Globalization

8 Pages 1984 Words

port. And then you have countries in the other civilizations, in some cases being rather surprisingly cooperative, like Russia. And then we have the Muslim world which clearly is very ambivalent about what happened to us and what has happened in Afghanistan. And so they divide very much along civilizational lines."
In his Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, published in 1948, T.S. Eliot comes to speak of a world culture and by doing so, he brings himself into an unsolvable dilemma: on one hand, Eliot cannot give up the term; but on the other hand, he knows that a world culture as he sees it can never become reality:
"A world culture which was simply a uniform culture would be no culture at all. We should have a humanity de-humanised. It would be a nightmare. But on the other hand, we cannot resign the idea of world-culture altogether. […] We are therefore pressed to maintain the idea of a world-culture, while admitting that it is something we cannot imagine. We can only conceive it as the logical term of relations between cultures. […] We must aspire to a common world culture, which will yet not diminish the particularity of the constituent parts. […] We are the more likely to be able to stay loyal to the ideal of the unimaginable world culture, if we recognize all the difficulties, the practical impossibility of its realization." (Eliot, 1948:62-63)

Eliot's problem is clear, he is holding on to a universalistic concept of culture, but at the same time he knows very well that this abstract notion has no substance and cannot be understood as a regulative idea either, only in the form of a relationship ("the logical term of relations between cultures"). Indeed, some pages earlier he ha...