The "threat" of "world government!" Oh My!

We all live in "One World" already..

The facts are these: There are now over 7 Billion people in the world and the population continues to grow. We humans are being crowded together as never before.

At the same time, technology has made it far easier for us to participate - if only vicariously for the most part - in one anothers' cultures. Today most people in the world (Americans are the exception) speak more than one language. A century ago, that was extremely rare.

Inexpensive travel has made the intersection of cultures far easier and more common. "Tourists" are now routinely found in what were once "the remotest corners of the earth," from the Galapagos Islands to the Arctic and Antarctic, to the Himalayas, "darkest Africa," and remote islands groups in the Atlantic and Pacific, that in the early 20th Century had been virtually isolated for hundreds of years.

The effect of all of this (and much, much more) that is going on right now, is the virtual "shrinkage" of the world. We are being pushed up against one another in a way that has never happened before. All population research indicates this kind of interconnecting and cross-influence will lead to crisis.

We see that already in how the flood of immigrants - mostly from the southern hemisphere to the northern at this moment - is changing the character of countries from France, Germany and Italy to the US and the Scandinavian countries.

Multi-culturalism isn't just a P.C. fad, it's an economic and political necessity. The movement of immigrants and refugees is changing the character of societies. You can build all the walls you want, but you won't be able to stop it. It's like the (probably apocryphal) story about King Canute ordering the sea to retreat.

On top of that, there's the intimately interconnected web of economies that erases borders and defies "National" definitions. In spite of the incredible blessings the US has enjoyed in regard to almost all natural resources, we have reached a point when even we are becoming increasingly dependent on supplies from other countries. Many countries around the world are already heavily dependent on products from the US and the other developed countries, and those other developed countries are even more dependent than we are on resources from outside their own borders.

There is only one forseeable outcome of all this - other than the End Times scenario, of course. That is increased cooperation, increased recognition of our common humanity, increased acceptance of the necessity of a system to co-ordinate world-wide sharing of resources and creativity.

This is not ideology - it is simple recognition of the physical reality of our situation. We are all stuck on the same island, floating in space, and we have limited resources with which to support ourselves.

In the past, we have solved this problem by fighting and killing each other, to obtain one anothers' resources for our own use. With nations like Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, India and Russia having nuclear weapons (with others on the verge), this becomes less and less practical.

In the past one nation could lay waste to a neighboring country, exploit its people and resources to enrich itself and get away with it. Although that can still be done - and many countries are still operating under that model - the opportunities are become scarcer, and the possible negative consequences much more dire.

With what we now know about the people of other nations, we can no longer justify our exploitation of their lands as "bringing civilization to the benighted natives." The argument that "Christians" have a duty to civilize the world with Christ's message (cleaning up on resource exploitation in the process) no longer flies - even among most Christians.

As we come into contact with (and assimilate as citizens) more and more people of other cultures, it becomes increasingly clear that - as medical and anthropological science has known for most of a century - there is only one "race" on earth, the human race.

We won't co-operate only because it is the right thing to do - although research indicates that except among a tiny socio-pathic minority of the population, altruism is our natural bent, and all of our great spiritual figures from Christ to Buddha to Mohammad have urged us to learn to love and support one another. We'll do it because the alternative is increasing chaos and misery for all of us.

Like some individuals, some societies will continue to try to blame their problems on others, but "blaming" doesn't solve problems. We will have to find solutions to our problems, or be overwhelmed and destroyed by them. The alternatives are: facing our problems in the real world and solving them; or embracing a psychotic, self-destructive breakdown.

It is clear that the solutions can't lie in "nationalism." We are already far too inter-related and interconnected for that. They have to lie in increasing international co-operation. This doesn't mean the destruction of unique national cultures - but it does mean the integration of many cultures into a greater whole. It does mean seeking to understand and respect that which is different. It does mean understanding, as Walt Disney tried desperately to tell us years ago - "It's a small world after all."

As in our lives, so in the world. We can either embrace change, grow and learn - or we can resist change and be run over by it. We can either face reality, or we can pretend the world is different from what it actually is, and create elaborate, ultimately futile structures to try to support our fantasy - usually at great cost and with terribly destructive effects.

"Global Governance" doesn't have to mean a totalitarian Big Brother state, any more than State governance means totalitarian control over towns, or Federal governance means totalitarian control over states.

In the US we are working out a system where people of quite different cultures - both ethnically and regionally - are learning to live together and manage their common affairs for the common good. That was our Founding Fathers' aspiration, and we're still working on it.

There's no reason why the ideas embedded in Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America, which have been touchstones for the transition from Monarchies and despotic states to democratic forms of government for everyone from Chairman Mao to the French, the Italians, and even Ho Chi Minh (who expressed admiration for Jefferson and other American political thinkers) wouldn't also be at the core of the thought of those trying to "form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity" on an international scale.

We can either maintain the current system of competition and it's "bad seed" child war between nations - which can only lead to misery and destruction - or we can seek increased cooperation - as the original thirteen American colonies did - and figure out a way to organize ourselves (as they did) into a political structure that best meets our objectives, that protects our rights and gives all the people of the world their best shot at what we in the US were the first to asssert as their birthright: "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."