ON COUNTER-POINT TO THOMAS FRIEDMAN'S "WORLD IS FLAT"

HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF?

Like most people who've read and/or reviewed it, I found a lot to like in Thomas Friedman's book, "The World is Flat".  Many of the ideas in it have been well-understood and "discounted" in today's global investment markets for some time now, but it's a pretty good packaging of a number of key themes in one book for the mainstream audience.  In that context, it's similar to other recently popular books like "Blink" and  "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell...a good re-packaging of a number of important themes.

My father taught me that it's always good to hear the other side of any idea, and as a result, this op-ed piece caught by eye yesterday.  Ralph Peters, who has a book titled "New Glory: Expanding America's Global Supremacy" coming out, had an interesting counter-point to some of the themes in Friedman's book, titled "Myths of Globalization" in an op-ed piece in USA Today yesterday.  For reader convenience, it's presented here:

Every generation has its illusions. One of ours is that "globalization" — the internationalization of trade, services, investment and information-sharing spurred by the Internet — will shatter states and change humankind for the better. While globalization itself is real enough, the visions imposed upon it by idealists and con men alike only make it harder to grasp what's happening — and what isn't.

Among the many myths surrounding globalization, two stand out: The notion that this phenomenon is new and, more dangerously, the claim that globalization will lead to an age of utopian peace. Those who see globalization as unprecedented simply don't know their history. Those who imagine that greater understanding, courtesy of the Internet, will deliver an idyllic peace don't know humanity.

The first claim, that globalization is a wondrous child without historical parents, is the easiest to demolish. Greek culture of the age of Alexander influenced India's hairstyles, while eastern silks were sold in Caesar's Rome. Chinese porcelain and coins more than a thousand years old turn up in East Africa. Europeans of the Middle Ages paid a premium for pepper harvested a continent away. The Islamic world brokered trade between the West and the Far East. And it was before the discovery of the Americas.

There are more parallels with the past than differences. When Portuguese warships wrested control of the Indian Ocean from the Ottomans and their clients at the dawn of the 16th century, they provided a model of strategic hegemony that remains in place today. Then, Lisbon's caravels and carracks controlled the spice trade. Today, U.S. Navy carriers guarantee the oil trade. The commodities have changed, but not the strategic geography.

Roots go way back

Globalization today may proceed at a swifter pace, generate greater wealth and touch more lives, but its essence is at least 2,500 years old. Over the centuries, the process has changed international relationships profoundly, but it has never changed human nature.

Which brings us to the second myth — one that also has ancient roots — that globalization will bring about peace. The human desire to believe in a worldly paradise is as old as it is understandable. And it always proves illusory, foundering on humanity's capacity for mischief, our deadly good intentions and our ineradicable selfishness. Just as hippie communes fell apart because somebody had to do the dishes, predictions that war will become "unthinkable" fail because they embrace a dream and ignore human reality.

Historical eras of relative peace never came about because competing cultures agreed to cooperate, but because both sides were exhausted by war or because a hegemonic power laid down the rules. No peace lasted.

Predictions that humankind "learned its lesson" echoed in every age. On the eve of World War I, Western thinkers said that European wars were a thing of the past, that new weapons were too terrible, that societies had grown too enlightened, that international trade made war economically suicidal and that workers of France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Britain, Italy and Russia had too much in common to march against each other. August 1914 saw a euphoric embrace of war.

Likewise, the collapse of the Soviet Union meant the "end of history." Democracy would sweep the world and put an end to conflict. Russia itself would become a Jeffersonian ideal. Well, democracy may still triumph at some future date, but the wreckage of the USSR failed to produce the Age of Aquarius. Instead, we saw bloodbaths in the Balkans, civil wars and genocide elsewhere, and a flood of passions the Cold War had dammed up.

We need not celebrate the human taste for violent solutions, but pretending the appetite doesn't exist only makes conflicts likelier and deadlier. As 9/11 should have taught us, today's hyper-globalization means the globalization of insecurity. Our new enemies think as internationally as any statesman or corporate CEO.

Every claim that globalization equals peace ignores the facts. Suggestions that the world is flat may be right, but not in the ways intended. The new flat-worlders aren't the information-age aristocrats rising above their fellow citizens. They're the millions of frightened believers who reject science and social change, while debasing religion to superstition. The inquisition is back.

