Wednesday, March 24, 2004

Blessed Trade

Radley Balko has an interesting piece up at Tech Central Station titled “God and Globalization." Balko’s piece looks at the “interplay between trade and religion,” and where they have taken the world in the past, the present, and could take the world in the future.

One paragraph in the piece struck me as off the mark, though.

"Any discussion of trade and globalization’s influence on religion will share many characteristics of the debate over globalization and culture. Religion, after all, is a pretty determinant factor in gleaning the identity of a given culture. Trade opponents argue that developing cultures don’t have the means to compete with overpowering western influence, and so trade and globalization have led to a kind of “Coca-Cola-fication” of places like Africa and South and Central Asia. The West moves in and imposes its culture before the developing countries in those regions ever had an opportunity to forge a culture of their own."

Specifically, what I find off the mark, are the words which I have put into bold type.  I do not necessarily think that the West “imposes” its culture on developing countries.  I think that individuals within developing countries suck up Western culture like sponges because they have been denied so much for so long.  Additionally, stating that developing countries have Western culture imposed on them prior to having “an oppotunity to forge a culture of the own,” is simply false.  Developing countries have had cultures of their own for centuries.  Its just that the cultures developed in these developing countries were extremely lacking in developing wisdom, reason, freedom and trade. 

Posted by John Venlet on 03/24 at 07:00 AM
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