Well let's revisit this statement in 500 years. Every decade has brought the world closer. Even the recent developments (brexit, trump) are reactions to increased pace of integration. You can find kfc, coca cola in socities as diverse as Mongolia and Madagascar. It will be extremely difficult to turn the clock back on this and this will only keep on intensifying in my opinion.
I love the fact that people always bring stuff like:
> hey you can find McDonalds and Starbucks even when you don't expect it, so it means the world is closer than it has ever been right?
You could find pottery exported in multiple places even in antiquity, that did not mean they had a single culture or single belief system in place. Do not equal exchange of goods with the assumption of a mono-culture.
Tea is also a phenomenal example here since it's been so globally traded that it no longer even has a cultural identity. And then when you get into the age of sail you suddenly see a massive intercontinental trade of sugar/cotton/tobacco/coffee/etc.
I also never understood why people seem to think that a multinational corporation selling stuff to different cultures is somehow doing anything but increasing the corporation's profit margins.
(1) there are more sovereign nations now than ever,
(2) all the big empires (from Babylonian, to Alexander's, to Roman, to Byzantium, to Persian, to Incas, all the way to the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, British and French colonial empires, USSR, and more) -aside from the Chinese and Indian who are more homogenous racially/culturally - have collapsed
(3) there is way more infighting that on any time in the previous 40 years
(4) nations that were held together for half a century as a single country have nonetheless split at the first chance, often under fierce wars (e.g. Yugoslavia), and even centuries old countries like Canada, Belgium, UK, Spain, etc, still have infighting, and even votes to break up...
(5) a worsening of climate change and economy will more than likely see every-nation-for-itself than some unity, even if there's a coordinated effort to reduce emissions and so on, there will also be huge pressure to ascertain certain resources, safety, etc at a country by country level (sharing is only good for those that need it. For those that have the power to avoid it, or even grab from others, it just gives you moral points)
>You can find kfc, coca cola in societies as diverse as Mongolia and Madagascar.
Yeah, that's a huge cultural (and dietary) destruction...
Do you know how many different empires, rulers, internal wars and government systems China and India have gone through in 2000 years, and how many "races" and "cultures" they have?
>Do you know how many different empires, rulers, internal wars and government systems China and India have gone through in 2000 years, and how many "races" and "cultures" they have?
Yes. Still more homogeneous and stable than most other empires...
Oh you mean like that time when the Mongol conquered and ruled china for like, 100+ years, ushering in the largest case of minority rule the world had ever seen to that point.
I mean like that time when this was just an episode in millennia of history...
I also mean like that time when the eventual demise of most empires and huge nations was my point, which China and India managed to avoid, and not China and India themselves (which are totally orthogonal to the point I was making, and in fact an exception to the rule I posited)
India is called a sub-continent for a reason. Its extremely diverse in race, languages, culture, climate, religions,genes etc. Definitely more diverse than Australia and probably more diverse than Europe.
>Its extremely diverse in race, languages, culture, climate, religions,genes etc.
I believe you meant ethnicity, not race. Also as for the diversity, the two major ethnicities in India are Indio-Aryan and Dravidian, at 73% and 24% respectively, leaving the rest of the 'massive diversity' spread across 3% of the population. Same holds true for language. So I'd argue that the actual ethnic/language diversity in India is rather small in practice.
>aside from the Chinese and Indian who are more homogenous racially/culturally
China and India are not very homogenous at all, now or historically. I can bring up plenty of examples, but here's one that caused huge amounts of political unrest and dispute just last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaveri_River_water_dispute
>Yeah, that's a huge cultural (and dietary) destruction...
Culture only has value if people decide it have value. There is nothing innate in the concept of culture that makes it valuable or positive. Certain aspects of existing cultures I think most people on HN would agree are detrimental to humanity - things that result in harm, control, removal of agency, etc. from the unwilling. Those shouldn't be protected just because they're part of culture. And by the same token, if a more homogenous culture is required for humanity's descendants to become a spacefaring civilization (which is ultimately required for something resembling humans to survive in the long run), people might value that over cultural diversity. I'm not really convinced that that is required, as diversity generally makes us better, but there might be aspects that are incompatible.
But even focusing on something like food - there's nothing inherently wrong with people deciding they prefer to eat some type of food more than what may have historically arisen in their culture or geographic location. I love trying different types of food and hope that it is preserved in some way, but no ones owes it to me, or anyone else, to eat something they don't want to in the name of preserving culture. Every individual has agency, and we should let the people that want to preserve aspects of their culture do so, and those that want to shed aspects should certainly be allowed to do so as well. At any rate, I doubt the people eating KFC and drinking Coke in Mongolia and Madagascar need or appreciate those of us on Hackernews telling them they should or shouldn't eat and drink.
> even centuries old countries like Canada, Belgium, UK, Spain, etc, still have infighting, and even votes to break up...
