Your history books are lying to you.
I say this sitting here in Tirana, watching the clouds drift over the Dajti mountains. As a physicist, I am trained to look for patterns in the chaos. As a man in a wheelchair, I have learned that stillness is an illusion; even when we sit, the earth spins, and our cells vibrate.
The same is true for our culture.
We are often sold a scary story about the 1990s. We are told that "globalization" is a modern monster, a sudden explosion of technology and corporate greed that arrived to crush our local identities. We are led to believe that before the internet and airplanes, we lived in pure, isolated bubbles.
But this is a deception.
I want to challenge how you see yourself. The truth is that there is no new global world. We simply forgot the old one.
The Great Forgetting
Let’s take a trip to a market in the Dutch city of Groningen.
Imagine a customer turning his nose up at purple hummus, demanding the "authentic" plain version, and then rushing off to buy potatoes for a traditional Dutch dinner. It makes me smile. That "authentic" potato is actually an immigrant from the Andes, brought over during the Columbian exchange. The hummus is a traveler from the Middle East.
This is what sociologists call "glocalisation".
It is a silent trick our collective memory plays on us. We digest foreign ideas, foods, and technologies, and then we forget where they came from. We claim them as our own. We do this to feel special, to feel rooted. But this forgetting is exactly how globalization succeeds.
When you celebrate your "local" culture, you are actually celebrating a shared human culture that has been traveling for millennia.
The Physics of Connection
In physics, we know that nothing exists in a vacuum.
If you look at the deep timeline of humanity, the "global age" didn't start with the steamship or the smartphone. It is written into our very survival. Consider the alphabet you are using to read these words. It was likely invented just once, perhaps around 1700 BCE .
From that single spark, it traveled.
It shifted shape and sound, moving through different cultures to become the global system we use today . The wheel followed a similar path. These aren't just local inventions; they are global wanderers that refused to stay put.
Technology has always been the bridge.
Before the fiber optic cables that carry this blog post to your screen, there were caravels and steamships . Before those, there were chariots and horses. Each new technology expanded the pathways of mobility, turning local languages into global lingua francas like Greek, Arabic, or French .
We Are Born Wanderers
I often think about the concept of home.
Moving from Italy to Albania taught me that home is a fluid concept. But science tells us this is a species-wide trait. We are a cosmopolitan species by design.
Right now, about one in 30 people on Earth are migrants.
That number scares some people. But if we zoom out to the Paleolithic Age—between 200,000 and 15,000 years ago—our entire existence was defined by movement. We didn't survive by building walls. We survived because we were free to move, adapting to new environments and mixing with the people we met along the way .
Mobility is not a modern crisis. It is our oldest survival strategy.
The Fear of the Mix
So, why does this terrify us today?
We are currently seeing a rise in "identitarianism" and nationalism, fueled by fears of a "Great Replacement" . People are terrified that their unique heritage is being washed away.
History shows us this anxiety follows a pattern.
Look back to the "General Crisis" of the 17th century. The world was facing a "Little Ice Age," a period of global cooling that destroyed crops and spread disease . People panicked. They felt the world was ending because it was too connected.
Japan responded with sakoku, locking itself away from the world for two centuries .
It didn't work then, and it won't work now. We see people today obsessed with DNA ancestry tests, hoping to find a pure identity. But genetics doesn't work like that. Your DNA is not a static ID card; it is a map of ancient journeys and encounters.
All Wars Are Civil Wars
This brings me to a heavy realization.
As I look at the conflicts raging in Ukraine and elsewhere, my heart breaks. We fight to defend borders that we imagine are sacred and ancient. But if we accept the scientific and historical truth, we must change our perspective.
We have always been global.
The differences we fight over—our cuisines, our religions, our social norms—are just local variations of a single human theme . We are the phenotype; humanity is the genotype.
When we wage war against another culture, we are fighting a mirror image of ourselves.
The anti-globalist movements of today are chasing a ghost. They want to return to a "golden past" of purity that never existed. The future isn't about retreating into tribes. It is about remembering that the stranger across the border is just a cousin you haven't met yet.
We are one family, bound by gravity and history. All wars, in the end, are civil wars .
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