Tool for hatred

That's the international phenomenon that should occupy our thoughts: The dynamic movements in world religions insisting their gods are intolerant and vengeful. If information is power, fanaticism is nuclear power. Far from uniting humanity, globalization has made billions of people newly aware of economic disparities. Globalization threatens inherited values and traditional societies. And the Internet, for all its practical utility, has been the greatest tool for spreading hatred since the development of movable type for the printing press.

Islamist fanatics, neo-Nazis and pedophiles now can find each other with startling ease. Those who hid in dark corners a dozen years ago are all but unionized today. The real global brotherhoods of the Internet age are conspiracies of hatred. This is an age of new possibilities for the most talented humans. Yet it is also an age of bigotries reborn, with digital propaganda as the midwife.

Yes, our future is rich with new possibilities, but it will take a firm sense of reality to maximize those opportunities. The latest edition of globalization may do many things, positive and negative, but it will not change human nature. Another enduring lie is that the future belongs to the dreamers. It belongs to those who go forward with open eyes.

Ralph Peters is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors and the author of the forthcoming book New Glory: Expanding America's Global Supremacy.

I do think his notion that today's Globalization is nothing new since it's been a part of human history for millennia, is comparing apples and oranges to today's globalization opportunities.

However I also think his point that the "bad guys" have the access to the same technology infrastructure, is a good one.

And his point, that entrenched institutions, be they countries, religions and/or cultures  will resist change for as long as possible.  This was ironically illustrated to be true in our own backyard, in this story in a North Carolina newspaper, about a Baptist minister putting up a sign outside his church proclaiming that "The Koran needs to be flushed".  As the pastor of the church, Reverend Creighton Lovelace explains:

"I believe that it is a statement supporting the word of God and that it (the Bible) is above all and that any other religious book that does not teach Christ as savior and lord as the 66 books of the Bible teaches it, is wrong," said Lovelace. "I knew that whenever we decided to put that sign up that there would be people who wouldn't agree with it, and there would be some that would, and so we just have to stand up for what's right."

We can find these types of intolerant, dogmatic, exclusionary and poisonous statements in almost every religion, society and culture on the planet.  And in most of these places, as here, there is generally a large, "silent majority", that will not take any action, perhaps for multiple generations, generally driven by the next, younger generation. 

True change may very well be a long, long time coming, despite Moore and Metcalfe's Laws, the Internet, wireless broadband, Wifi/wimax, iPods, and packed to the gills 3G cellphones, along with the wonders  of email, instant messaging, internet telephony, blogging, wikis, and double-half lattes.

Thus to me, Ralph Peter's refrain on human nature, and our failure to almost never learn from history, does ring true.  Here's hoping we can be better than ourselves going forward, and stop some history from repeating itself.

 

Comments

[Tapsearch Com Flat World Editor]

Ray Tapajna, editor and artist of Tapart News and Art that Talks : Globalization Free Trade issues, counters Thomas Friedman concepts. First of all they do not match up with history and the definitions of Globalization and Free Trade are different from the past. Free Trade as the tool of Globalization is not trade as historically practiced or defined. In the past all trade including Free Trade was based on trading products. Today Free Trade is primarily based on moving production - making it portable ready to move again and again based on cheapest labor markets of the world and the least line of resistance of workers to unfair work practices along with the ecology regulations.
If Globalization existed in the past, it was definitely not based on making workers the commodities of Free Trade. We did have the slave trade and perhaps a great part of Free Trade resembles the slave trade in a way since the lowest common denominator of Free Trade are wage slaves and even child labor.

Thomas Friedman in his Flat World of flatteners that supposedly paved the way for Globalization, does represent a new kind of Plantation Owners in the form of the vast trans-national corporations with these "Plantations" partnering with governments acting as brokers. With Fast Track, the Executive Branch in the USA is now the CEO of world trade. International organizations like the WTO control the flow of wealth through so called Free Trade outside of any real democratic process and without the consent of the workers who are the core of any economy.

History tells us what happens when workers have no voice and are used as tools of Capitalism, Communism or whatever. It never has worked and it will not work now. Instead of dwelling on Thomas Friedman 's Flat World theories we should be preparing for the post-Globalization era according to history and any common sense order of things.

See http://tapsearch.com/flatworld/
http://tapsearch.com/flipflatworld/
http://tapsearch.com/tapartnews/
http://www.experiencedesignernetwork.com/archives/000636.html