Watching the news from the Hong Kong stock markets, whilst sipping caffeine-free Indian tea and munching on a U.S.-made low-carb breakfast bar, the Finnish cellular phone vibrates on the Italian-made belt supporting my “Made in Thailand” trousers. The call is from a PR office in Britain letting me know about a scientist working in Africa, who is using an Israeli-made invention to return the eyesight of thousands of children.
From the webcam to the Chinese-style TV dinner, seemingly everything in this world is aimed at bringing us closer together.
This particular item will not deal with the notion that ethnicity demands space, not some claustrophobic cage. The point here, is much more about whether the marketing wonks really have it right – is this really a global village?
Believe it or not, there are people in probably every country in the world fighting against the tide. You don’t have to be Amish in order to remain distant from ‘American culture’. Not having a television, for instance, can immediately give you the chance to close yourself off from the malevolence of 21st-Century life.
But in order to discredit the idea of a global village we need to shed our Western mindset, our blind faith in the ‘spin doctors’ and head for the great outdoors, that is not the industrialized world. You see, the very term ‘industrialized world’ conjures up production lines, robots, automatons simply carrying out some hidden manager’s request. That is what the Western ideal – the panacea of the global village has become.
Yet billions of people on this earth are not only not part of the global village, they have never even heard of it.
Western China, for example, is filled with tens of thousands of villages where people carry on their lives much as their ancestors did over the centuries. True, they may be missing the benefits of the World Wrestling Federation and they may never have received a recorded phone message from George W. Bush, but then, to me, that sounds like a couple of plusses not offered by the aforementioned global village.
But you do not need to head into deepest Asia or Africa to find people largely unaffected by the global village. True, crofters in Scotland do take advantage of medical advances, but they are still content to wander with their sheep through often muddy, windswept tracts of land in the Highlands. Many could not tell you whether Gucci is a type of pasta or a former cricket captain of the neighboring England.
There are elements of scientific advancement that are wonderful – the telephone, the car, the defibrillator, but there are so many other elements of life that many of us in the West simply want to bandy about, while hundreds of millions of people are trying their best to say “no”.
The negative, of course, seems to be that villagers in China and crofters in Scotland are fighting a losing battle. The speed of ‘modernization’ and the power of the marketing people means barrier after barrier is being breached and those craving the simple life and a degree of isolation are being swallowed up in a tidal wave of ‘development’.