To sum up, if you could look down from the moon, as Menippus once did,
on the countless hordes of mortals, you’d think you saw a swarm of flies or
gnats quarrelling amongst themselves, fighting, plotting, stealing, playing,
making love, being born, growing old and dying.
It’s hard to believe how much trouble and tragedy this tiny little
creature can stir up, shortlived as he is, for sometimes a brief war or an
outbreak of plague can carry off and destroy many thousands at once.[i]
Erasmus, Praise of Folly, 1509
Erasmus, Praise of Folly, 1509
In his work The
Collapse of Globalism (2005) John Ralston Saul echoes the above passage
from Erasmus’s Praise of Folly when he points out that “One of the ideas that has been growing for some time
is that we are entering an era resembling the Middle Ages – the positive side
of the Middle Ages. This is a time when
the nature of borders and the definition of people are neither clear nor
exclusive. In many ways this was
Erasmus’s dream ….”[ii]. In other words, Europe in his day was “loose
but united”. Today the world is no
longer unipolar - despite Coca-Cola, McDonalds and Starbucks; rather, it is
interwoven.
Erasmus’s dream was revived in 1962 when the Marshall
McLuhan popularized the term “global village”.
In turn, he may have been inspired by our early astronauts and
cosmonauts, and, as we all were, by Neil Armstrong in 1969, who did look down
from the moon, joining Menippus. Within a
year or two of men on the moon, after digesting the pictures of earth from
space, implying man’s interconnectedness on this planet, we see the definite
emergence of globalization in the 1970’s, a period defined by stagflation, the
Energy Crisis, and dynamic change all at once.
Erasmus had anticipated the moon, when in his own day the
Portuguese rounded the horn of Africa to bring spices from India and silks from
China. And (of course) he wrote not long after Columbus’ success in the New
World. Improved technology and
subsequent trade slowly began to conquer space and time, as did trains and
telegraphs in the nineteenth century, a period significantly influenced by Adam
Smith and free trade, followed by the Internet and cell phones in our own age.
But today’s Globalism as the Middle Ages resonates with us
in other ways. We see for example in
China the rise of the Middle Kingdom. We
also see growing complexity, the need for reconciliation and compromise, and
other “middle type” concepts shared by our civilizational landmarks - namely our
philosophers Aristotle, Buddha and Confucius.[iii] We now also see borderless identities,
hybrids, transnationals, outsourcing and mass migrations – the latter perhaps a
reply to many “Crusades”.
The Middle Ages was prior to the formation of nation-states,
and so it reveals something of the predicament of nation-states in the period
of today’s globalism, particularly in permeable Europe, North America and
Australia. No nation is any longer autonomous.
The “will of the people” is also harder to find, or consolidate.[iv]
And a nation’s land and territory is
often open to different cultures – and dissimilar States. Perhaps the solution
is a continued form of federalism that reconciles the local particularity with
the cosmopolitan.[v] But, assuredly, economic globalism has aided the
emergence of both China and India which approximate a mind boggling one-third
of the world’s population. In other
words, this is a “plus” for global society, bringing us closer to the humanism
of Erasmus.
In 2005 John Ralston Saul predicted the collapse of
globalism, and he was perhaps at his most popular during the great recession
beginning in 2008, even considered a “prophet” by Time magazine. But globalism has not ended. Yes, the market metaphor has found real limits
– thankfully so, and yes technology and inexpensive labour feed consumerism,
among other things. But globalism has
taught us that the world is round, connected and interdependent – not “flat”,
as Saul’s even more long-winded nemesis Thomas Friedmann postulated, also in
2005, and this can only be good for mankind.[vi] Anywhere in the world men and women can use
technology to find, share or create knowledge; this brings people together –
and it brings freedom.
[i]
Erasmus, Praise of Folly, tr. Betty Radice, intro. by A.H.T. Levi
(Markham, Ontario: Penguin. 1988), p. 143.
[ii]
John Ralston Saul, The Collapse of
Globalism and the Reinvention of the Modern World (Toronto: Penguin, 2009),
p. 278.
[iii] See
Lou Marinoff, The Middle Way: Finding
Happiness in a World of Extremes (New York: Sterling, 2007).
[iv]
See Gurutz Jauregui Bereciartu, Decline
of the Nation-State, tr. William A. Douglass (Los Vegas: University of
Nevada Press, 1994), p. 104.
[v] Ibid., p. 166. See Gregory Jusdanis, The Necessary Nation (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 43ff.
[vi] See
Thomas L. Friedmann, The World is Flat: A
Brief History of the Twenty-first
Century. Updated (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2007).
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