The Global Hamburger

Chinese tonight?

I get to chat more or less daily with young people around the world. This has been my life, more or less, for the past thirty years. In those thirty years, something dramatic has happened. The world has changed utterly. And we are soon going to see its effects. 

When I started out, in Wuhan China, population six million then, I couldn’t go anywhere without drawing a crowd. I was exotic; and so, to me, was the place I had come to. Butter or cheese were unavailable, let alone such a thing as a hamburger. China might have been an extreme example, but places like Korea, or Thailand, or Saudi Arabia, or Bulgaria were also thrillingly strange. These were the adventures I had dreamed of as a boy reading Robert W. Service or Richard Halliburton.

But the internet has changed everything.

Just as the out-of-touch elites in Canada have been celebrating multiculturalism and cultural diversity, cultural diversity is disappearing everywhere else, as we all enter a vast melting pot. Thanks to the internet, aside from any other influences, young people in China or Saudi Arabia or the Philippines are now exposed to all the same cultural influences as young people in Brooklyn or Peoria. Everyone has at least a smartphone. They listen to the same music, see the same films, play the same games, know the same memes, and are regularly chatting with one another.

I ask a Chinese student what her favourite book is. Harry Potter. A Filipino toddler cannot get enough of Peppa Pig. I ask a Chinese student what his favourite meal is. Hamburger. I recently asked a student in Beijing to write an essay on the three historical persons he would most like to meet. Hannibal, Napoleon, and George Washington.

For the young, there are no longer local cultures. As the older generations die away, they will too.

It makes me a little sad; malls in Bangkok now look pretty much like malls in Sudbury. At the same time, each offers many more choices. And I have to be delighted at the visible death of the sinister folly of cultural relativism.