One of the most tragic consequences of the Bush Administration has been the wall it's driven between the people of the United States and the rest of the world. Seven years of war, jingoistic xenophobia, terrorism fear-mongering, anti-intellectualism, immigrant-bashing and disdain for international law and diplomacy have left a wider gulf between the U.S. and the rest of the world larger than anytime since American doughboys went sailing to France in the First World War.
On these shores, that gulf manifests itself in an explosion of people who don't know anything about the outside world, and don't care, and even consider themselves more patriotic for it -- "ignorant proud," my grandmother would have called them. Indeed, I've read that if it weren't for immigrants and the children of immigrants, the share of Americans speaking a language in addition to English would be at an all-time low. Only 21% of Americans even own a passport, and fewer are going overseas (further than Canada or Mexico). And, of course, as Ethan has extensively discussed, Americans get less -- and more narrow -- news about the wider world than the people of any other developed nation. Even well-educated Americans know far less about the world than their peers abroad.
But the closing of minds is not just an American phenomenon. Like most Americans who travel a lot and spend a lot of time around people from other countries, I can tell you that knee-jerk anti-Americanism is at a level I couldn't have even imagined 10 years ago. Not only do a great many people -- especially, in my experience, young people in Europe -- regard the U.S. itself as a corrupt and collapsing empire far behind the times; many have begun to treat Americans themselves with an open contempt. Even in more polite conversations, you sometimes get the sense that people abroad think Americans have all retreated back to the caves.
On both sides of this gulf, then, we have less and less willingness to learn and share and cooperate, at just the moment when the survival of civilization itself pretty much depends on rapid diffusion and evolution of innovation across the planet. That ain't good.
To make matters worse, we're headed into a global recession, and one of the things that's likely to go up on the chopping block first is exchange: business travel, conferences, learning journeys, international vacations.
In reality, we need the opposite. We need a heck of a lot more people traveling to more places, and sharing more ideas with more people. We need a flood of them in both directions. Bridge-blogging and more foreign news and online forums and so on are all great, but they won't build what we need most, which is a sense of comfort with one another.
It'd be great to see a global commitment to citizen diplomacy and global networking. Universities should step up their funding for languages and study abroad programs. Companies should commit extra funding for sending staff to foreign conferences and meetings. Foundations and donors should give more to support travel and event costs. Government programs (like the Peace Corps here in America, or its various analogs in European countries) should get a big infusion of funding.
I could go on -- nothing is easier than spending other people's money -- but the point is this: we need a huge increase in the number of Americans who are meeting people from elsewhere and sharing ideas about how to build a bright green future.
