How globalisation fosters intolerance

Martin Jacques

Civilised values: Many now believe that the Western model should be applied everywhere. I have just read Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Published in 1947, it analyses the nature of Japanese culture. Almost 60 years later, it remains a seminal work. However, here, I am interested in its origins and purpose.

In June 1944, as the American offensive against Japan began to bear fruit, Benedict, a cultural anthropologist, was assigned by the U.S. office of war administration to work on a project to try and understand Japan as the U.S. began to contemplate the challenge that would be posed by its defeat, occupation and subsequent administration.

Her book is written with a complete absence of judgmental attitude or sense of superiority, which one might expect; she treats Japan's culture as of equal merit, virtue and logic to that of the U.S. Its tone and approach could not be more different from the present U.S. attitude towards Iraq or that country's arrogant and condescending manner towards the rest of the world.

This prompts a deeper question: has the world, since then, gone backwards? Has the effect of globalisation been to promote a less respectful and more intolerant attitude in the West, and certainly on the part of the U.S., towards other cultures, religions and societies? This contradicts the widely held view that globalisation has made the world smaller and everyone more knowing. But, how has globalisation had this effect?

Of course, it can rightly be argued that European colonialism embodied a fundamental intolerance, a belief that the role of European nations was to bring "civilised values" to the natives, wherever they might be.

It made no pretence, however, at seeking to make their countries like ours: their enlightenment, as the colonial attitude would have it, depended on our physical presence. In no instance, for example, were they regarded as suitable for democracy, except where there was racial affinity, with white settler majorities, as in Australia and Canada.

In contrast, the underlying assumption with globalisation is that the whole world is moving in the same direction, towards the same destination: it is becoming, and should become, more and more like the West. Where once democracy was not suitable for anyone else, now everyone is required to adopt it, with all its Western-style accoutrements.

In short, globalisation has brought with it a new kind of Western hubris present in Europe in a relatively benign form, manifest in the U.S. in the belligerent manner befitting a superpower: that Western values and arrangements should be those of the world. At the heart of globalisation is a new kind of intolerance in the West towards other cultures, traditions, and values.

The idea that each culture is possessed of its own specific wisdom and characteristics, its own novelty and uniqueness, born of its own individual struggle over thousands of years to cope with nature and circumstance, has been drowned out by the hue and cry that the world is now one, that the Western model neoliberal markets, democracy, and the rest is the template for all.

The new attitude is driven by many factors. The emergence of an increasingly globalised market has engendered a belief that we are all consumers now, all of a basically similar identity. In this kind of reductionist thinking, the distance between buying habits and cultural/political mores is close to zero: the latter simply follows from the former.

We live in a world that we are much more intimate with and yet, at the same time, also much more intolerant of unless, that is, it conforms to our way of thinking. It is the Western condition of globalisation, and its paradox of intimacy and intolerance suggests that the western reaction to the remorseless rise of the non-west will be far from benign.

Courtesy: HINDU