Tyler Cowen: Free of the tyranny of place

Opinion

On one thing the whole world seems to agree: globalisation is homogenising cultures.

But does the growing global trade in films, music, literature and other cultural products destroy cultural and artistic diversity or encourage it?

Critics of globalisation rally around the banner of cultural diversity. But much of the contemporary scepticism about the value of cross-cultural exchange has little to do with diversity.

Many critics simply dislike particular trends and use diversity as a code word for another agenda, which is often merely anti-commercial or anti-American in nature. In reality, the global exchange of cultural products is increasing diversity in ways that are seldom appreciated.

The critics tend to focus on globalisation's effects on diversity across societies. Gauging diversity then becomes a matter of whether each society offers the same cultural menu, and whether societies are becoming more alike.

But the concept of cultural diversity has multiple and sometimes divergent meanings. It can also refer to the variety of choices within a particular society.

By that standard, globalisation has brought one of the most significant increases in freedom and diversity in human history: it has liberated individuals from the tyranny of place.

Growing up on an isolated farm or in a remote town, whether in the Waikato or Bangladesh, is less a limit than ever before on an individual's access the to the world's cultural treasures and opportunities. No longer are one's choices completely defined by local culture. There is more cultural diversity among New Zealanders and Bangladeshis than ever before.

When one society trades a new artwork to another, diversity within the receiving society increases (because individuals have greater choice), but diversity across the two societies diminishes (the two societies become more alike).

The issue is not so much whether there is more or less diversity but rather what kind of diversity globalisation brings.

Many critics of globalisation are also blind to the importance of diversity over time. If we value cultural diversity, then surely we also ought to value diversity over time, or cultural change.

Yet for many of diversity's self-appointed defenders, change is precisely the problem. They decry the passing of cultures and implicitly hope to freeze them at particular times, as if to say that Bali reached a state of perfection in, say, 1968, and should never change.

To celebrate the largely unacknowledged cultural benefits of globalisation, however, is not to deny its considerable costs. Globalised culture is another example of what economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction.

Cultural growth rarely comes as a steady advance on all fronts at once. While some sectors expand rapidly, others may wither. In the gale of cultural globalisation some poor, relatively isolated non-Western societies lose out. What they lose is the peculiar ethos that animates their culture and makes it distinctive - the special feel or flavour of a culture, often rooted in religious belief or in shared suppositions about the nature and importance of beauty.

An ethos is what gives a culture its self-confidence, its magic. These cultures depend for their survival on the absence of the very thing that globalisation promotes: internal diversity.

Is such cultural loss worth the gains? There is no simple answer to this question.

Because of widespread cross-cultural exchanges, the world has a broader menu of choices, but older cultures are forced to give way to newer ones.

Some regions, in return for access to the world's cultural treasures and the ability to market their products abroad, will lose their distinctiveness. Tragedy, that overworked and often misused word, certainly has a place in describing their fate.

Yet most Third World cultures (like Western cultures) are fundamentally hybrids to begin with, synthetic products of multiple global influences, Western and otherwise. For them, creative destruction is nothing new, and it is misleading to describe their cultures as indigenous.

It is impossible to deny that globalisation will bring the demise of some precious and irreplaceable small cultures, and for that reason we should hope that the new global cosmopolitanism does not enjoy total triumph, that places such as isolationist Bhutan will succeed not just in preserving their cultures but in sustaining cultures that continue to live and breathe.

Yet one could not hope for a world in which we all inhabited a Bhutan, or in which Bhutan was preserved merely for our own edification.

One could not hope for a world in which we lacked the chance to experience the world's diversity, or in which another people were kept isolated and poor simply to enhance the diversity available to us.

Culture is, and has always been, a process of creative destruction. We might wish for the creativity without the destruction, but in this world we don't have that choice.

* Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University in Virginia. He is visiting New Zealand as a guest of the New Zealand Business Roundtable.