The Inevitability and Desirability of Globalization
Host: Walter Anderson

Defining and Differentiating Globalization

(Participant) Walt, OK, I think I see where you are coming from. In the sense that I think you mean it, the process of globalization has always been part of the human experience. Probably a fundamental aspect of life itself. When I look at it from that perspective it doesn't seem all that much different today from how it has always been. The biggest differences I see are increased competition for fewer resources, the increasing velocity of change, a more level playing field, and a greater potential for accidental harm with possibly catastrophic consequences. Most of the other elements appear pretty much the same as always.

While these differences seem in some ways pretty significant, they also seem to offer as much opportunity as challenge.

I think the most serious issue might be to examine what do we HAVE to do differently today as opposed to 100 years ago, if anything. The various ways of handling government, business, the needs of the group and the relationship between them, all seem to have been tried at some time somewhere. Nothing that has been tried has proven to be particularly successful over a long period of time.

In re-reading the biggest differences the one that most stands out for me is the greater potential for accidental harm. I rather have the sense that we will cope relatively well with the others, but this one could be devastating. It's the "accidental" that kind of gets me.

(Walter Anderson) Ray, I just took a look through Waters' book, Globalization, and he does explore many economic matters. It's the definitions game again--he considers "social and cultural arrangements" to include economics. For some people "culture" means art, ritual, values, etc. For others, it means everything having to do with symbolic information. The classical evolutionary theorists (some of my intellectual heroes) recognized only two categories of information--genetic and cultural.

(Walter Anderson) Dick, welcome back. I think you come to the core of what I am trying to get at--and your last statement relates strongly to my conviction that we need a vision or agenda uniting national aspirations with the emergence of a global system based on the rule of law and the recognition of ever-growing interdependence. The US has a considerable history of creating international organizations--the UN, the system of alliances that were formed during the Cold War--but is currently better-known for resisting the creation of new bodies such as the International Criminal Court.

(Participant) "Nationalism" is not, of course, a simple concept. It has been a long time since any rational person would say that nations are totally independent of each other. A useful question, I think, would be: How far in the opposite direction might one go without abandoning the concept of "Nationalism" altogether? I.e. Are there any fundamental rights of nations, as we have said there are rights of individuals, that are sacrosanct?

(Walter Anderson) Nations are taking on new roles in the global system, and nationalism is functioning differently in most people's psychological makeup.

I don't see any sign that nation-states are about to go away, or should. What we're looking for here is an idea of a thinkable and achievable world order in the fairly near-term future.

I often quote something Vaclav Havel said in a speech a few years ago, about his belief that most nation-states will begin to change from "cult-like entities charged with emotion into far simpler and more civilized entities, into less powerful and more rational administrative units that will represent only one of the many complex and multi-leveled ways in which our planetary society is organized."

The psychological counterpart of this is that national identity represents only one of the many complex and multi-leveled ways that people define who and what they are.

(Participant) Some scholars, such as Jane Jacobs, believe that the power of the nation state, with its relatively meaningless and arbitrary borders, will gradually give way to the city state, because cities represent the more identifiable and vital economic and cultural units. So perhaps our concern about protecting national identity and sovereignty is already a dated concept. But whether it is cities or nations, I see no reason why either one could not promote its unique features and pursue its vital agenda while at the same time increasing its interdependence with others.

Ray, I think all international organizations are careful in their constitutions to honor national sovereignty along some crucial lines. For example, I don't think that the UN can compel any of its members to send military forces to an action with which that member country strongly disagrees. I wish I knew more about such things. Where is Harlan when we need him? International organizations are his specialty.

Perhaps a more fundamental question is, if globalization continues, will we cease to be who we are? That is, will America no longer be what we feel it to be? Actually, very few people can answer the question, "What's American about America?" I once read an article with that title by a Princeton professor whose name escapes me. He concluded that what is distinctly American is, I believe he used the term "continuation". He cited as examples such distinctly American features as comic strips, chewing gum, soap operas and ever expanding cities--each of which just keeps on going. He could have used American invented non-directive psychotherapy as an example.

