How Much Globalization Can We Bear?

Rüdiger Safranski, Patrick Camiller

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780745633893, 9780745633886
• eBook ISBN: 9780745683508
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

According to current deabtes, 'individualization' has frequently been proposed as the conceptual counterpart to 'globalization'. It has often seemed that nothing would be left once these processes have fully unfolded, other than individual human atoms dispersed on a globe without any political, economic or cultural structures.

Regardless of whether this description is based on any good and valid observation, nobody drew the conclusion that suddenly emerges as evident after reading Rüdiger Safranski's lucid and timely exploration of the issue: globalization, if it occurs, means a radical change in the human condition. It brings human being in direct confrontation with the world in its totality. Almost unnoticed in broader debate, the scenario of globalization entails a return - in new a radical guise - of the time-honoured question of the ways of being-in-the-world of human beings.

In this compelling new book, the philosopher Rüdiger Safranski grapples with the pressing problems of the global age: 'Big Brother' states, terrorism, international security and the seeming impossibility of 'world' peace. He suggests that the era ofglobalization should not be thought of as that epoch in world history in which all human beings will see themselves in the same, indistinct situation. There will always be, Sanfranski argues, some need for understanding one's own situation by drawing boundaries and conceptualizing 'otherness' and individuality.

1

First Nature, Second Nature

Man is a being who can relate to himself. This capacity for self-relation is precisely what is known in the philosophical tradition as ‘reason’, and there distinguished from ‘understanding’. We encounter ‘understanding’ in the animal kingdom. A chimpanzee who learns from experience to fish with a stick for a banana gives proof of such intelligent behaviour. Understanding is at work where tools are produced. Animal understanding knows all about means, but ends are set for it in advance by the instincts. Reason, on the other hand, is capable of setting goals for itself. This assumes a self-relatedness that makes it possible to take a step back from ourselves and thus to survey the means–end relationship. Reason comes into play when knowledge not only accompanies but generates the act of willing – in short, when we are able to set long-term goals for which the will must first be mobilized. This requires us to step outside or beyond ourselves. The career of man as a rational being begins with this stepping out, this self-transcendence.

Man, the transcending animal, enjoys the proud distance from which he contemplates the whole; it gives him the sense of being godlike. At the same time, he notices that although he can step outside himself he cannot step outside the animal world: he is part of it. He is torn between being a god who sees the whole and an animal that belongs to the whole. But what is the whole? ‘In endless space countless luminous spheres, round each of which some dozen smaller illuminated ones revolve, hot at the core and covered over with a hard cold crust; on this crust a mouldy film has produced living and knowing beings.’¹ That is a global human self-perception that can scarcely be distinguished from depression. Life discovers itself as a mouldy film on a cooled planet.

If reason is able to see the whole in such ways, the suspicion stirs in us that such reason may afflict us as a disease. Does it not demand too much? Are we not ‘defective beings’ precisely because we can look out on a horizon that is too wide and too distant – the horizon of the global? Is our abundance of knowledge and perspectives not our weakness?

Man is, as Nietzsche put it, the ‘not yet determined animal’, a semi-finished product: a being who is not yet consummated but has still to complete himself, and who has a remarkable ability to make up for natural defects with skill and intelligence. Defective being: this means that, in comparison with the rest of the animal kingdom, man’s instinctual endowment is inadequate. Man is unable to rely on his instincts: he has too many options. There is too little constraint and too much freedom. When nature left him in the lurch, he had to take his own evolution in hand in order to survive. Another way of putting it would be to say that man is by nature dependent upon artificiality, and therefore upon culture and civilization. It is through culture that man, the indeterminate animal, shapes his nature, his cultural ‘second nature’. In his imagination he has always been a little ahead, anticipating and rehearsing his second nature. For example, it was in religion, metaphysics and fairy tales that man made the first attempts to fly. And, since we actually have been able to fly, religion, metaphysics and fairy tales have declined in significance. In his first nature, man is a being driven by fear. Everywhere dangers lie in wait, and as man’s imagination is more developed than his instincts he sees nothing but imaginary causalities in the threatening external world. To avoid being overwhelmed by his own fantasies, man had to invent cognition: he thus came to recognize, for example, that lightning was produced by meteorological conditions; it was no longer a divine judgement striking his conscience. Instead of praying, humans preferred to erect lightning conductors. The second nature that we create for ourselves is, like much else, a lightning-conductor culture. It represents the easing of burdens, the restriction of fear and the reduction of risk. Technology enables us to create for ourselves prostheses and armour, shells and shelters.

There can be no doubt that the culture of technology and science usually stands us in good stead. But we also have problems with it – which is why, now and then, we begin to suspect that it might be better if we knew less than we do. This suspicion is as old as culture itself.

