Does globalization diminish cultural diversity? Is that really the question?

The Globalization Website provides the arguments for and against the thinking that globalization diminishes cultural diversity, but I believe that in a larger and more comprehensive sense this is a false dichotomy. Rather than reducing or enhancing cultural diversity, I believe that the miniaturization of the world which has resulted from advancing communication and transportation technologies have reformed the definition of culture -- requiring that we accept that "culture" itself is no longer exclusively a local or national phenomenon, but now a global one. In a world where cultural influences -- music, art, economics, politics, literature, and education -- are as available remotely as locally, the cultual unit is changing from regions and nations to the global community as a whole.

The scholar John Sexton, president of NYU, puts it this way during an interview with The Huffington Post: "I think the world at this point is miniaturizing. It's miniaturizing in every way so 'gating strategies' are utterly useless at this point. We just learned that you can't gate off of an economy, something we should have known long ago. Clearly you can't gate off the flow of people and ideas and information, so the world is becoming miniaturized, and the question I think, and maybe the most important question of the century is, how is humankind going to react to that miniaturization?"

That seems to me undeniably true. As distant causes have immediate and unavoidable worldwide results and faraway ideas and discoveries have a real time influential availability, the thought that we can isolate -- or even insulate -- our "cultural" development into a localized phenomenon is becoming increasingly obsolete.

Some will object. Local identity and national or regional exceptualism are strong forces. It may be, as Wordsworth wrote two hundred years ago, that "the world is too much with us" but the only way out of this experience is backwards, and that direction is lost to us forever. I hope.

For more, watch economist Jagdish Bhagwati's remarks at The Globalization Arguments.