The most read Aeon essay of 2025 was written by Inanna Hamati-Ataya and titled
There are no pure cultures
All of our religions, stories, languages and norms were muddled and mixed through mobility and exchange throughout history
Australia seems to have been almost completely isolated for 50,000 to 70,000 years. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, aboriginal culture was about as pure as you could get. Some countries sealed themselves off from the rest of the world and maintained a high degree of 'purity'. Others may have participated in global trade- or even Empire building- while putting great stress on maintaining the 'purity' of the mother tongue and native institutions.
Sadly, some countries decided to pursue 'multi-culti'. That didn't end well. The following essay was funded by the European Research Council. It represents a waste of tax-payer's money.
In the 1990s, an entire generation was robbed of its historical consciousness by a powerful and seemingly unprecedented tale.
Nonsense! I was in my Thirties then. I wasn't robbed of shit.
This story, crafted as the Cold War came to an end, declared that real or imagined boundaries had stopped working as they once had.
This was obviously false. Otherwise, Europe would soon have filled up with people who looked like me.
Humans were no longer contained within their old geographies or identities.
They were if they came from a country with a shitty passport. Nice places wouldn't give you a visa. Even if some nice traffickers smuggled you into the country, you might be arrested and deported. That's why everybody had to pretend to be a refugee fleeing persecution.
They now inhabited a new world that appeared to be unhinged from the normal evolution of human society.
The West continued to inhabit a world where they had more freedom and affluence. Few foresaw a day when China would overtake the UK, in terms of nominal GDP, by 2006.
The concept chosen to capture this transformational moment in human history was ‘globalisation’.
Winston Churchill pointed out that the first world wars were fought in the Eighteenth Century.
It described how new technologies and networks of connectivity had suddenly brought human communities closer together and made them permeable to an uncontrollable flow of people, ideas, goods and cultural practices, which all moved freely across the integrated markets of the world economy.
Keynes & Bertrand Russell pointed out that there was greater mobility for capital and people prior to 1914 than at any subsequent time. This remains true to this day.
In the wake of this transformation, new jargon emerged, expressing new anxieties: the world had truly become the ‘global village’ that Marshall McLuhan anticipated in the 1960s,
Satellites transmitted pictures of the Moon landing all over the world but only pro-American regimes televised it. Thus, Saudis got to see it but I didn't because I was in Baghdad.
but it was a world shaped by multinational corporations and ‘elite globalisers’, who spoke a common, hegemonic ‘global English’, and were spearheading a destructive ‘homogenisation’ (or ‘McDonaldisation’) of human cultures that national borders were too fragile to withstand.
People didn't mind McDonalds. It was dark skinned immigrants they objected to.
During the past three decades, more people have begun viewing our ‘global’ world as a cursed fate.
Immigrants ate my puppy dog. Also, they TOOK MY JOB! Well, they would have done if I'd ever had a job.
With its suffocating time-space compression, globalisation seems to have uncoupled us from the logic and flow of history.
That's a good thing. It means, unlike our parents, we won't die.
Our suspicious, bastard identities – patched together from a mishmash of cultures – appear incompatible with our ancestors’ ‘authentic’ traditions and ways of life.
e.g. burning witches.
We have become strangers to the places they called home, to the ways they dressed, ate or communicated with one another. And, with no template for how to live and no experience to learn from, the deafening siren songs of anti-globalisation movements are now luring us back into the safer identities and boundaries of a lost, golden past.
Trump is bad. I hate him. But Zelensky too is no angel. He shouldn't object to foreigners grabbing his territory.
This tale of globalisation is the most successful scare story of our times.
Immigration scares people. Demographic replacement is a real thing. Look at what happened to America's First Nations.
And like all scare stories, it stimulates our fear of an overwhelming unknown.
Or a known quantity- e.g. jihadi terrorists who attended a local mosque.
But it’s all an illusion. There is no new global world.
It was more global than what went before. Suddenly, London's poshest streets were populated by Russians rather than Saudis. The local cafe had to substitute borsht for sheep's eyes.
Our present appears that way only because we have forgotten our common past.
We don't have a common past. That's why I can't remember the first time you kissed a girl and decided you liked it.
Globalisation didn’t begin in the 1990s, or even in the past millennia.
It began in the sixteenth century and really took off in the eighteenth
Remembering this older shared history is a path to a different tale, which begins much, much earlier – long before the arrival of international supply chains, ocean-going sailing ships, and continent-spanning silk roads.
No. There was no globalization before Christopher Columbus. There were Eurasian and African trade networks but America and Australia weren't part of it.
The tale of globalisation is written across human history.
No. The tale of hominid migration is written across hominid history just as the tale of cat migration is written across feline history. But neither cats not early hominids were engaged in 'globalisation'.
So why do we keep getting the story so wrong?
We don't. We know about things like the Radhanite network which connected England to North Africa and even distant China and India but we also know that immigrants weren't popular. The Jews were expelled in 1290. It may be that the downfall of the Templars, too, had something to do with transcontinental trade networks.
Thirty years before I was born, in Bonn, FRG, a guy named Adolf Hitler came to power there. He was very concerned with purity. That didn't end well but only because the fool declared war on both the US and the USSR.
You are strolling around a street market, the Grote Markt, in the Dutch city of Groningen, sometime in the 2020s.
Something like that happened to me. I got drunk at the Betjeman Arms and got on the wrong train and woke up in Paris. Strolling around Parisian street markets is disconcerting if you think you are actually in Kilburn.
A lady operating a stall asks a customer if he wants his hummus ‘naturel’, by which she means ‘plain’. He looks baffled as she gestures to the orange, green and purple varieties of hummus on offer. It had taken him some time to try the original stuff – that pale paste that had him eating more chickpeas, sesame seeds and olive oil than all his ancestors combined
unless he was from the South of France where a similar dish is eaten on festive occasions.
