Today we are in the throes of a worldwide reformation of cultures, a tectonic shift of habits and dreams called, in the curious vocabulary of social scientists, “globalization.” It’s an inexact term for a wild assortment of changes in politics, business, health, entertainment. “Modern industry has established the world market…All old-established national industries are dislodged by new industries, whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes.” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote this 150 years ago in The Communist Manifesto. Their statement now describes an ordinary fact of life.

How people feel about this depends a great deal on where they live and how much money they have. Yet globalization, as one report stated, “is a reality, not a choice.” Humans have been weaving commercial and cultural connections since before the first camel caravan ventured afield. In the 19th century the postal service, newspapers, transcontinental railroads, and great steam-powered ships wrought fundamental changes. Telegraph, telephone, radio, and television tied tighter and more intricate knots between individuals and the wider world.

Now computers, the Internet, cellular phones, cable TV, and cheaper jet transportation have accelerated and complicated these connections.

Still, the basic dynamic remains the same: Goods move. People move. Ideas move. And cultures change. The difference now is the speed and scope of these changes. It took television 13 years to acquire 50 million users; the Internet took only 5.

Not everyone is happy about this. Some Western social scientists and anthropologists, and not a few foreign politicians, believe that a sort of cultural cloning will result from what they regard as the “cultural assault” of McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Disney, Nike, MTV, and the English language itself—more than a fifth of all the people in the world now speak English to some degree. Whatever their backgrounds or agendas, these critics are convinced that Western—often equated with American—influences will flatten every cultural crease, producing, as one observer terms it, one big “McWorld.”

Popular factions sprout to exploit nationalist anxieties. In China, where xenophobia and economic ambition have often struggled for the upper hand, a recent book called China Can Say No became the best-seller by attacking what it considers the Chinese willingness to believe blindly in foreign things, advising Chinese travelers to not fly on a Boeing 777 and suggesting that Hollywood be burned.

There are many Westerners among the denouncers of Western cultural influences, but James Watson, a Harvard anthropologist, isn’t one of them.

“The lives of Chinese villagers I know are infinitely better now than they were 30 years ago” he says. “China has become more open partly because of the demands of ordinary people. They want to become part of the world—I would say globalism is the major force for democracy in China. People want refrigerators, stereos, CD players. I feel it’s a moral obligation not to say: ‘Those people out there should continue to live in a museum while we will have showers that work.’”

Westernization, I discovered over months of study and travel, is a phenomenon shot through with inconsistencies and populated by very strange bedfellows. Critics of Western culture blast Coke and Hollywood but not organ transplants and computers. Boosters of Western culture can point to increased efforts to preserve and protect the environment. Yet they make no mention of some less salubrious aspects of Western culture, such as cigarettes and automobiles, which, even as they are being eagerly adopted in the developing world, are having disastrous effects. Apparently westernization is not a straight road to hell, or to paradise either.

But I also discovered that cultures are as resourceful, resilient, and unpredictable as the people who compose them. In Los Angeles, the ostensible fountainhead of world cultural degradation, I saw more diversity than I could ever have supposed—at Hollywood High School the student body represents 32 different languages.

In Shanghai I found that the television show Sesame Street has been redesigned by Chinese educators to teach Chinese values and traditions. “We borrowed an American box,” one told me, “and put Chinese content into it.” In India, where there are more than 400 languages and several very strict religions, McDonald’s serves mutton instead of beef and offers a vegetarian menu acceptable to even the most orthodox Hindu.

The critical mass of teenagers—800 million in the world—with time and money to spend is one of the powerful engines of merging global cultures. Kids travel, they hang out, and above all they buy stuff. I’m sorry to say I failed to discover who was the first teenager to put his baseball cap on backward. Or the first one to copy him. But I do know that rap music, which sprang from the inner-city ghettos, began making big money only when rebellious white teenagers started buying it. But how can anyone predict what kids are going to want? Companies urgently need to know, so consultants have sprung up to forecast trends. They’re called “cool hunters,” and Amanda Freeman took me in hand one morning to explain how it works.

Amanda, who is 22, works for a New York-based company called Youth Intelligence and has come to Los Angeles to conduct surveys, whose results go to many important clients. She has shoulder-length brown hair and is wearing a knee-length brocade skirt. Amanda looks very cool to me, but she says no. “The funny thing about my work is that you don’t have to be cool to do it,” she says. “You just have to have the eye.”

We go to a smallish’ 50s-style diner in a slightly seedy pocket east of Hollywood that has just become trendy. Then we wander through a few of the thrift shops. “If it’s not going to be affordable,” Amanda remarks, “it’s never going to catch on.”

