According to Brooks, the Blair counter-position lies in a belief that increasing global interaction and interdepence require us to call on our universal, shared human values, and that these can in fact prevail over cultural differences. And while we may continue to make ham-handed mistakes of catastrophic proportions in our cross-cultural interactions, the difficulty in engaging effectively across that which divides us by no means relieves us of the obligation to strive to do so.
In my personal journey, I have come to a strongly held faith that, while people on the surface may seem incredibly diverse, once one penetrates beneath the surface layers, our shared humanity makes us much much more similar than different. And in fact my personal experiences in cultivating relationships with those with whom I share little culturally have always borne this out. I'm convinced that, when viewed outside a cultural context, my life experience and that of, say, a Kalahari bushman, are essentially similar. We're both born as high-potentiality, unformed bits of protoplasm, with similar physiological infrastructure and innate capacities, into social networks that value family and community. We strive to organize and make sense of our lives and our environments by creating an internal operating system that is continually updated based on our experiences - creating layers upon layers of beliefs and assumptions that create the shortcuts by which we can constantly progress our personal functionality. (This is what we commonly refer to as "personal growth".) And I believe that much of what I and my Kalahari brethren experience as suffering is actually the result of "bad coding" - the 1/10th of a percent of our personal programming that is inherently dysfunctional, that which arose from unfortunate incidents in our past and/or our personal misconceptions and the innocently inappropriate beliefs and assumptions that made their way into our personal operating systems as a result. At our essence, we live, we love, we laugh, we cry, we grow and age and die, aware of our morality, wishing a better future for our children and generations to come - we are human.
And paradoxically, I hold if not a belief at least an aspiration that, as so often has happened in the course of human events, having a common enemy will unite us. As the world gets small and issues become not just theoretically but practically global shared concerns (e.g., global climate change, pollution, waning energy reserves, global terrorism and fundamentalism, risk of global pandemics, etc.), that the nuances that distinguish us culturally will be overcome by our needs to address the challenges that we share, those that threaten our livelihoods, well-being, and even existence without discrimination.
Those elements that distinguish us culturally, that seem so insurmountable when it comes to achieving global harmony, pale in comparsion to both the aspects that we share as fellow members of the human race, and the challenges to our continued existence on this planet. And though it seems to be human nature to seek out the differences that divide us, as globalization moves from a concept to a reality of everyday life, the opportunities to transcend and unite seem greater than ever. I choose to have faith in humankind and our collective ability to rise up and meet our shared challenges - and assert that those who choose otherwise risk authoring a self-fulfilling prophesy.
