The concept of globalism burdens American society, and this encumbrance comes mainly from the political and social Left. We rarely discuss what globalism is and many Americans don’t seem to see the grave dangers that it represents. We hear phrases like “global citizenship,” or “citizen of the world,” which are supposed to evoke an air of cosmopolitanism, or signal some admirable openness to compassionate dialogue among people and nations but these intellectual sensations are deceptive. Globalism is not that.
In fact, globalism is an ideology, and like all ideologies, it relies heavily on euphemisms to persuade the people of its moral goodness. It peddles in false promises of utopia and brings forth an illusion, if not a lie, of a beautiful society. We’ve been down this road before, except we called it Communism. As we know, that experiment didn’t turn out so well.
One of the aspects that characterizes globalism is its fluidity. Fluidity, in this case, implies change, constant motion, and the inevitable consequence of existential shapeshifting. Nothing is concrete, especially not any principles or perennial and human questions.
The fluidity that is seeping into every aspect of American society (especially in education) relies on what we might call primitive emotionalism—an idea that human beings merely emote and never use reason to reach conclusions, whether they be of a personal or a public nature. Emotions govern everything, and our reactions to events and other people are immediate. This is why there is such a premium today on those who are noted for their capacity to manipulate emotions. Globalism derives much of its strength from such emotional appeals and by presenting situations designed to provoke immediate compassion and action.
Emotions, in and of themselves, can be intelligent. But in the service of advancing globalism, they are meant to “shake people from their slumber” to see the supposed injustices of this world. The only problem is it’s the globalist who determines what an injustice is. No effort is made to understand or explain injustices. Feeling them and feeling outraged by them is sufficient.
The New Totalitarianism
Globalism’s biggest concern is eliminating the importance of differences between people or denying them in the name of a kind of bland corporate sameness. Nothing is exceptional; one thing is not better than another; and—while we’re at it—human beings are not particularly unique, either. Be they differences in abilities or characteristics of ethnic, national, or religious identity, under the globalist idea, we are not allowed to be singular beings or to identify with the groups of our habits, origins, or choosing. Instead, we are meant to disappear into the masses. For a globalist, this is a necessary sacrifice. What we’re witnessing here is an ideology slowly becoming totalitarianism—a globalist determines and then regulates the behavior of individuals as well as the structure of the society at large.
And yet, despite their firmly held belief in the fluidity of humanity, globalists cannot escape the necessity for some structure and grounding. Instead of creating a community composed of individuals, however, globalists attempt to create and partake in a collective that has no borders or boundaries. As Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, an individual disappears “into One Man of gigantic dimensions. To abolish the fences of laws between men—as tyranny does—means to take away man’s liberties and destroy freedom as a living political reality; for the space between men as it is hedged by the laws, is the living space of freedom.”
A globalist is not interested in borders, whether figurative or literal. The inhabitant of a globalist “country” is a human being who is not allowed to have an interior life or any personal reflection. This also excludes giving primacy to one’s family and friends, all for the sake of the collective. It follows then that real countries are not allowed exist in any meaningful sense or to have their own identities. If an American begins to express an admiration for his country’s history and uniqueness, then he is immediately branded as nationalist. And nationalism, to the feeble globalist mind, is always inextricably and conveniently connected to National Socialism. In the globalist world, everyone who even remotely expresses love of America is a Hitler in the making.
Diversity, Rightly Understood
This troubles me greatly, in part because of my own experience of choosing to immigrate to the United States after surviving the war in Bosnia and my life as a refugee. I also chose to become a citizen here. I am not without concerns or judgments about America because it is, in many ways, filled with all kinds of paradoxes. But intellectual concerns do not equal hatred or a movement toward destruction of the United States. At its core, the foundation of America is life-affirming in that it guarantees the liberty and rights of each citizen. Globalism goes against this principle because it denies individuality. Once individuality is negated, a citizen has no rights, no freedom, and ultimately, he becomes voiceless. Though he may be a citizen “on paper,” he is in fact rendered stateless in the globalist ideological oppression.
If we are to give globalism the benefit of the doubt (which I am doing rather reluctantly), we may say that the intention is to create some kind of closeness and understanding among the people of the world; to unite us in our common humanity rather than to divide us by placing over-much emphasis on our differences. But the problem is that in order to be truly close to one another and in order to have a real dialogue, what is required is an acknowledgment of difference. It is in difference that we are individualized and more importantly, humanized. Dialogue is an impossibility unless each individual human being recognizes and lives his own uniquely human potential and discovers, freely, what he may and may not have in common with various representations of his fellow man. Then, and only then, can we enter into an authentic encounters with one another. Then, and only then, can we become friends and fellow citizens.