Claude Lévi-Strauss is a French anthropologist and ethnologist. Text written in 1971 .
The gradual merging of populations hitherto separated by geographical distance, as well as linguistic and cultural barriers, marked the end of a world that had belonged to mankind for hundreds of millennia...
However, we cannot conceal from ourselves the fact that, despite its urgent practical necessity and the lofty moral goals it sets, the fight against all forms of discrimination is part of the same movement that is driving humanity towards a global civilization, destroying those old particularisms to which belongs the honor of having created the aesthetic and spiritual values that give life its price, and which we preciously collect in libraries and museums because we feel less and less certain of being able to produce such obvious ones.
No doubt we are lulled into dreaming that equality and fraternity will one day reign among men without compromising their diversity. But if mankind is not to resign itself to becoming a sterile consumer of the only values it has been able to create in the past, capable only of giving birth to bastard works and crude, childish inventions, it will have to relearn that all true creation implies a certain deafness to the call of other values, going so far as to reject them, if not even negate them.
For we cannot, at one and the same time, melt into the enjoyment of the other, identify with him or her, and remain different. Fully successful communication with the other condemns, sooner or later, the originality of his and my creation. The great creative eras were those when communication became sufficient for distant partners to stimulate each other, without however being frequent and rapid enough for the indispensable obstacles between individuals as between groups to diminish to the point where too-easy exchanges equalize and confuse their diversity."
What do you think of this text on the consequences of "globalization" on cultural diversity?
What he never had back then was the internet. Nowadays you can influence another culture from the comfort of your own sofa. What determines cultural change isn't speed of arrival or distance but a willingness to absorb it into your own. People tend to cherry pick the bits they like and discard the rest, e. g. Britain absorbed Indian cuisine but not it's fashion.
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Humans have been born to be a tribal species. It is baked into our DNA. If you take away geographical divisions people will find some other way to hate their fellow man.
