125ETHOS GUBERNAMENTAL

GLOBALIZATION ANDIDENTITY LOSS

Emilio Mordini

The concept of globalization in the current usage has come to have a meaning which is almost exclusively economic in nature, of which the vast public has a rather confused perception, accompanied by a sense of obscure threat. Thus, for example, faced with a sudden fall of his country’s stock market, which has blown away a good part of his savings, the layperson is offered the explanation that it was brought on by the serious economic crisis in Russia, or Mexico, or the collapse of the Asian stock markets, without being able to understand the reasons for these far-reaching effects, caused by “globalization”. Other times he realizes that an unemployment crisis that hits a certain production sector in his own region is caused by the fact that the enterprise that operated in that sector found it more advantageous to move its production facilities to third world countries, where labor costs much less. There are numerous examples, and they all fall within what we might call market globalization (capital, job, raw material, product, service markets). Therefore the current meaning of globalization is reduced to that of an “economic globalization”. From this standpoint, globalization raises a whole series of problems that, since they are often “new”, are such only in a relative sense, since they are nothing more than the world-scale projection of problems inherent in the market economy as such. Therefore, alongside those who see in the expansion of the “free market” according to the pure dynamics of its internal “laws” the condition of a long-term increased economic prosperity for all of mankind, there are those who stress the real risks of disastrous economic and social consequences for broad areas and strata of humanity, if “rules”, corrective measures, and guarantees are not promptly drafted to balance the economic logic with the needs for justice and the guarantee of basic human rights.

__________________________Acknowledgments - This work was partly funded by a grant from the European Commission - DG Research – Contract nr QLG6-CT-2002-01796.

126

Emilio Mordini

2006-2007

It is not, in any case, with this type of problems (crucial, complex, and urgent) that I intend to deal, but rather several disturbing characteristics that the globalization process shows, not so much on the economic level, as on the more general human and anthropological level, signs of unease that had appeared well before economic globalization asserted itself with all its evidence, i.e., since when, several decades ago, the expression “global village” had been coined to symbolically indicate the new sociological charter the world was destined to adopt, mainly as a result of the massive spread of communications and information. Among the most significant of these disturbing characteristics is undoubtedly a strong acceleration of that phenomenon of a loss of “individual identity” that has been afflicting pretty much all the so-called “advanced” societies for some time now.

When contemporary philosophy speaks of the problem of “individual identity” (or “personal identity”), it is referring to a fairly complex but, all in all, rather byzantine matter, i.e., the problem of understanding and explaining how a person can remain the same, even through the physical, mental, and existential changes he goes through during his lifetime. To be clear, by saying that it is a rather byzantine matter, I do not mean to suggest that it is a banal problem, since the answers provided for it may entail highly significant effects, for example in the ethical and bioethical field. There is, however, another sense of the individual identity that, while being less studied, has a more radical concrete importance and human value: I can express it by saying that every human being has a fundamental need to “know his own identity”, i.e., to know “who he is”, to have an overall “image” of himself that can give meaning to his actions and to his life as a whole. This progressive crumbling of man’s image has notoriously been contributed to by numerous “disorienting” moments connected with the dissolution of the “value” frameworks, broadly speaking, which long constituted an implicit common reference of Western civilization (moral, religious, social, political values). The “polytheism of values” of which Max Weber spoke, and which characterizes “advanced” societies, seems to have reduced the horizon of the “sense” on the basis of which each individual “identifies” his existence in the world, his duties, the authentic way of relating with others, and the final destiny of his life with a series of “subjective options” played in a situation of uncertainty, sensibility, or a more or less non-rational “faith”. All this has been joined by the succession of numerous “images of man” proposed

127

Globalization and Identity Loss

ETHOS GUBERNAMENTAL

by the developments of the various sciences, which have sought, and often claimed, to reveal the “mechanisms” of his existence: initially the physical, chemical, thermodynamic, and electrical mechanisms of the functioning of his body, but then the mechanisms of his psyche also, whether conscious or unconscious, or those of his social or linguistic conditionings, interconnecting them in a more or less arbitrary manner. All these “objective”, but partial, images intrinsically lack unity and, when they claim to offer it, they do so in a “reductionistic” sense, i.e., claiming to explain the most fundamental facts of subjectivity, such as the freedom of choice, self-conscience, and moral sense, as “effects” of determinisms that do not depend on us. Today, the neurosciences and artificial intelligence are the sectors in which it is most possible to measure the risk of disorientation that arises, as far as the possibility to grasp one’s identity is concerned. It is no longer I who want, choose, reflect, build a life ideal, strive, fight, suffer, and hope, but instead all this is the result of what is written in my genetic code, in my neuronal system, in the ways in which these structures of mine react to environmental stimuli, and so on.

