I’ve mentioned in two posts recently the effect that globalization has upon the power of individuals (one on the dilution of opinion, the other on the illusion of ineffectiveness). However, there is an increasing trend that is of utmost importance that I’ve, thankfully, noticed is coming to the forefront lately. This is the idea of maintaining an emphasis on the local while simultaneously thinking globally.

We live in a world that is full of paradoxes, in which we are forced to think on multiple levels if we are to flourish as a society and as individuals. This is one of those paradoxes. We are an incredibly complex and interconnected society.   This can give us the impression that what we do in our local area makes no difference. Indeed, this is the impression we get as people living in the United States. We live in suburbs where we are disconnected to everything–we have to drive to work, to school, to the mall, or any other place we want to go. Driving gives one a sense of distance from the place you live, so that instead of seeing a local community you see various places connected by an unknown distance of roads measured in driving time rather than physical, tangible distance.  Our lives are filled with large multi-national corporations that treat us with a distant friendliness and small businesses are replaced with Wal-Marts and various other chains.  Our food is grown far away in large corporate industrial farms.  Local news organizations have given away to large aggregate media conglomerates who focus, inevitably, on the larger national news.  Likewise, local politics becomes drowned out in national politics so that you’ll hear no end to presidential races but easily miss out on the much more important (as far as effect in your immediate life) local races.

But all of these things are results of our own social construction and are not the reality. The reality is: you still live in a local community. Local politics still govern your life. Your local area is of great importance to your lifestyle. The climate, the resources, the culture–all of these things are still tied to your area despite our increasingly global world.  This is much more evident in large cities, where the election of mayor is still a big deal and everyone is aware of the actions taken in the city, or the few remaining small communities, where people still know the mayor and own the land that is affected.  But for the majority of Americans, I get the impression we’ve lost our sense of locality.  Our nationalized media and emphasis on national politics is proof.  The end result: we neglect our local communities, allowing large corporate developers to tear apart our land, pave over large swaths of it with concrete and asphalt, and neglect the varieties and particulars of our local area.

What we need to do is learn to balance our sense of interconnected global (or more aptly, national) community with our local one.  This is increasingly coming to people’s attention in three ways:

1) Environment and Peak Oil
With concerns about global warming and environmental destruction mounting, people are again realizing that the way they treat their local communities is incredibly important. It isn’t just the world that is falling apart, it is your backyard as well.  In a recent Powerdown show featured on Treehugger they featured this idea quite prominently.  It combines the idea of Peak Oil with climate change and local environment, an idea also featured in the End of Suburbia video. As is stated in the show “While our climate says we should change, peak oil says we have to.”  With the end of cheap oil, we’ll have to revert back to local organizations to support a lot of our consumption. While we are developing alternative sources of energy, we are beginning to realize that we cannot just keep consuming energy needlessly. So not only is it important that we preserve our local fauna but that we have to create more self-sufficient communities.  We must walk out that front door and realize that the new, needlessly sprawled development of cookie-cutter houses is not only tearing apart your local environment but is building on an insustainble way of life.  It is not harming someone across the world, it is harming you, because you live in that local environment.

The video features several movements that have gained momentum to try to build more locally organized, self-sustainable communities.  My favorite part of this is the variety that is incorporated into the ideas there, that solutions are not the same for everyone, everywhere but dependent on local needs, culture, climate, and resources (a lesson we learned from the Green Revolution).  The idea is that people on a local level explore solutions as local communities. Many of these solutions are unique to the area and different places will develop different ideas about how they will create a sustainable community. This is incredibly exciting–it offers the potential to reforge the identity of small communities, create a rich variety of solutions and innovations, and create more ecological human civilizations.

For those who want to watch it, here is the video.

The Powerdown Show – Transition Towns and Energy Descent Pathways from Rob Carr on Vimeo.

2) Return to Local Business
There is an excellent trend among businesses to reorient themselves to local communities. In no small part this is due to the increased proliferation of the internet which is providing businesses with cheap and immensely beneficial ways to cater to the needs of localities. In June’s issue of Wired, there were some excellent articles on how this is reshaping the economy. This quote, from the introductory article, is particularly pertinent:

What we have discovered over the past nine months are growing diseconomies of scale. Bigger firms are harder to run on cash flow alone, so they need more debt (oops!). Bigger companies have to place bigger bets but have less and less control over distribution and competition in an increasingly diverse marketplace. Those bets get riskier and the payoffs lower. And as Wall Street firms are learning, bigger companies are going to get more regulated, limiting their flexibility. The stars of finance are fleeing for smaller firms; it’s the only place they can imagine getting anything interesting done.

As venture capitalist Paul Graham put it, “It turns out the rule ‘large and disciplined organizations win’ needs to have a qualification appended: ‘at games that change slowly.’ No one knew till change reached a sufficient speed.”

The result is that the next new economy, the one rising from the ashes of this latest meltdown, will favor the small.

