Globalization

An Introduction to the End of the Known World

Charles C. Lemert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315478999
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

"Globalization: An Introduction to the End of the Known World" surveys the history of globalization from the earliest of ancient texts through contemporary debates and the prospects for anticipating the new worlds to come. At the end of the twentieth century, debates over the nature of globalization were unable to agree on a simple resolution, except to say that globalization is economic, political, and cultural all at once. Cultural globalization affects everyone with a smartphone, on which global youth from Los Angeles to Jakarta listen to Jay-Z and Beyonce. States are torn in several directions at once by unsettling economic, political, and cultural forces. Lemert concludes with a serious outline of the possible ways of imagining what the still-unknown global world will become next ways including optimism, caution, and skepticism."

CHAPTER ONE


WORLD UNDER SIEGE

THE DARK SIDE OF GLOBALIZATION

A small band of boys on a school excursion are lost at sea near a remote island. No adults survived. The boys are on their own. After gathering themselves to face their situation, they decide to elect a leader, Ralph. A rival, Jack, after losing the election, emerges as the organizing force of resistance to Ralph’s civilizing leadership. The symbol of order, entrusted to Ralph, is a large seashell. When blown, the conch broadcasts a sound loud enough to call the boys to assemble. This is the disturbing fable of the origins of human society as retold in William Golding’s brilliant 1954 novel Lord of the Flies.

Fables play on symbolism. Here, Ralph is the representation of civil order. Jack is the symbol of disorder, even evil, in human nature. The “lord of the flies” is of ancient, probably Greek, origin. The flies are the infestation of human society arising from human nature. The general idea is that human society is always under siege by forces within its own nature that threaten social order. In Golding’s story, Ralph gradually loses control of the group as Jack becomes the dominant force of aggression. The story turns on a terrifying scene in which Jack leads his hunters to kill a female pig, representing mother nature herself: “Struck down by the heat, the sow fell and the hunters hurled themselves at her. This dreadful eruption from an unknown world made her frantic; she squealed and bucked and the air was full of sweat and noise and blood and terror. Roger ran round the heap, prodding with his spear whenever pigflesh appeared. Jack was on top of the sow, stabbing downward with his knife. Roger found the lodgment for his point and began to push till he was leaning with his whole weight. The spear moved forward inch by inch and the terrified squealing became a high-pitched scream. Then Jack found the throat and the hot blood spouted over his hands.” Thereafter, all is violence. The symbolic death of mother nature unleashes human rage among the boys. The hunters attack Ralph and his few remaining companions. Piggy, his friend, is murdered. The conch shatters into pieces. The primitive society is destroyed. In the end, Ralph is rescued. He has no idea what happened or why. He sobs uncontrollably.

As for the philosophy behind the story, many would deny that human nature is so deeply destructive. Yet there is more than enough evidence to suggest it may be. Versions of this fable have been told and retold since the earliest times, certainly from Sophocles to Shakespeare and Freud, then to Golding and a very great deal of popular as well as high fiction. When my then-fifteen-year-old daughter left her middle school, she volunteered that Lord of the Flies was her favorite book because, as she put it: “It reminded me of my school. We were left alone to destroy each other.” Humans of all ages and conditions seem to recognize that their better natures are regularly under siege.

WORLD UNDER SIEGE

Usually, to speak of a siege is to refer to an alien attack upon a settled village, city, or larger political entity. In the sixteenth century, for example, the British colony in Roanoke, Virginia, was lost sometime after 1590. An earlier settlement presumed that the native peoples would feed them. Soon the Indians lost patience and destroyed the white people. A few years later the British sent another band of settlers who were largely abandoned by the Royal Navy, which was preoccupied with raiding Spanish and French ships in the Atlantic. When, finally, one ship stopped to look for the second Roanoke colony they found the site deserted. To this day no one knows what happened to the settlers. Perhaps it was the primitive conditions or the weather or the failure of the crown to resupply them. If not that, perhaps native peoples laid siege on the small band of aliens. Long before the Roanoke colony disappeared, in 410 CE, the then-dominant global civilization, Rome, fell to Alaric and the Goths. Closer to our day, in 1944, when Germany’s almost 900-day siege on Leningrad in World War II failed, Hitler’s regime began its rapid decline. A siege on any scale is violent and destructive of social order.

Normally, unlike the Lord of the Flies fable, a siege is thought to be from an external force against a given settlement of any number of sizes. Usually a siege is strategic. When Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda movement attacked the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in the District of Columbia, the attacks were tactical assaults drawn from a long-standing terrorist strategy of laying siege on a symbolic aspect of the enemy to demoralize its people or cripple its economic or military power. September 11, 2001, failed tactically, but the continuing siege succeeded in mobilizing Euro-American powers to engage a war against terrorism that eventually resulted in the destruction of Osama bin Laden in 2011. “To lay siege” means, originally, to attack in order to seize the seat of power, as the Nazis tried but failed in Leningrad and as the Goths did in Rome.

