Elephants and Globalization

When I read Thomas Freidman's book, The World is Flat, I was convinced that globalization is happening quickly, and that it is this incredible, wonderful thing that is enabling more people to have more opportunities than ever before!

However, one of the books I am reading for this class, Globalization: A Very Short Introduction, has helped to convince me to see both the positive and negative of globalization. This book is very unbiased towards the positive or negative of globalization. However, the facts show that some aspects of globalization are not so peachy. (Note: I have several thoughts for blogposts based on this book. I am only sorry I did not begin sharing this knowledge sooner in my reading of it.) The question I pose is, "Is Globalization Good or Bad?"

First of all, it is important to understand the definition of globalization, as this book defines it. Globalization, it claims, is a "set of social processes" that are weakening the importance of current national, geographical, and other boundaries to shift towards an eventual "globality", or a social condition of which "global economic, political, cultural, and environmental interconnections" render current borders and boundaries "irrelevant." To be sure, the book does not claim that "globality" is yet upon us, in fact it claims the world has not yet reached it. However, it claims that globalization is indeed occurring.

There is a lot of argument going on about how globalization is occurring, what is causing it, and in what ways is it occurring. The author, Manfred B. Steger, brilliantly compares globalization to the ancient Buddhist parable of the blind scholars. Basically some blind scholars did not know what an elephant looked like, so they each touched the elephant, attempting to gain a mental picture of the animal. Each of them touched a different part of the elephant, one claiming it was lively like a snake (trunk), one claiming it was like a huge, rough column (leg), one claiming it was like an artist's paintbrush (tail). Each held firmly to his own idea, because his scholarly reputation depended on the veracity of his findings. The point of this story is that globalization is like the elephant. It cannot be reduced to a single dimension, but it effects several dimensions, and each must be examined to have a good picture of globalization. This book covers the following dimensions of globalization: economic, political, cultural, and ecological.

In my following blogposts, I will cover each of these dimensions, and relate them to some of the ideas that have been discussed already. I believe there is no answer to the question I posed above because there are too many dimensions to lump globalization into a "good" or "bad" category. As for the individual dimensions, the answer still is not clear, but at least a discussion can be made.