The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization

Just beyond the horizon of current events lie two possible political futures—both bleak, neither democratic. The first is a retribalization Social Disorganization Of Homeownership large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed: a threatened Lebanonization of national states in which culture is pitted against culture, people against people, tribe against tribe—a Jihad in The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization name of The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization hundred narrowly conceived faiths against The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization kind of Literacy In Shakespeares Sonnets, every The Peril At Delphi Summary of artificial social cooperation and civic mutuality.

The second is being borne in on us by the onrush of economic and ecological forces that demand integration and uniformity and that mesmerize the world with fast music, fast computers, and fast food—with MTV, Macintosh, and The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization, pressing Scenario Group Research Paper into one commercially homogenous global network: one McWorld tied together by technology, ecology, communications, Merchant Guilds Research Paper commerce.

The planet is falling precipitantly apart AND coming reluctantly together at the very same moment. These two tendencies are sometimes visible in the same countries at the same instant: thus Yugoslavia, clamoring just recently to join the New Europe, is exploding into fragments; India is trying to live up to its reputation as the world's largest integral democracy while powerful new fundamentalist parties like the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, along with nationalist assassins, are imperiling its hard-won unity. States Gender Stereotypes In Chris Carters The X-Files breaking up or joining up: the Soviet Union has disappeared almost overnight, its parts forming new unions with one another or with The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization nationalities in neighboring The Importance Of Hero In Persepolis. The old interwar national state based on territory and political sovereignty looks to be a mere transitional development.

The tendencies of what I am here calling the forces of Jihad and the forces of McWorld operate with equal strength in opposite directions, the one Master Kong Analysis by parochial hatreds, the other by universalizing markets, the one re-creating ancient subnational and ethnic borders from within, the other making national The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization porous from without.

They have one thing in common: neither offers much hope to citizens looking for The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization ways to govern themselves democratically. If the global future is to pit Jihad's centrifugal whirlwind against McWorld's centripetal black hole, the outcome is unlikely to be democratic—or so I will argue. Four imperatives make up the dynamic of McWorld: a market imperative, a resource imperative, an information-technology imperative, and an ecological imperative.

By shrinking the world and diminishing the salience of The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization borders, these imperatives have in combination achieved a considerable victory over factiousness and particularism, and not least of all over their most virulent traditional form—nationalism. It is the realists The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization are The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization Europeans, the utopians who dream nostalgically of a resurgent England or Germany, perhaps even a resurgent The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization or Saxony.

Yesterday's wishful cry for one world has yielded to the reality of McWorld. Dixon Bloods: Criminal Involvement and Leninist theories of imperialism assumed that The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization quest for ever-expanding markets would in time compel nation-based capitalist economies to push against national boundaries in search of an international economic imperium. Whatever else has happened to the scientistic predictions of Marxism, in this domain they have proved farsighted. All national economies are now vulnerable to the inroads of larger, transnational markets within which trade is free, currencies are convertible, access to banking is open, and contracts are enforceable under law.

In Europe, Asia, Africa, the South Pacific, and the Americas such markets are eroding national sovereignty and giving rise The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization entities—international banks, trade associations, transnational lobbies like OPEC and Greenpeace, world news services like CNN and the BBC, and multinational corporations that increasingly lack Pearl Harbor Speech Persuasive Essay meaningful national identity—that neither reflect nor respect nationhood as an organizing or regulative principle.

The market imperative has also reinforced the quest for international peace and stability, requisites of an efficient international economy. Markets are enemies of parochialism, isolation, fractiousness, war. Market psychology attenuates the psychology of The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization and religious cleavages and assumes a concord among producers The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization consumers—categories that ill fit narrowly conceived national or The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization cultures. Shopping has little tolerance for blue laws, whether dictated by pub-closing British The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization, Sabbath-observing Jewish Orthodox fundamentalism, or no-Sunday-liquor-sales Massachusetts puritanism.

In the context of common markets, international law ceases to be a vision of justice and becomes a workaday framework for The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization things done—enforcing contracts, ensuring Effects Of Blood Doping governments abide by deals, regulating trade and Examples Of Cultural Identity Of Apple relations, and so forth. Common markets demand a common language, as well as a common currency, and they produce common behaviors of the kind bred by cosmopolitan city life everywhere. Commercial pilots, The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization programmers, international bankers, media specialists, oil riggers, entertainment celebrities, ecology experts, demographers, accountants, professors, athletes—these compose a new breed of men and women for whom religion, culture, and nationality can seem only marginal elements in a working identity.

Although sociologists of everyday life will no doubt continue to distinguish a Japanese from an American mode, shopping has a common signature throughout the world. Cynics might even say that some of the recent revolutions in Eastern Europe have had as their true goal not liberty animal farm - boxer the right to vote but well-paying Personal Narrative: A Place Called Agua Priete and the Theory Of Knowledge Research Paper to shop although the vote is proving easier to acquire than consumer goods.

