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Princeton University Press
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2002
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Hardcover |
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Book Review
Reviewed by Phil Cantor
Tyler Cowen’s Creative Destruction is one of the most interesting books ever written on globalization and is genuinely thought-provoking in all sorts of ways. Judging by my own travels around the world in recent years, his account of the globalization of culture is right on target, and it has led me to re-evaluate my experiences. My favorite personal anecdote concerning globalization involves Australia, which I visited in 1994. Not content merely to travel to the other side of the world, I made sure to go to the most remote part of Australia--the so-called Red Centre of the country. Jetting to the famous tourist destination of Ayer’s Rock, one glimpses the most unearthly landscape I have ever seen. Indeed, with the endless vistas of red soil and dried up riverbeds--and not a sign of life, human or otherwise, in any direction--one gets the feeling one is about to land on Mars. But my visit to Ayer’s Rock and the nearby geological formation called the Olgas was still not exotic enough for me. I jumped at the chance to book a trip to a third attraction in the area, only recently opened to tourists--Mt. Connor. To get to this site, we had to hire a guide and a jeep, and I was thrilled that the tours had been so recently inaugurated that our guide actually got lost on our way to catch the glorious sunset on Mt. Connor. “Getting lost in the middle of nowhere--now that’s exotic” I said to myself.
But there was more--our tour package included dinner at an authentic Australian outback roadhouse (not to be confused with an Outback Steakhouse, which is somewhat less authentic). This dinner experience did turn out to be extraordinary and not just because to this day I still do not know what form of meat we ate. For as we entered the authentic roadhouse in the middle of the outback, we saw the locals watching a television, and it was tuned to Seinfeld. And the authentic Australian outback-dwellers we had traveled so far to see were laughing their heads off. Having grown up in New York, I have never had any trouble appreciating the humor of Seinfeld, but I always wondered if it traveled well, if, for example, people from Connecticut really were in a position to get the jokes. But here were people in the Australian outback following the antics of Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer and ostensibly with full comprehension. This was globalization in all its glory, and yet as a tourist I was bitterly disappointed. Had I traveled 13,000 miles to the most exotic spot on earth in order to view an episode of Seinfeld (and one I had already seen to boot)? My tourist mentality told me that I had every right to see the best Australia has to offer, but the Australians had no right to spoil my experience by being caught in the act of watching a rerun of an American sitcom. If they had to be watching television, why couldn’t it have been a Yahoo Serious retrospective or at least Crocodile Dundee? To make my attitude worse, even as I was railing inwardly against the Americanization of Australia, I was secretly hoping that somehow when I got back home, I would be able to find an American restaurant that served some of the spectacular seafood I had just been enjoying in the Great Barrier Reef section of Australia, delicacies such as Moreton Bay bugs, yabbies, and the peerless Queensland mud crab. I didn’t pause to analyze the contradiction in my thinking, but clearly I was hoping to indulge in all good things Australian myself, while denying to the Aussies any of the benefits of being exposed to America.
In Creative Destruction, Tyler Cowen analyzes this contradiction in the way people think about globalization. He has identified a pattern that reverses the familiar “not in my backyard” syndrome--the common attitude that leads people to want real estate development to take place anywhere but in their own neighborhood. The opposite often happens when it comes to globalization; people want to take advantage in their own lives of all the benefits it can bring, especially in terms of the wider availability of goods, but they take a “not in your backyard” attitude toward foreigners. They want other nations to remain unchanged and above all unaffected by any contact with the United States--only that way will these tourists find when they travel to foreign lands that they remain exotic, rather than having turned into a mirror image of the United States. In short, Cowen identifies the self-interested character of much of the seemingly high-minded criticism of globalization. When people complain that the expansion of international trade is homogenizing the world, they pretend to be speaking on behalf of indigenous people everywhere and fighting to preserve their distinct way of life. But in reality they are fighting to preserve their own right to view that way of life unaltered. Their self-centeredness is revealed by the fact that these critics of globalization seldom ask: do these foreigners want to preserve their way of life unchanged? Might they perhaps want to enjoy some of the benefits of other ways of life, aspects of American culture, for example, which we have learned to take for granted and have in some cases even come to despise, but which look rather desirable to people elsewhere who are currently denied them.
To draw upon my Australian experience again--the tourist authorities there take pride in having closed down the original hotel for Ayer’s Rock. It was too close to the site, threatening to spoil the view and offending the aborigines, who hold the great rock, which they call Uluru, sacred. The Australian tourist authorities emphasize the fact that they have moved the hotel accommodations 20 kilometers away from Ayer’s Rock, and done what they could to make the new complex as unobtrusive in the landscape as possible--and I applaud their efforts. But what they do not point out--we learned this from our Mt. Connor guide--is that the aborigines have chosen to move into the abandoned hotel. I must say that if I had been living in the world’s second driest desert, I too would have jumped at my first chance to get in out of the sun. In thinking about globalization we need to do more of this kind of putting ourselves in the other fellow’s shoes. As Cowen suggests, what we as tourists see as a loss may well look like a gain to the local natives.
In sorting out this issue, Cowen makes his most valuable contribution in Creative Destruction--articulating the difference between two kinds of diversity, what he calls “diversity within society” and "diversity across societies" (pp. 14-15). As he points out, these two developments are frequently at odds: "When one society trades a new artwork to another society, diversity within society goes up (consumers have greater choice), but diversity across the two societies goes down (the two societies become more alike)". The question is not about more or less diversity per se, but rather what kind of diversity globalization will bring (15). When I objected to Australians watching Seinfeld in the outback, I was focusing on the diversity between the United States and Australia, but when I wanted to have Queensland mud crab served at the Outback Steakhouse in my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia, I was focusing on the diversity within the United States. In the first case, I was speaking as a tourist; in the second as a consumer. And typically, as a tourist I wanted to decrease the diversity available within Australia in order to preserve my image of its difference, while as a consumer I wanted to increase the diversity available within the United States to broaden my own range of options at home.
