About fifty years ago when the US Space Program was going full blast, the Apollo 8 mission yielded a fabulous photograph of the Earth. This was one of several photographs, which showed the daylight side of the Earth as the spacecraft orbited the planet.When these photographs were widely circulated soon after they were taken, notably in such magazines as Life, Time and Newsweek, people's view of the Earth began to change. It took a while to actually realize just how much our concept of the Earth as a planet had been based on maps, which at best presented an abstract view of the planet. At one time, whether or not the Earth was flat had to be argued based on theoretical and scientific evidence that was essentially indirect, though of course the fact that the Earth was roughly a sphere had been suspected for millennia. To have direct visual, photographic depiction of the Earth was a shock. Suddenly, the atmosphere, the clouds, the various different views of Earth, now centered on the Atlantic, now centered on Africa, or on India, forced people to think of the planet objectively, rather than as simply something on which we stood.
For centuries, people of science, in particular, and other freethinkers of various persuasions had adopted the idea of A Citizen of the World, in which a person viewed him- or herself as belonging to the human race, rather than to a particular nation. In some quarters, this attitude is regarded with great alarm, and understandably, people with such a view were considered to be traitors. There is a concept of the antinationalist, which is someone opposed to the idea of nationalism (i.e., "devotion to one's country or nation"), which, by implication, meant that the person being described as such was less interested in devotion to his or her country than in devotion to the human race at large, or with even broader interests.
Coming back to the Apollo 8 photograph(s), a contemporary American poet, Archibald MacLeish (who was incidentally the Librarian of Congress at one time) wrote the following words, to describe how the photograph had struck him:
"To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in the eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now that they are truly brothers."(MacLeish chose not to capitalize the word Earth, for inscrutable reasons of his own. The capitalization in this quote is mine.) Though I would not romanticize the sentiment quite the way MacLeish has chosen to do it, it is truly remarkable how these photographs—to the extent that they were truly looked at, and their effect completely absorbed—have a strong effect on anyone. From the perspective of viewing it from space, it is the smallness of the planet that really strikes one. Down on the surface, we all see it as enormous, and we're preoccupied with staking out our own little holding on it, jealously guarding our claim to a little bit of Earth, and viewing everyone else as a potential threat, or invader. Territorial feelings are uppermost in the minds of most people, especially those in countries such as the USA and Australia, built by pioneers. But from in Space, as MacLeish tries to explain, one sees for the first time (and one is reminded whenever one really looks at one of these photographs) that the problem is one of sharing a planet that is much more fragile than it appears to us. In the USA, certainly, there are a vast number of people who are accustomed to thinking that the Earth can take a kicking and keep on ticking indefinitely, while the rest of us view all this kicking with horrified alarm.
These days I am frequently out of town, helping an elderly uncle and his wife downsize their home in preparation for moving into a retirement-sized dwelling. They were old-time intellectuals, and their house is full of issues of Time and Newsweek, and almost every issue of Life Magazine, and their specials on the occasion of the assassination of JFK, and Martin Luther King, not to mention enormous influential books by such as Arnold Toybee and Jacob Bronowski. And they have an enormous poster, the original of the image at the top of this post, and they were arguing about whether to take it with them. It has a far greater significance to them than it would have for the vast majority of Americans alive today; even the most liberal of us are preoccupied with the political implications of a global perspective, rather than the human implications.
To people with extreme working-class or (neo-) Marxist perspectives, the word globalist has apparently come to mean something that you would never guess. It means, I was stunned to discover, a person who subscribes to the philosophy that the boundaries between nations should be brought down, so that the economic and political elite of certain nations, namely the UK and the USA, should more easily dominate the world population and its resources. [Added later: to clarify, I, for one, had thought that a globalist was simply someone who was a humanist, who put the well-being of the planet at large ahead of the well-being of his homeland, as explained below.] We must now resort to describing ourselves as universalists, or something similarly bombastic, too bombastic to represent such a simple idea.
This is just one article (dated from 2012), and there are hints in the article that this might be one of the more extreme definitions of the term. The article is replete with common words given technical senses; in other words this paranoid view of the world has been polished and elevated to the level of a political theory or a system of beliefs. How widely accepted it is I do not know. So, I suppose, it would be a serious mistake for me, for example, to call myself a globalist in the sense in which I would use it, namely that I am not as interested in the economic success of the USA as my neighbors would like me to be, as I am interested in the welfare of the people all over the Earth.
