Knocking Down the Fence: Globalization, Anti-Culture, and the Death of Tradition
A dirt road runs deep into the mountains of the American west. It’s been a hundred years since it was last traveled, maybe more, and the pine trees have all but taken the road back. In fact, it’s not a road at this point so much as padded ground. Barely even a trail. But nonetheless it snakes its way through the undergrowth and comes to rest at a bubbling hot spring far away from civilization’s prying eyes.
Roughly halfway to its end point, running wide across it, stands on old and rustic fence. A fence possibly older than the road itself. And it stands strong and unyielding despite its age. It’s this fence that a young traveler, the first who’s set foot on this road for nearly a century, has paused to examine.
He knows where the road leads and he knows where he’s come from, but by all measures he cannot understand why the fence was built. It seems to him to be utterly pointless. A strange custom of a time long gone.
Annoyed at the prospect of walking around this fence, our young traveler begins to kick it down, and after a few well-placed kicks the dark soil beneath the fence gives way and the fence falls.
A flock of birds takes to the air, a breeze rattles the pines, a squirrel darts across a rock, and our young traveler continues on his way having no idea of the terrible mistake he’s just committed…
You may have heard of this parable before. But if you haven’t, let me reframe it in the real world.
This first picture is of a church built in the United States in 1886.
You’ll notice that the St. Anne de Detroit has an ornate and beautiful architectural design. You can sense the attention to detail that was put into its creation. You know, just by looking at the building, that it is making a divine appeal to God: the building itself is a monument to the worship that takes place within.
Now observe this second church, built much more recently.
This second church is one of the most highly attended churches in all of the United States, with tens of thousands of weekly attendees. It certainly doesn’t lack in popularity!
On the other hand, the second church has none of the beauty that radiates from the St. Anne. At best this second church can be described as a square consisting of other squares. A box you’d find in the mail…
It takes quite the discerning eye to pick out the differences between the Texas church and the below image of an actual United States prison. Isn’t it strange that we give the same architectural significance to two buildings that could not serve more opposite jobs within our society?
What does this detour into architecture have to do with a fence in the middle of a forgotten road in the heart of the American outback? And why was our traveler knocking this fence down such a terrible mistake? It comes out to a simple answer: our traveler did not understand WHY that fence had been erected in the first place. All he saw was its lack of utility and, annoyed, determined to remove it. This was foolishly misguided.
As the parable goes, a better man would first learn why the fence was put up, and then (and only then) could he have the right to remove it. Because once he learns why the fence was placed there, he might desire not to remove it at all — humbly admitting that his ancestors were more knowledgable than he’d first realized.
Returning to the two churches — one built by our ancestors, the other built by our contemporaries — I’d like to infer that the architectural beauty of the St. Anne was the fence that our contemporaries tore down when they built the Fellowship Church in Texas (and so many others).
Sure, the ornate beauty of our ancestor’s church wasn’t serving any sort of operative function — but it did convey a message. And that message is unique to the church. A prison, on the other hand, should not use similar architecture to a church. Its architecture should convey something different, just like a University, Library, or Restaurant should have unique architecture as well.
And yet, today, these buildings are all one and the same. I think both you and I can agree that something of great significance has been lost.
And this problem spans far beyond our architecture. Modern American culture has removed the fence in every aspect of our lives. You can see the impact in our art, our stories, our music, our businesses, our behaviors, our technology… everything. Somewhere along the line in the last one hundred years we’ve chosen to optimize for utility over beauty and soul. “Safety” and “efficiency”, over experimentation.
Our cities and towns have become corporate billboards.
Our entertainment lacks any meaning. Our people are fat. Our cars, computers, houses: all of them have become itemized and non-unique. Our society is entirely risk-averse — too interested in being comfortable than being challenged. The world we have built is so uninspiring that we are killing ourselves to get out!
But how did this happen? What fence did we uproot and burn to get down this path of anti-creativity? Of cultural genocide? And what’s the solution — if there is one at all?