The effects of globalization will, of course, homogenize our identities somewhat, as nation-wide business, communication and mobility has already done to our cities, which tend no longer to have unique features. Now that every franchise exists in every city, it is difficult for a traveler to distinguish among them. As Ralph Keyes has written, we have national hometowns, all alike. The Westernization of Asia is clearly a mixed blessing, as any visit to Tokyo will prove.

(Participant) Making any kind of substantive declaration about the future is usually an exercise in entertainment, but having said that, I would like to toss a few ideas into the pot.

1. True globalization is just not in the near future. Not in the next 25 years anyway. Globalization as community won't have much chance until our genetic makeup undergoes a significant change. There are simply too many genetic behaviors currently moving us as humans to allow us to share our essential experience of life in such a way as to achieve a global community.

2. The physical boundaries that currently define various groups will continue to lose meaning. As our communication methods become more refined and less dependent upon sharing physical space, communities of shared interests and values will grow and we will see an increase in what Mary Douglas describes as enclaves. They will evolve along two substantial branches. One branch will be virtual, while the other will remain physical. Both branches will consist of numerous twigs (enclaves) and these enclaves (on both branches) will expend considerable energy in differentiating their identities. There will be increased ideological competition between the branches and the twigs.

3. The biggest rift will emerge in the confrontation between the consumer mindset and the experiential mindset. Both of these mindsets will have membership and influence on both branches. The subsets of each mindset will become more dogmatic, more exclusionary and less tolerant of everything unlike themselves.

(Walter Anderson) Kip, you raise a lot of interesting points and concepts. For now, I'll just try to deal with the first one, which has to do with, among other things, the definition issue.

Globalization as you define it ("true" globalization, global community) is indeed far in the future, if anywhere--as a concept it seems to have much in common with Teilhard de Chardin's vision. It is a product, an end state.

What I mean by globalization is process--a process that has been going on for ages and now appears to be taking an exponential upswing. And the challenge I propose is to think hard about the realistic possibilities of global civilization--building in our own less-than-perfect time.

This challenge involves thinking about: (1)what's happening now, what the globalizing and anti-globalizing forces are; (2) what kind of a more desirable civilization might emerge out of this rapidly globalizing context; and (3) what we are doing or might do--as a nation, as ILF, as leaders of organizations, as individuals--to envision such a civilization and help bring it into being.

(Walter Anderson) Dick, I really don't buy the "homogenization" thing at all. It's true that certain symbols, patterns and institutions universalize. That has happened before in smaller ways--I've read that all over the Roman empire baths were built on the same floor plan, so you could walk into one in England and think you were in Romania--but, like other dimensions of globalization, it's happening more now, and worldwide. Then there's the harmonization of standards--for telephone systems and such--that's also going on worldwide.

Homogenization means sameness, and I don't see all people becoming the same. What seems to be happening is that there is tremendous diversity, and it's not just simple one-dimensional pluralism where you have one culture over here and another distinct one over there. Instead people mix up the memes in all kinds of new ways.

(Participant) Walt, with the superficial pressures toward homogenization, how do you account for the increased diversity? Could it be that it is a reaction to the homogenization? Or is it the fact that, in human affairs, opposites almost always coexist? Or that we learn so much these days through mass media about other cultures that are very different, and can experiment with those ways of being, so that simultaneously we have both what we were and what we are trying out? Or what?

(Participant) Walt, to what extent is the diversity we observe simply a stage in the homogenization process?

(Walter Anderson) I'd say that the diversities and the apparent homogenization are two facets of the same globalizing process, which is driven by technological changes, particularly in transportation and communication. Globalization and what the French call "informatization" go hand in hand.

