Homogenized: The Death of Cultural Diversity (OP-ED)

Homogenized: The Death of Cultural Diversity?

(Op-Ed)

J.M. Rogers

. . .

The globalization of the world has begun to accumulate at an exponential rate. As each day passes, social forces extend their cultural reach, spreading the tenets of Western Society. While at one time, “Western Society” was viewed as a strictly European effect; it is becoming clear that the universal meaning of “Western Society” is free-market capitalism. And while the expansion of these markets to ethnically diverse regions has often been romanticized as an expansion of modernity, the only factual assessment that can be extracted from the mass industrialization of the world is that cultural diversity is diminishing. The looming question is: “What does this homogenization of culture mean to the future of human survival?”

Even as I compose this essay, the English and Chinese languages are being taught to millions of individuals worldwide. With the advent of the modern industrial age, the diversity of languages serves as an obstacle to commerce rather than a contribution. Unfortunately, as the ethnically diverse peoples of the world are drawn into the lures of capitalism, they are often pressured to marginalize their own heritage. This marginalization of culture is never a total abandonment, though, and this, in part, is because of the reluctance with which many peoples in a given society interpret industrial pressures. The more religious or spiritual members of society may attribute the temptation to abandon their way of life as a test from the gods or even as a curse. However, the voices of these societal members have done little to sway the shift toward capitalism in their cultures.

While it is concerning to see the disappearance of diversity in cultures in favor of global cultures such as the U.S., China, and Japan, the more concerning issue is how these newly minted capitalists are treated. The world of capitalism is not driven by morality, hence the existence of overt financial inequality within the “home base” of Western society. This equality exists among citizens who are not only informed at a young age about capitalist norms, but they are also schooled throughout their lives via television, articles, and a litany of other information generated by the members of Western Society. The spread of capitalism into Africa during the 19^th century was met with disastrous results that have left the country torn and struggling in a series of endless conflicts that seek to fill the power vacuum created by capitalism.

It is important to note that capitalism itself is NOT a culture. Capitalism is an economic practice that allows individuals to compete with other individuals over resources and profit margins. And yet, if you were to ask most Westerners what they thought the center of their society was, they would probably refer to the free market. This is problematic, to say the least. While Western society has distanced itself from moral obligations and religions, many cultures of the world have not, and as such, the continued conversion of societies into market entities will cause the vacuum of power created by market warfare (and military warfare) to expand, leaving many countries unable to govern themselves and therefore dependent on the power structures of more developed countries. Once these societies attain “help” from the big players in the globalized world, their cultures become gentrified and molded to serve in a symbiotic relationship of monetary exchange with their “patron” country. 

There doesn’t appear to be any curb to this spread. Currently, the global shares of Europe, the United States, China, and Russia, make up over 50% of the world’s GDP, and that number looks to rise exponentially in the next two decades. Without restraint, global culture will continue to become less diverse. But, if biodiversity in the physiological spectrum is necessary for the survival of life on Earth, the question that surfaces is whether humanity, which is entirely dependent on societal structures for survival, will survive without a dynamic range of sustenance approaches being expressed. In the end, capitalism may be financially lucrative, but it remains to be seen whether society can survive a global collapse once the system has become wholly integrated. In the past, when catastrophes have struck, the outliers of society were able to survive due to their more simplistic relationship with the physical world, simplistic relationships built through personal experience, and the social skills that have been honed and passed down over several generations. In the not-to-distant future, these skills may no longer be available to us. As societies are shaped to the Western capitalist concept, valuable information is lost. And while we can say that a new Dodge Ram is worth about 45k, who can really put a value on the knowledge passed down by those ancestors who lived through the hardest conditions in human history?