To be honest, what we call our circle of concern evolves as we age, and is not a static thing. A child is concerned simply with itself and its own needs; an adult's circle of concern expands to his entire community and beyond. Simply from a practical standpoint, we're more likely to be concerned about the welfare of the people in our family than about those across the street; but to some, it stops there: it is only our street that matters; all other streets should be none of our concern. You can argue with them into allowing that the entire city deserves our concern, but not the entire county, and so on. Being concerned about the welfare of Mexico, for example, would rate a score of utter foolishness from some, and to be concerned about what Vladimir Putin was doing to those helpless Russians would be utter madness, regardless of the fact that Putin could do a lot more than he is about making the lives of Russians better. The point is not to make the lives of Americans better at the cost of the quality of life of the Mexicans, or the lives of Russians better at the cost of the quality of life of Georgians, or what have you. I don't have the vocabulary to express this conviction properly: that I would rather that everyone's quality of life be improved modestly than that our own quality of life be improved enormously. This is almost an unAmerican attitude, and I know better minds than mine have dealt with this issue, and the terminology we need is out there. But [the term] globalism is out of bounds, because, of course, we do not want to encourage the US economic and political elite to gain control of the world population or the planetary resources. It is almost as though the movie Avatar has become real. (I really resent the way some people hijack a term and give it a specialized meaning which spoils it for the rest of us. [An example is the use of the phrase the World in Christian theology. There goes another perfectly good word.])
For the goofballs who have run away with the GOP, of course, the sort of anti-nationalism that I'm describing—which is certainly not an interest in destroying the nation, or anything of the sort—is easy to describe: they would call it stupidity. This is why there is all this talk of walls, and getting Mexico to pay for them, etc, etc. But —despite the threat of too much centralization of power— it seems to me that one thing that must come first before the standard of living of the world population should be raised, is that the infrastructure should be put in place. The reason that Arkansas, or West Virginia, or other states in the US do not have to worry about roads or power lines is that some things can be left to the Federal Government to solve. The reason that the Texas education standards are so dismal is that they are in the hands of Texas, which does not know its right hand from its left. (Unfortunately, of course, if the education standards of Texas were to be raised, it would cause great alarm among Texans for the same reason.) It is far easier to put in place the infrastructure of progress by administering it centrally, than it is to administer it separately in each region. At some level, of course, administrative details will fall to local authorities. But the planning will move along much more efficiently if it is carried out globally. This is why the roads of the Interstate highway system are, generally speaking, a little better than local highways.
Imagine, if you would, that the drug pandemic does not exist, and that we do not live in fear of our population being addicted to drugs coming in across the Mexican border. This would mean that all the violence that narcotic gangs perpetrate in Mexico and US states on the border would not exist. Then the sole threat from Mexico would be cheap labor, and of course the language barrier. I don't think I'm the first one who concluded that if the two nations were to be amalgamated into one, that the standard of living of both peoples would rise. Both the Mexicans and the Americans would be vastly better off, despite the prospect of lovely young American damsels dating young Mexican hunks, to the dismay of their parents, and young Mexicans competing to mow your lawns, to the frustration of high school kids wanting to do the same. Extending this principle, some people see great progress when national barriers are loosened or eliminated entirely. Others view the prospect of this with fear and disgust. Anyone observing the phenomenon of the European Union sees these two forces at play over several decades. In that case, the paranoia has won, and it really appears as though the EU will explode. (Unbelievably, the deterioration of the EU was brought about by one of the most stable of the component nations, namely Britain. Modern Britain is not as stable as it has been historically, especially since the British economic elite has begun exploring the exploitation of the country. Evidently the Conservative Party has not been paying attention to what globalism means.)
Though it is currently out of fashion for anyone to describe themselves as citizens of the world, perhaps in the not-too distant future, the perspective that Archibald MacLeish recommends to us might become a reality, and that people, especially younger people, will begin to view the planet as a shared resource for mankind, and that we live not unimaginably far from those in foreign lands, but very, very close to them, on a tiny planet in a modest solar system.
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