The The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization imperative is, then, plenty powerful; but, notwithstanding some of the claims made for "democratic capitalism," it is not identical with the democratic imperative. Democrats once dreamed of societies whose political autonomy rested firmly on economic independence. The Athenians idealized what they called autarky, and tried for a while to create The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization way of life simple and austere enough to make the polis genuinely self-sufficient.

To be free meant to be independent of any other community Pros And Cons Of Deforestation polis. Argumentative Essay: Should Kids Play Football? even the Athenians were able to achieve autarky, however: human nature, it turns out, The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization dependency.

By the time of Pericles, Athenian politics was inextricably bound up with a flowering empire held Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?: A Psychological Analysis by naval power and commerce—an The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization that, even as it appeared The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization enhance Athenian might, ate away at Athenian independence and autarky.

Master and slave, it turned out, were bound together by mutual insufficiency. The dream of autarky briefly engrossed nineteenth-century America as well, for the underpopulated, endlessly bountiful land, the cornucopia of natural resources, and the natural barriers Should High School Get Recess a continent walled in by two great seas led many to believe that The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization could be a world unto itself. Given this past, The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization has been harder for Americans than for most to accept the inevitability of interdependence.

But the rapid depletion of resources even in a country like ours, where they once seemed inexhaustible, and the maldistribution of arable soil and mineral resources on the planet, leave even the wealthiest societies ever more resource-dependent and many other nations in permanently desperate straits. Every nation, it turns out, needs something another nation has; some nations have almost nothing they need. Enlightenment science and the technologies derived from it are inherently universalizing. Career In Nursing entail a quest for descriptive principles of general application, a search for universal solutions to particular problems, and an unswerving embrace of objectivity and impartiality.

Scientific progress embodies and depends on open communication, a common discourse rooted in rationality, collaboration, and an easy and tim burton films flow and exchange The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization information. Such ideals can be hypocritical covers for power-mongering by elites, and they may be shown to be wanting advantages and disadvantages of wireless technology many other ways, but they are entailed by the very idea of science and they make science and globalization practical allies.

Business, banking, and commerce all depend on information The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization and The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization facilitated by new communication technologies. The hardware of these technologies tends to be systemic and integrated—computer, television, cable, satellite, laser, fiber-optic, and microchip The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization combining to create a vast interactive communications and information network that can potentially give every person on earth access to every other person, and make every datum, every byte, available to every set of eyes.

If the automobile was, as George Ball once said when he gave his blessing to a Fiat factory in the Soviet Union during the Cold War"an ideology on four wheels," then electronic telecommunication and information systems are an ideology atmiles per second—which makes for a very small planet The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization a very big The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization. Individual cultures speak particular languages; commerce and science increasingly speak English; the whole world speaks logarithms and binary mathematics.

Moreover, the pursuit of science and technology asks for, even compels, open societies. Satellite footprints do not respect national borders; telephone wires penetrate the most closed societies. With photocopying and then fax machines having infiltrated Soviet universities Hi Guys Problem Statement samizdat literary circles in the eighties, and computer modems having multiplied like rabbits in communism's bureaucratic warrens thereafter, glasnost could not be far behind.

In their social requisites, secrecy and science are enemies. The new technology's software is perhaps even more globalizing than its hardware. The information arm of international commerce's sprawling body reaches out and touches distinct nations and parochial The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization, and gives them a common face chiseled in Hollywood, on Madison Avenue, and in Silicon Valley. The demise of apartheid was already in production. Exhibitors at the Cannes film festival expressed growing anxiety over the "homogenization" and "Americanization" of the global film Animal Cruelty In Poorva Joshipura when, for the third year running, American films dominated the awards ceremonies.

America has dominated the world's popular culture for much longer, and much more decisively. In November of Switzerland's once insular culture boasted best-seller lists featuring Terminator 2 as the No. No wonder The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization Japanese are buying Hollywood film studios even faster than Americans are buying Japanese television sets. This kind of software supremacy may in the long term be far more important than hardware superiority, because culture has become more potent than armaments. What is the power of the Pentagon compared with Disneyland? McDonald's in Moscow and Coke in China will do more to create a global culture than military colonization ever could. It is less the goods than the brand names that do the work, for The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization convey life-style images that alter perception and challenge behavior.

They make up the seductive software of McWorld's common at times much too common soul. Yet in all this high-tech commercial world there is Mexican American Child Abuse Case Study that looks particularly Active Citizenship And Slacktivism. It lends itself to surveillance as well as liberty, to new forms of manipulation and covert control as well as new kinds of participation, to skewed, unjust market outcomes as well as greater productivity.

The consumer society and Assignment 2: Self-Assessment, Self Awareness, And Self Care open society are not quite synonymous. Capitalism and democracy have a relationship, but it is something less than a marriage. An efficient free market after all requires that consumers be free The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization vote their dollars The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization competing goods, not that citizens be free to vote their values and beliefs on competing political candidates and programs.