In Greek antiquity there was competition between the theoretical curiosity represented by philosophy and the art of tragedy. Plato had no use for tragedy, as its wisdom consisted in leaving certain things obscure or insoluble. Think, for example, of the drama between Antigone and Creon, as it was acted out on the Sophoclean stage: both were right, and this led to a frightful collision and a tragic outcome. A philosopher like Plato could not accept that both were right: to get to the bottom of things meant, for him, to make an unambiguous decision about the good and the bad; the true Logos knew what was right. In Plato’s view, there could be tragedy only where defective knowledge blinded people to conditions that had once been apparent. Take a tragic figure such as Oedipus, of whom it cannot be said that it was good for him to discover everything about himself. Without the terrible things that he learned, he could have had a better life. The wish to know more was his undoing. A third example is Prometheus, who in Greek myth brought fire to man and thereby enabled his cultural advance. Less well known is another version of the myth reported by Euripides, in which human beings crouched idle and semi-conscious in their caves because they knew the hour of their death. They knew too much. Then Prometheus came and gave them the gift of forgetfulness: of course they still knew that they would die, but not when. By taking away that unreasonable knowledge with which they had been unable to live, Prometheus brought them relief. A new enthusiasm for work appeared among them, and Prometheus stimulated this further with the gift of fire.

Greek tragedy and myth understand that in matters of human knowledge – hence in our second nature, in culture – there can be too much of a good thing; we can demand too much of ourselves through technology and knowledge. The problem may be formulated as follows. How far can man with his second (cultural) nature depart from first nature? Can his second nature not become caught up in an opposition to first nature that is actually self-destructive?

The problem lends itself to copious illustration, but is posed with particular emphasis in the well-known case of weapons technology. It cannot be denied that our basic emotional equipment goes back a very long time; it belongs to first nature, as it were. This is also true of our aggressive potential. But, instead of clubs, which can only reach so far, we now have modern weapons technology. One touch on a button and hundreds of thousands die. We can scarcely imagine the effects of what we do; we are more capable of producing than of imagining. This is all well known and the object of much reflection, although obviously that does not remove the problem. And today this tension especially affects the problem of globalization.

In the last few decades globalization has gathered tremendous momentum, but its prehistory stretches further back. Here are a couple of examples:

Modern industry has established the world market … Constant revolutionizing of production … distinguishes the [present] epoch…. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away…. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.

This we read in a text from the nineteenth century. At approximately the same time another author wrote:

Now any little country town and its surrounding area, with what it has, what it is and what it knows, is able to seal itself off. Soon that will no longer be the case; it will be wrenched into the general intercourse. Then, to be adequate for its contacts on every side, the lowliest will have to possess much greater knowledge and capacity than it does today. The countries which … acquire this knowledge first will leap ahead in wealth and power and splendour, and even be capable of casting doubt on the others.

Both texts come from the middle of the nineteenth century: the first from the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels; the second from the novel Der Nachsommer by Adalbert Stifter.² One is revolutionary, the other conservative. In each perspective, however, modern globalization has already begun and is experienced in contemporary consciousness as the beginning of a future which, as we know, has never stopped beginning.

The man-made network of second nature, which covers our blue planet like a mould, is a global network. The first globe was produced in the sixteenth century, in Nuremberg. From that time there was a material pendant to global consciousness, if only in the form of a model; we were able to take this model world in our hands. Nearly 500 years later, cosmonauts were able for the first time really to look at our world as a globe, and since then we have grown used to that image as we do to all others. The moon landing in 1969, with its view from space over this blue planet of ours, was probably the moment at which modern global consciousness was born, the beginning of the fall from euphoria into panic. For, as world society and world history were wrenched as never before into globalization, the apprehension grew that there might be too much globalization or too much false globalization, and even that we might be on the wrong track altogether. The doubt and the unease eventually led to an anthropological question: how much globalization can we bear?

2

Globalization

First a few facts.

We live in an age of globalization – no doubt about that. Since the atom bomb there has been a globally shared threat. Missiles can reach any point on earth. The nuclear potential makes collective human suicide and global devastation a real possibility; life on earth is on the line. Wars are no longer limited to particular regions, nor conducted only by states. Non-state violence, or terrorism with bases of support in a changing list of states as well as links to organized crime, seeks to mount global operations and to procure weapons of mass destruction. We have known this since 11 September 2001, but even before we had to fear it. The diversion of nuclear energy from civilian to terrorist purposes – for example, through an attack on a power station – is possible at any time. And other dangerous technologies now in civilian use, such as biological or genetic engineering, could be given a terrorist application – with global effects. These few words may be enough to remind us that modern globalization began with the globalization of fear and terror.

This also holds in relation to ecology. Economic and industrial overexploitation, on land, air and water, is condensing into a truly frightening backdrop. Globalization in this sense means the plundering of our planet.

We could continue the list of horrors associated with, or directly traceable to, globalization. Diseases follow in its wake, either in reality or in people’s fantasy. Aids has been transforming the world into a global community of infection. And overpopulation is another terrifying aspect of globalization.

