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By Root 1156 0

often associated with Westernization because what replaces the old—the new dominant culture—looks Western, and specifically American. McDonald’s, blue jeans, and rock music have become universal, crowding out older, more distinctive forms of eating, dressing, and singing. But the story here is about catering to a much larger public than the small elite who used to define a country’s mores. It all looks American because America, the country that invented mass capitalism and consumerism, got there first. The impact of mass capitalism is now universal. The French have been decrying the loss of their culture for centuries, when, in fact, all that has happened is the decline of a certain old and hierarchical order. Did the majority of French people, most of whom were poor peasants, eat at authentic bistros—or anywhere outside their homes—in the nineteenth century? Chinese opera is said to be dying. But is that because of Westernization or because of the rise of China’s mass culture? How many Chinese peasants listened to opera in their villages decades ago? The new mass culture has become the most important culture because, in a democratic age, quantity trumps quality. How many listen matters more than who listens.

Consider the changes in one of the most traditional places in the world. In 2004, Christian Caryl, a Newsweek foreign correspondent, moved to Tokyo, having spent the preceding decade in Moscow and Berlin. He expected to find the exotic and deeply insular country he had read about. “What I have found, instead,” he wrote in an essay, “is another prosperous and modern Western country with some interesting quirks—an Asian nation that would not feel out of place if it were suddenly dropped inside the borders of Europe.”18 “We moved into our new house,” he recalled, “and soon found ourselves preparing for our first bizarre Japanese holiday: Halloween.” He quoted the American scholar Donald Richie, who has lived and taught in Japan for fifty years, explaining that young Japanese students today cannot understand the world of their parents, with its formalism, manners, and etiquette. “They don’t know anything about the family system because the family system doesn’t exist anymore,” says Richie. “So I have to reconstruct it for them.” The traditional, intricately polite version of Japanese used in the movies sounds alien to them, as if it came from a “vanished” world.

What sounds young and modern today is English. No language has ever spread so broadly and deeply across the world. The closest comparison is with Latin during the Middle Ages, and it is a poor one. Latin was used by a narrow elite in a time of widespread illiteracy, and most non-Western countries were not even part of the Christian world. Today, almost one-fourth of the planet’s population, 1.5 billion people, can speak some English. And the rate of English’s spread is increasing almost everywhere, from Europe to Asia to Latin America. Globalization, which brings ever more contact and commerce, creates an incentive for an easy means of communication. The larger the number of players, the greater the need for a common standard. Some 80 percent of the electronically stored information in the world is in English. When diplomats from the twenty-five governments of the European Union gather to discuss business in Brussels, they have hundreds of interpreters. But mostly they all speak English.

Does a common language make people think in similar ways? We will never know for sure. Over the last century, however, English has become the language of modernity. The word for tank in Russian is “tank.” When Indians speaking in Hindi want to say nuclear, they usually say “nuclear.” In French, weekend is “le weekend.” In Spanish, Internet is “Internet.” And increasingly, the English that people speak is Americanized, with certain distinctive features. It is colloquial, irreverent, and casual. Perhaps that irreverence will spill over into other realms.

Of course, that possibility worries the elders. Most newly modernizing societies want to combine their new wealth with elements