The Culture of Liberty
Mario Vargas Llosa
I. Attacks Against Globalization:
Most of the world is incapable of resisting the invasion of cultural products from developed countries, more specifically, from the superpower, the US.
Threats: North American culture will impose itself;
standardize the world;
annihilate the richness of diverse cultures
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21st century colonies-caricatures modeled after the cultural norms of a new imperialism.
Imperialism, due its capital, will impose:
military might; scientific knowledge
language, and the ways of thinking, believing,
enjoying, and dreaming.
Threats: The world will loose its cultural and linguistic diversity.
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Results: Delirium of persecution, hatred toward the North American Giant..
The most notorious cases: France--government campaigns in defense of cultural identity. Fear of invasion by McDonald's, Pizza Huts, etc.; Fear of Hollywood movies, blue jeans, sneakers and T-shirts.
Countered by: Massive subsidies for local film industry;
Quotas requiring to show a certain number
of national films;
Limit the importation of movies from the US
Penalize for littering the language with Anglicisms (the Web sites); Assign a popular hero status to crusaders against North American culture.
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Mario Vargas Liosa argues: The unquestionable truth: this century will have less local color than the previous one; folkloric and ethnographical variety will disappear or confine itself to minority sectors; All countries experience this process, but it's dew not to globalization, but rather to modernization. True that modernization makes many forms of traditional life disappear.
The process is unavoidable, and spreads to totalitarian regimes, countries like Cuba, North Korea, and the former Soviet Union, no matter how hard they were trying to protect themselves from the "bad influence." Such cultural identity may only take these nations to prehistoric standards of living.
What are the basis for anti-globalization sentiments ?
The static conception of culture.
Historically, only primitive cultures remained unchanged over time.
The notion of "cultural identity" is dangerous; an artificial concept;
People that were born and live on the same territory, speak the same language, practice the same religions and customs--have a common denominator, but it can never define each one of them;
the concept of identity, when not employed on exclusively individual scale, is inherently reductionist; the notion of collective identity is a foundation for nationalism; individual differences prevail over collective traits; globalization extends to all citizens the possibility to construct their individual cultural identities through voluntary actions.
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One Continent's Two Histories.
Latin America--the best example of absurdity to establish collective identity.
Hispanists vs. indigenists.
Hispanists: Discovery &v Conquest; Spanish & Portuguese languages; adopting Christitanity, becoming part of Western Civilization;
Indigenists: identity is in pre-Hispanic cultures and civilizations; Monuments of architecture should be burned since they represent "anti-Peru" Western World--"suffocation and distortionary.
Both doctrines are equally sectarian, reductionist, and false. Seeking to impose a cultural identity on a people is equivalent to locking them in a prison and denying the most precious liberties. "Latin America has so many cultural identities that it's like not having one at all."
Local Voices, Global Reach
Fear of Americanization--ideological paranoia
With Globalization, English has become the general language of our time, as was Latin in the Middle Ages; the language of international communication;
at the expense of other languages? Increasingly interdependent world, need to assimilate to other cultures; the ability to speak several languages and navigate in other cultures;
Spanish: had traditional linguistic confines; 3 million speakers in the US.
Response to globalization: don't vaccinate your language against English,; learn Japanese, German, Russian, Mandarin;
the tendency will increase in the years to come!!!
Cultures don't need to be protected by customs and iron bars; they must live freely;
Globalization will not make local cultures disappear; all that is valuable and worthy of survival in local cultures will find a fertile ground in which to bloom.
Eg.: Renaissance of local/regional cultures Regional cultures reemerge in Spain;
Global Democracy in the World of McWorld: the role of Technology?
Wriston, Taffler talk about the emancipatory, democratic powers of new technologies that drive McWorld. Wriston argues that "information age is rapidly giving the power to the people..."
He's right that improved communication and information is improving democracy. From the time of the ancient Greeks, technical gadgets have been made to support democratization. Eg., in Athens machines randomized black and white balls for jury selection; democratized literacy during Renaissance, when everyone could read; compass and gunpowder; Radio, TV, computers, helped to spread literacy, political knowledge;
the information superhighway offers unlimited access to endless data banks and opinion exchange worldwide;
Electronic bulletin boards can link like-minded individuals around their common interests, and offer formats for community debates.
Video teleconferences allow local meetings to interact with similar meetings across the region, country, or different countries. Without sacrificing the personalization of face to face interaction. Interactive TV transforms the audience of passive consumers of entertainment into an active social discourse and political feedback.
Satellite dishes are spreading the unregulated information to information-starved consumers in China & Iran.
In combination, technologies open access to information by all; provide communication links across distances; telecommunication turned the entire globe into a global village (McLuhn).
Dangers:
Futuristic idealism must be treated with a certain skepticism. We can only speak of potentiality not of actuality.
home voting could further privatize politics and replace public debate with expression of personal prejudice;
Technologies are likely to impede and not to reinforce political currency;
Technologies:
BAD: Technologies possess monstrous potentialities.
Capability for unprecedented surveillance;
can be used to impede, manipulate, access information;
Technology is left for the market. The market has no particular interest in the civic possibilities of technology; It is likely to reinforce inequalities by making resource and income poor information poor as well; Computer literacy becomes as important as language literacy and is likely to become vital to civic literacy. The division of labor into analytical and production of goods and services also accelerates the growth of social inequality; reinforces the boundaries between the privileged and the rest.
Technology can became an instrument of repression as of liber ation; it can be both fried and enemy;
Pocock and Postman talk of the tyranny of technology over its makers, and call it "technopoly."
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Those who are skeptical of McWorld attack its pervasive materialism. Both, traditional advocates of moral Jihad against the West consumer culture, such as Solzhenitsin, and some of the harshest critics of Jihad, as Zbigniew Brzezinski who talks about West's permissive wealth, and "dynamic escalation of desire for material and sensual pleasure."
the problem is much the same in Nebraska and in the post-communist Russia.
McWorld-- consumption-driven markets and technocratic imperatives; hollowness as a foundation for a moral existence. Robert Putman, people start bowling alone.
To construct a new democracy, e.g. in Russia or Somalia, is sufficient to export prefabricated constitutions and made-to-order parliamentary systems.
But: people corrupt by tribalism and numbed by McWorld are no more ready for prefabricated democracy than a people emerging for a long history of despotism and tyranny.