I stood there looking at that number 100, and thought about what it meant - that by simply walking over to the checkout and handing the clerk one of those tiny little metal discs with the figure '100' stamped on the front, I would be free to take one of these gorgeous pineapples home with me. There in my apartment I could slice up this magnificent fruit, arrange the pieces on a plate, and then sit there eating them one by one, juice running down my chin and the flavours bursting inside my mouth. And if I looked out the window, what would I see? Mile upon mile of concrete buildings, noisy streets, and parking lots. Do you understand why I use the word 'miracle'?

Perhaps you don't think that this is anything special - why is David so excited about the commonplace idea of having tropical fruit available in our supermarkets? But just think about all the expenses involved in that pineapple that must be paid for with that insignificant sum of 100 yen - it is an incredible list! We pay for the supermarket workers, the electricity for the freezers that kept the pineapple cool for us, the gasoline for the truck that brought it to the market, the driver of the truck, the men who work in the wholesale market, the people at the airport who unloaded it, the incredibly expensive airplane that brought it to Japan, the pilot, the fruit wholesalers, the truck that carried it from the farm to the airport, the packing boxes, the fertilizer, the company that produced it, and we haven't even started to discuss the people who actually planted, nurtured and harvested this delicious fruit. Have I bored you with this list? I could have made it much longer!

Of course it is not just fruit in the supermarket that is a miracle. I flick a switch on the wall, and a dark room is flooded with light. I pick up the telephone and hear the voice of my daughter thousands of miles away in Canada. I slip a disc of plastic into a small machine on my desk and hear the glorious sounds of Stravinsky's Firebird. With a quick search on the internet I can see that a tiny bookshop in another country thousands of miles away has a copy of a book I've been looking for ... These are all miracles!

All of us in this modern society are living in a way that not even the richest kings of old could dream of. I was talking about this recently with a friend who offered a different viewpoint though - what about all the people living in less-developed countries? Many of them have no access at all to any of those things I mentioned. Isn't this wonderful modern 'globalization' that brings me the cheap pineapple and other benefits just another example of the 'rich' stealing from the 'poor'?

This viewpoint is becoming widespread recently, and reports of demonstrations and violence associated with meetings of the World Trade Organization and other such global institutions have become common in our newspapers, as people take to the streets to express such views. A related concern is the so-called 'Internet Gap' - the variations between countries in the number of people with access to the internet; we read frequent stories about countries that are worried because they are 'falling behind' in the technology revolution.

I think though, that these concerns are somewhat misplaced, and I would offer a bit of historical perspective as evidence. Something we seem to have forgotten these days is that 'Things Take Time'. Back in the real 'old days', and I mean many centuries ago, it took agonizingly long times for advancements to become disseminated widely beyond their points of origin. Whether the idea was a technical one like a mechanical invention, or a social one such as a new concept of human rights, made no difference - dissemination came only slowly; centuries would sometimes pass before people in other areas picked up on the new idea. In the old pre-technological days such slow progress could of course be attributed to poor methods of communication, but this was not the only reason; human societies have an immense amount of inertia; we do not easily change our daily patterns of living. Most of us trundle on from day to day doing pretty much the same thing we did the day before, even those of us living 'on the edge' in advanced societies. Do we in the 'modern' countries enjoy more social benefits and a higher standard of living than other parts of the world? If so, then this is because such things started in our countries, and have yet to spread globally.

As far as an Internet Gap is concerned, such a concept is ridiculous; here we are at the very beginning of the 'Internet Era' (less than twenty years have passed since the first experiments in building such networks) and already we are at the stage where I can have email conversations with a friend living in Uganda. This is an astonishingly rapid rate of dissemination, especially when one considers the complexity of the technology involved. Are there more computers per capita in my town than in Uganda? Of course there are ... when a stone drops into a pond, the ripples always spread out from that point. That is the nature of things - it will take time, quite a long time, until people over there can enjoy my ease of access.

Unlike ripples in a pond though, which are only 'pushed' from the point of origin, dissemination of ideas across the globe is also affected by 'pulling'. This is where the opponents of 'globalization' are misunderstanding the situation I think. McDonald's restaurants are popping up all over the world not because of a sinister plot by the company, but because the people in those places see the presence of a famous fast food chain in their area to be an integral part of a movement towards the modern way of living they have heard about. They want the hamburgers not only for their own sake, but because they know what else comes in the same package - the fading away of traditional ways of doing things ... traditions such as child labour, the enslavement of women, endemic disease, widespread poverty ... traditions that they can well do without.

The earlier round of 'globalization' that took place a couple of centuries ago was conducted at the point of a gun - the technically advanced nations simply took what they wanted from the rest of the world. Cynics will say that this current round is not fundamentally any different - that the gun has simply been replaced by dollar bills being waved in front of the 'natives', with the power still all on one side. But this ignores what really happens: large companies send their manufacturing to third-world countries to 'take advantage' of the cheap labour rates there, but the very presence of those factories immediately ignites a process of raising the standard of living. Global trade means two-way trade. Both side must benefit, or no transaction can take place.

The demonstrators protest against the idea that the entire world will become a homogeneous place with a Starbucks coffee shop on every corner in every town in every country. But what if it did? Such a scenario could only come about if we had managed to elevate everybody on this planet to a decent standard of living, and that should be a goal worth shooting for! I rather suspect that once we are all at that level, such questions as a lack of diversity in coffee brands will seem like very small problems indeed.

I guess all that I am trying to say in this rather confused way, is that I think we are very much on the right track - with every day that passes more and more people around the world are coming into a position where they can enjoy decent living conditions; the ripples in this pond of ours are spreading out ever farther and ever faster. 'Gaps' are closing more quickly than at any time in human history.

Please enjoy these many miracles that surround us - but instead of taking to the streets in protest, let's work to ensure that our own wonderful standard of living can be enjoyed by everyone in the world.

(July 2000)