Is globalization actually disempowering? | Yann Martel | Big Think

I don’t think that globalization, globalism, this idea that the world is a village is true. In fact, it’s remarkable how culture bound we are. And that’s not a limitation; that’s just a feature of us as a species. We are animals, and animals operate based on their empirical senses.

So take a deer in a forest. A deer in a forest has the eyesight, the smell, and the hearing that it needs to survive. And so there’s an interesting concept in zoology of flight distance, which is the distance that an animal needs to be aware of something that might endanger it that will trigger a flight response. So animals have different kinds of flight distances.

So a flamingo, if it sees a threatening animal, needs a certain distance so that it can start flapping its wings and fly away. Flamingos are not natural flyers, so they need—so it’s like maybe 150 meters, let’s say. So they have senses that are good enough for them to survive. What we have done with our technology is so increased our sensorial capacity that if a ferry overturns in Bangladesh, we hear about it here in New York, 50,000 miles away, which means our senses are overloaded with information—which in an animal would stress it to death.

If you increase the deer’s capacity to hear beyond the whatever it can hear—let’s say a deer can hear, I don’t know what the distance is. Let’s say a deer can hear 300 meters away. That’s what it needs, let’s say. I’m sure it’s closer than that, but let’s say it’s 100 meters away. You know a deer needs to hear that distance, and if anything is coming or running towards it—a lion, a tiger, a wolf—the hundred feet will be enough for it to turn and decamp, and so it’s not stressed.

If there’s a perimeter of 100 meters around a diameter, a radius, sorry. A hundred meters around it where there are no sounds, it’ll be at rest, unstressed. If you gave a deer a hearing capacity of 1,000 feet, you’d be hearing way more noises than it needs to process. You’d be hearing about wolves or tigers that are way too far to endanger it. Yet it’s aware of them; therefore it would be stressed.

And I suspect in our world, and this idea of globalization, we are hearing things that are so far away from us that actually have no consequence on us as individuals. Now cumulatively, of course, they do. We are ultimately connected. There are six degrees of separation. So that’s the reason behind human rights advocacy; that when an individual is being tortured to death in Egypt or in China, it should matter to us. It should.

But in a practical way, each one of us every single day, there are only so many groans and cries and shrieks from around the world that we can hear where it keeps on being meaningful. At one point, we block it out because it’s too much. So I think globalization creates a sense of unity without empowering us that we can really do something about it.

And so that’s—it’s that schizophrenia that we live with every single day. You read about—you know, you read The New York Times, which is a fantastic newspaper with extraordinary coverage of many realities. Most articles—there’s very little you can do about. And so it’s kind of disempowering.

So I find globalization, while in a sense being well-meaning, giving us eyes around the globe, is also, in some ways, disempowering because it tells us things about which we can do nothing. So ultimately I think we have to limit the information and go deeper. And so I think that’s what often happens.

You see that, for example, with NGOs, with charitable organizations who specialize. So, you know, they’ll specialize about saving the panda bear, or the human rights situation in Haiti, or about educating girls in Africa. They will narrow their focus so they can have an impact. And that, of course, has been helped by globalization. We are aware of more knowledge that it’s overwhelming.

It’s a tidal wave coming our way, and you sort of select which bit of the water, which bit of the wave you want to try to engage with meaningfully.