There was always one complaint protesters made against globalization, lo those many years ago, that promoters of globalization never answered: the homogenizing effect of globalization would bring heightened cultural alienation and rising social dissociation everywhere. Yes, they also complained it would make some people or nations poorer, a complaint globalization’s promoters focused exclusively on and easily defeated, for it is true that increased trade generally increases prosperity. But the first charge should have been paid more attention to.
The once-rollicking anti-globalization movement was vaporized in the blasts of 9/11, but its predictions have nonetheless come harrowingly true. Mistaken as
virulent Islamism, or more generally as religious fanaticism, riots in the suburbs of Paris and on the beaches of Sydney, as well as bombs on the trains of London and bomb plots hatched in Toronto, no less than American Jews moving to occupation settlements in Palestine and “Support our Troops” t-shirts being sold in Parksville, BC, are very much about cultural alienation and social dissociation brought on by globalization, and are only incidentally about Islam and hate-preaching Imams.
The Muslim cloak enshrouding the latest events could have been any religious cloak in any other era, for all religions lend themselves to violent subversion of secular power when the need arises, even Christianity, even Buddhism. Religious fervor
rises up wherever social and cultural glues dissolve. By focusing on questions of whether Islam does or does not condone violence for this or that situation, the public, their pundits, and even prime ministers (including our own) miss the forest for the trees. The rise of religious fanaticism anywhere, including in the American south as much as in the Middle East, is evidence of high cultural alienation and spreading social dissociation.
Promoters of globalization would not answer to the charge that globalization will dissolve social and cultural glues because that is an acknowledged key function of capitalism itself. A vast proportion of retail sales of consumer products—the engine of capitalism—result from, and serve
to assuage feelings of, alienation and dissociation throughout all economic classes, the rich no less than the poor. Because they serve the needs of the capitalist economic system so well, behaviors and conditions that promote alienation and dissociation are encouraged (even if unwittingly) by political and other leaders. Or at the very least, behaviors and conditions that promote social integration and create cultural embeddedness are neglected, defunded, and left to atrophy, since they serve no immediately measurable economic good in a classic capitalist society.
Cars promoted as objects of self-expression, even to the point of vulgarity, as in the Hummer, shopping encouraged as an act of leisure itself, and the marketing of drugs to combat every conceivable negative thought, are examples of a society in which alienation and dissociation are being encouraged. On the contrary, high voter turnouts at all levels of elections, robust and evolving community centres, and expanding public systems like transit, health and education, are signs of a society in which cultural embeddedness and social connections are growing. But along with the growth of social and cultural standards comes a decline in sales of goods that serve as substitutes when those standards are in decline, like Hummers, televisions, drugs and iPods—and classic capitalism cannot be sustained in a milieu of declining consumer demand.
Social connectivity and cultural embeddedness are not nearly as easy to measure as economic growth, nor do we have as vocal and powerful a cadre of spokespeople clamoringabout them as we do spokespeople shouting about economic growth. Nor are we nearly as aware of the deleterious effects of declining social and cultural standards as we are of the effects of declining economic standards. We know each week if we are able to buy as much, and by exactly how much we are short. But it usually takes years for the effects of declining social and cultural standards to be noticed, and then only in indirect and indeterminate ways. Minute movements in stockmarkets and currencies around the world are reported every fifteen minutes on radio stations in every city, but never are movements in social capital or cultural currency reported.
But those effects are surely noticeable when they do arrive. Riots in Paris and Sydney, bombs in Bali and London, and plots hatched in Toronto, no less than bunker busters dropped on Afghan and Iraqi neighbourhoods and prisoners captured by Canadian troops and handed over to American torture chambers, are the visible signs of a generation-long decline in cultural and social standards of living (even while economic standards of living could well be rising in every one of these places). They are the manifestation of results of globalization as predicted by
anti-globalization activists for two decades priorto 9/11. Described variously by authorities in Canada and abroad as terrorism (homegrown or foreign), Islamism, religious fanaticism, hatred and
medievalism, these events are none of these as much as they are the flipside of thoroughly modern globalization. And that which passes as terrorism is a thoroughly modern reply. Emile Durkheim, in his seminal 1905 book Suicide, which every university undergraduate in the last three decades has surely read, made the point that while we might find the cause of each individual suicide in the minute details of a life, to understand why different societies had different overall rates of suicide, an accumulation of those individual details told us nothing. We needed, he wrote, to identify causes on the national level to understand national-level effects. And so it is with so-called terrorism. We can bicker about the individual causes of this or that particular person who decides to take up violence against economic and state symbols, but the accumulation of such individual causes will tell us nothing about why the effects are spreading globally.
To understand the phenomenon of “terrorism” on its global level, we need to identify a global cause to explain it. And that cause is none other than that set of policies falling under the rubric of economic globalization as promoted and
pushed around the world beginning two decades ago, in 1986, with the signing of the first Nafta agreement.
All the unthinking promoters of globalization, and all their dollar-sign-blinded defenders in the media over the last two decades—all those newspaper columnists and radio show hosts, the learned authors of journal articles, the speechmakers, the analysts and the economists, the professors and their graduate students, and all the think tanks, media companies, and universities, as well as all the companies that underwrote them with bursaries and grants —are directly to blame for the rising death toll and the spreading culture
of fear due to the twin phenomena of terrorism and war at home and abroad.
Critics of globalization warned repeatedly and convincingly that globalization would send into a hyperdriven offensive the already deleterious effects of capitalism on social and cultural standards, effects that would come to be felt in ways that would make the economic gains of globalization pale in comparison. Those critics were routinely abused in the media, ignored in the universities, and dismissed in the think tanks, and their warnings were never
answered. Just as Condalleezza Rice could say with a straight face that nobody in her administration had conceived that anyone would ever fly a plane into a building as an act of terrorism, so too might promoters of globalization claim that they never conceived of homegrown terrorism, bombings, or threats of prime ministerial beheadings as the direct results of globalization. But on both claims we know they were fully warned. What the alarmed leaders today call terrorism is nothing more, nor less, than the next stage of protest against globalization. And what we are today alarmed to see perpetrated in the name of anti-terrorism—the destruction of civil rights, the transformation of our economies into war economies, the forced deposing of foreign governments, the waging of brutal war around the world, and the outright mass murder of innocent civilians—is only the next stage in the globalization agenda. None of this has anything to do with religion, freedom, hatred, or economic well-being or the lack of it. It is all about economic globalization andthe negative effects of it on our social and cultural standards of living, and the reaction against these, only
with the intensity on both sides ratcheted up a few levels since the Battle in Seattle of 1999.
Globalization’s critics were silenced in the blasts of 9/11, but perhaps its time to stand them up and dust them off again to hear what they haveto say, seeing as how they were right. An end to the violence perpetrated, and in turn encouraged, by globalization’s promoters the last two decades will only come when globalization’s promoters are finally rejected, ridiculed, and marginalized right out of the media, the universities, and the halls of government power. Globalization is a monumental failure that has brought us to this point of massive violence, death and fear around the world. All its promoters the last two decades should be hunted down and held up against the wall to answer for these awful crimes. It is not the religious Islamists we need to smoke out, but the economic globalists, and it is the globalists’ ideology that needs to be repudiated, not the ideology of those who are only replying to globalization’s offensive. It is everyone who has promoted globalization the last twenty years who is fully to blame both for terrorism and for the war against it. |
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