WELCOME TO IDLEVIEW
The closest town to this forgotten road and its broken fence is called Idleview. It’s population: 1500.
George Johnson’s family has lived in Idleview for generations. George is the last of his line, and for most of his life he’s earned a living woodworking and, at night, playing the piano at the town’s bustling brewery. The songs he plays on the piano are songs he wrote, tales about Idleview passed down to him from his father. As for his woodworking: he handcrafts his furniture from sustainably sourced, local trees — and every handcrafted piece is spiced with local flare.
But lately, more and more Idleviewians have opted to purchase their furniture online: it arrives quicker and is less expensive than what George charges. The only downside is that the furniture is cookie cutter and lacks ingenuity — but that’s a small price to pay for a more streamlined service! Besides, their local farm/leathercrafting business/textiling gig has been having a hard time competing with out-of-town enterprises. They don’t have the cash to buy George’s wares!
The lack of business has made George more reliant on his piano gigs across town, but this has also begun to pose a problem. The bar patrons now expect to hear the hottest pop songs in the world blasted repetitively over the bar’s speakers. Where George was once only in competition with a few other hobbyist piano players in town, he now competes with the likes of Ed Sheeran and Drake: global phenomenons.
The hit to his wallet has been extreme, and with no other options George has been forced to sell the land his family has owned for generations and move to a small apartment across the river, owned and operated by an out-of-town investor.
Fortunately there’s a silver lining: the buyer of his land is a large corporation that plans to build a supermarket. The supermarket will let shoppers buy their cheap furniture while listening to the best pop songs of the day — and they’ve made it clear they want to hire George as a manager!
As time progresses, other local artisans like George are driven out of business by global enterprises, and the heart of the town — the local community — is turned into slaves for corporations who wouldn’t be able to locate Idleview on a map. The history and culture of Idleview is lost, replaced by a washed down globalist culture that consists of fast food, consumerism, and addiction. When George dies, his songs are forgotten, his woodworking craft disappears, and the town ceases to function without help from the very enterprises that enslaved them.
If you stopped through Idleview today — maybe to get gas and run to the bathroom — you might wonder if the town sprung up simply to serve as a rest stop for highway drivers. Why else would anyone want to live there?
Idleview has become like so many other small towns in America: a gas station that helps you get somewhere else.
THE FENCE
As the world has become increasingly more connected, competition has expanded onto a global scale. Where once our local woodworker competed among the people in his town, today he must compete at a global scale. He’s in a race for a winner-take-all competition that won’t just service his home town, but will service the entirety of America — possibly the world.
However, what works at a local level rarely works at a global one. In order to be successful our Idleview woodworker, George, must learn how to scale his business. He can’t build handcrafted tables in bulk: there aren’t enough hours in the day. Therefore, he’ll need an automated process with machines, and people who know how to use those machines (not people who know how to craft wood).
Then, he’ll need to remove the Idleview cultural references. Those references may have sold well in his hometown but no one is going to appreciate them in Los Angeles, Tokyo, or Spain.
For good measure — and to protect investors — he’ll also need to bring on administrators and HR reps to make sure that his company behaves in a politically correct manner and doesn’t isolate any potential customers with “offensive messaging”.
Finally, he can’t continue using Idleview trees: there just aren’t enough of them! So instead he’ll need to turn somewhere else. Luckily, there are plenty of third world countries willing to cut down their trees for some extra cash.
But what’s left of George’s handcrafted, soulful woodworking after he takes these steps to compete in today’s world? A highly optimized, well-functioning Ikea product.
In other words, our super talented George has become a sell-out. He’s knocked down the fence, and he’s taken Idleview down with him.
THE TRAVELER
Our traveler, the man knocking over the fence, is Globalization.
Globalization does not (as its proponents would say) lead to an arms race where the best ideas rise to the top. In most cases, it leads to an arms race for the most average. Globalists determine success by the number of people their product or idea reaches, and not by the underlying quality of their product. Global products sacrifice individuality for mass consumption.
These products develop a culture of anti-culture.
