The Death Throes of Globalization, by Carlos Ramahete

Image art @Jeronimovosking

Tales of woe about coming Globalization are quickly becoming a literary form of their own. It is understandable: when one is stuck in the middle of something, it is easy to make a mountain out of a molehill. From down here, surrounded by the coffee fields of Carmo de Minas, though, the view is completely different. Globalization is indeed at least an annoyance, and for people in Western Europe and Anglo-land it can become a serious nuisance in the near future. It is a doomed project, though, and I think it could help some to offer an explanation of where it comes from and where it is headed to.

Globalization is nothing but the final political form of Modernity. The death throes of a dying era.

Modernity is said to have started with the Lutheran Revolution, which substituted individual scriptural interpretation for the vast common understanding of religion that formed the Christian Civilization. After demolishing the common view that held society together, Modern solipsism’s next big step happened one hundred years later, when Descartes turned mankind’s relationship with the world upside-down by stating that what is inside man’s head is somehow truer that his perception of reality itself. Yet another century passed, and Kant doubled down on Descartes’ original mental revolution, stating that while we cannot be sure whether we have two arms, or that it is cold or hot, dark or sunny outside our mind, Reason is universal, that is, if people think hard enough on anything they will arrive at the same conclusions. Ideas became truer than real life, and the Age of Ideologies could and did start.