Heimat

In an article from the 1990s, the sociologist Roland Robertson coined the term "glocalization."  There are massive forces in the world making us the same, he argued -- consumerism is high on the chart -- and the worlds of international organizations, "third way" politics and intense levels of electrified, postmodern communications brings us together.  However, they (at least can) help us lose senses of who we are; "alienation," as so many German philosophers described it, is a common modern experience.  Sometimes we react.  Sometimes, in reaction to globalization, we create nationalisms.  We refer to ancient customs; we seek to make ourselves different from others.  We react to globalization by invoking our small scale provincial mentalities and primitive subconsciences.  Sometimes we bring those mentalities into national and international politics; those can be scary moments -- moments when societies rip themselves into two along lines of left and right.  In any case, the local makes the global more complex.  Bringing the local into the picture means globalizaton concerns heterogenization as much as homogenization.  We pull away from each other as much as we pull together.  That's because globalization's "together" sometimes doesn't feel like our together -- one we own.

Underneath the local and provincial, Robertson argues, is nonetheless an impulse not just representing backwater reactionary mentalities.  The local concerns, he argues, a sense of home -- the attempt to find a place where you belong.  Feelings about that are tough to account for as they are intuitive and learned.  They are real, though, and help give us that last 5% of who we are.  That's as we fight against the anomie, washes of anonymity and senses of disorientation modern life can often provide.  An interesting thought is how to join home and  cosmos; the global metropole and the tribe from which one comes -- to find a love that can flow through both, drawing from the countryside's quiet while using the vibrancy of the global city to spread love's essence and break down the boundary lines between its locales.  As The Circumstance; goes home today, those thoughts are very much in the air.