As a result: everything looks the same. Our cars, computers, houses, desks… everything!
To make matters worse, globalist out-sourcing is creating enormous voids of anti-knowledge. For hundreds of years, the citizens of a town like Idleview were self-sufficient. They could catch and grow food, they knew how to source their own water (and keep it clean), they built their own homes and made their own clothes and tended their own farm and raised their own children and defended their own backyards.
Today, most Americans don’t do (and most importantly, can’t do) any of those things. By letting globalization knock down the fence of localism and tradition, vast portions of the first world are completely reliant on faceless corporations and government entities to survive.
All it takes is a single chaotic event that leaves a government inept — or those huge corporations immobile — and enormous swaths of the American public could perish. All because of the substantial amount of anti-knowledge created by globalization.
In a global crisis, we don’t need accountants or PR people, we need self-sufficient independents.
THE TALE OF GROS MICHEL
Up until the 1950s the most popular banana in the world was a banana called the Gros Michel. The Gros Michel reportedly was far tastier than the bananas we eat today, and it’s the inspiration for most banana flavored candy (which explains why banana flavoring and “real bananas” taste so different). It was so globally popular that many banana farmers exclusively focused on this variety.
That is, until a disease killed the banana en mass.
Because so many farmers exclusively grew the Gros Michel the disease was able to run rampant across the industry and effectively wipe the Gros Michel out of existence. In response, farmers switched to a new variety of banana that was resistant to this disease: the one we eat today.
The Cavendish is now the most popular banana in the world. Entire supply chains are built solely around this single fruit. It has, in essence, achieved a mono-culture. The Cavendish variety is the Ikea of the banana world.
And just like its predecessor, a single disease is threatening to wipe it out of existence.
Globalization means that we all get to eat bananas, of a single variety, until the banana is wiped off the Earth.
ARE THERE SOLUTIONS?
Despite its egregious flaws, globalization provides a few upsides like the Internet — and things like phones, 24/7 food services, and automation can make life generally easier… when the system is working! So to be clear, this isn’t a manifesto about why the world needs to become Amish, or why everyone should sell their home and live alone in a forest somewhere. But I hope to make clear that globalization causes enormous, hard to observe issues… and these issues are much easier to point at than they are to solve.
As the world becomes more globally connected, negative events also have larger ramifications. Decisions that people make on the other side of the world now affect each of us personally. For instance, the 2008 financial crisis in the United States sent the entire world into a recession; now a respiratory illness in China has effectively put the whole globe under lockdown.
Whenever major issues arise today we are forced to look to larger and larger institutions to help fix those issues instead of solving them for ourselves.
But then again, how can we solve them? If you’re a banana farmer watching your crop be devastated by a pandemic that started half a world away, you have little recourse in fending for yourself. If you’re a man like George Johnson, who’s lost his job due to a lack of demand for his local wares, the only thing you can do is turn to larger institutions in order to survive (like getting hired at the new supermarket, or hopping on government welfare).
Each problem creates solutions that perpetuate the system that’s causing the problems!
NO EASY ANSWER
How can we find ways to cultivate a strong, localist culture while maintaining some of the upsides that globalization provides?
In essence, how do we rebuild our fence?
The globalist response would be a one-size-fits-all measure, like government stimulus or a new phone app. But the right answer is a local one. A question that must be asked and answered at the community and individual level — with a focus on what’s come before.
A more localist society would focus on its own culture and art. It would highlight its uniqueness, instead of trying to blend in. The result would be a flourishing of brand new ideas that advance the entire world — not just the local community.
A localist society would also be far less dependent on faceless institutions. They would be self sufficient and far less susceptible to global disaster.
Most importantly, the beautiful church would return. It may be a different shape and size, and it may worship something new, but it would have meaning again. And it’s that meaning that’s at the heart of a community’s identity. Without it, the community becomes nothing more than a gas station for out-of-towners.
In a better world, our traveler would come across a fence in the middle of a forgotten forest and he would stop to ask himself: what was this fence keeping out — and if I tear it down, what will I be letting in?