What trends does she see forming now? “the home is becoming more of a social place again. And travel’s huge right now—you go to a place and bring stuff back.”

“It’s really hard to be original these days, so the easiest way to come up with new stuff is to mix things that already exist. Fusion is going to be the huge term that everybody’s going to use,” she concludes. “There’s going to be more blending, like Spanish music and punk—things that are so unrelated.”

Los Angeles is Fusion Central, where cultures mix and morph. Take Tom Sloper and mahjong. Tom is a computer geek who is also a mahjong fanatic. This being America, he has found a way to marry these two passions and sell the result. He has designed a software program, Shanghai: Dynasty, that enables you to play mahjong on the Internet. This ancient Chinese game involves both strategy and luck, and it is still played all over Asia in small rooms that are full of smoke and the ceaseless click of the chunky plastic tiles and the fierce concentration of the players. It is also played by rich society women at country clubs in Beverly Hills and in apartments on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

But Tom, 50, was playing it at his desk in Los Angeles one evening in the silence of a nearly empty office building. Actually, he only appeared to be alone. His glowing computer screen showed a game already in progress with several habitual partners: “Blue Whale,” a man from Germany; Russ from Ohio; and Freddy, a Chinese-American who lives in Minnesota. Tom played effortlessly as we talked.

“I’ve learned about 11 different styles of mahjong,” he told me with that detached friendliness of those whose true connection is with machines. “There are a couple of different ways of playing it in America. We usually play Chinese mahjong.”

I watched the little tiles, like cards, bounce around the screen. As Tom played, he and his partners conversed by typing short comments to each other.

Does he ever play with real people? “Oh yeah,” Tom replied. “Once a week at the office in the evening, and Thursday at lunch.” A new name appeared on the screen. “There’s Fred’s mother. Can’t be, they’re in Vegas. Oh, it must be his sister. TJ’s online too, she’s the one from Wales—a real night owl. She’s getting married soon, and she lived with her fiancé, and sometimes he gets up and says ‘Get off that damn computer!’”

Tom played on into the night. At least it was night where I was. He, an American playing a Chinese game with people in Germany, Wales, Ohio, and Minnesota, was up in the cybersphere far above the level of time zones. It is a realm populated by individuals he’s never met who may be more real to him than the people who live next door.

If it seems that life in the West has become a fast-forward blur, consider China. In just 20 years, since market forces were unleashed by economic reforms begun in 1978, life for many urban Chinese has changed drastically. A recent survey of 12 major cities showed that 97 percent of the respondents had televisions, and 88 percent had refrigerators and washing machines. Another study revealed that farmers are eating 48 percent more meat each year and 400 percent more fruit. Cosmopolitan, plunging necklines and all, is read by 260,000 Chinese women every month.

I went to Shanghai to see how the cultural trends show up in the largest city in the world’s most populous nation. It is also a city that has long been open to the West. General Motors, for example, set up its first Buick sales outlet in Shanghai in 1929; today GM has invested 1.5 billion dollars in a new plant there, the biggest Sino-American venture in China.

Once a city of elegant villas and imposing office buildings, Shanghai is currently ripping itself to ribbons. In a decade scores of gleaming new skyscrapers have shot up to crowd and jostle the skyline, cramp the narrow winding streets, and choke the parks and open spaces with their sheer soaring presence. Traffic crawls, even on the new multilane overpasses.

But on the streets the women are dressed in bright colors, and many carry several shopping bags, especially on the Nanjing Road, which is lined with boutiques and malls. In its first two weeks of business the Gucci store took in a surprising $100,000.

“Maybe young women today don’t know what it was like,” says Wu Ying, editor-in-chief of the Chinese edition of the French fashion magazine Elle. “But ten years ago I wouldn’t have imagined myself wearing this blouse.” It was red, with white polka dots. “When people bought clothes, they thought ‘How long will it last?’ A housewife knew that most of the monthly salary would be spent on food, and now it’s just a small part, so she can think about what to wear or where to travel. And now with refrigerators, we don’t have to buy food every day.”

As for the cultural dislocation this might bring: “People in Shanghai don’t see it as a problem,” said a young German businessman. “The Chinese are very good at dealing with ambiguity. It’s accepted—It’s very different, but it’s OK, so, so what?”

Potential: This is largely a Western concept. Set aside the Gucci store and skyscrapers, and it’s clear that the truly great leap forward here is at the level of ideas. To really grasp this, I had only to witness the local performance of Shakespeare’s Macbeth by the Hiu Kok Drama Association from Macau.