– so purple hummus will have to wait for another day.
It should find a ready enough market.
He mutters: ‘The authentic one, please,’ and hurries to the opposite stall for the last item on his shopping list: potatoes, the most elementary ingredient of Dutch cuisine.
Only since about 1740.
Elsewhere in the market, other customers are searching for their favourite ingredients. Some are seeking whole wheat for a French-style sourdough loaf or Basmati rice for an Iraqi recipe; others are shopping for maize (corn) flour for a Nigerian pudding, tomatoes for a fresh Italian pasta sauce, or olives for a Greek salad.
We get it. Holland has too many immigrants.
Marketplaces like this one are perfect sites to observe the flux and mixing of peoples, goods, ideas and mores that we now call globalisation.
If you are lazy and shit at Data analysis- you have to settle for visiting a street market and calling it 'research'.
They are also places where we can begin imagining the longer history of this process.
Why 'imagine'? Just ask Grok or Copilot or whatever.
Many historical markets were established well before our global age.
First she says the world was already global and now she says our age is global.
When the Grote Markt started operating in the late medieval era, little of the produce now available to Groningen’s current international community would have been on display.
Also, darkies and Muslims would have been in short supply.
Back then, the people visiting the market would also have hailed from fewer and closer territories, most of them still speaking their regional dialects. In 1493, however, the imaginative horizons of everyday life at this and other European marketplaces suddenly expanded as news of an extraordinary discovery began to circulate: a previously unknown human world existed beyond Europe’s shores.
Back then, people still thought America was India.
It was a world so unexpected and seemingly so different that it shook Europeans’ consciousness to the core.
Nope. It simply made some of them very rich.
After Christopher Columbus arrived at the later-named ‘Americas’ in 1492, humankind experienced a four-century-long process of intensive world integration driven by imperialism, trade, religion, a new culture of mobility and an intellectual curiosity unleashed from the chains of tradition.
Parts of it did. Others didn't. Indeed, some places experienced massive demographic replacement. What worries Whites in Europe and America is that they may go the way of the First Nations.
As secure networks of maritime and land connectivity were established, the peoples of the ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Worlds were brought together in the most violent and transformative way.
Unless there was little violence or transformation because the locals told the foreigners to fuck the fuck off. Japan, however, did permit the Dutch to send a couple of ships every year.
This process inaugurated what the historian Alfred W Crosby Jr in 1972 called the ‘Columbian exchange’: a vast, human-driven intercontinental movement of animals, plants and disease-carrying microorganisms that forever changed Earth’s biological profile and the socioeconomic, cultural and political life of its inhabitants.
It would have happened one way or another. Had the Chinese stuck with an expansionary naval policy, they would have dominated the Indian and the Pacific Oceans.
For many historians, this ‘early modern era’, spanning from around 1500 to 1800, marks the first stage of globalisation. According to them, this period birthed the first global capitalist economy and integrated world market, began an unprecedented mixing of local cultures and ethnicities, and crystallised the first global consciousness of a shared world.
True enough.
It was so powerful that its effects still endure to this day in diets, languages, economies, social and legal regimes, international balances of political and military power, and scientific frameworks and institutions.
It was an unequal exchange. The Rest followed the Best- i.e. Western Europe.
The early modern era even shaped our philosophical notions of ‘the self’, born from the shock of Europeans discovering ‘otherness’.
Nonsense! 'Indians' were known to the Greeks. What was strange was finding out that America wasn't India. It was a place wholly unknown to the ancient geographers.
But even this era was not the first global age in human history. It, too, was the product of earlier global movements, encounters and exchanges.
which weren't global. They were confined to a world known, however imperfectly, to the ancient geographers.
In fact, early modern globalisation was merely one accelerated episode of a general process that has been ongoing for tens of thousands of years.
It was gradual, not 'accelerated'. Western colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa was 'accelerated' because there was a 'scramble' for it. Such was not the case with the Australia or the Americas. The 'Indies' however, were an object, of contestation.
Collective human memory is a partial and imperfect repository of our encounters with one another through time.
There is no collective human memory. There are books and there are archives. That is a different matter.
We are not good at remembering, let alone acknowledging, the ways that these encounters have shaped our present societies, cultures and economies.
Why can't you remember what the Normans did when they invaded in 1066? Is it because you were drunk at the time? I suppose so.
So, how did we forget?
We can't forget what we never knew.
Globalisation theorists following the sociologist Roland Robertson use the term ‘glocalisation’ to describe how local cultures digest the products of the global market and turn them into something seemingly new.
They really have nothing better to do.
Through this process, incoming goods – technologies, ideas, symbols, artistic styles, social practices or institutions – are assimilated, becoming hybrid recreations that take on new meanings.
You can use a laptop as a tray. That is 'hybrid recreation'. But, if you are going to be globally competitive as a computer programmer, there is one and only way to use your laptop.
These recreations are then redeployed as new markers of cultural or class distinction,
Very true. I used to wear my wife's kimono when I went to the shops in the hope that I would be mistaken for the Empress of Japan. Sadly, everybody knew I live on a Council Estate and thus am as poor as fuck.
sedimenting borrowed cultural products in the collective consciousness to the point of misrecognition.
If the borrowed product significantly diverges from the original- e.g. Japanese 'curry'- then its is indigenous.
And so the global becomes local, the foreign becomes familiar, and the other becomes us.
No. The other remains other. We may become more alike in particular areas.
Glocalisation is how and why we collectively forget.
No. We remember a time when there were five fish and chips shops on the High Street and zero fried chicken places. Now we have umpteen fried chicken places and no fish and chips shops. This is because cod has become very expensive.
Such is the silent trick of every single globalisation in our history: our forgetfulness of it is the method and mark of its success.
