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Globalisation
as a Context
Summary of the first Chapter of “The New
Catholicity”
by Robert J
The Context
1.
Politics:
Shift from a bi-polar (First and Second Worlds – capitalist and communist) to a
multi-polar world – explaining
politics in dyads of opposition or even dialectically has become much more
difficult. The world has become a
multi-polar place that no-one has yet been able to successfully map.
2.
Economics: A
single world economy – the collapse
of state socialism has allowed the expansion of market capitalism which ignores
national boundaries in the swift movement of capital and its engagement in
short-term projects which maximise profit.
Like the political world the economic world is now also multi-polar. If
there is a new bipolarisation it is not capitalist-socialist, nor even
North-South, but rich and poor – those who profit from global capitalism and
those who are excluded. With the end of
socialism it now becomes increasingly difficult to imagine alternative social
and economic forms that can co-exist with global capitalism.
3.
Communication:
global communication is now instantaneous. Air travel makes the movement of persons and
cargo easy, swift and inexpensive. The
communication revolution has changed how
we think of time and space. It makes
possible a networking that
increasingly excludes traditional hierarchical control: networking has replaced
hierarchy as a social model for communication.
Increased travel and migration has reconfigured societies resulting in
both conflict and new possibilities.
A definition: globalisation is the extension of the effects of modernity to the entire world and the compression of time and space, all
occurring at the same time.
Extension of the effects of modernity:
·
Positively –
increased material prosperity, better health care, expanded opportunities for
formal education, increase in personal freedom and individuality, liberation
from many traditional constraints.
·
Negatively –
materialism, personhood defined by the capacity to produce and consume material
goods, erosion or relativisation of values, anomic
individualism
Values:
·
Innovation
connotes improvement, but without clear goals becomes change for change sake,
or to create new markets and stimulate new desires.
·
Efficiency can
mean less drudgery, but efficiency without effectiveness can become narrow,
abstract and even deadly.
·
Technical rationality can provide clear purpose and procedure, but it can
also become profoundly de-humanising.
Ideals:
Neither
values nor ideals lead to a better society in and of themselves. Larger questions about the goal or teleos of
society must be answered.
Modernity
promised greater autonomy but exacts greater costs in terms of traditional
values and relationships. Thus people
feel an ambivalence when confronted with the maelstrom
of globalisation. It is in this context
of ambivalence that we must theologise – this force-field in which people are
both attracted to and repelled by modernity.
Homogenisation – heightened by a hyperculture
based on consumption and marked by icons of consumption from the most powerful
of the homogenising cultures, the
Compression of time and space:
Technological innovations
compress both our sense of time and our sense of space. Events happening around the world are now
experienced instantaneously. We
participate in world history as never before – now through CNN,
Our sense of space is also
compressed – symbolised by the computer chip.
Boundaries between states become increasingly insignificant in the
global flow of information and capital.
New federations (EU) and trading blocks undercut claims of the
sovereignty of the state. Movement of
peoples in search of the benefits of modernisation makes the meaning of home as
an ancestral place less significant.
The Global and the Local
While global forces shape the
local situation, the local is not some inert, passive object upon which
globalisation plays itself out. There is not a simple global replication of
western modernity, but a generation of plural modernities, that may
resemble the western variety yet remain distinct. Much of the tension, conflict and struggle
that globalisation generates grows out of the resistance that the local is able
to muster. The local situation can
seldom keep globalising forces out altogether (and frequently does not want to
– ambivalence) and so it is inevitably changed by the encounter. The line of encounter between the global and
the local, what Roland Robertson calls “glocalisation”,
is the privileged place for theologising and reflecting on the effects of
globalisation.
Reflexivity and Risk
Globalisation is not a
process that affects only the periphery or other still untouched areas. It also affects the west itself in a process
of reflexivity whereby the outflowing of the effects
of modernisation curve back on the west.
This is most evident in the influx of former colonial people into European
countries, creating multicultural societies in previously monocultural
ones. But what reflexivity brings as
well is a sense of contingency or risk that has long been experienced by
countries on the periphery – risks caused by pharmaceuticals, chemical
accidents and the terrorist attacks of those profoundly opposed to the inroads
that modernity has made into traditional societies. This reflexivity is one way to explain the
emergence of postmodernism in the West – the fact that the west now faces the
same kinds of ambivalences or contradictions felt by the rest of the world. These experiences undermine any master narrative
of what society can be counted on to be.