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classify us by cultures, much the way a biologist classifies the flora and fauna around us by species.
I've lived abroad much of my life, and I've always been fascinated by different cultures. People everywhere distinguish between members of their own iri-group and outsiders. In our country, individuals may belong to several in-groups—church, social club, business, for example, and the sense of belonging exclusively to any one of them is diluted. But in places like the Middle East, the lines of identification are much sharper; there is usually one in-group that stands out as the main source of the individual's sense of who he is and where he belongs.
I’ve tried to keep this argument simple, but in practice this concept of cultural in-groups is devilish hard to define, for you never find two cultures taking exactly the same form. Even in the Middle East, where the outlines are often crisp and the units easily identified, the constituent elements vary.
The most important challenge of the times is not the environment per se, or the population problem, or the threat of nuclear war. It is the need for a global consensus that the old culture-specific loyalties have to be subordinated to a new "in-group" loyalty that embraces everyone— in short, the "global village". To the extent that is achieved, the other problems become soluble. Absent such a consensus, they will only get worse.
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