In a particularly insightful moment, Cowen identifies the collectivist mentality of those who inveigh against the homogenization of the world that globalization is supposedly bringing about: "The metric compares one society to another, or one country to another, instead of comparing one individual to another, or instead of looking at the choices faced by an individual" (15). For Cowen, the way globalization expands the range of choices for individuals around the world is the overriding concern: "Different regions may look more alike than in times past, but the individuals in those locales will have greater scope to pursue different paths for their lives, and will have a more diverse menu of choice for their cultural consumption" (15). Moreover, Cowen points out that globalization produces another form of diversity: "Trade tends to increase diversity over time by accelerating the pace of change and bringing new cultural goods with each era or generation... Yet many defenders of diversity decry the passing of previous cultures and implicitly oppose diversity-over-time" (15-16). Cowen argues that many opponents of globalization would like to see other communities frozen in time, denied the benefits of progress that they themselves enjoy. As Cowen puts it, "they grant special status to particular cultures and time periods; they admire 'Breton as it was before the War' or 'Bali as it was in 1968'" (132). This kind of critic of globalization in effect wants to sacrifice the members of other cultures to his own nostalgia for the past and the primitive. Other people must continue to live at earlier stages of development so that the advanced Westerner can continue to project his fantasy of the unspoiled world of pre-modernity. In Cowen’s argument I could recognize myself and my self-centered desire to see all of Australia, or at least the outback, stuck at the stage of, say, I Love Lucy, doomed never to enter the postmodern world of Seinfeld.
I have quoted at length from Creative Destruction to give some sense of one of its prime virtues--the clarity and no-nonsense quality of Cowen’s prose. He continually goes right to the heart of any subject he is discussing, and offers crisp formulations of his points. Thus, although this book is brief (roughly 150 pages), it covers an extraordinarily wide range of material. Cowen could easily have been overwhelmed by the wealth of his material; he proves himself an expert on a wide range of subjects, from French cuisine to Persian carpets, from reggae music to the Tuvan throat singers of Mongolia. But such is the efficiency of Cowen as a writer that he can keep his discussion focused on a number of central themes, even as he explores the most arcane byways of globalization.
Creative Destruction is so rich in detail that it is difficult for me to single out a highlight, but, if pressed, I would point to the chapter "Why Hollywood Rules the World, and Whether We Should Care." Never one to shun a challenge, Cowen confronts the anti-globalization argument at perhaps its strongest--the claim that international blockbuster films from Hollywood have come to dominate the world market and are in the process of homogenizing the art of cinema. But Cowen shows that this argument is in effect Eurocentric or more specifically Francocentric. It is made largely by those who lament the decline of the once vibrant French film industry. And, as Cowen shows, that industry is in decline precisely because of efforts by the French government to protect it from foreign competition--government policies that typically have backfired and produced the opposite of what they were intended to achieve. As for the rest of the world, Cowen shows that in fact the art of cinema is thriving in many other nations, particularly in Asia, and above all in India and Hong Kong. As Cowen notes, “in numeric terms most of the world’s movies come from Asia, not from the United States.” It is not unusual for India to release between 800 and 900 commercial films a year, compared to about 250 from the United States (75). Moreover, Cowen points out that while we tend to focus on the Americanization of cinema around the globe, what we like to refer to as Hollywood is now globalized itself and hardly restricted to Southern California anymore: "A typical production will have Sony, a Japanese company, hire a European director to shoot a picture in Canada and then sell the product for global export. Of the world’s major entertainment companies, only Time-Warner is predominantly American in ownership" (93).
Although Cowen thus does an effective job of countering the typical arguments against globalization, I do not want to give the impression that he is a naive cheerleader for the process. He includes a chapter on “the tragedy of cultural loss” and shows that he is aware of the price the world may pay for the spread of modernity around the globe. Cowen understands the fragility of traditional societies, and how the complex of cultural attitudes that leads them to produce their works of art may be shattered by the introduction of foreign ideas. His discussion of this kind of tragedy reminds me of another excellent book on the subject, The Novel and the Globalization of Culture by Michael Valdez Moses, which analyzes how the “tragedy of cultural loss” has been portrayed in modern literature, from Thomas Hardy to Chinua Achebe, from Joseph Conrad to Mario Vargas Llosa. Both Cowen and Moses suggest that the triumph of global modernity is shadowed by the tragic loss of traditional community. Thus Cowen is wiling to concede that critics of globalization do have some valid points to make. It is just that on balance he believes that the gains from the process outweigh the losses.
Cowen’s willingness to acknowledge the dark side of globalization makes the underlying optimism of his book all the more convincing. Having considered all that can be said against globalization, he cautiously and judiciously comes down in favor of the process. In particular, he argues for the advantages of cultural hybridity, documenting how the clash of different cultures in the course of globalization often leads--not to the annihilation of one by the other--but to the emergence of a synthesis of the two, and hence a higher cultural complexity. The value of cultural hybridity has become a common theme in discussions of postcolonial literature, and Cowen is right to invoke authors such as Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez on his side. Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, for all its notoriety for other reasons, is perhaps the greatest novel about globalization, and balances a sense of “the tragedy of cultural loss” against a vision of the triumph of cultural hybridity in the way that Creative Destruction does. In his treatment of globalization, Cowen is thus in very good company. With books like Creative Destruction and his earlier In Praise of Commercial Culture, Cowen has emerged as one of the leading cultural critics of our day.
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