Globalization has been debated for years. Wikipedia stated the definition of globalization is ‘the process of international integration arising from the interchange ofworld views, products, ideas, and other aspects of culture’(‘Globalization’n.d.).This essayis trying from a cultural view to discuss the positive effects brought by globalization to human culture and, the negative psychological senseexperienced by certain groupsand the conflicts between western culture and other cultures in globalization era.
Globalization expedited modernization and economic development, and thereby promoted the development of cultures. In general, a culture is naturally self-motivated partially by the development of its economic foundation andpartially by the learning from other cultures, and, the self-development process is usually mild and slow unless there is serious external pressure. The unparalleled enhancement of productivity and massive economic achievement brought to a country by globalization founded additional internal demands to its culture.This has happened in many countries in the twentieth century and has caused deep reform and rapid development of cultures. In the meantime, with the wave of globalization, excellentcomponents in advanced cultures have been presented directly to disadvantaged cultures. Some simple but excellent cultural characters were learned and absorbed by the latter actively, resulted non-successive enhancements and supplements to the culture. For example, the western cutlery has been widely accepted in many countries. Some deeper cultural characters in advanced cultureswere also observed by the disadvantaged cultural groups and received more academic discussion, which has caused manyattempts of reform in countries.For example in China, liberal spirit has been applied more in the reform of economy structure in the last thirty years. Although these changes to aculturecan be massive and happen rapidly, the process isstill comparatively mild because it wasprimarily driven by the initiative of the learner itself, rather than having it imposed upon them. With the same reason, the practical achievements successfully became stable and solidcomponents in the culture. The actively enhanced culture haspositive affect to other dimensions of the social structure such as the political area and the economic area. From a global view, the developments of culture brought by globalization to nations formed a significant development of human culture as a whole in a comparatively short period of history.
The extremely rapid changes on life style and behaviourare challenging people’s psychological adaptability in globalization era. Adler stated that‘modernization and economic development have taken heavy psychological tolls in both developed and Third-World countries’ (Adler 1998).The cultural homogenization and superficial senseof culture appeared in the younger generation has caused discomfortto the matured especially intraditionalists. Although it is generally understood that the change of the world is necessary and inevitable, but to those who have formed a firmideology and steady life style, rapid change of psychoculture pattern is still toodifficult to accept. The psychologicalsignificance of globalizationis questioned when the strong impacts to psychoculturalframeworkwhich brought by rapid development havecaused numerous negative psychological experiences.
In the process of globalization, the interaction of cultures was sometimes presented in violent approach.There is an assumption that the practice of global modernization is actually westernization in all means of sociology,this is arguable. However, it is clear that most of the named universal measurements are actually concluded only from the practices in western history.These measurements should be called western universal measurement. In the globalization era, morephenomenon and practices in disadvantaged cultures were exposed to the public in advanced countries, in which many are intolerable with western universal measurements. For instances, the human rights such as social status of woman in some Islamiccountries; or the behaviour manners such as public flogging in Singapore; or the food habits such as eating dogs in the Oriental countries, and especially the political ideology such as dictatorships in many countries. Although many rational voices rose inside western society,such as Martin Jacques has made recent years, suggesting to study and to understand other cultures (Jacques 2012), the effort to reshape disadvantaged cultural components such as political system still overlooked local social ecology and became more and more violent in recent decades after the Cold War. Western culture was too imperative in the interaction of cultures like all dominant cultures have been in the history. It is known that politicalshape is a part of social formation, which is determined by thecultural environment.Radical replacement to the political systemwithout relevant progress in the culture will inevitably damage the coordination and cause turbulence of the society,which could bring people with heavy pains and disasters and result extensive resistance from the interfered culture. What is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan are vivid bloody examples.Since the difference between cultures will exist in long term, like Drezner stated, the question of whether China and India will ever embrace liberal political and cultural norms is not going to go away anytime soon.(Drezner 2011) it is a common question to human being that how to prevent the conflicts between cultures becoming too crude in the globalization era.
Globalization nowadaysprovides a numerous chance of interaction to various cultures in the world. Distant cultures exposed to each other in unparalleled extent. Through comparison, learning, competition and even conflict, cultures are actively or passively reformed and enriched, which results in development of the human culture as a whole. However, the interaction course of cultures is not always pleasant. The homogenization of cultures caused by globalization is progressively leading to ambiguity or even loss of culture identity. Globalization also caused the conflicts between cultures to become more intense in some cases.
