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Wrong place indeed. Unlike in, say, the British Empire, that
divided a person's identity "between the home he carried
in his blood and the one he had on paper," Iyer argues that
in the modern world, which I take to be an International Empire,
the sense of home is not just divided, but scattered across the
planet, and in the absence of any center at all, people find
themselves at sea. Our ads sing of Planet Reebok and Planet Hollywood--even
my monthly telephone bill in Japan speaks of "One World
One Company"--yet none of us necessarily feels united on
a deeper level.
Our very souls are at risk in the global age, Iyer says, quoting
Simone Weil: "No human being should be deprived of his metaxu,
that is to say, of those relative and mixed blessings (home,
country, tradition, cultures, etc.) which warm and nourish the
soul and without which, short of sainthood, a human life
is not possible."
Of course, these sorts of complaints aren't original to Iyer. American
Renaissance writers like Emerson and Thoreau made the same sorts
of arguments, as Iyer himself readily points out. (Indeed, The
Global Soul's title is an ironic reference to Emerson's notion
of a universal soul "that is not mine, or thine, or his,
but we are its; we are its property and men.") And the general
concern over the costs of progress wasn't unknown to British social
philosophers of the nineteenth century either. Think of William
Morris's socialist rage-against-the-machine drive behind the Arts
and Crafts movement, for example. (Click here
for a WAG article on the Arts and Crafts movement.) Among more
recent popular essayists, Witold Rybczynski is strikingly close
to Iyer in many of his central arguments; both men point out the
dehumanizing aspects of modern life while casting a prescriptive
eye on what we can profitably take from the past. (Click here
for WAG's review of Rybczynski's A Clearing in the Distance.)
Iyer's interest in the concept of 'home' shows up in some of Tracy
Kidder's work as well, particularly Kidder's Home Town,
although Kidder spends more time exploring the sense of belonging
to a place than he does lamenting its loss or absence. (Click
here for WAG's review of Home Town.)
Iyer's most original contribution to the tradition may lie
in what he makes of his own sense of dislocatedness:
I know a little about the Global Soul in part because, having
grown up simultaneously in three cultures [Indian, English and
American], none of them fully my own, I acquired very early the
sense of being loosed from time as much as from space--I had
no history, I could feel, and lived under the burden of no home;
and when I look at many of the most basic details of my life,
I realize that even though they look hardly strange to me, they
would have seemed surreal to every one of my grandparents. Growing
up, I had no relatives on the same continent as myself, and I
never learned a word of my mother's tongue or my father's (because,
coming from different parts of India, they had no common language
save that of British India). To this day, I can't pronounce what
is technically my first name, and the name by which I go is an
Italian one (though often mistaken for Spanish, Portuguese, female),
mostly because my parents, realizing I'd be living among people
foreign to Indian polysyllables, named me after a fifteenth-century
Italian neo-Platonist whose name was easy to spell and to pronounce.
Lacking Rybczynski's centralizing focus on architecture, Iyer
often uses himself and his equally multi-national (or perhaps
post-national) friends as his points of reference--perhaps not
a great tradeoff, but given his background, it's justifiable
as an essay device, if not a scientifically accurate one. Most
people, for instance, have only a few phone numbers at which
they can be reached, I think. Iyer's friend who carries a veritable
card catalog of around-the-world phone numbers is hardly representative
of the rest of us and really can't be used as more than an impressionistic
suggestion of how extreme the 'global soul' syndrome might become
for the rest of us.
On a more troubling note, one can't shake the feeling that
Iyer is a little skittish, with all his constant flitting among
his exhaustively catalogued examples; 'restless' would be a charitable
word for Iyer's narrative style. It's hard to feel comfortably
at home in Iyer's text, paragraph by paragraph, and The Global
Soul as a whole has the disjointed feel of a series of previously
written essays being forced together. Of course, some of the
rootlessness can be justified as an impressionistic portrayal
of the book's subject itself. But the same material seems to
pop up in slightly different forms throughout the book without
the text gaining much from each new appearance, and often one
feels that Iyer could have done his readers a worthy service
by deleting some of the repetitions. In this context, the opening
and closing chapters of the book are the strongest since Iyer
lingers over individual places longer there and keeps the fact-offerings
to a minimum. As he demonstrates in those two chapters, Iyer
is an engaging essayist who can capture and hold his reader's
attention easily, and one wonders how much stronger The Global
Soul might have been if he'd used those chapters as models
for the bulk of the book.
Still, The Global Soul's central arguments are engagingly
presented from a unique vantage point, and the book is well worth
reading closely as both a wide-ranging social history and a prescient
piece of contemporary cultural criticism.
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