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Global, local, national, personal:
Emerging layers of shared perspective
across which we may all relate

By Peter Orne
Commenting from Freedom, Maine

The national and now global emergence of documentary filmmaker Michael Moore is a sight to behold. A single suprastate actor, as he is sometimes called—the creator of “Fahrenheit 911” and other anti-establishment films such as “Bowling for Columbine” and “Roger and Me”—Moore has simultaneously tapped universal principles of honesty, responsibility and accountability via the global entertainment distribution network to put the squeeze on a national government he feels is lying and corrupt.

By embodying the homegrown features of the local—community, history, rootedness—Moore explores almost nonchalantly, as though kicking back in his hometown living room, the intersection between the often staggering national mistruths of the Bush Administration and its global designs. Moviegoers have responded favorably to Moore's local-styled demeanor—baseball cap, beer belly, plain talk—and his nostalgia for the America he once knew even as he attacks the largest power structures of our time.

By using the local and the personal to appeal to the global (through universals) in direct defiance of the national, “Fahrenheit 911” is easily one of the most important films of the decade, suggesting a path along which we might begin to rethink the heavily nation-based, nationally oriented perspectives most of us still exclusively orient toward in this breakaway era of globalization and modernization, global environmental concern, and increasing mobility and personal uprootedness.

Four shared perspectives

In the 21st century, certainly the identity of each of us may be explained by more than a passport and a couple of pins—for Place of Birth, Country of Origin—tacked on a Mercator projection of the world. If this simpler, nation-based idea about identity were more deeply elaborated below and above the level of birthplace and country, how might we characterize the newly emerging layers and, further, begin sharing perspectives across them?

Look around you for a minute and consider the context in which you are sitting right now. How you might describe it in its most basic terms? Essentially, there is you, sitting in a particular locale, in a particular country or nation, in the greater world in which we all live. Such categorizing may seem a very simple reduction of all you know about yourself and your surroundings, the country where you live, and the world, but it is simultaneously a rather profound diagnosis of the modern moment we all inhabit. Almost without exception, each of us has a perspective onto a self, a locale and a specific country on the globe.

It follows that these perspectives—global and local, national and personal—constitute emerging layers of shared insight across which we may all more easily view ourselves and one another, and even communicate, in a global era. Again, if any of these contexts is missing for any one of us at any time, it may be said that we are not here! Some exceptions do apply: We might be floating in international waters, laying over at the United Nations or in Antarctica, or drifting through outer space. Almost all the time, however, each of us exists within these four contexts, and it is across them that we, in personal but important ways, may all relate.

The long national march

For several centuries now, most of us have gotten used to thinking the nations we have fought for or the empires that have ruled over us define the inner and outer boundaries of who we are, forming a kind of bedrock for ourselves. Further cementing individual identity have been the unique local circumstances affecting the culture of family, tribe and village across all preceding generations—or at least until slavery, colonization, the Industrial Revolution and 19th- and 20th-century uprootings began shifting more and more of us, such that movement and migration—and a loss of rootedness—are far more commonplace today.

While for most people the national and the local continue to form the bedrock of identity, for others, personal understanding and global experience are fast becoming the new genies in the bottle of shared identity and perspective. Moreover, universals that have been with us for thousands of years—through spiritual, faith and, more recently, ethical and legal traditions—are newly accompanied by high-definition scientific inquiries into the mind and body and wide-definition global purviews across cities and regions that raise questions and possibilities about how we may expand on older views of ourselves and others.

While on a daily basis I live here, I work here, my family is here, I am American—facts that together inform my national and local identity—the global and the universal are pushing hard against my personal assumptions and challenging those long-held orientations. Consequently, the “inside-us” universal mixing with the “out-there” global may raise serious ethical and personal questions.

On a personal level, should you wish to move beneath national histories and local characteristics to explore who you are or could become, spiritual and religious traditions have always been available for a more stay-at-home-styled exploration. But with the global there on the horizon, the universal has an all-new dimension to it. Whether your journey is to the altar or the airport, by meditation cushion or seat cushion, the personal, universal and global are linking as never before. While many of us may be content to contemplate heaven and hell right at home, others will board an international flight—perhaps a little of both!—to transcend old locals and nationals and confront the possibility of new personal meaning, if also to risk becoming personally uprooted.

Consummating personal and global

Because the local and the national have for several decades been under pressure from global processes and personal preferences—say, for freedom and economic and social equality—many of us are watching governments become overshadowed by globalization even as we lose touch with the old, rough-edged features of the local such as culture, history and community.

Consequently, a dislocated few of us will face the “great out there” of the global with only family, friends and memories to guide us, while others will simply go it alone. Because, after the local, the last line of defense for each of us is the personal, a very few will tilt toward the global, or fanatical-fundamentalist manifestations of the universal, in a supranational grab at personal meaning. While the serious downside here are the psychological conditions that produce terrorism, an upside to the personal linking to the global is that it can inspire more and more hope that peace, equality and freedom are truly achievable universals. When facilitated by increasing mobility, cross-border flows of information and human-rights and institutional standards, and sharing of best practices, globalization itself may appear to be taking us toward the universal. Although many have rightly called globalization off-kilter and unfair, its progenitors have mostly effectively promoted these universalizing aspects of it.

At the same time, how do we personally assimilate the global and the effects of globalization into our lives while newspaper headlines and broadcast media around the world remain overwhelmingly focused on national interests, leaving the biggest global-trend stories of our lifetime woefully underreported or ignored? Without some enlightenment within the media, the consummation between the personal and the global will continue to feel unsettling as most of us look at the world through the rose-colored or Coke-bottle glasses of our national actions and policies. You may turn to your leader, your fellow citizens, your employer or your television for guidance, yet the global is always right there subtly peaking back at you from a corner—through job losses here, new construction there, the threat of terrorism, global warming, financial crises, and so on. You may not have the tools to understand how the global works, but you know your life and community may change quickly because of global trends and events, and that your government could be powerless to raise a finger.

Dot matrix you

For most of us a dot, or a few dots, on the map may be used to represent the center of our communal feeling, or that place that roots us, while for some of us several lines tied end to end—a matrix spanning cities, continents and oceans—additionally constitute a record of our travels across the globe. The denser this matrix, the more inputs some of us may receive from the broader world. The black dot representing our local-communal rootedness may have no clear link to our global matrix, yet our personal ability to negotiate between dot and matrix—and to share the perspective we've gleaned from this with others—is more useful if not outright necessary in a globalizing world.

Each of us may encounter a vast range of global, local, national and personal meanings in our travels, interactions and readings. In this way, the old Mercator projection or 2D Cartesian map of nation-states is less useful for describing the layered, 3D matrix many of us negotiate in the 21st century. Because the global has so challenged the bedrock of national and local identities, our understanding of ourselves and others relies more now on those four fundamental layers of shared perspective, opening us to a broader understanding within the context of the global and leading us to a deeper acknowledgement of human universals.

Because of the rapid ascent of the global, a more negative outcome may be an intensification of personal angst and cynicism about the alienating aspects of globalization and modernization in a world lorded over by a single superpower. While this is understandable to some extent, by intensively examining ourselves and engaging one another across the four layers of shared perspective—global, local, national and personal—we, not unlike Michael Moore, may individually and collectively continue to guide our governments and one another toward a better order.