Essay: Welcome to The Global Village

• Share

A new world has developed like a Polaroid photograph, a vivid, surreal awakening.

The effect has been contradictory: a sense of sunlight and elegy at the same time, of glasnost and claustrophobia.

Whenever the world's molecules reorganize themselves, of course, someone announces a new reality -- "All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born," in W.B. Yeats' smitten lines about the Irish rebellion of Easter 1916. Seventy-three years later, the Irish troubles proceed, dreary, never beautiful -- an eczema of violence in the margins.

But the world in the past few years has, in fact, profoundly changed. In Tiananmen Square last week, many of the demonstrators' signs were written in English. The students knew they were enacting a planetary drama, that their words and images in that one place would powder into electrons and then recombine on millions of little screens in other places, other minds, around the world.

The planet has become an intricate convergence -- of acid rains and rain forests burning, of ideas and Reeboks and stock markets that ripple through time zones, of satellite signals and worldwide television, of advance-purchase airfares, fax machines, the miniaturization of the universe by computer, of T shirts and mutual destinies.

The planetary circuits are wired: an integrated system, a microchip floating in space. Wired for evils -- for AIDS, for example, for nuclear war, for terrorism. But also for entertainment, knowledge and even (we live in hope) for higher possibilities like art, excellence, intelligence and freedom. Justice has not gone planetary and never will. But the village has indeed become global -- Marshall McLuhan was right. No island is an island anymore: the earth itself is decisively the island now.

Travel and travel writing are enjoying a sort of brilliant late afternoon, what photographers call the magic hour before sunset. But the romantic sense of remoteness shrivels. Even the trash announces that the planet is all interconnection, interpenetration, black spillage, a maze of mutual implication, trajectories like the wrapped yarn of a baseball.

A scene: blue plastic bags, bags by the thousands, struggle out of the Red Sea onto the shores of Egypt.

The wind dries them, and then they inflate like lungs and rise on the desert air. They come out of the sea like Portuguese men-of-war and then, amphibious, as if in some Darwinian drama, sail off to litter another of the earth's last emptinesses. Reverse Darwin, really: devolution, a flight of death forms.

Those who actually read Salman Rushdie's notorious best seller The Satanic Verses may have absorbed Rushdie's brilliant perception of what the planet has become: old cultures in sudden high-velocity crisscross, a bewilderment of ethnic explosion and implosion simultaneously. The Ayatullah Khomeini's response to Rushdie is (whatever else it is) an exquisite vindication of Rushdie's point. Khomeini's Iranian revolution was exactly a violent repudiation of the new world that the Shah had sponsored. The struggle throughout the Middle East now is, among other things, a collision between Islam and the temptations and intrusions of the West. In the new world, everything disintegrates: family, community, tradition, coherence itself. The old community perishes in deference to a new community not yet born.