Then there are the more narrowly economic and technological processes of globalization that increase the density of economic, cultural, touristic, scientific, technological and communicative networking. According to an OECD definition, economic globalization is the process whereby markets and production in various countries become increasingly interdependent as a result of cross-border trade in goods, services and labour and the movement of capital and technology. Globalization signals the triumph of a capitalism which, since the collapse of the Eastern bloc, has been the one dominant economic model. Despite the persistence of political and religious differences, the forms of economy and technology have become more unified, albeit at different levels of development. There are counter-tendencies, but even those are dependent upon capital and Western technology. Deregulation of financial markets spells ruin for entire economies. Corporations with global operations disempower locally legitimated politics. Capital flows like a river across national frontiers, and causes flooding and proliferation, desiccation and drought, not only in the metaphorical sense. The total effect is like that of a worldwide natural disaster, man-made though unplanned. Yet the whole thing unfolds with the help of precise technologies and calculated strategies of profit maximization, rational in the particular but irrational overall. Nor does public opinion escape attention. Global information technology makes it possible for us to know anywhere in the world what is happening anywhere in the world.

This high degree of self-reference and visibility is part of modern globalization. Everything has always been connected with everything else. But the processes used to operate behind the backs of those involved in them, whereas now a perception of networking that wavers between euphoria and hysteria has become part and parcel of globalization. Thus modern globalization means, first, networking as such and, second, networking that people know about – or rather that they know of, since all they know for sure is how much everything is bound up with everything else. Modern globalization is self-referential and – as far as communications technology is concerned – takes place in real time.

Now, globalization is not only the quintessence of the bad news travelling around the world; there are also nice enough communities engaged in global cooperation. It cannot be denied that the spread of modern science, medicine and technology has effects that make life easier and safer. At an institutional level, the United Nations and a dense network of complementary (or rival) intergovernmental and supranational organizations and agreements exist to keep war and violence in check. A world public opinion has established itself, so that tyrannical regimes are made to feel under scrutiny and legitimation pressure. Human rights abuses, though not systematically punished, do not pass unnoticed but give rise to worldwide protests. An international criminal court is being set up. And critics of globalization form a growing movement that makes expert use of the global technologies of information and mobilization.

3

Globalism

‘Globalization’ is not a single process but has several different facets, and for this reason it is better to speak of ‘globalizations’ in the plural. Nor is there any shortage of alternative (counter-) globalizations: that is, attempts to control and reshape the dynamic of capital and technology. If critics of globalization – governments, organizations or individuals – link up their economic and informational networks, their aim is to gain new scope for action and to develop alternative forms of a global ethos. This mostly happens at a practical level, but the scale of the global tasks also favours the emergence of broad ideological theories of the global, with either a critical or an affirmative intent. Thus, we have to deal not only with factual globalization but also with ‘globalism’ as an idea or ideology.

Globalism qua ideology generates the image of a world society more unified than it is in reality. Often it suppresses the fact that, while some regions are becoming more homogeneous, others are experiencing a dramatic de-linking from events in the rest of the world. Certain societies and regions communicate with one another, but others become ‘blank areas’ and regress to earlier stages of development. In a world that communicates in real time, lack of simultaneity is a growing phenomenon. New time zones are taking shape – not in the sense of the clock but in the sense of different epochs. In Africa, for example, countries are dissolving into tribalism and gang warfare; feudalization, robber barons and pirates are making a comeback; unimaginable poverty and a brutish struggle for survival are cancelling the rules of social existence. The very minimum of civilization is disappearing.

The dramatic lack of simultaneity causes various reflexes among the public in the West. Everything bad that it thinks to be impossible over here is considered possible in the East – for instance, a nuclear war between Pakistan and India. Those who try to avoid alarmist panic stick to the cosy liberal but now also cynical axiom: other countries, other customs. China’s strict policy of one child per family may be praised for its dampening effect on population growth, and at the same time despised because it contradicts our democratic standards.

Thus, new differences emerge on the ground of globalization, but not many suitable forms of behaviour to handle them. Globalism qua ideology does not want to see the growing lack of simultaneity and the differences in development, or else it treats them only as transitional phenomena. This means that it is not sufficiently realistic. At bottom, globalism is less a description of reality than a demand: it makes a global ‘ought’ out of a global ‘is’. Globalism is globalization become normative. If it remains undogmatic, flexible and rich in insights, then it is a question of ideas – but otherwise it is ideology. In one way or another, globalism reacts upon the real movement of things, by disguising, forcing, crippling or legitimating. As an ideology, it is the intellectual side of the global trap.

Three variants of normative globalism may be distinguished. First there is neoliberalism, the most effective variant. Because it is so powerful, it is the most likely to be denounced by the critical public. Neoliberalism invokes globalization as an argument for ending the social obligations of capital, and counts on competition among governments for jobs to eliminate so-called ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface: Understanding Globalization – Between Sociology and Philosophy Peter Wagner
• 1 First Nature, Second Nature
• 2 Globalization
• 3 Globalism
• 4 Making Enemies
• 5 World Peace?
• 6 The Global and the Other Totality
• 7 The Individual and the Immune System
• 8 Jungle and Clearing
• 9 False Glows
• 10 Creating Space
• Notes
• Index