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We have now evolved culturally to the point where the entire world is connected in a way it has never been before. Not only is it possible to jet off to Mumbai for a lecture over the course of a weekend, as I did in the aftermath of the 2008 attacks, but we use telecommunications technology to talk, email, SMS, instant message, videoconference and otherwise connect with each other in ways that were inconceivable only a century ago. Recall that when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, the New York World (then a major US newspaper) famously asked ‘of what use is such an invention?’ In the past century our world has become ever more connected, to the extent that today what happens in Kansas or Calcutta is immediately transmitted via streams of electrons to people around the world. The effect of this connectivity has been the globalization of culture, and as the West is the in the hegemony at the moment, this means that more and more people are becoming ever more western. While to those of us in living in the West there are many good aspects to this, to many others our way of life is not all it’s meant to be. For secular rationality, read loss of faith and certainty. For improving living standards, read increased consumption. For increased social mobility, read loss of traditional roles and threats to vested interests. The rise of fundamentalism in the latter half of the 20th century reflects the very real loss of the traditions that guided much of humanity over the past several thousand years. What to replace those traditions with, especially for those not privy to the largesse of the modern world, is a difficult question. If you believe that you have a stake in the future, you are likely to embrace it; if you feel left out, this is much less likely.
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