Rubbish! I've seen 'globalisation' in cities like Chennai & Hyderabad. We know it is a success because we remember how shitty things were back in the Seventies.
Every generation appropriates the inheritances of global exchanges and refashions them as its own.
None have ever bothered to do anything so foolish. The Beatles liked African American music. They didn't claim that Liverpool was settled by Nigerians in the fifth century BC. George Harrison took up the sitar. This didn't cause him to start saying 'Goodness Gracious Me! I do must humbly apologize'. On the other hand, he always kept a poppodom or two in the pocket of his Nehru jacket.
Excavating the sediments our predecessors left in our collective consciousness is not a task that we are naturally disposed to perform.
We don't have a collective consciousness which is a good thing because otherwise some stupid Professor will take a dump there. This will cause a very smelly sediment which will require excavation.
It is an act of remembrance and self-understanding that can destabilise our identities because it counters the processes that endow them with authenticity.
In other words, stuff I actually did or which was done to me will cease to matter. I might think my authentic self is that of a homosexual dolphin with dreams of a successful career in Actuarial Science.
Excavating the sources of our identities is made more difficult by our tendency to focus on the uniqueness of the present.
Instead of taking a dump now, why not do it yesterday? The answer is, you will soil your pants unless you take a dump right now. The present truly is unique. It is the only time at which you can actually do important stuff- e.g. taking a dump.
By limiting ourselves to the minutia of the current global moment, we overlook the most obvious manifestations of globalisation’s deeper past. Consider these broad, defining characteristics of human civilisation: our few world religions,
At one time, half the world was atheistic and Communist.
our dominant paradigm of written communication,
It isn't dominant at all. A verbal contract is as good as any other. Parliament votes on laws and Judges hand down verdicts in verbal form. They may later be transcribed. But they have force at the moment of utterance.
and our widely shared ethical norms of societal conduct.
We share the view that there should be ethical norms. We disagree as to what those norms should be.
Consider our (quasi-)universal agrarian mode of subsistence,
Subsistence agriculture has greatly declined.
and our single nutritional and psychotropic order, which is based on an incredibly small number of starchy crops (including wheat, maize, rice), domesticated animals (cows, chickens) and stimulants (coffee, sugar) uniformly consumed across the planet.
this is because of 'non-convexities'- i.e. economies of scope & scale.
These characteristics predate our current ‘global age’ by millennia.
No. I recall our class teacher in Nairobi explaining why Nubians (like Idi Amin) dominated in the Army. The reason was that Bantu people ate green plantain whereas Nubians ate grain which was easier to transport. We were surprised to hear that things like White bread and coffee and tea had only recently become acceptable to Bantu people. One result was that we were weaker and had less stamina than our elders. We made a fuss about walking one mile to school. Our fathers or grandfathers had run ten miles across mountainous terrain to get to classes.
And they are arguably more fundamental features of human culture, and more representative illustrations of globalisation, than either K-pop or the Birkenstock sandal – itself a recent reappropriation of identical or similar products that have been circulating for at least 10,000 years.
Sandals- sure. K-pop, not so much.
Such global phenomena follow a repeated pattern we can easily recognise throughout our history, in which cultural products travelled around the planet through increasingly elaborate connective technologies.
No. There was more 'convergent evolution' or independent discovery than there was dissemination.
Before the internet came aeroplanes and containerships. Before those, came the electric telegraph, railways, steamships, the printing press, newspapers, caravels, writing systems, chariots, and horses and camels. Before all of that came the earliest ideographic signs and the first sea-faring ships of the Palaeolithic Age.
And before all that, there were microbes. We need to remember what it was like when we were microbes- more particularly if we were lesbian microbes disappointed to find that gender hadn't been invented yet. Fuck you Judith Butler! Fuck you very much!
Each new connective technology has opened or expanded pathways of mobility and exchange, creating eras of globalisation
which excluded Australia and the Americas
that have left lasting imprints in human consciousness. Along these pathways, social intercourse turned local languages into global languages and lingua francas – French, Arabic,
widely spoken in France
classical Chinese, Nahuatl,
not widely spoken at all
Maya,
see above
Greek
only spoken by Greeks
or Akkadian
which vanished long ago.
– which facilitated and intensified cross-cultural relations.
Slavery can have that effect.
As a result, material culture, ideas and innovations were able to circulate more easily during each historical period of exchange. This is how both ‘prehistoric’ jewellery and T-shirts spread across the globe.
Very true. Prehistoric jewellers employed Madison Avenue mavens to help break into foreign markets. 'I'm with stupid' was originally an Akkadian slogan.
It is why monotheism and the story of the flood have appeared in so many different places.
That suggests independent or 'convergent' evolution. BTW, the Iranian story of the flood is totally different from the Indian version or the Jewish version.
And it explains why certain ideas, like the theory of humours or quantum mechanics, have become shared ways of understanding the world.
False theories may be the product of convergent evolution. QMT isn't false. It is very successful and very useful.
No cultural system of any significance to our existence escapes this pattern of global becoming.
Unless we want it to. Muslims, for some reason, object to homosexual orgies in their mosques. They seem set on escaping a pattern of 'global becoming' to which, under the new Pope, Catholicism is bound to succumb.
Consider the food systems that sustain our existence and culinary practices. When we associate the potato with ‘traditional’ European cuisines or the Irish famine, we forget its Andean origin
Nonsense! We all remember the episode of Blackadder where Sir Walter Raleigh puts a potato in his pipe and tries to smoke it.
and the global journeys that eventually made it ubiquitous in family kitchens and fast-food restaurants all around the world. Similar forgotten stories can be told of other globalised staple foods, including the tomatoes and maize that originated from America, rice from East-Asia and Africa,
These stories aren't forgotten. We were taught about them in primary school.
and the wheat, barley and olives of Southwest-Asia. This forgetting is why many local culinary emblems, such as French wine or American hamburgers, are easily turned into totems and mythologies of national identity.
