Posts Tagged ‘identity’
“I believe that we can forecast the ‘changing landscape of context,’ and thus get insight into when we are entering the danger zone”*…
Derek Thompson shares his interview with philosopher Agnes Callard…
Here are some questions that I consider self-evidently compelling about the modern world:
- Why is the news media so interested in telling you how much the world sucks all the time?
- Why are so many of us obsessed with distraction and managing our attention?
- Why is it so hard to stop comparing ourselves to others?
- And why does everything in art and design seem the same these days?
A week ago, I didn’t think these questions were related. I’m not sure I would have told you I had a good answer to most of them. And I certainly wouldn’t have made the audacious and borderline bonkers claim that one single theory could begin to explain all of them, at once.
But then I had the pleasure of speaking to Agnes Callard, the University of Chicago professor, about her new theory called “the uni-context.” It’s easily one of them most interesting conversations I’ve had all year. And once you’ve heard or read it, I think you might find it hard to think about anything else.
One way to prepare your mind for Callard’s theory of the uni-context is to think about the better-known concept of “context collapse.” If you post something to social media, it will be simultaneously visible to your boss, your parents, your ex, and total strangers. So, while your offline life might be distinct with each of these groups—you might be differential to your boss, childish with your parents, and bawdy with your friends—all of those distinctions are flattened on the internet. That’s context collapse, and you can think of it as the answer to a question: How do informational norms change when we’re all living in the same universal room?
Callard takes the idea significantly further. She asks: How do all other norms—our morals, our ethics, our sense of what is good for us and for others—change when we continually imagine ourselves to be living in a universal room with everybody else? The connections that Callard makes are consistently surprising, often quite funny, and ultimately mind-exploding…
A small sample…
… Thompson: Tell me if this is a fair recapitulation of our conversation so far.
For most of human history, people judged norms based on local context. A home had its own rules, a cathedral its own rules, and a classroom or bar or funeral parlor had its own rules. But now it is almost like we are constantly living in universal rooms, and the universal room we occupy is assumed to have universal values and universal norms. That has specific implications. First, rather than talk about what is good, which is context-dependent, we tend to focus about universal truths, and it’s easier to talk about universal bads than goods, so people focus on negativity. Two, character is context-dependent, so we talk less about character and more about its universalist equivalent, which is identity.
There’s a third implication that we should discuss. If everyone is on the same comparable plane, the same evaluative field, then comparison itself becomes a more inextricable part of life.
Callard: Exactly.
Thompson: Tell me how the uni-context leads to a world of more comparison and competition.
Callard: Imagine two school districts with two high schools that do things slightly differently. If you’re in district A, you go to school A, and if you’re in district B, you go to school B. There might be a lot of information about what they do, but people treat it as: I’m in this district, so I go to this school. Then they change the rule: You can go to either school no matter where you live. Suddenly there is motivation to compare. You had the information before, but no motivation to compare, because the schools were not in the same space of choice, the same evaluative field.
Now they are, so you find ways to compare them: graduation rates, what colleges people get into, how many AP classes they teach. And that affects the schools. Suppose one gets less popular because it doesn’t teach many AP classes. They were offering an individualized curriculum, but now everyone’s going to the other school, so they say, “We’ve got to teach AP classes too.” The process homogenizes the two schools, so they can compete. That’s not the only possible result. They could specialize, with one becoming the school for freshman and sophomore years, the other becoming the school for junior and senior years. But if they don’t recreate a normative barrier, you get homogenization from comparison.
As more things enter the same evaluative field, you make comparisons you never used to be able to make.
Thompson: There are three pieces I’m trying to keep straight.
One, the upstream phenomenon of the uni-context. Two, the downstream phenomenon of more fields of comparison. Three, the further downstream phenomenon of homogenization.
