperate for any contact with America. His brother lived in California, he told me, in a place I’d never heard of called Tamal; he had a large house and a swimming pool, tennis courts, and limousines. Please could I, on my return to the U.S., take back with me a letter for his sibling in the hope that he might be able to do something to rescue him from the privations of Havana?
I did so—my suitcase always came back from Cuba crammed with such entreaties—although I knew, from five previous trips back, that most of the letters would come back to me with “Addressee Unknown” stamped on them, or would arrive on the doorsteps of people who never wanted to think about Cuba again, if they were even alive (most recent Cuban refugees end up in the most violent and drug-stricken corners of America). In this case, however, an answer came back within a week, from Tamal, California. “Dear Pico Iyer,” the brother in the large house wrote (and I paraphrase), “Thank you so much for sending me the letter from my brother in Havana: I think of him, I think of Cuba, all the time. I don’t know if he knows my circumstances here, but I am in San Quentin Prison, here on Death Row. Is there anything he can do, do you think, to set me free and get me back to the safety of Havana? Please write me soon.”
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At O’Hare Airport in Chicago recently—another of the great cross-cultural meeting places of the spinning globe—a Romanian told me how his mother, new to the country, had been baby-sitting her nine-year-old granddaughter, when the little girl said she wanted to watch TV. The old woman said no, the child protested, and the woman did as she would do in Romania: she spanked the little girl.
Instantly the nine-year-old, as a good American, dialed 911 to report a case of “child abuse,” and when the father came home, it was to find his bewildered mother (speaking not a word of English) being dragged away by policemen to possible incarceration.
The world we like to think of as united, my experience suggests, looks, in fact, more and more like a group of differently colored kids all sleeping under the same poster of Leonardo DiCaprio, while arguing about whether Titanic is an attack on capitalist hegemony or a Confucian parable of self-reliance: in short, a hundred cultures divided by a common language. And though it may not matter if what I call “blue” suggests a different shade to you, it does matter if what I mean by “true” or “soon”—or “hope”—is different from what you do. Saddam Hussein may have requested Frank Sinatra to be played at his fifty-fourth birthday, and his son Uday may run a magazine called Babel and a youth television network that debuted with JFK, but that makes neither of them any less likely to wage war on Washington.
The CIA still has more employees worldwide than the United Nations, and while some parts of the planet look like a collection of broken shards (Cambodian gangs face off against Hispanic ones in Long Beach), others (I know from spending time in North Korea and Paraguay and Bhutan) are doing everything they can to keep their distance from the Information Planet. “Perhaps science and industry … will unite the world, I mean condense it into a single unit,” I remember Wittgenstein having written in 1946, “though one in which peace is the last thing that will find a home.”
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If I were to write a fairy tale about the Global Soul, progressing through the revolving doors of empires, I might tell of a young boy who goes to the Cathedral School in Bombay, where he is trained by the British even though they had formally left his native India just as he was coming to life. Already he is an exile many times over—a Muslim, who, post-Partition, ought to be in Pakistan—and does not fit any of the central categories (of Hindu, Christian, Sikh) in the city where he was born (the city where Kipling was born, too, though his famous tale Kim tells the opposite story, of a British boy raised by Indians).
This young changeling from Windsor Villas goes on to Rugby School, the most imperial of all Britain’s training grounds (where every boy, Dr. Arnold had said, will become “an Englishman—and a Christian to boot”), and afterwards, to King’s College, Cambridge (as Sri Aurobindo and E. M. Forster did), and then he starts writing novels, in English, newly enlivened by all the spirits he’s brought over from his tropical birthplace, and made magical by the everyday exoticism with which he’s matter-of-factly grown up. An archetypal “None of the Above,” he can see the strangeness of India through an Englishman’s eyes, the strangeness of England through an Indian’s gaze; the story of how he and his country came of age at once, as “midnight’s children,” is voted the strongest “British” novel in a quarter of a century.
The man’s freshness comes in savoring the masala fusions of our times—in part because he lives them—and in celebrating the end of all the old imperial distinctions of East and West and high and low; he speaks for many of the “translated men” in the new International Empire (as he calls them) because he soars beyond all traditions and religions and lives in the spaces between cultures (his book on India offends the Indians; his book on Pakistan outrages the Pakistanis). Belonging nowhere, he’s beholden to nowhere, and, settled in no faith, he underestimates, perhaps, the extent to which many people remain fiercely rooted in an older order, of doctrine and heritage and the past (the more so as they see the old constancies burning down).
