| 8:31a |
Discussing globalization; part two...
Suppose we accept, for the sake of discussion, the proposition that globalization is going to happen, barring some global cataclysm that wipes out humankind or shoves us precipitously back a few centuries. If that's stipulated, then the most frustrating aspect of the globalization controversy for me -- whether we're talking about Globalization A or Globalization B or Globalization X -- is having no way to know what the consequences of any steps I might take, or might help others take, will have in that context. I don't even know the answer to what I perceive as the most basic question for predicting (however tentatively) those consequences, which is:
Is it better for globalization to take place as fast as possible, no matter how messy and painful that may be -- or would it be better for it to happen in small careful increments with constant adjustments being made at every stage along the way?
Here we are, living in a world where the U.S. government is desperately taking actions based on a determination that when globalization is complete the United States will still be the "only superpower" standing, including the only superpower standing in space.... And I don't even know the answer to that most basic question. How, in that state of ignorance, do I decide whether I should shop at Wal-Mart or not? whether I should buy only local produce or not? whether I should continue contributing to Heifer International or not? and a score of other questions that relate to my personal participation in the globalization process? I don't believe in the "I'm only one person, and nothing I do could possibly matter, so I don't need to worry about it" hypothesis. It would be helpful, therefore, to have some rough idea about what I should be doing.
I keep thinking -- because I'm seventy, I suppose -- about what it must have been like when the U.S. was in the throes of switching from horse-and-carriage/wagon transportation to car/truck/bus transportation.[I'm old enough to remember living in a place where families still came into town to shop on Saturday night driving a horse and wagon, and where there were hitching racks and horse troughs all the way around the courthouse square, and instead of a garbage truck there was a garbage wagon pulled by a mule.]
There were tens of thousands of families who suddenly were faced with the loss of their income the way families hit by downsizing and outsourcing are today. If you made your living building carriages or wagons, or making saddles, or making buggy-whips, or hauling away horse dung from city streets, or working in any one of a thousand other aspects of that business domain, the coming of the automobile was economic disaster. And like globalization, it was going to happen, and there was no way to stop it, and it was adapt or else.
The basic economic assumption at the time was that the switch to cars and trucks and buses was a Good Thing. Painful and messy and chaotic, disastrous for many individuals, but a Good Thing for "Americans" as a whole, and -- eventually -- for humankind as a whole. It seemed obvious at the time -- self-evident. [There were of course dissenters, but the majority opinion was that it was self-evidently a Good Thing.]
Today I'm not so sure. That shift has given us 40,000 deaths a year on the highway and a multitude of injuries. It has been a major factor in the life-threatening pollution of the air we breathe and the rise of global warming. It has been a major factor in giving us Big Oil, and wars to keep Big Oil running. It has given us the suburbs, with no sidewalks and no neighborhoods, and the hour-or-more commute to work. It has given us the ability to go vast distances in a very short time, and with it the ability to easily move away from whatever messes we may have made instead of having to stay put and clean them up. Would it have been better not to make that shift? When we did it, we had no idea what the consequences were going to be. We just went blundering onward ... and here we are. Addicted to our cars and trucks and buses and oil.
We used to have the excuse of not having access to information on which to base our decisions about what it was best to do in situations of this kind. It seems to me that we don't have that excuse any longer, not with today's technology -- but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the idea that we're better equipped to make decisions and predictions is just an illusion? Every time we human beings come up with a new technology we start warbling about it being the advent of a new world; I'm sure we did that when we invented the wheel. Maybe I'm wrong, and we're just as ignorant as we ever were.
For sure I'm fretful. |