What's missing from the current American assumption about the global and its Englishness, is the wonder at difference, at the strange ways of another civilization, that there could be some completely different manner for people to treat each other and distinctly different values about books, marriage, religion, war, health than our single universally applied assumptions. I miss the care one needs to take while entering a new culture.
Now, there may be moments when caution is required, but behind any quiet first steps into a strange city, there lies implicit a fundamental sense that back home is superior.
Only the most stubborn fanaticism is treated as outside the global, and while it needs to be treated cautiously, it is never seen as a respectful alternative, never the sense that in this other society things are done differently for good reasons.
Whereas in the nineteenth century for an American to visit France or Russia, it meant to enter into a "new world" that one could not dismiss as backward. They were parallel societies.
The out-dated notion of civilizations, in the plural, meant that there were a goodly number, not a very many but more than a handful, of different ways to organize life.
Now the assumption is that one global norms exists which has many variations, most of which are measured in relation to some imagined standard of advanced modernity.
Even up until the end of the Cold War, there was the cautious respect for the limit of Western civilization. Now there are just pockets of intransigence.
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