From old Harvard prof. K. Anthony Appiah, we have The Case for Contamination. Writing about Ghana, he says,
I've seen visitors from England and the United States wince at what
they regard as the intrusion of modernity on timeless, traditional
rituals - more evidence, they think, of a pressure in the modern world
toward uniformity. They react like the assistant on the film set who's
supposed to check that the extras in a sword-and-sandals movie aren't
wearing wristwatches. And such purists are not alone. In the past
couple of years, Unesco's members have spent a great deal of time
trying to hammer out a convention on the "protection and promotion" of
cultural diversity. (It was finally approved at the Unesco General
Conference in October 2005.) The drafters worried that "the processes
of globalization. . .represent a challenge for cultural diversity,
namely in view of risks of imbalances between rich and poor countries."
The fear is that the values and images of Western mass culture, like
some invasive weed, are threatening to choke out the world's native
flora.
He says, quite correctly, "The right approach, I think, starts by taking individuals - not
nations, tribes or "peoples" - as the proper object of moral concern."
The entire article is excellent, and shows none of the "touchiness" for which he was sometimes looked down upon in Boston. I can't excerpt just one or two more sections, so I'll sum up: He argues that part of people's resistance to globalization is that they just don't like change, although in each case their pro-globalization friends are the ones choosing the foreign products over or in addition to the local ones. Moreoever, as I've pointed out before, some things are the product more of charity than of intentional globalization -- if you provide free american-made clothes to the poorest people who can afford no clothes at all, those a rung higher may still jump at the idea of free or low-cost clothes over paying normal rate for the local production.
If people want change, who are we to tell them they should prefer their own traditional culture? Even if they don't necessarily want change, but their own practices become eventually untenable, Appiah says, "we cannot afford to subsidize indefinitely thousands of distinct islands of homogeneity that no longer make economic sense. Nor should we want to. ... If we want to preserve a wide range of human conditions because it
allows free people the best chance to make their own lives, we can't
enforce diversity by trapping people within differences they long to
escape."
One of the best articles I've read in ages. Go read it yourself!
Recent Comments