Cultures without borders in the globalized world

Culture is a system of shared belief or instincts. The artifacts of culture are religion, language, dress and food. As we evolve geographical boundaries seem to be collapsing however culture is a bit tricky as it delineates who we are or gives us an identity. Culture is important because it gets people to understand each other, trust and collaborate.

Cultures have never had borders, because cultures have never required them. The lifeblood coursing through the veins of any way of life, I’d argue, is it’s contact and contrast with the dissimilar, as well as the universal. If the skeletal foundation of cultures (language, faith, meditations on life, death and love) have been nurtured in the first human civilizations, they have been flowing steadily back and forth between boundaries natural and man-made, occasionally discharging more violently into new theatres in the form of a migration or invasion. Globalization has simply speeded up the transmission of different cultures, opened up the possibility of engaging with different cultures, encouraged a hierarchy of the most powerful ‘soft power’ cultures, and forced all humanity to confront the diversity which always existed in its midst.

Only recently did we synthesize the diverse spectrum of local traditions and ways of life into one single concept, chaining it inseparably to the authority of the state. Not until the rise of the nation state with it’s clearly demarcated borders and linguistic homogeneity did we attempt to protect whatever is “ours” against whatever is “theirs,” and only then did any cultural contamination become a problem.

We’d be fortunate if we abandoned the foolish superstition that culture is constant, that it is set in stone rather than diluted in a mercurial mass of influences, and that’s the light in which I view globalization: an admission of our own failure and hubris, and a renunciation of any arrogant attempt to bend culture to fit our whims.