Globalization and Transformation

Bruce Mazlish

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781412856058
• eBook ISBN: 9781351517294
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Globalization and Transformation, Bruce Mazlish examines developments in contemporary warfare, economy, technology, and religion as fundamental factors in human experience that have accelerated global change in recent years. Continuing the analysis he began in Reflections on the Modern and the Global, Mazlish delves into human history, examining who we were so as to help us understand who we are today.Early in the volume, Mazlish highlights the British historian Geoffrey Barraclough, who foresaw the trajectory of world events that gave rise to the "New Global History." He also examines humanity's progress, reminding us of contemporary globalization's precursors: the theories of Charles Darwin; the concept of the global and the local coupled with inquiry into the concept of parts and wholes; merchant empires, such as the English and Dutch East India companies that crisscrossed the ocean in pursuit of profits and power; anti-globalization; and the linkage of globalization to the very concept of humanity.Though globalization is a complex concept, and versatile in its applications, Mazlish focuses on its transformational characteristics, noting that globalization's impact is not uniform across society's culture, politics, or economics. Some parts of the world have yet to accept the challenge to their past traditions. These stimulating essays offer new insights into a major phenomenon of our time.

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1

Where Are We Going? The Project of Humanity

(1)

In 1902, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin issued his short clarion call, “What is to be Done?” It was a call to revolution against tsarist Russia by a highly-disciplined, small elite: the Bolsheviks. The result was eventually Soviet Russia, communist rule in that country for about seventy years (much of it under Stalin), and then its downfall, bringing Marxist-Leninism into disrepute. Today such utopian visions are no longer in fashion. Instead, more soberly and staying closer to the ground, we must ask what are the possibilities and promises of our situation as it really is.¹

Ours is a time of what appears to be darkening skies in which it is important to assess our condition by looking both forward and back. In such an inquiry it is well to look at some of the major shaping forces throughout the past: warfare, economy, technology, and religion. They are still with us, not as essences but as dynamic, changing processes. I will not be gazing at a crystal ball, but examining the trends to be found in each and in combination. Then, I will speculate on this basis as to where we, the human species, are headed.

Humanity is an historical process. By this I mean that, having achieved biological unity as Cro-Magnon man about forty thousand years ago, the human species then embarked on the path of cultural evolution. Gifted with language and the use of tools, starting with small groups of hunter-gatherers, and tending to live in larger and larger social bonds—the familiar line of family to clan to tribal ties and then to the nation-state in the last three hundred or so years—the human species now stands on the threshold of the largest of such bonds, that of humanity.

This stadial process was first given significant attention starting in the seventeenth century and became ubiquitous in the eighteenth century. It was Scottish philosophers, such as Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith, who developed and popularized this view. They placed it in the context of “progress.” They made dynamic the various social bonds, such as family, clan, and tribe, and, emerging in their time, the nation. I am now suggesting that we must add the bond of humanity.

Before going on, I must admit that what follows is largely Eurocentric. Although I have tried to inquire into the concept of humanity in other cultures and societies, I have achieved little clarity. Specialists in, say, Chinese or Indian studies will have to shoulder that burden. On fait ce qu’on peut.²

In the West, there were many steps in the growing awareness of self and society. One spectacular explosion occurred in Europe at the time of the Renaissance. It dramatically reworked the relation between the religious and the secular. As Gabrielle Spiegel so succinctly put it,

Challenging the divine authority of pope and emperor, the humanists crafted a vision of history that engendered nothing less than a new kind of humanity, entailing a belief in the free, autonomous subject in charge of his or her self with the power to affect the fate of others.³

Niccolò Machiavelli was a striking figure in this reworking. A resident of Florence under the Medici, a minor figure of state, and the author of unremarkable plays, he fashioned his stick of dynamite, The Prince, as part of a larger book, Discourses. In The Prince, he stated that he was opening up a “new route.” It was a road to realism and an attempt at political science. It was in contrast to the Mirror of Princes literature prevalent at the time. Machiavelli proclaimed that he would describe how political affairs really were, rather than should be. He would be scientific, and his science dictated that the prince (we can substitute the state) must sometimes act in evil ways to preserve his power and the well-being of the people.

If we step back from The Prince for a moment, we can see that Machiavelli was extolling the very split between religion and the state, between moral injunctions and realpolitik, that was described by Spiegel in the quote above. Implicit in his work was the notion of the self as autonomous and as creating its work of art, the state, free of all religious trammels. The Florentine was offering us a “new kind of humanity.”

