globalization

The overall context of Bauman’s book delivers meaningful perception almost like many layers of an allegory. He diagnosed the modern problems of globalization and keenly criticized, especially the ideology of symmetrical differentiation in the first part, Time and Class. His way of viewing the problems reached a deeper level of understanding humans’ habits and culture through his holistic perspective. I agree with his discourse on the human consequence of polarization of the privileged/rich and unprivileged/poor has increased.
His insightful vision connects the concepts of ‘near’ to a psychological realm of anxiety-prone hesitation. “The idea of the ‘near’, on the other hand, stands for the unproblematic; painlessly acquired habits will do, and since they are habits they feel weightless and call for no effort, giving no occasion to anxiety- prone hesitation” (P. 14). Peoples’ settled habits make them not understand far beyond their boundary.
In the chapter, on New Speed and New Polarization, he states, “Some can now move out of the locality-any locality- at will. Others watch helplessly the sole locality they inhabit moving away from under their feet” (p.18). The new elite are isolated from physical space as ideologists are ungrounded or Christians find the truth from heaven, so symmetrical differentiation is impossible extension.
He continues “In Margand Werheim’s analogy between cyberspace and the Christian conception of heaven’…….while early Christian promulgated heaven as a realm in which the human society would be freed from the frailities and falling of the fresh, so today’s champions of cyberspace halt it as a place where the self will be freed from the limitations of physical embodiment”(p. 19). According to Bauman, it is a natural limit of human sight, hearing and memorizing capacity, but the problem is that those habits follow not their isolation, but others’.
Related to this concept of humans’ limitation, the theme of my final thesis is how to teach a way of seeing in order for people to understand their self-centered point of view. “One can safely anticipate that the strategy of symmetrical differentiation would always be preferred to the complementary alternative…. and above all the exterritoriality of the new elite and the forced territoriality of the rest” (p.23). There is no equality in Globalization. Those with the Power enforce the ideology of globalization of the poor in order to sustain their power.
His critical perspective of globalization makes me understand not only Korean peasants’ situation- their desire to leave their place--as an example of their loss because of what Bauman calls enforced immobility but also their contradictory habits--the farmers’ burden regarding their work--which were beyond my understanding. However, the farmers’ lack of Internet use follows their loss of power/richness and identity, ironically because they see/hear about its freedom through media, which seems like an egalitarian tool. They have enforced into double-surrounded walls in terms of ‘culture’ and ‘community’.
For Korean farmers, culture, especially English culture, is power. In this situation globalization is a hegemonic game, so it is like another type of Christian crusade of the Middle Age.
Nils Christie’s allegory of Moses’ pyramidal justice and the water well’s egalitarian justice defines the problem of loss of traditional community role well. The Industrial Revolution launched the beginning of the Western culture for modern society. Even though it has ensured peoples’ modern living is more convenient, Korea lost the traditional role of community and large family system, which had connected peoples’ living with each other and sustained their secure lives. As a result, we suffer more from being isolated than in the past (Cornish, 1991), the society has become materialistic and fragmented, and mental oppression has been serious in our modern society.
He questions at the end of his book, “If the concentration camps serves as laboratories of a totalitarian society, where the limits of human submission and serfdom were explored, and if the Panopticon-style work houses served as the laboratories of industrial society, where the limits of routinization of human action were experimented with-the Pelican Bay prison is a laboratory of the ‘globalized’ (or ‘planetary’, in Alberto Meluccic terms) society, where the techniques of space-confinement of the rejects and the waste of globalization are tested and their limits are explored” (p.113).
He has criticized the problems of power, however, his question remains, “The question is all the more ethically worrying for the fact that ‘those we punish to a large extent are poor and highly stigmatized people in need of assistance rather than punishment” (p.114, cited from Matiesen, Prison on Trial, p. 70).
I admire his thoughtful commitment about those who are powerless, and it is true that they need help. However, ultimately it is not a matter of being “in need of assistance’, but a matter of the privileged peoples’ understanding about how powerless as they are. Without it, his idea will create another hierarchical discernment as well.
Understanding these modern problems helps me clarify the Korean situation that we are going through, but my educational concern emerges into a question: How do I convey my understanding to others whose way of seeing/thinking already solidified? What and how can we teach for peoples’ change/transformation from fetishistic to voyeuristic look (by Bauman’s term)/critical gaze.