The Tribes Are Back

[NATO AIR]

globalization is a crock for most

http://www.nypost.com/php/pfriendly...post.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/67901.htm



THE TRIBES ARE BACK
By RALPH PETERS

May 3, 2006 -- WHEN pop bestsellers tell you something's bound to happen, bet on the opposite result. Now globalization is supposed make our values and tastes converge: Nascar Americans and Islamist terrorists will come to their senses and give each other a hug.

Don't believe it for an instant. What we're really witnessing, from Europe through the Middle East and Africa to Latin America, is the reassertion of local identities and beliefs.

The tribes are back.

On a recent trip through West Africa, I saw how native religions persist - to the identical frustration of Christian evangelists and Islamist missionaries. In Indonesia a few years earlier, I met "Muslims" clinging to beliefs whose roots pre-dated Islam. From Sulawesi to Sonora, "Christian" practices aren't always Vatican-approved.

In every case, the tenacity of local traditions defeated global models.

Even in Europe - the continent that supposedly was marching at the double-quick toward complete homogenization - recent votes, protests and legislation reinforced national identities (and for Basques, Welsh and Piedmontese, an even narrower one).

Rather than making the masses feel connected (on the Internet or otherwise), the tempest of forces we lump together as "globalization" leave men and women around the world feeling threatened and disoriented. In consequence, they turn to what they trust: exclusive identities, local beliefs and fundamentalist religion.

The heralds of "ice-cream-sundae globalization" - the notion that trade, connectivity and converging tastes will lead the world to realize humanity's common interests - aren't at the cutting edge of thought. They're 30 years behind the times.

The golden age of globalization theory passed in the late 1960s and 1970s, when campus commissars insisted that tribes didn't exist and nationality was an artificial construct, that such "assigned identities" were imperial Europe's inventions, that humanity's true beacons of hope shone in Third-World dictatorships.

The intellectual porn of left-wing fantasies foresaw the defeat of capitalism and the rise of the new, liberated, post-national man. All that's left are Che Guevara t-shirts and the dead of Srebrenica, Cambodia, Rwanda and dozens of other tributes to human solidarity.

Yet the pop prophets are still calling this one wrong. Why? The answer's straightforward: When they travel the world, they interview their own kind, other journalists or academics, government officials and successful businessmen who can afford a plasma TV, a Mercedes-Benz and Johnny Walker Blue.

What the globalist prophets are witnessing isn't the convergence of the masses for a chorus of "We are the world," but the rise of a new, globe-spanning aristocracy. Their books describe the golden crust on the half-baked human loaf.

What's stunning is how old patterns refuse to disappear. You see it not only in the stubborn persistence of Flemish or Baluchi identity, but also in the retreat of the new aristocrats behind their castle walls, from guarded compounds in Bangalore to ranches in Jackson Hole.

Just as yesteryear's aristos did, today's nobility of wealth and culture see themselves as above nationality. Patriotism is fodder for the peasants (unless it can be exploited for profit). They have far more in common with business partners across the globe than with the guy who fixes their plumbing. They intermarry across borders and forge alliances based on their own interests - as the Tudors, Valois and Medici did before them.

This new aristocracy is less attached to a passport than to a lifestyle. As for those who can't afford the price of admission, let 'em eat cake.

There is, indeed, a globalizing class. But the emergence of that super-class doesn't portend the globalization of humanity. For the masses, the flight from flags isn't toward a new borderless meta-identity, but back into old, enduring associations: tribe, faith, family - and bigotry.

As for those tribes that the professors insisted didn't really exist, go to Africa (or Iraq) and ask people who they are. Nineteen times out of 20, they'll respond with the name of their tribe: Kikuyu, Asante, Fulani, Igbo, rather than Kenyan, Ghanaian, Senegalese or Nigerian. Elsewhere, people no longer want to be Spaniards or British or Turks, but Catalans, Scots and Kurds.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, in Pakistan and Burma/Myanmar, in Sudan, Congo and Bolivia, old, deeply rooted identities trump those assigned by European boundary commissions. Owning a laptop or satellite dish won't make an ethnic or religious zealot a benign citizen of the world.

Globalization as we know it has not encouraged a sense of common humanity among the masses - only a sense of common interests among the new aristocracy (with no sense of noblesse oblige). For the billions left outside the gated communities, globalization has excited fear and revived old hatreds: It's revelry for the rich, rivalry for the poor.

Even in our own society - the best-positioned in the world to profit from globalization - there's a worrisome divide between the multinational executive who retires with a $400 million farewell smooch (and who naturally supports globalizing trade), and the worker maxing out a credit card to pay for a tank of gas - to whom globalization means a threatened job, even if it also means cheaper underwear.

Perhaps "the poor will always be with us." But globalization rubs their faces in it. That's hardly a prescription for peace in our time.

The point isn't that globalization is good or bad - it's both - but that it's vastly oversold when it comes to reforming human character and weakening group identities. Along with commercial integration, we get social fragmentation. In Europe, Africa and the Middle East, the sense of "who I am" now more closely resembles that of the 15th century than the 20th century.

As for those bestsellers promising that the Dow's about to soar to 36,000, or that we've seen the "end of history," or that the world is flat and becoming benign - well, if the authors put their money down on red, put yours on black.

Ralph Peters recently returned from his latest research trip to Africa.

 

[Annie]

http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000129.html

TRIBES

(Folks, there's R-rated language throughout this thing. Normally I can edit it out; this time, not so much. I may do so later, but now I want to leave it as I wrote it.)





I’m generally an optimist, and it’s been my pleasure to be able to write mostly about the good and the noble things in our lives. But the events in the Gulf – of Mexico – have brought to a head a summer and a year that has been getting progressively uglier and more painful to watch.

Who can not see the way the country has changed, not since 9/11, but before that – since the 2000 election? Who cannot feel the split, the division, that rips like a shredding sail on a broken mast, canvas tearing like the sound of musketry, as the rigging falls to the deck?

This breaks my heart. It just breaks my heart into little pieces. I have said less and less as I see more and more, because deep in my core I still don’t want to believe that some Americans could willfully and consistently do such destructive things out of such petty and base motivations, things which in time will make the horrors of New Orleans look like a flea circus in a small tent, with the much larger carnival raging unseen in the background.

I’ve taken sides in these essays, obviously – that’s what I do. But I have never, until now, felt the need to take the gloves off and really let fly. I always feared I would regret it, later. I still do. Only now, I fear I will regret it worse if I do not.

So now we must look at Tribes....