Both are widely exported.
The ‘local’ wine grapes and cattle that flood the world market today are the end-products of global migrations that began as early as the Neolithic Age.
Paleolithic age. A guy eats a fruit and walks ten miles before taking a dump. The seeds in the fruit have migrated. But animals too eat fruits.
The cultural markers of identity we cherish most jealously – our cuisines,
do the Dutch really cherish their cuisine?
religions,
Anglicans consider their religion a bit of a bore.
languages and social mores – are products of past globalisations.
No. Languages soon become localized and mutually unintelligible. Radio & TV have helped standardize vocabulary and pronunciation.
When we celebrate such cultural markers as ‘authentic’ elements of our identities, we are effectively celebrating our shared human culture, born of a long chain of encounters and exchanges.
We don't celebrate 'cultural markers' though we get drunk off our heads on New Year's Eve. Human cultures aren't 'shared' even if food is. It is not the case that I become a cultured Frenchman by dining in a French restaurant.
Globalisation is observable across all human history.
No. What was observable was marked differences in trajectory and material culture even without complete geographical isolation. What drives globalisation is 'selection pressure' reinforced by 'Tardean mimetics'- i.e. imitation of the superior. Sadly, some countries may choose to follow a shitty model.
It displays such a degree of constancy that it must be fundamental to the evolution of human society.
We fucked Neanderthals & Denisovans. What is fundamental to evolution is fucking. But who gets to fuck who depends on productivity- more particularly military productivity.
Far from being a mere lifestyle or worldview – or an invention of the elite – globalisation can be understood as the mass process through which human culture evolves and perpetuates itself.
Kicking out foreigners, or keeping them on a short leash while following Listian, protectionist, policies till you catch-up, works even better. Trump's supporters want America to take a leaf out of the East Asian playbook. Europeans too may have had enough of multi-culti.
Culture is how we have adapted to our changing environment to sustain ourselves and flourish.
No. That is 'Economics'. Culture is relatively independent of the economic substructure.
Cultures, plural, are the specific manifestations of human culture in different times and places.
Non-humans on other planets have cultures.
These two categories – human culture and cultures –
there is no 'human culture'. There are only 'human cultures'.
are roughly equivalent to the biological idea of the ‘genotype’ (our core code) and the ‘phenotype’ (its variable expressions).
No. Culture is not heritable. A Chinese kid brought up by American parents in America will have Chinese biological traits. It will not have any Chinese cultural traits. You may say 'it will have human traits'. But those traits are not cultural. They are biological. Suppose this were not the case. Then, by observing babies we would get some idea of the cultural life of our distant ancestors. But it isn't the case that 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny'. Baby does not start off as a cave-man before turning into a Greek philosopher at the age of one and a Christian Bishop at the age of 3. On the other hand, most 5 year olds are skilled at Cost & Management Accountancy. By the age of 10, they are astronauts who have landed on the Moon. I distinctly remember having done so back in the late Sixties.
The history of our globalisations is the history of how phenotypical variations in human culture have circulated and cumulatively transformed our cultural genotype.
If the genotype changes, there is mutation and a possible speciation event. The reason genotypes exist is so that phenotypical variation doesn't muck with the 'source code'. There can be convergent evolution of phenotypes on the one hand and a reduction in genotypical diversity on the other hand as particular lineages go extinct.
Exclusionist and anti-globalist sentiments come from a confusion of these categories.
You should love immigrants. Don't you know they too are human beings? So what if they want to rape you? It's just their way of saying 'I'm okay & you're okay. Grunt like a pig, you fucking retard bitch.'
National or regional cuisines, for example, which anchor feelings of pride in one’s identity
Mummy's food does that coz we love our Mummies.
and mediate feelings of disgust or contempt for the cuisines of others,
The French eat snails. That's totes gross.
are merely variations on a universal human behavioural trait, cooking, that distinguishes us from all other species.
Only because we killed or otherwise drove to extinction all the other hominids who cooked food.
Cooking is an extraordinary trait of true significance for our ‘identity’ as a species.
No. Neanderthals cooked meat with pulses 70,000 years ago. We really should fuck off from Europe which we illegally seized from them.
Less significant is how different cultures use this or that ingredient.
It is highly significant. My friend once ordered me a 'phal' curry in a Bangladeshi restaurant. It had so much chilli powder, I almost died. Then I learnt that Bangladeshis don't eat this type of curry. Apparently, it is a Telugu invention though the chillies themselves came from Mexico.
The distinctiveness of local cultures is an illusion of scale.
At large enough scale, the local disappears.
When viewed in the long term, their boundaries blur and melt into each other.
Long term, our species could scarcely be said to exist.
But the consciousness of an individual or a generation is not capacious enough to span the deep temporality that human culture inhabits.
In other words, this 'deep temporality' is inaccessible.
And so, we forget.
We can't forget what we have no means to ever know.
The national histories we are taught also erase this long story of cultural movement.
No. They tell us about where the different people who ruled over us or who created our religions came from.
They tend to focus on tales of innovation that emphasise moments of creation.
Why not focus on the prevalence of flatulence in the early Medieval period?
In reality, there are few stories of origin and genuine invention.
No. There are more and more of them. Sadly, what this lady is doing isn't inventive or intelligent. She represents 'multi-culti' Holland and is saying 'don't be racist. If migrants want to rape you, it just means they like you and want you to enjoy being sodomized by them. Why not grunt like a pig while they call you a fucking retard? It will mean so much to them. Also, if they are filming it on their smartphones, be sure to say something nasty about Trump. You wouldn't want people thinking you are a Nazi.'
