What does it mean to have "a global perspective"?

This is something we ask ourselves often at Berkshire Publishing Group, as we work with authors around the world on global publications. What do we--who are almost all native-born U.S. citizens--know about thinking globally? This wiki is a place where we can work together to analysis the concept.

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*A global perspective* doesn’t just mean that you think about international markets or worry about the rise of China or read the Herald Tribune, or even that you try to buy fair trade products. It doesn’t even come, necessarily, from having traveled a lot. In fact, people who travel a lot often seem to have little idea about what ordinary people around the world are like, perhaps because frequent travelers are such a privileged class. A global perspective doesn’t come from looking out over the world, surveying it from afar, but of being able to put yourself, as the Indians said, in someone else’s moccasins.

A global perspective can be scary. It is much more comfortable to think that everyone should live and think just the way you do. But a global perspective is comforting, too. It comes from a realization that we humans are all very much the same, deep down; we all have cultural rules to follow, we all require and enjoy human contact, we all have families. A global perspective requires, above all, humility. It results in a sense of connection, a confidence in shared human understanding and possibility that reaches across borders and boundaries of all kinds.

A global perspective requires imagination, appreciation, and curiosity. It comes from a sense of being connected, as a human being, to people in the past, in other places. It is a kind of primal sympathy, and humanity, that stretches across boundaries and borders.

People in different times and places do, however, see the world in very different ways. Their priorities are different, and the pressures they face vary enormously. There is always potential for conflict, especially over scarce resources and over cultural/national control and autonomy—that is, over money and power. Working towards a global perspective is a way to expand and sharpen our thinking, enrich our experience, and face potential problems effectively.

It is not just ordinary people watching Fox News who fail to understand the rest of the world. The more powerful a nation is, the more its culture dominates other places, the less likely are its people—including its politicians and academic experts—to understand that there are other viewpoints. Today, Americans are the most limited in terms of global perspective, but the British probably come close, and the French have some failings in this way, too. China might be expected to have an insular world view, given its size and growing clout. But as a developing nation, it has to be alert to other views--though necessarily much affected by them.

Americans—like the people of other powerful countries in the past—have had little interest in the rest of the world because they are not much affected by it—or at least want to believe that they won’t be affected by what goes on elsewhere. Besides that, American immigrants seem often to have come from a class, or circumstances, in which they were unable to, or chose not to, maintain contacts with their country of origin. They had no intention of returning. (It would be interesting to contrast this with Chinese immigrants to the USA today.) Oppressed or second class peoples, after all, need to know about the rulers more than the rulers need to know about them.

There have been a variety of people over the years who have made serious efforts to help Americans understand the rest of the world and the world (or parts of it) to understand American. Alistair Cooke is a perfect example: an English journalist who spent most of his working life in the USA, he is best known in Britain for his weekly “Letter from America.”