This is where the theory really starts to sing for me, because I think about sports. As the analytics revolution came for baseball, you had all these teams in possession of the same statistics by which they could compare players. Previously, you had 30 teams using their own private scouts, so their analysis was more context-dependent. But when an easily calculable statistic like on-base percentage or WAR becomes the conventional way to evaluate whether a player is good, all the players become part of the same comparative set. You can rank them one-to-250 easily on a spreadsheet.
But analytics didn’t just lead to more math, or more comparison. It led to more homogenization of strategy. One of the great critiques of baseball has been that every team essentially does the exact same thing: it’s the same strategies for pitchers; the same strategies for hitters; the three true outcomes; all the batters swinging for the fences. So you have the uni-context creating a comparative field, in this case analytics, which leads to homogenization.
Callard: What you said reminded me that I have a theory of the inflection point for the uni-context. I don’t think it started five or ten years ago. The moment it really showed up was around 1910.
One century ago, there were a bunch of people looking around at the world, thinking: What the hell is happening? Did culture break? A lot of those people were novelists, and they wrote a new kind of novel called the modernist novel, which is a novel about how to live in a world in which the uni-context is just coming into existence. Theorists of the time—such as Georg Simmel, Max Weber, and Martin Heidegger—they noticed something weird was going on. They tended to describe it in terms that sound almost like the opposite of the uni-context. They described it as the fragmentation of everything. All of a sudden, they said, everything is breaking apart. That was my first clue.
The reason I thought of this is that you said everything is becoming homogenous, and I thought, “in a way, yes, but that’s a later effect.” The first thing that happens when a bunch of stuff is unified in a single evaluative field is that you feel overwhelmed by your choices. It feels like stuff is fragmented, because you don’t know how to compare these things, because you haven’t yet developed technologies of comparing them.
So, the early feeling of the uni-context was a feeling of the world being fragmented. If you were a medieval peasant doing art, you were in art’s normative world. If you were in the church, you were in the church’s normative world. But in the 20th century, around World War I, you start to think: How do we reconcile the schoolteacher turned murderer, the soldier? How do we think about the relationship between art and religion? We’re suddenly trying to compare all these different values inside a single context, and the world feels dis-unified. Eventually we get technologies of commensurability. What fragmentation really means—and that part was invisible to these writers—is that suddenly everything is part of the same evaluative field. That’s why you experience a multiplicity where you used to experience one thing at a time…
There’s much more, all of it provocative. Here, the conclusion…
Thompson: I want to know what we should do about this.
A simple answer might be: When you’re having dinner with your family, you can be present with your family, or you can be on your phone, which is a universal room that makes you everywhere at once. So put away the phone. But that feels like a cheap and predictable answer. Do you have something prescriptive that isn’t just “put away the phone at family dinner?”
Callard: The question of whether the uni-context is good or bad is loaded, because the uni-context struggles to see good things. It’s better at seeing bad things. Pretty much everyone who hears me talk about the uni-context immediately responds that it’s bad. I’ve never had anyone say, “The uni-context sounds great!”But the thing is that this supposedly bad thing is a thing we’re creating. We’re choosing it over and over again. Even me talking to you from far away about an abstract thing [is the uni-context.]
The uni-context is a space of unruliness. It’s a space in which a certain thing about humanity gets expressed, namely our deep aversion to “world closure.” For almost all of human history, we have lived in closed little worlds, and those worlds presented themselves as the only world. A series of contexts presented the person with direction—here’s what you should do. What we are moving toward is a “world openness” that we hunger after, where I’m not just going to do things a certain way because that’s how we do things or where I was born.
Antonio Gramsci famously said, “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” So, how do we use openness, as Callard describes it, as space in which to create a world in which we want to live? How do we recover the wisdom imbedded in context– the accreted shell of our shared history– without context’s reactionary trappings? How do we build anew a better world?
In any case, once you learn what the “uni-context” is, you won’t stop seeing it everywhere: “A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird,” from @dkthomp.bsky.social and @agcallard.bsky.social.
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As we muse on milieu, we might recall that it was on this date in 1963 that The Essex (a singing group composed of four active-duty Marines) reached #1 on Billboard R&B chart with their first release “Easier Said Than Done” (which had been intended as the B-Side of the record); it went on to top Billboard‘s Hot 100, and was the biggest hit of their career.