1. Not all of these are centuries old.
2. The fact that they generally agree on a legal system to bring about the changes each side wants by voting on these separatist policies within the scope of that agreed system is impressive in and of itself. They simply want some decisions about their government to be made by different people in a different place which is quite compatible with some hypothetical global federalist system.
> (1) there are more sovereign nations now than ever,
Yeah, but the power of the nation state has also weakened. Try subtracting many of the EU member nations as individual sovereign countries for instance, or look to the outsized influence of multinationals.
2. The West is essentially one large empire.
> (3) there is way more infighting that on any time in the previous 40 years
Source? 40 years is a bad timescale - bring that up to a few hundred or thousand and we are at an almost all-time low.
Still, India as of today remains huge (1.4 billion people) and mostly homogenous and more long lived than most other nations, the claim wasn't that it was a monolithic thing that never had any splits/ethnic issues...
The comparison I explicitly made was to e.g. the Babylonian empire (now totally gone), the Roman empire (now totally gone), the British colonial empire (now almost totally gone), Austro-Hungarian empire (now gone), and so on...
It's certainly odd to measure the closeness of human societies by the proximity of coca cola dispensers.
Humanity is scientifically and materialistically closer and that will certainly continue, but the world is not closer in terms of modes of governance or ideas of how society ought to be organised.
On the contrary, 30 years ago after the fall of the Soviet Union that sentiment peaked and Fukuyama's end of history seemed plausible. Today with the nationalisation of cyberspace, we can see countless of new divides.
The US is rapidly withdrawing from global affairs, China is emerging with a competitive, alternative mode of organisation, a distinct European identity is beginning to form as a response to this particular in France, India is slowly emerging (see the very thread we're in), and Africa is a whole other matter.
But by no means does it look like the world is converging, as it did in the 90s and early 00s when we were all listening to corporate world music and cheering for Blair.
The convergence is massive and even faster than in the 90s. Languages die nearly daily (a language dies when its last speaker dies) and with them their culture, and people consume the same media and news all of the world. I'm not going to dig up some links on the net, you can do that yourself, but these are measurable phenomena.
You're thinking in short, next twenty years or so. A resurgence of nationalism is a response to globalization, but unless we give up our ways of living entirely (no capitalism, no markets, no growth) these movements will have practically no effect. Mass media alone ensure that, let alone the nature of global trading and social mobility. Think about the next two hundred years and there is no way culture on earth will not be vastly homogeneous. Whether that's good or bad I will leave open, my personal view is that all massive shifts in human development are accompanied by positive and negative effects.
> You're thinking in short, next twenty years or so
I suspect the drawdown of easily-accessible, dense, cheap fossil fuels will spell the end of global integration; consider a very low-energy future where most communication takes place via radio and travel for 99% takes place at a fraction of today's rate. We would expect regional differences to increase as groups adapt to local areas, ideally while carrying out extensive sharing of e.g. practices and techniques.
That's only because of Trump and that will fail when he fails to be re-elected in 2020. I don't know why people think this is a trend rather than a local minimum (the Trump minimum?) .
Of-course you are right: there are likely to be several major wars in 500 years where smaller and poorer nations get annexed or more likely - simply subjugated by sheer economic dominance. The winners who perform this 'integration' will definitely be in charge of the space missions.
" A 1910 best-selling book, The Great Illusion, used economic arguments to demonstrate that territorial conquest had become unprofitable, and therefore global capitalism had removed the risk of major wars. " [0]
If you assume that the world order should look like America in charge, everyone else playing quietly in their own garden then everything is fine. If you assume that the Asian, African and European powers might see the world differently, there is a lot of potential that the last 60 years are not the inevitable tide of history but a happy anomaly while everyone stood back up from WWII.
> If you assume that the Asian, African and European powers might see the world differently
And if you’re an American, the prospect of that single national government being say Bangladesh (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/world/asia/bangladesh-sta...) should be pretty scary! Star Trek style global government seems attractive to many people because they assume it’ll be “America in Space.”
More like Europe in space (more socialist/democratic) and I wouldn't mind it - but then I guess I'm biased, as a European (and I half-seriously fly the flag of United Federation of Planets).
Still, I don't think we can face planetary-scale challenges much longer as a bunch of competing nations; some form of global governance will be necessary for humanity to move forward.
As for culture difference, this may be unpopular opinion, but I do hope things will homogenize further over time. The driving aspect towards cultural unification even today is that people copy what works.
Yeah a "Great Leap Forward" kind of moving forward for humanity? Sounds good, works bad. Capitalism looks bad, but works good. I once also wanted a kind of world government but as I grew more knowledgable this Idea really started to terrify me. A decentralized world of competing small units with a small set of (trade) rules seems like the best option mid- to long-term. In short term of course socialist type of governance gives stability.
