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THE MOBILE AGE, PART 2: Globalism
My father felt imprisoned by his provincial hometown, post-war Toronto. He reacted with a bid to be independent and free, which manifested itself in a strongly nomadic tendency. My mother, half-Jewish in wartime Germany, found herself homeless at the age of 12 and a refugee after the war. Her survival instinct, opposite to my father’s, was a powerful impulse to settle. The cross-currents set up here certainly shaped the home dynamics of my childhood. My favourite illustration of this is the highly eclectic Taylor household cuisine. My mother cooked pure “settler,” by which I mean we ate the stuff of her confiscated German childhood: spaetzle, rouladen, pickled herring and pumpernickel. My father, meanwhile, contributed impulse purchases, postcards from more nomadic times. I remember pomegranates, yams, chili peppers, eggplant, mangoes. This was before the foodie era, remember. So it was notable that my mother took the 10 pounds of fresh prawns he produced one weekend and turned them into an Ecuadorean ceviche, a dish from the place they had met, the house scoured out for days with an effluvial mist of onion, lime and Tabasco. That was the hybrid household in which I was raised, settler and nomad impulses entirely blurred. And I guess you could say, based on this background, that my own mixed reactions to travel are easily enough explained. As I reflect on it in the context of these essays on human mobility, however, it seems to me that my modern-era family was in fact part of something going on much more widely. As we have shifted from the “modern” to the “globalized” era, the entire Western experience of movement and stability – and the related sense of what is “home” and “away” – has radically changed. My parents were only doing what millions of others were doing across the West as a matter of human reflex, struggling to release themselves from involuntary settings. But pushing toward self-determination, these people also naturally tended toward new ways of living that compensated for the specific lack of freedom they had experienced. Thus the refugee and her dreamed-of roots. The prisoner and his vision of movement, space, wind in the hair. Over the course of the late 20th century in the West, meanwhile – and this is true in North America, Western Europe and Australia – we have been the destination of choice for wave after wave of nomads and refugees seeking to act out their self-determination in settings most amenable to that mindset. Some of these migrants we have produced internally – the Second World War is a pretty good example of that phenomenon. Many have also entered from other parts of the world. But my point here is that in aggregate these refugees and nomads pouring into the democracies of the West have carried with them the adaptive techniques to which they owed their survival. The refugee’s new celebration of roots was the reason for her thriving, just as the prisoner found identity and direction in his embrace of movement. Those strategies, to speak of it in evolutionary terms, were selected. They were the behavioural adaptations that had been proven successful. And in the West, they have become legacy qualities, mingled in the cultural genetics. So globalization has given birth to a new mobility archetype, a hybrid nomad/settler which, in keeping with the four archetypes of mobility we’ve established in this series, you could model as follows: |