What might a siege on the world mean? Rome thought of itself as the center of the world and Hitler wanted to rule the world, but neither Rome in its day nor Hitler’s delusion of a world under his boots were worlds—not even in their dreams. The world, as we think of it in our day, may not be the world pure and simple. At least in our time it might be better to speak of worlds comprising regions, states, and subcultures. Many of them are at least marginal to the world order and some are all but outside of it—Antarctica is one example; parts of the Australian outback and Siberia are others. At the very least, a siege on the world is different from Alaric’s siege on Rome in that “the world” has no single, all-powerful seat or center—not even when Britannia ruled the seas; not even in the days after World War II when the United States stood alone as the global economic power. Never has it been possible for a lesser power to attack the world as such.

Still, we can speak of the world under siege, if it is understood that the world as we have known it is one that must pay the piper for the destruction its greatest powers have wrought. Individuals may, from time to time, get away with their crimes. But large political powers never do; certainly not when their crimes are against the nature of worldly things. The settlers in the lost Roanoke colony did no more than common human evil themselves, but, like all colonizers, Britain did. In the long run Britannia collapsed in due course when it overreached in its desire to control the world. The very fact of colonizing is, at least, evil. Whatever good may be done is never purely good for the colonized. It always spoils the land and the resources of the subjugated.

Sooner or later the dominated reject their dominators, usually not for an abstract value like freedom but for the real-life right to their own piece of the earth—its wealth, its food, or its wood. In 1930, colonial India rebelled against the British for its right to salt, as in 1773 the colonized in North America began their revolution over rights to tea. Decolonizing struggles may have material symbols like salt and tea but in the long run they are about throwing off the colonizers. Political domination hurts the dominated, who in time reject the system, whether by force or withdrawal of cooperation. Still, no matter how awful the world may be it is impossible to imagine how its inhabitants can express their outrage by attacking it—the world as such. Worlds do not have seats of power. Whatever else they are, and regardless of how many there may be in the wider universe, worlds are primarily environments for lesser entities, some of which are indeed powerful and evil.

Powerful states could not do what they do, good or bad, were they not grounded in a world. A world, bigger by far than a kingdom, is not as encompassing as an earth. Our local earth is land, sand, sea, and rocks. Our worlds, however, are a coming together of political, economic, social, and cultural forces distributed unevenly among a variety of worldly powers—some grand, some tiny, but all with a definite relation to the others. They may be dominators or dominated. They may be everywhere at once on the seas, in the air, or across the lands. They may be so remote and beside the point that no one notices them until their oil or timber is discovered.

Worlds, therefore, are mysterious spheres of human and natural life. Whether there are worlds on any earthlike body in the known universe is not known. Thus, we must speak of this world, without supposing other worlds of a divine or material sort. It may be that this or that set of beliefs common to various human cultures insist on the existence of other worlds ruled by gods or monsters. Such beliefs are common enough to seem necessary. They are not unappealing. In fact, gods, even monsters, serve to explain why believers are where they are in the scheme of things. Famously, these are concerns for which there are no easy or certain answers. This alone may be one reason human beings do so much damage to each other and to the world on which they depend. Since we don’t really know why we are here now, there is a natural tendency to think What the hell! I should take what I can while I’m here. Not all humanoids are selfish in this way, but even the saintly are taking something for themselves out of the good deeds they do or think they are doing. In either case they do what they do.

This is why the world is always at risk—under siege from those who most depend on it. Grass withers, beasts die, sands blow, but without the burden of wondering why. We die and in some sense it makes us anxious if not downright mad. This may be why the vast majority of us ultimately don’t deeply care about remote others or the world we share with them. It sounds harsh. But it cannot be ruled out, if only because our siege on the world is so absurdly illogical.

THE HUMAN ANIMAL

One day, while walking my dogs in the woods, I came upon a mother, her daughter, and their family dog. Their dog was recently adopted, young, and frisky. As we dog walkers do, especially when breaking the leash laws, we both apologized for our dogs, whereupon she launched into a way-too-long explanation that her dog was new to her and lacked manners. Everyone uses metaphors, but to expect manners of a domesticated animal is, I think, strange. Dogs may be obedient, even charming. They surely have a healthy set of animal instincts, including those drawing them into packs. Our dogs sleep in the same room with one or another or with us. Still, whatever instincts are, they are not manners. We humanoids have manners and may have had them in the earliest times. Whenever humanoids evolved from the beasts of the jungle, they no doubt had instincts, as did their phylogenetic ancestors. But real manners are overlaid upon and beyond instincts.

NOT JUST A STORY

In 1845 Captain Sir John Franklin set off by sea from England for the Arctic. His mission was to discover a Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He was not the first of the Arctic explorers, or the last. Then as now, the Northwest Passage was a much-valued prize—one that would drastically shorten the travel time from Europe to Asia, where most colonial powers since Columbus traded for riches valued in European capital markets.