As people, goods and symbols travel about the world more freely, some things become so common everywhere--Big Macs and t-shirts are the favorite examples, although other writers on this subject point to Chinese food and various things not of Western origin--that we see them as evidence of homogenization. But keep in mind that there is a kind of diversity in this. MacDonalds and Chinese restaurants bring a new choice to areas that were once limited to a single kind of cuisine. And there's much more to it than that, because major cities have not only diverse cuisines but much mixing-up of all kinds of foods and styles. Similar things are happening in many other fields, such as popular music, which draws on cultures past and present from all over the world. Eclecticism is one of the main features of globalization. It is not homogenization unless everybody becomes the same and does the same things. Personally I don't eat Big Macs much, nor do I listen to German salsa bands or Israeli rappers, although I'm fascinated to know they exist. I did listen to the Tokyo Bach Society on the radio this morning, though.

(Participant) Walt, I had to laugh when I read your response noting the essential similarity between the spread of McDonalds food and Chinese food. I'd never considered the parallel, yet clearly there is no substantial difference.

I want to make sure I'm on the same page here as to what you mean by globalization. Do you mean a process in which people cooperate responsibly across borders and beyond local agendas toward the goal of maintaining some common level of overall civilization? Or do you mean the process whereby some nations decide what constitutes the "right way" and impose that on other nations by economic, social, perhaps even aggressive means? Is the globalization you have in mind the result of global consensus that punishes those who don't get with the program? Is globalization as you use it the result of a reasoned agreement between ALL governments? What is the difference between globalization and domination in the context of this discussion?

(Walter Anderson) Kip, I think you miss a lot if you choose to define globalization chiefly in evaluative terminology such as people cooperating responsibly across borders. I see it as an ongoing change in the context of all life on the planet – non-human as well as human--with both good and bad implications. The internet and the web, for example, are powerful forces of globalization. They make possible good-guy cooperative interactions such as this one, and they also become the theater for spam, hacking, viruses, and all manner of predatory and corrupt behaviors. And I'm glad to be in a world in which they exist.

(Walter Anderson) Kip, you might be interested in the book World Risk Society by Ulrich Beck, a German sociologist. He defines the emerging global civilization in terms of risks--such as those associated with climate change and environmental destruction--that put us all in the same boat. Those risks also suggest some of the things we have to do.

(Participant) Walt: I've just finished reading (because The Futurist asked me to review it) a 2002 book which the author, J.F. Rischard, says he wanted to call "It's Not Globalization, Stupid." The publisher talked him out of that, and the book came out as "HIGH NOON: Twenty Global Problems, Twenty Years to Solve Them."

Rischard, the World Bank's V.P. for Europe, objects to "globalization" because it "brings about paralysis of the brain." Both its advocates and its opponents, he thinks, avoid the central issue: global problem-solving. (You can forgive him for not having read your "All Connect Now," which came out at about the same time as his book. Since my "Birth of a New World," which discusses problem-solving across a wide range of global issues, was published in 1993, my capacity for forgiveness is stretched.)

The interesting thing is that in setting up the 20 global issues and prescribing ways to tackle them, Rischard comes strikingly close to our way of thinking about a nobody-in-charge informatized world order that will have to be loosely governed if it's going to work at all. (To quote myself: "A practical pluralism, not a unitary universalism, is the likely destiny of the human race.")

In other words, despite Rischard's opening salvo against the concept "globalization," his analysis is mostly consistent with yours. It's not as broad, though: he doesn't deal adequately with security (military) issues, or with cultural and biological globalization.

His contribution, which is notable, lies in his effort to envisage processes of creative "global problem-solving," that bring civil society, business, and even (using the Internet) elements of the general public, along with governments, into analyzing and prescribing for inherently global problems.

The how-to (and who-does) questions will be important in ensuring what you call the "desirability" of globalization. I hope we can turn to them seriously during this Conference.

(Participant) What a pleasure to have you join us, Harlan. You certainly have a way of enriching the dialogue.

Rischard is probably right about globalization bringing about a paralysis of the brain. Perhaps that is why it is happening without leadership, management, adequate monitoring or a sense of urgency. And why we have a hard time designing responses to it. It undoubtedly presents mind numbing complexity, but also dilemmas, paradoxes and absurdities that defy rational analysis.