Stories of circulation and adoption abound and offer a much more interesting and accurate account of our shared history. Consider the wheel, which was invented just a few times in different shapes, materials and sizes.
Consider the pneumatic tire which was invented just once.
Only one or very few of these instances spread globally with extraordinary and enduring effects.
The wheel didn't spread globally. Australian aborigines didn't have it.
Consider the alphabet: it was invented just once, possibly around 1700 BCE (or even earlier),
maybe 2100 BC by labourers in the Sinai peninsula
but was appropriated via different scripts hundreds of times, and now provides a basis for our global communication systems. The invention matters in these stories,
No. It doesn't matter at all.
but equally important is the circulation of those discoveries.
Again, this isn't important at all. That's why little is known about it. What did make a big difference was first movable type and then lithographic reproduction. But without newspapers and periodicals, literacy tended to decay. Functional illiteracy prevailed for all save males of the clerical or sacerdotal castes.
Our culture is cosmopolitan because we are a cosmopolitan species.
Our culture is regional or national because we aren't. On the other hand, I've noticed that many Englishmen fly away to Africa during the winter. Also, they swim up a river in Canada to lay their eggs. I wish I could be as cosmopolitan as my English friends.
We are citizens of the world, not nations, to paraphrase both Socrates and Thomas Paine.
Socrates's fellow citizens thought so well of him, that they killed him. Thomas Paine wasn't killed but only six people attended his funeral. His mistake was to say nasty things about George Washington. Thus neither the English nor the Americans looked upon him with a glad eye.
What has allowed us to thrive, physically and culturally, is not our rootedness but our mobility.
Very true. That's why we don't live in houses. We flap our wings and fly off to Africa unless we are swimming through the sea to deposit our eggs up some Canadian river.
Without it, we would already be extinct.
Even the caveman had a cave to live in. We would have gone extinct if we hadn't found a way to shelter from the elements. Also, we had to band together to fight off invaders or else settle for enslavement.
Mobility requires freedom of movement.
Freedom for the invader to move into your neighbourhood means the end of your freedom. At least, that is Zelensky's theory. Europe should stop supporting him. Ukrainians should spout wings and fly off to Africa.
This is a fundamental right we often overlook as we focus our attention on the valuable freedoms that we gained more recently – freedom of thought, belief and expression.
I suppose this lady's ancestors come from Lebanon. Freedom to get the fuck out of there is important- more particularly if you are Christian.
Free movement secured our survival and allowed us to flourish on a planet we were not originally adapted to inhabit so widely.
No. We were adapted to inhabit it widely. Sadly, we were also adapted to permit stupid Professors to get grants for doing worthless research.
Forgetting this precious right makes it easier to succumb to the dominant ideology of rooted difference.
Why are you objecting to Sharia law? Don't you understand that you can just flap your wings and fly away to Africa?
To have ‘roots’, we are taught, is to have a home.
We are not taught that. We understand that homeless people have roots just as we do. What we object to is the notion that, if we suddenly become homeless, we will be at the back of the queue. Recent migrants, who never paid taxes in our country, will get priority. On my morning walk beside the River Thames I pass the tent of a homeless man in his fifties. He is White. He has a sign which reads 'where is my Asylum Hotel?' It is because people like him are suffering that Sir Keir will be dumped by his own party after Labour takes a big hit in the upcoming Council elections.
It means belonging to a distinctive place and people, which is something elevated as inherently good.
The Greek word for this is 'oikeiosis'. What is yours is inherently good- e.g. Mummy, Daddy & Woofy the dog. Skool, however, is inherently bad. The Headmaster scolded me in front of the whole Assembly for running around naked with a radish up my bum. That's why I gave up teeching.
City-states, nation-states and other polities based on territoriality often sacralise ‘roots’ and sedentariness while devaluing, controlling or even outlawing mobility.
Churchill was very evil. He should have invited that nice Herr Hitler to occupy the country. As for Zelensky- don't get me started, mate!
The profound hatred that is often aimed at nomads, immigrants and migrants, stateless people, displaced refugees and ‘travelling’ communities is a mark of this disciplining territorial ideology, which is constantly reproduced by the paradigm of the homeland.
Why does America have a 'Homeland Security Act'? It should have started blowing up its own buildings to ingratiate itself with Osama bin Laden. Instead, Obama had Osama killed. What a bastard!
A similar antagonism manifests towards so-called globalists or ‘cosmopolitan elites’ who invest their time, assets and interests elsewhere and end up sharing values and modes of being that are unrecognisable at the places where they came from.
Like the Russian oligarchs who were buying their way into British institutions. Most have now fled.
In the words of the former British prime minister Theresa May: ‘If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.’
Sadly, that wasn't the policy her Government pursued. If you were as rich as fuck, you were welcome to 'non-dom' tax status in little England.
In response to May, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah noted that ‘cosmopolitanism’, as originally conceived in ancient Greece, was not incompatible with the notion and practice of citizenship.
In so far as it was a Stoic notion, it was indeed incompatible with the practice of citizenship which involved killing the enemy or the indigenous 'corrupter of youth'. Stoicism, however, was compatible with servility to a Universal God Emperor.
Appiah found it ironic that cosmopolitans had become ‘objects of suspicion’ at a time when their humanist ethos of extended citizenship and collective action is precisely what is needed to face the global challenges of our times.
Letting in crazy jihadis leaves us facing the challenge posed by Nigel Farage & Tony Robinson. The other big problem with 'demographic replacement' is that the indigenous population won't support higher taxes because they believe they will receive less in benefits. This breaks 'Director's law' and thus reduces support for the welfare state. It may also reduce willingness to fund Defence. If you will soon have to move out of your neighbourhood because of an influx of migrants, you aren't worried about a hypothetical Russian invasion. The barbarians are already inside the gates.