“The web of our life is of a mingled yarn”*…
In what does our personhood consist? From what/where does it come? João de Pina Cabral unpacks the seminal thinking of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and the advances in cognitive science and developmental psychology that suggest that a person is not self-contained, but the outcome of a lifelong process of living with others…
It matters to understand what constitutes a person. After all, if there is one feature that distinguishes human society from other forms of sociality, it is that, at around one year of age, most human beings attain personhood: they learn to speak a language, develop object permanence – the understanding that things do not disappear when out of sight – and relate to others in consciously moral ways. Should all persons be accorded the same rights and duties by virtue of this condition? These are weighty questions that have occupied social scientists and philosophers since antiquity – particularly at moments such as the present, when war and imperial oppression once again raise their ugly heads.
Nevertheless, this question cannot be approached as a purely moral matter, for in order to determine what rights and duties may be attributed to persons, it is necessary to establish what persons are. This longstanding perplexity can now be addressed in increasingly sophisticated ways, following a century of sustained anthropological enquiry.
In September 1926, two of the most eminent anthropologists of the day met in person for the first time in New York. Both were Jewish and born in Europe, but one – Franz Boas – had become an American citizen and was a leading figure at Columbia University in New York, while the other – Lucien Lévy-Bruhl – was a professor in Paris. Both were highly learned, humanistically inclined and politically liberal; they respected one another, yet they did not seem to agree about the matter of the person.
Lévy-Bruhl had begun his career as a philosopher of ethics. His doctoral thesis focused on the legal concept of responsibility. He was struck by the fact that responsibility first arose between persons not as a law, but as an emotion – a deep-seated feeling. He argued that co-responsibility implies a bond between persons grounded less in reason than in the conditions of their emergence as persons. As children, individuals do not emerge out of nothing, but through deep engagement with prior persons – their caregivers. Thus, moral responsibility could not have arisen from adherence to norms or rules; rather, norms and rules emerged from the sense of responsibility that humans acquire as they become persons.
This led him to question how we become thinking beings. Do all humans, after all, think in the same way? He began reading the increasingly sophisticated ethnographic accounts emerging from Australia, Africa, Asia and South America, and was deeply influenced by an extended trip to China. He was an empirical realist, but also a personalist – that is, he accorded primacy to the person as such, refusing to subsume the individual into the group. In this respect, he was not persuaded by the arguments of the great sociologist Émile Durkheim concerning the exceptional status of the ‘sacred’ or the special powers of ‘collective consciousness’. Lévy-Bruhl soon arrived at a striking conclusion: in their everyday practices and especially in their ritual actions, the so-called ‘primitive’ peoples studied by ethnographers did not appear to conform to the norms of logic that had been regarded as universally valid since the time of Aristotle.
As a friend of his put it, Lévy-Bruhl discovered that such peoples are characterised by ‘a mystical mentality – full of the “supernatural in nature” and prelogic, of a different kind than ours’. Indeed, the basic principles of Aristotelian logic that continue to guide scientific thinking – underpinning modern technological development – seemed to be ignored by premodern peoples. Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle (p or not-p) did not appear to apply to their ‘mystical’ modes of thought, both because they tended to think in terms of concrete objects rather than abstractions, and because they exhibited what Lévy-Bruhl termed ‘participation’…
[de Pina Cabral traces the development of Lévy-Bruhl’s thought, starting with Plato’s concept of methexis; elaborates on Lévy-Bruhl’s ideas; and traces te advances in cognitive science and developmental psychology that support them…]
… the very experience of personhood – that is, the sense that I am myself – is not ‘individual’, since its emergence presupposes a prior condition of being-with others. The self arises from a sharing of being with others, from having been part of those who are close to us. One does not emerge as an addition to society, but rather as a partial separation from the participations that initially constituted one’s being.