Just 2 cents from a fellow European
Sounds like proof that cultural imperialism is a valid complaint for much of the world. Is it a bad thing that some of the previous worst offenders are starting to pull back?
Before we got to see what the internet actually became, it was a realm of endless idealism. It was going to be something that would finally unite people across cultures and any sort of boundaries. People would be able to share ideas, communicate instantly, and effectively turn humanity from a disparate group of people separated by arbitrary lines into simple a group of diverse and interesting people all sharing and communicating among one another. Instead we used its filtering ability to break down into even smaller groups than before. Before the internet Americans were mostly unified by an American identity. Now instead we've splintered off into a whole host of little subculture identities driven by the great ability of the internet to unite niches and expel the nonbelievers.
But this isn't about the internet. It's about people. Birmingham is one of the most "integrated" cities in England. This [1] page has heat maps showing the various religions there. There's basically no overlap. Instead of integration you have the Muslim section, the Christian section, the Jew section, etc. Even the Sikhs have there own little section, though granted they do share it a bit with the Hindus. Now instead of having one mostly unified city you now have a half dozen cities that have some very sharp cultural conflicts. The irony that literally bringing people closer together can, figuratively, do the exact opposite.
Even the notion that we're becoming more integrated is something I'd question. This [2] is a video showing the borders of the world over time. The surprising thing you'll notice is that, over time, divisions between society have actually been accelerating. Check out the mid 1200s. The Mongols created a single unified empire than stretched from western europe to eastern asia. Very near the entire known world at the time. No need for borders when there's one world government, and one that was also extremely tolerant of foreign cultures. Can you imagine living in this time and then somebody saying that within a couple of centuries the entire empire would be scattered like ashes in the wind?
And like nearly all the empire collapses you can see in that video, it was caused by internal culture clashes. Should the Mongol empire adopt western traditions and become a sedentary settled empire, or should it remain a putative Mongol empire? One side said x, the other said y, lots of people died, the empire broke up. A story told a million times on various scales. Of course even if they had chosen one direction or another, it likely would have had the same ending because once one side or another reached a critical mass - you'd see the emergence of internal insurrections.
Of course we've had a pause in open war since 1945 but nuclear deterrence isn't going to last forever. Imagine there were no nuclear weapons today. Do you think China, the Mideast, the United States, China, Russia, Europe, etc would still be maintaining the already tenuous peace we have? Without nuclear weapons the Cold War would not have been the Cold War, it would have been World War 3. And as soon as nuclear deterrence can be nullified by technological means, I expect we'll be quite quick to pick right back up.
There is extensive evidence beyond even just writings including death records, genetic records (1 in 200 men, around the world, are direct descendants of Genghis Khan), and much more. And when you reach such a tremendous scale there is just an unimaginable amount of writing from people of all different views and values.
The argument you're making is sufficient to discount and any all records of history. And indeed not even history of the long past, but also the present. Do you know exactly what happened in Syria from falsifiable objective accounts, or are you relying on information spread by a small number of sources each with their own agenda?
I think your argument definitely deserves consideration when you get into the minutia of history, but when you're talking about the big scale (this empire ruled this land at this time) I think your argument is more about a disbelief in everything, historical nihilism, rather than justifiable incredulity.
My point was that the times you refer to were so underdocumented and the reporting is so unreliable that using them in an argument amounts for confirmation bias. You wrote:
"The Mongols created a single unified empire than stretched from western europe to eastern asia [...] one that was also extremely tolerant of foreign cultures"
Was there a gigantic Mongol empire? Sure. Was it unified and extremely tolerant of foreign cultures in the sense that we use these words today? Not bloody likely. What kind of tolerance leads to what you also note:
"(1 in 200 men, around the world, are direct descendants of Genghis Khan)"
You are using your intuition of the past instead of any actual knowledge of such to formulate views and values. Yes, the Mongol empire was extremely tolerant of cultures by any interpretation of the word. For instance at the time religion was a huge deal and while himself a shamanist, he exempted all religious leaders (of any sort) from taxation and public service requirements. He also built a wide array of houses of worship for most of every major religion. With religions that proved troublesome to integrate, such as Islam, the Mongol leaders would themselves genuinely convert to the religion to try to help maintain better ties and relations. In places were there was religious persecution, Genghis Khan would happily depose leaders (including other Mongols) to ensure freedom under his empire.
Outside of religion they also even allowed local leaders to remain and organize their subjects as they saw fit (subject to things such as guarantees of religious freedom) including even maintaining their own militaries. The only requirement was a 10% tax to the Mongol empire.
They way he spread his genes was pretty much as the way we do today. The only difference is that he had hundreds of wives. Take somebody with several times the wealth of Jeff Bezos today and make him the absolute ruler of the USA, EU, and China. And now he imagine he asks, genuinely asking - not an offer one cannot refuse, practically any woman on this Earth to be one of his wives. Very few would say 'nah, I'm holding out for somebody better.'