This is an ethos of responsibility for others’ wellbeing that transcends national and cultural differences.
It is one thing to virtue signal with other people's money. It is a different matter to keep paying into a Welfare State which puts you at the back of the queue.
But the irony runs deeper. Ecologists use the term ‘cosmopolitan’ to describe species distributed across the planet. The black rhinoceros is endemic to Africa, and so were we.
No. We weren't 'restricted' to Africa. Nor were many other hominids.
But the peregrine falcon is cosmopolitan, and so we became.
Falcons can fly. We can't. It appears that humans played a part in the spread of the species.
This ecological cosmopolitanism, like its humanist counterpart, is not incompatible with its apparent opposite: our distinctive sedentism. We are, simultaneously, the first species of our lineage that learned to settle down and create lasting homes
we now think other hominid species did it before us
and the first that learned to inhabit the whole planet. We did so by repeatedly moving ourselves and our homes – and hundreds of millions of us still do.
Some of us moved because we were enslaved or had to flee enslavement. In recent history, no country with completely open borders has thrived. Why? There is a 'free rider' problem. Malthus pointed this out in his essay controverting Condorcet. Thus was born the idea of natural selection. This was extended by John Maynard Smith to show that 'uncorrelated asymmetries' (like who is native and who is a foreigner) dictate eusocial 'bourgeois strategies' (e.g. natives fighting harder to keep their own territory than foreigners who move on to some place less willing and able to defend itself).
Still, it must be said, Western countries thought of migration as a way to boost tax receipts while keeping the dependency ratio down. But sooner or later, migrants have babies and then qualify for pensions. A short term solution creates a long term problem if there is significant divergence in productivity between the immigrant and the indigenous population. A related problem, highlighted by Chichilnisky, is that both markets and voting mechanisms become sub-optimal once preference or endowment diversity fails to meet a Goldilocks condition- i.e. 'not too little, not too much'. Burying your head in the sand, even if paid to do so by the European Research Council, is no solution. Nor is saying 'we can just flap our wings and fly away to Africa'.
According to the International Organization for Migration, one in 30 people alive in 2020 were migrants. This number is expected to rise as populations continue to flee poverty, environmental degradation and local armed conflicts, or simply seek better livelihoods in an asymmetrically prosperous global economy.
Fortunately, Europe's low rate of growth means it will become less and less attractive- more particularly after Sharia law is imposed.
This movement isn’t new: earlier globalisations sometimes involved even larger migrations.
or- in the case of India or China, none at all till about the middle of the Nineteenth Century.
Our history is one of constant flux as people moved across the planet, mixing populations and cultures over the millennia.
No. Much of Europe had little or no coloured people when I was born. Germans had seen black American and French soldiers. They had never seen a brown skinned woman or a dark skinned baby.
The English knew about Indians because India had been part of their Empire. But there were plenty of Northern Mill towns where people gawked at the sight of a brown or black man, more particularly, if he wore a suit and tie rather than a turban and a kaftan.
This forgotten global story is still legible in the archaeological and genomic records that our ancestors left behind.
It really isn't. DNA studies tend to show there was far more continuity than there was disruption. What mattered was fertility. Farmers daughters simply had more babies than the daughters of foragers. Pastoralists, because of the supply of fresh milk, did even better.
The genealogy of free human movement is deep and so is its meaning.
It really isn't. Migration only leaves a footprint if indigenous people die off or run away. Otherwise, everybody who adopts the new technology has the same reproductive success.
Our first cosmopolitan ‘odyssey’ during the Palaeolithic Age lasted from 200,000 to around 15,000 years ago and its map tells the extraordinary story of our cosmopolitan transformation.
No it doesn't. It tells the story of national transformation and one nation domineering over another nation. This may cause a 'caste' system to come into existence- e.g. Mexico.
The routes we took as we moved around the world reveal how an endemic Afrotropical species
which became racially differentiated 110,000 years ago. Pygmies look nothing like Dinka warriors.
with little chances of surviving the radical climatic fluctuations of its original home
Nonsense! Africa was affected by the last ice age but people survived better than in parts of Europe.
successfully settled a planet of diverse habitats. Our regional cultures are the ingenious products of this wondrous journey, created as we adapted our shared human culture
we know of no such thing. It appears likely that some ancestor of our species started using fire a million years ago.
to diverse ecologies and responded to the innovations of other travellers we met along the way.
Unless we ate them.
Ultimately, in the fullness of deep time and human history, we are all migrants,
No. If you live in the country in which you were born, you are not a migrant. Your ancestors may have been, but that is another story.
and we have always been. For movement is an adaptive response to existential risks arising from our ecological and social environments.
So is killing a guy who tries to enter your house so as to rape your wife.
It is how we preserve our individual and collective dignity when our life conditions become unsustainable, unbearable and cruel.
Europeans will have no individual or collective dignity if they suffer demographic replacement. Perhaps Emperor Trump will take them in as he is taking in the White South Africans.
Coerced rootedness
e.g. enslavement or serfdom
and coerced mobility
e.g. running away from genocidal mobs
are both aberrations that equally contradict the very process of home-making – of how we come to belong.
No. They may be phases in the history of our community. England did have serfdom but it was on its way out by 1300.
Periodically, however, our natural tendency to move, mix and exchange generates profound anxieties.
When does this happen? The answer is 'when the economy turns to shit'.
This is because globalisation is always experienced in the here-and-now by social actors who are amnesic to past movements and cultural mixing.
Nope. I have friends who remember moving to the UK when they were kids. This doesn't mean they won't vote for Farage if Sir Keir continues to be utterly useless at deporting illegal migrants.
