THOSE WHO GLORIFY THE IDEA OF THE WORLD turning into a global village may not know much about the behavior of people in villages. Sometimes, as Cervantes understood, "there is more harm in a village than is dreamt of."
In any case, the global village -- proliferating now into a planetary city, with a few luxurious districts, and many terrible slums, and some neighborhoods that are savage and very dangerous -- has no police force. The people of Bosnia know this. What the global community does have is many churches. Sometimes it is the faithful of the churches, and the mosques, who need policing most of all.
If you scratch any aggressive tribalism, or nationalism, you usually find beneath its surface a religious core, some older binding energy of belief or superstition, previous to civic consciousness, previous almost to thought. Here is the paradox of God-love as a life-force, the deepest well of compassion, that is capable of transforming itself into a death-force, with the peculiar annihilating energies of belief. Faith, the sweetest refuge and consolation, may harden, by perverse miracle, into a sword -- or anyway into a club or a torch or an assault rifle. Religious hatreds tend to be merciless and absolute. The mystery is now on view among the Hindus and Muslims of India, among the Islamic fundamentalists of Egypt or Algeria, and among Orthodox Serbs and Bosnian Muslims and Catholic Croats.
Religion is sometimes a fortress for the beleaguered tribe in the new world disorder. Every cult is a kind of nation. The citadels bristle with intolerant clarities of doctrine -- and with high-caliber weapons. Outside Waco, Texas, a cult called the Branch Davidians, apocalyptic and armed to the teeth, played out a siege drama that owed something to Jim Jones' last hours, when he and more than 900 members of his People's Temple cult died in Guyana, and to some older religious Americana, like Elmer Gantry, darkened with touches of the Road Warrior. The tragedy in Texas was self-contained, and seemed a familiar story of what happens when a group sealed away in paranoia succumbs to the influence of a sort of preacherly hypnotist.
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