The neighbourhood is no longer national, but global, writes David Beresford
It was, in one sense, the cellphones which gave a unique flavour to the tragedy, more heartbreaking than the details of scale. The wife poignantly asking her husband, in government service on the ground, what to tell the pilot to do. The hefty young man calling his family as he hypes himself for what might well have been a heroic counter-attack by passengers that saved the White House. The resigned callers using their phones simply to say farewells to loved ones. The frantically hopeful calls from those buried alive under the rubble of the twin towers.
The ubiquitous cellphone currently represents the cutting edge of the communications revolution. And in the cellular design of their networks lies a metaphor which perhaps offers some understanding of genuinely global tragedy and the context of social change, in which it took place.
Cells are of course associated with living organisms and as such are seen as part of a whole. In the same way cellphones can be seen as representing a fast-growing intimacy of involvement that is leading to a global whole. They are not the first manifestations of the trend towards globalisation, obviously. The digital capture of images from a wealth of angles of flight 11 and flight 175 hammering endlessly into the twin towers and their instantaneous circulation around the planet was another example of the phenomenon. The airline industry itself represents the globalisation of travel with its commensurate sense of geographical intimacy. Perhaps to top them all is the Internet that is so intriguingly imitative of the brain in the mind’s ability to conjure a sublime sense of identity out of the seeming chaos of neural pathways.
But if this process of globalisation is widely recognised as taking place in the field of technology, politics must be seen as lagging far behind. Now we see politicians using old-fashioned concepts, which are in the process of becoming redundant, in dealing with the World Trade Centre disaster and its aftermath.
The United States, by characterising the attack as a “declaration of war” on the “American people” and indulging in excited displays of the national flag, are identifying with the concept of the nation state. It is a concept with origins in the days of our understanding of the world to be flat, which is disappearing down the plug hole of history just as surely as that of sovereignty, which was founded in the now ludicrous idea of the divine right of kings.
The worldwide community of interests and the speed of communication and travel increasingly make distance irrelevant. Bomb America’s financial centre and central banks around the world move almost immediately and automatically, with little heed for politicians, to steady the integrated markets. Joe Soap who happens to be gazing at a screen through a shop window in Eastgate has every chance of learning of a US disaster before the American president. As they dig a survivor out of the rubble of New York tears of shared joy will spring to eyes watching in Tokyo. In a world where perceptions are shared everything must be shared in time.
“An attack on one is an attack on all,” pipes Nato’s secretary general on behalf of 19 member states, with no apparent appreciation of the verities of the statement on a far broader scale.
It is an attack on all, the potential of which is not only to be recognised at the World Trade Centre, but in the seemingly disproportionate power of the atom bomb, of biological weapons and of the computer virus. Interdependence comes with vulnerability.
“This shouldn’t have happened in Fortress America,” but it did, because fortifications are as irrelevant to modern realities as is the Tower of London. The salient lesson to be learned from the rubble of the twin towers is that this is a world in which 19 men equipped with no more than Stanley knives and (from their perspective) a cause are able to slay 5 000.
It is no doubt a coincidence, but a useful one to recall, that this week’s events follow closely on those at the world racism conference in Durban. One of the most representative gatherings of frustrated causes ever, it effectively collapsed after proceedings had been snubbed by the US.
That conjunction of global tragedy with global dissidence reminds one of the old adage that one cannot live in peace while one’s neighbour suffers. In time the neighbourhood has become national and now needs be seen as global. In that context moral blameworthiness is not an issue. The Palestine question like many others around an ill-used planet that threaten the integrity of the whole can be seen as a sore on the global body politic causing fever and pain that, if neglected, could eventually destroy the patient.
But even a cancerous cell cannot be held morally responsible and “punished” in the name of national pride.
With recognition of the global nature of society in the 21st century must come the realisation that for George W Bush to now bomb the likes of Afghanistan makes about as much sense as it would for a man who has lost his balance and sprained an ankle to deal with it by means of a kick at the injury with the uninjured foot. The US military might as well have bombed Oklahoma in the wake of that terrorist atrocity.
If the sanctity of life is to be accorded to those in the World Trade Centre which means, but for accidents of timing, ourselves and our own loved ones it must needs be given recognition and equal weight in the camps of Palestine, the slums of Africa, the gutters of India, the refugee boats from Indonesia …
Some argue that the atrocity reflects a “hatred” of Americans, but as imperial powers go they are in fact fairly tolerant and well tolerated. Their governmental system is arguably the most advanced in the world today with regard to the practice and promotion of democracy and political freedom. Their culture is followed and imitated around the world. It is their misfortune that they have arrived in the role of imperial power when global development is in the process of making imperial fantasies redundant. By the same token theirs is the opportunity of leadership at a time when man is making a truly evolutionary leap.
In that context the role of the cellphone in the World Trade Centre tragedy symbolises far more than the “brotherhood of man”. It reflects an intimacy of involvement that no longer allows room for the question whether I am my brother’s keeper. In time it may offer nothing less than global liberation from fear.