If the world were shrunk to a community of one hundred souls, and all the appropriate proportions kept intact, 14 of that one hundred would be illiterate.
The photo is from a flash animation, and you can find it and a bunch other great photos and amazing statistics at the Miniature World Web site.
I remember when this idea – of shrinking the world’s population – first came into the public consciousness. Back in the 90s, how many of whichever race or religion seemed exotic to me. I think that such exotica helped forge part of my personality, and my latent interest in travel and culture. Well, that and Caravan, which my mother dragged me to when I was an even younger kid.
The name attributed to this idea (the world as a community of a hundred) is that of Donella Meadows. I’d never heard of her before, but as I delved into her legacy (she died at 60, in 2001), her work certainly showed itself to be influential to me. Back during my first stint in University (at Waterloo), in the faculty of environmental studies, her book, Limits to Growth, was like a bible to us budding environmentalists. Flawed as it has turned out. Of course I know better now. Ah, the naivité of youth.
Meadows also published an extraordinary series of essays (which can be found here), for which she was nominated for a Pullitzer Prize. One of these, an earlier one, is entitled What Shall We Do With Our Differences, and it seems particularly prescient in these days of jihad, global terror, and radical Islamicism.
She starts off with a joke. An old one.
In heaven the police are British, the mechanics are German, the cooks are French, the lovers are Italian and the Swiss organize the place.
In hell the police are German, the mechanics are French, the cooks are British, the lovers are Swiss and the Italians organize the place.
Her thesis deals with the the nature of diversity, and whether we are stonger for it, or weakened to the point of collapse. And she uses her experiences in living in a commune-like setting for 24 years to illustrate a point.
What I’ve just done here is substitute one kind of oversimplicity (people who are different can’t get along) with its equally absurd opposite (people who are different naturally complement one another). On this side of the ocean, in a nation chock full of different kinds of people, we know things are more complex. Every day we both benefit and suffer enormously from our diversity.
Why is that? Why don’t we simply combine our various strengths and rejoice? If, as the joke says, we can use our differences to produce either heaven or hell, why do we so often produce hell?
Indeed. In 1996, she was (sort of) predicting the collapse of the (then) new, European Union. Not predicting with glee, rather hoping that they’d see the benefits of diversity, using her own, individualistic Americanism as a foil to that end.
Her real question was whether there was any way for a community – be it a household, a city, a nation, or a planet – to learn the addition in which the whole is greater than the sum of parts.
I wish I knew. I do know that this question is central if our world or any small part of it is to flourish. So I try to practice community. Like anyone raised in individualistic America, I have to work at it.
I’ve come to believe that silent resentment is the worst enemy of community.
So I have to learn to air my discomforts with other people, not as big deal, just as simple fact. I have to discuss problems when they crop up, work them out, find their lessons. It’s not the most natural thing for me to do.
I have to dig deep to understand my own intolerance, separate my moral principles from my prejudices and egotisms and be willing to stick up for the principles while letting go of the rest. That’s hard. I need the loving help of others to do it.
The answer, she surmises, has to do with commitment to a greater ideal, not simply one’s own. An interesting perspective. You can read it all here. She died just months after 9/11.
And view the animation. Yes, it’s a small world after all. But an increasingly entrenched and unsophisticated one.