The Global Hamburger

Chinese tonight?

I get to chat more or less daily with young people around the world. This has been my life, more or less, for the past thirty years. In those thirty years, something dramatic has happened. The world has changed utterly. And we are soon going to see its effects. 

When I started out, in Wuhan China, population six million then, I couldn’t go anywhere without drawing a crowd. I was exotic; and so, to me, was the place I had come to. Butter or cheese were unavailable, let alone such a thing as a hamburger. China might have been an extreme example, but places like Korea, or Thailand, or Saudi Arabia, or Bulgaria were also thrillingly strange. These were the adventures I had dreamed of as a boy reading Robert W. Service or Richard Halliburton.

But the internet has changed everything.

Just as the out-of-touch elites in Canada have been celebrating multiculturalism and cultural diversity, cultural diversity is disappearing everywhere else, as we all enter a vast melting pot. Thanks to the internet, aside from any other influences, young people in China or Saudi Arabia or the Philippines are now exposed to all the same cultural influences as young people in Brooklyn or Peoria. Everyone has at least a smartphone. They listen to the same music, see the same films, play the same games, know the same memes, and are regularly chatting with one another.

I ask a Chinese student what her favourite book is. Harry Potter. A Filipino toddler cannot get enough of Peppa Pig. I ask a Chinese student what his favourite meal is. Hamburger. I recently asked a student in Beijing to write an essay on the three historical persons he would most like to meet. Hannibal, Napoleon, and George Washington.

For the young, there are no longer local cultures. As the older generations die away, they will too.

It makes me a little sad; malls in Bangkok now look pretty much like malls in Sudbury. At the same time, each offers many more choices. And I have to be delighted at the visible death of the sinister folly of cultural relativism.

Nationalism and Globalism

Map showing democracies in shades of blue; Economist Intelligence Unit.

I would not have thought that, in suggesting that endorsing “family values” is no different from endorsing nationalism, that I would get pushback on the idea that there were problems with nationalism.

Yet, when I suggested this to my friend Darius, I did.

He writes, “Being a patriot is a good thing not bad; maintaining an awareness and respect for one's heritage and national accomplishments … is a defense against Godless globalism.”

I do not condemn nationalism in itself. I wrote that nation is “useful,” and a national government “desirable.” The danger is in seeing the nation or national government as sacred or holy, as we tend to with “family values.” That is, straight up, Fascism.

I would call myself a “Canadian nationalist.” I support a nationalist view of Canada because I see Canadian nationalism not as a defense against globalism, but against tribalism: against ethnic allegiances like those of Quebec, or aboriginal groups, or various special interest groups. Canadian or American or Australian or Singaporean nationalism is special in this way, because Canada or the USA or Singapore are not nations in the conventional sense. They are not based on blood ties, but on adherence to shared values. In this, they are more like a monastery than a family.

To be American is to commit to the principles stated in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. To be Canadian is to endorse the principles stated in the preamble to the Canadian Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Since I wholeheartedly endorse these principles, and think they should be extended to all mankind, I endorse Canadian or American nationalism. All men are created equal; all are endowed with inherent rights. Among these are freedom of speech, of assembly, of conscience, and so forth. But this sort of nationalism is, implicitly, globalism; since these principles apply to all men.

I am much less well-disposed to other nationalisms: most nations are ethnically based, and so nationalism there amounts to tribalism. It is fine to feel a special warmth for your homeland, because it is human nature to do so, it is pleasant and enriches life. It is fine to feel an appreciation for your (or another) culture, as a thing of beauty, just as one can appreciate a fine painting. But it makes no rational sense to me that I should take any pride in what some other person did, because we are both Canadians. This is in principle the same as collective guilt. Are we going to hold Jews guilty for the crucifixion, then?

And I reserve the right to appropriate from whatever culture I so choose. Culture is for man, not man for the culture. The latter idea, again, is Fascism.