The deleterious effect of these various factors is not, however, the same for every man: indeed, for quite a few people, this variety of positions, stimuli, knowledge, and images can be an enrichment, if they have a global and unitary frame of reference from which to draw criteria for judgment and for the assessment of these different contributions, placing each of them in its proper dimension and giving it a specific meaning. As can be seen, this frame of reference is a “preliminary” condition, a sort of ground in which each individual’s identity is “rooted” from its origin, and which enables him to not be exposed all alone, and almost like a clean slate, to the various stresses which he is not really able to judge and assess.

These roots of an individual’s identity are spontaneously offered and guaranteed to each by the implicit awareness of belonging to a vital community, i.e., to a collectivity that does not consist simply of a “plurality” of human beings, but recognizes itself in a common history and destiny. In the same family, which is the most fundamental of these communities, the blood tie has a much richer and profound meaning than that of a biological tie: in reality, it means the graft of a “stock” that has its own history, i.e., a legacy of ideals, life models, and values, passed down from generation to generation and consigned to the memory handed down from father to son. This stock has experienced vicissitudes

128

Emilio Mordini

2006-2007

of suffering, glory, and mistakes, for which its present members may feel pride or sometimes even shame, but which they cannot really consider “extraneous”, since the various members somehow feel they are participants in a common destiny, with which they all feel solidary and to which they all contribute. This “belonging” broadens, with similar connotations, to the kin, the tribe, the city, and the nation, and gives concreteness to the individual identity.

In the 19th century, this profound concept of an existential solidarity gave rise to the precious development of the idea of a nation, capable of creating strong feelings of identity, the striving for great ideals, of arousing forms of heroism as well as inspiring literary and artistic expression: the individual had, at the same time, the precise perception of his unrepeatable identity, responsibility, and creativity, and the awareness of making a positive contribution to the formation of the national community, its enrichment, and its glory. In this way the idea of a nation, developed by romantic thinking, became an authentic ideal which, in reality, formed the fundamental engine of Western history throughout almost that entire century, and continued to be so even when certain elements making up this idea started to become corrupted. In fact, it must be remembered that while the founding fathers of 19th-century national thought, on the one hand, developed the idea of a specific identity of the single nations, on the other hand they stressed their mutual complementarity and the fecundity of a harmonious coexistence. With very few exceptions, even when they let themselves be led to celebrate a sort of “primacy” of the nation to which they belonged (something historically understandable in the case of nations that were still fighting to come together in political unity, like Italy and Germany), they did not slip into the claiming of a right of supremacy and dominion of their nation over others. Suffice it to mention, in this regard, the names of Mazzini and Bolívar.

Unfortunately the degeneration of this idea into the aberrant forms of nationalism (which, in particular, had cancelled the above-said original concept of the positivity and complementarity of the national differences) led to tragic historic experiences which marked the first half of the 20th century, and these caused a reaction of rejection of the very concept of nation (today this term has practically disappeared, almost censured, from ordinary and, even more so, from political discourse, in which it has been replaced by the weaker term “country”). With this, however, an authentic ideal vacuum has been created in contemporary Western

129

Globalization and Identity Loss

ETHOS GUBERNAMENTAL

civilization; into it have gone the tacit and worst surrogates of the idea of nation, such as racial and ethnic egoisms, which in reality are nothing more than projections at the collective level of the individualistic spirit that pervades everything today. Today the generalized loss of national identities causes phenomena which might be called “of regression” or “historic involution”. Many of those that could be considered the most solidly formed nations, and sometimes with a considerable historic legacy behind them, are seeing the occurrence of phenomena of separatism, often very accentuated and even violent, centrifugal and disintegrating, exasperated exaltations of differences that the historic process had gradually overcome and integrated into the unity of the nation. But the cultural, social, and political vacuity of these phenomena becomes clear as soon as we realize that they have not at all produced the formation, or perhaps the recovery, of communities authentically inspired by a spiritual and ideal sense of “belonging” to a common tradition, history, and destiny, but actually reveal themselves to be attempts to pursue a better defense of local interests, clothed as vague and generic talk of trampled identities. Thus the picture history presents today is the paradoxical one of a globalization, which tends to dissolve various types of frontiers among peoples, stimulates or produces mass migrations, mixings of traditions and cultures, and seems to project the future toward the existence of a planetary society while, on the other hand, there is an increasing swarming of particularisms, secessionisms, bloody tribal conflicts, and ethnic, racial, and religious intolerances. The common result of these two opposite dynamics is a growing loss of identity, i.e., of those communities of roots that provide a human being with an aggregating basis of reference for being himself, while at the same time feeling existentially similar to other human beings with whom he can share the belonging to a common heritage of values, customs, ideals, and commitments.

