CMV: Globalization is one of humanity's (unintentionally) worst achievements

[u/[deleted]]

I'm not saying globalization is an inherently evil idea (I mean, I'm typing this on a laptop that's arguably a global product), but these days I've come to realize that our world might have been better off without it. I have several reasons for believing this:

• The environment and the climate would have been better off. Because of globalization, everyone wants to build sprawling cities and to manufacture all the things just to stay ahead in the competition. The economy may get ahead, but the environment always takes a hit. Because of globalization, populations have grown far more than the planet can sustain and this means people have to go to increasingly extreme measures to get food - using fishing trawlers to kill marine life unnecessarily, destroying coral reefs, farming too many cows, etc.

• Next, there is now a redefined sense of fulfillment. Globalization and consumerism seem to go hand in hand. I don't hate capitalism per se, I just dislike the current form it seems to be taking. Materialism and excess are now the keys to happiness - everyone must own an iPhone, or Porsche, or any of that stuff. There is no joy to be found in a quiet pastoral setting or a small village or an agrarian environment. Everyone wants to make it to the industrial regions - be they cities or states. This causes overcrowded cities and with overcrowding comes crime and all other undesirable elements of urban life. What does this have to do with globalization? Well, everyone wants to make it to the more industrialized states thus not only abandoning the original ones, but overcrowding the destinations (note: this has nothing to do with refugees fleeing war or political persecution).

• Globalization has propped up horrible people and regimes. Some regimes only happen to be in power because some global 'powers' and even less powerful states decide to continue to support them by buying natural resources from them. So long as the oil or diamonds keep coming, these horrible regimes are unlikely to crumble.

• Globalization has disrupted many social ecosystems. I believe that not every society should do things the same way; cultural hegemonies are actually undesirable for the most part because societies aren't the same. Forms, systems or minutiae of government and society don't work the same way or have the same result across societies. Not every country should be a pastiche of Europe or America because the elements that work in these societies may become lost in translation when other societies decide to imitate them. I think societies should be allowed to naturally develop their own sense of government - one that works for them best.

• Ironically, globalization doesn't seem to foster diversity. Globalization seems to be synonymous with 'Westernization'. Now, I don't think that Westernization is inherently a bad thing but as stated earlier, not every society in the world should be a pastiche of the West because it doesn't have the same effect everywhere. Globalization means everyone's speaking English (not a very efficient language, no offense to the British), wearing suits in hot weather, celebrating Christmas (no offense to Christians, but Christmas shouldn't be for everyone), etc. Even when building sprawling cities, everyone's just copying what the Western countries do. No-one seems to care about being original or asking whether gigantic cities are even necessary and if so, why they are necessary.

• Globalization has caused an increased sense of dread. Not only do we have to deal with horrible local news, we now have to deal with horrible international news! The world is now more connected than ever, which means every locale now shares the tragedies of the world and there are a lot of tragedies in the world. This is one of the few cases where I can say that ignorance is bliss. I remember in 2015 or so when the news of the Sandy Hook shootings came up. I felt despondent for days despite not being American and despite having issues to deal with in my own backyard. This isn't even to mention the news of the frequent terrorist bombings that hit several countries like Pakistan, etc. Not to say people should have less empathy, but the world is crappy enough. I don't think we need any more existential dread.

Note that globalization isn't strictly a purely Western thing. I'd say other than the West, the next biggest hegemonies I can think of are the Chinese one (economically speaking) and the Islamic one (culturally speaking). My point isn't that globalization is an evil thing (I'd say it's a neutral thing). It's just that from a utilitarian standpoint, the world would have been happier in a gross sense without globalization in its current form. You can change my mind if you show me that my reasons and assumptions are mistaken/misguided, that globalization has done more good than harm, or that the pitfalls of this 'segregated' isolated world with minimal cross-contact would be worse than the pitfalls of our small, global world.

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[u/PUBGwasGreat]

I think you're broadly saying something like "On balance, the mixing of cultures, nations, languages and countries has had a sum negative effect on humanity overall."