(Walter Anderson) I hadn't heard about Rischard's book, but it does indeed sound like, despite the usual problems about what is meant by "globalization," he is moving along the same general lines that we are, and has a good deal to contribute to what I suggested early on as the project of this conference. Harlan, perhaps you could say just a bit more about his proposals.

By the way, I think that the cultural themes we've been considering in the past few days are extremely important, because cultural matters--such as people's values, sense of personal identity--can make or break any policy agenda.

(Participant) It seems that there is already a bit of a change afoot - though where it will wind up I don't know. The internet, smart MOBS, SMS etc. are bringing people together irrespective of physical or government boundaries. It's really fascinating to watch and its only in its infancy. Its always hard to predict where something so new might take us, but if we think about it as truly being part of this "process" and if we look at history it seems most likely that it will, on the one hand, bring about a cohesion based on some sort of personal compatibility (I don't know if that's the right word). Its more than just shared interests or ideas. Just the connectedness of it seems to have a strong appeal for many people. The virtual community really hasn't been heard from yet in an historical sense. I agree with Walt that world government isn't the way to go and isn't likely to happen any time soon, but a lot of the ideological (like religion) as well as physical boundaries will, I think, play a smaller role in the near future.

It's harder to be angry at a specific person whose religion is different once you come to know that person well in social contexts. As this communications wonder spreads people will find themselves, on a much more regular basis, interacting with people whom they actually like as people--regardless of nationality, ethnicity, class, etc. Online the things that separate us are not usually broached early on. Online, people seem to initially make contact and interact based on shared interests. Then you get to know the person and it may be some time before the separators even arise and by then there is already a relationship. This sequence is so different from the way it's been in the past when people most often met others within more narrow contexts.

(Walter Anderson) Today I'm in the process of trying to write an article for Pacific News Service, reflecting on the Columbia disaster. I'm taking as my text a book by David Peat, a physicist that I have known for a few years. It's titled From Certainty to Uncertainty, and he contends that the drift of thought over the 20th century has been away from a sense of stability and confidence, toward a perception of the universe as ultimately unknowable, of all systems as complex, chaotic and not subject to the kind of sure-handed predictability and management we used to associate with organizational leadership and scientific knowledge.

This idea echoes something I have been saying for years, which is that more information does not bring more certainty, and I think it has a lot to do with what we're talking about here. And I don't think it means we give up on science, information, global governance or complex systems--because we can't. It does mean, I think that we need to develop some new cognitive tools.

(Participant) Dear Walt,

It was interesting to me to see that you were quoting from David Peat and his book From Certainty to Uncertainty. We had David out in Portland last December

to speak on this book for our Institute for Science, Engineering and Public Policy and he gave a stellar performance. He also brought into focus another book of his called Blackfoot Physics which he wrote in the 1980ties because he

was entranced by the Indian synthesis of anthropology, history, metaphysics and cosmology of the Blackfoot Indian elders. What was apparent is the amazing resemblance of the indigenous Indian teachings and some of the insights that are emerging from modern science and the relationships between science, spirituality and different ways of knowing. Blackfoot Physics in a fascinating exploration of the native American universe as an example of some different cognitive tools.

(Participant) The worldwide interest and sorrow in the Columbia space shuttle tragedy, marked by a fascination with the smallest detail of what might have gone wrong in the loss of those seven lives, stands in sharp contrast to the seeming lack of interest in details of the impending war, equally high-tech and likely to cause the deaths of tens of thousands. The space program has come to symbolize planetary goals and international cooperation, no doubt contributing to globalization. Perhaps that is why we care so much.

(Walter Anderson) Doug, I do think that some of the ideas that Peat and other people like him are exploring have a lot to do with the larger global transition we're talking about here, and a linkage to the different ideas about organizations that Dick and Harlan speak for.

In regard to the Columbia disaster, the thing that hits me is that it's another one of these global events. It happens, in a sense, to everybody--enters billions of minds. Not in the same way, of course--I'm sure there are people gloating over it as well as those who are shocked and saddened. But it reinforces the knowledge that we are all on one planet, and that there are people out there on a space station.

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