I often wrestle with the apparent tensions between ‘local’ and ‘global’.
Last November we arrived home from a bonfire night party to find a man lying motionless in the road with his head covered in blood.
I discovered retrospectively that the assault had followed an argument in the local bookies. Anyway, it was late and raining and it seemed that all other characters lurking in the dark were either ‘turning a blind eye’ or were unaware of the situation.
Less because I am a good Samaritan and more because he was lying in my parking space, I attended to the man finding him drifting in and out of consciousness due to several blows to the head. I called the emergency services on his behalf.
The swiftness with which they arrived to nurture his recovery reinforced my appreciation for both the global technologies - like the mobile/cell phone - that we have at our fingertips, as well as for those who persevere stressful or lonely global lifestyles to bring them to us.
But in another respect, the episode reminds me that ‘local’ can mean responsive, hands-on, tactile and connecting in a way that ‘global’ cannot.
Global definitions of friendship - like as the veneer of a one-click-covenant according to one popular 'social networking' website - are a far cry from the teachings of Jesus/Rebbe Melech HaMoshiach Yehoshua.
I am unconvinced of the idly used notion of loving our ‘global neighbours’ from afar. Would our passions not be best exercised by moving into their neighbourhood?
If the church is confident in her identity, is our best response to globalisation that of riding the waves of global capitalism as a bunch of shallow virtual networks?
[1030:3694]
5 comments:
The danger is globalisation produces cultural homogenisation to the detriment of true community and man's spiritual dignity.
How do you define 'true community' and 'spiritual dignity'?
These are difficult terms to categorise. I don't think true community is something found online. Spiritual dignity - well I think globalisation reduces man to a market variable: in faceless mechanisms man increasingly loses his identity and dignity as a person. The challenges that we face under these circumstances of a shifting hierarchy of values to maintain man's view of himself, his destiny and the very future of humanity.
The only thing shared 'in common' amongst the online 'community' - for certain - is access to the internet. Everything else depends on individual relationships and the internet is just a communications medium to both help and hinder these.
I would say that it is global capitalism that treats individuals as market entities, rather than globalisation itself.
I think that globalisation is a platform on which some good, and an awful lot of meddling is done.
When the market sells people what they want, and the state ensures that “the public gets what the public wants” (Paul Weller, 1980), and both bodies use the increasingly-global media to whip the public onto common focus, cultural homogenisation seems to be an obvious outcome.
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