As I become a person, I learn to relate to myself as an other; I transcend my immediate position in the world. Without this, I would not be able to speak a language, since the use of pronouns presupposes reflexive thought. Thus, as Lévy-Bruhl had already insisted in his notebooks, participation precedes the person. Intersubjectivity is not the meeting of already constituted subjects, but the ground from which subjectivity emerges. Participation, therefore, may be understood as the constitutive tension between the singular and the plural in the formation of the person in the world. In 1935, the great phenomenologist Edmund Husserl expressed this insight clearly in a letter to Lévy-Bruhl where he thanked him for his ideas on participation:
Saying ‘I’ and ‘we’, [persons] find themselves as members of families, associations, [socialities], as living ‘together’, exerting an influence on and suffering from their world – the world that has sense and reality for them, through their intentional life, their experiencing, thinking, [and] valuing.
In acting and being acted upon together in human company during the first year of life, children become ‘we’ at the same time as they become ‘I’, which means that persons are always, ambivalently, both ‘I’ and ‘we’. Participation and transcendence will remain sources of theoretical perplexity for as long as the ‘we’ is approached as a categorical matter – a question of ‘identity’ – rather than as the presence and activity of living persons in dynamic interaction with the world and with one another.
By contrast, once we accept that personhood is the outcome of a process – the encounter between the embodied capacities of human beings and the historically constituted world that surrounds them – participation loses its mystery. As Lévy-Bruhl put it in one of his final notes: ‘The impossibility for the individual to separate within himself what would be properly him and what he participates in in order to exist …’ Participation, therefore, is the ground upon which everyday social interaction is constituted. The ‘mystical’ (or transcendental) potential within each of us – that which animates the symbolic life of groups – is part of the very process through which each of us becomes ourselves…
How does one become a person? “We” before “I”: “To be is to participate,” from @aeon.co.
A (if not the) next question: how does personhood emerge when the formative interactions are increasingly mediated/attentuated by technology?
* Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, Act 4, Scene 3
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As we get together, we might send behaviorist birthday greetings to a man whose work focused on how one might train the “persons” who emerge: Kenneth Spence; he was born on this date in 1907. A psychologist, he worked to construct a comprehensive theory of behavior to encompass conditioning and other simple forms of learning and behavior modification.
Spence attempted to establish a precise, mathematical formulation to describe the acquisition of learned behavior, trying to measure simple learned behaviors (e.g., salivating in anticipation of eating). Much of his research focused on classically conditioned, easily measured, eye-blinking behavior in relation to anxiety and other factors.
One of the leading theorists of his time, Spence was the most cited psychologist in the 14 most influential psychology journals in the last six years of his life (1962 – 1967). A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Spence as the 62nd most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
“The violence of positivity does not deprive, it saturates; it does not exclude, it exhausts”*…
Scheduling note: your correspondent is hitting the road again, so regular service will be interrupted; it should resume on Friday the 7th…
Author and psychoanalyst Josh Cohen on Byung-Chul Han’s critiques of digital capitalism…
I came across Byung-Chul Han towards the end of the previous decade, while writing a book about the pleasures and discontents of inactivity. My first researches into our culture of overwork and perpetual stimulation soon turned up Han’s The Burnout Society, first published in German in 2010. Han’s descriptions of neoliberalism’s culture of exhaustion hit me with that rare but unmistakable alloy of gratitude and resentment aroused when someone else’s thinking gives precise and fully formed expression to one’s own fumbling intuitions.
At the heart of Han’s conception of a burnout society (Müdigkeitsgesellschaft) is a new paradigm of domination. The industrial society’s worker internalises the imperative to work harder in the form of superego guilt. Sigmund Freud’s superego, a hostile overseer persecuting us from within, comes into being when the infantile psyche internalises the forbidding parent. In other words, the superego has its origin in figures external to us, so that, when it tells us what to do, it is as though we are hearing an order from someone else. The achievement society of our time, Han argues, runs not on superego guilt but ego-ideal positivity – not from a ‘you must’ but a ‘you can’. The ego-ideal is that image of our own perfection once reflected to our infantile selves by our parents’ adoring gaze. It lives in us not as a persecutory other but as a kind of higher version of oneself, a voice of relentless encouragement to do and be more.
