Following Chris’ very kind comment on Friday, I thought I would resume my digging into what my sputtering about glocalism and glocalization really means. It’s all fine and well to talk about “globalizing the local” (Chris’ summary) and maintaining global networks and interconnectivity that avoids visiting a corresponding violence upon local cultures and communities, but what is necessary for this idea to spark a real discussion is something approaching a coherent outline or structure. I’m getting there in bits and pieces, slowly but surely; however, the challenge here is that in some senses I’m still building the boat as I set sail. So I imagine that the whole project comes off a touch disjointed and schismatic.

I think Chris’ framing the discussion in terms of trying to introduce some verticality into Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s Multitude is helpful and it is true that I have actually drawn some vague and abstract inspiration from Hardt and Negri’s vision. Truth be told, though, I have started and stopped Multitude three times now, never really getting into the meat of it. Most of my understanding of what Hardt Negri outline there within comes from conversations with a good friend who speaks both highly and critically of the work and a handful of videos on YouTube that I’ve watched primarily featuring Michael Hardt.

However, Multitude is back on deck in terms of my reading schedule and the last time I had started I was actually quite into it — coincidentally, I suspended that reading to take on Barnett’s Great Powers. I intend to make a sizable dent in the book over the course of this weekend and am hopeful that doing so will flesh out some ideas in some interesting ways.

But in terms of why glocalism’s bee is stuck in my blogging bonnet, I tend to take as much inspiration from my interactions with a variety of localists around the blogosphere and their articulation of an ideal, or at least more sustainable, enjoyable, and manageable world.

Daniel Larison, Rod Dreher, Nathan Origer, Russell Arben Fox (hell, basically everyone at Front Porch Republic), and here at the League our own E.D. Kain present what I consider to be a powerful and compelling analysis of our modern lives and the ways in which we might choose to alter those lives towards a better end. I lock horns with these characters as much as I do precisely because I am so impressed with the vision they present, which is a vision that underwrites a great many of the ways I live my life and the values that inform my life. [Read more →]

I think it was smart that Mark walked his arguments around free trade and globalism back a few steps in the light of well-founded arguments presented to the contrary. Not only is it the intellectually honest thing to do, but I think it gives us an opportunity to breathe and take a look at what it is that we’re actually arguing about.

In some senses I find these discussions about localism and globalism, free-market economics and distributism/protectionism, interventionism and isolationism to be among the most interesting and exciting discussions going. It’s my own humble opinion that the issues grappled there within are perhaps the most pressing and vital on our collective plate, both because they lie at the heart of the question we all face on a day-to-day basis (whether we choose to acknowledge it or not), “How shall I live?” and because that question is the pulse that lies within the veins of so many other truly daunting and important questions (economics, environment, politics, culture, technology, architecture, the list goes on).

Alternatively; however, I also find these conversations truly frustrating because the tendency for their participants is to get caught in dichotomous tropes, well worn pathways that inevitably lead to brick walls of disagreement and intractability. To wit, Mark and his interlocutors all chose to frame their discussion in either/or language; we either go local or we go global, period (Dr. Larison explicitly titled his well-received rejoinder as such). There is always some benefit to strongly stated cases and arguments flying about on either side, but at some point you come to an impasse when the letters “vs” are stuck into your articulation — and this is all the more the case when it comes to issues that are as well debated as globalism and localism. For me, the truly fascinating space of the debate is that sliver of an opening that suggests that both sides have a good deal of proprietary truth they bring to the table, but still possess enough cracks in their master plan to allow for a certain intellectual legoing of the ideas offered.

Hence, my real direction in all of this is to explore the notions of how the truths uncovered by localists about a certain way of living that seems increasingly vital, especially insofar as value and integrity are concerned, might be fit together with the powerful potential of global networks with which our free-market economic adventures and resulting global cultural cross-pollination have provided us with. In my first crack at this I termed what I was trying to articulate was a sense of glocality, and appropriately warned of my neologistic midwifery. Imagine my surprise (probably not all that surprising, actually, but delightful all the same) when a couple of posts down the road, Dara Lind alerted me to the fact that my somewhat half-baked wordplay had a semi-coherent correspondent body of thought. So it is that my belief in matters large and small have come to rest on the notion that neither globalism nor localism themselves provide a full answer to the question, “How shall I/we live?” Rather, each contains some element of powerful but limited truth in the matter and that a fuller picture is best painted by finding some kind of fusion between the two.

Welcome to glocalism.
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….is the promise of globalization.  Just like coat factories that moved from the States to Eastern Europe and then off to China, and from there…to where?  Factories pop up for just a few years before heading on to greener pastures where labor is even cheaper than before.  Boom and bust.

“Our people made that choice, the choice to go to Sameness. Before my time, before the previous time, back and back and back. We relinquished color when we relinquished sunshine and did away with difference. We gained control of many things. But we had to let go of others.”

- Lois Lowry, The Giver

My year living in the Denver area was the first time I was really, glaringly aware of what life could be like when all the businesses and street corners and houses in a city were plagued with sameness.  For most of my life I’d lived in smaller towns or in towns that have in some way resisted this state of corporate replication.  Certainly these places have all eventually been accosted by Burger Kings and Starbucks and Jiffy Lubes and the myriad other national chains, but in Colorado – at least in the suburb in which I had imprisoned myself – sameness reached critical mass.  One could very well end up lost from one major intersection to the next.  The same grocery store sat in the same parking lot with the same shoe outlet all walled in by the same streets, the same sidewalks.  There were urban trails, thankfully, but for a long ways the grid-like city stretched bleak and flat and boring.  No interesting bars, no dusty old book stores.  No character.

