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42 | Tue Puttosopuy or Eco-Po rics 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
