Referring to the world of today as a “global village” was part of Marshall McLuhan’s attempt to explain how electric technology (made exponentially more powerful by digitization and integrated circuits), and communications technology in particular, has had the effect of reducing the barriers of time and space to the point where once distant and isolated societies are now virtually integrated within a complex social whole. Human society is now more like a single organism with a single environment than a disparate collection of different organisms, each with its own unique environment to which it has adapted. That is, despite the continuing condition of different geographical and climatological environments and the different cultures that have evolved to adapt to those environments, electric technology has created an artificial (i.e., man-made) environment that has come increasingly to dominate the natural environment, for better or for worse. In this sense, humankind is carrying out the responsibility given to us by the God of Genesis of having “dominion” over the Creation. Failure to recognize the existential implications of this new artificial environment, and then to make the adjustments necessary for adaptation to it, is to court the possibility of extinction. We have created this artificial environment in order to prosper, not just survive; and we have succeeded greatly, but at the great cost of unintended consequences such as climate change resulting from the release of “greenhouse gasses” into the atmosphere, the threat of nuclear war, and rapid species extinction. Successful adaptation to our own artificial environment requires that we moderate or eliminate these unintended consequences.
We can begin to address our predicament by rethinking McLuhan’s metaphor. I think it was a good one for the time he made it (the 1960s), but perhaps a slight tweaking might help make his point better by calling the human social world a “global city.” “Village” denotes a small homogeneous social unit, thus figuratively emphasizing how electric technology has served to shrink time and space, with the homogeneity of a village implying a common culture. But essential to understanding our new artificial environment is to recognize the heterogeneity of human society. As Vaclav Havel put it, “our civilization has essentially globalized only the surface of our lives.” He saw that in the face of massive social disruption due to rapid and accelerating change, people tend regressively to “cling to the ancient certainties off their tribe.” This new kind of “tribalism” can be as much ideological as ethnic, racial, religious, or national. Thus, today’s world looks more like the demographics of a city divided into “neighborhoods” each with its own particular unifying identity.
Thinking of the human social world as a “global city,” then, might help us move forward to address the challenges of the global artificial environment we have created. We now have–pace Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations”–a single global civilization of many different cultures. “City” and “civilization” derive from the same Latin roots: civis (‘townsman’) and civitas (‘city’). To be “civilized” means to have grown accustomed to living in a city, where people are packed together with strangers and must learn to get along. When it works, the “neighborhood” arrangement of cities helps people who share distinct identities and common values and interests to build their own communities to support each other. Their relation to the other communities of the city they share is mediated by a representative political system and moderated by a central city government that provides services without discrimination. The ethic of tolerance prevails, and the various neighborhoods live side by side according to shared laws, rules, and regulations. When this system fails to work well, good-faith efforts to re-establish harmony can succeed as long as the original understanding–basically, a government of consensual law–prevails. When that premise is taken over by a different premise, harmony is jeopardized.
Understanding the world as a “global city” implies a unifying consensus of law and government. That consensus is based on the idea of the legal equality of all its “citizens” (from the same root, civitas, as “civilization” and “civil”), one of the basic premises of Enlightenment rationalism. It is the belief that homo sapiens is a single species, and that the various “varieties” called “races” are distinguished by superficial features that are genetically transmitted but have no bearing on the essence of the species. Similarly, the various social units, whether “states” or “nations,” must be regarded as having equal rights to sovereignty and respect. Each state or nation has the right to live under its own laws and customs–as long as, of course, its laws and customs do not contradict the more general “laws of humanity” stated or implied in the United Nations Charter.
Since all nations or states of the world today have agreed to the principles of the United Nations, they have then tacitly agreed to the validity of the metaphor of the human social world as the “global city” described above. Getting a metaphor right–one that accurately identifies the complex reality it attempts to express–is an important step in the process of understanding and positive action. Of course the metaphor may be more aspirational than accurately descriptive. The world may be in fact as Hobbes described it, a “war of all against all” which is “without a common Power to keep them all in awe.” This political “realism” regarding a narrow view of “national interest” seems to be gaining favor in the post-Cold War world of autocratic regimes and a declining respect for the values and processes of liberal democracy. Such a world is regressive and self-destructive, especially with the powers that have emerged from Western technology. If the “global city” metaphor is accurate, we need to imagine it as the Rome of the Antonines or the Baghdad of Haroun al-Rashid, not the Rome of Caligula or the Baghdad of Saddam Hussein..
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