| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Peters: The tribes are back |
| 2006-05-04 |
| WHEN pop bestsellers tell you something's bound to happen, bet on the opposite result. Now globalization is supposed make our values and tastes converge: Nascar Americans and Islamist terrorists will come to their senses and give each other a hug. Don't believe it for an instant. What we're really witnessing, from Europe through the Middle East and Africa to Latin America, is the reassertion of local identities and beliefs. The tribes are back. On a recent trip through West Africa, I saw how native religions persist - to the identical frustration of Christian evangelists and Islamist missionaries. In Indonesia a few years earlier, I met "Muslims" clinging to beliefs whose roots pre-dated Islam. From Sulawesi to Sonora, "Christian" practices aren't always Vatican-approved. In every case, the tenacity of local traditions defeated global models. Even in Europe - the continent that supposedly was marching at the double-quick toward complete homogenization - recent votes, protests and legislation reinforced national identities (and for Basques, Welsh and Piedmontese, an even narrower one). 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 pop prophets are still calling this one wrong. Why? The answer's straightforward: When they travel the world, they interview their own kind, other journalists or academics, government officials and successful businessmen who can afford a plasma TV, a Mercedes-Benz and Johnny Walker Blue. What the globalist prophets 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. Their books describe the golden crust on the half-baked human loaf. What's stunning is how old patterns refuse to disappear. You see it not only in the stubborn persistence of Flemish or Baluchi identity, but also in the retreat of the new aristocrats behind their castle walls, from guarded compounds in Bangalore to ranches in Jackson Hole. 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. There is, indeed, a globalizing class. But the emergence of that super-class doesn't portend the globalization of humanity. For the masses, the flight from flags isn't toward a new borderless meta-identity, but back into old, enduring associations: tribe, faith, family - and bigotry. As for those tribes that the professors insisted didn't really exist, go to Africa (or Iraq) and ask people who they are. Nineteen times out of 20, they'll respond with the name of their tribe: Kikuyu, Asante, Fulani, Igbo, rather than Kenyan, Ghanaian, Senegalese or Nigerian. Elsewhere, people no longer want to be Spaniards or British or Turks, but Catalans, Scots and Kurds. In Iraq and Afghanistan, in Pakistan and Burma/Myanmar, in Sudan, Congo and Bolivia, old, deeply rooted identities trump those assigned by European boundary commissions. Owning a laptop or satellite dish won't make an ethnic or religious zealot a benign citizen of the world. 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. Perhaps "the poor will always be with us." But globalization rubs their faces in it. That's hardly a prescription for peace in our time. 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. In Europe, Africa and the Middle East, the sense of "who I am" now more closely resembles that of the 15th century than the 20th century. As for those bestsellers promising that the Dow's about to soar to 36,000, or that we've seen the "end of history," or that the world is flat and becoming benign - well, if the authors put their money down on red, put yours on black. |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #9 we do see the re-emergence of some tribalism; but we also see the re-emergence of pagan religions and nationalism. And they all seem to have some "Magic Date' to which they want to turn the clock back. 1967, 1492, 1200, 1948, match 'em up. |
| Posted by: jim#6 2006-05-04 17:51 |
| #8 "Who are you?" "I'm an American" - thats the normal response from almost everyone (legally) here in this nation. And that's what sets us apart. We've come here to give up tribalism, to live where you are who you want to be based on merit. That is, except for the liberals who must divide everyone into groups to categorize, manipulate and eventually rule by playing favorites between them. |
| Posted by: Oldspook 2006-05-04 16:05 |
| #7 The 'tribes' are back? File this complete waste of time under 'Duh'. |
| Posted by: mcsegeek1 2006-05-04 13:21 |
| #6 The title is a bit of a misnomer. The tribes aren't back, since they never went anywhere. Not much of the world has progressed to an understanding of a "nation". If anything, the "tribes" cited haven't moved anywhere for millenia, if ever. Just as Europe lead in civilizing much of the world, these areas need civilizing as well. Referring to "globalization" may just be a fancy way of labelling barbarians with the ability to acquire advanced weaponery and rudimentary training. Not much new in any of this. |
| Posted by: Whong Whoting4646 2006-05-04 12:20 |
| #5 ...go to Africa (or Iraq) and ask people who they are. Nineteen times out of 20, they'll respond with the name of their tribe... When I lived in Australia people would ask me where I was from. When I told them I was an American, they said, "I know that, but from where?" (And that was always difficult to answer. Last place I'd lived was California, but I didn't want to try to pass myself off as a Californian. I grew up in Missouri, but nobody had heard of that.) Similarly, if you're an American in the US and people ask you where you're from, they don't want to hear, "I'm an American." That would be crazy. They want to know what state or town you're from. Maybe this is the same phenomena, on a larger scale. |
| Posted by: Angie Schultz 2006-05-04 11:23 |
| #4 As for those tribes that the professors insisted didn't really exist, go to Africa (or Iraq) and ask people who they are. Nineteen times out of 20, they'll respond with the name of their tribe: Kikuyu, Asante, Fulani, Igbo, rather than Kenyan, Ghanaian, Senegalese or Nigerian. Elsewhere, people no longer want to be Spaniards or British or Turks, but Catalans, Scots and Kurds. I'm from Texas, what country you from? Sorry, Ralph has written better than this. Too long in Africa I suspect. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2006-05-04 09:11 |
| #3 I dislike how he tries to muddle any non-internationalist identity into tribalism. And yes, as a reaction to greater levels of internationalism, we do see the re-emergence of some tribalism; but we also see the re-emergence of pagan religions and nationalism. Then there is the difference between world-wide internationalism, and "continentalism" or "bloc-ism", such as the EU or NAFTA. In part these lesser organizations are moving in the direction of world internationalism; but on their own, they represent barriers to a world organization. To boil it all down: all politics is local; the greatest impact organizations have on people is in their home towns. Progressively greater levels of organization affect people less and less, and as such, they are less and less desireable. Nations, for the most part, evolve into the largest possible natural organization of a people. Beyond nations organizations are contrivances--conveniences of governments and businesses, not peoples. That is why there will never be a grand European army, any more than a NAFTA fighting force--there is no natural cohesion. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2006-05-04 09:10 |
| #2 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. In Europe, Africa and the Middle East, the sense of "who I am" now more closely resembles that of the 15th century than the 20th century. He's got some good points. In the U. S. we're much more factionalized than we were in the 20th century. In large part this is due to changes in communications. In the 20th century media were newspaper, radio, and television. All of these are capital intense, one way, top down communications that were easily controlled by the elite. In the 21st the emerging media are the internet and talk radio, two way, interactive, many to many communications. This allows many dissenting, minority opinions to be spoken and heard. Both the Rantburg community and the local traffic community are smaller, more intimate, more 15th century communities than the mass movements of the 20th century that buried such fine distinctions. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2006-05-04 08:14 |
| #1 This opion piece mushes a lot of things together and prefers polemic to analysis. I'll leave the economic aspects alone and comment on the social aspect of the global information village. The article tries to impose a physical location model on what is essentially a locationless phenomena. When it comes to geopolitics I have more in common with a resident of the Burg than I do with my next door neighbor, but when it comes to the local school and the traffic problems caused by the 3:30 pickup, I obviously have more in common with my neighbor. The reality is that the internet and other information technologies reinforce all kinds of communities, from crofters in the Shetland isles worrying whether there will be enough seaweed to feed their sheep to geeks who want to scan for transmissions from alien civilizations. The dichotomy presented is false. It's not either globalization or local identity, both can flourish. The risks from globalization lie elsewhere. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2006-05-04 07:54 |