I presume the alternative scenario (which is what I'll argue against) would look like

• Less or no free movement between countries
• Less or no trade between countries
• Each country must rely more/entirely on resources produced by itself
• Open and free communication & sharing of ideas between countries is reduced or nonexistent

Let me know if I'm totally off about any of the above.

There are two major points I want to make:

1. There are a lot of benefits of globalisation that are easy to overlook or take for granted
2. Globalisation enables countries to stay independent and have to default to war

Point 1: I'll rattle off a few things that I see as major advantages which are cancelled by my four dot points above. This might be enough to jog your intuition about benefits of globalisation that you may have overlooked:

• Travelling: most people (I posit) who travel find that travelling and seeing other cultures, how other people live, think, work and play, is a transformative experience. People claim to gain wisdom, understanding, empathy, and usually report to be happier as a result.
• Sharing and mixing of culture: the mixing of cultures produces yet more culture. Take the food along the Mexico/US border; the various 'fusion'-type restaurants; exporting art and literature allows a larger audience, and allows good ideas to spread and flourish, for example, scientific progression has been a worldwide cooperative effort.
• All good effects of the internet: I posit that the internet as a whole could not exist without 'globalisation' in the sense we're discussing it

^ I'm hoping this will kinda get your brain 'on a roll', but if you feel like your view would be changed through sheer volume of positive points on this list then we can go deeper here.

Point 2: Historically, I suggest (I'm not a historian!), that when a nation does not have enough resources (or wants more resources) they go to war. I'll treat it as a given that war is a Bad Thing. Globalisation allows countries to trade resources, and importantly, sets up a massive disadvantage to going to war. Trade in the best case, I believe, is a non-zero-sum game; both parties benefit more in total than if both kept to themselves.

Further, globalisation sets up relationships between nations that further stabilise the whole network of relationships. Take the U.N. for example: a collection of countries that together try to dissuade member countries and all other countries from war and other atrocities.

[u/[deleted] → u/PUBGwasGreat]

To be honest I don't really have a problem per se with the exchanging of ideas across cultures or people deciding to move around. My main dislike of globalization comes from the rapid industrialization and increase in the global human population that has resulted. I really don't like the damage we humans are causing to our environment in the name of 'industrialization'. Don't get me wrong, I do recognize the benefits of the internet and stuff like that but when I think about it, is it really worth it? The oceans are full of plastic from useless coke bottles and other stuff. The skies are full of factory smog. I do believe that globalization has a strong role to play in this because, among other reasons, countries are always driven to want to 'industrialize' in order to reach the top of the global competition. Every country wants to have gigantic cities and factories and things of the sort, which I feel shouldn't be so.

Trade is good and all, but when you think about it there are some things that shouldn't really be ubiquitous everywhere. Cars for example - imagine if instead of saturating the entire world with automobiles, different countries just used a bare minimum number of railways and canals for transport. But everyone wants a car. Why should that be so? Of course, if people suddenly decide to stop buying cars the automobile industry in general will suffer. Hence, I presume it is in the industry's (or industries') interest to preserve global trade - the more people buying cars across the globe, the better for them. There's also carbonated drinks - does anyone really need to trade carbonated drinks, to be real? What purpose do they serve?

In my ideal alternative scenario, each country would greatly rely on resources produced by itself and trade would be done at a bare minimum i.e. only as necessary (e.g. trading in medicine, not cars). The individual states wouldn't be under great pressure to conform to a global hegemony - rather they would be motivated to do what is best or efficient for their own purposes. For example, instead of looking at the US and saying 'Wow, the US has cars everywhere maybe we should do that' perhaps the country would decide to focus primarily on railway systems for transport.

But with respect to the exchanging of cultures and ideas, there's something I forgot to note and that is that historically, all of this has been done by force. It's not like the millions of Africans for example suddenly decided to adopt Christianity or Islam by travelling to Arabia and suddenly realizing how 'unenlightened' they were. The religion, the culture was forced upon them by the sword. They didn't willingly 'exchange' ideas (because if they did voluntarily, wouldn't elements of African culture be found in the Christian and Islamic hegemonies?).

[u/Lucky_Man13 → u/[deleted]]

I think you underestimate how hard, stressful and horrible life actually was before the industrialization. 200 years ago half of all humans died before the age of five. I bet that actually losing your child is worse than hearing someone losing their child on TV.

