All geography is local

American statesman Thomas "Tip" O'Neill famously said that "all politics is local" meaning that votes were cast and controlled in their own communities, subject to local political influence. Recent events in New York reaffirm that even global geography has local roots, and local geography has global branches.

Consider the so-called Ground Zero Mosque, more properly known as the Park51 Islamic Community Center: a private use of a small parcel of private property in a city where larger and more complicated real estate transactions happen every moment has taken on world-wide significance. Why? because its planned location is two blocks (or four, or further, or mere footsteps away, depending on the philosophical leanings of the person doing the measurement) from another location which has become invested with huge symbolic importance. The former World Trade Center site is "hallowed ground" some say, and therefore it is a sacrilege to let Muslims pray nearby.

The transparent bigotry which that opinion expresses is only half the point. The rest is that it comes dressed up as an argument about location -- geography -- rather than ideology. "Let them put it somePLACE else," the protesters say. "This is just too close." But where else? Is a mile away far enough away to insulate Ground Zero from the corrupting influence of nearby Islam? How about in the next county? The next state? This entire debacle presents an unusually pristine example of the power of places, the lure of locations. The people who complain that this Islamic Center does not belong near the scene of an islamic crime, would likely not want it anywhere else. But their prejudice takes traction from the fact that this place -- this tiny sliver of land, imbues their cause with a presumed geographical legitimacy.

Does globalization diminish cultural diversity? Is that really the question?

The Globalization Website provides the arguments for and against the thinking that globalization diminishes cultural diversity, but I believe that in a larger and more comprehensive sense this is a false dichotomy. Rather than reducing or enhancing cultural diversity, I believe that the miniaturization of the world which has resulted from advancing communication and transportation technologies have reformed the definition of culture -- requiring that we accept that "culture" itself is no longer exclusively a local or national phenomenon, but now a global one. In a world where cultural influences -- music, art, economics, politics, literature, and education -- are as available remotely as locally, the cultual unit is changing from regions and nations to the global community as a whole.

The scholar John Sexton, president of NYU, puts it this way during an interview with The Huffington Post: "I think the world at this point is miniaturizing. It's miniaturizing in every way so 'gating strategies' are utterly useless at this point. We just learned that you can't gate off of an economy, something we should have known long ago. Clearly you can't gate off the flow of people and ideas and information, so the world is becoming miniaturized, and the question I think, and maybe the most important question of the century is, how is humankind going to react to that miniaturization?"

That seems to me undeniably true. As distant causes have immediate and unavoidable worldwide results and faraway ideas and discoveries have a real time influential availability, the thought that we can isolate -- or even insulate -- our "cultural" development into a localized phenomenon is becoming increasingly obsolete.

Some will object. Local identity and national or regional exceptualism are strong forces. It may be, as Wordsworth wrote two hundred years ago, that "the world is too much with us" but the only way out of this experience is backwards, and that direction is lost to us forever. I hope.

For more, watch economist Jagdish Bhagwati's remarks at The Globalization Arguments.

What makes North "north"?

When cartographer Gerardus Mercator developed the Mercator Projection in 1569, he designed a cylindrical map projection with parallel east west lines to facilitate marine voyages from Europe. But, as we have discussed in class, this projection distorts the size and shape of every location on the globe -- and even their positions.

As the fictional character Dr Don Fallows tells White House staffers CJ Craig and Josh Lyman on this clip from The West Wing, because of the Mercator Projection and its distortions, "Nothing is where you think it is." The Mercator Projection distortion does more than offer a confusing and incorrect view of the world, it implicates issues of social justice by allowing the First World -- North America and Europe -- to appear bigger, and therefore more important that other less favored world areas. "In our society we unconciously equate size with importance and ecven power," explains Fallows.

The cartograpohers in this episode argue for another kind of map, one which is more accurate as to size, shape, and location. It is called the Peters Projection.
It really exists, and it looks like this:
















But wait, there's more.

The top-and-bottom orientation makes the Northern hemisphere -- where the First World is -- seem primary, elevated, and exalted, while the places in the Southern Hemisphere -- the African, South American and Asian Second and Third World are, well, on the "bottom" of the world. In truth, of course, neither is more accurate than the other. On a spinning planet which revolves around a star in a universe which has no top-and-bottom orientation, what -- other than the cultural egotism of the countries which decided -- makes North "north"???

Playing for Change:World Geography and the Information Revolution

In our second session the class discussed the Information Revolution, a term that usually refers to the effects of dramatic technological improvements in communications, data storage, and computing. The relation to world geography is obvious -- just as the Industrial Revolution effectively shrunk the globe by reducing the time for travel to distant points, the Information Revolution has shrunk it further reducing the time for communicating with distant points -- often allowing for an effective time delay of zero (a phenomenon which has given rise to the curiously appropriate phrase "real time," as if previous delays made the passage of time more artificial).

But as the study of Geography is at least partially the study of locations, instantaneous communications can be considered to make the entire world one super-location. If it takes zero time to get to another place (even though virtually), then is it really another place at all?

Which brings me (finally) to Playing for Change. According to Wikipedia, Playing for Change is "a multimedia music project created by the American producer and sound engineer Mark Johnson with his Timeless Media Group, that seeks to bring together musicians from around the world." But just watch this video a few times. PFC is really a way, impossible before the Information Revolution, for musicians from around the world to collaborate on the same performance, while they are miles -- and often thousands of miles -- apart from one another. They bring the culture of their actual location into a concert which takes place -- where? The PFC website says that they are "connecting the world through music." Maybe they are. But it seems to me that Shakespeare's old maxim that "all the world's a stage" has now become literally (and virtually) true.