Peters on Globalization

In today's Post Ralph Peters makes an important observation regarding the effects of globalization. He writes:

Rather than making the masses feel connected (on the Internet or otherwise), the tempest of forces we lump together as "globalization" leave men and women around the world feeling threatened and disoriented. In consequence, they turn to what they trust: exclusive identities, local beliefs and fundamentalist religion.

The heralds of "ice-cream-sundae globalization" - the notion that trade, connectivity and converging tastes will lead the world to realize humanity's common interests - aren't at the cutting edge of thought. They're 30 years behind the times.

The golden age of globalization theory passed in the late 1960s and 1970s, when campus commissars insisted that tribes didn't exist and nationality was an artificial construct, that such "assigned identities" were imperial Europe's inventions, that humanity's true beacons of hope shone in Third-World dictatorships.

The intellectual porn of left-wing fantasies foresaw the defeat of capitalism and the rise of the new, liberated, post-national man. All that's left are Che Guevara t-shirts and the dead of Srebrenica, Cambodia, Rwanda and dozens of other tributes to human solidarity.

Yet the discredited intellectual conceits of that earlier generation of thinkers live on today in the sacred groves of academe where "transnationalism" is all the rage. And hte academics are merely following the lead of today's power elites.

What we "are witnessing isn't the convergence of the masses for a chorus of "We are the world," but the rise of a new, globe-spanning aristocracy...."

Just as yesteryear's aristos did, today's nobility of wealth and culture see themselves as above nationality. Patriotism is fodder for the peasants (unless it can be exploited for profit). They have far more in common with business partners across the globe than with the guy who fixes their plumbing. They intermarry across borders and forge alliances based on their own interests - as the Tudors, Valois and Medici did before them.

This new aristocracy is less attached to a passport than to a lifestyle. As for those who can't afford the price of admission, let 'em eat cake.

And what of the rest of the world's population?

Globalization as we know it has not encouraged a sense of common humanity among the masses - only a sense of common interests among the new aristocracy (with no sense of noblesse oblige). For the billions left outside the gated communities, globalization has excited fear and revived old hatreds: It's revelry for the rich, rivalry for the poor.

Even in our own society - the best-positioned in the world to profit from globalization - there's a worrisome divide between the multinational executive who retires with a $400 million farewell smooch (and who naturally supports globalizing trade), and the worker maxing out a credit card to pay for a tank of gas - to whom globalization means a threatened job, even if it also means cheaper underwear.

He concludes:

The point isn't that globalization is good or bad - it's both - but that it's vastly oversold when it comes to reforming human character and weakening group identities. Along with commercial integration, we get social fragmentation.

Read it here.

Gee, it's nice that he admitted, at the very end of his piece, that there might be some unspecified benefits from globalization, and that those benefits might accrue to people other than the transnational elite.

The economic effects of globalization are undeniable. Since WWII the standard of living of the world's population has risen dramatically, and not just in the West, due to the proliferation of global trade relations. Both the proportion and the absolute number of people living in abject poverty has been steadily declining, and that decline has accelerated in recent decades. The past few decades have seen throughout the world more available health services, better nutrition and access to potable water, better education and communication, and many other benefits of the spread of global interrelations and institutions. And, perhaps most surprisingly, since the end of the Cold War there has been a dramatic decline [yes, decline] in the incidence of both intra-state and inter-state conflict. The world is rapidly becoming a more peaceful place.

Still Col. Peters has a valid point. The cultural and psychological effects of globalization are not what they were predicted to be. The transnational elite has become a new aristocracy, exhibiting all of the vices and few of the virtues of traditional aristocracies. And few people outside that elite have been willing to adopt their shallow cosmopolitanism.

The rise of an elite radically disconnected from the population that sustains it is indeed a "worrisome" development, especially in places like the Middle East and Africa where it has become parasitic or predatory, but the general trend has been positive and, if we have not achieved the utopian condition predicted by the academic lotus-eaters of the sixties and seventies, we still have achieved much in a very short time.