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Dilemma of World Unity

From our cosmopolitan perspective in the postmodern monoculture, we may regret the disappearance of ethnic ways, as we do the disappearance of species. Apart from nostalgia, there is a real loss of variety and of alternative models analogous to the loss of genetic diversity. On the other hand, humans must achieve a world culture if there is to be a collective human will. This requires not the imposition of cultural uniformity, but the eradication of disparities of health, wealth and education. It is conceivable to have diversity and equality, individuality with equity. It is possible to find individual identity and distinction through unique interests and through the pursuit of quality, rather than through winning the bigger prize. The global monoculture, in contrast, ironically achieves its uniformity and ubiquity at the cost of enormous class disparities and loss of cultural ways. It flaunts individualism and democracy while actually destroying them. This follows from the actual intent behind it, which is to create a monolithic engine of profit. The appeal of this monoculture to liberal-minded thinkers trades on a confusion between uniformity and unity; it confuses individual expression with having more than others and promotes self-interest in the name of “freedom.” The brute fact is that the interests of power, in a world with enormous differences of living standard, militate against both unity and democratic freedom. It might be possible for educated middle-class Moslems to sit down with their Jewish or Christian counterparts, leaving their guns at the door, and calmly discuss their doctrinal differences; but until the rich are willing to sit down with the poor, with another aim than further exploiting them, there will be no basis for lasting peace. Religion will only serve to amplify sensitivity to injustice.

RELATED TAGS: [postmodern/globalist monoculture, loss of cultural diversity, vanishing ethnic ways, manifest destiny, consumer hypocrisy, social inequity/injustice, cosmopolitanism, liberalism, humanism]