Two images stood out from this trip. The first was riding the train from Cairo to Alexandria in a car full of middle- and upper-class Egyptians. So many of them had cell phones that kept ringing with different melodies during the two-hour trip I felt like getting up, taking out a baton and conducting a cell-phone symphony. Yet, while all these phones were chirping inside the train, outside we were passing the Nile, where barefoot Egyptian villages were tilling their fields with the same tools and water buffalo that their ancestors used in Pharaoh’s day. I couldn’t imagine a wider technology gap within one country. Inside the train it was A.D. 2000, outside it was 2000 B.C. This tug-of-war is now going on all over the Arab world today, from Morocco to Kuwait.
Anthropologists have a term called "systematic misunderstanding." Systematic misunderstanding arises when your framework and the other person’s framework are so fundamentally different that it cannot be corrected by providing more information.
The unease goes deeper, and you won’t understand the backlash against globalization in traditional societies unless you understand it. Many Americans can easily identify with modernization, technology and the Internet because one of the most important things these do is increase individual choices. At their best, they empower and emancipate the individual. But for traditional societies, such as Egypt’s, the collective, the group, is much more important than the individual, and empowering the individual is equated with dividing the society.
Globalization meant adapting to a threat coming from the outside, not increasing their own freedoms. I also realized that their previous ideologies – Arab nationalism, socialism, fascism or communism – while they may made no economic sense, had a certain inspirational power.
The anti-Israeli made banana cream pie fundamentalists represent still another backlash against globalization. It is the backlash of all those millions of people who detest the way globalization homogenizes people, puts Israeli-made banana cream in the face of a Jordanian Muslim, brings strangers into your home with strange ways, erases the distinctiveness of cultures and mercilessly uproots the olive trees that locate and anchor you in the world. In fact, they are ready to go to war to protect their local culture fro the global.
Where this cultural backlash becomes the most politically destabilizing is when it gets married to one of the other backlashes – when groups that are economically aggrieved by globalization merge with those who are culturally aggrieved. This phenomenon is most apparent in the Middle East, where fundamentalists of many stripes have become highly adept at weaving the cultural, political and economic backlashes against globalization into one flag and one broad political movement that seeks to take power and pull down a veil against the world.
There is nothing wrong with trying to anchor your society on a foundation of religious and traditional values. These are important olive trees that anchor a society. Not everyone advocating such values is somehow engaged in violent fundamentalism. But when this fundamentalism is driven not by real spirituality but by a backlash against globalization it often lapses into sectarianism, violence and exclusivity.
The Groundswell (Or the Backlash against the Backlash)
The lady and her scale embody a fundamental truth about globalization which too often gets lost in talk of elite money managers, hedge funds and high-speed microprocessors. And it is this: globalization emerges from below, from street level, from people’s very souls and from their very deepest aspirations. Yes, globalization is the product of the democratizations of finance, technology and information, but what is driving all three of these is the basic human desire for a better life – a life with more freedom to choose how to prosper, what to eat, what to wear, where to live, where to travel, how to work, what to read, what to write and what to learn. It starts with a lady in Hanoi, crouched on the sidewalk, ,offering up a bathroom scale as her ticket to the fast world.
This explains why, along with the backlash against the brutalities, pressures and challenges of globalization, there is a groundswell of people demanding the benefits of globalization.
Creating a stable political, legal and economic environment friendly to entrepreneurship, in which people can start businesses and raise their productivity, is the precursor for effectively fighting poverty anywhere.
Sometimes the news is in the noise – in what is being shouted on the streets of Seattle and painted on the walls in graffiti. But sometimes the news is actually in the silence – in what isn’t being said. The greatest wisdom you can acquire as a reporter is understanding the difference between the two, and knowing when the silence is speaking volumes. I feel that the most important news story from Asia and Russia in 1998 and 1999 was the relative silence with which the lower and middle classes in Thailand, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia and the former Soviet Union accepted the verdict of the global markets – that their countries had fundamental software and operating system problems – and were ready to take the punishment and are now trying to make the necessary adjustments.