To these periodic anxieties we owe such inventions as passports
by Henry V in 1413?
and travel restrictions,
these became universal with the Great War.
ethnically segregated urban designs,
in America maybe. Not Europe. Why? Europe, even at the time of my birth, was ethnically and culturally homogenous.
and the banning of mixed marriages
never banned in Europe, save under Hitler, though some Dutch dude did try to ban such marriages in the colonies back in the Seventeenth Century. But that ban was never enforced.
as well as specific foods,
monkey brains?
books
How to kill kaffirs?
and fashions.
Prancing around naked with a radish up your bum?
These measures ultimately fail. Consider maize tortillas, which early modern Spaniards once believed posed an existential and spiritual threat to the Christian body and soul.
There was a theory that 'converted' Jews considered maize unkosher.
Today, ‘un-Christian’ maize has become part of our everyday world culture – and Christianity itself is now a world religion despite earlier persecutions of its converts and the prohibition of its ideas.
It is disappearing from the Middle East.
Anti-globalism often expresses itself in multiple registers that can be compounded into powerful ideological narratives.
So can pro-globalism. You can make an economic case for it or you can tell people that they can flap their wings and fly off to China. So long as you get a grant from the European Research Council, you are laughing all the way to the bank if you took the less onerous route.
In 1686, France banned Indian cottons because of their damaging economic impact on the national textile industry.
Thus they handicapped their own East India Company while permitting large scale corruption.
But to counter their uncontrollable popularity, state propaganda claimed that these textiles had morally damaging effects on the soul of the French public.
Dacca muslin was see-through. How indecent!
Current anti-globalist anxieties and calls to ‘de-globalise’ the world feature similar narratives,
No. Trump says immigrants will eat our puppy dogs. That's not a familiar narrative at all. In the past immigrants would merely mug you or rape you or blow you up. But they left our beloved bow-wows alone. Personally, I blame Usha Vance. Ever since her hubby refused to eat pussy claiming it to be forbidden by his Catholicism, she has taken to devouring puppy dogs. What can I say? Bitches be kray kray.
which have become more acute in the supposedly unprecedented ‘polycrisis’ of our age, whereby political, ideological, environmental, economic and military crises are said to be converging to undermine our security.
and eat out puppy dogs.
However, our times are not inherently unique,
coz the ancient Romans had AI. Caesar lost his job to Copilot.
and we are therefore not clueless about how to diagnose and respond to the generalised narrative of an impending global collapse.
This is easily done. Look at the futures market. If they are in contango, people think everything will be fine.
The so-called ‘General Crisis’ of the 17th century offers a strikingly similar conjecture to our own and invaluable lessons for our times.
We have global warming. They had a little Ice Age.
That century witnessed an unprecedented number of political revolutions and wars in almost all regions of the world.
Not in India. It was the Mughal Golden Age.
This social unrest unfolded in the unstable climate of the Little Ice Age, a period of global cooling that ran from at least the 16th to roughly the 19th century, which affected the world economy through a disruption of food production and the spread of epidemic diseases. The apparent ‘contagion’ of the General Crisis, attested to by observers across the Northern Hemisphere and conveyed by global information networks, generated a shared sense of melancholy and gloom that everywhere reinforced apocalyptic visions and predictions of the end of the world.
The world did end in 1666. The Great Fire of London soon spread to Beijing and Delhi. I remember it well.
What seemed to have brought about this chaos was the world’s unprecedented interconnectedness.
No! It was Satan. That fucker is in a hurry to get us all into Hell.
As a result, voices eventually rose to demand a cultural retrenchment toward the orthodox belief systems of regional civilisations and greater protection from external influences. An early and extreme response to such anti-globalist ideas was Japan’s sakoku policy of quasi-total isolation, which began in 1633 and ended two centuries later with little success.
The Japs and the Chinks could still kick ass big time. If they wanted foreigners to fuck off, the foreigners had to comply. Apparently, East Asians weren't keen on selling their people as slaves to Europeans. Africans were more broadminded in this respect.
In our own contemporary era, anti-globalisation movements have recently shifted from the far Left to the far Right of national and global politics.
Both were anti-globalization. The Right had the edge because it was also against migration.
Justified resentment against the locally experienced injustices of the global economy and the growing disruptive effect of global climate change are now couched in resentment for the social and cultural dimensions of globalisation.
Pakistan & Iran are deporting Afghan refugees. The Germans have decided to renege on their pledge to take the Afghans who worked for them who are now stuck in Pakistan.
Identitarianism,
which can be about your sexual orientation
a political ideology that stresses the preservation of narrowly conceived ‘Western’ ethnicities and cultures,
like the culture and etiquette which prevails in homosexual orgies. Are you allowed to bring a donkey? Or is that a faux pas?
has accordingly become the easiest and most efficient strategy to mobilise local grievances, and direct them at whatever is perceived as a threat to the wellbeing of those suffering within. The ugly age of nationalism is back.
When did it go away?
Is nationalist identitarianism the ethos we will now deploy to confront the common existential threats that await us in the coming century?
Yes. If you don't have a national identity, you have no means of solving collective action problems.
Why wouldn’t it be? Does anyone doubt that national borders will be turned, once again, into sacred physical boundaries and fiercely defended against those fleeing the environmental, economic or military devastation of their homes?
The complaint is that illegal immigrants aren't being deported fast enough. Asylum laws have to change or, rather, Courts must adopt a more restrictive interpretation of existing law.
Do we doubt that eloquent voices animated by the most (ig)noble intentions will rise to justify patriotic bullets being aimed at ‘alien migrants’ and climate refugees?
Some do. They will vote for the far Right which will become the mainstream Right.
And that leaders will say these displaced people cannot be accommodated because of their numbers and cultures, and the threat they pose to our secure lives – to our ‘identity’?
It's what Mrs. Thatcher said so as to get elected. But, sadly, it turned out she liked brown skinned shop keepers.