The three follow up articles emphasize how this is revamping the economy to favor small businesses, even to the point that socialism is redefined in a new, much more beneficial form.  The best example they use is how Detroit can be and ought to be remade using smaller car companies.  Overall, the impression is that we are finally moving past the era of large corporate exploitation and onto the era of a global world, formed of millions of interconnected small communities.

3) Return to Local Politics
The concept of nations has always been somewhat arbitrary.  There is an excellent blog-entry that I found at a site called The Daily Clarity on whether the concept of nation-states is even relevant anymore.  The impression is this: nation borders are somewhat irrelevant. They change and always have changed due to any number of circumstances. Nations always attempt to form a national identity and use this identity to craft wars and to take advantages of resources.  But, as Stuart Ford says in his entry,

Countries, in today’s age, are  not  big enough individually, with very few exceptions,  to deal with the global issues  that confront their populations – security, environment, the global economy, resource allocation and on. These issues need collectives such as the UN, the Arab League of Nations, G20,  the EU, NATO and on to make any meaningful impact, as the issues are larger than any individual country’s borders.Making head-roads on these issues requires co-operation and collectivism of many nations.  Countries had to combine their efforts, resources and intellects to make any meaningful progress on the major issues of the day.

The counterpart of this is that all of the issues of individual communities become overlooked by these large supra-national organizations. And as they should be. Local issues should be handled by local politics while global issues should be handled by large global bodies.  What we ought to see in the coming years is a split between the two that rids us of the unecessary political middle steps. Instead of states and nations, I would suggest that we could have large global organizations representing whole regions and then small local political bodies on the level of cities. Not only would this be conducive to the dual-nature of a global-local world but also cut out the unnecessary bureaucracy of middle players that our new social organization could potentially bypass.

Conclusion
I have often heard people lament the end of local communities and the rise of globalized forces. These people, however, neglect to see the interesting dynamics that I have illustrated here, when local communities can actually become more important in a global world than they ever have been in human history. It will be exciting to see, moving forward, how these dynamics play out in our rapidly developing world.

Photo Credit: anjan58 via Flickr

A friend of mine recently wrote some interesting and thought-provoking comments that I would like to address:

When I consider the history of humanity, I wonder about the feasibility of change. Powerful men have changed nations adn started wars, politicians have changed governments, priests have created new belief structures, but none of these things have truly changed people. None of it has really made people a whole lot happier or resulted in considerable and widespread self-actualization. Oppressive leaders have tried to force change on people, usually only making them worse or less happy; and on the other hand, philosophers and moral teachers have developed many systems and principles for living better lives, the vaste majority of which have been ignored by the majority of people.

This was written by an intelligent, historically and philosophically minded individual who sincerely wishes that he can make a difference. Yet the message is clear: how can anyone make changes to the world?  How, as one single individual, can anyone hope to inspire change?

This is not the first time I have heard this sentiment. Rather, this seems to be a common theme that comes up over and over again in conversation when I talk to people about everything from politics, to global warming and people starving in Africa. What can I, as one individual, do to help that?

The sentiment here, however, goes even further than that. It questions the fundamental ability of human-kind to direct their own fate. With all due respect to this friend, the statement that “none of it has really made people a whole lot happier or resulted in considerable and widespread self-actualization” is somewhat ludicrous. What I want to argue is that all of this talk of ineffectiveness and inability for us to make a difference is an illusion created by the way we live in modern times.

This is composed of a few elements:

1. Interconnectedness (the Global Community)
With the increase in exchange of ideas and cultures across the internet, television, and general migration, we get the impression now that we are moving towards one world-wide community.  For an idea to get to the top of the google search you have to compete again the millions and billions of other people around the world shouting out as loud as they can. The basic result is what I call a dilution of one’s power and opinion. Before, in a small community of a few thousand, one’s voice was one in a few thousand. Now it’s one in millions.  It’s a lot harder for an individual to get noticed in the middle of all that noise.  Too often you have to do something crazy to stir up controversy and get noticed.

Even if you argue against the feasibility and extent of a global community the same phenomenon exists within individual cultures as well. Anytime you are not dealing with smaller, local communities (I’d say, anything bigger than a city of a few million) your voice becomes so drowned out that it’s nigh impossible to feel like you have any effect at all, whether that’s in your vote for president or your influence over what TV show to keep on the air (thank God they saved Chuck!).

2. Distance
This may seem like a contradiction, since I just talked about how we were all one global community. But in reality is the world is still a big place and we are not all very close to one another. As a blogger one thing I have to keep in mind is that anyone, anywhere could read these posts and be miraculously changed (*hopes*) by them.  But I may not know it.  Even if they come and thank me for my infinite wisdom I will not see the way that it really changes their outlook.  Nor can I see if and how they passed those ideas along to others.  The world may seem small, but there is still distance and ideas still take time to really penetrate people’s worldview.