With this triumph of positivity, the roughness of the demanding boss gives way to the smoothness (a key Han term) of the relentlessly encouraging coach. On this view, depression is the definitive malaise of the achievement society: the effect of being always made to feel that we’re running hopelessly behind our own ego-ideal, exhausting ourselves in the process.
The figure of the achievement subject gives rise to some of Han’s most vivid evocations of psychic and bodily debilitation:
The exhausted, depressive achievement-subject grinds itself down … It is tired, exhausted by itself, and at war with itself. Entirely incapable of stepping outward, of standing outside itself, of relying on the Other, on the world, it locks its jaws on itself; paradoxically, this leads the self to hollow and empty out. It wears out in a rat race it runs against itself…
… Han’s critique of contemporary life centres on its fetish of transparency; the compulsion to self-exposure driven by social media and fleeting celebrity culture; the reduction of selfhood to a series of positive data-points; and the accompanying hostility to the opacity and strangeness of the human being…
… Under the rule of digital capitalism, time itself is severed from any ‘narrative or teleological tension’, that is, from any discernible purpose or meaning, and so, like the digital paintings in an immersive show, it ‘disintegrates into points which whizz around without any sense of direction.’ In such a regime of time, there is no possibility of Erfahrung, which depends on a sense of narrative continuum and duration. There is only the proliferation of its pale counterpart Erlebnis: the discrete event that ‘amuses rather than transforms’, as Han would later put it in The Palliative Society…
… Because power so often involves coercion, Han argues, there has been a tendency to see them as inextricable. But it is only when power is poor in mediation, felt as alien to our own lives and interests, that it resorts to threatened or actual violence. Whereas when power is at the ‘highest point of mediation’ – when it seems to speak from a recognition of its subjects’ needs and desires – it is more likely to receive those subjects’ willing consent. One could conceive of a power, therefore, that has no sanctions at its disposal, but which is nonetheless rendered absolute by its subjects’ full identification with it.
The less it relies on the threat of punitive measures to back it up, the more power maximises itself. ‘An absolute power,’ writes Han, ‘would be one that never became apparent, never pointed to itself, one that rather blended completely into what goes without saying.’ This is precisely what happens in digital capitalism’s burnout society, where the power of capital consists not in its power to oppress but in the voluntary surrender of its subjects to their own exploitation.
Han draws on the German-American theologian Paul Tillich’s conception of power as ipsocentric, that is, as Han puts it, centred around ‘a self whose intentionality consists of willing-itself’, cultivating and bolstering its own status. God is the ultimate embodiment of power because, in the words of G W F Hegel, ‘he is the power to be Himself’. This will to persist in one’s own existence, to cling to one’s own selfhood, is the basic premise of the Western mode of being. We can discern it at work in the empty narcissism of social media and the culture of self-display in which we’re all enjoined to participate. Self-exploitation is, in a sense, a twisted variant on the Cartesian cogito: I am seen therefore I am. In making myself perpetually visible, I may empty myself out, lose the last vestiges of my interiority. But, in cleaving to the bare bones of a self-image, some form of my existence survives.
