Grassroots Versus Globalism

ALLOW me to advance two propositions that may help explain, among other things, the outcomes of recent elections in the world's most powerful democracy (the United States) as well as in the world's most populous (India).

Proposition One: Socially meaningful life exists locally, in a particular time and place, or it does not exist at all.

Nobody can have an immediate knowledge of society in the mass. Someone living in Los Angeles, say, has no direct contact with something called American society. What that person has is a direct knowledge of his or her own family, circle of friends, colleagues in the workplace, and so on. This is not to deny that something called American society - or Chinese or Indian society, for that matter - has any reality. Far from it. Societies, nations, obviously act. Through the agency of the state, they go to war, make laws, administer justice, provide social safety nets, determine the socio-economic life of countless people.

But there are different levels of immediacy governing our existence as social beings. We tend to forget this when we read, say, a newspaper. By virtue of its ability to place events from different locations (Fallujah, Somalia, Washington, Jakarta) on the uniform surface of a page, newspapers (like the rest of the media) foster the impression that all these geographically separated events can exist in a common mental space. That space does indeed exist, but the immediacy of its reality is in inverse proportion to its distance from the directly experienced facts of daily life, in particular local communities.

Proposition Two: The global economy is a fact completely at variance with the first proposition.

The global economy doubtless exists, but it has no location. It is a vast transactional system involving people who are far more unlikely to meet each other than are people who live in the same country, and are far less likely to understand each other when they do meet. If the first stage of industrialisation involved the reduction of all value to exchange value, the latest stage of capitalism involves the reduction of all communities to the status of symbols circulating in a space without location. The global economy, in other words, is everywhere and nowhere.

The problem here is how do we connect the first mode of social existence - here and now, in particular communities, in particular spaces - with that other, equally real mode, the global, which in essence has no location?

The solution obviously cannot involve shutting off the local from the global. That would be the route to economic suicide. But neither can the solution involve suppressing the local in favour of the global. There is no society which answers to a global 'we'; there is no meaningful social life unless a group of people can say 'we'; and that is only possible in local communities.

India and the US are vastly different societies at different stages of economic development, but they may be wrestling with the same contradiction - that between the local and the global.

In the Indian case, the contradiction manifested itself clearly when the country went to the polls in May this year. The then ruling coalition was certain of victory. The economy was doing exceptionally well, India's software industry had become a global player, India was 'shining'. But as it turned out, only the globally interconnected, upwardly mobile middle-class in the major metropolitan centres agreed. The ruling coalition was turfed out by India's vast rural population who couldn't care less if India had become a force in the global economy. They weren't interested in the Internet; they wanted local intranets.

The contradiction didn't manifest itself so clearly in the case of the recent US election, but it probably underlay the sleeper issue of the 2004 presidential race - 'moral values'.

This becomes clearer if one takes a look at the communities from which President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry drew their respective support.

The 'blue' Democratic areas were in fact far smaller than the 19 states that Mr Kerry carried would suggest. California, for instance, which he carried by more than a million votes, is blue only along its densely populated coast. Apart from this sliver of land, the rest of the state is as red as the reddest of red states.

The same is true of New York and all the other large states Mr Kerry won - blue only in its densely populated urban areas but red otherwise. A US map showing how each county in each state voted would reveal a sea of red interrupted by only splashes of blue along the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, the Gulf of Mexico, the Great Lakes and the Mississippi and other rivers. As one commentator noted, Kerry-voters tended to be water people while Bush-voters tended to be land people.

But who are these watery people and what are the places they occupy like? The people are disproportionately young, secular, racially mixed and unmarried or childless. The cities - New York, San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles - are cosmopolitan, globally connected service economies. The office malls, the manufacturing centres, the families with children, the churchgoers have moved to Bush country - the suburbs, exurbs and rural towns of the interior. There are two Americas, each marching to the beat of a different drummer.

The revelation that one in five voters listed 'moral values' as their top concern, and that 80 per cent of them voted for Mr Bush, has caused some Democrats to fear that America is turning intolerant and anti-secular. This is probably an exaggeration - and most certainly a condescending view of the heartland. People who distrust the cosmopolitan cultures of the coasts are not all hicks and bigots. What most of them are seeking is the shelter of stable communities, rooted in family and faith.

The Democratic Party, a coalition increasingly of cosmopolitan elites and disadvantaged minorities, must learn to re-connect with the heartland.

The Republican Party, a coalition increasingly of big business and social conservatives, will have to learn to balance the contrasting agendas of its two wings.

Each in its own way is grappling with the contradiction at the heart of globalisation - the fact that socially meaningful life exists only locally but the global economy has no location and is therefore essentially rootless.

This is a contradiction which will beset every globalising society, including Singapore.