The venture was dangerous. Well into their navigation across the Arctic, Franklin and his company were lost. Some years later, after a number of searches, stone markers and the remains of three crewmen were found at Beechey Island. Local Inuit were found to have artifacts they could only have come upon by trading with the English crew. There the Franklin expedition had ended. Lives were lost. Still, it was not clear how a well-supplied expedition had lost its way. They were not abandoned as had been the Roanoke colony, which was lost in a far more hospitable climate. Then again, while the English in Virginia may have been destroyed by native peoples, those found on Beechey Island clearly had established good enough relations with local Inuits who, apparently, spoke well of them—perhaps even to the extent of helping them. No one knows. Then too, they may have been victims of the inadequacy of their own modern technologies. One theory is that they suffered food poisoning from leaks in the tin containers meant to preserve their food.

It was not until a good century later, early in the 1980s, that a forensic scientist studied the remains of the Franklin crew to discover that their bones bore cuts that could only have been inflicted for the purpose of cannibalism. Some who had remained were willing to eat their shipmates to survive.

Cannibalism usually shocks human beings, especially so-called modern ones. This is why Lord of the Flies can be such a shocking story. Piggy was killed but not eaten. Still, the story is one of the extent to which human nature is willing to kill for just or evil reasons. Franklin’s crew was not evil. They formed, it seems, human enough relations with the Inuit people. Yet when they came to their end they did what other animals do. They struggled to survive to the extent of killing and eating their kind.

The disturbing truth of the story of Franklin’s crew is that normally subhuman animals do not eat their own. Though humans may not be the only cannibals among vertebrates or mammals, they are creatures who will eat each other. If this, then how far will we go in destroying our own world?

We are animals. We are human. We would not be the latter were we not also the former. We must be both. Were it the case, which it is not, that we had to choose one or the other, we humans would be foolish to choose to be nothing but human. This would be choosing nothing or little at all. Whatever is good about human cultures, manners included, without our animal nature we would succumb to the forces of nature, including most likely the revenge of dogs and wolves and other creatures our species has taken advantage of. Though it is hard to imagine, one supposes that if they could, buffaloes, especially, would stomp us out for what we did to their ancestors on the American plains and the whales would rise up against our greedy harvesting of the sea animals.

Left to their own natural devices, lesser animals seem to get along quite well without us. Even parakeets and poodles came from a genetic line that knew nothing of cages and foolish groomings. So far as we can tell, they don’t long for an afterlife or, for that matter, any kind of life in this world that does not come naturally to them. They may starve in droughts or be eaten by their local predators, but for the most part the so-called lesser animal species figure out how to get by in the long run. Dinosaurs are the exception. Cockroaches are the animal normal.

Yet if cockroaches are closer to the animal normal, this prospect presents a moral challenge to our species, which thinks of itself as higher, more evolved, than bugs and dogs. Dogs, even wild ones, do not seem to make quite the mess of our shared world as we domesticated people have. As wonderful as so very much human ingenuity has been, the genius of our inventions has been bought at the price of a terrible devastation we have visited on each other and on the world we must share.

THE DARK SIDE OF GLOBALIZATION

Today, still early in the twenty-first century, the aftereffects of our longstanding siege on our own world are of acute concern and pose particularly urgent problems in our time.

Today few deny that we have degraded our natural environment. For centuries, petroleum fuel, including coal, was considered nothing but a miraculous gift that lent heat and light to homes and ran the engines of modern industry and technology. Now it is plainly foolish not to consider its dangers. Burning oil sends gases into the atmosphere that choke the air, warm the planet, melt the ice caps that will flood our coastal cities sooner than we dare to know. Just when the global human community ought to be set on saving our planet and each other, violence of all kinds, including against the seas and atmosphere, tear at what natural social bonds we have and need. We think of ourselves as somehow special, but whatever cockroaches may do to the world, they do not degrade it as we do. Most modern cultures do not take seriously the fact that, whatever humans are, we are first and foremost natural beings. Human social life begins as animal life. Yet we pretend this is not so. Lions roam the Serengeti. They hunt antelope to survive, but they are not as preoccupied as we are with destroying each other.

You might suppose that to the extent that globalization has increased the prospects for global communications and visual awareness of each other, it would have already begun to make us more aware of the urgency with which we require a healthy natural and social environment. Instead, sadly, so far globalization seems to have cast a dark shadow over human prospects.

HIDDEN BUT NOT LOST

In my town, just over the hill pushed up in the Jurassic period, is a park I enjoy for long hikes with my dog. Several years ago, I came across a small, neatly kept camp site—a tent, a few provisions for cooking, other signs of regular occupation. It was off the beaten path, hidden in summer by bushes and tall grass. One day it was gone, cleared, I supposed, by the park rangers. I never saw anyone there, but I was sure that it had been if not a home, at least a shelter for someone who needed a place to rest or, perhaps, for an occasional sexual encounter. I never knew and never will. But my idea was c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Text Box Features
• Preface: Unknown Worlds
• Acknowledgments
• 1 World Under Siege: The Dark Side of Globalization
• 2 What Is Globalization? Economic, Political, and Cultural Clashes
• 3 When Did Globalization Begin?
• 4 Globalization in the Modern World-System, 1500–1914
• 5 Changing Global Structures in the Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991
• 6 The Globalization Debates: After the Short Twentieth Century and into the Twenty-First
• 7 The Future of Globalization: The Unknown Worlds to Come
• References
• Index
• About the Author