Most people acknowledge that human beings are essentially the same wherever we live on earth. Yet there’s also a strong belief that ethnic and cultural differences are primary, and that universality is a western construct.
It cannot be both — people are either essentially the same, and cultural differences are secondary; or cultural differences are primary, and people are different in different places.
For the United States and its Western allies, universality meant, until the Trump era, “the expansion of a liberal, rules-based international order” largely made in America after World War II.
That model became inadequate to the point of being harmful in a globalized world. But rather than think creatively about the future of humanity, China and Russia are reverting to 19th century forms of nationalism. Meanwhile, America sticks to its “indispensible nation” bullshit even more, lately using its obscenely bloated military to invade and bomb other nations at the whim of a deranged and demented president.
The United States helped pave the way for the current economic world war (which could explode militarily again at any moment) after decades of the hubristic, triumphalist notion that “we won the Cold War.”
In fact, both the USSR and the US lost the Cold War, just in different ways. The American intelligentsia still hasn’t acknowledged that truth, and so right-wing extremism has fully taken over, root and branch, in the USA.
The problem is not globalization, but the dominance of the kind of globalization that the United States and Western Europe promoted, and that China has bought into economically by embracing capitalism.
Now the forces of fragmentation are, to put it mildly, ascendant at home and abroad. Commentators are proclaiming “an end to globalization.” Our interconnectedness isn’t reversible however.
Just as serious people didn’t subscribe to the idea of global convergence around a set of America’s supposedly universal values in the 1990’s, so too serious people don’t subscribe to “de-globalization” and a return to national interest in the 2020’s.
For one thing, and it is the first thing, man’s decimation of the earth is now fully globalized, and cannot be sectioned off into “spheres of influence,” as political pundits are so compulsively inclined to do.
For another, technology cannot be contained and controlled within national borders, despite China and Russia’s desperate attempts to do so. Information spills out and spills over, and technologies leak into and out of nationally controlled spaces. That’s especially true with AI.
The notion that “countries such as Britain are at risk of dependency on a handful of American companies with oligopolistic control over vital digital infrastructure” is a nonsensical future scenario. It manages to be both archaically nationalistic and purblind to the real and present dangers that AI poses to the human mind and society.
Alex Karp of the spy tech company Palantir comes across as a comic book supervillain, though his company is paid billions to do all kinds of insidious, Trojan horse things worldwide. But he’s right about “vacant and hollow pluralism.” It’s not an adequate response to the polycrisis at any level.
The idea that “Britain is destined to side with Washington in a world carved into Chinese and US spheres of digital influence” is naïve. Chatbots are already talking to each other, and will soon have Mythos’s hacking prowess, if they don’t already. Does anyone seriously think that national borders and national interests matter to them? Do they matter to transnational corporations?
The consensus of professors and pundits after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was that “Mr. Putin sent history into reverse.” But history hasn’t been sent into reverse. Rather, western illusions of progress — the “rules based international order” and capitalistic globalization — have been shattered by Russia’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine, Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and America’s military adventurism.
To my mind, human history is an intensifying cycle of crises, punctuated by lost opportunities to fundamentally change course. Since the Industrial Revolution, and especially in the Digital Age, man has not been ascending but descending, not evolving but devolving.
Psychologically, the darkness in human consciousness has been accumulating in inverse proportion to the advancement of science and technology. That is, man’s fragmentation is increasing outwardly as the endarkenment of human consciousness is increasing inwardly.
Now it’s both much more possible and much more necessary for a sufficient minority of people to emotionally perceive humankind as a whole. The right response is to awaken authentically universal perception and insight.
Like it or not, it’s one divided, disordered, violent human society now, and will continue to be so until there is a revolution in consciousness that changes the disastrous course of humankind.
It has been millennia in the making, growing more imperative and urgent with each turn of the wheel, each downward spin of the same basic patterns of self-interest, greed and power that have propelled the cycles of human history.
The idea that humans are essentially different in different cultures is patently false. Psychologically and emotionally, we are the same. Differences now can either make for diversity in the context of wholeness, or the continuation of the momentum of division, conflict and homogeneity.
So the problem is not universality, but western ideas about what universality means. Those ideas include personal freedom, national sovereignty and degraded democracy — the crumbling edifice built on the rotting foundation of the Enlightenment.
A worldview based on separate nation-states has led to global war as surely as the fragmenting human mind has led to the ecological precipice at which we stand.
“National interest” is a hideous thing, the fountainhead of conflict, colonialism and grotesque disparities of wealth. And “western values” have brought about a pervasive and palpable deadness in America and the West, which Putin, for one, is reacting to with delusions of a pre-revolutionary Russian Empire.
The core issue is tribalism, and its modern expression, nationalism. Tribalism is the universal, atavistic tendency to identify with a particular group, whether ethnic, religious or national, over the emotional realization of the actuality of human being.
Just as war is unchanged except for its technology of nukes and autonomous drones, man is the unchanged tribal creature scaled up to national identification. Whereas human beings emotionally belong to the entire planet and world.
Which species will prevail when man hits bottom, tribalistic man or the emerging human being? That’s up to us, the living generations.
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