「違いは山ほどあり、グローバル化されている部分はむしろ誰かが何かを売って儲けることのできる領域に限られているのではないか」（多和田葉子、『言葉と歩く日記』）。There are piles of differences, and it seems that the globalized parts are confined within that field where someone can sell something and make profit (Yoko Tawada, A Diary of a Walk with Words).The brokers of reason whose understanding takes unceasing satisfaction in being able to confront everything that there is with an ought and consequently with a would-be-superior knowledge ... do not see that, with regard to the finitude of their sphere, the ought receives full recognition. - But in the actual order of things, reason and law are not in such a sad state of affairs that they only ought to be (G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, 21.124).
Art is an indispensable element of reason, since art teaches the mind to suspend theoretical and moral judgements and to observe something at the level of feeling. To feel means to take it into one's own body without question. If philosophy is the description of its own times in the form of thought, then philosophers are those who coldly take into account how things are. In other words, philosophy does not refuse to describe or include something on the basis that that something ought not to be. Art teaches philosophy how to do this by giving the latter a "sentimental education."
In The Fourth Political Theory, Alexander Dugin talks about globalization in the following ways.
Globalisation is the equivalent of the end of history. Both go hand-in-hand. ... If we are going to make a 'tomorrow' common to all societies existing on the planet, if we are going to propose a global future, then we need first to destroy the history of those other societies, to delete their pasts ... Globalisation is the death of time (164).Only a global crusade against the US, the West, globalisation, and their political-ideological expression, liberalism, is capable of becoming an adequate response (155).All traditionalists should be against the West and globalisation (193).Differences between ethnicities do not equate to superiority and inferiority. There is no common or universal measure to judge different ethnic groups. When one society tries to judge another, it applies its own criteria, and so commits intellectual violence. This ethnocentric attitude is precisely the crime of globalisation and Westernisation (195).
It is clear from these passages that Dugin sees globalisation as a criminal and an enemy, and a formidable one at that. To an extent, Dugin is correct. More precisely, Dugin is correct at the material level: the American capitalist culture of departments, apartments, and highways does materially destroy local culture by destroying the natural environment, the traditional streets and buildings, and by creating a physical distance between people.
On the other hand, perhaps Dugin falls short in thinking more deeply about what happens to cultures and traditions in their immaterial form. For example, an Irish person would use a kettle to boil water and then would use a teapot and a teacozy to make tea, while a Californian person might put tap water into a mug with a teabag and microwave it. Differences like this are not trivial; on the contrary, they can be interpreted as particular instances of a universal difference. As Yoko Tawada perceptively remarks, perhaps it is only in the field of economic exchange that things appear homogeneous. After all, in both cases, a consumer is consuming tea. It is only the artist's perspective that reveals the differences which a merely economic perception overlooks.
This observation may spawn the question concerning ethnic identity. According to Dugin, the "crime of globalisation" is its "intellectual violence," whereby it presumably "tries to judge" others societies. It is interesting to note that Dugin also judges the West according to his own ethnic criteria, namely the Russian, and so according to his own theory he is also committing "intellectual violence" and thus a "crime." But calling such an act of judgement a "crime" implies that it ought not to be. However, in order to call it a crime, one must already presuppose its standpoint, namely, judging another ethnicity according to the criteria of one's own ethnicity. Hence, the claim "globalisation commits the crime of intellectual violence by judging other ethnicities" is self-contradictory, and sublates itself. It is not necessarily a crime to judge others. Rather, judgement exists of necessity, for in order to judge the judgement as a crime, there necessarily must exist a judgement that does so.
The same logic can be discerned in Dugin's call for a "global crusade." In order to fight globalisation through a global crusade, one must have already accepted some form of globalisation, for otherwise the crusade would not be a "global" one. Again, the point is not to try and annihilate globalisation at a global scale, but rather to admit its necessity.
Reading Dugin's criticisms of "ethnocentrism" and "globalisation" in The Fourth Political Theory, one begins to wonder what exactly these terms stand for. There are many artists who are not rooted in one tradition, who traverse them in their art: Thomas Pynchon, David Mitchell, Yoko Tawada. To my mind, works written by those and like-minded writers represent a much more robust "crusade" compared to the vague "Fourth Political Practice" which Dugin puts forward. These writers are not reactionary; they do not portray something for the sake of condemning it as something which ought not to be. Rather, these writers reveal how ethnic, traditional, and cultural differences exist in unexpected ways even within the allegedly homogeneous globalised world. By doing so, their words suggest that there is no need to fight heads-on liberalism, for the sheer existence of these works of art already is evidence that the battle has already been won without a fight.
The same kind of crusade can be launched through philosophy. Philosophy, like art, is cold reflection upon what in fact is. If globalisation seems to reduce everything into a homogeneous cycle, and if this seems to be "unjust," "violent," and "immoral," then philosophy's task is not to preach what ought to be the case, but to rather discern the source of this urge to make a moral judgement and to patiently show that in fact globalisation does not reduce everything into a homogeneous cycle. Philosophy resists by this patient descriptive attitude. Without this patience, the battle would already have been lost. While I sympathize in part with Dugin's sentiments in The Fourth Political Theory, I think that the aspect of the "ought" or the call for a global crusade betrays a weakness and a limitation in the descriptive, diagnostic part of Dugin's analysis of globalisation.