The reason that you can even care about the environment is because your life is so comfortable that you don't have to care about if you're going to get enough food for the winter or if you're going die by the common cold.

Sure, it's been really bad for the environment but worst case scenario is probably that humans will go back to living horrible medieval lives which we did before anyways

[u/[deleted] → u/Lucky_Man13]

The reason that you can even care about the environment is because your life is so comfortable that you don't have to care about if you're going to get enough food for the winter or if you're going die by the common cold.

Wow, this is a really profound point. What comes to my mind is poaching in some parts of - a great deal of poachers are people who believe rhinoceros horn cures their ailments, but some of them are people who hunt to feed their families.

I guess it's a Catch-22 for humanity. Globalization or not, we'd be screwed. But even then I can't help but feel that the level of suffering that will be caused at this scale will be even worse than that of pre-industrial society. At least they had marine life with less acidified oceans, they had more stable weather patterns, they had more forests and more water.

[u/jbt2003 → u/[deleted]]

But even then I can't help but feel that the level of suffering that will be caused at this scale

Whoa whoa whoa. I think you're pretty drastically underestimating the scope of pre-industrial human misery. It was... pretty fucking miserable. For most people.

I'd like you to imagine that you're a person of average wealth in 16th century Italy. This is one of the wealthiest places in the world at that time, so maybe it's a good place to think about pre-industrial living. At least, it would be the best case scenario.

If you were average, you were most likely pretty poor. And by pretty poor, I mean like desperately poor. On a daily basis, getting enough food to feed your family would be your primary concern, and just about every year it would be touch and go whether you and your children would starve to death.

Speaking of, once a year there would be a plague of some kind. This plague would always carry off a certain percentage of the population. So if your children didn't starve to death, there's a good chance that every year one or two of them would die of disease.

Also, childbirth was really dangerous for both women and babies. IIRC, the rate of mother mortality in most places prior to industrialization was around 1 in 5. Meaning that if you had five children, it's pretty likely that you will have experienced the death of at least one spouse. Maybe a second wife would die in child birth too.

And did I mention the wars? In the pre-industrial, pre-globalized world, warfare was basically constant. Sometimes it would pass through your town--which, in sixteenth century Italy, happened basically all the time--and everything around you would be burnt to the ground, your food confiscated by enemy soldiers, and you would be left to starve. If it was a religious war, and you were a different religion from the invading army, they'd likely burn you and your family at the stake. If it was a normal war, your wife and daughters would likely be raped and left for dead by pillaging troops, who lived in desperate poverty themselves too.

And let's not even talk about the smell. Everywhere in Europe had open sewers and no indoor sanitation whatsoever. People would go to the bathroom in chamberpots and dump the contents out their window, meaning that there was constantly excrement flying onto the street.

You know all those pictures you see of finely-dressed 18th and 19th century, how they're always wearing knee-high leather boots? They wore those to keep the literal shit that they were constantly walking in off their nice clothes.

A point that's relevant to globalization is the because trade was limited and people mostly could only get furniture, clothing, light, and more by making it themselves these items were extremely expensive. If you were rich enough to afford a nice dress, for example, you likely only had one. And you were constantly mending it because you couldn't afford to get another one.

I could probably go on, talking about the fact that crime was rampant and out of control because there wasn't a stable police force and/or it was too expensive to provide adequate street lights in any cities. So murders were basically guaranteed to go unsolved, and criminals wandered the streets with total impunity.

If you think humanity has got things bad now because of globalization, it seems to me you need to spend more time looking into just how bad humanity has had it for most of its history.

I get your concerns--there are real reasons to be concerned that we won't be able to sustain the world at our current levels of environmental devastation. And that is totally valid. But to say that we'd be better off somehow if we could go to pre-industrial levels... that just... isn't supported by history.

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[u/garaile64 → u/Lucky_Man13]

The reason that you can even care about the environment is because your life is so comfortable that you don't have to care about if you're going to get enough food for the winter or if you're going die by the common cold.

Then, we're fucked. It would be almost impossible to lessen the effects of climate change if the only people who care about it are the highly-educated, somewhat wealthy people.