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Moral opposition to change—to the erosion of cultural monotony—induced by the processes of globalization has deep roots. Plato’s, and his student Aristotle’s, praise of self-sufficiency (autarkia) is at the root of their general hostility to trade, their insistence on the distinction between Greeks and non-Greeks (i.e., “barbarians,” so-called because instead of speaking Greek, their words seemed to sound like “bar bar bar”), and their suspicion of chrematistic, or money-making. Thus, in Book IV of Plato’s dialogue The Republic, it is agreed that a polis (or city-state) should be of a size and so structured as to be “sufficient and one.” Aristotle argued in Book VII, Chapter 4 of The Politics that a state (the translator’s term for polis), “when composed of too few, is not, as a state ought to be, self-sufficient; when of too many, though self-sufficient in all mere necessaries, as a nation [ethnos in Greek] may be, it is not a state, being almost incapable of constitutional government. For who can be the general of such a vast multitude, or who the herald, unless he have the voice of a Stentor?” Interdependence beyond the small embrace of the polis was considered perilous to unity and to autarkia; the extraordinary experience of Greek commerce in the ancient world was upending established moral orders and entrenched ruling classes by introducing new ideas, among them democracy and liberty, even to the point of questioning and undermining slavery, as Karl Popper documents in The Open Society and its Enemies. Plato and his students sought to preserve static social relations—analogous to his theory of unchanging forms—that were being overturned by globalization.
Ever since Plato’s assault on the open society, critics of globalization have tended to view cultural innovation and exchange as a pure loss rather than as the emergence of new forms of human life that increase the available store of possible human understandings and experiences.
The modern form of that yearning for “unity” and the attendant criticism of globalization focuses on “identity.” According to journalist Nadav Eyal in Revolt: The Worldwide Uprising against Globalization, “Economic globalization poses a significant threat to identity. It inevitably injects universal values into the local discourse, because of its need for supranational relations. Prosperity cannot be achieved alone, and the need for the economy to interact globally does not coexist easily with exclusive national power structures and community.” Setting aside the reification of globalization as an “it” that “needs” things, Eyal overlooks the fact that globalization is and always has been constitutive of identity. There are no “pure identities,” just as there are no “pure races” or “pure cultures.” Identities are constituted by the interplay of many influences, the intersections of ideas, trends, customs, practices, and experiences. As Jeremy Waldron asks, “What if there has been nothing but mélange all the way down? What if cultures have always been implicated with one another, through trade, war, curiosity, and other forms of inter-communal relation? What if the mingling of cultures is as immemorial as cultural roots themselves? What if purity and homogeneity have always been myths?”
The anti-liberal writer Patrick Deneen enthusiastically embraces the illiberal ideas of Plato, whom he curiously refers to as “the Greeks,” as if Plato represented them all, including those Plato lambastes in his writings. Deneen blames globalization for the creation of identities that are “globally homogeneous, the precondition for a fungible global elite who readily identify other members capable of living in a cultureless and placeless world defined above all by liberal norms of globalized indifference toward shared fates of actual neighbors and communities. This in turn induces the globalized irresponsibility that was reflected in the economic interactions that precipitated the 2008 economic crisis but which is assuaged by calls for ‘social justice,’ generally to be handled through the depersonalized levers of the state.”
Besides the sweeping economic claims (which notably ignore irresponsible domestic governmental policies in the United States that were ostensibly intended to secure ownership of homes for all Americans regardless of financial capability but instead created a massive real estate bubble, financial contagion, and global crisis), Deneen misunderstands what economic interdependence entails. Trade tends to make people more connected to others and more interested in their welfare, precisely because their prosperity is entwined more when they trade than when they don’t. Indeed, the prosperity of one community is beneficial to that of those with whom they trade, contrary to the zero-sum, beggar-thy-neighbor view embraced by anti-globalization advocates. Deneen identifies as the beneficiaries of globalization not the low-income people who have seen their real incomes rise as prices of goods, telecommunication, travel, and previously unimaginable things have plummeted but instead a shadowy “fungible global elite,” which is an old trope in the repertoire of illiberalism, that of the “rootless cosmopolitans.” As the economist Jean-Baptiste Say noted,
A good harvest is favourable, not only to the agriculturist, but likewise to the dealers in all commodities generally. The greater the crop, the larger are the purchases of the growers. A bad harvest, on the contrary, hurts the sale of commodities at large. And so it is also with the products of manufacture and commerce. The success of one branch of commerce supplies more ample means of purchase, and consequently opens a market for the products of all the other branches; on the other hand, the stagnation of one channel of manufacture, or of commerce, is felt in all the rest.
The same is true of nations across whose borders goods and services are freely traded. Peace and harmony are consequences of trade.
Cultural exchange is foundational to living cultures. Pasta, for which Italian cuisine is famous, has origins in Asia, whether it was brought to Italy by Marco Polo, as folklore tells, or earlier, and the tomatoes that form the base of many Italian sauces are cultivated from plants brought from Meso-America by Spaniards. Food has been globalized for millennia, but somehow that has not stopped it from developing an amazing diversity of identifiable cuisines, styles, and dishes with many distinctive characteristics. The same can be said of architecture, traditions, mores, religions, and every other element of human culture.
Some local customs have dwindled or disappeared. Consider the virtual disappearance of human sacrifice and slavery, both of which had long traditions in many cultures. In that respect, all cultures have become more similar over time—and a good thing too. As a political example, if all the countries of the world were to adopt democracy and to throw off autocracies, tyrannies, colonial masters, and so on, there would be less diversity among systems of government, although a wide variety of forms (Westminster parliamentarism, federalism, presidential systems, constitutional monarchies, etc.) would remain. If genocide, ethnic cleansing, and colonialism were to be eliminated and replaced by some form of live-and-let-live mentality, another kind of diversity would be reduced.
But are such reductions of diversity morally objectionable? Some people, such as the influential legal theorist of the Third Reich Carl Schmitt, who posited the distinction of friend and enemy as the foundation of “the concept of the political,” consider the replacement of tyrannies and dictatorships an unacceptable form of political homogenization. However, people who wish to defend such political heterogeneity need to offer justification for their preference for dictatorship and violence and not merely assume that variety is preferable—just as someone advocating disease and suffering should not assume that it’s better for some to be ill and some to be healthy on the grounds of variety. It matters what kind of variety is protected.
This piece was originally published in the Cato Institute’s Globalization: Then and Now in 2024 under the title “The Moral Case for Globalization”. It is republished on Bastiat Scrolls with the author’s permission, in recognition of its continued relevance to today’s debates on globalisation.
