February 10, 2004
The Global Citizen... Let's take five with Moira Gunn. This is "Five Minutes."
The ethics of any particular human ends abruptly at the frontier of his personal horizon. After all, who can feel a moral obligation about someone or something we don't know? So, you might say that the scope of social ethics is a function of place and space, centering around where we are and what we know and extending through to a space defined by what we can conceive of.
That said, it occurred to me that the great mass of humanity has only had a sense of the global nature of things for a few thousand years. That's right. Humans have been around for several million, but it's only been recently we've come to view the Earth as a whole. And we still wouldn't, if it weren't for technology.
Staying with the idea of place and space, it's a relatively new ability that people could travel worldwide. There wasn't the technology to navigate across the waters. Forget about flying from one place to the next, or traveling in space.
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In terms of place, even early explorers couldn't tell you where they were. Read their chronicles, and you see descriptions are almost universally useless. "We crossed a big river and climbed a gorge and camped in a meadow and there were trees all around." It's taken centuries to place where they were, and in many cases, we will never find it again. Perhaps more importantly, whatever sense of globalicity these people had, it was not shared - it had to have been markedly different from one person to the next, and much was rooted in the imagination.
Now look around you at anyone who is under the age of 35. They grew up with photos of planet Earth, and never knew the paradigm shift which occurred when humans went to the moon, looked back and snapped a picture. But that paradigm shift is history, and every human today has seen an picture of themselves in a global sense.
Which brings us back to our sense of place.
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In times past, a place was only a place if you could hook it to a dominant and essentially findable physical phenomenon. Heck, I have laundry piles bigger than Plymouth Rock, but it was the only rock around and it wasn't going anywhere.
But today, any traveler can whip out his GPS, record his exact location, label it for future reference and email to anyone, all before he moves from the spot. In fact, he can do it with one hand tied behind his back.
And the relation between you and the rest of the globe has shrunk. Global transportation has replaced the village cobbler with shoes manufactured a continent away, and global communications means that worldwide information - from television to telephone - has become the norm.
Which got me to thinking about this latest generation of teenagers. They've come of age with the World Wide Web. They've never known a world where goods weren't global and news wasn't ubiquitous. They may even consider traveling everywhere, carrying a cell phone and having access to the Internet a basic human right. They may be the first generation to understand the true worldwide consequences of technology, and en masse, to develop a global sense of ethics.
From here forward, humanity's sense of place and space is forever changed. In the shadow of the relentless march of technology, every child born is now a global citizen - both literally and figuratively.
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
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