Ch 2 Globalization. When the world is not enough.
‘There is the assumption that globalization is the continuation of the Christian civilizing project, and that whatever stands in the way is ‘oriental’ despotism, Muslim fundamentalism, etc. To this extent, globalization is counterpoised against the non-West in a mission of redemption and salvation.’ Eduardo Mandeita in Habermas’ Religion and Rationality.
Globalization= ‘a number of activities and processes related to historical developments in trading and capitalism that have been informed by neoliberal economics.’ (as opposed to Chinese or Japanese capitalism that some argue is less individualistic and more family network oriented.) But it is not only economics, it is also ‘ideologies of internationalism’, the ‘contraction of space and time’ and their impacts of society and politics. But it is inseparable from capitalism and the nation-states and liberal democracy that advocated it.
Globalism = ‘a worldview, a universal or global vision, intrinsic to certain ideologies (e.g., Marxism and Christianity), certain practices (e.g., missionizing and peacekeeping), or certain phenomena (e.g., the Internet and satellite television).’
‘The central argument of this chapter is that the historical development known as globalization is the product of a globalism issuing from Christian theology and its ecclesial history.’
Hayek (The Road to Serfdom), Friedman (Capitalism and Freedom) and Huntington all argue that capitalism is the only way to safeguard democratic freedom. But Ronald Inglehart has noted the shift in values that occurs as people cease having to worry about food and survival: from materialism to postmaterialism.
Postmaterialism is not anticonsumerism or asceticism. Postmaterialism is aware of labour costs etc but it is ‘fickle’, ‘a matter of consumer choice’, ‘subject to the rise and fall of economic prosperity’. We ‘actively desire to be ignorant’ about the labour conditions of who makes our clothes (for instance). Ward wants to root postmaterialism in a theology and metaphysics to make it more stable.
globalization and secularization are religious ideologies.
Christian and capitalist imperialism
Christianity encourages democracies to develop (Latin America in 70s and 80s, South Korea, Philippines; US and UK further back). Democracies favour neoliberal economics.
Christianity saw itself as the universalizing of Jewish salvation: God’s people were now open to Gentiles too. the pace of globalization increases as technology enables us to overcome territorial particularity. With Constantine ‘The imperial administrative and military networks provided Christianity with the technological means for expansion, the means for developing the universalist logic at the heart of its monotheistic credo.’ Our current globalization is based on the church’s maintaining of the infrastructures that the Roman empire left when it died. Charlemagne was crucial here.
Then Christianity was channelled into colonization and universalized into ‘religion’. In the 1400s ‘religion’ meant the different monastic orders, but it came to mean any worship/practices. Partly this was to allow a peace between them (essential to the emergence of liberal democracy). This generated a new anthropology of a universal human condition; this in turn founded humanism from which came liberalism and rights theories. Capitalism developed in Europe in which Christianity was the main ideology, so Christianity’s habits and views (e.g. on freedom, contracts, truth) laid the groundwork for capitalism.
92 ‘The secular eschatology of early Enlightenment liberal humanism now informed the visions for a world market. By “secular eschatology” I mean that the transcendent role of divine providence yielded to the purely immanent teleology of history and economics but the absolutism of the utopianism remained the same…’
Ward uses two elements of Marx’s analysis of capitalism. 1) ‘the process of producing commodities…dematerializes the world’ and ‘establishes the social world as an allegory’, because people relate to one another as owners and representatives of commodities. We are living a fiction without realizing it. 94 Marx wants to let us see objects only in their use value (re-materializing the social world), but this is also an illusion, a secularized messianic eschatological task. It can never happen.
2) commodities are idols or fetishes, part of a religious worldview that capitalism generates. Everything is subjected to the authority of money, which ‘disappears’ in that we don’t even think about it.
One of the roots of capitalism is desire, and it promises a version of freedom as ‘unfettered desire’, so that ‘the world is simply not enough.’ Capitalism, like Christianity, has no outside; both deal with the world but both are transcendental in ethos and ethics. For instance, brands/logos often float free of their specific products, so that, e.g., Nike means athletic perseverance and excellence rather than being a type of sporting footwear or clothing; or Disney means holidays, childhood, magic, Mickey Mouse, etc.
virtual immateriality
Capitalism, along with technology, is re-creating the world as a simulacrum, only better than the original; we have ‘real virtuality’. ‘We are deluded into believing that the world we have created in the West and participate in is real.’ But it depends on exploitation and waste. But the desires that want to believe in this fantasy are theological ones: we want heaven, we want to live like the Olympian gods, but we don’t want to wait.
Capitalism is about this unbounded freedom that doesn’t need to notice physical or cultural boundaries: we can drink Chilean wine, wearing Italian suits, on re-produced Shaker furniture made from Russian pine, etc. And we want everything instantly, which is partly why the internet is so popular. 102 the culmination of this is the desire ‘for total escape, full immersion…The logic of total escape culminates in death – death as oblivion.’ 103-4 This ‘culture of immateriality’ ties in with the ‘immaterial labour’ that Hardt and Negri describe in Multitude, based on social and working life modelled on networks. Immaterial labour is labour that produces information or texts, or affects the emotions (flight attendants or fast food workers who serve with a smile). And both fit perfectly with New Age spiritualities that are ‘hyperindividualist, self-interested, and vision oriented.’ (105). There is a ‘pursuit of the pure’, instantaneous and sublime.
Globalization as a cultural phenomenon relies on a ‘detraditionalized’ Christianity in six ways. 1) ‘a new vision of infinite freedom’, not relying on any person or locality. 2) ‘a belief in an eternal sustainability promising unlimited consumption.’ 3) globalization is seen as fated, inevitable.4) this force is dematerializing: note how money has been progressively dematerialized; this is assisted by the internet and the collapse of time and space. 5) ‘an all-encompassing worldview’, in which the whole world is connected and interdependent. 6) a moral vision that believes in the rejuvenation of the economy through work.
So globalization promotes a re-enchantment of the world, it undoes secularization, bringing religion back into the public sphere. Various people (Stiglitz, John Gray, etc) have recognised that the universally integrated world is an illusion. Yet as a myth shaping beliefs and desires and actions it remains powerful, despite the counterfactual evidence of its benefits.
Complex ironies
Neoliberal economics is actually not very free, because it has been so closely allied with neoconservative, authoritarian, top-down government. In fact, countries seek to be nodes of power with influence over other satellite countries; if they refuse and seek to maintain their national sovereignty they are seen as ‘rogue states’ and threats to world peace (e.g. Iran, North Korea, former Iraq). Yet neoliberals are meant to be fearful of big government, but why the do we have the massive extension of security and surveillance? Or gated communities? ‘Certain freedoms are being bought at the expense of other freedoms.’
There is a ‘structural analogy’ between aggressive marketing by transnationals and aggressive democracy by countries such as the G8. Capitalism needs new markets and this leads states to colonize other states as markets, either directly (invasion) or indirectly (loans that force dependency). Crises, fear and insecurities can all be good for business.
‘Globalization is transforming democracy, undermining what makes democracy flourish – a vigorous civil society.’
Questions
As with the previous chapter, Ward is mostly engaged in description rather than constructive work, so questions and comments that most immediately spring to mind are whether his various descriptions are accurate, whether he’s missing some important information, and so on.
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