His displacement is so great, in fact, that he mocks even the tradition in which he was born, and on Valentine’s Day in the year of revolutions (the year the Berlin Wall comes down), as he’s mourning the passing of a fellow wanderer, an apostle of nomadism brought down by the new nomadic plague, the word fatwa joins all the new terms he’s imported into the universal dictionary. The great spokesman of the people who live everywhere becomes literally a man with no address, in a society of one.
The forces that resist what they see as the promiscuous liberties of the Global Soul—responding to the man’s celebration of planes and speed with the Prophet’s words, “Haste is the devil’s work”—pursue their almost medieval cause as globally as their enemy did (killing his Jap
anese translator, attacking his Italian translator and his Norwegian publisher). And they are as precise and ingenious in their symbolism as any master craftsman of fiction (bombing the World Trade towers in Manhattan, claiming the name GIA in Paris, exploding the Planet Hollywood in Cape Town under the name of Moslems Against Global Oppression). In stalking the defining Global Soul, high and low, they want to make a larger point about the resilience of God and the Word and ancient absolutes, even in a time of flux, and if they are called “fundamentalists,” that is mostly because they would call for a consideration of fundamentals—basic human needs and promptings—in an age when many of them are seeming to get lost.
As for the voice of the diaspora, he becomes a kind of phantom, protected by the security forces of the country he disowned. He shows up on late-night TV, at pop concerts, in the rooms of presidents on several continents, but the man who’s always taken himself as a symbol of the new world order is taken now, by the old world order, as a symbol. His last book of the millennium is about shifting ground and burning childhood homes—earthquakes within and around the “nonbelongers’ ” world—and it asks, almost plaintively, underneath its affirmations, “How to find moorings, foundations, fixed points in a broken, altered time?”
In the midst of all this, the Emersonian hope keeps burning: in Davos, one of the scientists I met spoke of the Internet as the makings of a “planetary soul,” and when people today quote Chief Seattle’s famous dictum—“Whatever [man] does to the web, he does to himself”—they cannot fail to hear an extra resonance. A leader such as Václav Havel always takes pains to stress that the main term to be qualified by “global” should be “responsibility,” and that in a world in which everyone’s problems are everyone else’s, a new sense of community must be formed on the basis of something deeper than soil and higher than interest rates, if our “One World” dreams are not to devolve into One Nation parties.
Besides, many of the figures helping to shape our new world are themselves Global Souls, sometimes by choice (the former president of Mexico spoke fluent Japanese), and sometimes by circumstance (the King of Tonga, I recently heard in New Zealand, though a global descendant of the sky-god Tangaloa, has to spend much of his time traveling from Auckland to Sydney to San Francisco, since the majority of his people live outside Tonga). Technology has made much of local politics global—a typical constituency is likely as polyglot as an Immigration line—and leaders in every field are aware that the possibility exists, as never before, for one bright soul to light up the planet in a moment.
Yet it seems unlikely that globalism will prove any less ambiguous than any other of our dreams. While I was writing this book, I happened to visit the Dalai Lama in his increasingly crowded exile’s home in the foothills of northern India (the clocks in the little village showing the time in Israel), and I heard him say, as he often does, that the shrinking of the planet is making visible and palpable what Buddhists, among others, have always held: that all our destinies are intertwined, and even the meanest self-interest suggests we look out for the ones around us. “Due to the modern economy,” he told me, “and also due to information, to education and to tourism and the ecology problem—due to all these factors—now the world is heavily interdependent, interconnected. So, under such circumstances, the concept of ‘we’ and ‘they’ is gone; harming your neighbor is actually harming yourself.” And your neighbor is everyone alive.
Yet as one trained for twenty years in logic and dialectics, the head of Tibetan Buddhism was not about to settle for a watered-down “global ethics” that is no more than the spiritual equivalent of the lowest common denominator. “If we try to unify the faiths of the world into one religion,” he told a group of Catholics a few months before, while expounding the Gospels, “we will also lose many of the qualities and richnesses of each particular tradition”; indeed, for a Westerner to practice Tibetan Buddhism, he said—given that the discipline grew up in response to a culture and environment very different from that of the West—is as strange as putting a “yak’s head on a sheep’s body.” And as his doctrine, long hidden behind the highest mountains on earth, has been translated around the world, the Buddhist monk has himself lived out the fork-tongued destiny of globalism: giving more Kalachakra Initiations for World Peace than all the thirteen Dalai Lamas of six centuries before him, yet having to face questions about why Tibetan Buddhism is so “patriarchal” and why he’s not a vegetarian.