The fundamental basis of this erosion of meaningful experience, argues Han, is felt at the level of temporality. The accelerated time of digital capitalism effectively abolishes the practice of ‘contemplative lingering’. Life is felt not as a temporal continuum but as a discontinuous pile-up of sensations crowding in on each other. One of the more egregious consequences of this new temporal regime is the atomisation of social relations, as other people are reduced to interchangeable specks in the same sensory pile-up. Trust between people, grounded in both the assumption of mutual continuity and reliability, and in a sense of knowing the other as singular and distinct, is inexorably corroded: ‘Social practices such as promising, fidelity or commitment, which are temporal practices in the sense that they commit to a future and thus limit the horizon of the future, thus founding duration, are losing all their importance.’…
Consumer culture, with its compulsion for novelty and perpetual stimulation, likewise erodes the bonds of shared experience that engender meaningful narratives. The fire around which human beings would once have gathered to hear stories has been displaced by the digital screen, ‘which separates people as individual consumers.’ Time, love, art, work, narrative; these are the key zones of experience hollowed out by the disintegrative logic of digital capitalism. Each is a rich store of transformative encounter, or Ehrfahrung, which the ‘non-time’ of the present has reduced to empty instances of Erlebnis…
How the “suffocating system” of digital capital creates hollowed-out lives: “The winter of civilization,” the thought of @byungchulhan.bsky.social in @aeon.co. Eminently worth reading in full.
* Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society
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As we analyze ambition, we might send careful birthday greeting to Charles Ponzi; he was born on this date in 1882. A con artist, he swindled his way across Canada and the U.S. in the early 1920s, promising clients a 50% profit within 45 days or 100% profit within 90 days, by buying discounted postal reply coupons in other countries and redeeming them at face value in the U.S. as a form of arbitrage. In reality, Ponzi was paying earlier investors using the investments of later investors. While this type of fraudulent investment scheme wasn’t invented by Ponzi, it became so identified with him that it now is referred to as a “Ponzi scheme“. The scam for which he’s known ran for over a year before it collapsed, costing his “investors” $20 million (over $300 million at current value).
Ponzi schemes have grown since Ponzi’s time (Bernie Madoff‘s version is estimated to have totalled around $65 billion) and are alive and well in the U.S.
“What’s in a name?”*…
… maybe, Roger’s Bacon suggests, more than we typically think…
An aptronym is when a person has a name that is uniquely suited to its owner. Some examples:
- Usain Bolt, the fastest human ever
- Mark De Man, Belgian football defender
- William Headline, Washington Bureau Chief for CNN
- Marijuana Pepsi Vandyck, American education professional with a dissertation on uncommon African-American names in the classroom
- William Wordsworth, poet
- Philander Rodman, father of basketball player Dennis Rodman, who fathered 26 children by 16 mothers
- Sue Yoo, attorney
And of course there are also inaptronyms:
- Rob Banks, a British police officer
- Don Black, white supremacist
- Robin Mahfood, President and CEO of Food for the Poor
- I.C. Notting, an ophthalmologist at Leiden University
Maybe this is all coincidence, or maybe it’s nominative determinism, the hypothesis that people tend to gravitate towards areas of work that fit their names (an idea captured in the ancient Roman proverb “nomen est omen” meaning “the name is the sign”). Psychologist Lawrence Casler proposed three possible explanations for nominative determinism: one’s self-image and self-expectation being internally influenced by one’s name; the name acting as a social stimulus, creating expectations in others that are then communicated to the individual; and genetics—attributes suited to a particular career being passed down the generations alongside the appropriate occupational surname.
But does nominative determinism actually exist—are people with occupation-related names over-represented in those occupations?…
[RB considers the evidence… then ponders a more fundamental issue: “the virtually universal practice of assigning a permanent name at birth”…]
… When naming conventions are created by governments and for governments, they favor legibility and as a consequence, individuality and stability of identity. In my brief heretical statement, I suggested that our modern naming conventions have caused a species-wide shift towards a more narcissistic and egotistical mode of being. Maybe this goes too far (or not far enough…), but the more general idea is that personal nomenclature is never value neutral and never without cultural and psychological ramifications. In other words, we shouldn’t be surprised that our culture has become sterile, stagnant, and individualistic to a fault when those values are embedded in the way we name ourselves.