Condemned by ecclesiastics, moralists, and princes alike, Machiavelli’s ideas were as much a blow against the walls of the Catholic Church as was Martin Luther’s nailing in 1517 his Ninety-Five Theses to a church door. Together the two exploded the unity of the Church. Into that breach, in the strange ways of history, stepped those who favored religious tolerance as one of the rights of man, especially after the ghastly religious wars. There were also those who wished for a secular society. Here were further steps toward the autonomous human being.

The next, and overpowering, step was taken in the seventeenth century in what came to be called the “scientific revolution.”⁴ Now the bar facing any belief was its ability to clear the fences—not of religious faith, but those of reason. By the eighteenth century, we are in the realm of Enlightened reason. The philosophes, not the clerics, appear to dominate public opinion. It is in a newly opening public space, rather than in the cloisters, that the reigning ideas are to be found. It is the salon, not the altar, where the brightest men gather, with the salons often being hosted by women. We have before us a new example of the admired human being, a new being.

At about the same time that Machiavelli was opening a new route in the political world, the voyages of discovery epitomized by Columbus and his three small ships opened up a view of a “new” continent. For the first time, the world became global in the sense of man recognizing it as such. About a half century later, the astronomer Nicolas Copernicus (what a nice touch that he and Machiavelli have the same first name), building on the notion of the Earth as a planet, saw it as no longer the center of the universe but itself circling around the sun. The effect on man’s self-image can hardly be overestimated.

Copernicus’s gaze at the Earth was “from outside, as a globe in the universe.”⁵ The impact on man’s perceptions was staggering. The notion of the globe, as represented in models, became ubiquitous in the paintings of the time. Once present in thought, it could be mapped both as to latitude and later as to longitude and thus be taken possession of both mentally and physically.

Meanwhile, we can see the development of maps from the time of the ancients up until the “New World” discovery. These maps portrayed regions of the earth on a flat surface. They also, so to speak, took possession of these spaces, first in the mind and then in a physical sense with sailing expeditions. Conquest in the mind led to conquest in the real world. It was Abraham Ortelius who gathered together the best maps of the time, thus providing Europe with what his friend Gerard Mercator called in 1569 an atlas.

Building on the rediscovery of Ptolemy’s Geographia, the humanists could imagine standing outside the planet and plotting “its surface through perspective and mathematics.” As a result Martin Behaim, a geographer living in Lisbon in the same year that Columbus sailed west, produced the first terrestrial globe.⁶

Almost immediately, as remarked earlier, these globes became enormously popular. Many paintings of the time show affluent individuals with a globe on their desks or beside them. Now individuals at home could vicariously share with the courageous sailors their explorations, especially of the New World. They could employ their own compass to trace lines on the globe, just as the adventurers upon the seas could use a different sort of compass to guide them through hitherto unknown seas.

The newly discovered lands had aboriginals on them. Were these people fully human beings? If that was the case, they could be converted to Christianity and thus take on the cloak of civilized beings. Or were they cannibals, thus devilish and to be exterminated or enslaved? In any case, the existence of these “Indians” challenged the thinkers of the time to think harder about what it meant to be human. This experience was to be part of a new kind of humanity. An incipient science of anthropology had come into being.

I have already touched briefly on the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. More needs to be remarked upon. Copernicus’s heliocentric theory had been advanced as merely an aesthetically and mathematically enticing theory, and not as reality. When Kepler and Galileo claimed it was real, a clash with religion ensued. As is well known, Galileo was brought before the Inquisition and told to recant. To save his life he did. The story is told that as he was leaving the scene of his trial, he said under his breath, “It still moves.” This is simply to echo what he had said earlier; religion might tell us how to go to heaven, but science tells us how the heavens move.

There used to be much talk about the battle between religion and science. In fact, most early scientists were still religious, claiming that they were simply on the track of God’s creation. In principle, there was a sharp difference in the way science viewed the world and the way religion did: one employed reason, while the other, when push came to shove, embraced faith. In reality, at the time scientists often thought in terms of two truths. Many had no trouble with this form of schizophrenia.

Isaac Newton, with his theories of gravity and optics, imposed a universalism on man’s universe, which could be tied to the project of Humanity. The world was the same everywhere and was recognized as such by all people guided by reason. The belief that what defined humanity was a common reason became deepened and central, as expressed dominantly in the so-called Age of Reason. Newton himself was a religious man, though he disbelieved in the Trinity, and he spent much of his career looking for numerical markers in the Bible.

