Globalisation And Modern Consequences

I would like to finish this discourse by tying it all together with the nascent phenomenon created by technology: globalisation. Globalisation, thanks to technology, has been able to run its course such that corporations can easily communicate with foreign markets. A vice-president of a corporation can hop the concorde and have lunch with his British counterpart on a moment's notice. Financial decisions carried out on Wall Street can adversely affect a coffee farmer in South America. An American based oiling company can bribe a developing nation into being its security force against dissenters.

The compression of time and space, the ability to mask one's identity, the erosion of nation-states to mere police forces, toxic chemical explosions (like those in Bhopal, India) killing humans, are all a matter of globalisation, and a direct result of but some of the technological advances considered in this discourse. My one hope for humankind is that where people will congregate, people will talk; where people will talk, ideas will be exchanged; where ideas are exchanged actions will follow.

If there is one thing that Modernity has taught us, is that humans are not machines. Humans are not predictable! I will make no positivist predications of the future, or even near future; however, I will state that if the human species continues to spread like a cancer, it will topple under its own weight. I will conclude this discourse with a passage from Philip Slater's Earthwalk:

...technology would have to be regarded as a cancer on human culture, Western culture a cancer on the human species, and the human species as a cancer on terrestrial life - a cancer that may in the end be treated by radiation and radical surgery at the same time.[13, p. 38]