Opinion Sur
The de-globalization multiplies watertight social compartments but leaves intact the imitation of the worst of the previous globalization. The best metaphor for this type of disordered multiplication is metastasis.
The globalization that gained strength in the 90s of last century and accelerated until the first decade of the current one, is now in visible retreat, bordering on disintegration. Both processes of action and reaction have been so dizzying that attempts to understand them have been left behind, and in search of new concepts. Such an understanding crisis encompasses all social sciences, from economics to sociology. It invites us to reflect.
Many years ago, the great American sociologist Everett Cherrington Hughes, in his classes on field methods, said that to understand a social phenomenon one does not have to ask what it is but rather what it is not, and what it resembles. In other words, to understand a social phenomenon you have to try to apply metaphors to it, until you find one that illuminates it and stimulates a series of productive questions. With this common thread, I propose to try some of these metaphors to understand the current process of de-globalization.
To begin with, I will say that both globalization and the reaction it has provoked are disorderly and contradictory processes. Among other things, the globalization of three recent decades to which I refer has provoked a sharp contradiction between the secular tendency to equality (through social struggles) of the last 300 years, on the one hand, and the setbacks caused by savage capitalism and the associated backward ideologies of globalization1; an upward mobility of social sectors that until then were on the margins of national and international society (primary mobilization, as is the case of large Asian masses), and at the same time downward mobility of sectors that until then were integrated (secondary mobilization, of former worker sectors in deindustrialized countries of the West for example). Related to the above, the inversion or misrepresentation of aspirations and prospects; and chained to all the above, the emergence of social movements with opposite signs that have no direct relation to the meaning of the words “left” and “right” inherited from a previous world.
These factors ruined the entire shelf of the international order that was established after World War II, under the hegemony of the United States, with its Western allies and more or less forced followers on other continents. With the collapse of the alternative order proposed by the Soviet Union (according to the thesis of E. Wallerstein) around 1989, the seemingly triumphant West stimulated a new phase of growth and intercommunication called globalization that, however, dialectically, undermined the foundations of the previous order.
Today we are facing the spectacle of a world in pieces, with fragments of the order in force from 1945 to 1990, plus fragments of a later process that did not curdle into a new order, plus the emergence of uneven blocks and units, connected in some dimensions and distant or incommunicado in others, with disputes everywhere (insurrections, wars, protectionisms, closed nationalisms but imitators in methods and varied forms of social regression). The net result of this disorder is the accelerated destruction of humanity’s global heritage (especially the environment), that is, abdication in the face of the greatest existential challenge facing our species.
If the above argument is correct, then to better understand the simultaneity and contradictory relationship between fragmentation and connection, I propose a metaphor. It is metastasis. It is a concept transferred from medicine, but of secular and general circulation. The word comes from the Greek meta [μετά] (then, otherwise, beyond, in a distant place) and stasis [στασις] (action of being). In some Greek texts (for example in Plato), it refers to the change in the political constitution or a social revolution. In medicine, the word is also a metaphor, and refers to the spread of a primary malignant tumor to other parts of the body, in distant organs, by blood or lymphatic route.
I believe this metaphor is appropriate to capture the current geopolitical situation, in which blocs of countries, individual countries, and social groupings within or between countries, separate from each other, compete in certain dimensions (especially political and cultural), and enter into acute conflicts, which often become violent (ranging from polarization to both civil and inter-state war). The channels of communication, today so effective in their speed and ubiquity, disseminate elements of both association and dissociation, both broad visions and obstinate blinders, both compassion and hatred. And the same technology, powered by artificial intelligence, eliminates dialogue, doubt, ambiguity, which are essential for the formation of intelligent judgment. It is the Greek phronesis [Φρόνησις], which in Aristotle means the virtue of moral thought, normally translated as “wisdom”. I dare to argue that the culture of the algorithm to which the cell phone screen has accustomed us, is the enemy of wisdom.
All this affects the different levels of society, from the bottom up, in which the intense interaction does not produce community, but rather a kaleidoscope of identities increasingly self-absorbed, where the superficiality of the “friendships” on Facebook is compensated by the self-absorption of identities, where each one reclaims with those who resemble him but does not solidarize with different others, except in the shoulder-raising of menefreguista relativism (“I don’t care” or indifference), where extreme individualism or the association of elective affinities fails to create a wide civic space of national or international concertation. Moving up the social and political ladder, we see that instead of a social democracy there is either a false democracy (e.g., “people’s democracy,” “anti-liberal democracy,” and other similar barbarisms) or a “veto-cracy” that paralyzes the general will of which Rousseau spoke. A series of hatreds and selfishness that are copied and reproduced is similar to a tumor that repeats throughout the body, and in the end finishes it off (any accidental or opportunistic crisis knocks it down).
In the social stratosphere, a group of billionaires plays, takes away, and takes out investments (also governments) without worrying about the consequences, except the impact on their insatiable thirst for profits. Further down, at the regional or national level, other elites cling to power for the sake of power itself, which in turn is a degraded version of true power, which is, as Hannah Arendt argued, communal2. This idea, based on important historical experiences, we have lost.
Faced with this situation, the management of public affairs, when it is not entirely abandoned, remains, as the “best” option, in the hands of a technocracy. In extremis, it will remain in the hands of an artificial intelligence. Max Weber already anticipated this more than a hundred years ago, in a section of his great unfinished work Economy and Society:
Experts without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has reached a level of civilization never before reached3 .
What Max Weber did not see is how that civilization is ending.
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- In the A Brief History of Equality by Thomas Piketty (2021), the well-known economist analyzes the search for equality since the 18th century. For Piketty, the struggle for equality has been the historical thread that has linked struggles, revolts and revolutions throughout the globe for more than 300 years, consolidating a trend that, with its advances and setbacks, always walks towards greater levels of equality. Issues such as a more equitable distribution of wealth, income, or property, access to political power or the recognition of rights, including improvements in educational or health indicators are examples of this trend. But at the same time, and since 1990 in particular, globalized capitalism has produced a new and enormous inequality. It is a new “old regime” which is to fall into crisis and revolt as it did in France in the 18th century. For a quick read, see the review at https://blogs.publico.es/otrasmiradas/55651/la-eterna-lucha-por-la-igualdad-a-proposito-del-ultimo-libro-de-piketty/
- In his book The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt conceives power, in open opposition to the tradition of political thought, as that which arises when men come together to perform and dialogue in concert.
- The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Chapter 5.
