Culture Conquest through Globalisation
For sale: anything, anywhere, everything, everywhere. Our beliefs, customs, dress, self-perceptions and the way we do business. Everything is for sale in globalisation’s race to the bottom – where the cheapest factors of production (inputs) are globally sourced to provide us with the cheapest goods. But are we really aware of the cultural damage being done to the planet for the cost of a 60 cent tin of tomatoes or a shiny new iPod?
I recently published an article on this website called Globalisation of the American Psyche about the New York Times article by Ethan Watters titled The Americanization of Mental Illness. Ethan has written another article around the same topic for New Scientist titled How the US Exports its Mental Illnesses which not only looks at how cultural views of the world we live in are being Americanised, but also how drug companies and disaster response initiatives are pushing this homogenisation of culture.
Which begs the question: what is the real price of globalisation? Are we even prepared to consider the irrepairable damage we are inflicting onto societies? I mean, after all, hands up who is naive enough to think that the World Wide Web does not have a down side? Because, of course, everything has a down side and we are mostly caught up in the glory of globalisation… and how it benefits us.
ABC National Radio’s Lingua Franca on 16th January 2010 had for their guest Professor Nicholas Evans head of the department of linguistics in the Research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University… the episode was called Dying Words and is based on Professor Evans’ book titled Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us. He says that in the logosphere, the history of words and languages of the world, its clear that most languages are localised rather than being spread widely.
What do the common threads of Ethan Watters and Professor Nicholas Evans tell us about the effects of globalisation? Every time we market into the global environment, every time we expose ideas and language and psychological constructs, and every time we rip out a little part of the jungle and move out the indigenous tribe… we’re homogenising. We’re creating a less interesting world so that every person can take our medications, subscribe to our definitions of illnesses, talk our language, dress in our clothes, drink our fizzy sugar drinks and join our mad rush (at the top or the bottom of the supply chain) of consumerism.
While we are seeing a layer of homogenisation of products and services, including the World Wide Web, we have to accept that we are pushing back cultures and they are pushing back at us – which David Kilcullen, author of The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One and Special Advisor for Counterinsurgency to the Secretary of State, mentioned in his National Press Club Address in early September, 2009. He asserted that just as the wars after WWII were seen later as wars against colonisation, the wars we are currently fighting will (in hindsight) be seen as wars against globalisation. Wars in which cultures are pushing back against Americanisation and homogeneity.
So do you think its worth having a homogenised world American culture? All I want is for you to ask questions… because globalisation is not just about economics. And until we are willing to ask these questions we will all be sucked into the benefits for one and all marketing of globalised propaganda. A rational mind would have to accept that globalisation is not all that we are promised.