This, of course, in utter contrast to some of the grittier parts of the city.  Uptown Denver (though not so much Downtown) is fairly full of its own unique flair.  There are non-Starbucks coffee shops and at least one bar with a giant mural of Jerry Garcia painted in the men’s bathroom.  I went to a hamburger shop on Colfax and an employee there tried to sell me one of a variety of rings with my meal.  I don’t think the job paid well enough to sustain certain habits, or at least the shakiness of his hands and the fact that he was peddling rings on the clock seemed to indicate as much.  Indeed, crime festers around the edges of the older parts of the city.  A woman was kidnapped in the parking lot of one of the largest liquor stores I’ve ever visited, a block from where one of my friends lived.  Then again, Colfax Avenue stretches east to west across the city and crime is bad all along it, whether it’s downtown or in the eastern suburbs.  Certainly, though, the appeal of the old Victorian and brick apartment buildings and ancient houses of the older downtown neighborhoods is dampened by the heightened crime the further into the city one burrows, the further from the comfy Cherry Street suburbs or the new, glossy burbs lining the Tech Center.

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Both E.D. and Mark have excellent posts up debating and discussing the merits of individualism versus communitarianism and lamenting the marketization of moral calculation. Regardless of which inflection you happen to prefer, I think that one can find a great deal to appreciate about E.D.’s careful and biting criticism of individualism run amok and Mark’s exemplary effort to carve out an alternative and ultimately more authentic definition of individualism.

Both writers note how morality and value qua materialism is perhaps the most pressing scourge currently facing us, and I am inclined to both heed and agree with their warnings. But that said, I think that it becomes easy in such a game of finger pointing to wind up up over selling one’s case and failing to mind a certain persistent set of details that beg acknowledgment. Listen, it is certainly true that unbridled consumerism presents significant problems on numerous levels — not just the philosophical ones to which Mark and E.D. point, but also environmental/survival problems to which Thomas Friedman somewhat recently alluded in one of his op-eds. The hollowing effects of consumerism therefore present a significant edifice over which we must scale in order to both embody our authentic selves and maintain the livable space in which to mount that effort.

That qualifier out of the way, though, I think we ought to be careful about not tossing the baby out with the bathwater, especially insofar as I think that baby includes several billion additional heads who might have something to offer to the project. It is easy for us in the West to disown and ridicule the excesses of materialism because, well, we’re the ones who are drowning in its mire. But to assume that such an outlook is universal is to commit the grievous sin of ethnocentrism: our circumstances are not the only circumstances effecting this calculation. There are whole sections of the world who look at images of the wealth, comfort, and stability of our culture and ask the perfectly legitimate question, “When will it be our turn?”

Indeed, the exercise of even pontificating about certain elements of life is in some senses a luxury reserved for those who have achieved (accidentally stumbled into?) a degree of affluence that affords them the time and space in which to engage such mental gymnastics. In some regards, we ought to be careful how thoroughly we thumb our noses at the junk of our lives, it is the ability to accumulate that junk that has given us the platform from which to have the privilege of rejecting it in pursuit of even more worthwhile realizations and modes of living — there are a great many (vast majority?) for whom such intellectual abandon is simply not a reality. [Read more →]

Some time ago Chris posed a question to the rest of us at the League that has been tumbling around in my head for some time and to which I think have the rough outlines of an answer, or at least the tickle of a start. Chris said,

Exit Question for my fellow members of the League.  I would be interested in hearing yours thoughts about how we can get back to sense of the value of things: community, trade, materiality, thought, our time and what it should be spent on, family, and the like.

Of course there are a lot of different ways that one could answer Chris’ question depending on how one takes the question. There are potentially many reasons why we are experiencing a distance from a sense of the value of things, but among the things that Crhis lists off there is a thread that presents itself to my eyes: globalization.

Now rest assured that I’m not about to go off on some broadly construed anti-globalization rant, it was some years ago that I developed an appreciation for the effects of globalization on our planet: economic, cultural, technological, and otherwise. That appreciation persists to this day. But one runs the risk of  harbouring a one-sided analysis if one remains unwilling to contemplate some of the negative effects of the world’s increasingly globalized context.

One such effect is an increasingly widening perspective that takes our frame of reference so far out of relation from our lives as lived that we do indeed start to lose our grip on, as Chris puts it, the value of things. In many regards, our inherent value of things comes from the orbit they inhabit within the constellation of our lives and how we interact with them. But as our lives become more and more exposed to the mind-numbing pace and unstructured parameters of a global context, the gravitational force of those orbits cease to exert the force to which we’ve become accustomed and our unspoken value of things begins to come into question.

Even our interactions with one another are increasingly mediated by a variety of interfaces that take away the human-to-human contact that is vital to a grounded sense of value — this blog, love it thought I do, is a good example of just one of those devices. Which is not to say that networking devices that expand the parameters of our interactions are bad, per se, but it is to cultivate an awareness of the impact they have on various aspects of our lives and to factor those impacts in when we determine the ways in which we choose to live and how we determine value. In some cases, those impacts may be considered so as to re-orient ourselves to the devices that open us to a more expansive and globalized context to see if we might be able to co-opt their original intention in such a way as to reverse or coerce the potential unintended negativity. To redeem our beloved League, the communal emphasis of this site is precisely such an attempt in the realm of blogging. [Read more →]