In France especially, a rational, mechanical worldview seemed to dominate in the eighteenth century. In fact, with La Mettrie’s L’homme machine building on Descartes’s work, man seemed to be hardly, if at all, more than a mechanical being. It would be wrong, however, to think that the mechanists had it all their own way. Diderot thought in organic terms, and Buffon wrote widely on natural history. By the end of the eighteenth century, the term biology was coined. And before that, in a further correction of the mechanical tendency, Rousseau inserted the organic in the shape of the passions into man’s nature.

Clearly, up to now I have been operating mainly in the terms of intellectual history. In the more material world, humans were being shaped by what came to be called The Industrial Revolution. By 1833 Thomas Carlyle could read the “signs of the time” and pronounce his era a mechanical one, hailing the advent of what he called industrial society. Man’s project was being pointed in a new intellectual and material direction. His sense of self was altered.

This self-identity, however, with its emphasis on “man the machine,” was soon complemented or displaced by man the evolutionary creature, a result of natural and, added later, sexual selection. Here we burst past the Eurocentric framework. Though the knowledge of the world’s species was spurred by the imperialism of the West, it allowed Darwin to build his theory as a global one. It was not just Western man who had taken on a new kind of humanity, but man everywhere.

At the same time that Darwin was exploring man’s long natural past, a new form of inquiry, archaeology, was digging up his more recent past. The fossil record, along with geology, exploded the view that humanity’s past was a short one, with his creation de novo about six thousand years ago.

(2)

In 1859 Darwin published The Origin of Species, presenting his evidence and arguments for his theory of evolution by means of natural selection. In 1872 he extended his theory to the human species. He called that book The Descent of Man, which unfortunately led to easy caricature of man as descended from a monkey. Hee haw. It would have been better and truer to his theory if he had called his book The Ascent of Man. (This was the title chosen by Jacob Bronowski for his wonderful series on the BBC.)

Darwin’s work, it should be needless to say, did not emerge full-blown as did Athena from Zeus’s forehead, but came from standing on the shoulders of lesser giants. Foremost among these were geologists and Darwin at first saw himself as one. There is an irony here in the fact that the Catholic Church in Rome bases its claims to supremacy on the passage in Matthew 16:18 (King James Version): “I tell you that you are Peter and it is on this rock that I will build my church.” Peter in Greek means rock and it is a nice conceit to realize that the Catholic Church is based on a pun and that the geologists with their pick axes were undermining the foundations of faith. (It is also worth noting that Islam, too, has its rock: the Kaaba at Medina.)

As remarked earlier, in some quarters historians of science have postulated a battle between religion and science. This may be so in terms of philosophy and methodology; it is certainly not true historically. Most scientists, at least up until the end of the seventeenth century, saw their work as being on the track of God. Only in the late eighteenth century itself did cracks appear in this edifice of faith. The geologists had begun the work of weakening religion’s foundations.

We can see this shift literally in the case of William Buckland. The first Reader in Geology at Oxford University, the position thus giving institutional recognition to the new science, Buckland was born into a clerical family. This was hardly unusual, for churchmen with a living were frequently found in the annals of natural history and other branches of incipient sciences. After earlier schooling, he attended Oxford University, where he spent much of the rest of his life. The universities at this time can be said to have been an arena for the battle of what we now call the Two Cultures. Devotees of the classics and ancient languages were loath to see their primacy challenged by the new sciences.

Buckland also undertook the usual upper-class European tour. In his case, it was not to view great art but to find geological specimens and ship them back to England. Earlier, indeed, with the same idea in mind he had travelled by horseback to parts of the British Isles to discover fossils as well as new specimens. His professional career really took off with his appointment as Reader in Geology at Oxford in 1819. The inaugural address he delivered then was published the next year under the seminal title of Vindiciae Geologiae; or the Connexion of Geology with Religion Explained. His aim was to reconcile the new science of geology with Biblical accounts of Creation and Noah’s Flood. This was followed by the more famous Bridgewater treatise in 1836, intended to prove “the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God as manifested in the Creation.”

A scientific celebrity and an eccentric—not an unusual combination among gifted indiv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Where Are We Going? The Project of Humanity
• 2 Comparing Global History to World History
• 3 Humanity and Globalization
• 4 Identity in a Global Era
• 5 The Advancement of Humanity
• 6 The Global and the Local: Parts and Wholes
• 7 The New Global Merchants of Light
• 8 Revisiting Barraclough’s Contemporary History
• 9 On the Brink of the Global
• 10 Whither Globalization?
• Subject Index
• Name Index
• Works Cited Index