The World is Not Flat

The Tom Friedman version of globalization is finished. And the real battle for the idea of national identity has started — in India. The world should watch carefully. The future of globalization depends on it.

For about two or three decades, most of my adult life that is, I grew up surrounded by the dizzying idea that one could belong everywhere.

When I started to study economics, one of the first lessons was that for most of human history the idea that people would progressively do better, earn more money, lead a better life with each generation, never mind in their own lifetime, was an astounding thought. No one expected this to happen, and it certainly did not happen, for most people. Expanding riches were meant only for the upper-classes, the aristocracy, in most cases.

Like economic mobility, mass physical mobility too is a relatively new concept. This idea that everyone, or seemingly everyone, would be able to go wherever they want, to whichever corner of the world they seek, would not be easily understood even by my parents’ generation who expected at best to travel to a few places, a few times.

With great transportation comes great theory, and so it came to pass that for many years it seemed that everyone was talking about being a ‘global citizen’, a life spent on air-crafts and airports, gazing presumably over a flat, or at the very least flattening, world.

If we all wore blue jeans, and ate at McDonald’s, surely, we would all be the same? And the never-ending flow of cash would sustain our common buoyancy forever — didn’t the bankers tell us that the idea was to better liquefy every asset and ‘democratize capital’?

By the time Lehmann Brothers came down, we knew the cost of such mindless liquidation, and today, through political movements around the world we are waking up to all those who don’t necessarily live from airport to airport, who don’t think the world has become flat.

Culture cannot be so easily transposed as shedding old clothes for new jeans after all. Places have meaning, they have time and stories stitched in them, geography is, in fact, history.

Related posts:

If a new shop is called 24/7 Don’t celebrate yet It might just have been opened on 24/7, the 24th day in July. The shop has all the yummy things I like to cook, Spices to make the food tastier…

Can you find out if a life insurance policy was put on a person’s life that recently passed away and foul play is suspected? Can you find out if a life insurance policy was put on a person’s life…

Lake Pend Oreille Toastmasters Club: 5:30 p.m., Sandpoint Library, 1407 Cedar St. Information: Debbie Ford, 208–283–9008 or Al-Anon Zoom meeting: Open to anyone concerned. “I’m standing out in the…