The global hegemony of governmentally-developed naming systems has crippled our imagination by removing alternative models of nomenclature…
[He considers alternatives with examples from New Guinean and Native American cultures…]
… Naming systems are reflections of a culture’s values, but, as I’ve argued, it’s a two-way street—the way we name ourselves reinforces these values and frames how we think about ourselves and the world around us. When legibility, individuality, and stability of identity are the master values of our personal nomenclature, of course we will look for legible, de-personalized solutions (e.g. technology, laws, governmental programs) to society’s ills (environmental degradation, social isolation and loss of community, mental health and addiction, to name just a few). These solutions are only partial and always will be because they don’t get to the root of the problem: ourselves—who we are as people, what we value, and how we think. There is no shortcut to profound personal change, but a first step in the right direction might make all the difference—if we want to be the kind of people who value community and the natural world and who believe that people can grow and then perhaps we should name ourselves in a way that inspires us to be those kind of people…
A provocative challenge to the way we name ourselves: “Nomen est Omen,” from @RogersBacon1.
* Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
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As we dig into denotation, we might note that today is a red-letter day for another of the descriptors of our idenitities, one with increasing importance (at least unless we use trustworthy password managers or come up with a better system): it’s Change Your Password Day.
“The bond of our common humanity is stronger than the divisiveness of our fears and prejudices”*…
Inanna Hamati-Ataya on the importance of understanding our place in the world…
In the 1990s, an entire generation was robbed of its historical consciousness by a powerful and seemingly unprecedented tale. This story, crafted as the Cold War came to an end, declared that real or imagined boundaries had stopped working as they once had. Humans were no longer contained within their old geographies or identities. They now inhabited a new world that appeared to be unhinged from the normal evolution of human society.
The concept chosen to capture this transformational moment in human history was ‘globalisation’. It described how new technologies and networks of connectivity had suddenly brought human communities closer together and made them permeable to an uncontrollable flow of people, ideas, goods and cultural practices, which all moved freely across the integrated markets of the world economy. In the wake of this transformation, new jargon emerged, expressing new anxieties: the world had truly become the ‘global village’ that Marshall McLuhan anticipated in the 1960s, but it was a world shaped by multinational corporations and ‘elite globalisers’, who spoke a common, hegemonic ‘global English’, and were spearheading a destructive ‘homogenisation’ (or ‘McDonaldisation’) of human cultures that national borders were too fragile to withstand.
During the past three decades, more people have begun viewing our ‘global’ world as a cursed fate. With its suffocating time-space compression, globalisation seems to have uncoupled us from the logic and flow of history. Our suspicious, bastard identities – patched together from a mishmash of cultures – appear incompatible with our ancestors’ ‘authentic’ traditions and ways of life. We have become strangers to the places they called home, to the ways they dressed, ate or communicated with one another. And, with no template for how to live and no experience to learn from, the deafening siren songs of anti-globalisation movements are now luring us back into the safer identities and boundaries of a lost, golden past.
This tale of globalisation is the most successful scare story of our times. And like all scare stories, it stimulates our fear of an overwhelming unknown.
But it’s all an illusion. There is no new global world.
Our present appears that way only because we have forgotten our common past. Globalisation didn’t begin in the 1990s, or even in the past millennia. Remembering this older shared history is a path to a different tale, which begins much, much earlier – long before the arrival of international supply chains, ocean-going sailing ships, and continent-spanning silk roads. The tale of globalisation is written across human history. So why do we keep getting the story so wrong?…
[She unpacks the answer to her questions, then turns to it implications…]
… In our own contemporary era, anti-globalisation movements have recently shifted from the far Left to the far Right of national and global politics. Justified resentment against the locally experienced injustices of the global economy and the growing disruptive effect of global climate change are now couched in resentment for the social and cultural dimensions of globalisation. Identitarianism, a political ideology that stresses the preservation of narrowly conceived ‘Western’ ethnicities and cultures, has accordingly become the easiest and most efficient strategy to mobilise local grievances, and direct them at whatever is perceived as a threat to the wellbeing of those suffering within. The ugly age of nationalism is back.