3. Magnitude
Are people happier today? Or rather, have we come a long way as a society? Granted, the whole premise of this blog is that we still have a frikin long way to go. But we have to readily admit, people at least have the potential to be happier today than ever before. That in itself has its own hosts of problems (more on that later) but, for the most part, human civilization has come quite a ways in a very short time.  To a large extent we’ve overcome the crude, dirty, and violent world that was the everyday experience  of all humankind only a few centuries ago. Although some places still hold on, we’ve largely overcome slavery, uneccessary and cruel violence between groups (I mean, the world is not like Apocolypto, which was part of everyday experience pre-modern era), and an enormous number of viscious diseases.  Slowly but surely we are learning to rid ourselves of discrimination, lift up the world’s poor, be more globally minded, and respect the environment.  All of this did not just happen: it was because of ideas that spread among people, ideas that start at and spread through individuals.

The problem is simple: it takes a long time for change to occur. Of course we have not yet reached “considerable and widespread self-actualization.” Of course we’re not all automatically happy. That kind of thing doesn’t come easy. As it is, we only regard a few people in history as truly achieving such trascendental status.  And we do listen and try to imitate those people. In fact, those people have had significant effects on humanity. Jesus, Moses, Mohammad, Ghandi, Bhudda, Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln, etc–these people have always served as examples that have improved people’s lives for centuries.  But even lesser individuals have helped bring about great change in their own small ways. You don’t have to be Ghandi to help a friend, to uplift a community, or to publish a brilliant idea. But you can’t expect things to change quickly. It takes more time than that.

Making a Difference

I would suggest that the problem here isn’t that one is ineffective, it is that too many people want to change the world too much.  They have good ideas and strong opinions about how the world should be, so they try to fight for that vision. But it isn’t any one persons world.  Your vision isn’t any more valid than mine.  You have your own things that make you happy and your own experiences and understanding about what leads towards self-actualization.  You can’t hope to force that vision on the world. They will never accept it, not in aggregate. Some people might like parts of it, fewer will like all of it. This goes with all philosophers and thinkers as well as the rest of us.

If you hold to this mindset then it will seem like you have no influence on the world at all, as if your one vote, your simple choices, your small voice, makes no difference at all.  Because of course your vote won’t automatically get what you want.  Of course your brilliant comment won’t instantly change everyone. Of course your system of philosophy won’t bring self-actualization and peace to the world’s populations.  People are too complex for that.  Yet that doesn’t mean your vote, your comment, or your life doesn’t matter.

On the contrary, it is easy to suggest that the most important things in life are done by individuals. Many of them go unnoticed. But together as human beings we  move this world forward. That is the hope. That is life.

Picture Credit: Gia Ciccone

On a cool morning in early May of 2009 I saw out a small little window my first view of a country to which I do not belong. As I stepped from the airplane I was astonished by the immediate weight of foreigness. But more powerful was the fact that it was not the place that was foreign but that I was foriegn. Hearing around me another language that was not my own I realized, for the first time, the enormous variety of cultures and people and languages that exist on this planet. That day as I walked and down the streets of Geneva, the crossroads and symbol of peace and cooperation, the variety of architecture gave me the impression that I was simulataneously observing not only all of the modern world but an enormous portion of human history. The type a buildings you expect to see in history books sat next to smooth towers of glass. Next to the large, stocky train station stands an old church that, and this may emphasize my ignorance, could have been built in medieval times. Wires ran above the streets and wove like a web through the buildings, as if this electical grid also held the city together. Perhaps just as astounding were the cars which were all half the size of the standard American vehicle, of makes and models that I have never seen.

But despite all of the strangeness of this place, the people looked the same: a mix of all races, cultures, background intermingling as they walked to their various destinations or simply wandered the streets of that beautiful city.

Perhaps for many of the people who live in and around Geneva this assessments seems odd. Silly American, they may say. Of course we live in a global society. Didn’t you hear?

Still, the moment was, to be a little dramatic, profound–to the point that I feel like I have been completely remade in some sense. In America we occaisionally hear about other countries and places far off in the world but, to a great extent, we remain locked in our own little bubble and it is hard for us to comprehend the rest of the world beyond our extensive borders. This doesn’t seem to be the case in Europe, where the small countries and variety of languages forces everyone there to understand the enormous variety, the immensity, and interconnected nature of human civilization.

After a week in France talking extensively with several local students I have left with a far greater sense of the importance that we look at this world as a whole. It is impossible, despite our love for distinctions and the vaste differences between people, to try to do anything in this world without an eye to the global context.

It is this impression that we hope to expound on as we look into questions of a global nature. Granted, our limited excursions out of the United States are not nearly enough to fully understand the variety of issues and problems and cultures that exist. But this is precisely why we have this category, so that we can more adaquately understand and grasp the global nature of the world.

We appreciate the help of any foreign readers who may offer us insights to the variety of cultures, people, issues, and worldviews that may exist. Hopefully together we can start to understand this complex, interactive, and variable (syn??) world.

Among the topics we wish to discuss under this category:

Globalization

Developing Countries

Interconnectedness of Civilization (and our problems)

Variety, spread, and interaction of cultures

Cross-cultural impacts

Differing worldviews

International Relations

The status of countries around the world

Photo Courtesy of  NASA / Goddard Space Flight Center