Cultural Globalization

Cultural globalization is the spread of ideas, images, goods, and habits across national borders until distant societies begin to resemble one another. The same films, brands, phones, and slogans reach São Paulo, Lagos, and Seoul. Conservatives greet this process with unease, not because they oppose exchange between peoples, but because they prize the particular — the local loyalties, inherited customs, and settled ways of life that give a community its character and that a homogenized world tends to dissolve.

Roger Scruton gave the conservative worry its clearest form: love of home, what he called oikophilia, is the root of the civic attachment that free societies depend on, and it cannot survive if every place becomes interchangeable.

Key Takeaways

• Conservatives value particular attachments — nation, region, custom — that cultural globalization erodes.
• The objection is to homogenization and the loss of rootedness, not to trade or exchange as such.
• Roger Scruton’s idea of oikophilia, love of home, anchors the conservative case.
• The market that spreads prosperity can also flatten the local cultures conservatives seek to conserve.

History And Context

Cultures have crossed borders since antiquity, along the Silk Road and through empire, religion, and migration. What distinguishes the modern phase is speed and scale. The steamship and telegraph of the nineteenth century, the jet and television of the twentieth, and the internet of the twenty-first collapsed the distances that once kept ways of life distinct. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the opening of China accelerated the reach of a largely Western, and largely American, consumer culture.

The German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, writing in the 1780s, had already framed the counter-current. Against the universalism of the French Enlightenment, Herder argued that each people possesses its own genius, expressed in its language, songs, and folkways, and that flattening these into a single cosmopolitan culture would impoverish mankind. This defence of national particularity against abstract universalism runs directly into the conservative tradition of Edmund Burke, who prized the concrete inheritance of a people over the paper schemes of theorists.

The Conservative Position

Conservatives argue that human beings are not interchangeable units but creatures of place, formed by a specific language, faith, landscape, and history. The attachments that grow from these particulars — Burke’s “little platoons” — generate the trust and loyalty that make self-government work. A culture dissolved into a global monoculture loses the shared inheritance that binds citizens to one another and to their ancestors and descendants.

Scruton pressed the point furthest. He held that free institutions rest on a prior loyalty to a shared home, and that this loyalty attaches to something particular: a nation, its law, its landscape, its dead and unborn. Cultural globalization threatens this by replacing rooted membership with rootless consumption, and by teaching the young to feel more at home in a borderless brand-world than in the country they actually inhabit. The conservative aim is not to seal borders against all influence but to conserve enough of the particular that a people remains itself, capable of the loyalty on which liberty depends.

Differing Positions

Cosmopolitan liberals answer that cultural exchange enriches rather than impoverishes, that no living culture has ever been pure or static, and that the free movement of ideas breaks down the parochialism and prejudice that closed societies breed. On this view the spread of common standards — human rights, science, shared art — is a gain, and conservative anxiety about homogenization romanticizes cultures that were themselves the product of earlier mixing.

Critics from the left add a different charge: that cultural globalization is not neutral exchange but the export of American commercial power, crowding out local traditions in the name of the market. This objection oddly parallels the conservative one, though it blames capitalism rather than cosmopolitanism. The conservative reply grants that cultures mix and change, but insists there is a difference between organic growth from a living root and the replacement of every root by the same manufactured product.

References

1. Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative (Bloomsbury, 2014).
2. Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity (1784–1791).
3. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
4. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon & Schuster, 1996).