In Tibet, in fact, many of the currents of our “small world” hopes come into a compact focus. The accordioning of borders has meant that many of us, even in western Japan or Madison, Wisconsin, have gained access to the rites and teachers of a culture that, in my parents’ youth, was as remote as Lost Horizon; yet, in the same breath, Tibet itself has acquired a Holiday Inn, a Rambo café, and a hunger for pencils. The singers of groups called Public Enemy and Porno for Pyros cry out for a “Free Tibet,” while the Disney Company (rather than the State Department) sends Henry Kissinger as its emissary to Beijing (and the incarnation of the Tibetan god of compassion, to promote his cause, serves as guest editor of French Vogue). Tibet is now on the world’s screens, impeccably re-created in the mountains of Morocco and Argentina, while the country itself draws ever closer to extinction. And as its people get cast around the globe, running from their own burning houses, it can seem as if all of us have gained something of Tibet and lost a little of Shangri-la.
In recent years, any number of books have begun to speak of our global future, but very few of the ones that I have seen have spoken of our dreams, of disconnection, of displacement, of being lost within a labyrinth of impersonal spaces. (I, when feverish, find my subconscious clicking round a dizzying sequence of airline codes and flight numbers and departure-board destinations, where once it had spun around the London subway map.) And nearly all of them have read as if they were aimed at political scientists or public-policy experts more than at the neighbors of that Hmong tribesman from Laos who, suddenly airlifted to America, is found dead in his sleep, like too many of his young and healthy compatriots, the victim, doctors can only suppose, of a nightmare so strong that it stopped his heart from beating. It’s familiar to hear that the stories on the “Business” and “Technology” pages of our newspapers—about international coproductions and virtual “town halls”—contradict the ones on our front pages (about tribal conflict and “Balkanization”). Yet an even deeper story, and often a richer one, is being played out on the “Personals” page, and it may be the more critical for being the most overlooked.
I thought it might be interesting, therefore, to try to take some readings of how this shaking of the planet felt and looked at ground level to a not entirely untypical global villager making his way through a scrambled world. Instead of consulting experts (who, when questioned with a microphone, speak as if into one), and instead of making special trips to places outside the common domain, I decided to see how these forces crisscrossed, unbidden, in one life, as one (admittedly privileged) Global Soul went about his business, seeing friends, reading the novels that fell into his lap, going now and then on trips for business and pleasure. Though in a much less desperate sense than most of the world’s peoples, I, too, had a strong incentive in finding out where I belonged, as, with my house burned down, I’d been stripped of a past, and of any future I’d imagined.
In recent times, I’d found myself thinking more and more of Thoreau’s sage reminder that all the new methods of communication in the world don’t actually ensure that we have anything more, or better, to communicate (in fact, they may detract from that); and as the millennium approached, with its somewhat illusory sense that we were not just continuing a sentence but turning a new page, I’d found myself meeting, more and more, a statement from a relatively obscure twelfth-century Saxon monk called Hugo of St. Victor:
The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire worl
d is as a foreign land.
The sentence was first shown to me by a young friend, of Swedish and American heritage, who lives up the road in California (he’d been sent it, through E-mail, he said, by a Barbadian correspondent who’d lived in England and Germany but was settled now in Israel). A little later, I came upon the same piece of wisdom, in an essay on exile by Edward Said, and then again, written out as a poemlike epigraph, by a Chinese Australian in a Kyoto magazine, and then, once more, in bastardized form, among the floating fragments of global wisdom that run along the margins of the latest treatise by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas.
Yet the monk’s injunction to a higher sense of home seemed to mean something different from the Global Soul’s slippery pro-teanism. For in context, of course, it is a call to the other world: to one rooted in Heaven, the monk is saying, all places on earth will look the same. For those of us not yet ascended, however, the wisdom gives less solace as we sort through the confusion of “postdenominational” temples and self-created traditions.
Looking around the ashes of my home, the day after the fire, I’d recalled that in the Buddhist poems I’d been reading, much of the world’s a burning house. Indeed, in the Lotus Sutra, a house in flames is a symbol of the urgent confusion in which a father notices his children, so caught up in their latest toys that they hardly notice that the walls around them are in flames. The only way to lure them out, he realizes, is by promising them a cart—using the image itself to save those of us hypnotized by images while the flames burn all our foundations down.