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there the mass migration is currently causing a crisis with an
unforeseeable outcome, because integration has not been successful —
contrary to the predictions of global social unification. The drastic
increase of the number of arrivals has, with time, almost everywhere
halted and rendered impossible the initial noteworthy results.
We could not speak, however, of a global elite and globalisation only
with severe constraints if the resounding success of this project were not
visible in the changes in the life and thought of people worldwide and
if these did not all point in the same direction. But what we experience
is that there is something missing from the lives of their ancestors that
unites the computer scientists of Silicon Valley, the warriors of Jihad,
Japanese tourists, Nepalese sherpas and French peasants, no matter how
different their views and education. Whether they see it as consolation
or threat, they all experience the presence of the same unavoidable
challenge that crushes their traditional world and questions their
inherited notions. This challenge is none other than that to achieve their
goals — whatever those may be — they need to use certain new tools that
are identical worldwide. These are IT devices, weapons, medicines,
clothing and vehicles and the knowledge necessary to use and, to an
extent, produce them. It is somewhat deceptive to talk about cultural
globalisation in this regard; instrumental globalisation would be a better
term. The particularity of the situation lies in that the mass spread of
these technological novelties creates a profound change in the everydays
without demanding a unification of worldviews, values and explanatory
frameworks. We are performing ever more similar physical activities
with a basically identical technological toolbox against the background
of horizons of reality no less different than before. ‘The peoples of the
world are on the road to becoming replaceable without needing to
understand one another.
The spokespeople of cultural globalisation speak of the fusion of
cultures and expect the emergence of an effectively united global culture.
Opinions differ as to what this means, for the essence of a culture are
its differences: the way it differentiates between good and bad, true and
false, beautiful and ugly and ours and theirs. It is not as though the
system of values within each culture were homogenous. ‘The members
of a cultural community do not have to agree on what truth is, but
instead on what the question is to which they seek the answer: what
they have to solve, the decision in which is essential to them. So far in
history the transformation (e.g., the adoption of Christianity, the
triumph of the scientific worldview or modernisation) or expansion (for