Cultural Impact of Globalization

Critics of globalization charge that the phenomenon, especially through pop culture, is perpetrating a kind of cultural genocide on the world – that the largest, most dominant cultures are becoming larger and more dominant at the expense of many others. In this view, globalization is in fact another word for Americanization.

However, others argue that globalization offers the potential to enrich the world culturally. To these people, the notion that the opportunities for cultural exchange brought about by globalization can help promote tolerance and diversity is very attractive. Their vision is the multi-cultural “global village”, where ideas and practices can be freely exchanged and appreciated.

The potential enlightenment of the global village can be contrasted with the way people tended to view other nations and cultures ages ago. In the 18-th century, Adam Smith, the father of economic theory, noted the detachment of emotion caused by distance:

“Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connection with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity… If he was to lose his little finger tomorrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw [the Chinese people killed by an earthquake], he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own” (The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759).

Smith’s point was that no matter how sympathetic this 18th-century European might be to the plight of others, a tragic event so far away could not affect a person on an emotional level unless they had a more real connection to the event.

Globalization has changed this dynamic, in sometimes quite powerful ways. In today’s world, foreign policy decisions are sometimes driven by television images beamed around the world by satellites showing famine or fighting in other nations. In this context, globalization enables a newscaster to humanize an event overseas. As Adam Smith might have observed, seeing images of starving children and other human suffering on television creates a much more powerful emotional reaction in an observer than reading in a newspaper that 100,000 people have died as a result of a natural disaster overseas.