As The World Shrinks

Throughout the history of civilization, until just a moment ago, the attraction of “abroad” consisted of the enticing mystery of the unknown, the challenge of the unfamiliar, the risk of fundamental obscurity, and above all the hope, born of the deepest and most natural human need, that one might find wisdom out there. That is to say, the world beyond one’s own comfortable environs was both the greatest source of unease and the ultimate sustenance of one’s most painful craving, the desperate wish of every dreamer and spiritual outsider to believe that life can be something more. Today, thanks to our “miraculous” technological advances (according to the current judgment of a species that has forgotten what a miracle is), international communication is not merely easier than ever, but in most cases essentially instantaneous and borderless. The world, as we say, is getting smaller all the time. Indeed, the very word “international” has almost been supplanted in our discourse by the word “global,” indicating the breadth of our ability to reach one another today; “seeing the world” is no longer a romantic matter of the ambitious or adventurous among us daring to stretch out their fingers to touch the mysterious Other in a limited way, but rather the commonplace matter of every schoolchild’s or lazybones’ easy and omnipresent capacity to embrace every inch of the Earth without so much as having to get out of bed.

And by the natural law of superabundance, this ubiquitous and universal mutual access has resulted, not in a more widespread appreciation for the great mysteries of otherness, but in a terrifyingly sudden evaporation of all mystery. The stranger has lost his strangeness, the foreigner his alien nature. Our routine and continual interaction, direct and indirect, with people around the world — and conversely theirs with us — does indeed make us all neighbors. This precisely is the problem. For what, above all else, motivated the intrepid or unstable among us, for thousands of years, to seek out the strange or foreign? Their neighbors, of course. That is to say, they — and by “they,” to make myself perfectly clear, I mean those with the noblest souls in all times and places — were seeking an escape from the oppressive sameness of their immediate surroundings. They were hoping to find evidence of real and inspiring alternatives — not merely new things to see, but new ways of seeing. Nothing is more heartening, and in truth more essentially necessary, to the spiritual misfit or melancholic searcher, than the plausible hope that something more is possible, if only one can find it, grab onto it, and let it take you to places that your neighbors not only do not care about, but do not even have the eyes to see.

As international becomes global, as the strange and mysterious Beyond becomes the similar and predictable Here, as The Other becomes the crowd, as all differences are shallowed, relativized, and trivialized — in short, as the wonder of the potential savior-in-waiting becomes the all-too-familiar next-door neighbor (“Small world!” exclaim the bland with relieved pleasure, when they find comforting sameness in strange places) — the world does in fact shrink, along with the souls and hopes of those few among us who alone once sustained and revealed the world’s erstwhile vastness and openness. As we shrink into universal uniformity, the natural wanderers and restless meaning-seekers will suffocate, shrivel up, and die off, for lack of the wide terrain in which they, and their kindred spirits who bequeathed such alternative worlds to our wastefully ungrateful era, would have hunted for their life-sustaining food.


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