There can be few reflective people who have not been struck by the thought: if I had been born and bred in an entirely different place or time, my beliefs, attitudes, pursuits and values would probably have been very different from what they are here and now. In a way, the observation seems too obvious to be worth making. If I had lived in much earlier times, my knowledge of the world would have been limited to the knowledge then available, and that would no doubt have shaped my perspective on all kinds of things. Beliefs and attitudes that most of us now consider irrational might have been perfectly rational in past times, given knowledge then available. But many social and cultural attitudes have been changed by increased acquaintance with the mores of societies once considered completely alien to our own. The rise of anthropology in the nineteenth century, driven by exploration of other cultures, increased our recognition that “our” way of doing things was not the only way, and that alien societies functioned well in spite of cultural mores that seemed very different to our own. Around the mid-1960s, mass air travel began, but mostly not to exotic destinations. Towards the end of the twentieth century, there was the sharp growth of globalization and the inception of the information revolution. Indeed, the information revolution is itself an important cultural phenomenon, with things that were considered luxuries less than thirty years ago, such as the possession of a personal computer, now regarded as normal and even necessary.