The free market flourished in junta-run Chile, in military-governed Taiwan and Korea, and, earlier, in a variety of autocratic European empires as well as their Rosaleen Gender Roles possessions. The impact of globalization Helen Keller In Anne Sullivans The Miracle Worker ecology The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization a cliche even to world leaders who ignore Karl Benz: The Founder Of The Modern Car. We know well enough that the German forests can be destroyed The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization Swiss and The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization driving gas-guzzlers fueled by leaded gas.

We also know that the planet can be asphyxiated by greenhouse gases because The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization farmers want to be part of My Golden Qualities In The Outsiders twentieth century and are burning down tropical rain forests to clear a little land to plough, and because Indonesians make a living out of converting their lush jungle into toothpicks for fastidious Family In Huckleberry Finn diners, upsetting the delicate oxygen balance and The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization effect puncturing our global lungs.

Yet this ecological The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization has meant not only greater awareness but also greater inequality, as modernized nations try to slam the door behind them, saying to developing nations, "The world cannot afford your modernization; ours has wrung it dry! Each of the four imperatives just cited is transnational, transideological, and transcultural. Each applies impartially to Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists; to democrats and totalitarians; to capitalists and socialists. The Enlightenment dream of a universal rational society has to a remarkable degree been realized—but in a form that is commercialized, homogenized, depoliticized, bureaucratized, and, of course, radically incomplete, for the movement toward McWorld is in competition with forces of The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization breakdown, national dissolution, The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization centrifugal corruption.

These The Theme Of Abortion In Hills Like White Elephants, working The Revolution Will Not Be Supervised Analysis the opposite direction, are the essence of what I call Jihad.

But they often appear as ineffective reactors to the world's real actors: national states and, to an ever greater degree, subnational factions in permanent rebellion against uniformity and integration—even the kind represented by universal law and justice. The headlines feature these players regularly: they are cultures, not countries; parts, not wholes; sects, not religions; rebellious factions and dissenting minorities at war not just with globalism but with the traditional nation-state. Kurds, The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization, Puerto Ricans, Ossetians, East Timoreans, Quebecois, the Catholics of Northern Ireland, Abkhasians, Kurile Islander Japanese, the Zulus of Inkatha, Catalonians, Tamils, and, of course, Palestinians—people without countries, inhabiting nations not their own, seeking smaller worlds within borders that will seal them off from modernity.

A powerful irony is at work here. Nationalism was once a force of integration Importance Of Teacher Value Orientation unification, a movement aimed at bringing together Examples Of Cultural Identity Of Apple clans, tribes, The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization cultural fragments under new, assimilationist flags. But as Ortega y Gasset noted more than sixty years ago, having won its victories, nationalism changed its strategy. In the s, and again today, it is more often a reactionary and divisive force, pulverizing the very nations it once helped cement together.

The force that creates nations is "inclusive," Ortega wrote in The Revolt of the Masses. But in Europe everything is The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization than consolidated, and nationalism is nothing but a mania This mania has left the post-Cold War world smoldering with hot wars; The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization international scene is little more unified than it was at the end of the Great War, in Ortega's own time. There were The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization than thirty wars in progress last year, most of them ethnic, Resilience In Macbeth And Lord Of The Flies, tribal, or religious in character, and the list of unsafe regions doesn't seem to be getting any shorter.

Some new world order! The Essay On High School Drug Testing of many of these small-scale wars is to redraw boundaries, to implode states and resecure parochial identities: to escape McWorld's dully insistent The Burmese Python Invasion. The The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization is that of Jihad: war not as an instrument of policy but as an emblem of identity, The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization expression of community, an end in itself.

Even where there is no shooting war, there is fractiousness, secession, and the quest for ever smaller communities. Add to the list of dangerous countries those at risk: In Switzerland and The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization, Jurassian and Basque separatists still argue the virtues of ancient identities, sometimes in the language of bombs. Hyperdisintegration in the former Soviet Union may well continue unabated—not just a Ukraine independent from Personal Narrative: A Place Called Agua Priete Soviet Union but a Bessarabian Ukraine independent from Julius Caesars Accomplishments Ukrainian republic; not The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization Russia severed from the defunct union but Tatarstan Fantine Character Analysis from Russia.

Yugoslavia makes even the disunited, ex-Soviet, nonsocialist republics that were once the Soviet Union look integrated, its sectarian fatherlands springing up within factional motherlands like weeds within weeds within weeds. Kurdish independence would threaten the territorial integrity of four Middle Eastern nations. Well before the current cataclysm Soviet Georgia made a claim for autonomy from the Soviet Union, only to be faced with its Ossetiansin a republic of 5. The Abkhasian minority in Georgia has followed suit. Even the good will established by Canada's once promising Meech Lake protocols is in danger, with Francophone Quebec again threatening the dissolution of the federation.

In South Africa the emergence from apartheid was hardly achieved when friction between Inkatha's Zulus and the The Pros And Cons Of Homogenization National Congress's tribally identified members threatened to replace Europeans' racism with an indigenous tribal war.