Such scenarios are far too likely given the rise of xenophobic worldviews, such as the conspiratorial idea of a ‘Great Replacement’, in which elites – imagined to be Jews and other minorities – have begun executing a plan to replace so-called indigenous white Europeans with other populations of apparently greater and threatening reproductive vitality.
Blacks have ginormous dongs. Muslims have 4 wives- the horny devils. East Asians, on the other hand, aren't going to cuckold you. But they will fill up the Ivy League and you'll end up mowing their lawn.
These racialist worldviews dangerously converge with a public misunderstanding of ‘race’ as reflected in the recent craze for DNA ‘ancestry tests’.
The ancient Greeks had no such craze. Also, they didn't know about DNA.
DNA has little to do with ‘identity’, as social and political ideologies have constructed it,
It has to do with the fact that you have a body. No ideological 'construction' is involved. If you don't have a body, you are a ghost. Fuck off, Caspar!
and much to do with physical and social geography.
It has nothing to do with either. DNA is biological. My DNA shows I have ancestral South Indian maternal ancestry. Sadly, it is not human ancestry. I am descended from ancient South Indian penguins. Anyway, that's what my sister told me. Why would she lie?
Our genes are a result of human adaptive mobility,
No. Lamarck was wrong. There is no inheritance of acquired characteristics.
and the journeys, rich encounters and kin-making that our freedom of movement made possible over tens of thousands of years.
more especially if we were enslaved or raped a lot
Our genome does not tell our whole story, but the story it does tell shows how past globalisations made us what we are today.
My ancestors were raped by Neanderthals and Denisovans. Penguins aren't slutty at all.
How can we perceive plurality as a threat to survival
Lebanon is pretty 'plural'. That's why it is a shithole despite having very smart people.
and not see the richness of our shared human culture?
Do we want London to become like Lebanon? Of course we do. Anyway, we can always flap our wings and fly off to Africa.
As we search for ways of communing with one another beyond the stubborn ideology of difference,
e.g. thinking another person's breasts actually belong to you and thus you are entitled to fondle them lovingly.
we should also prepare for vicious future distortions and manipulations of our current scientific and historical understanding of identity.
e.g. kids objecting to being gang-raped by refugees.
Some humans today carry a few genes that their Pleistocene ancestors inherited from intercourse with our Eurasian Neanderthalian and Denisovan cousins, whom some communities of Homo sapiens encountered on their journeys of cosmopolitan expansion.
It looks as though their males impregnated some of our females. I hope they got screwed over for child-support. Indeed, that's probably what drove them extinct.
How might such a genetic difference among us be interpreted and used in the future by those intent on pursuing identitarianism to its silliest or most murderous conclusions?
If so, there will be an arms race between genetic recoding and those seeking to instrumentalize it. This is like Goodhart's law.
Might they declare that some humans are not ‘pure’ enough to enjoy the full freedom, security and dignity we recognise as the natural rights of humankind?
The Swedes were big on eugenics forcibly sterilizing low IQ people even into the Seventies.
Or might they, on the contrary, elevate the Neanderthalian or Denisovan gene as a marker of Eurasian ‘distinction’ to recreate narratives of racial superiority, similar to those that once plagued archaeological thinking about the allegedly more ‘advanced’ nature of those human fossils laying the farthest away from the species’ original African homes?
It is easy enough to identify White, European, populations. In my case, you only have to look at me to know that I am not, as I claim, the dowager Duchess of Dorsetshire.
Palaeontologists who insist on ascribing the label ‘humans’ to the entire Homo genus while reserving that of ‘modern humans’ to the surviving representatives of the lineage (ie, us) probably understand better than most the dangers of ideological manipulations of scientific taxonomies.
There are no such dangers. Ideological manipulation just means 'stupid shithead writing nonsense'. That's what this woman is doing here. What she means to say is 'migrants are lovely. Why not let them rape you? You might enjoy it.'
But in the open marketplace where ideas freely flow in the name of freedom of thought and expression,
that isn't a market place. It is the intellectual equivalent of a latrine. What flows freely is shite. Good ideas, you have to pay for.
how can we protect ourselves and one another from such dangers, if we still perceive plurality as a threat to survival, and cannot see the richness of our shared human culture?
we can't defend ourselves or solve any other collective action problem unless we perceive 'uncorrelated asymmetries' which give rise to 'bourgeois strategies'- e.g. Ukrainians getting together to try to expel Putin's mercenary hordes.
The wars we wage against one another are all civil wars.
In Lebanon, maybe. Not Holland. There's a good reason this lady is in no hurry to return to the land of her ancestors. Still, it must be said, Lebanon has very strict laws forbidding Palestinians from owning real estate. They can't buy it or inherit it.
Until we recognise them as such,
we won't be certifiably insane
they will remain tragedies we accept as natural –
such a shame Zelensky is fighting his own people in a civil war. Maybe, it is because he is a Jew.
or horrors we cheer on in the name of grand notions sold to us by loud voices who know our fears too well (and know too little of the richness of our world and our history).
Why not just come out and say that killing Osama was wrong? Obama should have ordered the killing of all kaffirs in America starting with his own wife and kids. Sadly, he engaged in Civil War- probably because he was a darkie and thought Osama was actually General Lee.
We have always been global, and this is our shared identity.
What is more we can all fit into the same pair of underpants because we all share the same body. Neo-liberalism won't tell you this because it has been paid off by the under-pant industry.
It is our unique way of being and remaining in the world as one family.
Which is why you should welcome impregnation by rapists.
Whatever we cherish in our humanity and culture has been crafted by our global journeys and encounters.
especially getting raped or enslaved.
Through them, we will continue to write the story of how we become us.
The story of how this woman became so utterly stupid is easily told. She studied worthless shite at Uni and stayed on to teach worthless shite. Now, she is funded by the 'European Research Council'. That's money well spent- thinks nobody at all.