Is nationalist identitarianism the ethos we will now deploy to confront the common existential threats that await us in the coming century? Why wouldn’t it be? Does anyone doubt that national borders will be turned, once again, into sacred physical boundaries and fiercely defended against those fleeing the environmental, economic or military devastation of their homes? Do we doubt that eloquent voices animated by the most (ig)noble intentions will rise to justify patriotic bullets being aimed at ‘alien migrants’ and climate refugees? And that leaders will say these displaced people cannot be accommodated because of their numbers and cultures, and the threat they pose to our secure lives – to our ‘identity’?
Such scenarios are far too likely given the rise of xenophobic worldviews, such as the conspiratorial idea of a ‘Great Replacement’, in which elites – imagined to be Jews and other minorities – have begun executing a plan to replace so-called indigenous white Europeans with other populations of apparently greater and threatening reproductive vitality. These racialist worldviews dangerously converge with a public misunderstanding of ‘race’ as reflected in the recent craze for DNA ‘ancestry tests’. DNA has little to do with ‘identity’, as social and political ideologies have constructed it, and much to do with physical and social geography. Our genes are a result of human adaptive mobility, and the journeys, rich encounters and kin-making that our freedom of movement made possible over tens of thousands of years. Our genome does not tell our whole story, but the story it does tell shows how past globalisations made us what we are today.
As we search for ways of communing with one another beyond the stubborn ideology of difference, we should also prepare for vicious future distortions and manipulations of our current scientific and historical understanding of identity. Some humans today carry a few genes that their Pleistocene ancestors inherited from intercourse with our Eurasian Neanderthalian and Denisovan cousins, whom some communities of Homo sapiens encountered on their journeys of cosmopolitan expansion. How might such a genetic difference among us be interpreted and used in the future by those intent on pursuing identitarianism to its silliest or most murderous conclusions? Might they declare that some humans are not ‘pure’ enough to enjoy the full freedom, security and dignity we recognise as the natural rights of humankind? Or might they, on the contrary, elevate the Neanderthalian or Denisovan gene as a marker of Eurasian ‘distinction’ to recreate narratives of racial superiority, similar to those that once plagued archaeological thinking about the allegedly more ‘advanced’ nature of those human fossils laying the farthest away from the species’ original African homes?
Palaeontologists who insist on ascribing the label ‘humans’ to the entire Homo genus while reserving that of ‘modern humans’ to the surviving representatives of the lineage (ie, us) probably understand better than most the dangers of ideological manipulations of scientific taxonomies. But in the open marketplace where ideas freely flow in the name of freedom of thought and expression, how can we protect ourselves and one another from such dangers, if we still perceive plurality as a threat to survival, and cannot see the richness of our shared human culture?
The wars we wage against one another are all civil wars. Until we recognise them as such, they will remain tragedies we accept as natural – or horrors we cheer on in the name of grand notions sold to us by loud voices who know our fears too well (and know too little of the richness of our world and our history). We have always been global, and this is our shared identity. It is our unique way of being and remaining in the world as one family. Whatever we cherish in our humanity and culture has been crafted by our global journeys and encounters. Through them, we will continue to write the story of how we become us…
All of our religions, stories, languages, and norms were muddled and mixed through mobility and exchange throughout history: “There are no pure cultures,” from @berytia.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
Still, as Venkatesh Rao reminds us, the “vacuous over-large abstractions like “globalization” make us underestimate the horizontal historicity of the world.”
* Jimmy Carter
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As we go with the flow, we might recall that it was on this date in 1690 (or so musicologists believe) that Johann Christoph Denner, inspired by a reeded recorder-like instrument called the chalumeau, designed and created a longer and keyed (so more widely-ranged) instrument that was quickly copied and modified by other makers– and became what we know as the clarinet. By 1791, Mozart was composing for the instrument; by Beethoven’s time, the clarinet was a staple member in the orchestra.
To the point of the essay above, it’s worth noting that the chalumeau– and thus the clarinet– were direct descendants of ancient Greek and ancient Egyptian reeded pipes… that may themselves have been modeled on similar instruments from Central and East Asia.
The clarinet, as depicted in Diderot’s Encyclopedia, 1776 (source)
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