I fear I may be about to touch off an intramural dispute. About a week ago, my dear colleague made some very concise, very strong arguments in favor of free trade, or at very least against protectionism. In answer to his question (“Protectionism, Anyone?”), I am still inclined to speak in the negative. Recently, however, I have begun to have hesitations about the vision of a world of free trade first and perhaps best articulated by David Ricardo, both in his own writings and as a literary character.
Now, let me be clear: I, too, am irritated by the junior senator from our beloved yet vexing home state and his incessant whining about global capitalism. I, too, am simultaneously appalled and bemused by the anti-globalization riots—er, protests—around the world, particularly when the host nation subsidizes its own antagonists. In no wise do I question the efficacy of global free-market capitalism to bring about the maximal level of prosperity. And yet, I remain unconvinced that embracing a Ricardian world is the best course for humanity.
Primarily, my concern stems from the increasingly-more-apparent tendency of global capitalism to create what Alexandre Kojeve called the “universal homogenous state.” This refers to the tendency of capitalism to eliminate all differences between peoples, nations, societies, et cetera—to obliterate all distinctions of place. Intuitively, it makes sense: we justly praise companies like Sony and Chili’s for making good products, and their popularity leads naturally to an increase in quantity supplied. It is not accident that the oft-lampooned chief critique of globalization runs something like this: whether one is in Houston, Harare or Hong Kong, one can be assured of a Starbucks on the corner and the Golden Arches in the sky.
But the truth is, the UHS creates far more dire consequences than the omnipresence of coffee and fast food. The Canadian philosopher George Parkin Grant takes up Kojeve’s concept in his masterful little book Lament for a Nation. For Grant, often called a “Red Tory” for his not-as-crazy-as-it-sounds mixture of Burke/Hooker British traditionalism with mild national socialism (not that national socialism), the USA is the UHS in germ. He posits the inevitability of the global capitalism victory as he laments the death of the true Canada, which in his eyes was a propositional nation, conceived in colonial subservience and dedicated to not being America. But Canada is not the real point; our neighbor to the north is but a placeholder for all the distinct subsidiary units that are swept away and homogenized like a gallon Bernie Sanders’ beloved beverage.
Interestingly enough, the Red Tory is hardly the most famous person to invoke Kojeve. In one of the most widely disseminated works in recent history, Francis Fukuyama used a brand of Hegelianism to argue that the final victory of liberalism was nigh. The particular Hegelian he used to support his thesis was none other than our good friend Alexandre Kojeve, who had had a similar idea many years earlier. The problem is, triumphant free-market apologists who read Fukuyama’s article with joyous exuberance almost always forget the last paragraph, which for the impatient was helpfully alluded to in the title of his subsequent book. The title is this: The End of History and the Last Man.
How can we keep ourselves from becoming Nietzsche’s infamous picture of the denizens of a technologically supercharged, post-theistic age? As I myself pointed out recently, technology is not neutral, and has wide-ranging effects detrimental to the human psyche. I believe global capitalism has similar effects in that it militates against all loyalties other than the love of money. While I greatly respect Grant, socialism is clearly not the answer, and I highly doubt protection is either. But we proponents of free-market capitalism need to think deeply—and quickly—about an answer to this question: how can we prevent the engines of economic progress from grinding us into an undifferentiated mass without homes, without virtue and without hope?
1 comment:
Ach! Finally, something we agree on (free trade) and then you decide that you're going to abandon me on the basis of maintaining the inherent "placeness" of a place in the face of oncoming cultural hegemony? What kind of crazy hippie have you become?!
In all seriousness, however, you bring up an important point and one which showcases a major but unexplored overlap of liberal and conservative values. Zach's answer to the creeping UHS is both Reaganesque and (therefore?) incomplete. Yes, he says, homogeneity can be a bad thing, but, as such, it must be caused by government. Therefore, if we tell government to stop doing it and then take personal responsibility for finding our own dwellings everything will be fine. That solves the problem if you live in the middle of nowhere and own a good deal of the land around you (to those of you who have never seen my house, that's a funny joke), but the whole point of existing in a community and in an economy is that we are effected by the actions of others. For example, if, in the entirely fictional small town of Ain't Salbans, Wal-Mart decides that it wants to open a store on the outskirts thereby destroying a solid downtown of locally-owned small businesses, are the residents to welcome the lower prices like good free-marketeers or do they have an argument that in the downtown they would lose something of greater intrinsic value than would be gained by having a local Superstore? I would argue that they have a strong argument, one which cuts across ideological lines, and furthermore one which manages to ignore the straw men of government malfeasance and of man's personal responsibility to create his own dwelling. The value of a distinct community lies in both protecting an evolving values system (conservative) and in harnessing the combined power of people who identify with that system (liberal), and both of those goals are threatened when the generators of the social capital which allow the community to exist, like functioning downtowns, are replaced with a deeply indistinct Wal-Mart.
This example, while obviously not transnational and not concerned with the economic realities of protectionism versus free trade, does cover the essence of the threat from the UHS. It also hammers home Zach's very pertinent point that, from small towns to independent countries, protectionism will not guard against homogenization. Tariffs on foreign goods will not improve the domestic economy in the long run, but rather leave it stagnated and susceptible to overrun by even more powerful outside econo-cultural forces. The same can be said (obviously) of most domestic subsidies. The answer to the threat of becoming the same as the next guy, for both towns and nations, is to cultivate both public and private investment in that which makes a community unique. In Ain't Salbans, that would have meant the city re-investing in downtown parking while working to attract retail stores to the downtown area where they would strengthen rather than destroy the city's commercial core. At the national level, that means investing in the infrastructure which fuels entrepreneurism while continuing to open new markets for exported products. Of course, that brings us back to the Obama economic plan, where we differ once more. But it is important to recognize that, while our methods here may differ, our aims are very much the same and that our worries about the encroachment of the UHS on our lives and those of others are legitimate.
Also, we Eagles look forward to seeing you Friars in the Hockey East playoffs. Last year was just too much fun.
~Sam R
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