There we were at the Shanghai Theatre Academy, some 30 professors and students of literature and drama from all over china and I, on folding chairs around a space not alike half of a basketball court.”

“I’m not going to be much help,” murmured Zhang Fang, my interpreter. “I don’t understand the Cantonese language, and most of these people don’t either.”

I thought I knew what to watch for, but the only characters I recognized were the three witches. Otherwise the small group spent most of an hour running in circles, leaping, and threatening to beat each other with long sticks. The lighting was heavy on shadows, with frequent flashes. Language wasn’t a problem, as the actors mainly snarled and shrieked. Then they turned their backs to the audience and a few shouted something in Cantonese. The lights went out, and for a moment the only sound in the darkness was the whirring of an expensive camera on auto-rewind.

This is China? It could have been a college campus anywhere in the West. Until recently such a performance was unthinkable. It strained imagination that this could be the same country where a generation ago the three most desired luxury items were wristwatches, bicycles, and sewing machines.

Early on I realized that I was going to need some type of compass to guide me through the wilds of global culture. So when I was in Los Angeles, I sought out Alvin Toffler, whose book Future Shock was published in 1970. In the nearly three decades since, he has developed and refined a number of interesting ideas, explained in The Third Wave, written with his wife, Heidi.

What do we know about the future now, I asked, that we didn’t know before? “We now know that order grows out of chaos,” he answered immediately. “You cannot have significant change, especially on the scale of Russia or China, without conflict. Not conflicts between East and West, or North and South, but ‘wave’ conflicts between industrially dominant countries and predominantly agrarian countries, or conflicts within countries making a transition from one to the other.”

Waves, he explained, are major changes in civilization. The first wave came with the development of agriculture, the second with industry. Today we are in the midst of the third, which is based on information. In 1956 something new began to happen, which amounts to the emergence of a new civilization. Toffler said. “It was in that year that U.S. service and knowledge workers outnumbered blue-collar factory workers. In 1957 Sputnik went up. Then jet aviation became commercial, television became universal, and computers began to be widely used. And with all these changes came changes in culture.”

“What’s happening now is the trisection of world power,” he continued. “Agrarian nations on the bottom, smokestack countries in between, and knowledge-based economies on top.” There are a number of countries—Brazil, for example—where all three civilizations coexist and collide.

“Culturally we’ll see big changes,” Toffler said. “You’re going to turn on your TV and get Nigerian TV and Fijian TV in your own language.” Also, some experts predict that the TV of the future, with 500 cable channels, may be used by smaller groups to foster their separate, distinctive cultures and languages.

“People ask, ‘Can we become third wave and still remain GhiMes?’ Yes.” Toffler says. “You can have a unique culture made of your core culture. But you’ll be the Chinese of the future, not of the past.”

Linking: This is what the spread of global culture ultimately means. Goods will continue to move—from 1987 to 1995 local economies in California exported 200 percent more products, businesses in Idaho 375 percent more. People move: It is cheaper for businesses to import talented employees than to train people at home. Ideas move: In Japan a generation of children raised with interactive computer games has sensed, at least at the cyber level, new possibilities. “The implicit message in all this,” wrote Kenichi Ohmac, “is that it is possible to actively take control of one’s situation or circumstances and, thereby, to change one’s fate. For the Japanese, this is an entirely new way of thinking.”

Change: It’s reality, not a choice. But what will be its true driving force? Cultures don’t become more uniform; instead, both old and new tend to transform each other.

The late philosopher Isaiah Berlin believed that, rather than aspire to some utopian ideal, a society should strive for something else: “not that we agree with each other’” his biographer explained, “but that we can understand each other.”

In Shanghai one October evening I joined a group gathered in a small, sterile hotel meeting room. It was the eve of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, and there were diplomats, teachers, and businessmen from many Western countries. Elegant women with lively children, single men, young fathers. Shalom Greenberg, a young Jew from Israel married to an American, was presiding over his first High Holy Days as rabbi of the infant congregation.

“It’s part of the Jewish history that Jews went all over the world,” Rabbi Greenberg reflected. “They received a lot from local cultures, but they also kept their own identity.”

The solemn liturgy proceeded, unchanged over thousands of years and hundreds of alien cultures: “Create in me a clean heart, 0 God, and renew a right spirit within me,” he intoned. I’m neither Jewish nor Chinese, but sitting there I didn’t feel foreign—I felt at home. The penitence may have been Jewish, but the aspiration was universal.

Global culture doesn’t mean just more TV sets and Nike shoes. Linking is humanity’s natural impulse, its common destiny. But the ties that bind people around the world are not merely technological or commercial. They are the powerful cords of the heart.