In principle, I am in favour of globalism over nationalism, just as and for the same reason I am in favour of nationalism over tribalism. This is one important reason I am Catholic: the sense of unity and brother hood around the globe. This is a reason I even lament the loss of the British Empire―despite my Irish heritage. It united people around the globe in one common endeavour, and under comparatively liberal principles. This is why I am essentially pro-American: because American culture is globalist culture. Where do you think hamburgers come from? America? Where do you think ketchup comes from? Pizza? Hot dogs? Jazz?

I do oppose “Godless globalism.” That adjective identifies the enemy. I rather think we liberal democracies should walk away from the United Nations and form a League of Free Nations, perhaps built on NATO’s foundations. If any member veered from the path of democratic elections and a fundamental list of human rights, their membership would be revoked. The present situation is pernicious: the worst offenders always get the first seats on the UN panel meant to deal with any given issue of human rights.

Any such league must recognize the supremacy of God. As the Canadian constitution does explicitly, and the Declaration of Independence does implicitly. You cannot have human rights and human equality without belief in God. As Locke himself pointed out, the two cannot be separated.

Moreover, any such league must be founded on the principle of subsidiarity, or federalism. This is where the EU went awry. Powers must always reside with the lowest level of organization capable of dealing with them. This is required by the very concept of human rights, which means that the individual has, as much as possible, the right to decide for himself.

The Sahib Syndrome

What do you do? 

I’m a teacher. 

What do you teach? 

People. 

What do you teach them? 

English. 

You mean grammar, verbs, nouns, pronunciation, conjugation, articles and particles, negatives and interrogatives …? 

That too. 

What do you mean, ‘that too’? 

Well, I also try to teach them how to think, and feel – show them inspiration, aspiration, cooperation, participation, consolation, innovation, … help them think about globalization, exploitation, confrontation, incarceration, discrimination, degradation, subjugation, …how inequality brings poverty, how intolerance brings violence, how need is denied by greed, how –isms become prisons, how thinking and feeling can bring about healing. 

Well I don’t know about that. Maybe you should stick to language, forget about anguish. You can’t change the world. 

But if I did that, I’d be a cheater, not a teacher.

This is the introduction to a new book on teaching English put out by the British Council. This is an attitude we are commonly up against in ESL.

Too many teachers of all sorts believe their main task is to teach their charges to have specific views on specific issues; rather than to teach their nominal subjects. It seems that the British Council, which is to say the British government, agrees.

One bit of subterfuge must immediately be addressed: Mr. Maley, the author, an acquaintance of mine, claims he is teaching his students “how to think and feel.” Of course, he is not. He is doing roughly the opposite of this. There is an academic field that teaches how to think. It is called philosophy. There is no trace of it here. The students are being told what to think, not how—their own capacity for thought is being short-circuited.

There is also an academic discipline for teaching people how to feel—although is is commonly considered rather tawdry, less legitimate. That would be rhetoric. No trace of that here either. though. It is all about teaching people what to feel, not how.

This lie at the very beginning of the arguments a red flag. It is proof that the author himself knows he is doing a con. And, obviously, it is a con: you are advertising your services as a teacher of English, and then, instead of teaching English, you are teaching something else. It does not matter whether the ideas you want to promote are good ideas: you are still defrauding the customer. But then, if you yourself believed they were good ideas, you would not see the need to resort to fraud to advance them.

So, as they are bad ideas, any altruistic motive can be eliminated. The obvious question then is, cui bono? What is the teacher’s, or the British Council’s, payoff?

When this sort of thing is done in public schools and universities in Canada or Britain, one motive is obvious: you want voters to support your political party, which then runs the government, which employs you. Ideally, you and teachers like you then get to write your own ticket.

It is less clear in ESL. 

The most obvious explanation is a colonialist agenda. The poor unwashed primitives are expected to look upon the foreign expert and his class as the fount of wisdom. And maybe put him in charge of stuff.

It seemed like a good line to many Europeans of an earlier generation. So perhaps we should not be surprised.

And there is another, natural human motive. One tends, if one does not oneself like to think, to lean heavily on prejudice, on "the way things are done." For a person like that, life in a foreign country can be a strain: these people, not knowing "the way things are done," are obviously all idiots, or malicious recalcitrants.

By God, let's whip these wogs into shape, shall we?