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The hope, in the face of these counterclockwise movements, is that we can be bound by what unites us, which we have ever more occasion to see; that the stirring visions of Thomas Paine or Martin Luther King Jr. have more resonance than ever, now that an American can meet a Chinese counterpart--in Shanghai or San Francisco (or many places in between)--and see how much they have in common. What Emerson called the Over-soul reminds us that we are joined not only by our habits and our urges and our fears but also by our dreams and that best part of us that intuits an identity larger than you or I. Look up, wherever you are, and you can see what we have in common; look down--or inside--and you can see something universal. It is only when you look around that you note divisions.
The fresher and more particular hope of the moment is that as more and more of us cross borders, we can step out of, and beyond, the old categories. Every time a Palestinian man, say, marries a Singhalese woman (and such unions are growing more common by the day) and produces a half-Palestinian, half-Singhalese child (living in Paris or London, no doubt), an Israeli or a Tamil is deprived of a tribal enemy. Even the Palestinian or Singhalese grandparents may be eased out of longtime prejudices. Mongrelism--the human equivalent of World Music and "fusion culture"--is the brightest child of fragmentation.
Yet the danger we face is that of celebrating too soon a global unity that only covers much deeper divisions. Much of the world is linked, more than ever before, by common surfaces: people on every continent may be watching Michael Jordan advertising Nike shoes on CNN. But beneath the surface, inevitably, traditional differences remain. George Bernard Shaw declared generations ago that England and America were two countries divided by a common language. Now the world often resembles 200 countries divided by a common frame of cultural reference. The number of countries on the planet, in the 20th century, has more than tripled.
Beyond that, multinationals and machines tell us that we're all plugged into the same global circuit, without considering very much what takes place off-screen. China and India, to cite the two giants that comprise 1 in every 3 of the world's people, have recently begun to embrace the opportunities of the global marketplace and the conveniences of e-reality (and, of course, it is often engineers of Chinese and Indian origin who have made these new wonders possible). Yet for all that connectedness on an individual level, the Chinese government remains as reluctant as ever to play by the rules of the rest of the world, and Indian leaders make nuclear gestures as if Dr. Strangelove had just landed in Delhi. And as some of us are able to fly across continents for business or pleasure, others are propelled out of their homelands by poverty and necessity and war, in record numbers: the number of refugees in the world has gone up 1,000% since 1970.