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Globalising the mind

Richard Pearce considers what we can learn from some startling world events

Currently we are still reeling from the impact of two elections, the Brexit referendum in the UK and the presidential election in the USA, and nervously watching a cycle of elections due in several European countries. What will happen next?

But we should have known. The majority vote isn’t always what we expect. There was an election in Gaza a few years ago, and we all know what happened there. The question for us small ‘d’ democrats is: if the people in power don’t like the popular choice, under what circumstances should the popular vote be overruled or, as Richard Dawkins put it, on what issues should the people be consulted?

This debate, repeated around a thousand dinner tables and at a thousand bars, will run and run. But if we move from our dinner table to the wider world there may be a different question being asked. The so-called ‘Remainers’ in the UK should have listened to the British politician who said ‘the people have had enough of experts’. In the event, it was those who thought themselves well-informed, articulate, and educated who were outvoted. Instead of just looking at ‘them’, who made such crazy choices, perhaps we ought to ask who are ‘we’, the right-thinking folk who suddenly find ourselves in the minority. In Anthropology there is talk of the ‘WEIRD’ community: the Western, Educated, Intellectual, Rich, Developed societies, to which most people in education belong. International school careers provide an even wider experience of the ways of the world; surely we know best? If we are the ones who know about these things, we tend to conclude that the only possible reasons for taking the illiberal side in these elections are ignorance or stupidity.

How did it look to Them, the non-liberals? Surely they hear the same stories, read the same papers, watch the same TV news as we do? If we are all in the same community, our knowledge and our attitudes are built from shared ideas and a common picture of the world. Above all, the way that digital media allow us to converse through the universally-available, universally-accessible social media networks should surely bring us all together.

But this is exactly what social media do not do. Despite the protestations of some of its devotees – and they are truly devoted – the Internet is actually structured to narrow our vision. For a start this universal participation is an illusion; it is only universal among the young and modern. Then it has various devices that trace our previous searches and offer us reiterations of those searches. Governed by advertising, they want to classify us and then sell us what we are likely to buy. Everything is there on the Internet, but we are steered away from conflicting or dissonant encounters. We reinforce this ourselves, by the way we use it. Since the ‘death of distance’, to quote an influential book of the 1990s, we have had such wide contacts that we are able to populate our social lives entirely with congenial people. There was a time when the Flat Earth Society only met once a month in a room above a pub in Clapham, London, but now they can chat for as long as they want, every day, with all their members. We no longer have to deal with those awkward people who think differently, and who might occasionally make us question our own view of things. We can simply share our laughter at the stupidity of others with like-minded friends around the world, reassuring ourselves that we are the ones who are right. But without difference we are oysters with no grit to form the pearl, no reflection to develop our ideas. On the one hand is the comfortable certainty of our cliques, and beyond it a post-fact world in which knowledge is instant thanks to Wikipedia and truth is a matter of personal choice.

It is a challenge that we are well positioned to meet in international schools. The diversity of the world is right in front of our eyes. In school we can encourage a critical approach to online information. In class we can give students the confidence to display their own beliefs and values. Outside of the class we can promote genuine interaction with the host country. We can show by our example that we respect and want to understand all of the communities we serve, and not just the ones whose syllabus we teach. Of course each situation is unique, but that is the way of the world. Perhaps this is the biggest lesson of all – that not everyone sees things the way we do. Isn’t that where we started?

Mary Hayden and Jeff Thompson Editors Jonathan Barnes Editorial Director James Rudge Production Director Alex Sharratt Managing Director

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