Globalism and universalism, as appealing as they are rationally, are too rational. You can’t love an abstraction; you can only get obsessive or fanatical about it.
Is a unified vision of society possible across different peoples, lands, and worldviews, yet in a way that doesn’t dominate the local, and doesn’t impose its ideological gods on everybody? Maybe, but we’ll need a radically new breed of thought.
For now, the localist spirit will tend to prevail, both in good and bad forms—wildflowers and weeds bursting up through the globalist asphalt. And it’s hard to imagine it otherwise in an age of upheaval, when it can feel like the problems facing our world just keep piling up. If the day should come when the lights wink out, and the internet dies, and when the look in everybody’s eyes becomes anxious and uncertain, we won’t be clinging to the promises we saw in the pixels of those dead screens, made by people far away who didn’t know us. We will do what people have done since the beginning of time: gather around our hearth, holding fast to each other and our prayers, and sharing whatever we have…
But even that isn’t putting it quite right. Really, the end is always near. Even when it flourishes, life can be taken away at any moment. Which means if we are going to love this home, these people, this God, we must always do it, not merely as a defensive response during a crisis, and not as a form of in-group tribalism or way of hiding behind our boundaries.
We just love, from the center outward, overflowing the boundaries whenever we can.
That is the hope of the future, I think.