To overcome this situation, which many today justly consider negative, and especially to be able to hope to give a sense and value to the unstoppable process of globalization that is taking place, the idea might come to mind to reattempt, on a large scale, something similar to the building of the ideal of nationality, and to proceed with its historic realization. However, today it appears practically impossible to repeat such a process for all of mankind, precisely because the elements for perceiving that community of history and destiny which, as has been seen, made it possible for the idea of nation to mature (not by chance, it was born just less

130

Emilio Mordini

2006-2007

than two centuries ago, as the result of a profound reflection on history) are objectively missing. While it is true that today various peoples are starting, even if with many uncertainties, to conceive a community of history and destiny (like the peoples of Europe and of the two Americas), it is no less true that this awareness does not crop up in many other parts of the world and, even more, that these different “common histories”, having remained separate in space and time for millennia, and even continuing to be almost mutually unknown by one another, cannot give rise to the sentiment of a common history of mankind. It may be that in a not-too-distant future a similar awareness may develop, perhaps thanks to a non-scientific reflection on the common history of humanity, interpreted no longer from a political-military standpoint, but from an anthropological one, i.e., considering how the human race, at the most various latitudes, has gone through stages of “cultural evolution” which are similar in many aspects, giving rise to forms of civilization and culture that are both original and extremely different, but also very similar in many ways, comparable, understandable, and appreciable by all. This could be accompanied also by the awareness of a common destiny that the mankind of the coming generations could be forced to experience, faced with the serious ecological problems that are forming on the horizon, as well as with the serious social problems that the development of globalization will bring to the fore more and more.

These are obviously futuristic prospects. Nevertheless, an immediately practicable path could be the same one that once characterized the changing of the concept of nation, i.e., that of the enhancement of diversities, which globalization tends to make disappear, but which an elementary wisdom should, instead, attempt to safeguard, considering them not as a sign of “extraneousness”, or even of inferiority, compared to the life models or values different from those of one’s own group, but instead as authentic sources of wealth. Many nations, in the best times of their history, have been nourished by the diversities existing within them, and they reaped fruits such as civilization, splendor, success, and power. The sense of national identity managed to be felt very strongly even in nations that incorporated populations of different languages, religions, and ethnic origins (for example Switzerland, the United States, and Russia).

Thus there is no lack of historic examples to back this project which, however, presupposes the availability of a precise spiritual attitude, i.e., the intimate belief that the others have many things

131

Globalization and Identity Loss

ETHOS GUBERNAMENTAL

that I don’t have, and that they are of value in themselves, or could even have value for me (or for us) also. It is not an easy mentality to acquire, since it presupposes the coming aware of ones cultural, historic, knowledge, institutional, and political limits. Every culture has cultivated the illusion of being somewhat the center of the world and of history (it is not a deformation attributable only to the vituperated “Eurocentrism”: it has been common to the Chinese, as well as to the Mexican-American, and even the “primitive” cultures). Today it is a matter of giving up finding a new “center”, to instead realize that the human limitedness never permits for either an individual or a single community or culture, however “advanced” it may be, to embrace the entire range of what is good, beautiful, and valid for all men, while they all have something to contribute and something to learn and assimilate from the others. Thanks to this new awareness, the man of the globalization age may continue to find the particular roots of his identity, and at the same time be open and enrich himself with what comes to him from the contact with and sharing of the contributions of the traditions other than his own.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Emilio Mordini is a clinical psychoanalyst and founding Director of the Centre for Science, Society and Citizenship. He was formerly Director of the Psychoanalytic Institute for Social Research (1986-2001) and Professor of Bioethics at University of Rome "La Sapienza", at the Dept. of Gynecology, Obstetrics and Child Care (1994-2005). He was originally trained as a medical doctor (M.D. Magna Cum Laude from “La Sapienza”, 1981; specialization in gastroenterology, 1984) before switching to psychoanalysis (registered psychoanalyst, Medical Association of Rome, 1989; member of the Italian Society of Psychiatry, 1992) and then to ethics and social sciences (M. Phil.Magna Cum Laude, from the Pontifical University of Rome “Angelicum”, 1994). Since 1994 Dr. Mordini has served in ethical panels of the European Commission. He is also served as a project reviewer in various national programmes (Spanish Ministry of Health, French CNRS, Wellcome Trust, Regione Veneto, Regione Emilia Romagna). Since 2003, Emilio has been a certified expert of the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (decree n.603 March/24/ 2003). His current research concerns biometrics and identification technologies, and their social, ethical, cultural and legal implications. This research focuses on the political, social and ethical implications of recent developments in identification technology, notably biometrics, RFID, MEMS, smart tags, implantable microchips and the ways in which these change our ideas about human identity, about the distinction between private and public data, and indeed about the borderlines between personal identity and body integrity, including the so called “informatisation of the body”.