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The Alexandrian model of globalisation

By Evaggelos Vallianatos - posted Thursday, 3 February 2011


Globalisation or the spread of an idea or product throughout the world affected humans for the first time following the conquest of the world by Alexander the Great in late fourth century BCE. For several centuries, Alexander and his successors spread Hellenic culture all over the Mediterranean.

For example, Alexandria in Egypt became a major center for advanced studies, science and world history and literature, the repository of all that the Greeks and other people had written since antiquity. Alexandria made available to all a modern-like and science-based Greek civilisation. The Antikythera Mechanism, the world’s first scientific computer, came out of the technological ferment of the Alexandrian age. Greek scientists like Euclid, Aristarchos of Samos, Archimedes, Hipparchos, Apollonios and Ptolemy set the foundations of Western science.

The next time globalisation entered human affairs in a big way was under the auspices of religions, especially the monotheistic religions of Christianity and Islam. These one-god faiths became so enamoured with their “revealed” theologies that they spread their message by the sword.

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Neither Christianity nor Islam ignored the polytheistic Greeks.

Christianity came to power in the fourth century when Roman Emperor Constantine made it a state religion. Greek was the language of globalisation. If Jews and Romans wanted to be read, for example, they wrote their books in Greek. So Christianity disseminated its teachings in Greek. But Christianity saw Greek polytheism as a mortal enemy. With the support of the state, Christianity ordered the Greeks to accept its dogmas on the pain of death. It also wrecked Greek temples, statues, altars, theatres, libraries, and other public buildings. However, Christianity used Greek learning selectively to legitimise itself, making philosophy a handmaiden of theology.

Islam came into being in the seventh century. It immediately clashed with the Christian empire of the Romans and Greeks, conquering Egypt and Syria. But relatively quickly Islam Hellenised itself in a massive experiment unprecedented in history. Throughout the eighth to the tenth centuries Islam borrowed ancient Greek scientific and philosophical thought in the building of its culture. That way Islam became a superpower of enlightenment where Aristotle and Greek science held sway. Indeed, Islamic scholars considered Aristotle “The Philosopher”. And in contrast to Christianity, that remained schizophrenic about Greek thought, Islam launched its career with Hellenism, becoming the centre for Greek studies for centuries. The Hellenisation of Islam even benefited Western Europe because Muslim al-Andalus (Spain) became the gateway to Greek learning for eager Christian Europeans.

However, now in the 21st century, both Christianity and Islam have shed their Greek trappings for a theology and practice befitting their Jewish origins. Once again, these one-god religions fight for territory and souls. Their global conflict is mostly proxy wars fought in places like Nigeria, Egypt, Sudan, Somalia, Palestine, Turkey, Russia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan. Americans are heading the Christian party of this war, which former president George W. Bush dubbed “war on terror”.

In the societies of Christianity and Islam, however, this crusading war is largely ignored, the better to pursue business as usual, that is, exploit people and the earth for profits. Rich Muslims in the Middle East sell oil to the West and Western petroleum companies and other corporations sell machines and technological culture to the Muslims.

Globalisation makes good of this profitable business. Its dogma of “free markets” competes with the Bible and the Koran. It assumes perfection among thieves, ready and willing to gamble with everybody’s wealth but their own. The free market advocates come from academia, corporations, the government and Wall Street. These desperate men and women, with their minted MBAs from the country’s business schools, are ravenous for profits at any cost, including the destruction of the middle class and democracy.

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Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, one of the few politicians who denounced President Barack Obama’s deal with the Republicans to give generous tax cuts to the country’s richest people, also criticised the greed of those rich Americans who toy with tyranny as a preferable form of political control of the world. Here you have a tiny number of super rich who are no longer patriots, taking hostage the vast majority of Americans in order to force the government to give them more money. The Republicans in Congress, who are in the same class with the super rich, ignore the revolutionary implications of the class war they foster on the country.

On December 13, 2010, Senator Sanders said the super rich are fighting with religious ferocity for more wealth, knowing fully well that such federal giveaways to them mean less food for America’s hungry children. These super rich and their Republican allies know that their policies are converting the United States into a banana republic, a Third World nation.

Americans losing their jobs to workers in China is not causing any anxiety among the boosters of globalised plutocracy. After all, replacing millions of American workers with Chinese and other workers in the tropics makes huge profits for American corporations.

There’s another insidious effect from the business homogenisation of the world. The victims of corporations spill over the border of many countries, including the border of America. They are running away from the destruction of their culture and societies. They are the refugees of globalisation. But now entire countries are joining the ranks of these refugees.

The financial meltdown of Greece and Ireland, for example, was not accidental or solely the result of Greek and Irish kleptocrats. Greece and Ireland were no different than Americans tempted and urged to borrow beyond their means. In the case of the deceived American borrowers, they lose their homes: but Greece and Ireland lose their independence and slide violently into poverty and humiliation. The role of the bank appropriating the house of the deliquent borrower is taken over by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the American financial policeman of corporate capitalism.

The IMF, expert in institutionalising poverty among nations, insists on austere economic policies that impoverish the majority of the population, thus assuming the leadership of the country in a manner taken from the textbook of colonialism. The money Greece and Ireland received from the European Union and IMF went to pay the private lenders, transferring the Greek and Irish debt to government institutions.

In contrast to the Alexandrian globalisation that spread the benefits of Greek culture to the world two millennia ago, the globalisation of our time impoverishes the many for the luxury of the few. It is a mafia-like affair among the chiefs of corporations backed by government, religious, and academic elites.

What we need is a globalisation modeled from the eras of Alexander the Great and medieval Islam where things of the mind mattered more than petroleum and bombs.

We need to globalise the best things of our Western culture that have their roots in Greece: democracy, books, libraries, science and technology, universities and love for the natural world.

Put people to work to clean up the mess of unregulated capitalism. Reforest the logged forests; free the rivers from dams; stop factory fishing; replace industrialised farming and its pesticide infrastructure with small family farmers; expand public transportation everywhere; end toxic industries and nuclear power plants, replacing them with solar and wind power; dismantle all nuclear bombs in the world, prohibiting their manufacture and possession.

Tax the very rich for this work of reconstruction. Cut down military spending and end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Remind the Muslim Arabs to return to the Hellenic-inspired periods of their history and restart their houses of wisdom.

Now that would be a globalisation that would change today’s fear to campaigns for saving our civilisation - and the earth. Aristotle was right: the Earth is alive. Our fate is inextricably tied to the wellbeing of our Mother Earth.

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About the Author

Evaggelos Vallianatos is the author of several books, including Poison Spring (Bloomsbury Press, 2014).

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